Changing the World with the Point of a Pen
I just read Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It’s a great book and an emotionally touching one. It really made me cry. What made it more heart-rending was knowing it was real, real in the sense that the things described in the book also happened to real people, millions of real people. That made the book hard to read sometimes.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin is the story of two Kentucky slave families. Their owner has fallen into debt and is forced to sell two slaves or break up his entire farm and sell all his slaves. He chooses his farm manager, Tom, into whose arms he was put as a baby, and Henry, the handsome young child of his house servant, Eliza. He chooses them because they will bring the most money and satisfy his debt. Eliza, overhearing his plans, takes her child and flees. Tom chooses to stay and sacrifice himself rather than cause any other slaves to be sold. Those slaves would include his wife and children but he also stays because he loves his owner, a love the man does not deserve, and because he sees it as his Christian duty. The novel follows Eliza as she travels North to Canada and freedom and Tom as he is sold South, finally finding his own kind of freedom. It shows us how all, master and slave, are corrupted by this form of labor.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin has been parodied so often that I thought it would be a silly book, hard to take seriously, but it is a book like Tom Paine’s Common Sense, a book that brought on a revolution and changed the world, a book that showed slavery so clearly that only those with hard hearts or financial interest could continue to accept it.
As I read it I found myself holding my breath as Eliza escaped, crying when Tom and others were wrenched from their families, horrified when young girls were sold to rapists. It is also a very well written adventure story. You get involved with the people and knowing that these things really happened to real people, that Stowe isn’t exaggerating, made it something else, made it news, made it history.
When the escaping slave George declares that he will kill or die for his freedom you admire him. When he shoots a slave catcher to save his wife and child, you applaud. When Tom is taken from his family and then later sold to a cruel master who works his slaves to death and Tom still holds on to his religion, you don’t fee contemptuous of him, you admire his strength and steadfastness. He is not a fool but a good man caught in bad circumstances and still trying to live a good life.
Even the events that seem most unlikely, like Eliza’s flight across the moving ice flows in the Ohio River, were based on real incidences. In February, 1838, a young slave woman holding her child in her arms escaped in just such a way.
If anything Stowe minimized the misery many individuals suffered. Her villains seem very true to life, so true to life that if you think back on people you have known, you will recall some who, if slavery were legal, would act just as Stowe’s villains do.
While I didn’t find Stowe’s villains implausible I did find her heroes a bit unbelievable. Truth be told I have known very few people who would act so nobly, but there must be people who would or the civil war would never have been fought. The Beecher family probably would. All of Harriet’s siblings were reformers in addition to being writers, preachers, educators and all fervent abolitionists. They didn’t just talk the talk, they walked the walk.
The novel is soaked with Christianity and, despite that, my pagan soul did not rebel. If anything I embraced the version of Christianity that Stowe shows us, a Christianity based in action, not just blind superstition, a Christianity that works to better the lives of those who are unfortunate instead of just accepting things as they are, a Christianity that could fight against slavery rather than just teach slaves blind faith.
If Eva’s death lays it on a bit thick you must remember that Stowe had lost a child of her own and when the book was published in 1852 the mortality rate for children was much higher than today. There were no antibiotics and even the germ theory was unknown so many families, even most, experienced the loss of a child. Stowe had seven children herself but was survived by only three. Life was much more tenuous then and people found Christianity a solace. Given that Stowe was from a family of famous preachers and reformers and believed deeply herself it is only natural that her work would show Christianity as a positive force in life. Despite this I think anyone would enjoy this book regardless of their religion or lack of it.
Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind is another great book. It shows how the pre-civil war south was remembered by those who lived affluent lives. It is also a very women’s lib book. Scarlet is a strong, capable person who survives and helps her family survive despite living a time when women were supposed to be weak and helpless. Scarlett is a rock. A vain, selfish, not too smart rock, but a rock nonetheless. The blacks in Gone with the Wind are all shown as strong people with independence and dignity. Well, except for Prissy, who was an idiot. On the white side Aunt Pittypat was an idiot as well but Aunt Pittypat had a defacto guardian, the negro butler/driver Uncle Peter. When the parents of Melanie and Charles died and they were sent to live with their Aunt Pittypat, it was Uncle Peter who practically raised them and who made most of the decisions in the family. Peter is the one who went to get the housekeeping money from Pitty’s brother. He was the one who decided when Melanie could put up her hair and start attending parties, when Charles should have a larger allowance and what college he would attend. It was Uncle Peter who decided when it was too cold or wet for Miss Pittypat to go visiting or when she needed a shawl. Indeed, Miss Pittypat would get upset and “swoon” if Peter was gone for long. At one point he is referred to as “the grizzled old despot of Aunt Pittypat’s house.” When Peter goes through the dangerous area where Sherman marched to the sea, burning almost everything in the army’s path, goes through it on a horse he “acquired” in order to deliver a letter to Melanie, his main concern is that the girls return with him to live with Miss Pittypat so his Miss will look more respectable.
Despite this, Uncle Peter’s position was no more secure than Tom’s in Stowe’s work. The death or bankruptcy of his owner could have put him on the auction block just as easily as it did Tom.
The thing about Margaret Mitchell’s work and even Stowe’s is that to white people the lives of slaves were like icebergs, 90% was hidden.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Gone with the Wind are both great books. Add in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, mix all three together and you get a picture of life in the slavery South. But Stowe’s book is the most important. It sparked a revolution that freed four million people. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was also translated into every major language and became the second best selling book in the world after the Bible. You don’t sell that many books just on morality. You also have to have a good read and Uncle Tom’s Cabin is that.
By the end if the book Tom seemed to me to be, not just a poor slave, tortured and exploited, but a veritable Spartacus. Except that the character Tom didn’t really exist. He was created by Harriet Stowe. She was the Spartacus, leading people to freedom but better than Spartacus. In the end Spartacus and his followers ended up nailed to crosses along the Appian Way. Those that followed Tom and Harriet Beecher Stowe ended slavery in the United States. That is how you change things. Not with some superhero, and Spartacus was a superhero, one of the greatest men who ever lived, a slave that led a slave revolt that almost brought down Rome, but superheroes don’t change the world and Spartacus didn’t. To change the world you have to change the human heart, one heart at a time. It was what Tom Paine and Harriet Beecher Stowe were able to do. When Abraham Lincoln met Stowe he said “”So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war!”, the war the ended American slavery.
I recently watched a program on propaganda on C-Span. Propaganda is about fooling people, about governments, organized religion, or political groups getting people to blindly support one thing or another by using symbols and myths rather than by using the truth. That is not what Tom Paine and Harriet Stowe did. They got people to believe something by telling them the truth and by reaching their hearts.
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© Alllie 2007
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