“The Chief Glory of God [Is] in Self-Denying, Suffering Love!

”: True Religion in Harriet

Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Author(s): Curtis Evans
Source: The Journal of Religion, Vol. 92, No. 4 (October 2012), pp. 498-514
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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“The Chief Glory of God [Is] in
Self-Denying, Suffering Love!”: True
Religion in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Curtis Evans / University of Chicago Divinity School

INTRODUCTION

June 5, 2011, marked the 160th anniversary of the first installment of Harriet
Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” which appeared June 5, 1851, in the
National Era, an antislavery newspaper. This was the first of forty-one install-
ments that would end on April 1, 1852.1 Periodicals and parlor literature, as
Joan Hedrick notes, expanded in the 1830s, and by the 1850s a respected body
of antislavery pamphlets and sentimental novels was published and dissemi-
nated broadly, Stowe’s work becoming one of the most popular and widely
read.2 This book became a central tool of white spectators and activists who
sought textually to represent a religious community (that is, black slaves) and
locate them in the larger society, providing an intimation of what this new
arrangement would look like if emancipation were to occur. Stowe’s represen-
tation of Uncle Tom and black religiosity is even more illuminating, as previous
interpreters have argued, when linked to a broader analysis of white antislavery
activists’ attempts to write blacks into the national (American) narrative by an
appeal to a Christian conscience. I think even more important is Stowe’s
framing of her narrative as a lesson (or through a series of stories with lessons,
implied and direct) for whites through the medium of an exemplary black
slave who resists temptation for vengeance and disobedience and is ultimately
murdered because of his faithfulness to his Master in heaven. Though Stowe’s

1
For the process and significance of serialization, see Susan Belasco Smith, “Serialization and
the Nature of Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” in Periodical Literature in Nineteenth-Century America, ed. Kenneth
M. Price and Susan Belasco Smith (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995), 69–89.
2
Joan Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life (New York Oxford University Press, 1994),
chap. 12; and Elizabeth B. Clark, “‘The Sacred Rights of the Weak’: Pain, Sympathy, and the
Culture of Individual Rights in Antebellum America,” Journal of American History 82 (Septem-
ber 1995): 463–93.

© 2012 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.

0022-4189/2012/9204-0004$10.00

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 True Religion in Uncle Tom’s Cabin

novel leaves little doubt that her desire is to defeat the institution of slavery, to
do so she creates radically different understandings of Christianity between
blacks and whites, grounded in innate biological differences. While the aim is
to create sympathy for slaves so that readers might identify with their sufferings,
the consequences of this depiction of blacks and whites as fundamentally
racially and religiously different are far reaching: they envision little hope for
blacks’ inclusion into the national commonwealth. However, Stowe’s Uncle
Tom is much more complex than any epithet of “Uncle Tom,” or more than
merely a slave figure struggling against the entanglements of slave life, impor-
tant as this representation is to her project. He is also an incarnation of true
religion and authentic Christianity. Stowe uses “Uncle Tom” to teach whites
how to suffer and endure in the midst of trying and painful circumstances. The
unfortunate consequence of this narrative is that it does not escape reiteration
of notions of African exceptionalism, especially by inextricably linking reli-
gious expression to innate racial qualities. In short, Stowe’s complex novel
grants true Christianity as a racially grounded expression to an extent that
makes it hard to imagine how Christianity can bridge what she and her
contemporaries saw as the chasmic gap between blacks and whites and thus
can serve as the basis of mutual existence in a new nation.
I stress several themes in this essay with chief attention to Stowe’s unifying
theme of the lowly and oppressed as the objects of and respondents to divine
grace. First, I emphasize Stowe’s insistent demand that humility and lowliness
must be the disposition of all humans to appropriate and receive grace.
Though there remains an underlying tension between grace as uncondi-
tional divine gift and true religion as an expression of racial heritage, Stowe
explicitly commends the lowly as a means of grace, powerfully invoking this
theme as a critique of slavery as an oppressive institution that creates and
reinforces human hubris. Second, language for Stowe is also a medium of
belief and a palpable example of how grace is realized. A focus on language
opens up Stowe’s strategy to convey what true religion looks like and how it is
enacted through her very use of the written word. Third, Stowe’s personal
journey elucidates how her story made possible her narrative and her iden-
tification with slave suffering. All of these elements illustrate her conviction
that God especially uses the lowly and poor for God’s purposes in the world.

UN FINISH ED BUSIN E SS

By concentrating on Stowe’s attempt to portray in story form “true religion,”

we also gain a better understanding of why her work was more effective and
popular than other (prior) antislavery texts and speeches that had made
essentially the same argument against slavery.3 Lydia Maria Child’s Appeal in

3
For an attempt to gauge the “influence” of Stowe’s antislavery work and later appro-
priations of her ideas, see David S. Reynolds, Mightier Than a Sword: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the

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The Journal of Religion

Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans (1833) and William Ellery
Channing’s Slavery (1835) were remarkably similar to Uncle Tom’s Cabin in
their principal critiques of slavery. Even when noting salient points of simi-
larity and difference, Stowe’s novel was by all accounts more successful and
became a more enduring representation of black character(s). Yet, the irony
is that though the book strongly condemned slavery, the central issue that
remained unaddressed or underdeveloped in Stowe’s novel was envisioning
a place for blacks in America.4 Part of this failure of viewpoint is because of
Stowe’s suffering servant model of Uncle Tom, which was her chief means
of eliciting sympathy for slaves. By presenting blacks as exemplars of reli-
gious virtues that the dominant race lacked because of heritage or race, one
is left to ask: how would blacks and whites relate peacefully in American
society, or what mechanism would enable them to surmount the constraints
of biology after emancipation? These are the questions that Stowe’s work
leaves unanswered.
Although Stowe draws upon Paul’s dictum (I Cor. 1:26–29) that God
chooses the lowly of the world to accomplish his purposes (especially in her
use of Eva, a little white child, and Uncle Tom, a lowly black slave), she never
resolves the tension between grace and race in her novel. On the one hand,
Stowe makes it clear that slaves are more susceptible and open to divine
grace because they do not have much in this world, are oppressed, have few
earthly “friends” besides the humble but risen Jesus, and are a despised and
outcast race. On the other hand, she offers race as a comprehensive expla-
nation of black (African) religious belief and practice. There are many
instances in which Stowe points to racial peculiarity as the reason for black’s
particular religious exercises and their exemplification of specific Christian
virtues. If race or biology is the reason for different responses to the divine,
what point is there in urging people to change when they are, in fact, ac-
cording to this reasoning, acting out of their racial impulses or instincts? Can
Anglo-Saxons—cold, hard, and analytical (in Stowe’s rendering)—really be
held responsible for their harsh treatment of Africans if this is in their nature
or part of their biological makeup? This is one of the central tensions or
ambivalences in Stowe’s novel. The assertion of African alienness or pecu-
liarity blunts the force of her argument for the inclusion of blacks within the
national commonwealth. It limits Stowe’s attempt to create sympathy for
blacks beyond an end to slavery.

Battle for America (New York: Norton, 2011). There is a lot of helpful information in Reynolds’s
book, though he makes rather strong judgments about what Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin actually
accomplished.
4
I stress this point with a realization that Stowe could only deal with so many issues in her
work. My reflections build on some of her contemporaries’ critiques of the novel, and I also
believe that embedded in the novel itself are notions that make it difficult to argue the case
for blacks’ full inclusion in the nation.

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 True Religion in Uncle Tom’s Cabin

G RACE IN THE LIV ES O F THE LO WL Y

As already noted, Stowe emphasizes Paul’s words, which have served as a

source of critique toward the powerful and mighty, as an indictment of
injustice and oppression: “But God hath chosen the foolish things of the
world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the
world to confound the things which are mighty; and base things of the world,
and things which are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which are
not, to bring to nought things that are: That no flesh should glory in his
presence” (I Cor. 1:27–29).5 More than any other section of Scripture, this
narrative shapes and forms Stowe’s depiction of Uncle Tom in her attempt to
draw sympathy for “life among the lowly.”6 The Jesus whom Stowe presents is
the one who delivers the “needy” and the “poor” (xiv).7 He hears the cries of
the unprotected (236) and those who are oppressed (310). This Jesus iden-
tifies with and cares for the lowly. Hence, Stowe’s conception of true religion
is captured at the moment of Tom’s death, when she urges her readers not to
pity Tom because his death tells us something about God’s character. She
writes: “Not in the riches of omnipotence is the chief glory of God; but in self-
denying, suffering love!” (365). Thus, we find Stowe’s principal critique of a
Calvinism that placed God’s glory in his power, foreknowledge, and sovereign
control of human destiny. In story form she provides an alternative concep-
tion of true religion, a different account of religious experience than that
which was advocated by the leaders of Calvinism even in its revised form.8
Though for Stowe African slaves deserve freedom and respect from the
dominant white race, they remain the exotic, suppliant, and suffering Afri-
cans in her moral imagination. No real vision for blacks as Americans is
forwarded, only hazy intimations about emancipation and possible emigra-
tion to Africa. The suffering servant narrative fixed an image of blacks as

5
On the use of Scripture by blacks as a weapon for the lowly, see Allen Dwight Callahan, The
Talking Book: African Americans and the Bible (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), xiii.
6
See Smith, “Serialization and Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” 73–74. Smith notes that the original
subtitle for the series was “The Man That Was a Thing,” but “Life among the Lowly” was the only
subtitle for the published version of the novel. Perhaps the original subtitle reflected Stowe’s
emphasis on the central character of Tom and her critique of Southern legal codes, which
regarded blacks as chattel property (a “thing” possessed by another human being). The
reference to the lowly was not simply to Tom but to other slaves, little Eva, and those other “little
ones” in the novel who, though without worldly power and prestige, exemplified Christian
virtues.
7
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, ed. Elizabeth Ammons (1852; New York:
Norton, 1994), xiv. All other page references to this edition are included in parentheses at the
end of sentences in the body of this essay.
8
For overviews of the revision of Calvinism in Stowe’s time, the following two accounts are
indispensable: Mark Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2002), chap. 15; and E. Brooks Holifield, Theology in America: Christian
Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003),
chap. 17. Critics and reviewers have rightly commended these works for their thoroughness and
sophisticated argumentation but have also noted their neglect of women and issues of gender.
Noll includes a discussion of Stowe’s revision of Calvinism.

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The Journal of Religion

perpetual suppliants or victims who need sympathy and who are rarely
treated as equal human beings. Suffering or bearing a burden to show others
how to suffer becomes a necessary precondition for black and white coexis-
tence. Stowe’s novel is not solely responsible for this way of seeing blacks, but
it became the principal manifestation of this image of blacks in the American
imagination (at a crucial moment in the nation’s history). The suffering
servant conception reflected Stowe’s and the nation’s inability to imagine
blacks as free persons beyond the immediate end of slavery. Precisely when
the sectional conflict was intensifying, this powerful representational strategy
(articulated most effectively by Stowe) emerges. This depiction of blacks as
the suffering servant or the redemptive narrative of blacks as overcoming
their sufferings through a religious journey (in this case, Christianity) has
exercised a powerful hold over the white imagination. Teaching whites how
to endure suffering was part of its purpose.9 Blacks would then serve as an
example of those who had been chosen “to teach the world a lesson with
empty hands.”10 A devoutly religious slave, who had nothing but the Word
inscribed in his heart and soul, became the medium through which this trope
was conveyed.
The expansion of print culture in the 1830s coincided with and was
influenced by the growth of the abolitionist and antislavery movement. For
the first time, a respectable portion of the American public, located in the
North, promoted the cause of the African slave and condemned slavery as a
moral evil. One of the necessary undertakings in this massive project was to
visually represent through the written word the character and sufferings of
African slaves in the South and thus to make the case for their freedom.
Although slave narratives were an important part of this project, white
Northern antislavery activists (as opposed to blacks or radical abolitionists
such as William Lloyd Garrison) became the dominant cultural authorities in
representations of the character of blacks. Antislavery activists were the most
prominent participants in the print revolution of the mid-ninetenth century.
The postal campaign of 1835, which flooded the South with antislavery and
abolitionist material, was one example of the abolitionists’ belief in the power
of words and print, in part justified by the violent response of the South,
which engaged in public burnings of this material, seizing of post offices, and
prohibiting speech and publications that advocated emancipation or aboli-
tion.11 This was one of the most sustained attempts up to this point at altering
9
George Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character
and Destiny, 1817–1914 (197l; repr., Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1987), 97–120.
Fredrickson’s work was one of the first sustained scholarly accounts of this representation of
blacks.
10
I have taken this quotation from a line put in the mouth of one of Saul Bellow’s Jewish
characters who was reflecting on dominant views of Jewish mission. See Saul Bellow, The Victim
(1947), in Saul Bellow, Novels, 1944–1953 (New York: Library of America, 2003), 246.
11
Ronald G. Walters, American Reformers, 1815–1860, rev. ed. (New York: Hill & Wang,
1997), 86. See also David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New

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 True Religion in Uncle Tom’s Cabin

public opinion through print and written material. The “sentimental power”
of Stowe’s novel rested on a history of sentimental and parlor literature that
had become popular among middle-class white women in the North. The
word, as novel, pamphlet, periodical, and journal, was seen as efficacious.12
For Stowe, it painted a picture, elicited and evoked sympathy, and brought
the reader into a cultural and linguistic world where he or she could (ideally
and hopefully) feel and see rightly. Her work, through its combination of
protest literature and regional or sociological fiction (as Carolyn Karcher
labels it) sought to convey the “real presence” of slaves to its readers, some-
thing that would go beyond the abstract arguments contained in most aboli-
tionist tracts.13
Though slavery is central to the novel, we overlook or trivialize its edifica-
tory mode, especially in using blacks as central characters, if we focus too
narrowly on the critique of slavery. Obviously, the book is about evoking
sympathy for slaves. Indeed, the book intervenes polemically in the nation’s
central crisis—the existence, moral legitimacy, and expansion of slavery. But
Stowe also uses black characters (and women and children) to teach her
audience about true religion, to read the Bible rightly, to feel and see the
spiritual realm appropriately, and to deal with doubt and suffering with one’s
faith left intact or strengthened. Why are blacks (and women and children)
so important in this analysis or so useful for this purpose? Is it just because the
story is about slavery? Is Stowe simply following Victorian depictions of
exemplary and innocent children in her characterization of Eva? All of these
are important concerns for Stowe, but they are not the complete story. Stowe
is engaging in a Herculean task of rewriting the Scriptural story through the
adventures and struggles of Tom (and Eva).14 Stowe is at once attacking a
clerical male Calvinism (there are many references to Methodist camp meet-
ings) and offering an alternative vision of true religion, exhibited in the most
difficult circumstances of life. These circumstances include the breakup of
families (separation of spouses and children from their parents and forcible
sexual encounters that occur with impunity), suffering brutality and violence
without recourse to any law or authority to mitigate one’s pain, legal and
political pressure to commit an immoral act (remanding or returning run-
away slaves to their masters), and submission to tyranny. Readers are provided
a flesh and blood narrative, an embodied person who navigates through
these difficult moments in life. They are provided a story, not simply an

World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), chap. 13; and Seymour Drescher, Abolition: A
History of Slavery and Antislavery (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), chap. 11.
12
On Stowe as writer, see Claire Parfait, The Publishing History of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 1852–
2002 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007), 7–23.
13
Carolyn L. Karcher, “Stowe and the Literature of Social Change,” in The Cambridge Com-
panion to Harriet Beecher Stowe, ed. Cindy Weinstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2004), 203–18.
14
This point is emphasized and helpfully developed in Jane Tompkins’s Sensational Designs:
The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).

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The Journal of Religion

abstract argument, about the evils of slavery. In this way, they are invited into
the story and asked to make a connection to the lives of slaves in all their
varied and divergent experiences.

LANGUAGE AN D THE DARKNESS O F D OUB T

Although not emphasized as often by reviewers, doubt suffuses Stowe’s novel.

One example among many others is the following: George Harris, respond-
ing to Mr. Wilson’s (his former boss at a mechanical factory) exhortation to
trust in God in his attempt to gain freedom, replies by saying “Is there a God
to trust in? O, I’ve seen things all my life that have made me feel that there
can’t be a God. You Christians [whites?] don’t know how these things look to
us [slaves]. There’s a God for you, but is there any for us?” (100). For the most
part, only characters who have “white blood” truly express doubt about God’s
existence and goodness, and this doubt is usually about the presence and
problem of sustained and unrelenting evil. This doubt surfaces on various
occasions and for various reasons: doubt that God can allow such terrible
things to occur. Doubt that God’s presence can be felt, sensed, or known in
the midst of hardships and inexplicable evil. Doubts about the Bible: is it a
proslavery book? Doubts about the Bible’s authenticity and whether its words
can be rendered efficacious to a different age. Doubts that the modern, hard
Anglo-Saxon can accept the softness of Christianity, as Stowe conceives it.
The novel also expresses doubt about the ability of the language and
nature of the Bible to bring its saving message to white Anglo-Saxons. Stowe
develops this point in several ways. Most prominently, Stowe wrestles with the
presence of doubt mostly among white males. Through the figure or type of
Cicero, noted Roman statesman, orator, and philosopher, she generalizes
doubts about the Bible’s authenticity and trustworthiness to the entire Anglo
Saxon race (primarily men are in view). Stowe compares Cicero to Uncle
Tom, focusing on the former’s loss of his daughter. Cicero, unlike Tom, who
clings to the words of Scripture, would probably not have found hope in such
simple words. He would have entertained no hope of reunion in the future
with his dead daughter, and even if he had read the words of Scripture,
Stowe conjectures, “ten to one he would not have believed.” Cicero would
have likely filled “his head first with a thousand questions of authenticity of
manuscript, and correctness of translation” (125). Authenticity of manu-
script and correctness of translation are about language and interpretation.
Could this ancient text reach the logical and analytical mind of the modern
Anglo-Saxon? This comment about Cicero filling his head with a thousand
questions follows Stowe’s description of Uncle Tom slowly and tediously
reading the Bible, laboring over every verse. Tom found in the Bible “just
what he needed,” something “so evidently true and divine that the possibility
of a question never entered his simple head” (125). Given the hardships and
difficulties Tom has encountered and, at this point in the novel, his forlorn

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 True Religion in Uncle Tom’s Cabin

and desolate condition with Haley, the callous slave trader, one wonders why
Tom never questions Scripture or the goodness of God. What is it about Tom
that explains this glaring contrast between him (the African) and Cicero (the
modern Anglo-Saxon)? Stowe never makes the deeper sources of these stark
contrasts clear, as she refuses to leave Cicero in a pagan or pre-Christian state
and takes it upon herself to assume how he would have (negatively) re-
sponded to Scripture. Besides the implicit assumption that his education
and rhetorical training would have made the words of Scripture seem crude,
she seems to resort to racial arguments to explain the difference between
blacks and whites, where Tom and Cicero end up functioning as types or
representations of black and white respective responses to divine grace.
One explanation for this contrast between Tom and Cicero is that the
language and imagery of the Bible poses a difficulty for Stowe. She sees the
language of the Bible as an obstacle for belief among whites (males). As
Stowe notes in the novel, Tom can hardly read the words of Scripture, and
throughout Uncle Tom’s Cabin and even in A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1853),
Stowe reiterates that blacks get and appropriate the Christian message, even
though they cannot read the Bible. She constantly contrasts blacks’ eager
acceptance of grace to the resistant higher and skillful culture of whites,
which profits them little in practicing true Christianity. Stowe regards race as
so powerful that she writes in the Key that “perhaps it was with a foresight of
their [Anglo-Saxons’] peculiar character [by which she means race], and
dominant position in the earth, that God gave the Bible to them in the
fervent language and with the glowing imagery of the more susceptible and
passionate oriental races.”15 It is as though God must accommodate God’s
self or stoop to human limitations (which presumably God created because
God was the author of racial distinctions) by arranging Scripture in a certain
linguistic clothing to reach a hard and obstinate people (made so by their
own racial heritage). Yet, the very details and structure of the novel—filled
with poor slaves who can barely read, practicing the truths of the Bible, in
contrast to “true readers” who can appreciate the nuance and complexity of
language, such as Augustine St. Clare or the type of Cicero, neither of
whom can believe for some unknown reason, and the enfleshing of the
central biblical theme of sacrificing one’s life to save others—indicate that
Stowe believes that the “fervent language” of the Bible and its “glowing
imagery” were not sufficient to reach the cool, logical, and practical mind
of the Anglo-Saxon. Her very rewriting of the biblical motif of the suffering
servant through Uncle Tom demonstrated that she feels a need to revise or
re-present the biblical story and update its language to induce belief, to

15
Joan D. Hedrick, The Oxford Harriet Beecher Stowe Reader (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1999), 421. Consistent with her claims for God’s work among the lowly, Stowe quotes
the words of Isa. 57:15, which speak of God dwelling among those with a contrite and humble
spirit.

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The Journal of Religion

strengthen faith when doubt assaults, and to think and feel rightly about
slavery. This was an enormous task then, to convey through words “real
presence” and evoke sympathy so as to change one’s thinking and actions.
This challenge made Stowe all the more insistent on presenting slavery “in
a living dramatic reality” to demonstrate its awfulness and sinfulness (383).
This longing for the reality behind, beyond, and invoked by words also
informs Stowe’s treatment of slaves and their relationship to the Bible. For
Stowe, the language of the Bible has woven itself into the very being of blacks
such as Uncle Tom, which is all the more remarkable given the fact that most
of them could not read it. This theme of juxtaposing believing blacks with
doubting whites who seem unaffected by the Scriptural narrative and its
imagery is a central subtext of the novel. If biblical language and style would
not reach the hard Anglo-Saxon, what gives Stowe confidence that womanly
feeling and influence, domestic settings, heart religion, tears, and sympathy
can induce them to believe? Why, for example, is Simon Legree not reached
by Tom’s example, or why is it so hard to finally get Augustine St. Clare to
believe? There is no compelling answer to these accounts unless one takes
race and gender into account. Unlike these white male characters, for little
Eva, Jesus “had ceased to be an image and a picture of a distant past, and
come to be a living, all-surrounding reality” (239). This is one of Stowe’s
central tasks in Uncle Tom’s Cabin: to make Jesus a living reality—to make
visible/real his presence through the story of Uncle Tom and through the
words she uses to tell this story. Language is thus the medium through which
the real is conveyed or made palpable. Language also bridges the distance
between the past and the present by making the past a living reality in the
present. Stowe’s style suggests that language accomplishes this task by pro-
viding an appropriate vehicle to recount or represent the quotidian aspects
of life, thereby evoking the substance of reality for the reader. She argues that
personal experience is uniquely conveyed through word pictures, linking the
reader to the character, thus creating sympathy and a universal bond of
common humanity. In the serialized edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, each
edition was read weekly as listeners gathered as a family to hear the latest
installment, which in part explains the emphasis on family and the separation
of children from their mothers.16 In one of the most poignant vignettes in the
novel, Stowe develops this point about language and its relationship to a
living presence. Senator Bird has just returned home after debating and
supporting the Fugitive Slave Law. His wife tells him that it is a Christian duty
to break this law by helping the slave to escape from bondage or at least to
house slaves if they seek refuge. She argues in vain with the senator, who
seems to pity his wife’s feelings coloring her judgment. Stowe describes the
senator’s reasoning as abstract and legalistic, and thus taking no regard for
the law’s effect on real human beings. Here is Stowe’s description:

16
On this point, see Smith, “Serialization and Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” 71–72, 74–78.

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 True Religion in Uncle Tom’s Cabin

He was as bold as a lion about it [defending the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850], and
“mightily convinced” not only himself, but everybody that heard him;—but then his
idea of a fugitive was only an idea of the letters that spell the word,—or, at the most,
the image of a little newspaper picture of a man with a stick and bundle, with “Ran
away from the subscriber” under it. The magic of the real presence of distress,—the
imploring human eye, the frail trembling human hand, the despairing appeal of
helpless agony,—these he had never tried. He had never thought that a fugitive might
be a hapless mother, a defenseless child. (77)

Michael Gilmore argues that the “magic of . . . real presence” is the ideal
toward which all representation in Stowe’s narrative strives.17 Gilmore rightly
notes that for Stowe real presence alone can awaken listeners or readers out of
their sleep (a state of somnolence induced by law and custom) and rouse
them to act in the name of conscience. However, Stowe provides us with a
written description of Eliza’s escape from slavery and not an actual presence.
This was representation, which is necessarily a mediation of presence. What
precisely is it about Stowe’s narrative, then, that can actualize real presence,
given her opposition of the living person over against “dead letters”? What
makes some “letters” more alive than others? How is she to prevent her own
words from becoming merely dead letters? Gilmore suggests that the biblical
and Eucharistic resonances of Eliza’s escape are what help Stowe’s scene to
become more than lifeless words. She could simulate the spiritual reality that
infused the ordinance and the Word, which still had power to move people
and make its presence felt.18 It is hard to determine if Gilmore is making a
claim about shared resonance between Stowe and her readers, which will
enable them to make the connection between Tom and Jesus, and that
somehow the Eucharist was an implicit area of commonality, or if he is making
an ontological claim about the efficacious power of the Eucharist. Both
explanations leave unanswered too many questions and add another layer of
analytical difficulty. They provide a rather speculative view of what readers
may have heard or read from the novel, and they do not satisfactorily answer
the question about linguistic efficacy: that is, why Stowe’s writing, apart from
its newness, vividness, and local color, should be able to penetrate the cold
and logical mind of the Anglo-Saxon if the biblical text (and by extension, the
living Word) had such difficulty in doing so. In other words, on Stowe’s own
terms, what can make her representation of true religion efficacious?
Many of Stowe’s reflections about language can be gleaned from a close
reading of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but her personal life is also instructive. Personal
tragedy haunted the Stowe household, much of which she endured prior to the
publication of her novel. In 1843, her brother George committed suicide. Less
than two years before the first installment of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Stowe’s son

17
Michael T. Gilmore, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the American Renaissance: The Sacramental
Aesthetic of Harriet Beecher Stowe,” in Weinstein, The Cambridge Companion, 61.
18
Ibid.

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Charley died of cholera. He was less than two years of age. Stowe later wrote that
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. In those depths of sorrow which
seemed to me immeasurable, it was my only prayer to God that such anguish
might not be suffered in vain!”19 Although Stowe’s easy identification of her
own suffering as a white woman with that of slave women may strike modern
readers as naive or arrogant, nonetheless the very popularity of her novel and
the central concern about breaking up slave families indicate that she made a
powerful connection to mothers whose experiences were quite removed from
those of slaves in the South. It is difficult to imagine how she could otherwise
make the case for sympathy if she denied any similarity between her own
suffering of loss and that of slave women. As Joan Hedrick argues, “Stowe
turned her human weakness into a source of divine strength and fixed on a
historical and religious reality that linked her experience as a woman with that
of a slave.”20 Stowe links this identification with slaves at another level. She
consistently argues that the lowly and meek would be used by God to shame the
wise and mighty. In the same letter where she connects her own loss of a child
with that of slave women’s losses, she expresses surprise that Uncle Tom’s Cabin
had now made her famous. Stowe writes, “It seems to me so odd and dream-like
that so many persons desire to see me, and now I cannot help thinking that they
will think, when they do, that God hath chosen “the weak things of the world.”21
So much of Stowe’s personal experience and struggle with belief is deeply
embedded in the structure of the novel. Thus, her personal religious views and
struggles are part of the very fabric of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. But there is one subject
that stands out as the subject of enormous criticism since the novel’s publica-
tion. That subject is race or Stowe’s representation of blacks.

REPRESENTATIONS OF RACE

Probably no aspect of Uncle Tom’s Cabin has garnered more attention than its
characterization of blacks and its racial views. Stowe’s frequent narrative
asides about the “natural” qualities of Africans command attention and
comment. At the very beginning of the novel, she introduces slaves as an
African and exotic race. They are essentially “unlike the hard and dominant
Anglo-Saxon race” (xiii). Stowe explains the passionate hymn singing and
rousing religious services in Tom’s cabin by noting that the “negro mind,
impassioned and imaginative, always attaches itself to hymns of a vivid and
pictorial nature” (25). The way Stowe depicts Tom and compatriots in this
scene indicates that there is something instinctive and natural about Africans
that compels them to express themselves in fervent religiosity and that they

19
Hedrick, Oxford Reader, 72.
20
Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, 157.
21
Hedrick, Oxford Reader, 76.

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have a racially distinct temperament that enables them naturally to identify

with the language and imagery of Scripture. Africans thus have a native
genius for religion. This racialized notion of Africans’ natural religious
capacities deeply informs Stowe’s view of their potential contributions to
Anglo-Saxon society.
As intimated above, the use of the meek and lowly as exemplars of Chris-
tian virtues works for Stowe because of the object of her criticism: what she
referred to as the “higher and more skillful culture” of whites (343). She
draws upon the Christian Scriptures, having in mind, as noted above, Paul’s
argument in 1 Cor. 1:19–31. The same could be said about her use of Eva, a
female child, to illustrate this principle. Africans serve as the ideal type for the
suffering servant motif. Even the choice of Scriptures indicates Stowe’s
attraction to this model. She writes, “Perhaps, as God chasteneth whom he
loveth, he hath chosen poor Africa in the furnace of affliction, to make her
the highest and noblest in that kingdom which he will set up, when every
other kingdom has been tried and failed; for the first shall be last, and the last
shall be first” (156). Africans as a nationality or racial collective, in this
reading, not as individual Christians, are the object of God’s chastening for
a future purpose. As Arthur Riss argues, Stowe’s appeal for black freedom, to
the extent that we regard this freedom as a reality in any sense apart from
colonization to Africa, is grounded in the “material importance of race.”22
Whatever her racial politics, Stowe articulates a theology of suffering as a
necessary path to future elevation. Africans could teach white Americans the
true meaning of religion precisely because of the educative role of suffering
and the lowly position they have occupied since the slave trade. In other
words, Stowe frames her analysis with vivid African characters to help readers,
especially through the experiences of Uncle Tom, relive the miraculous as
depicted in the biblical narrative and to bolster their faith in God’s provi-
dence and goodness. But even this framework is racially framed, as in the Key,
where she argues that Africans have an oriental character that makes them

22
Arthur Riss, “Racial Essentialism and Family Values in Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” American Quarterly
46, no. 4 (December 1994): 513–44. Riss’s work is one of the most incisive and compelling
accounts of Stowe’s complicated conflation of race and Christianity. I count myself among those
Riss criticizes because we ideally want Stowe’s antislavery position to be “accompanied by and
derive from an equally liberal stance against racial essences.” Nonetheless, my primary
objection to Riss is that he minimizes the tension between Stowe’s racialist notions of black
Christianity and a broader Christian tradition that regarded grace as transcending conditions
of racial heritage, ethnic background, or national affiliation. Based on my understanding of
Stowe’s religious heritage and the more universalistic claims of Christianity historically and
among some of her contemporaries, there was no necessary reason for Stowe to connect racial
heritage to acceptance of grace. As Riss’s own work indicates, for an antislavery activist Stowe
makes a peculiar and distinctive association between a racial collective and Christian virtues.
For an alternative account of how antebellum Northern blacks sought to transcend race or
ground unity within a broader Christian community that extended beyond a racial collective, see
Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp, Setting Down the Sacred Past: African American Race Histories (Cambridge,
MA: Belknap Press, 2010).

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closer spiritually to the ancient Hebrews and early Christians than the Anglo-
Saxons were.

HOW G RACE IS REALIZED : P LA C E VE R S U S R A CE

Receptivity, fertile soil, and impressionable minds and hearts: these are the
grounds Stowe regards as appropriate for Scripture and its message to enter
races and individuals. Anglo-Saxons have a cool heart, difficult soil, and
analytical minds. Africans are naturally impressionable with vivid imagina-
tions that resonate with the language of Scripture. Blacks then are invoked as
a complement to whites, but so long as they are regarded as suffering servants
under a regime of slavery, one wonders if this motif would have any efficacy or
meaning apart from a condition of bondage, deprivation, and a state of
dependence. After all, Stowe makes so many references to slaves being
unable to read the Bible, one wonders if inability to read Scripture is in some
sense an advantage, especially as this lack is often compared to whites who
can read the “dead words” even if they do not get the message. This certainly
is one way to interpret Augustine St. Clare’s discussion with Tom after Eva’s
death. Here St. Clare reads for Tom the account of Jesus raising Lazarus from
the dead in John 11. St. Clare expresses surprise that this is all very real to
Tom. He questions Tom: “But Tom, you know that I have a great deal more
knowledge than you; what if I should tell you that I don’t believe the Bible.
Wouldn’t this shake your faith?” Tom replies, “Not a grain,” and proceeds to
quote from Scripture: God hides God’s truths from the wise and prudent but
reveals them instead to babes (263). St. Clare cannot invoke or feel presence
through his own words, informing Tom that he does not pray because “it’s all
speaking unto nothing.” He asks the simple Tom to show him how to pray, a
request Tom answers by praying in St. Clare’s presence. Here again the
vicarious experience, at a second remove, becomes manifest: St. Clare is
“borne, on the tide of his faith and feeling, almost to the gates of that heaven
he seemed so vividly to conceive” (263–64). Only Tom’s prayer can presum-
ably bring him any closer to belief or to his dead daughter, Eva. In this and
other parts of the novel, the inability to read or to possess power or things
becomes the very condition to advance Stowe’s version of Christianity. But
can Africans convey a message to the world when their hands are not empty,
when suffering is not their lot?
In general, Stowe utilizes race or writes about what she assumes to be the
immutable fact of race as the comprehensive explanation for black belief and
religious susceptibility and white doubt and unbelief. But there are times
when it is not clear (based on her reasoning) that race rather than place (or
the lowly condition of blacks) is the appropriate explanation for black
religious expression. Stowe makes many references to Scriptural narratives
(from the Old and New Testament) where God abases the proud and
powerful and chooses the lowly to carry out God’s purposes. Thus, the place

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of blacks, as an enslaved and despised race deemed inferior, is more crucial

in this way of telling her story. In the Key Stowe makes this point clearly: “It
would be well for the most cultivated of us to ask, whether our ten talents in
the way of religious knowledge have enabled us to bring forth as much fruit to
the glory of God, to withstand temptation as patiently, to return good for evil
as disinterestedly, as this poor, ignorant slave . . . out of this race whom man
despiseth have often been chosen of God true messengers of his grace, and
temples for the indwelling of his Spirit.”23 Thus, in God’s inscrutable provi-
dence, God has chosen Africans for the furnace of affliction to teach the
haughty Anglo-Saxons something about the “true nature” of religion and to
rebuke them for their arrogance. But is grace stronger than race? Does the
place of blacks, their degradation and the stigma attached to their skin color,
explain their receptivity, as Stowe conceives? How does race, a divine allot-
ment, figure into Stowe’s broader narrative? She seems to chastise Anglo-
Saxons for exercising a divine gift, their racial genius, though at times her
message appears to be, as Riss notes, that Anglo-Saxons mistook their partial
racial genius for a universal principle, which made them unable to appreciate
the native genius of the African.24 But why should she criticize them for
exercising a God-given racial heritage? This tension between race and place
is one of the central unresolved problems in the novel.
Take, for example, the different ways in which Uncle Tom and George
Harris address their individual plights. Tom’s victory is an internal one: Jesus
appears to him in his pain and agony and gives him comfort to endure a
savage beating at the hands of Simon Legree. After Tom receives this vision of
the risen Jesus, Stowe reminds us that he “offered his own will an unques-
tioning sacrifice to the Infinite” (340). Like Jesus in the Garden of Gethsem-
ane, Tom no longer prays that the cup of suffering would pass from him, but
rather he prays that God’s will be done henceforth. He is ready to die, and he
has given up every hope in this life. For George Harris, however, who has
Anglo-Saxon blood in his veins, no such submission to the divine will is ever
envisioned. To be sure, the closest George comes to settled belief is when he
is at home amid the Quaker settlement, with his wife, Eliza, and their son
Harry. It is only then and there, according to Stowe, that “a belief in God, and
trust in his providence, began to encircle his heart, as, with a golden cloud of
protection and confidence, dark, misanthropic, pining, atheistic doubts, and
fierce despair, melted away before the light of a living Gospel” (122). But in
most other instances, George’s beliefs appear to be vicariously experienced
through Eliza, his wife. Though much attention has been focused on Stowe’s
sentiments about colonization in George’s letter at the end of the novel,
George’s self-reflection on his faith requires some analysis. He spoke these
words with forcefulness about his African destiny: “In myself, I am feeble for

23
Hedrick, Oxford Reader, 420–21.
24
Riss, “Racial Essentialism,” 523.

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this [that is, undertaking the development of Christianity in Africa]—full half

the blood in my veins is the hot and hasty Saxon; but I have an eloquent
preacher of the Gospel ever by my side, in the person of my beautiful wife.
When I wander, her gentler spirit ever restores me; and keeps before my eyes
the Christian calling and mission of our race” (376). Here is another example
of Stowe’s view that Anglo-Saxons do not have a natural affinity for the
Christian gospel and that they most somehow have it mediated to them by
a race that is more susceptible to Christian influence. Thus, the very qualities
that Stowe associates with Christianity become so racialized that even Garri-
son questions whether she advocates two Christs: one who espoused patience,
long-suffering, and forgiveness as a model for blacks and one who modeled
taking up arms for whites. Given the stark opposition that Stowe portrays
between Tom, a full-blooded African who fully submits to God’s will and
refuses to strike back against his master, and George, a defiant Anglo-Saxon
whose blood makes him ready to kill and die for his freedom, Garrison’s
question seems fitting.
Stowe’s particular version of racial essentialism requires special analysis.
She was hardly unique in her belief that race crucially formed personal and
national identity, a belief that pervaded antebellum culture.25 The attribution
of an essentially Christian character to blacks as an African race is the key
distinctive in her view of race. Stowe’s novel, because of its popularity, became
the leading exponent of what historian George Frederickson calls “romantic
racialism,” which asserted that blacks were more susceptible to Christianity
than Anglo-Saxons and that their distinctive brand of Christianity would be
their signal contribution to American culture. In response to Stowe’s depic-
tion of blacks as having a natural affinity for faith, one English reviewer wrote,
“If Mrs. Stowe’s portraiture is correct, and if Uncle Tom is a type of a class, we
deliberately assert that we have nothing more to communicate to the negro,
but everything to learn from his profession and practice.”26 The reviewer’s
more general point was that Stowe’s problematic claims about African affinity
for Christianity undercut any need for bringing Christianity to blacks and
suggested that apostolic religion was being practiced in the present age of
Stowe and her contemporaries. Although Stowe’s narrative asides about the
natural religious capacities of Africans invited scrutiny about her views of
blacks, the criticism of her religious picture of Tom as miracle worker by his
example was really a criticism of her more general feelings about religion. In
the 1840s, Stowe was already urging her readers to awaken to the reality of
primitive Christianity, claiming that such “apostolic experience” must “be-
come the common experience of all Christians, before Christ can subdue the
world.”27 The novel was her attempt to recreate anew this story, making it

25
Ibid., 517.
26
See the review in Ammons’s edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 480.
27
Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, 157.

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 True Religion in Uncle Tom’s Cabin

vivid and palpable to a doubtful age. Her use of slaves was intended to address
this larger point.

STO WE ’ S L EG AC Y

Stowe was more successful than other antislavery activists such as Channing
and Child for several reasons: Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s popularity in part derived
from its vivid characters, comic interludes, and melodramatic storytelling
from an antislavery perspective. It departed from the abstract and confron-
tational rhetoric of the immediate abolitionists. Yet, the substance of Stowe’s
novel, except for her positive remarks (in the mouth of George Harris) about
colonization, was the same as the abolitionist arguments advanced since the
1830s: that slavery was contrary to the principles of the American Revolution
and Christianity, that slavery was a sin to be renounced immediately, that all
righteous people must come out of corrupt churches and other institutions
that uphold slavery, that northerners bore responsibility for slavery, that the
self-interest of masters provided no protection for slaves, that the essence of
slavery was arbitrary power, and that the institution of slavery was evil even
when the treatment of slaves was humane.28
What, then, was different about Uncle Tom’s Cabin? Stowe explained the
success of her work (or perhaps, by extension, its variance from prior aboli-
tionist works) by pointing to the personal and the political: the loss of her
child and the enactment of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. The Fugitive Slave
Law had a section that commanded citizens to aid and assist in the prompt
and efficient execution of this law, whenever their services might be required.
Anyone who gave shelter, food, or assistance to an escaping slave was liable to
a fine of $1,000 and six months in prison. The law effectively abrogated
individual rights such as habeas corpus and the right to trial by jury, and it
provided what abolitionists called bribes to commissioners by awarding them
$10 for every alleged fugitive they remanded to slavery but only $5 for
everyone they determined to be freed. Soon after its adoption, newspapers
were full of reports of outrages against blacks, especially in urban centers
such as Boston and Washington, DC.29 For Stowe and other antislavery
activists, the Fugitive Slave Law confirmed what abolitionists had been saying
for decades: that northerners were morally implicated in the sin of slavery. In
the concluding remarks of the novel, Stowe wrote that she had heard with
consternation that Christian and humane people were actually recommend-
ing the remanding of escaped fugitives to slavery, as a legal duty binding on
good citizens. In the mouthpiece of Senator Bird’s wife, Stowe exclaimed: “I
don’t know anything about politics, but I can read my Bible, and there I see

28
Ronald G. Walters, “Harriet Beecher Stowe and the American Reform Tradition,” in
Weinstein, The Cambridge Companion, 184–85.
29
Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, 203.

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that I must feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and comfort the desolate, and
that Bible I mean to follow” (69). Mrs. Bird insists to her husband that she is
bound to a higher law, the Christian law of love, and that she will break the
“shameful, wicked, abominable” fugitive slave law the first chance she can.
The law also troubled Stowe because it represented for her another instance
of cold and rationalistic legal principles that hid or ignored the “real pres-
ence” of human distress. This was another example of Stowe pitting “abstract
systems of civil and religious justice (created by men) against the concrete
realities of human life.”30
The personal experience of Stowe had a profound impact on her use of
black characters (and women and children) as instruments of salvation. Her
personal loss of a child, her struggle to emancipate herself from what she
regarded as an abstract and cold system of Calvinism, and her quest for an
experiential and apostolic Christianity gave life and urgency to her critique of
slavery. Her appreciation of the culture’s growing elevation of children (and
her own emphasis on the saving power of the home) enabled her to make a
link between slave suffering and the potential losses that her readers might
endure by other means (e.g., early death because of disease). In this way,
Stowe could see her own struggles as necessary preparation and discipline for
a new work of helping to free slaves and thus contributing to ridding the
nation of its original sin. Her struggles then merged with those of the slave,
testifying to her reading of Scripture: that God does, indeed, use the weak
things of the world to accomplish God’s purposes. As a literary woman, to use
the words of her husband, Charles Stowe, she could use her talents and gifts
to attack slavery and, out of the brokenness of her own pain and loss, write
and represent the “visible presence” of the Word. Through her writings, she
hoped, the word would become flesh again to her generation.

30
Ibid., 279.

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