The Trouble with White Women

by Kyla Schuller

  Stowe does portray enslaved characters whose agency ripples off the page, if outlandishly so: to escape the Kentucky slave catchers pursuing her young son, Eliza Harris clutches him to her chest and leaps from one shuddering ice chunk to another across the Ohio River’s mile-wide span. Nonetheless, the novel’s thrust pushes toward one central source of agency: the white woman in the parlor. “There is all the difference in the world in the servants of Southern establishments,” Stowe’s narrator opines, “according to the character and capacity of the mistresses who have brought them up.” Eliza, for her part, had been enslaved by the quasi-abolitionist Mrs. Shelby, who took it upon herself “to do [her] duty to these poor, simple, dependent creatures” by civilizing them.19 Eliza’s leaps of faith are simultaneously repercussions of discipline.

  The novel’s paradigmatic white woman is not a woman at all, but a child. When enslaved by an extravagantly wealthy family in New Orleans, Tom forms an unshakeable bond with the master’s daughter, the five- or six-year-old Eva St. Clare. Though slavery’s wrongs seep into her malleable body, weakening her constitution, she welcomes the opportunity to sacrifice herself for the enslaved. “I would die for them, Tom, if I could,” Eva confides. She soon does just that—but not before gathering the enslaved around her deathbed to impart her final wish: “You must not live idle, careless, thoughtless lives. You must be Christians.”20 In her life and death, Eva stamps herself on Tom’s impressible nature. By the novel’s close, Uncle Tom is beaten to death on the Louisiana cotton plantation because he refuses to whip a fellow slave; Eva’s sacrifice has become his charge. If Eva has been born in Christ’s image, Tom is molded in Eva’s own.

  Uncle Tom’s Cabin exalts white women’s sympathy as the most powerful civilizing force. Lest the reader miss this message, Stowe places an abolitionist aunt from Vermont in the St. Clare household. Miss Ophelia insists that it is the environment of slavery, not the innate nature of Black people, that conditions the enslaved to deceit, immorality, and debasement. To test Ophelia’s theory, Eva’s father purchases a naughty young orphan named Topsy to serve as the “fresh-caught specimen” of Ophelia’s new “experiment”: Could a white woman elevate even the “blackest,” most “animalized” and “degraded” slave child? But Miss Ophelia’s horror at slavery is matched only by her revulsion to Black people, and she can’t bring herself even to touch Topsy. Topsy, for her part, continues nicking ribbons, swinging from bedposts, and cutting up Ophelia’s bonnet trimmings to make coats for her dolls. Eva, however, showers Topsy with affection and religious instruction. After Eva’s death, Ophelia learns the secret of Eva’s sway over Topsy: “honest tears,” shed in pity. When Ophelia finally breaks down and sobs, “from that hour, she acquired an influence over the mind of the destitute child that she never lost.”21 Ophelia cries, and Topsy transforms.

  Sentimental novels “always traffic in cliché, the reproduction of a person as a thing, and thus indulge in the confirmation of the marginal subject’s embodiment of inhumanity on the way to providing the privileged with heroic occasions of recognition, rescue, and inclusion,” literary critic Lauren Berlant writes, building on James Baldwin’s classic takedown of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.22 The real significance of white girls’ and white women’s tears, Stowe’s novel suggests, is their clout: a conduit of discipline, a determinative power, an upper hand. Sentimental sympathy is a tear-stained cloak for authority.

  When the Fugitive Slave Act passed in September 1850, Harriet Jacobs had lived in the North for eight years. But she was still forced to run from the Norcom family, who continued to pursue her. The act’s passage only intensified their aim to capture. She learned to dread summer, when “snakes and slaveholders make their appearance.” Jacobs rarely left the Willises’ Fourth Street house and every night she scanned the newspapers’ coverage of visitors arrived in New York for familiar names; twice she fled to Boston. The first escape was motivated by a warning she received from North Carolina that Dr. Norcom was soon to resume his search for Jacobs and her children. Unbeknownst to her, given the difficulties her contacts faced posting her a letter, he had died months prior. His death only escalated Jacobs’s danger, however, for Norcom’s son, James Norcom Jr., had driven the family into debt. Norcom’s daughter and her husband Daniel Messmore, desperate for funds, continued the pursuit.23

  Early one February morning in 1852, one month before three printing presses would begin churning twenty-four hours a day to keep up with the instantaneous demand for Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Jacobs realized her nanny duties the prior night had distracted her from examining the Evening Express. She rushed into the parlor and grabbed the daily just as a servant boy was about to crumple it up for the morning’s fire. The words gripped her heart like a tightening fist: Daniel Messmore had arrived in New York and was posted at what she deemed a “third-rate hotel.”24 She feared especially for her daughter Louisa, now nineteen and visiting Jacobs in the city; to evade slave catchers emboldened by the Fugitive Slave Law, her son Joseph had joined her brother John in the gold mines of California. Jacobs escaped to Boston once more, again with Cornelia Willis’s assistance. Willis wrote to Jacobs that she would like to purchase her freedom from Messmore to end his “persecution.” Just as in the South, for Jacobs to be free in New York, she would have to be sold.

  Jacobs was grateful but wounded. To give the Norcom family money, after all she had suffered, would transform her “triumph” into defeat.

  “Being sold from one owner to another seems too much like slavery,” Jacobs replied to Willis. “I prefer to go to my brother in California.”

  Eager to assist her friend and employee, Cornelia approached Messmore anyway and negotiated the sale of Jacobs, and the relinquishment of any claims on her children, for the bargain price of $300. Jacobs was stung, disgusted that she was “sold,” like property, “in the free city of New York!” But she also breathed easier upon being able to board the train back to the city with her face uncovered and her gaze forthright.25

  No longer hunted, Jacobs could think about contributing to the abolition movement by sharing her story. Her friend Amy Post had been encouraging Jacobs to tell her tale for years, but Jacobs was “mortified” to imagine revealing her sexual persecution and her affair with Sawyer. “If it was the life of a heroine with no degradation,” she confided in Post—one of only two people in the North whom she had told the circumstances of her children’s origin—she would be happy to share.26 Two years of prayer to overcome her own “pride” so that she may “save another from my fate” softened her to the idea. Cornelia suggested to Jacobs that Stowe could be entrusted with bringing the story of her life and escape to the public. At the close of 1852, Jacobs asked Post to make the approach.

  “I should like to be with her a month,” Jacobs proposed along with ideas for the structure of the text, and in return “I could give her some fine sketches for her pen on slavery.”27 Post wrote to Stowe, delicately broaching the details of Jacobs’s life—including her self-entombment and her affair with Sawyer—to communicate the urgency of the tale and their hope Stowe could take on the sensitive project.

  The return mail was silent.

  A month later, Jacobs read a notice in the newspaper that Stowe was soon to sail for Great Britain to meet with abolitionists. Realizing her opportunity to work with Stowe, and thus her chance “to be useful” to the cause, was slipping away, she thought of another tactic to gain the author’s ear. Her daughter Louisa, who had recently finished boarding school, could accompany Stowe on her speaking tour, at Jacobs’s expense. She “would be a very good representative of a Southern Slave” for British audiences to meet, Jacobs argued, and could assist Stowe’s abolition work while gaining experience on the abolitionist lecture circuit. At the same time, Louisa would build a relationship with Stowe that might enable a future partnership with Jacobs herself. Jacobs, unlike Stowe, had traveled to England before, while working as Nathaniel’s nanny after the death of his first wife, and she was also eager for Louisa
to similarly experience the temporary reprieve from the racism saturating American life. Cornelia Willis agreed that Jacobs’s plan was sound and she, too, wrote to Stowe.28

  This time, Stowe replied, and her letter lit a fire inside Jacobs.29

  It would be “much care” to take along Louisa, Stowe wrote, especially since she was traveling at the invitation of the Anti-Slavery Society of Glasgow—a perhaps reasonable objection. But what incensed Jacobs was Stowe’s immediate follow-up. Louisa would “be subject to much petting and patronizing” by the English when they learned of her history as a slave, Stowe condescended. Louisa would no doubt find the attention “pleasing,” to which Stowe was “very much opposed… with this class of people.”30 Stowe, it seems, trusted only white abolitionists like herself with receiving the esteem and acclaim of British antislavery activists.

  Stowe pushed further. She saw Jacobs as a source of material for her new book, a factual follow-up to her blockbuster novel. A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin was conceived to fend off proslavery accusations that she materialized the abuses of slavery solely from the mist of her imagination. Because Stowe had created a character who hid in a Louisiana attic on the way to self-emancipation, Jacobs’s seven-year confinement represented a potential jackpot. She could now proffer Jacobs’s story, after the fact, as the alleged basis of her plot. Stowe had been eager to extract stories from Bibb for her own use; her method now remained the same.

  Desirous to authenticate these details of Jacobs’s life in order to publish her story in A Key, Stowe had not replied directly to Jacobs. Instead, she wrote to Jacobs’s employer, Cornelia Willis. In the envelope, she tucked in Amy Post’s letter divulging the sensitive details about the origin of Jacobs’s children, requesting Willis corroborate its contents so that she could use Jacobs’s story as the basis of her own. She sought Willis’s verification, rather than Jacobs’s permission.

  Jacobs felt the hot flush of shame when Willis, outraged, showed her Stowe’s breach of confidence. Willis had been kind enough to never ask Jacobs about Louisa and Joseph’s father, understanding that it was a wound she preferred to tend by herself. When Stowe included Post’s letter, she revealed details Willis hadn’t known. No one had anticipated that Stowe would circumvent Jacobs’s authority and puncture her privacy.31

  Jacobs now had no desire to give her narrative over to Stowe and resolved her intention to tell “the history of my life entirely by itself.” Cornelia wrote to Stowe, begging her to leave the material out of A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin and sharing Jacobs’s offer that “if she wanted some facts for her book,” Jacobs “would be most happy to share some.” Stowe didn’t reply, so Cornelia wrote again. Jacobs then penned two letters to Stowe.

  No reply ever came, and Stowe sailed for Liverpool.32

  In England and Scotland, Stowe was received as a star and savior. She met her first adoring crowd, quite by surprise, at the Liverpool wharf where they disembarked. Stowe had nurtured interest in Great Britain from the initial publication of her novel, having sent a copy and friendly letter to many of the nations’ dukes, lords, and other noblemen and to distinguished writers like Charles Dickens. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, now one year old, was well on its way to becoming the first international bestseller. Forty different editions issued from London alone, while ten different theatrical productions of the novel were on the city’s stages. One publisher estimated over 1.5 million copies already circulated throughout Great Britain and its colonized territories.33

  Harriet Beecher Stowe adopted her new public role with a mixture of humility and authority. The abolitionist movement had been churning for decades without her participation; suddenly now the white public saw her as its leader. She understood herself to be taking on the burden of getting elbow-deep in the horrors of slavery in order to fight its existence. Her letters during the time she was compiling A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin reveal the emotional toll of a daily labor that required immersing herself in the graphic details of whippings, kidnappings, and torture. The majority of white authors chose to avert their eyes altogether from an industry built on cruelty. While Stowe’s position cannot be compared to experiencing the lash firsthand, her dedication to writing about slavery had tremendous effect in rallying white audiences to oppose the institution.

  Yet Stowe was also encouraged by a sense of her own responsibility and ownership over the cause, a position she authorized on the grounds that as a woman and mother who had lost a child to early death, she could best sympathize with the sufferings of slave women. Defenders of slavery argued that Black Americans lacked the same capacity of feeling that whites did. White women abolitionists like Stowe countered that all women, enslaved and not, shared a commonality of feeling.

  “I wrote what I did because as a woman, as a mother I was oppressed and broken-hearted,” Stowe explained to a prominent British judge a few weeks before she rebuffed Jacobs. “It is no merit,” she continued, “that I must speak for the oppressed—who cannot speak for themselves.”34 But this was precisely the bind: white women who insisted that they knew exactly how enslaved women felt also felt entitled to assume authority over them, even when Black men like Douglass, Bibb, Jacobs’s brother John Jacobs, and numerous others wrote and spoke for themselves.

  Meanwhile, Uncle Tom’s Cabin began raking in profits for its author and its publisher. Within the first three months of its release, Stowe earned a record-breaking $10,000 in royalties, more than $300,000 in today’s terms. Stowe and her professor husband had barely been making ends meet, a situation that prevented her from accepting her publisher’s first proposal: splitting the expense of production and the ensuing profit fifty-fifty. If they had been able to afford to take on this risk, she may well have found herself in a position somewhat similar to the one Louisa May Alcott would negotiate sixteen years later for Little Women: full copyright and an ensuing fortune that supported her family for generations. Stowe’s publisher, however, went to considerable expense marketing the book and soliciting theatrical interest, doubtlessly contributing to its massive sales, and her 10 percent royalties piled up.35

  Stowe’s UK trip presented another windfall. She received no royalties from international sales since copyright law did not yet cross borders, but in response British supporters organized a “penny offering” campaign encouraging each reader to donate one pence to the author. These voluntary contributions amounted to nearly $20,000. Hundreds of pounds were also presented to Stowe to distribute to the antislavery cause, particularly the Underground Railroad. While the penny offering was explicitly intended for Stowe’s own use, some grumbled nonetheless about Stowe’s reluctance to fund the actual practice of antislavery reform.36

  This reticence was a consequence of her strategy to appeal to the heart and stay out of the dirty business of politics, particularly the conflict roiling between different branches of the antislavery movement. As would soon be true of the campaign for women’s suffrage, the abolitionist movement comprised multiple conflicting approaches. These factions included the Garrisonians, who fought for immediate abolition and, since the 1840 London antislavery conference Stanton had witnessed from the balcony, supported women’s involvement; a second organization founded in 1840 by Lewis Tappan who fought to keep women out of abolition; and a conservative wing who supported incremental emancipation and compensating enslavers for their financial losses. Amid these debates that generated the energy and momentum of the movement, Stowe adopted a position of lucrative neutrality that did not go unnoticed. Stowe was “quite willing to get all she can out of us, but means to be very careful how she mixes up herself with the Old org[anizations],” commented one Garrisonian activist. Of Stowe’s $20,000 penny offering purse, she later accounted for spending a little over $6,000 to support antislavery, including funding tracts, initiating a petition campaign, and aiding fugitives. The bulk of the funds, she promised, would go toward constructing “a large & elegant building” for Miss Miner’s, an all-Black school in Washington, DC, whose patronage she urged.37
Yet no building ever came.

  While it was one thing to be an antislavery writer, and another thing altogether to be part of the antislavery social movement, Stowe inspired abolitionists of all stripes—an influence she no doubt calculated to maintain. And in some ways, Hedrick notes, her neutrality was of use to activists, for she divorced antislavery sentiment from the messy, but necessary, battles of movement politics, framing it instead as a straightforward matter of the civilized heart. Such a tactic may not have produced legions of activists. Nonetheless, her novel has often been deemed one of the single most important factors in shifting white opinion in the North and in the United Kingdom against slavery, especially among the women she most sought to reach. Feminists applauded the public role she helped create for women’s feelings, leading Stanton and Anthony to approach her about serving as editor of the Revolution. In the South, booksellers often banned the book, sometimes after intimidating threats from anti-abolition activists and authors. Within the movement, Stowe’s novel earned high praise from radicals and incrementalists alike for rallying new supporters of the cause. Frederick Douglass, a Garrisonian, enthused that “nothing could have better suited the moral and humane requirements of the hour. Its effect was amazing, instantaneous, and universal.” Stowe’s son made a rather grander claim, one that still regularly finds its way into print today despite its apocryphal status: that upon meeting the five-foot-tall Stowe, President Abraham Lincoln allegedly exclaimed, “So you’re the little lady who started the big war!”38

  But not all abolitionists were delighted. Martin Delany, a radical Garrisonian physician, novelist, and Black nationalist, expressed horror at Douglass’s support. Stowe, he objected, sought to displace African Americans by sending them to Africa, didn’t support Black teachers of Black children, and was attracting all the “pecuniary advantages” of antislavery writing, “thereby depriving” Black authors of opportunity. “No enterprise, institution, or anything else,” he concluded, “should be commenced for us, or our general benefit, without first consulting us.” Douglass countered Delany with the biting logic of a seasoned organizer. “Where will he find ‘us’ to consult with?” he beseeched. “Through what organization, or what channel could such consulting be carried on?… How many, in this case, constitute ‘us’?”39