This household had been indoctrinated by the zeal of Dr. Lyman Beecher into believing unreservedly all the inventions of ignorant a.s.sailants of slavery instead of the widely different facts.
Before I begin a detailed statement of the material errors and perversions of fact in "Uncle Tom"s Cabin" I want to emphasize it that every one of them appeared to northern readers, unfamiliar with the negro and the south, to be true, and most efficiently helped to form and strengthen sentiment against enforcement of the fugitive slave law.
Many things that she writes show that Mrs. Stowe was completely ignorant of the ways of the cotton plantation. I have s.p.a.ce to mention but one. Tom was bred in Kentucky, where no cotton was grown. And Ca.s.sy, by reason of her indulgent rearing, had had as little experience as Tom in cotton-picking. Yet these two show such expertness that Tom can add to the sack of a slower picker, and Ca.s.sy give Tom some of her cotton, and each have enough to satisfy the weigher at night. The good cotton-picker is surely a most skilled laborer. He must be trained from childhood to use both hands so well that he becomes almost ambidexterous. The training that the typewriter is now urged to take is a parallel.
Mrs. Stowe shows that she had no accurate knowledge of the sentiments of the whites of the south as to slavery. As we have already suggested, there may have been among the Kentuckians of the border some outspoken opponents of slavery; but it is very probable that in her womanly ardor for her great cause she lavishly magnified their numbers. In her novel she has nearly all of her white southerners--I may add all of the attractive ones--to declare themselves as abolitionists at heart. Misrepresentation of fact could not be grosser than this. I was twenty-five years old when the brothers" war commenced. I had mingled intimately with the people, high and low, of my part of the south. During all of this time I never found out there was a single one of my acquaintances, man, woman, boy, or girl, who did not believe slavery right. The charge implied by Mrs. Stowe that we southerners were doing violence to our consciences in holding on to our slaves is utterly without evidence; nay, it is unanimously contradicted by all the evidence. As we and our parents read the bible, it told us to hold on to them, but to treat them always with considerate kindness.
Mrs. Stowe emphasizes the frequent cruelty of the master to the slave; and she emphasizes more strongly still that under the law he was helpless. The slave was not helpless. He was protected by law. Note this example, given by Toombs:
"The most authentic statistics of England show that the wages of agricultural and unskilled labor in that kingdom not only fail to furnish the laborer with the comforts of our slave, but even with the necessaries of life, and no slaveholder could escape _a conviction for cruelty to his slaves_ who gave his slave no more of the necessaries of life for his labor than the wages paid to their agricultural laborers by the n.o.blemen and gentlemen of England would buy."[92]
The witness just called has full knowledge, and is the extreme of frank honesty and truthfulness.
The statute-book demonstrates that the law was steadily bettering the condition of the slave. I have not s.p.a.ce to state the progression which can be found in the different Georgia enactments. But I must mention two instances. In 1850 the procedure of trying a white person charged with a capital offence was extended to the slave. The code which came of force January 1, 1863, and which had been adopted some while before, prevented any confession made by a slave to his master--it mattered not how voluntary or free from suspicion it might be--from ever being received in evidence against him.
I commenced law practice in 1857. From that time until I went to the front I observed that public opinion was becoming more decided against mistreatment of the blacks. The masters of _ashcats_,--as ill-fed negroes were called in derision of their lean and dingy faces by the great mult.i.tude of sleek and shining ones,--those who punished with unreasonable severity, those who exacted overwork,--they were few and far between,--they were all more and more detested; and grand juries became more and more p.r.o.ne to deal properly with them. I would support this by cases, if their citation would not be unpleasant to descendants of parties.
Mrs. Stowe has his master to brand George Harris in the hand with the initial letter of the former"s surname. She has Legree"s slaves to pick cotton on Sunday. I never heard of any cases of branding human beings except as a punishment for crime in execution of a judgment of conviction, and very few of them. Tidying up the house, cooking, serving meals, caring for the animals on the place, and such other things as are done everywhere on Sunday, were of course required of the domestic slaves. Leaving these out, no slave was ever put to work on Sunday except to "fight fire," or at something commanded by a real emergency. Their employers now exact from thousands of white persons of both s.e.xes all over the country a great amount of such hard and grinding Sunday work as was never exacted of the slaves in the south. Peep into stores, offices of large corporations, and elsewhere, while others are at Sunday-school or church, and count those weary ones you find finishing up the work of the last week.
But all of the mistakes of Mrs. Stowe noticed in the foregoing are mere matters of bagatelle as compared with the character and nature which she gives the average negro of the south.
She represents the women as chaste as white women, and the husbands faithful to their wives even when separated from them. I shall now tell the truth as I know it to be--the truth that all observant people who have had experience with negroes know.
The moment almost that a married pair of slaves were separated for any cause, each one secretly, or more often openly, took another partner. Even when not separated, infidelity of both was the rule. Mrs. Stowe has the girls and their parents to shrink with horror from the desires of the master. To the simple-hearted African the master was always great, and there was among them not a woman to be found who would not dedicate herself or her daughter to greatness, finding it so inclined,--husband, father, brothers, and sisters all in their desire for a friend at court heartily approving. The white whose concubine gave favors behind his back to her slave friends was the stalest joke of every neighborhood.
The ma.s.s of the negroes are more unchaste now than they were in slavery, a subject of which I shall say something further in another chapter. But even where the master"s steady requirement from one generation to another of a stricter observance of family ties, and the natural imitation of the ways of the dominant race, had lifted the slaves, in appearance at least, far above their West African ancestors, not even mothers had become chaste. Boys, girls, men, and women, both married and unmarried, were as promiscuous by night as houseflies are by day. The horror of horrors in this abyss of moral impurity to one of a superior race was their utter unconsciousness of incest.[93]
Mrs. Stowe has their philoprogenitiveness--as phrenologists call it--as fully developed as the whites. One bred in the cotton districts well remembers that it required all the vigilance of master and mistress, overseer, and the deputies selected from the older slave women, to secure from the mothers proper attention to their children, and especially to keep them from punishing too cruelly. But I do not mean to say that this parental misbehavior was as general as the unchast.i.ty mentioned. When the mothers aged beyond forty-five or fifty, they would begin to think somewhat less of beaux and somewhat more of their children.
George Harris and Eliza are next of the slave characters in prominence and importance to Uncle Tom. With their large admixture of white blood, their comparatively good education and superb moral training, a southerner would think that you were merely mocking him if you named these as fairly representative negroes. As they are drawn, they are really whites--whites of high refinement--with only a physical negro exterior, and that softened down to the minimum.
But Uncle Tom--I pray my northern readers to take counsel of their common sense and consider what I shall now say of him. Rightly to estimate him, I must begin with some contrasts. The first that occurs to me is Tyndarus, the slave hero of the Captivi of Plautus, p.r.o.nounced by the great critic Lessing to be the most beautiful play ever brought upon the stage.
Tyndarus and Philocrates, his young master, taken prisoners, are sold to Hegio. The two captives personate each other, and induce Hegio to send home Philocrates, who was a wealthy n.o.ble, and keep only the born slave.
Hegio was scheming to recover his own son, now a slave in the land of the captives, by a bargain for Philocrates, this bargain to be negotiated by the counterfeit Tyndarus. Discovering how he had been duped, the anguished father tells the real Tyndarus that he shall die a cruel death. This is the reply of the slave:
"As I shall not die because of evil deeds, that is a small matter. My death will keep it ever in remembrance that I delivered my master from slavery and the enemy, restored him to his country and father, and chose that I myself should perish rather than he."
That is exalted. But Tyndarus has not the complete goodness of Uncle Tom.
As soon as he is at last rescued from the horrible mines, to find Philocrates true and himself a free man, he threatens woe to a slave who had injured him, and looks approvingly upon the execution of his threat.
Compare Uncle Tom with the good men of the bible, such as Moses, Peter, and Paul, to mention no more. Not one of these was able always to keep his feelings and tongue in that complete subjection that never fail Uncle Tom.
Uncle Tom, in whom love alone prompts all thoughts and deeds, surpa.s.ses every saint in Dante"s Paradise--he surpa.s.ses even the incomparably sweet Beatrice, who now and then chides unpleasantly.
The climax of my comparison is reached when I suggest that Uncle Tom is made from first to last a more perfect Christ than the Jesus of the gospels. The latter, as Matthew Arnold and other reverent christians remark, was sometimes unamiable. Remember his expulsion of the money changers and traders from the temple, and the many opprobrious words he used of and to the Pharisees. Growing recognition of the all-human Jesus is benignly replacing a religion of superst.i.tion, intolerance, and dogma with one of universal love and brotherhood. I cannot fully express my appreciation of the liberal divines, from Charming to Savage, who are preparing us so well for the millennium. But I am sure a new study of Uncle Tom would give each one of them firmer grasp of christlikeness and far more power to present it. Think over such instances in that holiest and most altruistic of lives as these: He has just learned that he has been sold; that he is to be carried down the river. His wife suggests that as he has a pa.s.s from his master permitting him to go and return as he pleases, he take advantage of it and run away to the free States. As firmly as Socrates, unjustly condemned to death, refused to escape from prison when his friends had provided full opportunity, Tom declared he would stay, that he would keep faith with his master. He said that, according to Eliza"s report of the conversation she had overheard, his master was forced to sell him, or sell all the other slaves, and it was better for himself to suffer in their place. And as he goes away he has nothing but prayers and blessings for the man who sends him into dread exile from his wife and children. He falls to a new master, whom, and his family, he watches over with the fidelity and love of a most kind father, doing every duty, but above all things trying to save that master"s soul.
Then his cruel fortune delivers him to the monster Legree. For the first time in his life he is treated with disrespect, distrust, and harshness.
Yet he forgets his own misery, and finds pleasure in helping and comforting his fellow sufferers, striving his utmost to bring them into eternal life. He will not do wrong even at the command of his cruel master, who has him in a dungeon, as it were, into which no ray of justice can ever shine. And here he dies from the cruel lash--almost under it. He falters some, it is true; but there was no sweat of blood as in Gethsemane, nor exclamation upon the cross, "My G.o.d, my G.o.d, why hast thou forsaken me!" He went more triumphantly through his more fell crucifixion.
I believe that the character of Uncle Tom is the only part of the book which future generations will cherish; not for the lesson against slavery it was intended to teach, but because it excels in ideal and realization all imitation of Christ in actual life or the loftiest religious fiction.
Consider its marvellous effect upon Heine, as told by a quotation from the latter in The Author"s Introduction to the book.[94]
The detailed comparison which I have just made puts Uncle Tom upon a pinnacle, where he is above all the saints in lofty, self-abnegating, and lovingly religious manhood; and the reader notes how fruitlessly I have tried to find another like him. But Mrs. Stowe was confident that she had not exaggerated or overdrawn him, and further that such were common among the southern slaves. Here is what she deliberately says in her Key:
"The character of Uncle Tom has been objected to as improbable; and yet the writer has received more confirmations of that character, and from a greater variety of sources, than of any other in the book.
Many people have said to her, "I knew an Uncle Tom in such and such a southern State." All the histories of this kind which have thus been related to her would of themselves, if collected, make a small volume."[95]
Toombs once said to me, "It would have been a matchless eulogy of slavery if it had produced an Uncle Tom." But, as we see from the last quotation, she claims far more. She really claims that it was fruitful of Uncle Toms in every southern State.
Shall we attribute this firm belief, that there were among the southern slaves many who were better christians than Christ himself is represented to have been, to a mere hallucination? That word is not strong enough. To explain the belief, we must think of visions suggested by the hypnotizing powers, or something like the spell on t.i.tania, when Bottom with his a.s.s"s head inspired her with the fondest admiration and love.
Although the foregoing is far from being exhaustive, it is enough; it shows incontrovertibly that Mrs. Stowe builded throughout upon the exceptional and imaginary. My father, a Presbyterian clergyman, with the strictest notions as to the Sabbath, as he generally called Sunday, made me read, when a boy, a book called, if I recollect aright, "Edwards"s Sabbath Manual." Be the t.i.tle whatever it may, the entire book was but a collection of instances of secular work done on Sunday, and always followed closely by disaster, which appeared to be divine punishment of sabbath-breaking. The author was confident he had proved his case. He believed with his whole soul that if one should do on Sunday any week-day work not permitted in the catechism, it was more than probable that G.o.d would at once deal severely with him for not keeping his day holy.
This is a somewhat overstrained example of Mrs. Stowe"s method. I will therefore give one which is as close as close can be. Suppose a diligent worker to cull from newspaper files, law reports, and what he hears in talk, the cases in which one party to a marriage has cruelly mistreated the other. If he digested his collection with a view to effect, it would prove a far more formidable attack upon the most civilizing and improving of all human inst.i.tutions than Mrs. Stowe"s Key is upon slavery; and if he had her rare artistic gift he could found upon it a wonderful anti-marriage romance. The author of such a Key and romance would be confuted at once by the exclamation, "If these horrors are general, people would flee marriage as they do the plague." Let it be inquired, "If "Uncle Tom"s Cabin" and Mrs. Stowe"s Key truly represent, why did not more of the blacks escape into the free States? and why did they not revolt in large bodies during the war in the many communities whence all the able-bodied whites had gone to the front far away?" and there can be but one answer, which is, there was no general or common oppression of the African in slavery--there were no horrors to him in the condition--but on the contrary he was contented and happy, merry as the day is long.
How was it that a book so full of untrue statement and gross exaggeration as to an American theme found such wide acceptance at the north and elsewhere out of the south? For years I could not explain. When I read it at Princeton, I talked it over with the southern students. We pooh-poohed the negroes, but we admired the princ.i.p.al white characters except Mrs. St.
Claire, whom we all regarded as a libellous caricature. The representation of slavery was incorrect, and the portrayal of the negro as only a black and kinky-haired white was so absurd that one of us dreamed that either would be taken seriously by the north. It was some ten years after the brothers" war that the true explanation commenced to dawn upon me, and it has at last become clear.
It is an important fact that the great body of the people of the north knew almost next to nothing of the south, and especially of the average negro. As one calmly looks back now he sees that in the agitation over the admission of California, the cleavage between the two nationalizations treated in foregoing chapters was becoming decided, and that the people belonging to each were losing their tempers and getting ready to fight.
When even a political campaign in which the only question is, who shall be ins and who outs, is on, each party is p.r.o.ne to believe the hardest things of the other. But when such a fell resort to force as that of 1850 and the years immediately following is impending, all history shows that those on one side will believe any charge reflecting upon the good character of those on the other side which is not grossly improbable. Such quarrels are so fierce that we never weigh accusations against our adversaries--we just embrace and circulate. Thus had the northern public become ripe for an arraignment of the morality of slavery, which--as was with purblind instinct felt, not discerned--was the sole active principle of the southern nationalization. Even without the provocation just mentioned, a northern man would liken the African in everything but his skin and hair to a white. We always cla.s.sify a new under some old and well-known object.
When the Romans first saw the elephant they thought of him as the Lucanian ox. The automobile which propels itself around our streets is made as much like the corresponding horse-drawn vehicle familiar to the public for ages as can be. The northerner knew no man well but the Caucasian, and he had long been led by a common psychological process to give his characteristic essentials to the negro. And now when anti-slavery partisans positively maintained that the latter was a white in all but his outside, adducing seeming proofs, and the free-labor nationalization was with its leading strings pulling all the northern people into line, even the calmest and most dispa.s.sionate among them were influenced to believe that the negroes were so much like our Anglo-Saxon selves it was an unspeakable crime to keep them in slavery. And all tales of cruelty and horror found easy credence.
Thus had the northern public been made ready for "Uncle Tom"s Cabin." And although the book wholly ignored and obscured the really live and burning issue, and it was packed from beginning to end with the most gigantic errors of fact, it took the section by storm.
It is a great book. When something has been as persistently demanded as long as "Uncle Tom"s Cabin" has been by the northern public and the "Conquered Banner" by the southern public; when thousands upon thousands of plain people weep over them and lay them away to weep over them again, you may know--it matters not what the unruffled and sarcastic critic may say--that each is a work of the very highest and the very rarest genius.
Tears of sympathy for tales of distress and misery, whoever can set their fountain flowing is always a nature"s king or queen.
I have read "Uncle Tom"s Cabin" four times: first at Princeton in 1852; the second time amid the gloom of reconstruction, more accurately to ascertain northern opinion of the negro and forecast therefrom, if I could, what was in store for the south; the third time as I was meditating the Old and New South; and just the other day the last time. The more familiar I become with it the greater seems to me the power with which the attention is taken and held captive. The very t.i.tles to the first twelve chapters are, in their contents and sequence, gems of genius, and draw resistlessly. I become more and more impatient with Ruskin"s reprehending the escape of Eliza, when, with her child hugged to her bosom, she leaps from block to block of floating ice in the Ohio until she is safe on the other side--a marvel like the ghost"s appearance in the first scene of Hamlet, exciting a high and breathless interest at the outset, which is never allowed to flag afterwards. Whenever I begin to read the book, I fall at once into that illusion which Coleridge has so well explained. I accept all her blunders and mistakes as real facts, and although it is hard to tolerate her negro travesties and the anti-slavery sentiments of her southern whites, somehow they do not then offend me, and there is chapter after chapter in which I follow the action with breathless interest. "Gulliver"s Travels" and "Pilgrim"s Progress" are examples to show how little of reality either entertaining or moving fiction needs.
From a ma.s.s of false a.s.sumptions, seasoned with the merest sprinkling of fact; and especially from her taking for granted that the negro is really on a par of development with the white, she has constructed the Iliad of our time. The nursery tale out of which Shakspeare fashioned the drama of Lear did not furnish him with smaller resources. What a wonderful action he puts in the place of the nursery tale! how natural and probable it all appears to us as it unfolds! how we hate, or pity, or admire, or love as we cannot keep from following it! Likewise every reader in the north accepted Mrs. Stowe"s novel as the very height of verity, and afterwards saw in every fugitive slave a George Harris, or Eliza, or an Uncle Tom.
And the book evoked the same effect out of America. The most curious proof of this that I can think of is the statue of The Freed Slave, which I saw on exhibition at the Centennial. It has nearly all the peculiar physical characteristics of the Caucasian; and it represents not a typical man of African descent, but a negro albino, that is, a white negro, not a black one. There are albino negroes, but there are also albino whites. That statue shows what was European conception of the negroes whose chains were broken by the emanc.i.p.ation proclamation. Its reception in America shows also that the same conception prevailed here. Day after day I saw crowds of northern people contemplating that counterfeit with deep emotion, many of the women unable to restrain their tears.
Surely "Uncle Tom"s Cabin" in its propagandic potency is unrivalled. It did more than the anti-slavery statesmen, politicians, preachers, talkers, and orators combined. To it more than to all other agencies is due that the people of the north took such a stubborn stand in opposition that the south at last saw that the fugitive slave law had been practically nullified. Thus the fates worked to bring about secession. For secession was to bring the brothers" war; and this war was to do what could not be done by law or consent,--that is, to get rid of slavery as the informing principle of southern nationalization.
The post-bellum propagandic effect of "Uncle Tom"s Cabin" has been very malign. With the companion literature and theories, it formed the opinion that devised and executed the reconstruction of the southern States. The cardinal principle of that reconstruction was to treat the blacks just emanc.i.p.ated as political equals of the whites.
Those who did this are to be forgiven. They had been made to believe that the negroes of the south were as well qualified for full citizenship as the whites, and it was but meet retributive punishment of the great crime of slavery and waging war to hold on to it, that the masters be put under their former slaves. "Uncle Tom"s Cabin" had made them believe it.
The only parallel of ma.s.s of pernicious error engendered by a book, so far as I know, is "Burke"s Reflections." Const.i.tutional England ought to have followed Charles Fox as one man, and given countenance to the rise in France for liberty. But Burke"s piece of magnificent rhetoric effectually turned the nation out of her course, and had her in league with absolutists to put back the clock of European democracy a hundred years or more. Even yet intelligent Englishmen magnify that most unEnglish achievement. The bad effects of "Uncle Tom"s Cabin" have not been so lasting in our country. We Americans get out of ruts much more easily than the English. The north is now rapidly learning the real truth as to the utter incapacity of the ma.s.s of southern negroes to vote intelligently, and complacently acquiesces in their practical disfranchis.e.m.e.nt by the only cla.s.s which can give good government.
We must utterly reject and discard everything that Mrs. Stowe and those whom I distinguish as the root-and-branch abolitionists have taught, in their unutterable ideology, as to the nature and character of the negro, and in its place we must learn to know him as he really is--to tolerate him, nay, to love him as such. This is the only way in which we can prepare ourselves for giving the negroes their due from us.
Further, we owe it to our proud American history, now that the brothers"
war is forty years past, to ascertain the real cause of that mighty struggle, maintained most laudably and gloriously by each side. Those whom I am here criticising made many believe that the real stake was whether the slave should remain the property of his master or not. Note the emphasized adjuration in the "Battle Hymn of the Republic:"
"As he [Christ] died to make men holy, let us die to make men free."
A most beautiful sentiment, fitly expressed; but how it humiliates the grand issue, which was whether federal government should live or perish!
And that greatest of American odes, Whittier"s "Laus Deo," how wide of the true mark is its sublime rejoicing! Celebrating the abolition of slavery by const.i.tutional amendment, the occasion demanded that he extol the really benign achievement. That achievement was that all cause of diverse nationalization in the States had been forever removed, and thus it was a.s.sured that brotherhood of the nations was to grow without check. But the rapt bard was blinded, as his utterances show, by what now almost appears to have been a fit of delusional insanity. He says: