SLAVERY AND RELIGION IN HARRIET BEECHER STOWES

UNCLE TOMS CABIN

One of the most influential books ever written, Uncle Toms Cabin was written by Harriet

Beecher Stowe in order to advance the anti-slavery cause in the antebellum USA and to try to persuade

her compatriots by appealing to their God-given sense of morality, thus interconnecting religious beliefs

with abolitionist attitudes. In her preface to the 2003 edition of the book, Amanda Claybaugh points out to

the fact that the novel is indebted to the many varied Beecher family projects, the background providing

her with a firm foundation and faith in context of the social implications of Christianity. The father's

battle for the soul of the nation, the brothers' Christian ministries, one sister's advocacy for women and

slaves, another's celebration of the properly run homeall of these can be found in Uncle Tom alongside

Stowe's own contribution and originality. (Claybaugh, 14) The result was a novel more popular, and more

influential, than anyone could have imagined.

Slavery
The antebellum period in the USA was a time of dramatic socio-political concerns in which many

ideological modes appeared around the slavery conflict. The abolitionists ideals of setting blacks free

were mostly unaccepted by average white men whose economic interests depended on the submission of

slaves. The romantic racialism, which proclaimed kindness for the humane treatment of slaves and

sympathy to the antislavery argument (and seems to have influenced Stowe according to Claybaugh)

strongly opposed the notions of the superiority of the white man who degraded African American race.

There was also a contradicting conception of America as a democratic nation since the ideals of human

equality and freedom were being censored by the practice of slavery. Published in 1852, mainly as a

reaction to the Fugitive Slave Act, the novel brought even more controversy to the slavery issues within

this contradictory manifestation. (Gomez R. 116)

Basing his analysis of Uncle Toms Cabin on the sociologist R.W. Connells theory of relations

among masculinities, Luis Fernando Gmez R. offers in his article Relations among Masculinities:

Controversy in Uncle Toms Cabin a complete image of the way in which Stowe perceived slavery, her

novel clearly showing opposite relations of dominance, subordination, exploitation, and exclusion

between black and white males.

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 Considering themselves superior to black males, the whites reduced Africans to slaves, using

them as essential means to achieve economic goals. (Gomez R. 117) Stowe depicts this idea in the novel

in many instances, one of which that is worth citing found in the very first chapter, when Mr. Shelby is

trading the sale of some of his slaves with Haley, a slave trader. This scene basically shows not only how

white men have the power to decide on the lives of black people as they buy and sell them, but also their

incredulity, especially Haleys, that black men are able to be good Christians, implying that slaves were

inferior to really have a Christian mode of life as white men did. In the same way, Mr. Shelby decides to

sell Elizas little black boy without any concern about separating him from his mother and breaking one

of the most sacred institutions of society, the family.

Further on, Gomez R. emphasizes the idea that white men created a code based on

aggressiveness, ambition, racism and a compulsory heterosexuality in order to determine a particular

model of masculinity through which they could hold power. Thus, whites male hegemonic behavior is the

product of complicity. (Gomez R. 120) This idea is presented in the novel in the long discussion on

slavery that Ophelia has with Saint Clare in chapter XIX. Saint Clare suggests that he has slaves because

he inherited that tradition from his family, and because he cannot do anything to go against the system.

He recognizes that slavery is evil and whites are hypocritical but later he implies that he will do nothing

to change the system, even though he knows it is wrong. Evidently, this is an indication of cynical

masculine complicity. He is accepting the rules imposed by his race because, after all, he is taking

advantage of the situation in order to please his own materialistic benefit.

Another aspect of Connells theory important for this analysis is that of subordination, connected

to the corrupt and immoral practice of physical and psychological abuse, punishments, economic, social,

and cultural discrimination, verbal insult, humiliation of any kind, and even death, if necessary. (Gomez

R. 121) To this respect, Stowes intention was to show the horrors and abuse of slavery, which were

inflicted by the whites masculine ideology. Whites were convinced that they were benevolent because

slavery was divine providence and God had destined Africans to be submitted since they were thought to

be animal like and inferior, and because slaves labor was a profitable business tactic that provided whites

the means to increase their fortunes.

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 An example of masculine subordination that Beecher-Stowe portrays in the novel is Legrees

attempt to dominate Tom in body and soul. The confrontation between these antagonist masculinities is

clearly based on hegemonic power in which Legree submits Tom by using a method of verbal abuse and

physical cruelty until Tom is humiliated to the lowest level of marginalization. Legree represents the

compulsively racist characteristics of manhood that turn out to be animalized, since he acts like he has an

irrational impulse of rage. As he emphasizes that Tom is completely his property because Legree paid

much money for him and that Toms body and soul is Legrees now, it is implied that Toms personal

identity and masculinity is totally annulled by his hegemonic oppressor. (Gomez R. 121)

In her lecture entitled Uncle Toms Cabin: Its History, Its Issues, and Its Consequences,

Deborah S. Koelling strongly underlines the fact that precisely the characters who demonstrate traditional

masculinity actually become villains. Among these, Legree is the most degraded man in the novel, but he

is also the man who is most masculine, according to Stowes societys definition. By presenting Tom

the way she does, Stowe manages to create sympathy for the black race and illustrate her idea of perfect

masculinity. (Koelling, 8) Since black men constituted a subservient kind incapable to freely express their

masculinity on normal basis and in correspondence to their African cultural ideals, Stowe portrays black

males, in spite of their circumstances, developing another type of masculinity based on a strong Christian

faith resembling the masculinity of Jesus Christ. (Gomez R. 122)

Religion
Modern critics attack Stowes idealization of characters in the novel, especially that of

Uncle Tom, as being uncharacteristically pious and not reflecting the actions of real people. However,

Veronica Margrave foregrounds the idea that taking into consideration the deep-rooted connection

Stowes novel makes with the most popular book and source of her time - The Bible, one can recognize it

as a carefully constructed call to Christianity. Most readers do not have the familiarity to The Bible nor

use Christian imagery in everyday conversation as they did in Stowes day, and this leads the modern

reader miss even the smallest religious imagery in the novel. (Margrave, 1)
From the opening chapters of the novel, there are echoes of Christ in Tom's words and

actions, suggestions that Tom somehow resembles Christ. (Claybaugh, 29) When he learns that he is to be

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sold, for instance, he refuses to attempt an escape or even to protest, for he knows that if he is not sold

then his family and friends will be instead; he chooses to bear all suffering on their behalf. Another

disputed scene is that when Tom chose to stay with St. Clare when he was offered his freedom, the author

describing it as a gesture made by a Christian man who saw another in need, and chose to be a situational

martyr, choosing another over himself. Thus, Tom emerges as a strong and enduring man who is able to

undergo suffering and humiliation and who is adhered to a fixed Christian moral, all his actions and

thoughts reflecting a fortified connection with Gods designs.

His refusal to deny his faith in the face of even the cruelest treatment sets up once again a

pivotal martyrdom that is central to Stowes message in Uncle Toms Cabin, as Veronica Margrave points

out. As soon as Tom is in the possession of Legree, his personal belongings are stripped from him in a

mockery and divided among the deckhands much like Christs stripping and mocking after his

condemnation and the division of his things at Calvary. At the agonizing moment of his death, Tom

forgives his tyrant master and dies in the name of love for others and in the name of God, his real master.

Through Toms characterization, then, Stowe, who opposed slavery, wanted to show blacks as being

strong and masculine in spirit and faith, suggesting that Toms masculinity parallels that of Jesus Christs,

who endured humiliations and became a hero by leading a conduct of obedience and self-sacrifice.

(Gomez, 122)
Seeing the novel as a rewriting of the Bible as the story of a Negro slave, Gomez R. states that

Stowes main intention, as being an active member of the Christian Evangelical church, was to show the

American society that the imposition of hegemony and subordination of human beings was an evil

practice and that, therefore, whites complex of superiority had gone too far. Stowe believed that ruthless

masculinities based on despotic power and compulsive expression of brutal manly behaviors had taken

men away from moral decency. (Gomez, 122)

But Stowes Evangelical notion of masculinity functions in a deeper and more sublime

way because it is not only the fight between two males, but it is also the representation of the eternal fight

between good and evil. Stowes idea is that masculinity can be good, not evil, and that is why Tom has to

die. Her point is that masculinity is to be away from the ideas of power, rudeness, and violence because it

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is a false social and cultural construction. In other words, due to her religious influence, she believed,

paraphrasing in modern terms, that if there should be a cultural construct of masculinity, it should be

constructed on ethical and moral Christian foundations. (Gomez, 123)

In conclusion, the novel not only increased the number of antislavery activists and

strengthened their resolve, but it also, in doing so, provided the North with a powerful language through

which the long struggle for union could be articulated and sustained. By taking slavery to be the chief

difference between North and South and by framing the issue of slavery in apocalyptic terms, Uncle

Tom's Cabin, made the coming war seem inevitable, righteous, even holy. Stowe carefully constructed the

story of Uncle Tom to be charged with religious symbolism in an effort to bring light to the one thing she

felt should end slavery, the Christian Church and the beliefs it propagated and the abolitionists. Stowes

notion of Christian masculinity was not an impossible task because it did not mean to suffer and sacrifice

in the literal sense as many may have understood. She wanted to show that one of the ways to abolish

slavery was to change mens hearts. After all, her proposal was defined on normal ethical and moral

principles that should be part in the social practice of normal masculinity.

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 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Claybaugh, Amanda Introduction And Notes To Uncle Toms Cabin, 2003
Gomez, R., Luis Fernando - Relations Among Masculinities: Controversy In Uncle

Toms Cabin, Web

Koelling, S., Deborah - Uncle Toms Cabin: Its History, Its Issues, And Its Consequences,

Web

Margrave, Veronica Rethinking Contemporary Criticism Of Uncle Toms Cabin: Unraveling The Myth

Of Transparency, Web