• 1 She moved to Cincinnati with her family in 1832 (when her father was appointed President of the Lan (...)
• 2 Joan D. Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe. A Life, New York: Oxford University Press, 1994, 121.
• 3 “Harriet Beecher Stowe” (Sept. 1869), The Western Monthly, vol. 2, 1869, ed. Francis Fisher Browne, (...)
• 4 Susanna Ashton’s research has led her to only one fugitive that Stowe herself harbored in late 1850 (...)
• 5 Letter to Eliza Cabot Follen (Andover, Febr. 16, 1853), in Charles Edward Stowe, Life of Harriet Be (...)
• 6 The Fugitive Slave Law was part of the Compromise of 1850. It required Northerners to assist the So (...)
• 7 Ethan Kytle, Romantic Reformers and the Antislavery Struggle in the Civil War Era, New York: Cambri (...)

1During her eighteen-year residency in Cincinnati (Ohio), a busy station on the Underground Railroad, Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) became closely involved with the network of abolitionists helping fugitives escape northward to Canada.1 The Beecher family had tight connections with prominent Underground Railroad agents such as Reverend John Rankin, one of the most active “conductors” in Ohio, and gave assistance to fugitives on different occasions. Thus, Stowe’s husband Calvin Ellis Stowe and her brother Henry Ward Beecher reportedly helped an enslaved runaway woman reach a station on the Railroad, whence she safely made her escape.2 The Stowe couple is also said to have hosted fugitives in their own house on Walnut Hills, a secret “depot” on the Railway, concealing them in the cook’s quarter.3 Though such statements remain subject to caution,4 Stowe’s well-established proximity with the network increased her awareness of the enslaved individuals’ plight: “I learned incidentally of the slave system in the history of various slaves who came into my family, and of the underground railroad which, I may say, ran through our house”, she wrote in an 1853 letter to Eliza Cabot Follen.5 From her encounters as well as her reading of slave narratives and other contemporary documents, she gathered vivid stories that she wove into Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life among the Lowly (1852), an antislavery novel expressly written first and foremost to oppose the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law.6 The politics of the text yet proceeds from its narrative strategies rather than its explicit and hence oft-criticized political discourse. The Underground Railroad serves as a governing thread that runs through the novel and structures its antislavery politics, opening onto a call for the refoundation of American democracy. The fictional representation of the secret network brings together literary, philosophical and political influences. It is shaped by a multi-layered romantic influence ranging from European poetry and fiction to transcendentalism and the reform movement of the antebellum period. While reinterpreting principles embraced by reformers in the 1830s and 1840s, the novel also explores some of the themes brought forth by the reformers who took the lead in the antislavery struggle in the 1850s – a group whom Ethan Kytle refers to as the “New Romantics”, whose most prominent figures include Thomas W. Higginson, Theodore Parker, Martin R. Delany and Frederick Douglass, along with Stowe herself.7 Thus, the Underground Railroad plotline relies on a chain of sympathy which brings together sentimental strategies and the antislavery principle of moral suasion, notably embraced by William Lloyd Garrison and other reformers in the 1830s. It nonetheless also involves the characterization of enslaved runaways as heroic figures demonstrating the necessity to “strike the blow”, in Byron’s terms, to slavery through rebellious resistance and martial bravery, a strategy which gained prominence in the 1850s. Through the political reconfiguration enacted by the narrative, the Underground Railroad ultimately serves as a conduit for the regrounding of American democracy on the principle of higher law.

• 8 Kytle contrasts the “Sentimental Martyrs” (Tom and Eva) with the “Resistant Rebels” (Eliza and Geor (...)
• 9 Ibid., 28, 15.
• 10 Ibid, 32.

2In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the Underground Railroad materializes into a plotline leading enslaved fugitives (namely the Harris family) northward to freedom through several stations where they find solidarity and solace. Being based on active resistance and rebellion as the only effective way out of slavery, it contrasts with the other, more static plotline (involving Tom and Eva), which rests on Christian forbearance and martyr-like acceptance of one’s ordeals.8 The emotional and moral appeal that is acted out by the story of Tom and Eva nevertheless also fuels the Underground Railroad narrative thread, both on the intra- and extradiegetic levels. In different ways, the two plotlines rely on one common principle, moral suasion, a nonviolent abolitionist strategy calling on sympathy as well as moral and Christian values. As Kytle indicates, moral suasion, “an emotional appeal to the American conscience”, gained importance in the 1830s under the influence of William Lloyd Garrison, yet receded in the 1850s as the reformist movement became increasingly militant.9 Stowe nonetheless kept it alive and reshaped it through her sentimental writing strategies, so much so that Uncle Tom’s Cabin was considered early on as “the most influential moral suasionist tract produced by an American abolitionist”.10

• 11 Preface to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in Harriet Beecher Stowe, Three Novels, New York: The Library of Amer (...)
• 12 Harriet Beecher Stowe, A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin [1853], Port Washington (N.Y.): Kennikat Press, I (...)
• 13 Philip Fisher, Hard Facts. Setting and Form in the American Novel, New York: Oxford University Pres (...)

3In the preface to the first edition of the novel, she noted that her aim was to stir antislavery sentiment in her readers: “The object of these sketches is to awaken sympathy and feeling for the African race, as they exist among us […]”.11 She conceived of her project as being essentially political: “the book had a purpose entirely transcending the artistic one”, she wrote in A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1853).12 Central to her strategy is her reliance on sympathy, an essential principle that stands at the core of her abolitionism and serves as a narrative tool relating the text to sentimental fiction, which was extremely popular at the time. Combined with what Philip Fisher regards as the historical and naturalist “structure” of the novel, its sentimental “texture” turns out to be a political mode rich in antislavery potentialities; for sentimentality, he writes, is a “politically radical technique” liable to “build itself around the hard fact of slavery” and to arouse action against it.13

• 14 All parenthetical references to the novel are to the following edition: Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncl (...)
• 15 “True Womanhood” was defined by Barbara Welter as an ideal based on four tenets: domesticity, purit (...)
• 16 David S. Reynolds, Mightier than the Sword, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Battle for America, New York, (...)

4The principle of sympathy shows a wide range of variations along the different stages of the runaways’ flight to freedom. It is common to Underground Railroad agents and to characters who just happen to give a hand to Eliza Harris on her way to freedom, in the makeshift stations on her improvised Railway. The first such station is Senator Bird’s house in chapter 9 (“In Which It Appears That a Senator is But a Man”), where Eliza seeks shelter with her child right at a “critical juncture” (145) in a heated discussion between the Senator and his wife on the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, which the Senate has just passed.14 Indignant at the Senate’s “passing a law forbidding to give meat and drink to those poor colored folks that come along” and skeptical about her husband’s liability, as a man and not a senator, to “[turn] a woman out of doors in a snow-storm, for instance” (145), Mrs. Bird is the embodiment of active sympathy, here stereotypically presented as a feminine quality: she is a “timid, blushing little woman […] with mild blue eyes, and a peach-blow complexion, and the gentlest, sweetest voice in the world”, endowed with an “unusually gentle and sympathetic nature” (142-143). As a “True Woman”, she is entirely defined by her domestic “sphere”, which is nonetheless allowed to present an alternative mode of government: “Her husband and children were her entire world, and in these she ruled more by entreaty and persuasion than by command or argument” (143).15 Here as in other instances in the novel, domesticity is invested with “protofeminist force”.16 As defined by the principle of sympathy, the politics of Mrs. Bird’s domesticity sets up an alternative to the pro-slavery political sphere of the Senate, embodied by her husband.

• 17 Elizabeth Ammons, “Heroines in Uncle Tom’s Cabin”, American Literature, vol. 49, n° 2, 1977, 161-17 (...)

5Confronting his wife who rejects the “unchristian”, “shameful, wicked, abominable law” (142, 144) and turns the domestic sphere into a new political arena, the Senator carries the flag of rationality (“we mustn’t suffer our feelings to run away with our judgment”, 144), holding it out as the decisive political value whereby he defended “great state interests” in the Senate (155). Yet in the domestic sphere where the debate now takes place, his allegedly rational stand comes to be defeated. For under his intellectual shell, Senator Bird has “a particularly humane and accessible nature” (144), a “sentimental weakness” (155) which is his “indefensible point” (145). His legalist pro-slavery political posture, here identified as masculine, is reformed along sentimental lines which the text labels as feminine. The episode thus exemplifies a pattern which Elizabeth Ammons has shown to underlie the novel: the “radical substitution of feminine and maternal for masculine values”, whereby “essentially repressive concepts of femininity” are converted into “a positive (and activist) alternative system of values”.17

• 18 Letter to Catharine Beecher (1850 or 1851). Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Oxford Harriet Beecher Stowe (...)
• 19 Elizabeth Ammons, “Heroines in Uncle Tom’s Cabin”, op. cit., 173.

6More than his wife’s argumentation, based on sympathy, morality, and Christian principles, it is the actual presence of the “hapless mother” and her “defenceless child” (156) that arouses the Senator’s compassion. As a refugee now interrogated by her hosts, Eliza herself aptly pleads her case. Instead of blankly stating that her masters were about to sell her son down the river, she appeals to sympathetic identification to justify her flight: “Ma’am […], have you ever lost a child?” (149), she asks, unknowingly thrusting her question on a “new wound” (149), thus leading “every one around her” to show “signs of hearty sympathy” (150) and the Senator to give up his law-abiding stance. The episode calls to mind an anecdote which Stowe had earlier exposed in a letter to her sister Catharine: the argument she had with Thomas Cogswell Upham, a professor of moral philosophy and friend of the Stowe couple who claimed he would obey the law supposing a fugitive came to his door, yet (reportedly) provided help to an actual fugitive on the following day. Hence her conclusion that individuals’ “hearts are better on this point than their heads”.18 Stowe’s reliance on the heart as an antislavery principle in this letter as well as in the novel has a true political import. As Ammons puts it, in 1852 “Stowe, thoroughly romantic in this, locates the solution to slavery in a revolution of white values which will honor emotional verities above rationalized materialistic themes”.19 As opposed to the alleged rationalism that was victorious in the Senate, the principle of sympathy here aligns with sentimentalism, which is clearly inscribed in the feminine, domestic sphere. The text nonetheless contradicts the supposedly clearcut separation of the domestic and public spheres, proving domesticity to be a site of reform and political action.

• 20 Harriet Beecher Stowe, A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, op. cit., 23. It is to John Van Zandt’s house th (...)

7The fugitives’ chaotic ride in the Senator’s carriage on a muddy “Ohio railroad of the good old times”, which is devoid of the “smoothness and speed” that a railroad typically conveys to “some eastern traveller” (156), is evocative of the roughness of the Underground Railroad. Located “back in the woods” (152), the station where they find shelter is a farmhouse owned by one John Van Trompe, who offers a distinct embodiment of sympathy – a manly counterpart to Mrs. Bird’s feminine version. He is a rugged man whose bear-like, “tall, muscular form” (159) is but a metaphor for a “great heart” open to compassion and antislavery feelings: “Having ‘nothing of the bear about him but the skin,’ and being gifted by nature with a great, honest, just heart, quite equal to his gigantic frame, he had been for some years witnessing with repressed uneasiness the workings of a system equally bad for oppressor and oppressed” (159). Like John Van Zandt, an Underground Railroad conductor and station-keeper after whom he was modelled as Stowe asserts in A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin20, John Van Trompe emancipated his own slaves and converted to abolitionism: “At last, one day, John’s great heart had swelled altogether too big to wear his bonds any longer; so he just took his pocket-book out of his desk, and went over into Ohio, and bought a quarter of a township of good, rich land, [and] made out free papers for all his people […]” (159). In line with Stowe’s romantic distrust of cold-minded rationality and her perception of the heart as the locus of political reform, “honest old John Van Trompe” (159) embodies a form of abolitionism stemming from innate sympathy rather than thought-out political principles.

• 21 Mary Ellen Snodgrass, The Underground Railroad, op. cit., 434-435.
• 22 Ethan Kytle, op. cit., 149.
• 23 Elizabeth Ammons, “Heroines in Uncle Tom’s Cabin”, op. cit., 166.
• 24 See Jane P. Tompkins, “Sentimental Power. Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Politics of Literary History”, (...)

8The Quaker settlement to which John Van Trompe then delivers Eliza and her son Harry is described as an actual Underground Railroad station from which no fugitive has ever been “stolen” (216). Picturesquely characterized as Quaker through idiomatic features like the use of “thee”, the Halliday family regularly hosts “friends” (219) to serve the abolitionist cause – an active concern for the Society of Friends, who played a major role in the Underground Railroad.21 Having already been “found” once, Simeon runs the risk of “meet[ing] trouble” again out of a Christian humanism (doing it “for God and man”, 225) that teaches people “how to love [their] neighbor[s]” (220) and dovetails with the “religion of the heart” that was brought forth by the “New Romantics”22 – their adherence to feeling and emotion as reforming principles. The Quaker settlement is a matriarchal community founded on “motherliness and full-heartedness” (223), truly “home-centered”,23 yet where domesticity – epitomized by the hospitable kitchen – is not set in contrast to the political sphere but is the nurturing soil for the family’s active involvement against slavery. As critics have shown, it is a utopian community where power is relocated in the kitchen, presenting a model of harmonious, communitarian and sentimental government.24 With her “heart as good and true as ever throbbed in woman’s bosom” and her “motherly loving kindness” (215) to the newcomers, Rachel Halliday is moved by a principle of sympathy that leads her to identify with the fugitives and consequently host them, rejoice at the arrival of Eliza’s husband, and urge her daughter Ruth, herself “a wholesome, whole-hearted […] little woman” (217), to tell the news to Eliza as early as possible: “Why, now, suppose ‘t was my John, how should I feel? Do tell her, right off” (220). The Quakers’ politics of sympathy thus merges with their antislavery commitment.

• 25 Ken Egan Jr., The Riven Home: Narrative Rivalry in the American Renaissance, Selinsgrove: Susquehan (...)

9Phineas Fletcher, a converted Quaker who offers practical help to the runaways in chapter 17, is an exception in the otherwise pacifist and matriarchal community. He is a Frontier backwoodsman, rough and able-bodied, whose physical efficiency is epitomized by his “long” arms, “a pair of arms like sails of a windmill” (288). He embodies the outdoors, manly counterpart to the domestic and matriarchal principle that reigns over the Quaker settlement. As Ken Egan points out, with his “natural piety” and his “desire to defend the persecuted”, he recalls Fenimore Cooper’s Natty Bumppo, yet his manners and language are those of Jim Doggett in T. B. Thorpe’s “The Big Bear of Arkansas” (1841).25 While Rachel’s “heart” stands for her motherly compassion, Phineas Fletcher’s is primarily a symbol of vigor and practical wisdom. He is “a hearty two-fisted backwoodsman, a vigorous hunter”, “a wise and skilful [sic] man” who knows “a thing or two about the road” (287) and who, aware that the slavecatchers are coming near, takes the fugitives on a desperate ride through the woodlands (294) to “the ledge of a steep overhanging rock”, one of his “old hunting-dens” (296). He offers practical help but rejects the idea of his being “involved” by George Harris (“When thee does involve me, please to let me know”, 287), as if to claim his reliance on deeply-rooted principles rather than circumstantial sympathy. In spite of his sound heart, he stands out from the rest of the community. As Rachel Halliday puts it, “Friend Phineas will ever have ways of his own, […] but we all think that his heart is in the right place, after all” (289). Contrary to other Quakers, he does not abide by pacifist principles and readily puts his physical might in the service of the abolitionist cause. Thus, when the leading slavecatcher progresses on the ledge of the rocky precipice, refusing to retreat after being shot and wounded by George, Phineas pushes him with his “long arms” into the chasm, a potentially deadly thirty-feet fall among “trees, bushes, logs, loose stones” (300). In true Frontier fashion, he is a merciless fighter who does not shrink from killing if circumstances require it (“Why not?”, “serves him right”, 301), even though the hunter in him sees it as an “ugly operation” (304). He nevertheless spontaneously shows humanity towards his opponent left behind by the other slavecatchers and draws sufficient expediency from his backwoods life experience to tend to the wounded man (302). He thus offers a reinterpretation of the principle of sympathy that combines innate humanity with practical wisdom and physical might.

• 26 “When Mercy’s hand hath turned the golden key, /And Mercy’s voice hath said, Rejoice, thy soul is f (...)

10The enslaved runaways are eventually spirited away to freedom through the assistance of a group of Quakers to whom Phineas Fletcher entrusts them, and then of Mrs. Smyth, a Quaker Underground Railroad agent from Canada who leads the Harris family safely across the lake in a theatrical cross-dressing episode in chapter 37. As they reach the Quaker settlement on the Canadian shore, the principle of sympathy governing the whole network becomes allegorized as the “Christian charity” which has placed there a “good missionary”, “as a shepherd to the out-cast and wandering” (549). In the poem inserted at the point of the fugitives’ arrival on the Canadian shore, the allegorical evocation of “Mercy” confers their flight a religious significance opening onto the evocation of the afterlife; its “hand” and “voice” (549) are set as the true agents of their liberation.26

• 27 Letter to Eliza Cabot Follen (Andover, Febr. 16, 1853), in Charles Edward Stowe, op. cit., 199.
• 28 Ibid., 21, 25.

11The authorial aim of converting the reader to abolitionism implies an additional, extra-diegetic link in the chain of sympathy on which the runaways’ plotline relies. Moral suasion, which ultimately targets the reader, is the impulse framing the writing of the novel: Uncle Tom’s Cabin stems from, and aims at, compassion for the enslaved. In her aforementioned letter to Eliza Cabot Follen, Stowe explains that “much that is in that book […] had its root in the awful scenes and bitter sorrows” of the summer of 1849, alluding to the death of her infant son Charley, which left in her “a deep compassion for the sorrowful, especially for mothers who are separated from their children” in the context of slavery.27 “It was at his dying bed and at his grave that I learned what a poor slave mother may feel when her child is torn away from her”, she writes, adding that “this crushing of [her] own heart might enable [her] to work out some great good to others”.28 The project of arousing antislavery feelings in her readers is sustained by sentimental strategies, as in chapter 7 where the narrator directly addresses mothers among the readers so as to establish a bond of compassion:

• 29 Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Oxford Harriet Beecher Stowe Reader, ed. Joan D. Hedrick, op. cit., 59.

12The emotional call to the reader is brought forth by the italicized pronouns, the direct questions, and the numerous adjectives emphasizing the helplessness of the child. The expected identification of female readers with enslaved mothers also depends on the verisimilitude and vividness of the picture, which were crucial to Stowe’s project: “I wish to be able to make a picture that shall be graphic & true to nature in its details”, she wrote to Frederick Douglass on July 9, 1851.29 The conjunction of sentimental and realistic narrative devices is the sine qua non for identification and compassion, and hence also for the political impact of the novel.

• 30 Ethan Kytle, op. cit., 15, 33, 35. See The Heroic Slave by Frederick Douglass (1853) and Blake, or (...)

13The abolitionist force of the novel owes much to the characterization of the enslaved runaways as romantic heroes – a distinctive feature of the “New Romantics”, as Kytle has shown. Martial heroism indeed became a major point of emphasis in the 1850s after the passing of the Fugitive Slave Law, as Romantic reformers grew increasingly pessimistic about the possibility for moral suasion to overthrow the institution of slavery, defending instead a more forceful response. Some of them accordingly wrote short stories or novels casting enslaved rebels, whether real or imagined, as heroes.30

• 31 Harriet Beecher Stowe, A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, op. cit., 13.
• 32 Ibid., 13-16, 19, 26-27. Josiah Henson is otherwise the model for Uncle Tom.
• 33 Stowe quoted by Claire Parfait, The Publishing History of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 1852-2002, Aldershot: (...)

14Responding to the criticism that the rebellious enslaved protagonist, George Harris, is “overdrawn, both as respects personal qualities and general intelligence”, and that “so many afflictive incidents happening to a slave are improbable, and present a distorted view of the institution”, Stowe provides historical sources demonstrating the verisimilitude of his characterization in A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin.31 She asserts that he is drawn from the experience of real-life enslaved individuals of her own acquaintance, such as Lewis Clark[e] (for his “European features”, the “incidents of his life”, and the “recovery of his freedom”) and Josiah Henson (the inspiration for George’s account of the sale of his mother and her children), and that his adventures offer a “most interesting and affecting parallel” to Frederick Douglass’s Narrative (“with regard to [his] intelligence […] and his teaching himself to read and write”).32 As Claire Parfait indicates, Stowe claimed to have relied on such sources only to keep within the “limits of probability” and grew exasperated with the speculations concerning the models for the various characters of the novel. Rejecting the notion of “living prototypes”, she made assertive claims to authorial creation and insisted that the figures of George Harris and Uncle Tom were only “imaginary suggested in the first instance by Josiah Henson and Lewis Clark [sic] but greatly improved by imagination”.33

• 34 Ethan Kytle, op. cit., 14, 33-34. Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage [1812] (canto 2, stanza 76 (...)
• 35 Frederick Douglass, The Heroic Slave, ed. Robert S. Levine, John Stauffer, and John R. McKivigan, N (...)

15Indeed, George’s characterization as a romantic hero depends less on actual biographical and historical sources than on literary and political influences. He is the embodiment of the romantic ideal of martial heroism as defined by European writers such as Byron and Scott, yet reinterpreted through the lens of American abolitionism. As Kytle remarks, the “New Romantics” admired Byron’s heroism in joining the Greek war of independence from Ottoman rule and repeatedly turned to the latter’s “ode to self-emancipation” in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812-1818) – “Hereditary bondsmen! know ye not / Who would be free themselves must strike the blow?”34 Douglass for instance quoted these lines as an epigraph to Part IV of his 1853 novella, The Heroic Slave, emphasizing the necessity for the enslaved to be active agents of their own freedom.35

• 36 Stowe’s recollections written in the form of a letter to her brother, inserted in her father’s auto (...)
• 37 Alice Crozier, “Harriet Beecher Stowe and Byron”, in Elizabeth Ammons (ed.), Critical Essays on Har (...)
• 38 Caroline Franklin, “Stowe and the Byronic Heroine”, in Denise Kohn, Sarah Meer and Emily B. Todd (e (...)
• 39 Harriet Beecher Stowe in Lyman Beecher, op. cit., 391.
• 40 Winfried Fluck, “The Nineteenth-Century Historical Novel”, in Leonard Cassuto, Clare Virginia Eby a (...)
• 41 Lyman Beecher, op. cit., 391.
• 42 Denise Kohn, Sarah Meer and Emily B. Todd, “Reading Stowe as a Transatlantic Writer”, in Transatlan (...)

16Stowe herself had read Lord Byron’s poetry and Sir Walter Scott’s novels with great enthusiasm, and the Beecher family, especially Harriet’s father Lyman Beecher, had shown a rare interest in these two writers. It is on one of her visits as a child to her aunt Esther in Litchfield that she discovered Byron’s recently published poem The Corsair, the reading of which “astonished and electrified” her and sent her home “absorbed and wondering about Byron”.36 In the midst of the transatlantic Byronic fever, she developed a passion for his poetry. As Alice Crozier has shown, Byron would become “the single greatest literary and imaginative influence on [her] writings”.37 Caroline Franklin goes further to indicate that the young Stowe idolized him, engrossed in long-lasting “adolescent hero-worship”.38 Sir Walter Scott was the other most influential writer of Stowe’s childhood. She later recalled that his fiction, in which her father saw “real genius and real culture”, had been an exception in a house where novels were disapproved of as “trash”, as was frequently the case among the elite at the time: “serious-minded people regarded novel reading as an evil”, she wrote.39 The educated had indeed dismissed the novel form as childish and non-respectable, and as a purveyor of dangerous illusions; yet Scott’s historical novels were eminently popular with readers of all social levels, even among the elite, and started to change the public perception of fiction.40 Encouraged by their father in this particular case, Harriet and her brother George had taken them one by one, reciting many scenes verbatim, and had read Ivanhoe seven times in one summer.41 Stowe later mentioned returning to the Waverley novels and reading them in chronological order while composing Uncle Tom’s Cabin.42 Her early passion for these writers paved the way for her vision of antislavery heroism and influenced the characterization of the enslaved fugitive protagonist in this novel.

• 43 Larry J. Reynolds, European Revolutions and the American Literary Renaissance, New Haven: Yale Univ (...)

18The narrator’s strategy feeds on the “Kossuth fever” that was then sweeping the nation, following the seven-month stay of the Hungarian hero in the United States in 1851-1852. For most Americans, Kossuth, a “handsome, colorful, charismatic” hero and a “martyred rebel”, was a legitimate revolutionary hero of the George Washington type.43 Like Byron who had been acclaimed as a hero for fighting for freedom in Greece, Kossuth was praised for leading the fight for independence in the Hungarian revolution of 1848.

• 44 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Dred, A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Pres (...)
• 45 Frederick Douglass, The Heroic Slave, op. cit., 7.

19Physical strength is a recurrent feature in abolitionist fiction where enslaved protagonists are frequently modeled on the monumental heroes of Greek or Latin antiquity or on the medieval knights of Scott’s historical romances. Martial heroism accordingly is a central aspect of the enslaved fugitive’s characterization in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. George, whose ability to “strike the blow” to slavery is emblematized by his “pair of strong arms” – “[…] am I going to stand by and see them take my wife and sell her, when God has given me a pair of strong arms to defend her?” (288) – is a prototype for Dred, the statuesque eponymous hero of Stowe’s 1856 antislavery novel, who displays “a neck and chest of herculean strength” as well as “the muscles of a gladiator” and might have been “one of the wild old warrior prophets of the heroic ages”.44 He also announces Madison Washington, the protagonist of Douglass’s novella The Heroic Slave, another fugitive of “Herculean strength” with “arms like polished iron”.45

• 46 “With regard to the intelligence of George, and his teaching himself to read and write, there is a (...)
• 47 Frederick Douglass, “Pictures and Progress” (lecture). Quoted by Ethan Kytle, op. cit., 103.
• 48 Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, & the Heroic in History, lecture III (May 12, 1840), “The (...)

20George’s martial heroism is not just a matter of physical might but also, and above all, of moral perfectionism, showing the influence of transcendentalism and of the romantic reform movement on Stowe’s novel. Through his commitment to self-improvement, demonstrated by his self-taught literacy, George appears as Douglass’s fictional alter ego, as suggested by Stowe herself in A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin.46 He is a “talented, young mulatto man” (54), whose “zeal for self-improvement” “led him to steal the much coveted arts of reading and writing, amid all the toil and discouragements of his early life”, and brings him later on in Canada “to devote all his leisure time to self-cultivation” (604). With its desk covered with pens and paper (604), his study in Montreal is an emblematic place which encapsulates his intellectual progress. There, George enacts what Douglass depicted as man’s “marvelous power of enlarging the boundaries of his own existence” by “the cultivation of his intellect” and “the development of his natural resources”.47 Besides, like Douglass and his fictionalized Madison Washington, he is a true orator serving the cause of freedom with his words and moral commitment. In chapter 17, the climactic armed confrontation between the fugitives and the slave hunters is briefly suspended by an impassioned political speech in which George Harris proclaims himself a free man and pronounces his own “declaration of independence” (298). The interconnection of physical might with eloquence and moral strength relates the enslaved rebel to Carlyle’s “Hero as Poet”. “Morality itself, what we call the moral quality of a man”, Carlyle writes, “[is] but another side of the one vital Force whereby he is and works;” one “may see how a man would fight, by the way in which he sings; his courage, or want of courage, is visible in the word he utters, in the opinion he has formed, no less than in the strokes he strikes”. “[The Hero as Poet] is one; and preaches the same Self abroad in all ways”.48

• 49 Larry Gara, The Liberty Line: The Legend of the Underground Railroad, Lexington (KY): the Universit (...)
• 50 Claire Parfait, op. cit., 168-172.
• 51 Harriet Beecher Stowe, A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, op. cit., 21-23.
• 52 Ibid., 184.

21More than George, Eliza Harris is an icon of what Larry Gara has called “the legend of the Underground Railroad”, a narrative that blends history with folklore and “has become part of American mythology”.49 She is the emblematic female fugitive risking her life to get herself and her child out of bondage. Her picaresque and melodramatic flight with her son Harry in her arms, and more specifically the so-called “ice-cake scene”, have quickly entered popular imagery, through illustrations as well as theatrical adaptations.50 As a way to establish the verisimilitude of her portrait and of the scene, Stowe insisted in A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin that Eliza was “drawn from life”, resembling a “beautiful quadroon” she had seen in Kentucky, and that her crossing the river on the ice was inspired from a true story told by Reverend Rankin, the story of a woman whom abolitionists helped reach Canada under the pseudonym of Eliza Harris. 51Stowe also wrote about “a fugitive quadroon mother” with two children, both “surpassingly fair, and uncommonly beautiful”.52 Eliza accordingly is described as a white-skinned quadroon – “she was […] so white as not to be known as of colored lineage, without a critical survey, and her child was white also” (107). As a graceful woman of “dazzling” beauty, with a “peculiar air of refinement” and a “softness of tone and manner” (54), she conforms to the ideal of womanhood of antebellum times. Leaving aside the impossibility for her, as an enslaved woman, to have a domestic sphere of her own, she fulfills the basic tenets of “True Womanhood”, being a motherly, virtuous, pious and submissive wife. Besides, as a “petted and indulged favorite” of her mistress (54), she received the latter’s “protecting care” and managed to reach maturity undefiled, contrary to Cassy and Emmeline, the victims of Simon Legree’s predation. Her conforming to conventional standards of womanhood brings her close to antebellum female readers and sustains identification, a condition for the antislavery purpose of the book to function.

• 53 “The Great Man […] is a Force of Nature; whatsoever is truly great in him springs up from the inart (...)

22As a fugitive nonetheless, she enacts a form of heroism that converts conventional features of womanhood into a source of power and emancipation. It is first and foremost her motherly instinct that drives her to run away from slavery into the frosty night – “But stronger than all was maternal love, wrought into a paroxysm of frenzy by the near approach of a fearful danger” (104). Motherliness fuels her flight but becomes transfigured into preternatural energy: “She wondered within herself at the strength that seemed to be come upon her; […] every flutter of fear seemed to increase the supernatural power that bore her on.” (105) Her strength is akin to the force of the “Great Man”, which for Carlyle “springs-up from the inarticulate deeps”.53 As with the “Hero as Poet”, this force materializes into a voice, which she nonetheless does not recognize as her own: “a voice that startled herself; for it seemed to her to come from a spirit within, that was no part of her” (105). This same supernatural strength, which she perceives as coming from the child, adds “fire and spirit to her movements” (105) and pours “into her in electric streams” (106), allowing her to metamorphose morally, and hence physically, into a heroic figure : “Sublime is the dominion of the mind over the body, that, for a time, can make flesh and nerve impregnable, and string the sinews like steel, so that the weak become so mighty” (106). Her steel-like sinews evoke the “arms like polished iron” of Douglass’s “heroic slave”. Yet, what is “sublime” in her is not identified as “heroism”, as is the case with Madison Washington in Douglass’s novel or with George Harris in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but as the empowering motherly instinct that transfigures her body. Motherliness is the agent of her metamorphosis into a heroine who is never acknowledged as such. In the words of the man who helps her up the bank, she is at best “a brave gal”, “a right brave gal” with “grit” (118).

• 54 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Literature, translated by Julie Rose, Cambridge (UK): Polity Pres (...)

25In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the Underground Railroad is the narrative conduit for a “democracy of writing” which reaches beyond the narrator’s and characters’ explicit discourse and consists, as defined by Jacques Rancière, in the “reconfiguration of the field of political objects and actors”.54 The novel gives voice and visibility to the unheard and unseen, brings them center stage and turns the margins into a site of political agency. It thereby calls for a regrounding of American democracy on the principle of higher law.

• 55 Emerson claims that “heroism and grandeur” “belong to acts of self-reliance”. Ralph W. Emerson, “Hi (...)
• 56 As Philip Fisher writes, “sentimentality, by its experimental extension of humanity to […] slaves [ (...)

26The narrative strategies deployed in the runaways’ plotline underpin the novel’s democratic mode. The narrator’s suggestion that an enslaved fugitive may be as much of a hero as a revolutionary is in tune with Emerson’s claim, in his essays “History” and “Heroism”, that heroism is a matter of self-reliance, which any individual should pursue.55 Likewise, Eliza’s designation as a desperate mother empowered by her feelings for her child places her prowess within the reach of any woman, and the narrator’s hint that any other mother would have run as fast only confirms her representativeness. The process of identification, on which much of the political effect of the novel depends, is intrinsically democratic as it implies the reader’s subjective view that they may share in a character’s achievements and life experiences. More fundamentally, the community of feelings between reader and characters which is established by the principle of sympathy asserts the humanity of the enslaved men and women, contrary to the laws which consider “human beings, with beating hearts and living affections, only as so many things belonging to a master” (51).56

• 57 Ethan Kytle, op. cit., 32, 53.
• 58 Ralph W. Emerson, Emerson’s Antislavery Writings, ed. Len Gougeon and Joel Myerson, New Haven (CT): (...)
• 59 Emerson, quoted by Joseph Urbas, Emerson’s Metaphysics, A Song of Laws and Causes, London: Lexingto (...)
• 60 Frederick Douglass’ Paper (Apr. 8, 1852), quoted by Ethan Kytle, op. cit., 56.

27Through their opposition to pro-slavery laws, enslaved fugitives and “their harborers and abettors” (155) make a claim for the refoundation of American democracy on higher law, a principle which was central to the transcendentalist and reformist vision of democracy in the antebellum period. As an outspoken proponent of the higher law principle and an opponent of the Fugitive Slave Law, Mrs. Bird is the mouthpiece of the romantic reformers, who called upon the higher law as the fundamental political principle on which democracy should be grounded. Rejecting the “debased human statutes that made compromises with immoral institutions like slavery”, Parker, Douglass and Higginson put forth higher law doctrine “to justify not just pacifist disunion but also active resistance”.57 Emerson likewise, in his 1851 “Address to the Citizens of Concord” on the Fugitive Slave Law, mentioned his “dismay at hearing that the higher law was reckoned a good joke in the courts”.58 He considered the higher law as the moral sentiment that should inspire all laws: “The end of all political struggle”, Emerson wrote, is “to establish morality as the basis of all legislation”.59 Stowe herself had supported higher law doctrine in “The Freeman’s Dream: A Parable” (1850), and Uncle Tom’s Cabin was read as a powerful defense of the higher law theory, as an 1852 review in Frederick Douglass’ Paper demonstrates.60 The right for individuals to oppose pro-slavery laws is sustained by the principle of civil disobedience, which was theorized by Thoreau in his 1848 lecture “Resistance to Civil Government” and gained importance within the abolitionist movement after the passing of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law. Acknowledgment of civil disobedience underpins the narrator’s development on the heroism of rebellious enslaved characters in the antepenultimate chapter of the novel, leading up to a purely rhetorical question: “My good sir, is this man a hero, or a criminal?” (606) The address to the reader implicitly makes the law an object of investigation which is open to all; it reminds readers that the law is a public thing, res publica, and invites them into the arena of political debate.

• 61 Quoted by John Howe, Language and Political Meaning in Revolutionary America, Amherst: University o (...)

28Language is a site of democratic reconfiguration that contributes to set the law into the public space. With much irony, the law comes up in the language of enslaved characters (such as Topsy and Chloe) in the guise of an interjection that destabilizes its meaning – “Laws!”, which is used as a substitute for “Lord!”. Far from consecrating the law, the substitution brings it into the vernacular sphere and consequently tends to take it down its pedestal. As in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), the informal use of the term carries subversive potentialities in a nation which defined itself first and foremost through its laws and institutions. In his Thoughts on Government (1776), John Adams had defined the republic as “an empire of laws, and not of men”, while Thomas Paine, in Common Sense (1776), had claimed that “in America the law is king”.61 The repeated use of “laws” as an interjection debunks such civil sanctification of the law as a pillar of democracy. Instead, it promotes a linguistic regimen whereby anyone, citizen or slave, is entitled to make the law their own verbal property.

• 62 Ralph W. Emerson, “Self-Reliance”, Essays and Lectures, op. cit., 270, 259.

29The narrative lends the enslaved runaway protagonist a political voice, allowing him to herald the nation’s founding values. George is the embodiment and mouthpiece of freedom; he is a new Patrick Henry, the patriot of the War of Independence whose “Give me Liberty or Give me Death” declaration he converts into a motto of emancipation from slavery: “I’ll be free, or I’ll die” (64). Beyond the iconic figure of the patriot, George positions himself as the true inheritor of American historical heroes: “I’ll fight for my liberty to the last breath I breathe. You say your fathers did it; if it was right for them, it is right for me!” (187) The narrator’s allusion to George’s militant speech as a “declaration of independence” (298) in “The Freeman’s Defence” (chapter 17) is of much importance too, less for the historical hint than for the liberation which is accomplished through the political commitment of his voice. His speech starts with self-assertion: he reclaims his name, converting it from a legacy of bondage into a statement of freedom – “I am George Harris. A Mr. Harris, of Kentucky, did call me his property. But now I’m a free man, standing on God’s free soil; and my wife and my child I claim as mine” (298). George’s stance is one of self-reliance, sustained by his rhetorical skills. It is his own Emersonian “I think, I am”, which leads him to speak out and allow his thoughts to become public, and hence shared: “Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense”, Emerson writes.62 The fugitive’s self-reliant voice is the instrument of freedom, democratic commitment, and representativeness.

• 63 Ethan Kytle, op. cit., 89.

30George’s own “declaration of independence” as he opposes the slavecatchers in chapter 17 is the enactment of a political voice which is fully embodied and democratic. His political diatribe involves his whole body and has a true dramatic quality. His rhetorical skills make him an alter ego of Frederick Douglass who, as Higginson observed, always “commands attention”: “His dramatic power […] is always great”.63 Likewise, George’s soaring rhetoric is enhanced by his dramatic presence. His proclamation of political dissidence in chapter 11, whereby he rejects laws and country for the sake of liberty, is delivered “partly while sitting […] and partly walking up and down the room”, “with tears, and flashing eyes, and despairing gestures” (187). It is echoed in chapter 17, where the narrator emphasizes George’s towering position “in fair sight, on the top of the rock” as he utters his own “declaration of independence” based on the very same triad of values – laws, country and liberty: “We don’t own your laws; we don’t own your county; we stand here as free, under God’s sky, as you are; and, by the great God that made us, we’ll fight for our liberty till we die” (298). The “flush” of “his swarthy cheek”, the “fire” that “bitter indignation and despair” give to “his dark eye” and his raising his hand to heaven (299) contribute to the dramatic strength of his speech. It is altogether “the attitude, eye, voice, manner” of the speaker that “[strike] the party below to silence” (299). Through the commitment of his voice and body to liberty and independence, the enslaved fugitive performs a political act that makes him the true embodiment of the nation’s values.

• 64 The songs of the Underground Railroad often deployed Exodus or Promised Land symbolism. Eddie S. Gl (...)

31The narrative reinterpretation of democratic principles draws on political myths inherited from the Puritans. The fugitives’ flight is the reenactment of the Puritan experience, which itself is set in a Biblical frame. Eliza perceives her ordeal as a repetition of the exodus of the Hebrews from Egypt (“God is going to bring us out of bondage”, 546), while the slaves in chapter 4 envision “the other side of the river” – free Ohio – as “Jordan’s banks”, “Canaan’s fields, or “the “New Jerusalem” (77-78), as in the songs of the Underground Railroad.64 The analogy between the banks of the Ohio and those of the Jordan river, and between Canada and Canaan, pervades the novel. The narrator plays on such symbolical analogies when Eliza reaches the river in chapter 7: she “entered the village of T——, by the Ohio river, weary and foot-sore, but still strong in heart. Her first glance was at the river, which lay, like Jordan, between her and the Canaan of liberty on the other side” (107). Promised land symbolism also serves to announce her escape to her mistress in the following chapter: “Wal, she’s clar ‘cross Jordan. As a body may say, in the land o’ Canaan” (133). Such images, which were recurrent in Negro spirituals, are part of an idiom in which slaveholders are not conversant – an idiom making “great capital of scriptural figures and images” (133). Hence Mrs. Shelby’s linguistic bewilderment when she attempts to decipher the symbols (“‘Why, Sam, what do you mean?’ said Mrs. Shelby, breathless, and almost faint, as the possible meaning of these words came over her”, 133), and the need for Sam to provide a translation (“Wal, Missis, de Lord he persarves his own. Lizy’s done gone over the river into ‘Hio, as ‘markably as if de Lord took her over in a charrit of fire and two hosses”, 133).

• 65 Sacvan Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self, New Haven, London: Yale University Pre (...)
• 66 Jane P. Tompkins, “Sentimental Power: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Politics of Literary History”, op. (...)
• 67 Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad, op. cit., xi.
• 68 When meeting Stowe at the White House in 1862, Lincoln reportedly greeted her with the following wo (...)

32Such analogies set the Underground Railroad within a Puritan, typological framework whereby the fugitives’ ordeals, like those of the Puritans, repeat the Hebrews’ Lord-driven flight from bondage. The novel relies on Puritan writing forms which strongly pervade American romanticism, such as typology (exemplified by Mary Rowlandson’s 1682 captivity narrative) and the New England jeremiad, which Perry Miller identified as the American colonies’ first distinctive literary genre.65 As Jane Tompkins has noted, Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a whole is a jeremiad “in the fullest and truest sense”, even though Sacvan Bercovitch omitted it from his study of the literary legacy of the genre – sentimental fiction being commonly excluded from the American canon.66 The latter’s definition of the jeremiad as “a mode of public exhortation […] designed to join social criticism to spiritual renewal, public to private identity, the shifting ‘signs of the times’ to certain traditional metaphors, themes and symbols” adequately accounts for the novel’s narrative discourse on slavery67. Uncle Tom’s Cabin fuses theology and politics and exhorts its readers to antislavery action – so efficiently, in fact, that it triggered an acute debate on slavery, if not the American Civil War as the legend goes.68

• 69 Miller borrows the phrase from a sermon by Reverend Samuel Danforth delivered in 1670. Perry Miller(...)
• 70 Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad, op. cit., 6- 9.

33The jeremiad relies on what Perry Miller has called the Puritan “errand”, which is part of a scheme of redemption fusing secular and sacred history.69 Beyond freedom, the purpose of the errand in the wilderness is to guide the Puritan people individually and collectively towards spiritual redemption. In addition, the jeremiad is not just a mode of denunciation but also an optimistic sermon promising success and salvation.70 The fugitives’ plotline in Uncle Tom’s Cabin involves Puritan errand imagery (night, wilderness, pristine nature) in the episodes of Eliza’s flight through the frosty night (in chapter 7), through the “benighted regions of the west” on a “pristine” muddy road (156) with the senator (in chapter 9), and through the “dark stretches of woodland” (294) with Phineas (in chapter 17). Set in a Puritan interpretative frame, the senator’s ride through the night in chapter 9 is the "penance” whereby the “political sinner” might “expiate” his political sins (156). It is not just a form of punishment, but also a means of individual – and potentially collective – redemption. The rhetoric of salvation climaxes in chapter 43 (“Results”), blending the sentimental and spiritual modes as the reunited fugitives kneel together, pray, pour their feelings “into the bosom of Almighty love” and “[embrace] each other, with a holy trust in Him, who from such peril and dangers, and by such unknown ways, had brought them together” (606). Canada, the new Canaan at the end of the fugitives’ errand, is a site of salvation as well as reunion, the earthly materialization of God’s promise: its “shores of refuge, like the eternal shore, often unite again, in glad communion, hearts that for long years have mourned each other as lost” (606).

• 71 Theodore Parker writes that “the American idea” is “that all men have natural rights to life, liber (...)

34Canada, the terminus of the Underground Railroad, is looked forward to as a refuge and as an alternative to the “dark land” of racial oppression. For Eliza as for most fugitives, it is an idealized and abstract elsewhere (“To Canada, if I only knew where that was. Is it very far off, is Canada?”, 151), just a place beyond (“I must go onward. I dare not stop”, 216), the mythic site of freedom (“But yet we are not quite out of danger”, said Eliza; “we are not yet in Canada”, 285). For George, the mouthpiece of democracy, Canada is the country where the nation’s original political ideals are fulfilled. Having rejected American laws and refused to acknowledge such a country as his own (“Do you call these the laws of my country?”, 187), he presents himself as stateless (“Sir, I haven’t any country, anymore than I have any father”, 187) and proclaims his wish to be allowed to select Canada as his new homeland (“[…] when I get to Canada, where the laws will own me and protect me, that shall be my country, and its laws I will obey”, 187). Canada stands as the place where actual laws are in accordance with higher law, as a state founded on the natural rights articulated in the Declaration of Independence. It embodies, and relocates, what Parker called “the American Idea” in his 1852 speech on “The Political Destination of the United States”.71

• 72 Ethan Kytle, op. cit., 169, 192-193.
• 73 Ibid., 187.
• 74 Ibid., 187-188.
• 75 Letter of Martin R. Delany to Frederick Douglass (April 18, 1853), Frederick Douglass’ Paper (May 6 (...)
• 76 Frederick Douglass’ Paper (May 6, 1853), quoted by Ethan Kytle, op. cit., 193.

35Beyond the Canadian “shores of refuge” (606) though, stand the “shores of Africa” (609) and George’s project of a republic of self-educated and self-emancipated men, enounced in his closing letter in chapter 43. What he calls for is an African nation embodying republican principles, where the dynamics of emancipation would be fulfilled. This is also the last step in the elaboration of George’s self-reliant voice, which now reaches beyond the use of the first person to acquire a representative quality. Though written, his language in the letter remains a potent, prophetic voice giving shape to the project of an ultimate stage of emancipation beyond Canada in Liberia. The emigrationist scheme that the letter brings forth is nonetheless a very problematic ending to the novel, one for which Stowe was much criticized.72 The reaction to this sequence of the novel was framed by the debates of the time. As Kytle writes, emigration schemes had long been “a bugbear” of the nation’s African American community.73 The most active proponent of the project was the American Colonization Society (ACS). Supported by politicians and prominent clergymen such as Lyman Beecher, it established the colony of Liberia where six thousand African Americans were sent between 1820 and 1860, although most free African Americans and many white abolitionists objected to the project.74 Delany, who had argued since the 1830s that racial relations should be reformed within the United States but eventually embraced mitigated emigrationist views in 1852, criticized Stowe’s seeming endorsement of the removal of African Americans to Liberia in her novel: “Is not Mrs. Stowe a Colonizationist? Having so avowed, or at least subscribed to, and recommended their principles in her great work of Uncle Tom”.75 Defending Stowe’s novel, Douglass nonetheless argued that its antislavery message is of wider scope than George’s letter: “We shall not […] allow the sentiments put in the brief letter of George Harris, at the close of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, to vitiate forever Mrs. Stowe’s power to do us good”.76