"Uncle Tom's Cabin" and the Art of Persuasion (2011)

What does it take to persuade—to move people from one position to another, or to get them to care about an issue that has never stirred their interest? How do you get a critical mass of people to believe that a dispute affects their visions of themselves as individuals and the world in which they live? We’re often told that American society is polarized as never before, with civility in shreds and partisanship so corrosive that government has become nearly inoperable. But this year marks the sesquicentennial of a moment when politics truly failed and the American government splintered. Between 1861 and 1865, Americans did more than hurl verbal brickbats across the political divide; they fired cannons and rifles, killing one another in astonishing numbers. And they did so, in part, because a large number of Americans had been persuaded that they could not live in a country that countenanced slavery.

Slavery had been a contentious issue in the United States from at least the time of its founding. The soaring words of the Declaration of Independence caused many people to pause over the spectacle of humankind being treated like property in the ostensible land of liberty. The Constitution, ratified in 1788, seemed to settle the issue, with compromises written into its text that protected slavery and made Union possible. Some of the most prominent members of the founding generation believed that slavery was a dying institution. Yet the debate after the Louisiana Purchase, in 1803, and the three-year struggle over the admission of Missouri to the Union as a slave state, between 1819 and 1821, discredited such hopes: not only was slavery growing entrenched but the South intended to extend its dominion by carrying it west.

By the eighteen-thirties, Southerners were offering the country a new vision of slavery, as a positive good ordained by God and sanctioned by Scripture. Naturally, abolitionists in the North believed that the Bible told them the opposite: slavery offended the basic tenets of Christianity. Each claimed moral authority, hoping to win over the vast majority of citizens who were not activists on either side. Nothing would change in either direction without the support of these uncommitted and wavering citizens. They had to be persuaded that slavery, one way or another, had moral implications for everyone who lived on American soil.

This was the country that Harriet Beecher Stowe addressed in 1852 when she published “Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or Life Among the Lowly,” one of the most successful feats of persuasion in American history. Stowe’s novel shifted public opinion about slavery so dramatically that it has often been credited with fuelling the war that destroyed the peculiar institution. Nearly every consideration of Stowe mentions what Abraham Lincoln supposedly said when he met the diminutive New Englander: “Is this the little woman who made this great war?” The historian David S. Reynolds, in his passionate “Mightier Than the Sword: ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ and the Battle for America” (Norton; $27.95), answers resoundingly in the affirmative. But the most fascinating part of his lively and perceptive cultural history is the account of how she did it.

Stowe, a deeply religious woman, claimed that “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” came to her “in visions,” that she did not so much write it as receive it from God. But even before the novel was written God helped the process along by having her reared in a family that was the perfect incubator for her talent. Stowe, born on June 14, 1811, in Litchfield, Connecticut, was the seventh of the nine children of Lyman and Roxana Beecher. Her brother Henry Ward Beecher was born two years later. Harriet was five years old when her mother died of tuberculosis; Beecher, a prominent New England minister, remarried and had four more children.

Social reform was the Beecher family business. They produced progressive ministers, educators, writers, and a feminist agitator. Lyman Beecher recognized early on that his daughter Harriet was special, proclaiming her “a great genius” when she was just eight years old. Realizing that her talents might go to waste because of her gender, he wrote that he “would give a hundred dollars if she was a boy & Henry a girl—She is as odd—as she is intelligent & studious.” Reynolds describes young Henry as “tongue-tied” and “seemingly slow,” but Lyman Beecher need not have worried about either child. Stowe went on to become hugely influential in one of the few mediums available to women at the time, writing, and Henry Ward Beecher, the tongue-tied boy, became one of the century’s most accomplished and celebrated preachers.

Reading and storytelling captivated Stowe from childhood. She read whatever books were available—even old theological tracts, though she found them somewhat tedious. The Arabian Nights provided more thrilling fare, as did Cotton Mather’s “Magnalia Christi Americana,” a series of stories about the development of Puritan New England. She wrote that they “made me feel the very ground I trod on to be consecrated by some special dealing of God’s providence.”

This Puritan background was essential to Stowe’s personality. It wasn’t the anti-sex Puritanism of popular legend that gripped her; it was the levelling tradition that, as Reynolds writes, lent support to “radical independence and rebellion against authority.” Puritanism in the North, he notes, helped spur “progressive movements against slavery, intemperance, and other social ills”—which is precisely what pro-slavery Southerners found so irritating about it. They thought of New Englanders as “law defying Puritans who endorsed all kinds of disruptive ‘isms’—most dangerously, abolitionism.”

Stowe’s early life was as conventional as that of a member of the Beecher family could be. She was educated at female academies, including the Hartford Female Seminary, which her older sister Catherine had founded and ran. Stowe herself started teaching there in 1827, but in 1832, when her father became president of Lane Theological Seminary, in Cincinnati, she went along. It was a fateful decision, personally and professionally. Cincinnati was in the Upper South, close to the culture of slavery, and she began to hear stories that would provide templates for her most influential work. In Cincinnati, too, she met Calvin Stowe, whom Lyman Beecher had recruited to the faculty at Lane. Stowe and his wife, Eliza, became great friends with the Beechers. Eliza died in 1834, and two years later Calvin and Harriet married.

The couple had seven children, and Harriet wrote stories to supplement her husband’s small income, lamenting, “I am but a mere drudge with few ideas beyond babies and housekeeping.” When the couple’s son Charley died, in 1849, at eighteen months, Stowe began, as Reynolds writes, her “fixation on Jesus Christ as the humble sufferer, the grand symbol of the burdens borne by the lowliest members of society.” She explored this theme in a number of short stories and, of course, in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” when she portrayed the title character, an enslaved man, as a Christ figure. She said that losing Charley made her understand “what a poor slave mother may feel when her child is torn away from her.”

Stowe’s religious fervor, combined with what she learned about slavery, produced her “visions.” Visions and spiritualism were accepted parts of life in nineteenth-century America. Calvin Stowe himself spoke about having had visions of “aerial forms that passed through walls” from the time he was a child. At one point, the couple believed that Calvin’s first wife, for whom Harriet had great affection, was communicating with them from beyond the grave. (Both welcomed the intrusions.) The first vision that led to “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” came in February of 1851. While taking Communion, Reynolds writes, Stowe “saw four figures: an old slave being whipped to death by two fellow slaves, who were goaded on by a brutal white man.” The man being whipped would become Uncle Tom. The “brutal white man” would become Simon Legree. The novel that resulted appeared in forty-one weekly installments in a Washington-based anti-slavery newspaper from June, 1851, to March, 1852, when it was published as a book in two volumes.

Stowe said of the book that she had a “vocation to preach on paper,” just as the men in her family preached in pulpits. It’s a crucial point, because the Beecher men, especially Henry, had helped to modernize the art of preaching. They moved away from sermons that followed a strict trajectory and that discussed doctrine in a routine way. Instead, they relied on narrative. Telling stories from the pulpit made the message of the Gospels more accessible to congregations by using drawn-from-life vignettes, a staple of church services today. Stowe, too, understood how influential narrative could be, and with “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” she achieved what endless speeches in the halls of Congress, political tracts, harangues, and newspaper articles failed to do: she made the reality of slavery palpable to the American public. As one Southern commentator noted, “Thousands will peruse an interesting story, and thus gradually imbibe the author’s views, that would not read ten lines of a mere argumentative volume on the same theme.”

What was needed was a story with characters, fully realized, in whom readers would develop a stake. The novel’s two plotlines, Northern and Southern, emphasize slavery’s national reach. An enslaved woman, Eliza Harris, escapes north with her young son and joins her husband, George. Though out of the South, the Harrises must contend with the Fugitive Slave Law, which required Northerners to help return escaped slaves to their masters. Along the way, they meet friend and foe, in scenes meant to show the human capacity for empathy and for evil. The Southern plot centers on Uncle Tom, who, when his owners fall on hard times, is sold “down the river,” away from his beloved wife and children. On the trip down, he saves the life of young Eva, prompting her father, Augustine St. Clare, to buy him. Tom and Eva, another of Stowe’s Christ figures, become friends. While Eva is dying, St. Clare promises to free Tom but is killed before he can, and Tom falls into the hands of the villainous Simon Legree, with fatal consequences.

Stowe took pains not to demonize all Southerners, or beatify all Northerners. In her view, no one was corrupt by nature; the system of slavery spoiled everything and everyone it touched. But her story was effective because it directly assaulted Southern pretensions. Pro-slavery Southerners had been propagating a narrative of their own: slavery was a benevolent institution in which mentally inferior slaves were watched over by owners who treated them as part of their family. The Romans had had slaves, they argued, and the South was a new Rome. (Never mind the absence of the ancient civilization’s great architectural, artistic, engineering, legal, and literary achievements.)