Stowe about the Horrors of Slavery and the American Civil War - Research Paper Example

Harriet Beecher Stowe It was God’s will that this nation - the North as well as the South - should deeply and terribly suffer for the sin of consenting to and encouraging the great oppressions of the South; that the ill-gotten wealth, which had arisen from striking hands with oppression and robbery, should be paid back in the taxes of war; that the blood of the poor slaves, that had cried so many years from the ground in vain, should be answered by the blood of the sons from the best hearthstones through all the free states; that the slave mothers, whose tears nobody regarded, should have with them a great company of weepers, North and South - Rachels weeping for their children and refusing to be comforted; that the free states that refused to listen when they were told of lingering starvation, cold, deprivation, and barbarous cruelty, as perpetrated on the slave, should have lingering starvation, cold, hunger, and cruelty doing its work among their own sons, at the hands of these slave-masters, whose sins our nation had connived” - Harriet Beecher Stowe (Charles Stowe and Lyman Stowe, Harriet Beecher Stowe: The Story of Her Life, 192). Harriet Beecher Stowe stated clearly that she believed that the horrors that were experienced during the American Civil War were defined by a type of justice that was afflicted upon those who had owned slaves the same kind of terrible conditions that slaves had suffered under their master’s ownership. The condition of legalized slavery was intolerable to Stowe who wrote about her point of view on the subject in her book Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The work was used to ignite a passion for the abolitionist movement, a source for relating to the inhumane treatment that was experienced by those who were subjected to the slavery of the South. Stowe came out of obscurity to write a story that could provide a framework for the slavery experience, a tale that expressed to the Caucasian public a point of view that had not been considered by many. Through the power of her beliefs about the wrong of slavery, Stowe participated in motivating the public into action against the terrible conditions that had allowed one culture to put another into ownership and slavery. Stowe was born on June 11, 1811 and died on July 1 1896 having written her seminal work, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and published it after she turned 40 in the year 1851. She was born Harriet Elizabeth Beecher and was the daughter of a famous minister, Lyman Beecher with her sister being growing to be a famous educator, Catherine Beecher. She married Calvin Stowe in 1836 and bore seven children, one of which died at a very young age from cholera (Claire Parfait, The Publishing History of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 7-8). Stowe was originally a teacher, writing her first book which was a text book, Primary Geography for Children, in 1833. She became part of a writing group, Semi-Colon, in Cincinnati and used the forum to submit her writings in order to improve her skills. In 1834 her work began to appear in a Cincinnatti weekly paper called Chronicle. She also wrote for the Western Monthly and The Evangelist, a religious magazine out of New York. While she wrote because she loved the experience of writing, she made a small income that supplemented that of her husbands. When in 1837 her husband’s salary was cut due to a financial crisis, she began to work to increase her income through devoting herself to becoming a professional writer (Parfait, The Publishing History, 9). She wrote for anything that would pay her, providing enough money to the household to keep her released from having to participate in the domestic running of their home, a position she was specifically against. Stowe wrote to a friend, Mary Dutton, that “if you see my name coming out everywhere - you may be sure of one thing, that I do it for the pay”, specifically and historically identifying herself as a professional writer (Parfait, The Publishing History, 9). Her justification of her writing was that in order to be freed from being a “mere domestic slave”, as she was quoted in saying, she had to provide enough income to pay the servants that did the duties that she would otherwise be required to attend. Her husband supported her pursuits and boasted of his wife with pride for her accomplishments (Parfait, The Publishing History, 9). Stowe began her anti-slavery beliefs through the sermons that she heard her father give. She was powerfully moved by the plight of the slaves, her feelings expressed through many of the essays that she wrote as an adult. In 1836, the presses of James Birney, the editor of an anti-slavery weekly periodical, the Philanthropist out of Cincinnati, were destroyed in protest of his publication. A second attack included the destruction of several homes of African -American families, thus moving Stowe to write on the topic. She sent a letter to her the Cincinnati Journal and Luminary, edited by her brother, Henry Ward Beecher, denouncing the violence and reminding those who would read the letter that freedom of the press was one of the freedoms of the United States. She signed the letter ‘Franklin’ in order to secure herself and her family from any backlash. It was not for another ten years that she openly declared her position on slavery (Parfait, The Publishing History of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 14). Publishing a book was an expensive prospect in the mid 19th century. Therefore, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was first published in installments in the National Era, the installments taking a year to complete and ending with the book being published in 1852. According to The Publisher’s Weekly (1873), the novel had sold over 316,000 by 1873, a large number of volumes for publications of the period. The success was overwhelming, putting Stowe into the middle of the controversy over the abolishment of slavery. Stowe, a naturally non-confrontational type of person, had expressed her rage and opened the door for her life to be framed by the impending conflict (Joan Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe: a Life, 202). In choosing to act and in voicing her point of view on the condition of slavery, she moved people towards the abolitionist movement, creating a stir with the drama that she created from the horrors that she perceived about the issue. Despite the focus on her activism in the pursuit of ending slavery, the way in which she wrote the novel diverged sharply with the expectations of female writers during the 19th century. Therefore, her methodology can be seen as a protest against the oppression of women as much as it was a novel intending to express an anti-slavery message. Novels in the 19th century that were written by women were on subjects of domesticity and were written in refined prose. Stowe wrote a novel that was politically charged and expressed sympathetic African American characters through the use of dialectically appropriate narrative. She was highly criticized and even called a “foul-mouthed hag” by one reader. She protested this criticism by claiming that she was not the author, but merely an instrument through which God spoke. In this way, she could disclaim responsibility and elevate the work to a sense of glorification through divine inspiration (Elsa Dixler, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, 8). However, Stowe was not fully immersed in the politics of the anti-slavery issue. She supported the idea of colonization, of sending the African Americans who were within the United States back to Africa. She exchanged a number of letters with Frederick Douglas on the issue to try and change his mind on the issue. It was Stowe who would change her mind, coming to an understanding that by this time, the homeland of Africa was many generations away from the births of most of the slaves and the free with an African heritage were no longer African, but belonged in the culture in which they were born. While in Uncle Tom’s Cabin it ends with the slaves going back to Africa, her novel Dred did not end with her characters going to the continent (Charles Robbins and Lyman Stowe, The Cambridge Introduction to Harriet Beecher Stowe, 106). While Uncle Tom’s Cabin has many aspects that can be considered very racist as read from a modern point of view, the intent of the novel was to incite the passions of the North against the atrocities of slavery. While Douglas had several problems with some of the aspects of the work and wrote critiques on the ending in order to express his anti-colonization point of view, he also saw it as a powerful weapon in the fight against slavery (Robbins and Stowe, The Cambridge Introduction, 106). In 1862 when Stowe went to the White House to discuss the ending of slavery with President Abraham Lincoln, it is reported that he proclaimed “So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war!”. Her daughter Hattie was in attendance and claimed it to be a true, but it is unclear if this is historic myth or fact (Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, vii). Still, the historic myth, even if it is untrue, reflects some truth about the way in which her novel motivated the anti-slavery sentiments to a point where action could no longer be denied. Hedrick states that “Stowe’s very success has made it difficult to evaluate her role in our cultural history” and that “To engage her life is to engage the plurality and contradiction of American culture” (Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, vii). The 19th century was a time in which issues of gender, race, region, and class were in high contrasts between the ideologies of the North and the South, and even within each of these cultures. The ideological point of view of the wealthy plantation owners was in conflict with that of the poor farmers, those of the academicians of the North in contrast with the urban industrial workers. However, it was the regional divisions that caused the most difficulty, the life in the South vastly different from that of the North. The novel that Stowe wrote was problematic as it dismissed some sub-cultures, elevated others, and more than likely inadvertently conflicted with the belief systems a great variety of people that she had never intended to address. The novel, during its time, was criticized for being inflammatory about the portrayal of Southern plantation owners, the owners of slaves feeling that the mistreatment which they were accused of leveling against their property exaggerated and well inflated beyond reality. From a modern perspective, the novel seems highly prejudice and not reflecting a true enlightened concept of the equality between people, stereotyping the African American slaves by the way in which they are portrayed. The work was translated into a whole series of other art forms, which included a play, into other languages, into song, toys, wallpapers, and a whole list of forms in which the message was both perpetuated and exploited (Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, vii). The impact of the novel on the anti-slavery movement is diminished, to an extent, by the commercialization of its success. The one thing that the novel did do was to create a distinct mark between the North and the South, the sectionalism that was creeping over the nation as differing ideologies were causing rifts between the people of different sections of the country being deepened through the obvious criticism of the South by the North through the depictions within the book. The novel expressed an exaggerated point of view, but affected those who read the book and had sympathy for the anti-slavery cause in such a way as to create a deeper chasm between themselves and those who would treat others the way in which the characters of the book suggested. As the nation was beginning to feel the pressure of the vast territories and the different economic and social needs that existed in areas that had different requirements of survival, the novel increased the division through the resentment of the South of its portrayal and the belief in the North of its accuracy. While the book cannot actually be claimed as the cause of the Civil War, it can be used as an example of many of the ways in which the country was headed towards a war, an ongoing wrong exacerbating the differences between the North and the South as the economic pressures in the South were deepening and driving them to the desire to sever their ties with a nation which seemed against their economic success. As people were heading North in search of better jobs in the industrial sector and immigrants were staying in the North to also take advantage of those jobs, the South was suffering from a vast number of losses of labor that were becoming increasingly difficult to overcome. In the threat to end slavery, the South saw the end of its economic stability and fought back through the threat and attempt of secession. The fuel of the anti-slavery sentiments was the threat that the South could not abide, its resource for labor a needed part of its survival. While despicable, slavery existed because the South had designed its economy to be supported by its use. The novel, though it is a cause for a great many concerns in regard to its portrayal of slaves, its commentary on the nature of the people of African heritage, and the obvious mistake of the colonialist theory, was intended to support the abolitionist movement. The writing portrayed a level of ignorance in that it was reflective of certain types of prejudices that have since been reframed and understood from a different perspective. The way in which the novel is presented is inflammatory, as it intended, but to a modern aesthetic it tends to inflame outrage against the nature of the writing, rather than to inflame an anti-slavery spirit. Stowe was most likely a victim of her time, the culture not fully embracing the nature of equality and denying the concept that skin color was irrelevant to many of the beliefs that were held about the visible differences that could be observed between people of different origins. Stowe should be seen as the proponent for good that she intended, a woman who wrote about a culture she did not fully understand, thus making many mistakes about its nature. She wrote of the South, slavery, and of the nature of women who were held within that slavery, all cultures that she had no direct understanding from which to resource her writing. Still, the novel incited the kind of outcry that she desired, her words and descriptions of the inhumane treatment of the slaves carried into the hearts of those who could put them to action against the crime of slavery. More even than this, she aptly represented the sectionalism that was plaguing the country, the different regional problems that were making it difficult for one subculture to understand the nature of another. As she promoted the end of slavery, she widened the rift between the two regions, a fuel from which to justify the resulting in war. Bibliography Cox, James M. “Harriet Beecher Stowe: From Sectionalism to Regionalism” Nineteenth Century. 38 (1984): 444-456. Dixler, Elsa. Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. Woodbury, N.Y: Barron's Educational Series, 1985. Hedrick, Joan D. Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1994. Parfait, Claire. The Publishing History of Uncle Tom's Cabin, 1852-2002. Aldershot, Hampshire, England: Ashgate, 2007. Robbins, Sarah, and Harriet B. Stowe. The Cambridge Introduction to Harriet Beecher Stowe. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2007. Stowe, Charles E, and Lyman B. Stowe. Harriet Beecher Stowe: The Story of Her Life. Boston: Houghton Mifflin company, 1911. The Publishers Weekly. New York: F. Leypoldt, 1873. Read More