MR. GILFILLAN, who was received with great applause, said he had been
intrusted by the Committee of the Ladies' Antislavery Association to
present the following address to Mrs. Stowe, which he would read to the
meeting:--
"MADAM: We, the ladies of the Dundee Antislavery Association, desire to
add our feeble voices to the acclamations of a world, conscious that
your fame and character need no testimony from us. We are less anxious
to honor you than to prove that our appreciation and respect are no less
sincere and no less profound than those of the millions in other places
and other lands, whom you have instructed, improved, delighted, and
thrilled. We beg permission to lay before you the expressions of a
gratitude and an enthusiasm in some measure commensurate with your
transcendent literary merit and moral worth. We congratulate you on the
success of the _chef-d'oeuvre_ of your genius, a success altogether
unparalleled, and in all probability never to be paralleled in the
history of literature. We congratulate you still more warmly on that
nobility and benevolence of nature which made you from childhood the
friend of the unhappy slave, and led you to accumulate unconsciously the
materials for the immortal tale of Uncle Tom's Cabin. We congratulate
you in having in that tale supported with matchless eloquence and pathos
the cause of the crushed, the forgotten, the injured, of those who had
no help of man at all, and who had even been blasphemously taught by
professed ministers of the gospel of mercy that Heaven too was opposed
to their liberation, and had blotted them out from the catalogue of man.
We recognize, too, with delight, the spirit of enlightened and
evangelical piety which breathes through your work, and serves to
confute the calumny that none but infidels are interested in the cause
of abolition--a calumny which cuts at Christianity with a yet sharper
edge than at abolition, but which you have proved to be a foul and
malignant falsehood. We congratulate you not only on the richness of the
laurels which you have won, but on the dignity, the meekness, and the
magnanimity with which these laurels have been worn. We hail in you our
most gifted sister in the great cause of liberty--we bid you warmly
welcome to our city, and we pray Almighty God, the God of the oppressed,
to pour his selectest blessings on your head, and to spare your
invaluable life, till yours, and ours, and others' efforts for the cause
of abolition are crowned with success, and till the shouts of a
universal jubilee shall proclaim that in all quarters of the globe the
African is free."
The address was handed to Mrs. Stowe amid great applause. MR. GILFILLAN
continued: "In addition to the address which I have now read, I have
been requested to add a few remarks; and in making these I cannot but
congratulate Dundee on the fact that Mrs. Stowe has visited it, and that
she has had a reception worthy of her distinguished merits. [Applause.]
It is not Dundee alone that is present here to-night: it is
Forfarshire, Fifeshire, and I may also add, Perthshire:--that are here
to do honor to themselves in doing honor to our illustrious guest.
[Cheers.] There are assembled here representatives of the general
feeling that boils in the whole land--not from our streets alone, but
from our country valleys--from our glens and our mountains O! I wish
that Mrs. Stowe would but spare time to go herself and study that
enthusiasm amid its own mountain recesses, amid the uplands and the
friths, and the wild solitudes of our own unconquered and unconquerable
land. She would see scenery there worthy of that pencil which has
painted so powerfully the glories of the Mississippi; ay, and she would
find her name known and reverenced in every hamlet, and see copies of
Uncle Tom's Cabin in the shepherd's shieling, beside Bunyan's Pilgrim's
Progress, the Life of Sir William Wallace, Rob Roy, and the Gaelic
Bible. I saw copies of it carried by travellers last autumn among the
gloomy grandeurs of Glencoe, and, as Coleridge once said when he saw
Thomson's Seasons lying in a Welsh wayside inn, 'That is true fame,' I
thought this was fame truer still. [Applause.] It is too late in the day
to criticize Uncle Tom's Cabin, or to speculate on its unprecedented
history--a history which seems absolutely magical. Why, you are reminded
of Aladdin's lamp, and of the palace that was reared by genii in one
night. Mrs. Stowe's genius has done a greater wonder than this--it has
reared in a marvellously short time a structure which, unlike that
Arabian fabric, is a reality, and shall last forever. [Applause.] She
must not be allowed, to depreciate herself, and to call her glorious
book a mere 'bubble.' Such a bubble there never was before. I wish we
had ten thousand such bubbles. [Applause.] If it had been a bubble it
would have broken long ago. 'Man,' says Jeremy Taylor, 'is a bubble.'
Yea, but he is an immortal one. And such an immortal bubble is Uncle
Tom's Cabin; it can only with man expire; and yet a year ago not ten
individuals in this vast assembly had ever heard of its author's name.
[Applause.] At its artistic merits we may well marvel--to find in a
small volume the descriptive power of a Scott, the humor of a Dickens,
the keen, observing glance of a Thackeray, the pathos of a Richardson or
Mackenzie, combined with qualities of earnestness, simplicity, humanity,
and womanhood peculiar to the author herself. But there are three things
which, strike me as peculiarly remarkable about Uncle Tom's Cabin: it is
the work of an American--of a woman--and of an evangelical Christian.
[Cheers.] We have long been accustomed to despise American literature--I
mean as compared with our own. I have heard eminent _litterateurs_ say,
'Pshaw! the Americans have no national literature.' It was thought that
they lived entirely on plunder--the plunder of poor slaves, and of poor
British authors. [Loud cheers.] Their own works, when, they came among
us, were treated either with contempt or with patronizing wonder--yes,
the 'Sketch Book' was a very good book to be an American's. To parody
two lines of Pope, we
Admired such wisdom in a Yankee shape,
And showed an Irving as they show an ape.'
[Loud cheers.] And yet, strange to tell, not only of late have we been
almost deluged with editions of new and excellent American writers, but
the most popular book of the century has appeared on the west side of
the Atlantic. Let us hear no more of the poverty of American brains, or
the barrenness of American literature. Had it produced only Uncle Tom's
Cabin, it had evaded contempt just as certainly as Don Quixote, had
there been no other product of the Spanish mind, would have rendered it
forever illustrious. It is the work of a woman, too! None but a woman
could have written it. There are in the human mind springs at once
delicate and deep, which only the female genius can understand, or the
female finger touch. Who but a female could have created the gentle Eva,
painted the capricious and selfish Marie St. Clair, or turned loose a
Topsy upon the wondering world? [Loud and continued cheering.] And it is
to my mind exceedingly delightful, and it must be humiliating to our
opponents, to remember that the severest stroke to American slavery has
been given by a woman's hand. [Loud cheers.] It was the smooth stone
from the brook which, sent from the hand of a youthful David, overthrew
Goliath of Gath; but I am less reminded of this than of another incident
in Scripture history. When the robber and oppressor of Israel,
Abimelech, who had slain his brethren, was rushing against a tower,
whither his enemies had fled, we are told that 'a certain woman cast a
piece of a millstone upon Abimelech's head, and all to break his skull,'
and that he cried hastily to the young man, his armor-bearer, and said
unto him, 'Draw thy sword, and slay me, that men say not of me, A woman
slew him.' It is a parable of our present position. Mrs. Stowe has
thrown a piece of millstone, sharp and strong, at the skull of the giant
abomination of her country; he is reeling in his death pangs, and, in
the fury of his despair and shame, is crying, but crying in vain, 'Say
not, A woman slew me!' [Applause.] But the world shall say, 'A woman
slew him,' or, at least, 'gave him the first blow, and drove him to
despair and suicide.' [Cheers.] Lastly, it is the work of an evangelical
Christian; and the piety of the book has greatly contributed to its
power. It has forever wiped away the vile calumny, that all who love
their African brother hate their God and Savior. I look, indeed, on Mrs.
Stowe's volume, not only as a noble contribution to the cause of
emancipation, but to the general cause of Christianity. It is an olive
leaf in a dove's mouth, testifying that the waters of scepticism, which
have rolled more fearfully far in America than here,--and no wonder, if
the Christianity of America in general is a slaveholding, man-stealing,
soul-murdering Christianity--that they are abating, and that genuine
liberty and evangelical religion are soon to clasp hands, and to smile
in unison on the ransomed, regenerated, and truly 'United States.' [Loud
and reiterated applause.]"