Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (20 page)

It is not possible to measure precisely the political influence of
Uncle Tom's Cabin
. One can quantify its sales but cannot point to votes that it changed or laws that it inspired. Yet few contemporaries doubted its power. "Never was there such a literary
coup-de-main
as this," said Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. In England, Lord Palmerston, who as prime minister a decade later would face a decision whether to intervene on behalf of the South in the Civil War, read
Uncle Tom's Cabin
three times and admired it not so much for the story as "for the statesmanship of it." As Abraham Lincoln was grappling with the problem of slavery in the summer of 1862, he borrowed from the Library of Congress
A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin
, a subsequent volume by Stowe containing documentation on which she had based the novel. When Lincoln met

21
. Charles H. Foster,
The Rungless Ladder: Harriet Beecher Stowe and New England Puritanism
(Durham, N.C., 1954), 12, 28–29.

the author later that year, he reportedly greeted her with the words: "So you're the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war."
²²

Uncle Tom's Cabin
struck a raw nerve in the South. Despite efforts to ban it, copies sold so fast in Charleston and elsewhere that booksellers could not keep up with the demand. The vehemence of southern denunciations of Mrs. Stowe's "falsehoods" and "distortions" was perhaps the best gauge of how close they hit home. "There never before was anything so detestable or so monstrous among women as this," declared the
New Orleans Crescent
. The editor of the
Southern Literary Messenger
instructed his book reviewer: "I would have the review as hot as hellfire, blasting and searing the reputation of the vile wretch in petticoats who could write such a volume." Within two years proslavery writers had answered
Uncle Tom's Cabin
with at least fifteen novels whose thesis that slaves were better off than free workers in the North was capsulized by the title of one of them:
Uncle Robin in His Cabin in Virginia and Tom Without One in Boston
.
²³
A decade later during the Civil War a South Carolina diarist with doubts of her own about slavery reflected the obsession of southerners with
Uncle Tom's Cabin
by using it as a constant benchmark to measure the realities of life in the South.
²⁴

In a later age "Uncle Tom" became an epithet for a black person who behaved with fawning servility toward white oppressors. This was partly a product of the ubiquitous Tom shows that paraded across the stage for generations and transmuted the novel into comic or grotesque melodrama. But an obsequious Tom was not the Uncle Tom of Stowe's pages. That Tom was one of the few true Christians in a novel intended to stir the emotions of a Christian public. Indeed, Tom was a Christ

22
. Longfellow quoted in Thomas F. Gossett,
Uncle Tom's Cabin and American Literature
(Dallas, 1985), 166; Palmerston quoted in Edmund Wilson,
Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War
(New York, 1962), 8; Earl Schenck Miers, ed.,
Lincoln Day by Day: A Chronology
1809–1865, 3 vols. (Washington, 1960), III, 121; Herbert Mitgang, ed.,
Abraham Lincoln: A Press Portrait
(Chicago, 1971), 373. Dramatized versions of
Uncle Tom's Cabin
quickly reached the stage. At first these plays expressed the novel's themes and augmented its antislavery message. As time went on, however, "Tom Shows" lost much of their antislavery content and became minstrel-show parodies.

23
. Gossett,
Uncle Tom's Cabin and American Culture
, 185–211; Craven,
Growth of Southern Nationalism
, 153–57.

24
. See the frequent references to Mrs. Stowe and her book in C. Vann Woodward, ed.,
Mary Chesnut's Civil War
(New Haven, 1981).

figure. Like Jesus he suffered agony inflicted by evil secular power. Like Jesus he died for the sins of humankind in order to save the oppressors as well as his own people. Stowe's readers lived in an age that understood this message better than ours. They were part of a generation that experienced not embarrassment but inspiration when they sang the words penned a decade later by another Yankee woman after she watched soldiers march off to war:

As he died to make men holy,
    Let us die to make men free.

II

The South's defensive-aggressive temper in the 1850s stemmed in part from a sense of economic subordination to the North. In a nation that equated growth with progress, the census of 1850 alarmed many southerners. During the previous decade, population growth had been 20 percent greater in the free states than in the slave states. Lack of economic opportunity seemed to account for this ominous fact. Three times as many people born in slave states had migrated to free states as vice versa, while seven-eighths of the immigrants from abroad settled in the North, where jobs were available and competition with slave labor nonexistent. The North appeared to be racing ahead of the South in crucial indices of economic development. In 1850 only 14 percent of the canal mileage ran through slave states. In 1840 the South had possessed 44 percent of the country's railroad mileage, but by 1850 the more rapid pace of northern construction had dropped the southern share to 26 percent.
²⁵
Worse still were data on industrial production. With 42 percent of the population, slave states possessed only 18 percent of the country's manufacturing capacity, a decline from the 20 percent of 1840. More alarming, nearly half of this industrial capital was located in the four border states whose commitment to southern rights was shaky.

The one bright spot in the southern economy was staple agriculture. By 1850 the price of cotton had climbed back to nearly double its low of 5.5 cents a pound in the mid-1840s. But this silver lining belonged to a dark cloud. The states that grew cotton kept less than 5 percent of it at home for manufacture into cloth. They exported 70 percent of it

25
. It should be noted, however, that the principal cities and staple-producing areas of the South were located on or near navigable rivers, which made canals and railroads less important than in the North.

abroad and the remainder to northern mills, where the value added by manufacture equaled the price that raw cotton brought the South, which in turn imported two-thirds of its clothing and other manufactured goods from the North or abroad. But even this did not fully measure the drain of dollars from the South's export-import economy. Some 15 or 20 percent of the price of raw cotton went to "factors" who arranged credit, insurance, warehousing, and shipping for planters. Most of these factors represented northern or British firms. Nearly all the ships that carried cotton from southern ports and returned with manufactured goods were built and owned by northern or British companies. On their return voyages from Europe they usually put in at northern ports because of the greater volume of trade there, trans-shipping part of their cargoes for coastwise or overland transport southward, thereby increasing freight charges on imported goods to the South.
²⁶

Southern self-condemnation of this "degrading vassalage" to Yankees became almost a litany during the sectional crisis from 1846 to 1851. "Our whole commerce except a small fraction is in the hands of Northern men," complained a prominent Alabamian in 1847. "Take Mobile as an example—
of our Bank Stock is owned by Northern men. . . . Our wholesale and retail business—everything in short worth mentioning is in the hands of men who invest their profits at the North. . . . Financially we are more enslaved than our negroes."
²⁷
Yankees "abuse and denounce slavery and slaveholders," declared a southern newspaper four years later, yet "we purchase all our luxuries and necessaries from the North. . . . Our slaves are clothed with Northern manufactured goods [and] work with Northern hoes, ploughs, and other implements.

26
. The data in these paragraphs have been compiled mainly from various schedules of the U. S. census reports for 1840 and 1850. Some of this material is conveniently summarized in tables in Lewis C. Gray,
History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860
, 2 vols. (Washington, 1933), II, 1043; Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., ed.,
History of American Presidential Elections 1789–1968
, 4 vols. (New York, 1971), II, 1128–52; and in
Twelftn Census of the United States Taken in the Year
1900,
Manufactures
, Part II (Vol. 8), 982–89. Tables on canal and railroad mileage and on American foreign trade can be found in George Rogers Taylor,
The Transportation Revolution
, 1815–1860 (New York, 1951), 71, 451. Harold Woodman,
King Cotton and His Retainers
(Lexington, Ky., 1968), and Douglass C. North,
The Economic Growth of the United States
1790–1860 (New York, 1961), document the colonial economic status of the South as an exporter of raw materials and an importer of capital and manufactured goods.

27
. Joseph W. Lesesne to John C. Calhoun, Sept. 12, 1847, in J. Franklin Jameson, ed.,
Correspondence of John C. Calhoun
(Washington, 1900), 1134–35.

. . . The slaveholder dresses in Northern goods, rides in a Northern saddle . . . reads Northern books. . . . In Northern vessels his products are carried to market . . . and on Northern-made paper, with a Northern pen, with Northern ink, he resolves and re-resolves in regard to his rights." How could the South expect to preserve its power, asked the young southern champion of economic diversification James B. D. De Bow, when "the North grows rich and powerful whilst we at best are stationary?"
²⁸

In 1846 De Bow had established a magazine in New Orleans with the title
Commercial Review of the South and West
(popularly known as
De Bow's Review
) and a hopeful slogan on its cover, "Commerce is King." The amount "lost to us annually by our vassalage to the North," said De Bow in 1852, was "one hundred million dollars. Great God! Does Ireland sustain a more degrading relation to Great Britain? Will we not throw off this humiliating dependence?" De Bow demanded "action! ACTION!!
ACTION!!!
—not in the rhetoric of Congress, but in the busy hum of mechanism, and in the thrifty operations of the hammer and anvil."
²⁹
Plenty of southerners cheered De Bow's words, but they got more rhetoric than action.

De Bow was inspired to found his journal by the vision of a southern commercial empire evoked at a convention in Memphis in 1845. This meeting renewed a tradition of southern conclaves that had begun in the 1830s with a vow "to throw off the degrading shackles of our commercial dependence."
³⁰
The dominant theme in these early conventions was the establishment of southern-owned shipping lines for direct trade with Europe. The Memphis convention, the first to meet after a six-year hiatus, focused on the need for railroad connections between the lower Mississippi valley and the south Atlantic coast. No such railroads nor any southern shipping lines had materialized by 1852, but De Bow prodded the commercial convention movement into life again that year with a meeting at New Orleans. Thereafter a similar gathering met at least once a year through 1859 in various southern cities.

These conventions were prolific in oratory and resolutions. In addition

28
. Alabama newspaper quoted in Robert Royal Russel,
Economic Aspects of Southern Sectionalism, 1840–1861
(Urbana, 1923), 48;
De Bow's Review
, 12 (1851), 557.