Review: Uncle Tom's Cabin

Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I recently re-read Uncle Tom's Cabin, so I elected to read this edition for the included A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, a book by Harriet Beecher Stowe published to document the veracity of the depiction of slavery in her anti-slavery novel. So, this ebook has both and I noticed the percentage was right around 5o% going from the novel to its key. So, Stowe felt a need to publish a nonfiction work of the same heft as the work of fiction is defended.

Stowe was the seventh of 13 children born to outspoken Calvinist preacher Lyman Beecher and Roxana (Foote), a deeply religious woman who died when Stowe was only five years old. She had brothers who became ministers: including Henry Ward Beecher, who became a famous preacher and abolitionist, Charles Beecher, and Edward Beecher. Harriet enrolled in the Hartford Female Seminary run by her older sister Catharine, where she received a traditional academic education usually reserved for males at the time with a focus in the classics, including study of languages and mathematics. In 1832, at the age of 21, Harriet Beecher moved to Cincinnati, Ohio to join her father, who had become the president of Lane Theological Seminary. Areas of the city had been wracked in the Cincinnati riots of 1829, when ethnic Irish attacked blacks, trying to push competitors out of the city. Beecher met a number of African Americans who had suffered in those attacks, and their experience contributed to her later writing about slavery. Riots took place again in 1836 and 1841, driven also by native-born anti-abolitionists. It was in a literary club there that she met Calvin Ellis Stowe, a widower who was a professor at the seminary. The two married on January 6, 1836. He was an ardent critic of slavery, and the Stowes supported the Underground Railroad, temporarily housing several fugitive slaves in their home. Most slaves continued north to secure freedom in Canada.

So, by 1851 when she wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin, she was approaching building this edifice of social realism in literature, utilizing descriptive and critical realism, with a goal in mind not unlike John Steinbeck did with The Grapes of Wrath.

In they, we have three parts. The first part is key characters and scenes backed up by the sources and events that inspired them. This part includes lively correspondence from readers attacking Stowe, declaring they had seen the real Uncle Tom or other character, or felt trapped by an economic reality: "Would anyone believe that I am master of slaves of my own purchase? I am drawn along by the general inconvenience of living here without them. I will not, I cannot justify it. However culpable my conduct, I will so far pay my devoir to Virtue as to own the excellence and rectitude of her precepts, and lament my want of conformity to them."

The next two parts are an indictment and call to arms for organized Christianity. First, she highlights the duplicity of Christian institutions in defending and supporting slavery, such as this document from the southern Methodists' shoddy record:

"THE GEORGIA ANNUAL CONFERENCE.
Resolved unanimously, that whereas there is a clause in the discipline of our church which states that we are as much as ever convinced of the great evil of slavery; and whereas, the said clause has been perverted by some, and used in such a manner as to produce the impression that the Methodist Episcopal Church believed slavery to be a moral evil— Therefore Resolved, that it is the sense of the Georgia Annual Conference that slavery, as it exists in the United States, is not a moral evil. Resolved, that we view slavery as a civil and domestic institution, and one with which, as ministers of Christ, we have nothing to do, further than to ameliorate the condition of the slave, by endeavouring to impart to him and his master the benign influences of the religion of Christ, and aiding both on their way to heaven."

The third part is Stowe's call to action for American churches to work to the end of slavery nationally and globally. Here concluding line is the same Jesus quote I would offer as the most exposing of hypocrisy then, “Inasmuch as ye have done it to the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.”

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