New and Noteworthy----Was The Fugitive Slave Law Repealed By Uncle Tom's Cabin?

Mightier Than The Sword: Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Battle For America, David S. Reynolds, Norton Publishing, 351 pp., 43 b/w illustrations, notes, bibliography, index, 2011, $27.95.

Before the Civil War Uncle Tom's Cabin: Life Among The Lowly was banned in the slave holding states and readers were jailed if found with a copy. In December 1862, Lincoln greeted the author "Is this the little woman who made this great war?" This remark may be a false memory written down three decades later by the author's relative but it reveals that maybe Uncle Tom's Cabin is better remembered as a provoking piece of literature than it is for plot and characters. Is the novel's reputation more important than its contents? Other novels, such as Jack Kerouac's One The Road [1957] and poems such as Allen Ginsburg's Howl[ 1955] have had similar fate. People know enough about them to get the Jeopardy question right, but haven't read them.

Starting with the June 5, 1851 issue, Uncle Tom's Cabin appeared as a weekly serial in theNational Era, an abolitionist newspaper. The serialized story, like Charles Dicken's serialized works, began to change hearts and minds from 'I don't care' to 'Maybe slave holding is wrong.' The book was published in 1852. It is estimated that each copy of Uncle Tom's Cabin before the Civil War had ten readers or listeners. At a time when reading aloud to the household was typical, each copy served an audience that discussed it immediately afterward.

In this modern era it is difficult to read Uncle Tom's Cabin; CWL started it twice. The dialects were too thick to read either silently or aloud. The problem was solved by securing an audio book read by an professional reader. It worked not only for CWL but also for his children, who on more than one occasion refused to leave the car until a chapter was concluded.

Mightier Than the Sword: Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Battle for America, is a biography of the life of a book in the context of 150 years of American literary, social, political, and entertainment history. David S. Reynolds knows this history well; his biographies of Walt Whitman and the notorious John Brown are fine examples that teach their readers as much about American culture as they do Whitman and Brown. Reynolds shows that Uncle Tom's Cabinwas central not only to the antebellum era but also from the Reconstruction era through today. The themes of fairness, family, and the empowerment of marginalized minorities are constant themes in American life and groups. The novel speaks to African-Americans, women, social and political protest movements that struggle within the confines of the American democratic republic.

Reynolds offers interpretations of religion, reform, literature [both literary and pulp fiction] and theater. He examines two plot lines from the novel. The Northern one involves the escape of a slave family from Kentucky to Canada and the Southern one traces the painful separation of Tom, a slave, from his family when he is sold from Kentucky to Mississippi. For Reynolds, Stowe realistic human narrative had "a crystal clear social point: slavery was evil, and so were the political and economic institutions that supported it." [xii]. What made slavery wrong? For Stowe, the central issue was that slavery destroyed families.

Uncle Tom's Cabin was immediately translated into European and other languages, including Russian and Chinese. Vladimir Lenin named it as his favorite book and cited it as an impetus for his revolutionary life. Mightier Than the Sword relates the path of the novel from the pen of Stowe, an emotionally and economically depressed mother living in Cincinnati, Ohio, through the modern Civil Rights Movement that denigrated Uncle Tom as a black, servile, master-pleasing character. Both Martin Luther King and Malcolm X were labeled Uncle Toms by African American radicals who pursued violent confrontations. Uncle Tom's Cabin provoked Southerners to offer counter-fictions, the most successful of which came 40 years after the Civil War. Thomas Dixon was so enraged by a theatrical performance of Uncle Tom's Cabin that he wrote three novels.

These novels were used as source documents for D.W. Griffith's film The Birth of A Nation. Reynolds merges this racist film with the Dunning school of thought regarding Reconstruction. The Dunning school believed that Reconstruction was the Dark Age of the South, one in which corrupt Carpetbaggers and Scalawags advanced illiterate, uncouth, lust-filled blacks into political power. The school understood the violent response of the Ku Klux Klan as noble and necessary.

Was the Fugitive Slave Law repealed by Uncle Tom's Cabin? Reynolds leave little doubt that the novel did indeed convert many Northerners who didn't worry about slavery to a position in which worry and then resistance was an acceptable response to the extension of slavery in the western territories. During the Victorian era, the idea of 'family' was foundational to society. Uncle Tom's Cabin showed that slavery was an assault on the ideal of family.

It is not necessary to have read Uncle Tom's Cabin before reading Mightier Than The Sword. Reading or listening to Uncle Tom's Cabin after reading Mightier Than The Sword would be true to the goal of a liberal arts education. Living history presenters would be well served by addressing Mightier Than The Sword. Quite likely the historical person whom the presenter is portraying read Uncle Tom's Cabin and, whether a Northerner or Southerner, it challenged them.

Bottom Image Source: Classic Comics Illustrated
Caption: Simon Legree on the cover of the comic book adaptation of Uncle Tom's Cabin (Classic Comics #15, November 1943 issue).

New and Noteworthy: Fugitive Slaves, Their Rescuers and The Coming of the Civil War

Fugitive Justice: Runaways, Rescuers, and Slavery on Trial, Steven Lubet. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 367 pp., notes, index, hardcover, 2010, $29.95.

H-Net, H-Law review: Triumph of Law, Failure of Justice, Steve Peraza Published on H-Law, May, 2011.
Excerpt: The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 affirmed the U.S. government’s support of slavery, catalyzing conflict in the process. The law required federal officials to aid in the search for and seizure of alleged runaways anywhere in the United States. It also criminalized efforts to stall or block the law’s enforcement. Therefore slave catchers and U.S. Marshals hunted fugitives with impunity, even in states and territories where positive laws had abolished slavery. Moreover black and white abolitionists who refused to help slave catchers, or who chose to rescue recaptured runaways, faced federal fines and imprisonment. The fugitive slave law thus protected southern slaveholders’ rights to their human chattel, but as one historian has noted, “To secure these rights the law seemed to ride roughshod over the prerogatives of the northern states.”

Excerpt: That the fugitive slave law overcame social, political, and legal challenges is one of the lessons of Fugitive Justice: Runaways, Rescuers, and Slavery on Trial, a well-researched and elegantly written monograph by Williams Memorial Professor of Law Steven Lubet. But the purpose of the study is not to measure the effectiveness of the law. Rather, Fugitive Justice explains how federal enforcement and prosecution of the law pushed abolitionist lawyers to advance radical legal theories in defense of the runaways and rescuers they represented. To do so, the monograph retells the stories of three high-profile fugitive slave trials in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Ohio, respectively, focusing acutely on the legal arguments delivered for and against the fugitive slave law during each case. In this way readers experience both the palpable drama of antebellum trials in the United States as well as the ideological and rhetorical battles among prosecutors, defense attorneys, U.S. commissioners, and federal judges.

Excerpt: Professor Lubet’s Fugitive Justice convincingly argues that fugitive slave trials were a contributing factor to the coming of the Civil War. It also explains clearly how notions of “higher law” evolved from mere rhetoric to antislavery legal theory. In the final analysis Lubet’s study tells a compelling story about the fugitive slave law and its challengers from which both legal scholars and historians will benefit.

Full Text Review: H-Net, H-Law May 2011.

New on the Personal Book Shelf: The ANV, Southern Journalism and The Anti-Slavery Movement

CWL received an offer from Louisiana State University Press and picked up a nice stack of books for $7.50 each and that included shipping! Unfortunately, the books doubled the size of the stack labeled 'Read This Summer'.

Audacity Personified: The Generalship of Robert E. Lee, edited by Peter S. Carmichael. Six essays that praise and fault the Marble Man.

The Cause of the South: Selections From De Bow's Review, 1846-1867, edited by Paul Paskoff and Daniel Wilson. De Bow's Review was one of the preeminent Southern publications of the antebellum period. Based in New Orleans, the journal was the forum for agricultural and industrial issues, the slavery vs. wage labor issue, southern nationalism and Black Republicanism issues among others. A book for the primary source shelf.

Legacy of Disunion: The Enduring Significance of the American Civil War, edited by Susan Grant and Peter Parrish. Twelve essays on the myths, memories, leaders, legacies, perceptions and realities of the war.

Campbell Brown's Civil War: With Ewell and the Army of Northern Virginia, edited by Terry Jones. Since its publication in 2001 Campbell Brown's journals have added a new dimension to the study of the Army of Northern Virgina's leadership.

A Troublesome Commerce: The Transformation of the Interstate Slave Trade, Robert Gudmestad covers the emptying out of the Upper South's slaves into the lower and trans-Mississippi South during the three decades before the war. Speculation in slave prices was comparable to the speculation in oil prices today.

No Taint of Compromise: Crusaders in Anti-Slavery Politics, Frederick Blue. Anti-slavery politics generated Southern fears that it could lose the right to hold property in slaves. Pittsburgh's Jane Grey Swisshelm gets a chapter in the book.

The Smoothbore Volley That Doomed the Confederacy by Robert K. Krick. Ten essays that consider the death of Jackson, Jackson's persecution of Garnett, the accuracy of Longstreet's memoirs and his relationship with McLaws, brigade commanders Rodes, Gregg and Early, Confederate bibliography and other topics.

CWL will start with Audacity Personified, then Campbell Brown's Civil Warand then The Smoothbore That Doomed the Confederacy next. Hopefully finish one in July one in August and one in September. After reading Glaathar's General Lee's Army during the winter, it seems to be shaping up to be a Army of Northern Virginia year. CWL probably focus on John Brown in October as a way of saluting the 150th anniversary of the Harpers Ferry Raid.

New---The North's Joan of Arc

America's Joan of Arc: The Life of Anna Elizabeth Dickinson, J. Matthew Gallman, 272 pages, 17 illustrations, July 2008, paperback, $16.95.

One of the most celebrated women of her time, a spellbinding speaker dubbed the Queen of the Lyceum and America's Joan of Arc, Anna Elizabeth Dickinson was a charismatic orator, writer, and actress, who rose to fame during the Civil War and remained in the public eye for the next three decades. J. Matthew Gallman offers the first full-length biography of Dickinson to appear in over half a century. Gallman describes how Dickinson's passionate patriotism and fiery style, coupled with her unabashed abolitionism and biting critiques of antiwar Democrats--known as Copperheads--struck a nerve with her audiences.

In barely two years, she rose from an unknown young Philadelphia radical, to a successful New England stump speaker, to a true national celebrity. At the height of her fame, Dickinson counted many of the nation's leading reformers, authors, politicians, and actors among her friends. Among the dozens of famous figures who populate the narrative are Susan B. Anthony, Whitelaw Reid, William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Gallman shows how Dickinson's life illuminates the possibilities and barriers faced by nineteenth-century women, revealing how their behavior could at once be seen as worthy, highly valued, shocking, and deviant.

"Gallman has made an outstanding contribution to our picture of nineteenth-century gender politics and culture and the pivotal place of Anna Dickinson in that world."--Nina Silber, Civil War History

Source: Text from publisher