CHAPTER IX

"UNCLE TOM'S CABIN"

The misrepresentations in "Uncle Tom's Cabin" of the character of the

negro and his usual treatment in southern slavery have been taken as true

by the best-informed and most unprejudiced everywhere outside of the

south. The quotations which I make above from Prof. Barrett Wendell's

_bahnbrechend_ work on American literature[81] show a rare and exemplary

freedom from sectional bias. But he is a most convincing witness to the

statement with which I begin this chapter, as I shall now show by two

other excerpts from the same book, making it appear that even Professor

Wendell has accepted without question the misrepresentations mentioned. In

these excerpts I italicize the important statements, and I follow each

with a contradictory one of my own. I invite close attention to what

Professor Wendell says on one side and I on the other, for they make up

issues of fact that must be rightly settled before the historical merit of

the work which is the subject of this chapter can be accurately judged.

This is the first excerpt:

"Written carelessly, and full of crudities, 'Uncle Tom's Cabin,' even

after forty-eight years, remains a remarkable piece of fiction. The

truth is that almost unawares Mrs. Stowe had in her the stuff of which

good novelists are made. Her plot, to be sure, is conventional and

rambling; but her characters, even though little studied in detail,

have a pervasive vitality which no study can achieve; _you

unhesitatingly accept them as real. Her descriptive power, meanwhile,

was such as to make equally convincing the backgrounds in which her

action and her characters move. What is more, these backgrounds, most

of which she knew from personal experience, are probably so faithful

to actual nature that the local sentiment aroused as you read them may

generally be accepted as true._"[82]

I say as to the characters in the novel that the negroes are monstrous

distortions, being drawn in the main with the leading peculiarities of

whites and without those of negroes; and that as to her most

representative southern whites Mrs. Stowe is utterly untrue to fact by

making them all anti-slavery. I say as to the "backgrounds," that she knew

as little of them as she did of the negroes. I expect to demonstrate that

the "personal experience" claimed for her by Professor Wendell was scanty

and inadequate in the extreme.

I now give the second and last excerpt: "She [Mrs. Stowe] differed from

most abolitionists _in having observed on the spot all the tragic evils of

slavery_."[83]

I do not dispute that her opportunity of learning southern slavery, small

as it was, was very far superior to that of the other prominent

abolitionists except Seward, who had taught school in the black belt of

Georgia.[84] I maintain that she knew but little of southern slavery, and

they less; that what both they and she conscientiously and most

confidently believed to be their knowledge of this slavery, the slave, and

of the slaveholder, was but a prodigious mass of delusion and prejudice.

I shall show, I think, that, instead of observing, she merely fancied and

imagined, and that, to say the least, it is very misleading to allege

that this fancying and imagining of hers was done "on the spot."

By the words, "all the tragic evils of slavery," Professor Wendell

evidently means that the evils of southern slavery to the slave were both

very many and very great. I shall show, I believe, that the condition of

the average negro in southern slavery was far better than it was in Africa

whence he came, and far better than it is now since he has been freed.

There are occasionally incident to every human condition--even to the

relation of parent and child--some tragic evils of its own. In the native

home of the negro in West Africa all the women and nearly all the men are

slaves of brutally cruel savages, without any protection of law whatever.

The social organism is in the very lowest stage; and there is complete

inability to evolve into a better one as the stationariness of ages

proves. In the new south, certain causes which I have described at length

in the last two chapters of this book have, ever since emancipation, been

steadily and with acceleration depressing the average negro; and the rise

of the few who have managed to acquire some property, or to get a good

industrial education, only brings out more conspicuously the misery and

wretchedness of the mass. It is correct to say that there was a vast

multitude of tragic evils to the negroes in West Africa; and it is also

correct to say that there is now the same to them in the south; but it is

not correct to say that the tragic evils of southern slavery to the slave

were frequent or general. The truth as to southern slavery ought to be

known everywhere, which is, that it raised the negro very greatly in

condition, and, now that he has been taken out of it, his progress has

been arrested, and he is relapsing.

The great proposition of Mrs. Stowe and of the root-and-branch

abolitionists was that slavery in the south was such a flagrant and

atrocious wrong to the negro, that every human being was commanded by

conscience to do everything possible to help him if he should try to

escape from his master. Combating this proposition, without any concession

whatever, I think it well that we try at the outset to ascertain how

southern slavery affected the negro, whether cruelly or beneficially. To

do this, his condition in his native land, his condition while a slave in

America, and, lastly, his condition after his emancipation, must be

compared. I beg my reader to follow me attentively as I now review and

contrast these three conditions. First, as to his condition in Africa.

Here is what Toombs said of him to a Boston audience, January 24, 1856:

"The monuments of the ancient Egyptians carry him back to the morning

of time--older than the pyramids; they furnish the evidence both of

his national identity and his social degradation before history began.

We first behold him a slave in foreign lands; we then find the great

body of his race slaves in their native land; and after thirty

centuries, illuminated by both ancient and modern civilization, have

passed over him, we still find him a slave of savage masters, as

incapable as himself of even attempting a single step in

civilization--we find him there still, without government or laws of

protection, without letters or arts of industry, without religion, or

even the aspirations which would raise him to the rank of an idolater;

and in his lowest type, his almost only mark of humanity is, that he

walks erect in the image of the Creator. Annihilate his race to-day,

and you will find no trace of his existence within half a score of

years; and he would not leave behind him a single discovery,

invention, or thought worthy of remembrance by the human family."[85]

If my reader deems Toombs's picture overdrawn let him consult those parts

of the recent work of a most diligent and conscientious investigator

describing the negroes of West Africa, and note what is there told of

heathen practices still surviving,--slavery of women to their polygamic

husbands, pitiless destruction of useless members of the family, robbery,

murder, cannibalism, the utter want of chastity.[86] We quote this as to

slavery, which is especially important here:

"Slavery, having existed from time immemorial, is bound up with the

whole social and economic organization of West African society. There

are, broadly speaking, three kinds of slaves: those captured in war,

those purchased from outside the tribe,--usually from the

interior,--and the native-born slaves. _All alike_ are mere chattels,

and _by law are absolutely subject to the master's will without

redress_. But in practice a difference is made, for obvious reasons,

between native-born slaves and captives taken from hostile tribes.

_The latter are numerous, and the severest forms of labor fall to

their lot. They are treated with constant neglect, and cruelly

punished on the slightest provocation. Their lives are at no time

secure; they serve as victims for the sacrifice; when sick they are

driven into the jungle; in times of scarcity they starve._"[87]

The master has the power of life and death over all slaves.[88]

The same author adds: "_The pawning of persons for debt is exceedingly

common. If the debt is never paid in full, the pawn_ and his descendants

become slaves in perpetuity."[89]

Surely the reader who has attended to these details which I have given

from Mr. Tillinghast will admit that the southern master transferred the

African into a condition far better than any he could find at home. In the

south two agencies gave him beneficent favor to which he and his fathers

had always been strangers. The law of the land protected his life and

shielded him from cruelty; and his high market value made it the interest

of his American master not to overwork or under- feed and clothe him. And

he was introduced into the first stage of monogamic life, which he

developed steadily and rapidly until he was freed. In this he was

travelling the only true road up from barbarism. If he could have but

stayed in it until, after some generations--perhaps centuries--chaste

wives and mothers had been evolved, he would have stood firmly on the

threshold of permanent civilization and improvement.

Whatever evil of southern slavery to the negro my readers, prompted by the

root-and-branch abolitionists, may suggest, they will find on reflection

that it would have been far greater to him and more frequent had he

remained in Africa. Separation of members of the family has been

repeatedly emphasized as a most horrible evil of slavery in the south.

Such separation was incalculably more cruel and frequent in West Africa

than it ever was among the negro slaves in America. And how have the

root-and-branch abolitionists mended matters? What do we see in the new

south, now that slavery, the great rupturer of family circles, is no more,

and a master no longer can part parent and child, or husband and wife?

Before the end of the brothers' war there had not been a single

separation of a family among my father's slaves. At much expense and

inconvenience he had bought the husband of one and the wife of another in

order to keep each one of these two pairs united. In 1866, Bob, a boy of

sixteen, who, because of his obedience and merry-making gifts, had always

been a greatly indulged pet, signalized his new-found freedom by stealing

from the house of one of our neighbors some articles of considerable

value. He fled from justice, and, never seeing his parents or his brothers

and sisters again, died among strangers. In 1868, Lewis abandoned his wife

Esther and their young child, and went to a distant town. Some ten years

afterwards, Bill, a brother of Bob, and several years younger, convicted

of an unmentionable crime, received a ten years' chain-gang sentence. Not

long before this the body of one of his two wives who was at the time out

of his favor was found in a well. Reputable whites living near were

convinced that he had murdered her. If that be true, it should count as a

separation. While he was serving out his sentence his remaining wife

married again, and this should be set down also as a separation. Bob,

Lewis, Esther, and Bill were slaves of my father. He did not own twenty in

all. This example shows how, as to the same negroes, southern slavery

operated to prevent separation of families, and how freedom has operated

to encourage and stimulate it. It is not an exceptional example. My

maternal grandfather and a maternal aunt owned each many more slaves than

my father did. Some of my father's near neighbors had slaves in

considerable number. In all of these slaves, while I knew them, there

never was a separation of a family except by death or the voluntary act of

parties to a marriage? But when they were freed in 1865 separation at once

became rife, and it has always been active. What I have just told is

fairly representative of the new south throughout the cotton States.

There were now and then sales made of slaves which sundered man and wife,

and parent and child; but such were extremely few, and their proportion

was steadily decreasing under two potent influences. Restraint of them by

the law had commenced and was growing. But the stronger influence was

custom and public opinion. Before approaching sales at public outcry by

sheriffs or representatives of a deceased, and also before private sales,

the slaves to be sold were given opportunity to find their new masters.

There was generally a neighbor who owned husband, wife, parents, or

children, or wanted a cook, washerwoman, seamstress, boy to make a

carpenter, striker, or blacksmith of, somebody careful with stock, etc.,

and the upshot would be that the man selected by the slave had got him.

The seller had natural feelings. His wife and all of his children would do

their utmost to get such new masters as the negroes preferred. I shall

always cherish in memory the affectionate regard which the mother of the

household and all the family habitually showed to their slaves. As I

write, a sweet reminiscence comes of how the children would always clamor

and mutiny against the most merited punishment of their nurse by father or

overseer. There is no doubt that the slave steadily won larger place in

the domestic affections, and that his treatment by each generation of

masters was more kind and humane. And as a part of this amelioration the

percentage of forced separation of slave families was all the while

becoming less.

Let us devote a moment to the negro trader, as he was called, and his

slave-pens, which were the subjects of much and heated invective. The

first suggestion in order here is that there were such in West Africa, far

more frequent and far exceeding in cruelty any ever known in the south.

To take the African away from the latter and turn him over to the former

was great kindness to him. I remind my readers, in the next place, that

the factors constantly minimizing separation of slaves from other members

of the family--law, public opinion becoming more sensitive, custom

becoming more merciful, and the sway of the domestic affections

stronger--were _pari passu_ humanizing every incident of the commerce in

slaves as property. Lastly, the negro trader and the pen, by reason of the

small number of the slaves to whom they caused real suffering, were mercy

and prosperous condition itself beside the convict gangs and pens which

emancipation has put in their place, as will come out more clearly in a

short while.

His use of the lash was a dire accusation of the master. The reader thinks

at once of the relevant words in a famous passage so often quoted from one

of President Lincoln's messages: "If this struggle is to be prolonged till

... every drop of blood drawn by the lash shall be paid by another drawn

with the sword." This was said March 4, 1865, a month and five days only

before General Lee's surrender, and when all the great battles of the

brothers' war had been fought,--a war by far the most sanguinary in the

world's history. Blood did sometimes follow the blow of the lash, but not

often. The overseer who could not correct without breaking the skin always

lost his place. When the statement of Mr. Lincoln just commented on is

compared with the actual fact, it appears to be one of the most

extravagant hyperboles ever uttered.

Before I have my readers to look at the actual facts I want to say a

preliminary word. The parent was enjoined by Solomon not to spare the rod.

The rod was permitted to the master of the apprentice, the school-teacher,

the drill officer, and others. It was often used with great severity. As

we see from the Decameron husbands were wont to correct their wives by

beating them with sticks. Whipping on the bare back was a common execution

of the judgment of a criminal court. Our insubordinate convicts are

strapped. The usual punishment of a slave's disobedience was to whip him.

A switch was not generally used, because by reason of his thick and tough

skin and lower nervous development--to use a common expression--it would

not hurt him. It was a familiar thing to me in my childhood to hear some

negro tell of the use of a switch on him by women or feeble men, how the

blows could scarcely be felt, and yet with what outcry and clamor he

pretended that each one gave him great pain. The cowhide, but far more

frequently the whip, took the place of the switch. The former was more and

more discredited, because it could seldom be laid on hard enough without

cutting the skin. The whip had a flat lash at the end, with which, as the

strap or paddle now used on our convicts, a stinging blow could be hit

that would not draw blood.

An ordinary correction of a negro did not cause him as much pain as your

child, with his far superior sensitiveness, receives when you give him the

rod. Large and heavy as the overseer's whip looked, the negro, with his

high degree of insensibility to physical pain inherited from his African

ancestors, who for a hundred generations or more had bestowed upon one

another all kinds of corporal torture, cared far less for it than the

abolitionist who insisted on making him merely a black white man, could

ever understand. How little of both mental and corporal suffering the lash

causes the average negro is strikingly shown by the fact that ever since

his emancipation, when he is detected in a serious offence, he is prone to

propose that he be whipped instead of being carried to court. If his

offer is accepted he strips off his clothes with alacrity, exclaims the

conventional "O, Lordy!" under every fall of the whip; and when the

contract number of lashes has been given he goes away with the look and

air of one who has just learned that he has drawn a lottery prize of

thousands; and his nearest and dearest, his wife and children, all his

sweethearts, congratulate him cordially, and the entire negro community

rate him as rarely fortunate. This is enough here of the lash; but a word

or two more will be appropriate when we give the chain-gang attention.

"Run, nigger, run, patroller get you."

The riotous merriment of this air can be fully appreciated only by one who

has heard Cuffee sing it at the quarters while picking his banjo. It

completely confutes the charge often made that the patrol law was a cruel

one. To the negro, the execution of that law was more of fun and frolic

than punishment. Let this air, and all the others to which the slaves used

to dance, be meditated by those, if there are such, who incline to believe

that Professor DuBois has really detected, as he seriously contends, in

the negro melodies of the old south deep sorrow over slavery. If miserable

conditions give character to musical expression, the songs, if any, that

now come forth spontaneously from the mass of southern negroes--that is,

from those of the lower class, which class will be described later

herein--ought to be sadder than the tears of Simonides.

My reader who has his memory stored with the raw-head and bloody bones

fiction of abolitionists who had never set foot on an inch of slave

territory, probably thinks of bloodhounds, and wonders if I will be frank

enough to mention them. He has been made to believe that runaway slaves

often had the flesh torn from their bones by these dogs. I witnessed

several chases of runaways, and in every one, when the negro was overtaken

by the dogs, he was in a tree far above their reach. Think about it, and

bring it home to yourself. Put yourself in the runaway's place, you would

surely understand as well as a common house cat does how to avoid pursuing

dogs. Negro dogs, as they were called, were bred to be far more slow than

fox dogs. The tricks of the runaway would put the latter at fault so often

that they could hardly ever catch him. Further, the packs of negro dogs

were usually too small to overpower a stout negro. He was often armed with

a scythe-blade for use if overtaken where he could not find a tree. When

he could keep ahead no longer he preferred taking refuge to fighting with

the dogs. He knew he could kill or disable only the few that would rush in

recklessly, and that the others would stay too far from him to be hurt and

yet keep him at bay. He was now going to be caught, and he would think it

better not to provoke the ire of the owners by killing or injuring their

dogs.

The negro hunted the 'possum and 'coon by night and the hare--the rabbit,

as everybody called it--on Sundays, half-holidays, and Christmas, either

with his young master or without him, and always with the dogs; which he

thus learned to control. A negro woman cooked the corn-bread and

pot-liquor, with which they were fed by her or some other slave. They were

always waiting near when the slaves ate by day in the fields or at all

hours of night in their cabins, and many a bit was thrown to them. Usually

there was the greatest friendship between the dogs on the plantation,

those intended for chasing runaways included, and the negroes. It was

great entertainment for a negro, at the command of his master, to give the

young negro dogs a race, as it was called. These races were frequent, and

they were the entire training of the dogs for their business. A hunting

dog when lost will track his master. And many a runaway was caught by dogs

which he was in the habit of feeding and hunting with. The average negro

of those days, prowling so much at night as he did, necessarily became a

most expert dog-tamer. How often I have been diverted with this sight! A

strange negro, coming on some errand, intrepidly opens the front gate and

enters the yard of a dwelling. A savage dog dashes forward. Just as the

dog couches near for his spring, the negro, by a very quick movement,

takes off his hat and extends it to the dog. The latter turns his eyes

away from the negro, looks at the old, soiled wool hat, smells it, and

then retires, nonplussed.

As a general rule a negro was safe from the bite of dogs. Running away was

not frequent. The almost insuperable difficulty of final escape from the

dogs prevented it. And it was in practice a most mild means of prevention.

I suppose that I knew and heard of the catching of some twenty odd slaves

in the contiguous parts of Oglethorpe, Wilkes, Taliaferro, and Greene

counties, which constituted the locality with which I was familiar, and in

not a single case was one injured by the bloodhounds. The dogs that are

now turned loose after our convicts are of far more savage temper than

were the negro dogs of the old south; and consequently the human game,

when come up with, is more prompt to go up a tree than was the old slave.

There was much less lack of food and raiment among the slaves than among

the class known as the white trash. It was considered a business blunder

not to keep them supplied always with more food than they wanted. They

were in better physical condition than the average white laborer now

shows.

And they were not worked hard. Even in the longest days of the year, when

the battle with the grass was fiercest, at night the quarters were

resonant with mirth, song, and dancing as soon as the mules had been

watered, stabled, and fed.

The foregoing is a report, from my observation on the spot, of "all the

tragic evils of slavery" to the negro in the south. I have been at pains

to make it as true as can be. I purpose to follow it now with a like

report of all the gladsome blessings to him of his freedom.

His true and fast friends, the abolitionists, equalized him _per saltum_

to his master as a voter and office-holder. This single measure was sure

to make deadly enemies of white and black in the south, and to bring a war

of races in which the superior one was bound to conquer and become

absolute. This war did come, and was fought out. Profound peace has

reigned for some years, and the negroes now contentedly stay away from the

polls, and manifest no aspiration whatever for office and place.

His same friends gave the ex-slave equality with his old master under the

criminal law. He had this in slavery only when charged with a capital

offence; and if he was charged with a graver one of the non-capital

offences, such as breaking and entering a dwelling, stealing something of

considerable value, he was brought before a statutory court of justices of

the peace, and if upon his summary trial he was convicted, his punishment

was usually a short term in jail, the sheriff to give him so many lashes

each day until he had received the full number adjudged in his sentence. I

never heard of one that was seriously injured by this kind of punishment.

It never gave him any permanent mental anguish. His conscience approved

whipping as the most fit punishment for every offence. The crimes of

negroes mentioned above in this paragraph were very infrequent. Their many

peccadillos were in practice wholly ignored by the law, and given over to

private and domestic jurisdiction. Cuffee would sometimes indulge a sudden

craving for fresh meat by appropriating a shoat or grown lamb, or he would

gratify a watering mouth by stealthy invasion of melon patches or sweet

potato patches and banks. And he was prone to other small larcenies. If

caught,--which was very far from always happening,--he was whipped; and

that was the last of it. Now he must replace the bounty of his master

which sheltered, clothed, and fed him comfortably all his life by living

from hand to mouth. His forecast utterly undeveloped, and more and more

losing the work habit, there is often but one way for him to avoid

starving or freezing, and that is to get the necessaries of life by

various acts which are crimes in the law. It is but a scanty supply that

he thus manages to get. His year is nearly always, from beginning to end,

but an alternation of short feasts upon the cheapest fare, and prolonged

fasts. Yet in the eye of the stern and severe law how many gross offences

does he commit by doing only the things which, if he did not do, he could

not keep soul and body together. And so he is brought before every court

of any criminal jurisdiction, and when convicted, as he generally is, for

he is nearly always guilty,--not in conscience, but guilty under the law

which his emancipators have put him under,--often he cannot find a friend

to pay his fine, and he must work it out in the chain-gang. The city has

its chain-gang, the county has its chain-gang, and the State works or

farms out its convicts. The percentage of whites among these convicts is

very small. Often when you encounter a gang at work you cannot find a

single white person in it. These negro convicts are many, many. As fast

as one's time expires his place is filled by another. Disease, decay of

energy from irregular food supply, growing habits of idleness, and other

things in the train, bring forth tramps more plentifully, and from these

the chain-gangs are more and more largely recruited. These slaves of

punishment work under the eyes of guards furnished with the best of

small-arms loaded to kill. The most of them work in shackles. If they do

not work as their superintendents think they ought, they are strapped. I

have seen them working in the rain, as I never saw required of slaves. At

night they are put to sleep in a crowded log-pen, all of them chained

together, the chain being made fast to each bunk. The guards are practised

marksmen, known to be men who will promptly and resolutely "do their

duty." This hell-like life constantly keeps each convict watching for

opportunity to make a dash for liberty. If the guards have anything like

fair shots when he starts, one more unmarked and soon forgotten grave is

dug and filled in the paupers' burial ground, and that is the earthly end

of this poor derelict of the human race. Suppose he gets safely away from

the guard. In a few minutes the unleashed dogs are yelping on his track.

In the old days even the negro dogs were fed and tended by slaves, and

almost every dog in the land seemed to love negroes. But these bloodhounds

in the convict camps have been bred into a deadly hatred of every negro.

Escaping Cuffee is usually caught. Then more of the paddle, heavier

shackles, chains at night stronger and more taut, and the bosses harder to

satisfy as he works under greater hindrances--these make his lot more

hell-like than it was before.

It is a melancholy proof of the insufficient dietary and bad hygiene of

the common negroes that these convicts fatten in spite of their cruel

hardships.

The long-term convicts, farmed out to coal and other mine owners and

various manufacturers, and private employers, I know but little of from

observation. But what I hear makes me believe that their condition is

worse than that of those just described. This is to be expected, for two

reasons. First, they are worked for profit by persons whose only interest

is to get the largest possible product out of their labor. The labor

exacted by the owner, bear in mind, would not be severe enough either to

impair the market value or check vigorous reproduction of his slaves.

Second, the places where these convicts are worked are more or less

retired, and thus the employer escapes scrutiny nearly all the year. Think

of a negro who, receiving a twenty years' sentence for burglariously

stealing a ham when he was hungry, is put to work in the coal mine! Who

ever hears of him afterwards? He is soon forgotten by his wife, who takes

another husband, and by his children either skulking here and there to

shun the officer, or toiling in a chain-gang. Here is indeed a bitter

slavery--bitterer by far than any West Africa ever knew. There the slave

does not labor underground and out of the sun so dear to him. His

manumission comes mercifully in many ways, long before the expiration of

twenty years--the sacrifice may need a victim; he may starve; he may fall

sick and be cast out in the bush. But the mine slave--the mine boss will

not whip him hard enough to give him even short rest from his work, work,

work; he shall always have enough of raiment, food, and sleep to keep him

able to work, work, work; when he gets very sick the mine doctor will

patch him up and send him back to his work, work, work; he will work,

work, work out his twenty years in this hell hole. Miss Landon in her

immortal invective against child labor exclaims:

"Good God! to think upon a child

That has no childish days,

No careless play, no frolics wild,

No words of prayer and praise!"

This factory child that never knew any of the proper joys of a child is

without either sweet memory or unavailing wish. But the mine slave, the

most of whose former life was passed in the open air, how he pines for the

splendor of his loved sun by day; how in his bunk he recalls his rounds by

night when the Seven Stars, the Ell and Yard and Job's Coffin were his

clock and the North Star his compass. Each part of the revolving year

whispers to him when he is at work or dreaming. Christmas suggests the jug

with the corn-cob stopper, the 'possum cooked brown, the yams exuding

their sugary juice, the banjo picker and his song, the fiddle playing a

dancing tune, and the floor shaking under the thumping footfalls; the cold

weather following suggests the 'possum and 'coon hunt; the early spring

brings what he used to call the corn-planting birds and their lively

calls; and on and on his thoughts go over mocking-bird, woodpecker, early

peaches and apples, full orchards spared by frost, the watermelon,

solitary and incomparable among all things for a negro to eat, his Sunday

fishings and rabbit hunts, his church and society meetings, this and that

dusky love who fooled him into believing that he was dearer to her than

husband or any other man, especially some yellow girl, his nonesuch,

exceeding all other women as the watermelon excels all other produce of

tree or vine,--on and on his thoughts go over what he can never have

again. I need not say a word for the white victims of child labor, for

their race is rousing for their rescue, and I know its power to achieve.

But I do feel that it is my duty to put that friendless, forgotten,

long-term negro convict in the minds of my southern readers. If he must

be a convict, do not farm him out to mine operators or where he will be

worked behind any screen. Put all our convicts, both felony and

misdemeanor, upon the public roads until they need only a little working

now and then, say I. There the convicts will not be worked for profit, nor

in secret.

The total of the negroes suffering in southern slavery from all causes

falls in amount far below that alone which has come upon him because he

was stupidly subjected to the white man's criminal law, and not given

reformatories and other belongings of the system which we are perfecting

for juvenile offenders. The suffering in slavery was occasional only, and

soon over. The present suffering of the negroes under the criminal law is

constant, and is to be found rife in every locality. The aggregate of the

felony and misdemeanor convicts of Georgia now at hard labor is about

4,500. The convicts sentenced by city and town police courts for short

terms of days I cannot give with any approximate accuracy. I think it

probable that the number of those convicted each year in the municipal

courts is somewhat larger than that of those convicted in the State

courts. By reason of a late wholesale reduction of felonies the number of

long-term convicts does not increase,--it is at a standstill,--but the

number of the misdemeanor and municipal convicts steadily increases. More

than nine-tenths of those in each one of the three classes are negroes.

The stench, filth, and discomfort of their nights and the hardship of

their days, who can describe? How it moves my pity to see, as I often do,

the convict toiling incessantly for long hours, impeded and tortured by

his iron shackles, the paddle at hand, and a double-barrel or Winchester

frowning over him, each to be used on occasion by somebody who cares

nothing for and has no interest in him. Weary as the worker may be, a

word from the boss gives new impetus to his pick or shovel. Here is the

only place I have ever known on American soil where one can find "poor,

oppressed, bleeding Africa." How different it was with the slave offender!

It mattered not what was the charge against him, he had persons related to

him both in interest and affection who would intercede powerfully at his

call. Wherever he might be,--in the sheriff's hands, or locked up by the

overseer in the gin-house,--a messenger-service as secret and more sure

than wireless telegraphy even if not as quick, was at his command; and

some child, white or colored, or favorite servant would carry his

entreaties to the Big House. And the justices, or ole master or the

overseer, would be influenced by a word from ole miss, or the tears of

young miss, or the importunity of young master. In the end Cuffee's

punishment would be made tolerable; and after it was over he would the

next night at the cabin brag joyfully of the many friends he had and what

great things they had done for him--the children of his master present and

showing more gladness than himself.

Which of the two was the more humane and christian punitive system for the

negro? Which of the two was the better for him? That of slavery, or that

produced by the conditions which his professed friends put in place of

slavery?

I assert it most solemnly that I never saw a negro slave worked in

shackles and under a loaded firearm, neither by his master nor an

overseer, nor by their command, nor by an officer of the law; and,

further, that I never had information or report that such had been done.

When their emancipators led the negroes out of their cabins into their new

life it was something like throwing our domestic animals into the forest

and desert, where they, without formed habits of self-maintenance and

without knowledge of the new environment, must live, if they can live,

only in competition with their wild brothers and sisters knowing the

environment and who are self-maintaining experts therein. That comparison

serves somewhat. But this comes nearer: Suppose children between the ages

of eight and twelve, who have never been taught to do anything for

themselves, to be taken away from their parents, and settled among a

people lately made bitterly hostile to the children, as the whites were

made to the negroes by the effort of the emancipators to give political

equality--nay, supremacy--to the latter. Those emancipated children must

subsist themselves. How little they could earn by begging or work. They

would have to steal to live. Those that did not steal, and for whom no

companion would steal, would perish. The philanthropists who founded this

infantile colony would have outdone but by a very little those who thrust

the reluctant negroes into freedom.

I ask my reader to add here mentally the full description which in my last

two chapters I have given of the lower class of the negroes in the

south--this description showing them to be ninety-five per cent of the

whole, far below their average condition in American slavery, and steadily

becoming worse.

I believe that in due time the people of the north will make these

admissions:

1. Any and every evil of southern slavery to the negro was accidental, and

not a necessary incident of the system, just as the occasional evils of

marriage to the parties are not necessarily incidental to that

institution.

2. As this slavery had improved and was still improving the negroes so

prodigiously in every particular, and as their condition during the forty

years following emancipation has been going uninterruptedly from bad to

worse, until now the extinction of the great body is frightfully probable,

as I shall show in my last two chapters, the sudden and sweeping abolition

of 1865 was an unutterable misfortune to these dependent creatures.

Emancipation ought to have been gradual. Especially ought there to have

been established something like the Roman patronate, under which the

freedman would have been sure of wise advice, beneficial overlooking, and

efficient protection from his former master.

3. The grant at once of right to vote and hold place and office to the

southern negroes indiscriminately exceeds all blunders of democracy in

madness and stupidity.

4. Southern slavery, so far from being wrong morally, was righteousness,

justice, and mercy to the slave. The federal constitution was simply

obeying the commands of good conscience in recognizing the slave as the

property of his owner, and protecting that property. Therefore, when the

federal government emancipated the slaves it ought to have given the

masters just compensation.

* * * * *

So much for what American slavery was to the negro, and what its abolition

has done for him in the south. This can be told now. But for years the

powers watching over our union kept the subject in the dark. It did not

suit their purpose that the people of the union-preserving section should

see and understand. They had decreed that northern resistance to slavery,

as the solitary root of disunion, should go beyond refusing it extension

into the Territories. They chose to add another provocation of the

secession which they had planned as the means of abolishing slavery. This

new provocation was that the north be induced to make the fugitive slave

law a dead letter. To drive the south into early secession, perhaps it

would not be enough merely to deny her new territory. But unite the north

against the law mentioned, and encourage both running away and the

underground railroad by an active public opinion, then soon all along the

southern border slavery will lose its hold, some of the slaves escaping

and the rest going south. This zone will, after a while, be settled by the

friends and employers of free labor, who from year to year will push the

southern non-slave district further in. The menace of this hostile

occupation will steadily become greater to the slaveholders, and finally

it will convince them that they cannot protect slavery in the union.

Many northerners who declared it was wrong to interfere with slavery in

the States, at the same time sympathized with the public opposition to

restoring the fugitive to his master. It is clear that they did not regard

this opposition to be what it really was; that is, actual war upon slavery

where it existed. To oppose execution of the law was both to invite and

help runaways. And if such invitation and help was persisted in, from one

end of Mason and Dixon's line to the other, the risk of escape of slaves

and their consequent depreciation in market value would both steadily

increase. The refusal to enforce the fugitive slave law was therefore a

deadly attack upon slavery in the States; and this was so plain that the

union-loving people of Georgia declared in the famous Georgia Platform of

1850 that the union could not be preserved if that law was not faithfully

executed.

The faithful guardians of the American union had "Uncle Tom's Cabin"

written of purpose to prevent the execution of the fugitive slave law.

They hypnotized the root-and-branch abolitionists and Mrs. Stowe into

believing that to abet in any way the restoration of a flying slave was an

unpardonable crime; and that the obligation of conscience to refrain from

committing such a crime imperatively commanded disregard of all counter

provisions of the constitution and the law of the land. One cannot at all

understand the mighty abolition movement if he stop with the professed

motives of Phillips, Whittier, Garrison, Mrs. Stowe, and the rest. They

believed in their hearts, and declared, its purpose was to wipe out the

great national disgrace of slavery, to lift the slave out of an abyss of

unspeakable outrage and injustice, and to better his condition. As we have

shown you, they were, in their very extreme of conscientiousness, as wide

from the facts and right as wide can be. They were not doing their own

wills, as they thought they were. They but did the will of the fates. The

latter ruthlessly--so it seems to us now--sacrificed both the prosperity

and comfort of the southern people for several generations, and the very

existence, it may be, of nearly all the negroes in America, besides also

making a laughing-stock of the abolitionists--all to the end to kill that

nationalization which threatened the integrity of the American union.

I believe that I can now take my reader on with me in what I have to say

of Mrs. Stowe's book. Let him bear in mind that the object of the fates

was to have in it not a representation true to fact, but such an untrue

and probable one as would unite the people of the north in moral and

conscientious resolve against any and every attempt to restore a fugitive

slave. What the fates wanted was an author who appeared to have extensive

and accurate acquaintance with slavery, and who, while believing it most

conscientiously to be the extreme of evil to the black, was endowed with

the power to make the north see with _her_ eyes. They found their author

in Mrs. Stowe, whom they had educated and trained from infancy.

In view of the mighty influence which "Uncle Tom's Cabin" exercised upon

public opinion, it is important to examine what were Mrs. Stowe's

qualifications to speak as an authority on southern slavery. And in this

investigation the same qualifications of all others who arraigned the

system for what they alleged were its heinous moral wrongs to the slave

are likewise involved. The statement of Professor Wendell, quoted above,

that she was the only one of the abolitionists who had observed slavery

"on the spot," can be corroborated by overwhelming proofs. If it be made

to appear, as I think will be the case, that she was from first to last

under a delusion which metamorphosed the negro into a Caucasian, and

further that she had no real opportunities of learning the facts of

slavery, then the case of the root-and-branch abolitionists must fall with

the testimony of the only eye-witness whom they have called.

Whether she was biased or not we will let her own words decide. Here they

are:

"I was a child in 1820 [she was then nine years old] when the Missouri

question was agitated; and one of the strongest and deepest

impressions on my mind was that made by my father's sermons and

prayers, and the anguish of his soul for the poor slave at that time.

I remember his preaching drawing tears down the hardest faces of the

old farmers in his congregation. I well remember his prayers morning

and evening in the family for 'poor, oppressed, bleeding Africa,' that

the time of her deliverance might come; prayers offered with strong

crying and tears, and which indelibly impressed my heart, and made me

what I am from my very soul, the enemy of all slavery. Every brother

that I have has been in his sphere a leading anti-slavery man. As for

myself and husband, we have for the last seventeen years lived on the

border of a slave State, and we have never shrunk from the fugitives,

and we have helped them with all we had to give. I have received the

children of liberated slaves into a family school, and taught them

with my own children, and it has been the influence that we found in

the church and by the altar that has made us do all this."[90]

No comment is needed. The passage shows that her strongly excited feelings

unavoidably shaped all her perceptions and formed all her judgments as to

everything in slavery.

Now as to the means she had of acquiring the facts. Although she had seen

a little of Kentucky, a border slave State, she had never lived in it, nor

anywhere else in the south. Especially is it to be emphasized that she had

had no experience of the cotton region, the real seat of slavery, and the

only place where it could be fully studied and learned. She passed some

eighteen years in lower Ohio, just across the river from Kentucky, where

she saw much of escaping slaves. Of course, being aflame with zeal as she

was for her subject, she had observed closely the native negroes of the

north. Such of these as she met were widely different from the mass in

slavery; for, born and bred in the north, they had had the beneficent

training of the free-labor system, and also opportunity to absorb

considerable of a higher culture. These negroes were exceptional, even of

the northern natives. And the fugitives were also exceptional; for they

far excelled the companions left behind them in intelligence, spirit, and

every essential of good character. An ordinary Cuffee had liberty the

least of all things in his thoughts. A negro like Hector or Garrison, the

former escaping from Calhoun and the other from Toombs, was as much above

the average as the shepherd dog is above common sheep-worriers and

egg-suckers. Mrs. Stowe, as her book shows, had no conception whatever of

the ordinary plantation negro. And while she had seen much of some

Kentuckians, these were not representative southerners. They lived upon

the border, where slave labor found but little lucrative opportunity, and

they were also affected more or less with the sentiments of their nearby

northern neighbors. Naturally only those Kentuckians of the border who

really were of her opinion would consort with this decided anti-slavery

partisan; the others would stand aloof. Mrs. Stowe never knew either real

negroes or real slaveholders. And she also knew nothing whatever of cotton

plantation management. Some authors show an amazingly full and accurate

knowledge of countries and communities which they never saw. Burke's

knowledge of every detail touching India occurs to me. Lieber had visited

Greece while Niebuhr had not. When the former had minutely described to

the other some famous landscape,--say the battlefield of

Marathon,--Niebuhr would make copious inquiries about remains of old roads

and belongings which the other had forgotten, although he had seen them.

Tom Moore had never been in Persia, but there is so much of that country

drawn to the life in Lalla Rookh that somebody applied to him the saying

that reading D'Herbelot was as good as riding on the back of a camel. Mrs.

Stowe could not collect, sift, and read facts, and see through the most

cunningly devised masks, as Henry D. Lloyd showed his marvellous power to

do in "Wealth against Commonwealth." That was not her gift. Her gift was

to tell the best of stories--to vary it prodigally and artistically

throughout with wonders, with things to make you shudder and also thrill

with pleasure, with things to make you cry and laugh. Her emotional

invention was the great factor. Here is her own account:

"The first part of the book ever committed to writing was the death of

Uncle Tom. This scene presented itself almost as a tangible vision to

her mind while sitting at the communion-table in the little church in

Brunswick. She was perfectly overcome by it, and could scarcely

restrain the convulsion of tears and sobbings that shook her frame.

She hastened home and wrote it, and her husband being away she read it

to her two sons of ten and twelve years of age. The little fellows

broke out into convulsions of weeping, one of them saying through his

sobs, 'Oh, mamma, slavery is the most cursed thing in the world!'"

The description of Uncle Tom's death is the goal and climax of the novel.

Its scene is laid far down in the south, hundreds of miles below any place

which she or the children had ever seen or studied. It would have been

more in order for her to submit the draft to observant residents of that

locality; but the fates did not intend that her convictions should be

weakened by real information. Evidently she considered that her truth to

fact was fully vindicated by the effect of the narrative upon her

children, who, like herself, were entirely without knowledge of the

subject. They wept and exclaimed over it. Why, of course, like all

children they loved horrible tales, which their weeping and lamentation

proved that they thought were true. Doubtless these same children had made

respectable demonstrations over Bluebeard or Little Red Ridinghood. And

now over Uncle Tom's death, which is more dreadful than anything in

Dante's Inferno, and as pure figment, their feelings were shaken with

storm and tempest as never before.

The statement just quoted proceeds thus:

"From that time the story can less be said to have been composed by

her than imposed upon her. Scenes, incidents, conversations rushed

upon her with a vividness and importunity that would not be denied.

The book insisted upon getting itself into being, and would take no

denial."

I often fancy, as I think over it, that the last quotation describes

suggestions from the fates.

But we must let Mrs. Stowe finish what we have had her tell in part.

Informing us that, after writing "two or three first chapters," she made

an arrangement for weekly serial publication in the _National Era_, she

says:

"She was then in the midst of heavy domestic cares, with a young

infant, with a party of pupils in her family to whom she was imparting

daily lessons with her own children, and with untrained servants

requiring constant supervision, but the story was so much more intense

a reality to her than any other earthly thing that the weekly

instalment never failed. It was there in her mind day and night

waiting to be written, and requiring but a few moments to bring it

into veritable characters. _The weekly number was always read to the

family circle before it was sent away, and all the household kept up

an intense interest in the progress of the story._"[91]

This household had been indoctrinated by the zeal of Dr. Lyman Beecher

into believing unreservedly all the inventions of ignorant assailants 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 space to mention but one. Tom

was bred in Kentucky, where no cotton was grown. And Cassy, 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 Cassy 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 noblemen 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 space 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

multitude 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 prone 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 sexes 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 mass 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 unchastity 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, pronounced 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 noble, 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, surpasses

every saint in Dante's Paradise--he surpasses 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 superstition, 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 pass 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 God, my God, 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 Titania, when Bottom with his ass'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 title 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 God

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 institutions 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 principal 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 prone 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 classify 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 dispassionate 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 titles 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 mass of false assumptions, 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 emancipation 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

emancipated 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 mass of pernicious error engendered by a book, so far

as I know, is "Burke's Reflections." Constitutional 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 mass of southern negroes to vote intelligently,

and complacently acquiesces in their practical disfranchisement by the

only class 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 constitutional 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

assured 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:

"Ring! O bells!

Every stroke exulting tells

Of the burial hour of crime."

What does he mean is the crime? Why, the delivering of certain Africans

and their descendants from lowest human degradation and misery, and

blessing them with opportunity and help to rise far upward? Had he seen,

as we do now, forty years later, instead of pouring out this wild and mad

delight, he would have dropped scalding tears over the "burial hour" of

all that promised anything of welfare to those for whom he had labored so

long and faithfully. And in the last stanza his command that

"With a sound of broken chains"

the nations be told

"that He reigns,

Who alone is Lord and God!"

The poet misunderstood the "broken chains" as greatly as he did the

"burial hour." Chains were broken, but their breaking was no blessing to

the negro. Golden chains of domestic ties, drawing him gently, kindly,

surely up to higher morality and complete manhood--these were broken; and

far other were forged for him, with which fear he has been made fast to

destruction. His only friends able to help alienated; what a clog! Given

back to African improgressiveness; what a fetter! How he is held to the

body of death by unbreakable chains of want, misery, vice, disease, and

utter helplessness! and how his shackles gall him and his convict chains

clank in every corner of the land which was once an earthly paradise to

him!

Let us not sully with Whittier the glory of the federal arms by ascribing

to them as their chief triumph the gift of illusory freedom to a few

negroes. Rather let us inform ourselves with the spirit of Webster, and

give praise and thanks without end for the actual blessings and the richer

promise of the restored union to myriads of that race whose mission it is

to spread an inexpressibly fair socialism over all the earth.

And let me say at the last, the people of the north should learn that all

the tragic evils which Professor Wendell and others outside of the south

have in mind belong only to the slave-ships, and by a strange

psychological metastasis--no stranger, however, than that by which the

fourth commandment, in popular conception, has been abrogated as to the

seventh day, and applied to the first day of the week--they have firmly

attached themselves to the reputation of southern slavery. For long years

we of the south, our mothers and our mothers' mothers, our fathers and our

fathers' fathers, have been charged with cruelties and outrages purely

fancied. These fabrications are the stock comparisons with which almost

every invective against the wrongs of any lower class is sharpened. The

writer or speaker whenever he is taken short says something of the

dreadful condition of the southern slave under the sway of an entirely

absolute master. Variety of the misdeeds invoked as illustration is

limited only by the promptness with which the utterer can think of what he

has read in abolition literature or its sequel. It is all mere parrot

gabble. To hear so much of it as we do is "a little wearing," as Reginald

Wilfer said. Surely if our brothers and sisters of the north but think,

they will acknowledge that these so-called horrors of slavery were all

nothing but the inventions of the angry passions provoked by the powers in

the unseen after they had decided that slavery must be sacrificed in the

interests of the union. And these dear brothers and sisters will no longer

persist in asserting that southern slavery was but robbery and oppression

of and cruelty to the slave; that the system was evil to him of itself.

They will talk no more of the pro-slavery infamy, of the unscrupulousness

and perfidy of the slave power, and all such false twaddle, that can now

serve no purpose whatever except to offend good men and women and their

children without cause.