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Harriet Beecher Stowes "Uncle Tom's Hut": Trigger for the Civil War?

2021-07-01T09:22:39.889Z


To this day, Americans argue about the anti-slavery novel "Uncle Tom's Hut". The author Harriet Beecher Stowe died 125 years ago. During her lifetime she had little influence on the use of her work.


On December 2, 1862, Harriet Beecher Stowe met US President Abraham Lincoln.

The writer had published her anti-slavery novel "Uncle Tom's Hut" ten years earlier, and for just under a year and a half, northern and southern states had been fighting in the American Civil War over whether slavery should be abolished.

"So you're the little woman who wrote the book that brought us this great war," Lincoln is reported to have said to her.

The famous quote cannot be substantiated, it was only spread by family members after Stowe's death. Historians also doubt that "Uncle Tom's Cabin" led to the civil war. It is undisputed, however, that your book triggered a lot. The Protestant American Missionary Association praised Stowe in 1892 as the woman "who has done more than any other person living now to awaken our nation's conscience to the sin of slavery and to ensure the emancipation of this race."

James Baldwin, on the other hand, criticized the "very bad novel" with "self-righteous, morally superior sentimentality," as the African-American writer and activist wrote in an essay in 1949.

To this day, 125 years after her death, Stowe's work preoccupies the country, which still argues over how to come to terms with its past of slavery.

10,000 sales in the first week

Harriet Elisabeth Beecher was born in Litchfield, Connecticut in 1811, the sixth of eleven children of a strictly religious family.

Her father Lyman Beecher was a respected pastor and a leading exponent of the abstinence movement, which fought alcohol as the devil's stuff.

At the age of five she lost her mother, and two years later she won a writing competition.

Harriet received a good education, which is still unusual for girls.

In the family circle there was lively debate about current affairs: the devout Beecher family, for example, rejected slavery.

In 1836 Harriet Beecher married Calvin Stowe, a professor of theology.

The couple moved to Maine and supported the Underground Railroad, a secret escape network that smuggled slaves from the southern states into freedom.

For years the dispute between the northern states, which oppose slavery, and the southern states had been simmering.

There, the exploitation of the slaves sustained the flourishing cotton and tobacco industry.

Only a few slaves were lucky enough to escape the terrible conditions.

But the "Fugitive Slave Act" renewed in 1850 stipulated that slaves who had fled to the northern states had to be sent back to their owners in the south.

The abolitionists, opponents of slavery, were outraged because the law de facto forced them to uphold a system that they opposed.

Stowe had published short stories, novels and newspaper articles.

Now the abolitionist newspaper "The National Era" gave her the task of writing a story about slavery.

Stowe planned three or four parts - it turned out to be more than 40.

"Uncle Tom's Hut" describes the fate of the slave Tom, who is sold for lack of money and thus separated from his family.

Tom ends up in the clutches of a brutal slave owner.

Guards beat him to death for failing to reveal the whereabouts of two escaped slaves.

The publication in "The National Era" was so successful that Stowe also published the story as a book.

The novel sold over 10,000 times in the first week and over 300,000 times in the first year.

"Uncle Tom" on handkerchiefs, cups, board games

The book brought many admirers to Stowe in the north. For example, the African-American writer Frederick Douglass, who once escaped slavery himself, wrote: “It is my concern, Madam, to express my deep appreciation for the service you have rendered to my afflicted and persecuted people by publishing your inimitable book on the subject of slavery to have. This contribution to our bloody cause alone brings with it a debt of gratitude that cannot be measured. ”By contrast, proponents of slavery dismissed Stowe's novel as fiction, and“ anti-Tom novels ”were written about benevolent slave owners.

Some points of criticism are still relevant today. The fact that Stowe endowed her characters with an inherently childlike character earned her the accusation of using racist stereotypes herself. Their decision to eventually let the survivors return to Africa to found a Christian country was denounced as colonialist thinking. In response, Stowe disclosed the sources for her novel in A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1853. So the fate of their main character was based on the memoirs of the former slave Josiah Henson.

But the author had little control over how her novel was adapted: Uncle Tom appeared on wallpaper, handkerchiefs, ceramics or board games.

And soon on stage too.

Stowe herself refrained from participating in the development of a play because of her religious beliefs.

Slavery supporters hijacked their novel

But because there were still no copyrights that forbade the adaptation of plays without the author's consent, actors soon traveled through the country with "minstrel shows": white actors dyed their faces black ("blackfacing") and gave one on stage stereotypically stupid, lazy, lustful black people.

The "Tom Shows" had little in common with Stowe's novel; entire scenes were cut out.

The strong, courageous Tom in the novel: on stage he became a submissive old man.

While advocates of slavery simply paraphrased Stowe's work, the abolitionists as well as the women's movement looked up to her.

Stowe's sisters Catherine and Isabella were also involved in the fight for women's suffrage.

The women's rights activists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony therefore hoped to win Stowe for their magazine "Revolution": with a serial novel about women's rights, she should advance the cause as she did with "Uncle Tom's Hut" in the debate about slavery succeeded.

Stowe was open to the fight for women's rights, but very religious.

In her opinion, women with more rights should have a positive impact on public morality and education.

She advocated women's education - and still believed that women were primarily called for domestic purposes.

"Wicked Prison Sister"

In the meantime, the American women's movement broke up into two camps: one wanted to fight for women's suffrage across the board through a constitutional amendment, the other through laws in each state individually.

When the group around Susan B. Anthony demanded their rights more radically and then even wanted to become a woman US President with Victoria Woodhull in 1872, before women were even allowed to vote, Stowe saw their fears confirmed.

Woodhull had jobs as a fortune teller, dancer, and New York's first stock trader;

she behaved as she pleased.

To Stowe she looked like the epitome of a woman who only demanded rights without wanting to perform her duties.

And then, in a newspaper article, Woodhull made public the affair of Stowe's brother, the priest Henry Ward Beecher, with a married parishioner - now Stowe called her an "insolent witch" and a "mean jail sister."

The writer created an inglorious monument to Woodhull with the character of Audacia Dangereyes in her novel "My Wife and I".

In it the women plead for a right to education and a job;

Stowe lets them wield their power by bringing men under their influence and using them for their own ends.

None of Stowe's other works could ever follow the sales success of "Onkel Toms Hütte". After her husband's death in 1886, her mental health deteriorated dramatically. In 1888 the Washington Post reported that Stowe had started to write her best-selling novel again: in the firm belief that it was the first time to put the words on paper. Harriet Beecher Stowe died eight years later, on July 1, 1896. She was 85 years old.

Source: spiegel

All news articles on 2021-07-01

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