Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (30 page)

Titled
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
, Stowe’s “living dramatic reality” entered bookstores on March 20, 1852. “The scenes of this story,” she opened the novel’s preface, “lie among . . . an exotic race, whose . . . character” was “so essentially unlike the hard and dominant Anglo-Saxon race.” In Black people’s “lowly docility of heart, their aptitude to repose on a superior mind and rest on a higher power, their childlike simplicity of affection, and facility of forgiveness,” she wrote, “[i]n all these they will exhibit the highest form of the peculiarly
Christian life.
” Only enslavement was holding them back.
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In one novel, Stowe ingeniously achieved what Garrison had been trying to do for roughly two decades in article after article in
The Liberator
. For the cosmic shift to antislavery, Stowe did not ask Americans to change their deep-seated beliefs. She asked only for them to alter the implications, the
meaning
of their deep-seated beliefs. Stowe met Americans where they were: in the concreteness of racist ideas. She accepted the nationally accepted premise of the enslaver. Naturally docile and intellectually inferior Black people were disposed to their enslavement to White people—and, Stowe crucially tacked on—to God. Stowe inverted Cotton Mather and all those preachers after him who had spent years trying to convince planters that Christianity
made Blacks better slaves. She claimed that since docile Blacks made the best slaves, they made the best Christians. Since domineering Whites made the worst slaves, they made the worst Christians. Stowe offered Christian salvation to White America through antislavery. In order to become better Christians, White people must constrain their domineering temperament and end the evil outgrowth of that temperament: slavery.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin
was a powerfully effective tool for Stowe’s racist abolitionism because it was such an awesome page turner. An indebted Kentucky slaveholder plans to sell the enslaved religious leader Uncle Tom and the young son of Eliza Harris. Eliza grabs her son, flees, and reunites in northern freedom with her fugitive husband, George Harris. Tom stays and is sold South. Heading downriver on a boat, Tom saves a pious little White girl, Eva, who had fallen in the river. Grateful, her father, Augustine St. Clare, buys Tom.

The relations of Tom and Eva sit at the novel’s thematic center. Stowe created the double-character—the naturally Christian Tom/Eva—to highlight her conception of Blacks being more feminine, “docile, child-like and affectionate,” which allows Christianity to find a “more congenial atmosphere” in Black bodies. In a major proselytizing battle, Stowe pits the
soulful
Christian Black slave, Tom, against the
mindful
un-Christian White master, St. Clare. “Thou hast hid from the wise and prudent, and revealed unto babes,” Tom says in biblical style. Blacks were spiritually superior because of their intellectual inferiority, Stowe maintained. This spiritual superiority allowed Blacks to have soul.
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Stowe’s popularization of spiritually gifted Black people quickly became a central pillar of African American identity as Black readers consumed the book and passed on its racist ideas. Racist Whites, believing themselves to be void of soul, made it their personal mission to find soul through Black people. Racist Blacks, believing themselves to be void of intellect, made it their personal mission to find intellect through White people. Black Americans almost immediately made Uncle Tom the identifier of Black submissiveness, while accepting Stowe’s underlying racist idea that made Uncle Tom so submissive: Blacks were especially spiritual; they, especially, had soul.

And these Black people were inferior to biracial people, in Stowe’s reproduction of biracial racism. The only four adult characters who run away are the novel’s four biracial captives, the “tragic mulattos.” Though appearing and acting White, they are tragically imprisoned by Blackness. And yet in their intellectual and aesthetic superiority, in their active resistance to enslavement, Stowe distinguishes the mulattos from the “full black.”
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In the novel’s “concluding remarks,” Stowe called for northerners to teach Blacks until they reached “moral and intellectual maturity, and then assist them in their passage” to Africa, “where they may put into practice the lessons they have learned in America.” Her call was a godsend to the vanishing American Colonization Society.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
and Blacks fed up with the United States revitalized the colonization movement in the 1850s. President Fillmore intended to endorse colonization in his 1852 Message to Congress. “There can be no well-grounded hope,” he was going to say, “for the improvement of either [Blacks’] moral or social condition, until they are removed from a humiliating sense of inferiority in the presence of a superior race.” Although they were omitted in the speech itself, these remarks found their way into newspapers.
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Garrison revered Uncle Tom in his book review of March 26, 1852. But he was virtually alone in his antiracist questioning of Stowe’s religious bigotry. “Is there one law of submission and non-resistance for the black man, and another law of rebellion and conflict for the white man? Are there two Christs?” Garrison also regretted seeing the “sentiments respecting African colonization.” His antiracist religiosity hardly made waves like his critique of Stowe’s endorsement of colonization.
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Frederick Douglass was also wary of Stowe’s embrace of colonization, though he did not criticize her portrait of the “soulful” Uncle Tom. He sent off an assimilationist, anti-Indian letter to Stowe explaining why Blacks would never accept colonization. “This black man (
un
like the Indian) loves civilization,” Douglass wrote. “He does not make very great progress in civilization himself, but he likes to be in the midst of it.” In not totally rebuking Stowe and her novel, the most
influential Black man in America hardly slowed the consumption of the novel’s racist ideas.
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No one came closer to totally trashing
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
than a Black writer and physician named Martin R. Delany. He had become disillusioned about abolitionism because its proponents had not come to his aid when he had been ejected from Harvard Medical School in 1850. He had been accepted, along with two other Black students, but when they arrived, White students had called for their dismissal. In 1852, Delany released his largely antiracist
The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, Politically Considered
. Antislavery societies, Delany charged, “presumed to
think
for, dictate to, and
know
better what suited colored people, than they know for themselves.” Black people had two choices: continued degradation in the United States, or establishment of a prosperous community elsewhere—meaning colonization on Black terms. Even on Black terms, Black people still mostly opposed colonization.
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While splitting on colonization in the 1850s, Black male activists seemingly united in their distaste of Uncle Tom for disseminating the stereotype of the weak Black male. For some time, racist Black patriarchs had been measuring their masculinity off of the perceived controlling masculinity of White men, and they found Black masculinity to be lacking. They demanded control of Black women, families, and communities to redeem their masculinity from the “weak Black male” stereotype. As antislavery Black patriarchs petitioned in 1773, in Massachusetts, “How can the wife submit themselves to [their] husbands in all things” if Blacks remained enslaved? And then, at the male-dominated National Convention of Colored Citizens in Syracuse in 1864, they complained, “We have been denied ownership of our bodies, our wives, home, children and the products of our own labor.” These Black men resolved to “vindicate our manhood,” as if it needed any vindication. It could not have been a coincidence that while women like Sojourner Truth were asserting their right to gender equity in the 1850s and early 1860s, Black (and White) men were asserting their right to rule women.
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The sexist opposition seemed wrapped up in the proslavery opposition, especially since a woman had penned
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
. Southerners hailed the publication of Caroline Lee Hentz’s
The Planter’s Northern Bride
, and William Gilmore Simms’s
The Sword and the Distaff
, the most prominent of the more than twenty plantation-school novels published in the reactionary aftermath of
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
. In these books, professorial planters, and their pure and upright wives, civilized their animal-like or childlike contented captives on their family farms. These plantation novelists could write up some fiction. Although
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
may not have spread among southerners as widely as the plantation-school books, a large number of southerners did get their hands on it. “Mrs. Stowe says that the . . . chief wrong in the catalogue of sins against the negro, is the prejudice of caste, the antipathy of race, the feeling we crush into their souls that they are ‘nothing but niggers,’” wrote a Georgia “lady” in
De Bow’s Review
. But Mrs. Stowe was forgetting, she said, “the fact that their Maker created them ‘nothing but niggers.’”
¹²

NEITHER THE FREE-SOIL
upsurge nor the antislavery upsurge from the Fugitive Slave Act and
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
could overcome the political parties’ overwhelming propaganda or the sectional and slavery tensions during the presidential election of 1852. New Hampshire’s flamboyant Mexican-American War general, Franklin Pierce, ready to turn the nation’s attention from slavery toward national expansion, won in a rout for the Democrats. “The question is at rest,” Pierce proclaimed in his First Inaugural Address in 1853. Abolitionists will never rest until “the eternal overthrow” of slavery, the forty-seven-year-old Garrison shot back.
¹³

In 1853, the American Anti-Slavery Society refused to admit defeat in the wake of Franklin Pierce’s victory. Members celebrated their twentieth anniversary by celebrating Garrison, in order to put him before as many eyes as possible. It mirrored the international effort in 1853 to put the recently deceased University of Pennsylvania
polygenesist Samuel Morton before the public and hail him as the exemplary pioneer. Josiah C. Nott and George Gliddon published, on April 1, 1853, the monumental
Types of Mankind
, eight-hundred pages of polygenesis, dedicated “to the Memory of Morton.” For visual learners, they inserted an illustration of two columns of faces adjoining skulls: the “Greek” at the top, the “ape” at the bottom, the “Negro” in the middle. The debate over “the primitive origin of the races” was the “last grand battle between science and dogmatism.” Who would win? “Science must again, and finally, triumph!”
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Types of Mankind
appeared during a crowded 1853, a critical year for segregationist ideas making the case for permanent Black inferiority while assimilationist abolitionists advanced. Democrats welcomed the publication of New York editor John H. Van Evrie’s
Negroes and Negro Slavery
. Van Evrie ran at the front of a stampede of northern pro-slavery, pro-White pamphleteers chasing down the abolitionist movement in the 1850s. “God has made the negro an inferior being not in most cases, but in all cases,” Van Evrie declared. “The same almighty creator made all white men equal.” Over in France in 1853, aristocratic royalist Arthur de Gobineau released his four-volume
Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines
(
An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races
). Gobineau’s demand for France’s return to aristocracy included an analysis of the “colossal truth” of racial hierarchy, of polygenesis. The intelligent White lovers of liberty were at the top; the yellow race was the “middle class”; and at the bottom were the greedy, sexual Black people. Blacks’ abnormal physical traits had developed to compensate for their stupidity, Gobineau wrote. Within the White species, the Aryan was supreme—and was the supreme maker of all great civilizations in history the world over. Germans embraced Gobineau, especially since he said Aryans were “la race germanique.” In 1856, Josiah C. Nott arranged for the translation of Gobineau’s book into English.
¹⁵

Though the book was expensive and had a lot of competition for readers’ attention,
Types of Mankind
sold out almost immediately. It was “handsomely welcomed” in Europe, and well regarded as an excellent treatment of the “pre-eminently . . . American science” of polygenesis, as the
New York Herald
wrote. The reviewer for
Putnam’s Monthly
accepted polygenesis, too, explaining that “the nations are of one blood, therefore, not genealogically, but spiritually.” Cotton Mather’s old case of spiritual equality (and bodily inequality) to square slavery and Christianity was now squaring polygenesis and Christianity.

In
Putnam’s
competitor,
Harper’s Magazine
, Herman Melville, who had just authored
Moby-Dick
, issued “The ‘Gees.” The antiracist satire relentlessly mocked the contradictions of polygenesis. The fictional ‘Gees are a people “ranking pretty high in incivility, but rather low in stature and morals.” They have “a great appetite, but little imagination; a large eyeball, but small insight. Biscuit he crunches, but sentiment he eschews.” Meanwhile, the character of Queequeg in
Moby-Dick
gave Melville a chance to challenge racial stereotypes.
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