READINGS- John Brown and Radical Abolitionism

Abolition and Antebellum Reform (Gilder Lehrman Collection)When the Boston abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson looked back on the years before the Civil War, he

wrote, “there prevailed then a phrase, ‘the Sisterhood of Reforms.’” He had in mind “a variety of social and psychological theories of which one was expected to accept all, if any.” Of that sisterhood, anti-slavery stands out as the best-remembered and most hotly debated, even though it was not the largest in terms of membership or the most enduring. (That honor goes to the temperance movement.) Abolitionism continues to fascinate because of its place in the sectional conflict leading to the Civil War, its assault on gender and racial inequality, and its foreshadowing of the twentieth-century Civil Rights Movement.

Sometimes, however, it is useful to consider abolitionism in relation to Higginson’s Sisterhood of Reforms. The years between 1815—the year that marked the end of the War of 1812—and 1861 did indeed produce a remarkable flowering of movements dedicated to improving society, morals, and individuals. Some appear silly from a present-day perspective (would cheap postage really foster international unity and understanding?), but many contemporaries nonetheless took them seriously. And although Higginson exaggerated connections between movements, it was relatively common for people who believed in anti-slavery reform also to believe in religious reforms, women’s rights, temperance, and health reform. (The latter was based on the idea that proper diet—a severely vegetarian one—could eliminate illness and produce moral human beings.)

Placing anti-slavery within the sisterhood helps us to see both what was and what was not distinctive about it, as well as begin to address the larger question of why certain periods in American history provide especially fertile ground for reform movements. The answer to the latter question is not always straightforward. Drunkenness did not begin around 1819, when a temperance movement began to take shape; slavery had not suddenly changed in 1831, the year a new, more radical anti-slavery movement emerged; and the oppression of women did not start around 1848, the year of the pioneering women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York. For that matter, segregation and racial discrimination began well before the twentieth-century Civil Rights Movement. Making it all the more difficult to answer the question of timing is the fact that periods of intense reform activity sometimes coincide with economic crises, as was notably the case during the Great Depression of the 1930s, while at other times such as the Progressive Era (1890–1919) and the 1960s, periods of reform are also periods of general prosperity. But regardless of whether reform movements take place in good or bad economic times, the point is that reform movements usually are more than just simple, direct responses to a perceived problem.

Multiple changes converged after the War of 1812 to produce the Sisterhood of Reforms. Improvements in transportation—especially steamboats, canals, and railroads—made it easier to send lecturers and publications—including abolitionists, other reformers, and their writings—far and wide. And new printing technologies in the 1830s lowered the cost of publications, including publications from abolitionists.

At the same time, a dynamic American economy created a new class of men and women with the leisure time and financial resources to devote to reform movements. A comparison with eighteenth-century reformers is revealing. They were fewer in number and, with some notable exceptions (mostly Quakers), tended to be part-timers like Benjamin Franklin who were either retired or had other jobs. By contrast, antebellum reformers were both more numerous and, in cases like that of the abolitionist editor William Lloyd Garrison, had no other career.

Social and economic change also provided a psychological context for reform. After 1820, the rapid growth of cities and expanding commerce and manufacturing seemed both to herald a glorious future and to open the door to temptations and vice. How to ensure that God, and not Satan and Mammon, would win?

Behind that question lay two powerful traditions that compelled reformers to contrast what America and Americans were with what they ought to be. One was the legacy of the American Revolution. Even when most critical of their government, reformers evoked it. The first women’s rights convention modeled its declaration after the Declaration of Independence. Similarly, after publicly and notoriously burning a copy of the Constitution on July 4, 1854, William Lloyd Garrison asked, “What is an abolitionist but a sincere believer in the Declaration of ’76?” He was repudiating a government that supported slavery, not the principles of the Revolution.

The other tradition was evangelical Protestantism. An outpouring of religious fervor in the early nineteenth century—sometimes called the Second Great Awakening—swept from west to east and fired the hearts of millions of Americans. It encouraged many to believe they had a moral imperative to do what they could to bring about the Kingdom of God on earth. Although not all evangelicals were reformers, and not all reformers were evangelicals, the Awakening put the power of religion behind a belief that individual men and women could change the world, rather than passively accept as inevitable whatever fate held in store, as their ancestors often had done.

Why should they conclude that that job fell to them rather than to their leaders? The most famous foreign observer of the young republic, Alexis de Tocqueville, was struck by the peculiar propensity of Americans to form local “voluntary associations” to accomplish a wide range of goals, including reforms. In large measure, this was a reasonable approach in a nation with few effective institutional sources of moral authority, and one with relatively weak political institutions, no national church, and a culture mistrustful of governmental power. Use of voluntary associations also reflected a feeling among some—especially the most radical abolitionists—that elected officials were part of the problem, not the solution. Antebellum reformers believed in moral absolutes; politicians believe in the art of the deal, even when the result is

compromise with an evil like slavery. Under the circumstances, it seemed better to go around the political system than through it (a position temperance reformers and some abolitionists began to reconsider in the 1840s).

If multiple changes came together after the War of 1812 to produce the Sisterhood of Reforms, they did not determine how antebellum reformers tried to change the world or what they regarded as the main thing wrong with it. Even within a movement like abolitionism, there was widespread disagreement over tactics and goals.

Running through many reforms, however, were common themes and assumptions, one of the most important of which was a passionately held belief that individuals must be able to act as free moral agents, capable of choosing right from wrong, and not restrained by the “arbitrary power” of someone else (like a slaveholder or immoral husband) or something else (like alcohol, bad diet, or mental illness). In that respect, abolitionism was the ultimate expression of the antebellum reform impulse: Slaves, for abolitionists, were the mirror image of freedom, symbols of what it was not—the most extreme example of unfreedom. This logic helps explain the close connection between abolitionists and reforms such as the women’s rights movement, as well as why abolitionists felt an affinity with European revolutionaries and efforts to end serfdom in Russia. All such cases, in their view, were part of a larger international drama of the progress of freedom. With this powerful rhetorical tradition entrenched by the 1840s, it is no accident that the term “slave” persisted in reform rhetoric throughout the nineteenth century, long after the institution itself died in 1865—drunkards as “slaves” to the bottle, women as “slaves” to men, and factory workers as “wage slaves.”

Abolitionists themselves were vague about what freedom might mean in practice after the death of slavery, and unconcerned that others might disagree with their definitions. Even so, their emphasis on individual moral agency and their use of the antithesis between slavery and freedom to define freedom’s absence and presence locates them within Higginson’s sisterhood. But in three important respects—in their views on their government, gender, and race—abolitionists parted company with other sisterhood reforms. Few reform movements prior to 1861 produced the fundamental attacks on the American political system that abolitionists mounted in denouncing its devil’s bargain with slavery. And although all major antebellum reforms depended heavily upon women, only a handful of utopian communities gave as prominent a voice to them as abolitionism in its most radical forms.

Most distinctive, however, was how abolitionists framed the relationship between anti-slavery and race, using ideas and concepts that went well beyond the movement’s assault on slavery and that eventually came home in the form of attacks on discriminatory laws and practices in the North. In addition, the abolitionist movement was unusually interracial. The fame of a few black abolitionists—notably Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and Harriet Tubman—somewhat obscures the high degree to which lesser-known African American abolitionists also supported the cause in every way possible, including with their own organizations, pens, speeches, and dollars. If racism never entirely disappeared among white abolitionists, and if relations between them and black colleagues were sometimes strained, it is nonetheless true that no other movement of the day was remotely close to abolitionism in interracial cooperation, in mobilizing black communities, and in challenging racism in both theory and practice. On those issues, abolitionism was both part of a band of sister reforms and a movement that went well beyond them.

Ronald Walters, Professor of History at The John Hopkins University, is the author of The Antislavery Appeal: American Abolitionism after 1830 (1984) and editor of Primers for Prudery: Sexual Advice to Victorian America (1973) and A Black Woman’s Odyssey through Russia and Jamaica: The Narrative of Nancy Prince (1989).

The Underground Railroad and the Coming of War (Gilda Lehrman Collection)The Underground Railroad was a metaphor. Yet many textbooks treat it as an official name for a secret network that

once helped escaping slaves. The more literal-minded students end up questioning whether these fixed escape routes were actually under the ground. But the phrase “Underground Railroad” is better understood as a rhetorical device that compared unlike things for the purpose of illustration. In this case, the metaphor described an array of people connected mainly by their intense desire to help other people escape from slavery. Understanding the history of the phrase changes its meaning in profound ways.

Even to begin a lesson by examining the two words “underground” and “railroad” helps provide a tighter chronological framework than usual with this topic. There could be no “underground railroad” until actual railroads became familiar to the American public–in other words, during the 1830s and 1840s. There had certainly been slave escapes before that period, but they were not described by any kind of railroad moniker. The phrase also highlights a specific geographic orientation. Antebellum railroads existed primarily in the North–home to about 70 percent of the nation’s 30,000 miles of track by 1860. Slaves fled in every direction of the compass, but the metaphor packed its greatest wallop in those communities closest to the nation’s whistle-stops.

Looking into the phrase “Underground Railroad” also suggests two essential questions: who coined the metaphor? And why would they want to compare and inextricably link a wide-ranging effort to support runaway slaves with an organized network of secret railroads?

The answers can be found in the abolitionist movement. Abolitionists, or those who agitated for the immediate destruction of slavery, wanted to publicize, and perhaps even exaggerate, the number of slave escapes and the extent of the network that existed to support those fugitives. According to the pioneering work of historian Larry Gara, abolitionist newspapers and orators were the ones who first used the term “Underground Railroad” during the early 1840s, and they did so to taunt slaveholders.[1] To some participants this seemed a dangerous game. Frederick Douglass, for instance, claimed to be appalled. “I have never approved of the very public manner in which some of our western friends have conducted what they call the underground railroad,” he wrote in his Narrative in 1845, warning that “by their open declarations” these mostly Ohio-based (“western”) abolitionists were creating an “upperground railroad.”[2]

Publicity about escapes and open defiance of federal law only spread in the years that followed, especially after the controversial Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Anxious fugitives and their allies now fought back with greater ferocity. Douglass himself became more militant. In September 1851, he helped a former slave named William Parker escape to Canada after Parker had spearheaded a resistance in Christiana, Pennsylvania, that left a Maryland slaveholder dead and federal authorities in disarray. The next year in a fiery speech at Pittsburgh, the famous orator stepped up the rhetorical attack, vowing, “The only way to make the Fugitive Slave Law a dead letter is to make half a dozen or more dead kidnappers”. [3] This level of defiance was not uncommon in the anti-slavery North and soon imperiled both federal statute and national union. Between 1850 and 1861, there were only about 350 fugitive slave cases prosecuted under the notoriously tough law, and none in the abolitionist-friendly New England states after 1854.[4] White southerners complained bitterly while abolitionists grew more emboldened.Students often seem to imagine runaway slaves cowering in the shadows while ingenious “conductors” and “stationmasters” devised elaborate secret hiding places and coded messages to help spirit fugitives to freedom. They make few distinctions between North and South, often imagining that slave patrollers and their barking dogs chased terrified runaways from Mississippi to Maine. Instead, the Underground Railroad deserves to be explained in terms of sectional differences and the coming of the Civil War.

One way to grasp the Underground Railroad in its full political complexity is to look closely at the rise of abolitionism and the spread of free black vigilance committees during the 1830s. Nineteenth-century American communities employed extra-legal “vigilance” groups whenever they felt threatened. During the mid-1830s, free black residents first in New York and then across other northern cities began organizing vigilant associations to help them guard against kidnappers. Almost immediately, however, these groups extended their protective services to runaway slaves. They also soon allied themselves with the new abolitionist organizations, such as William Lloyd Garrison’s Anti-Slavery Society. The most active vigilance committees were in Boston, Detroit, New York, and Philadelphia led by now largely forgotten figures such as Lewis Hayden, George DeBaptiste, David Ruggles, and William Still.[5] Black men typically dominated these groups, but membership also included whites, such as some surprisingly feisty Quakers and at least a few women. These vigilance groups constituted the organized core of what soon became known as the Underground Railroad. Smaller communities organized too, but did not necessarily invoke the “vigilance” label, nor integrate as easily across racial, religious, and gender lines. Nonetheless, during the 1840s when William Parker formed a “mutual protection” society in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, or when John Brown created his League of Gileadites in Springfield, Massachusetts, they emulated this vigilance model.

These committees functioned more or less like committees anywhere—electing officers, holding meetings, keeping records, and raising funds. They guarded their secrets, but these were not covert operatives in the manner of the French Resistance. In New York, the vigilance committee published an annual report. Detroit vigilance agents filled newspaper columns with reports about their monthly traffic. Several committees released the addresses of their officers. One enterprising figure circulated a business card that read, “Underground Railroad Agent”.[6] Even sensitive material often got recorded somewhere. A surprising amount of this secret evidence is also available for classroom use. One can explore letters

detailing Harriet Tubman’s comings and goings, and even a reimbursement request for her worn-out shoes, by using William Still’s The Underground Railroad (1872), available online in a dozen different places, and which presents the fascinating materials he collected as head of the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee. Anyone curious about how much it cost to help runaways can access the site where social studies teacher Dean Eastman and his students at Beverly High School have transcribed and posted the account books of the Boston vigilance committee. And the list of accessible Underground Railroad material grows steadily.But how did these northern vigilance groups get away with such impudence? How could they publicize their existence and risk imprisonment by keeping records that detailed illegal activities? The answer helps move the story into the 1840s and 1850s and offers a fresh way for teachers to explore the legal and political history of the sectional crisis with students. Those aiding fugitives often benefited from the protection of state personal liberty laws and from a general reluctance across the North to encourage federal intervention or reward southern power. In other words, it was all about states’ rights—northern states’ rights. As early as the 1820s, northern states led by Pennsylvania had been experimenting with personal liberty or anti-kidnapping statutes designed to protect free black residents from kidnapping, but which also had the effect of frustrating enforcement of federal fugitive slave laws (1793 and 1850). In two landmark cases—Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842) and Ableman v. Booth (1859)—the Supreme Court threw out these northern personal liberty protections as unconstitutional.

Students accustomed to equating states’ rights with South Carolina may be stunned to learn that it was the Wisconsin supreme court asserting the nullification doctrine in the mid-1850s. They may also be shocked to discover that a federal jury in Philadelphia had acquitted the lead defendant in the Christiana treason trial within about fifteen minutes. These northern legislatures and juries were, for the most part, indifferent to black civil rights, but they were quite adamant about asserting their own states’ rights during the years before the Civil War. This was the popular sentiment exploited by northern vigilance committees that helped sustain their controversial work on behalf of fugitives.

That is also why practically none of the Underground Railroad agents in the North experienced arrest, conviction, or physical violence. No prominent Underground Railroad operative ever got killed or spent significant time in jail for helping fugitives once they crossed the Mason-Dixon Line or the Ohio River. Instead, it was agents operating across the South who endured the notorious late-night arrests, long jail sentences, torture, and sometimes even lynching that made the underground work so dangerous. In 1844, for example, a federal marshal in Florida ordered the branding of Jonathan Walker, a sea captain who had been convicted of smuggling runaways, with the mark “S.S.” (“slave-stealer”) on his hand. That kind of barbaric punishment simply did not happen in the North.

What did happen, however, was growing rhetorical violence. The war of words spread. Threats escalated. Metaphors hardened. The results then shaped the responses the led to war. By reading and analyzing the various Southern secession documents from the winter of 1860–1861, one will find that nearly all invoke the crisis over fugitives. [7] The battle over fugitives and those who aided them was a primary instigator for the national conflict over slavery. Years afterward, Frederick Douglass dismissed the impact of the Underground Railroad in terms of the larger fight against slavery, comparing it to “an attempt to bail out the ocean with a teaspoon”.[8] But Douglass had always been cool to the public value of the metaphor. Measured in words, however—through the antebellum newspaper articles, sermons, speeches, and resolutions generated by the crisis over fugitives—the “Underground Railroad” proved to be quite literally a metaphor that helped launch the Civil War.

[1] Larry Gara, The Liberty Line: The Legend of the Underground Railroad (1961; Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996), 143–144.[2] Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave (Boston: Anti-Slavery Office, 1845), 101 (http://www.docsouth.unc.edu/neh/douglass/douglass.html).[3] Frederick Douglass, “The Fugitive Slave Law: Speech to the National Free Soil Convention in Pittsburgh,” August 11, 1852 (http://www.lib.rochester.edu/index.cfm?PAGE=4385).[4] See the appendix in Stanley W. Campbell, The Slave Catchers: Enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law: 1850–1860 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1970), 199–207.[5] Out of these four notable black leaders, only David Ruggles has an adult biography available in print. See Graham Russell Gao Hodges, David Ruggles: A Radical Black Abolitionist and the Underground Railroad in New York City (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).[6] Jermain Loguen of Syracuse, New York. See Fergus M. Bordewich, Bound for Canaan: The Underground Railroad and the War for the Soul of America (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), 410.[7] See secession documents online at The Avalon Project from Yale Law School (http://avalon.law.yale.edu/subject_menus/csapage.asp).[8] Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (Hartford, CT: Park Publishing, 1881), 272 (http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/douglasslife/douglass.html).

Matthew Pinsker is an associate professor of history and Pohanka Chair in American Civil War History at Dickinson College. He is the author of Lincoln’s Sanctuary: Abraham Lincoln and the Soldiers’ Home (2003) and co-director of House Divided: The Civil War Research Engine at Dickinson College.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Matter of Influence (Gilda Lehrman Collection)One hundred years after Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852, the poet Langston Hughes called the novel,

“the most cussed and discussed book of its time.” Hughes’s observation is particularly apt in that it avoids any mention of the novel’s literary merit. George Orwell famously called it “the best bad book of the age.” Uncle Tom’s Cabin is arguably no Pride and Prejudice or Scarlet Letter. Leo Tolstoy is one of the few critics who praise it unabashedly, calling Uncle Tom’s Cabin a model of the “highest type” of art because it flowed from love of God and man. So why has it been called “a verbal earthquake, an ink-and-paper tidal wave”? How and why has it been so influential?

Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life among the Lowly is at heart a typical 19th century melodrama of cruelty, suffering, religious devotion, broken homes, and improbable reunions. The plot in brief: the slave Uncle Tom is sold away from his cabin and family on the Shelby plantation in Kentucky; he serves the St. Clare family in Louisiana, from which he is sold after the death of Eva and her father; he lands at the Legree plantation on the Red River where he is whipped to death rather than betray two runaway slaves. Meanwhile some slaves escape (Eliza) and find long-lost relatives; others kill themselves and their children. The white characters discuss politics and religion. Everybody weeps.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin has been cussed and discussed since May 8, 1851, when the novel’s first installment appeared in abolitionist Gamaliel Bailey’s Washington, DC, weekly, the National Era. Cussers include Southerners such as William Gilmore Simms, who considered it a libelous hodgepodge of bad research and flat-out lies; Reverend Joel Parker, who threatened to sue Stowe for the “dastardly attack” on his character; Charles Dickens, who wondered if Stowe patterned Eva on his Little Nell; and James Baldwin, who bemoaned the sentimentality and the powerlessness of Uncle Tom. Discussers include everybody else: Frederick Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, George Eliot, Horace Mann, Mark Twain, Charles Dudley Warner, Henry James, and in modern times, Richard Wright, Harold Bloom, Elaine Showalter, Ann Douglas, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and John Updike, who confessed to having never read the novel until he reviewed it in the New Yorker in 2006.

Nearly everyone agrees that the reason for Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s initial influence was a matter of timing. Its author, Harriet Beecher Stowe, was the perfect combination of magpie, shrewd political operator, and grieving mother. After the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, the time was right for an anti-slavery novel and Stowe wrote one (though she claimed later that God himself held the pen). But Stowe’s beliefs about slavery’s effects on family did not simply manifest themselves in a fictional story. The brutal facts of slavery did not automatically translate themselves into an effective political tract. The reading public may have been primed and ready for the right anti-slavery story to come along and simply “touch a nerve” or “strike a chord,” but why was this novel the “right” story?

Sales and readership figures demonstrate Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s popular appeal. Readership of the National Era jumped from 17,000 to 28,000 during the story’s serialization. On March 20, 1852, John J. Jewett & Co. published the first one-volume edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and sold 5000 copies in two days. Over 100,000 copies were sold by the end of the summer and 300,000 by March 1853. One southern literary critic credited new technology for the novel’s sales figures, which relied on “steam-presses, steam-ships, steam-carriages, iron roads, electric telegraphs, and universal peace among the reading nations of the earth.” Hundreds of editions and millions of copies have been sold around the world. Uncle Tom’s Cabin remains the world’s second most translated book, after the Bible.

The literary influence of Stowe’s novel is evidenced by the immortality of Uncle Tom, Eliza, Little Eva, Simon Legree, and Topsy. These characters exist beyond Stowe’s tale; they have become literary archetypes. Uncle Tom began as a Christ figure—a character like Jesus who loves God, loves his tormentors, turns the other cheek, and shows inhuman forbearance in the face of cruelty—but has been transformed into the perfect, silver-haired, silent, sexless, stalwart servant. Eliza remains, however, the model of the desperate mother who will leap across the ice to save her child. The name “Simon Legree” is shorthand for any cruel overseer. Topsy is the avatar of the mischief-maker, the magic urchin who asserts her own alien status, claiming, “I spect I grow’d. Don’t think nobody never made me.” These characters appeared in popular poems, cartoons, and songs within weeks. Dramatic versions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin appeared within months; George L. Aiken’s stage production remained the most popular play in England and America for seventy-five years. Henry James compared the many spin-offs Stowe’s novel provoked to “a wonderful leaping fish” that “fluttered down” around the globe. Modern theatergoers may know “The Small Cabin of Uncle Thomas,” the version that appears in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical The King and I.

The political influence of Uncle Tom’s Cabin can be measured by who talked about it or who used it as a rationale for action. Exhibit A is the remark supposedly made by President Lincoln when he met Stowe in 1862: “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this Great War.” True or not, its circulation is testament to both Lincoln’s and Stowe’s sense of public relations. Exhibit B is everyone else who saw Uncle Tom’s Cabin as revolutionary. Frederick Douglass wrote of Uncle Tom’s Cabin that “nothing could have better suited the moral and humane requirements of the hour. Its effect was amazing, instantaneous, and universal.” It was banned in the South and nearly banned by the Vatican. It was also banned in tsarist Russia, but apparently Uncle Tom’s Cabin was Lenin’s favorite book as a youth. Woodrow Wilson wrote that Uncle Tom’s Cabin “played no small part in creating the anti-slavery party.” Yet in the twentieth century, Malcolm X suggested that it wasn’t radical enough, claiming that Martin Luther King Jr. was a “modern” Uncle Tom, “who is doing the same thing today, to keep Negroes defenseless in the face of an attack.”

Rather than “a book that made history,” Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a novel that matters because it is still provokes argument. Many modern readers wish Uncle Tom would stop praying and serving and do something. W. E. B. Du Bois saw Tom’s “deep religious fatalism” as an example of the stunted ethical growth endemic to plantation existence, where “habits of shiftlessness took root, and sullen hopelessness replaced hopeful strife.” In Nabokov’s Lolita, the porter who carries the bags to the hotel room where Humbert Humbert will first have his way with his young stepdaughter is called “Uncle Tom.” He will not get involved. Unfounded as the term and the application may be, “Uncle Tom” remains, even today, the standard epithet for any black man who serves whites and does not carry a gun. Indeed, in recent history, the term has been applied to Dr. King, Clarence Thomas, Colin Powell, and Barack Obama.

Much of the cussing and discussing of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin comes from those who haven’t actually read the book. Those who have know that the power of Stowe’s novel resides in the dozens of her characters who enter our consciousness by acting fully human: Senator Bird, who reluctantly agrees that the letter of the Fugitive Slave Law does not trump his Christian duty to break

the law and help the runaway Eliza and her son; Marie St. Clare, vain and whiny, who sees her daughter Eva’s death as a personal affront; Ophelia, the prim Vermonter who finds slavery and blacks equally abhorrent; Augustine St. Clare and Arthur Shelby, thoughtful and good-hearted but utterly weak; and Sam, whose “comic inefficiency,” critic Kenneth Lynn writes, “no American author before Mrs. Stowe had realized . . . could constitute a studied insult to the white man’s intelligence.” To read and take seriously the entirety of Uncle Tom’s Cabin is to see why it matters not as a historical or political phenomenon but as a relentless and passionate work of literary fiction.

Hollis Robbins is the co-editor with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., of The Annotated Uncle Tom’s Cabin (2006) and The Selected Writings of William Wells Brown (2006) with Paula Garret. She is a member of the Humanities Faculty at The Peabody Institute of The Johns Hopkins University.An African American protests the Fugitive Slave Law, 1850 (Gilder Lehrman Collection)

This 1850 letter written by Henry Weeden is a statement against slavery by a free African American. Weeden was one of Boston’s leading abolitionists. In the 1840s, he had been an activist for the integration of Boston’s schools.[1]Henry Weeden was also a tailor with a shop at 10 Franklin Avenue in Boston. On December 4, 1850, Weeden’s shop received an overcoat in need of repair from Watson Freeman (1797–1868), a US Marshal in Massachusetts appointed by President Franklin Pierce. One of Freeman’s jobs as a marshal was upholding the Fugitive Slave Law, passed in September 1850 as part of the Compromise of 1850.

Upon receiving Freeman’s overcoat, Weeden wrote this strongly worded letter to Freeman refusing his business and returning the coat. Weeden wrote that he did “crave the patronage of no Being that would volunteer his services to arrest a Fugitive Slave” and had “take[n] this method of returning [the coat] without complying with Your request.” Weeden closed his letter by responding to a declaration Freeman had once made of his “readiness to hang any number of negroes remarkably cheap.”[2] A dedicated abolitionist who would not overlook his commitment to equality in order to make a profit, Weeden wrote, “With me[,] Money afterwards.”

Henry Weeden to Watson Freeman, December 4, 1850Sir

Your Coat came to me this morning for repairs. I take this method of returning it. without complying with Your request. With me Principle first. Money afterwards.

Though a poor man I crave the patronage of no Being that would volunteer his services to arrest a Fugitive Slave or that would hang 100 Niggers for 25 cents each –

Henry Weeden10 Franklin Avenue

[1] William C. Nell, Henry Weeden, Thomas Cummings, and James J. Jiles, “New-England Freedom Association,” The Liberator, December 12, 1845.[2] “Slave-Hunters in Boston,” The Liberator, November 1, 1850.

“ Bleeding Kansas” and the Pottawatomie Massacre, 1856 (Gilder Lehrman Collection) In 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska Act overturned the Missouri Compromise, which stated that slavery would not be

allowed north of latitude 36°30 . Instead, settlers would use the principle of popular sovereignty and vote to determine ′whether slavery would be allowed in each state. Supporters of both sides flooded into the territory of Kansas, where violence soon erupted between pro-slavery and anti-slavery settlers.

In retaliation for the “sack” of the free-state town of Lawrence on May 21, 1856, the abolitionist John Brown led a brutal attack on a pro-slavery settlement at Pottawatomie Creek on the night of May 24. This was an example of the kind of violence that alienated even his anti-slavery supporters. Brown and six followers killed five men, hacking at them with broadswords and cutting their throats before shooting them. Mahala Doyle, the wife and mother of three of Brown’s victims, expressed her bitterness and pain in this letter to John Brown. She sent it to him in November 1859 as he awaited execution after the Harpers Ferry raid.

Mahala Doyle to John Brown, November 20, 1859.

Chattanooga Tennessee Sir

Altho vengence [sic] is not mine, I confess, that I do feel gratified to hear that you ware stopt in your fiendish career at Harper’s Ferry, with the loss of your two sons, you can now appreciate my distress, in Kansas, when you then and there entered my house at midnight and arrested my husband and two boys and took them out of the yard and in cold blood shot them dead in my hearing, you cant say you done it to free our slaves, we had none and never expected to own one, but has only made me a poor disconsolate widow with helpless children while I feel for your folly. I do hope & trust that you will meet your just reward. O how it pained my Heart to hear the dying groans of my Husband and children if this scrawl give you any consolation you are welcome to it Mahala Doyle

[2] N3 my son John Doyle whose life I begged of (you) is now grown up and is very desirous to be at Charleston on the day of your execution would certainly be there if his means would permit it, that he might adjust the rope around your neck if gov: wise would permit it M Doyle.

To : John Brown (Care of the Jailer Commander of the Army ), Charles Town. at Harper’s Ferry. Charlestown, Jefferson County

John Brown’s Final Speech, 1859 (Gilder Lehrman Collection)John Brown, “Address of John Brown to the Virginia Court..." December, 1859

On Sunday evening, October 16, 1859, radical abolitionist John Brown led a party of twenty-one men into the town of Harpers Ferry, Virginia, with the intention of seizing the federal arsenal there. Encountering no resistance, Brown’s men seized the arsenal, an armory, and a rifle works. Brown then sent out several detachments to round up hostages and liberate slaves. Brown’s plan soon went awry. Angry townspeople and local militia companies trapped his men in the armory. About twenty-four hours later, US troops commanded by Colonel Robert E. Lee arrived and stormed the engine house. Five of Brown’s party escaped, ten were killed, and seven, including Brown himself, were taken prisoner. Brown was tried in a Virginia court, although he had attacked federal property.

The trial’s high point came at its end when Brown was permitted to make a speech, which appears on this broadside printed in December 1859 by the abolitionist newspaper, the Liberator. In his address, Brown asserted that he “never did intend murder, or treason, or the destruction of property, or to excite or incite Slaves to rebellion, or to make insurrection,” but rather wanted only to “free Slaves.” He defended his actions as righteous and just, saying that “to have interfered as I have done—In behalf of His despised poor, was not wrong but right.”

Brown also told the court that he was at peace with his actions and their consequences, proclaiming: “Now if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice and MINGLE MY BLOOD FURTHER WITH THE BLOOD OF MY CHILDREN, and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments—I submit; so LET IT BE DONE.”

Brown’s speech convinced many northerners that this grizzled man of fifty-nine was not an extremist but rather a martyr to the cause of freedom. The Virginia court, however, found him guilty of treason, conspiracy, and murder, and he was sentenced to die. Brown was hanged on December 2, 1859, and his body was buried on his family farm at North Elba, NY.

ADDRESS OF JOHN BROWNTo the Virginia Court, when about to receive the

SENTENCE OF DEATH,For his heroic attempt at Harper’s Ferry, to

Give deliverance to the captives, and to let the oppressed go free.____________________________________________________ [MR. BROWN, upon inquiry whether he had anything to say why sentences should not be pronounced upon him, in a clear, distinct voice, replied:]

I have, may it please the Court, a few words to say. In the first place, I deny every thing but what I have already admitted, of a design on my part to free Slaves. I intended, certainly, to have made a clean thing of that matter, as I did last winter, when I went into Missouri, and there took Slaves, without the snapping of a gun on either side, moving them through the country, and finally leaving them in Canada. I desired to have done the same thing again, on a much larger scale. That was all I intended. I never did intend murder, or treason, or the destruction of property, or to excite or incite Slaves to rebellion, or to make insurrection.

I have another objection, and that is, that it is unjust that I should suffer such a penalty. Had I interfered in the manner, and which I admit has been fairly proved, – for I admire the truthfulness and candor of the greater portion of the witnesses who have testified in this case, – had I so interfered in behalf of the Rich, the Powerful, the Intelligent, the so–called Great, or in behalf of any of their friends, either father, mother, brother, sister, wife, or children, or any of that class, and suffered and sacrificed what I have in this interference, it would have been all right. Every man in this Court would have deemed it an act worthy a reward, rather than a punishment.

This Court acknowledges too, as I suppose, the validity of the LAW OF GOD. I saw a book kissed, which I suppose to be the BIBLE, or at least the NEW TESTAMENT, which teaches me that, "All things whatsoever I would that men should do to me, I should do even so to them." It teaches me further, to "Remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them." I endeavored to act up to that instruction. I say I am yet too young to understand that GOD is any respecter of persons. I believe that to have interfered as I have done, as I have always freely admitted I have done, in behalf of his despised poor, I have done no wrong, but RIGHT.

Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life, for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and MINGLE MY BLOOD FURTHER WITH THE BLOOD OF MY CHILDREN, and with the blood of millions in this Slave country, whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, – I say; LET IT BE DONE.

Let me say one word further: I feel entirely satisfied with the treatment I have received on my trial. Considering all the circumstances, it has been more generous than I expected; but I feel no consciousness of guilt. I have stated from the first what was my intention, and what was not. I never had any design against the liberty of any person, nor any disposition to commit treason, or excite Slaves to rebel, or make any general insurrection. I never encouraged any man to do so, but always discouraged any idea of that kind.

Let me say something, also, in regard to the statements made by some of those who were connected with me. I hear that it has been stated by some of them, that I have induced them to join me; but the contrary is true. I do not say this to injure them, but as regarding their weakness. Not one but joined me of his own accord, and the greater part at their own expense. A number of them I never saw and never had a word of conversation with, till the day they came to me, and that was for the purpose I have stated. Now I have done. – John Brown

TIME 5A (1844-1877)Name: _____________________________________________________________ Date: ______________________________

QUESTIONS: John Brown and Abolitionism Readings

1. How did the abolitionist movement become more radical in their efforts to abolish slavery and aid slaves in the period just before the Civil War? Cite at least three examples, NOT including the actions of John Brown. Use specific examples from the readings to support your answer.

2. Consider John Brown’s attacks on Pottawatomie Creek and on Harpers Ferry. Was this a valid abolitionist tactic?

3. What John Brown a martyr for slavery or was he truly “mad”? Support with specific evidence from the readings.