UNCLE TOM’S CABIN. (continued 2)

Legree’s exterior only very faintly adumbrates the interior horrors of his character, as the reader soon finds out. He seems specially pleased with one of his purchases—the sweet Emmeline, who, as they approach “home,” feels the hot foul breath of the serpent upon her.

‘“Well, my little dear,” said he, turning to Emmeline, and laying his hand on her shoulder, “we’re almost home!” When Legree scolded and stormed, Emmeline was terrified; but when he laid his hand upon her, and spoke as he now did, she felt as if she had rather he would strike her. The expression of his eyes made her soul sick, and her flesh creep.

“You didn’t ever wear earrings!” he said, taking hold of her small ear with his coarse fingers.

“No, mas’r,” said Emmeline, trembling, and looking down.

“Well, I’ll give you a pair, when we get home, if you’re a good girl. You needn’t be so frightened! I don’t mean to make you work so very hard! You’ll have fine times with me, and live like a lady! Only be a good girl!”’

Alas, sweet Emmeline! motherless Emmeline! was there no MAN—no father, no brother, near you, to fell the monster to the earth? No, none; and you are close to the residence of your eager and brutal proprietor. There he had destined her as the successor of one of whom he was tired—but whom yet he feared: and that was Cassy; a being whom we did not suppose Mrs Stowe, with all our trust in her previously exhibited powers, equal to conceiving and supporting. She occasionally reminds us of some of the greatest passages in Greek tragedy.

‘“Come, mistress”—quoth Legree to Emmeline, having reached the house, and dismissed all his other purchases to their prescribed localities in the plantation—“You go in here with me!” A dark wild face was seen, for a moment, to glance at the window of the house; and as Legree opened the door, a female voice said something in a quick imperative tone.’

This was—Cassy; and here is her figure.

‘She was tall and slenderly formed, with remarkably delicate hands and feet, and dressed in neat and respectable garments. By the appearance of her face, she might have been between thirty-five and forty; and it was a face that, once seen, could never be forgotten—one of those that, at a glance, seemed to convey to us an idea of a wild, painful, and romantic history. Her head was high, and her eyebrows marked with beautiful clearness. Her straight, well-formed nose, her finely cut mouth, and the graceful contour of her head and neck, showed that she must once have been beautiful; but her face was deeply wrinkled with lines of pain, and of proud and bitter endurance. Her complexion was sallow and unhealthy, her cheeks thin, her features sharp, and her whole form emaciated. But her eye was the most remarkable feature—so large, so heavily black, overshadowed by long lashes of equal darkness, and so wildly, mournfully despairing. There was a fierce pride and defiance in every line of her face, in every nerve of the flexible lip, in every motion of her body; but in her eye was a deep, settled, night of anguish—an expression so hopeless and unchanging, as to contrast fearfully with the scorn and pride expressed by her whole demeanour.’

Her relations to Legree were of a mysterious character. The first that Tom saw of her was when she suddenly, and to the surprise of all her fellow-slaves, made her appearance, as one of themselves, in the cotton-fields, walking by his side, erect and proud, in the dim grey of the dawn. She works with the others, but infinitely quicker and more effectively. Observing Tom generously transfer some cotton of his own picking to the sack of a feeble female fellow-slave, whom he had just seen brutally maltreated by the driver—she approached him, and transferred some of her own cotton to his bag, telling him in a fearful whisper, “that he knew nothing about that place, or he would not have done what he had: that when he had been there a month, he would have ceased helping anybody, finding it hard enough to take care of his own skin.”

“The Lord forbid, missus,” quoth Tom, instinctively recognising her superiority over the others.

‘“The Lord never visits these parts,” said she, bitterly. But her action had been observed by the driver, across the field: and flourishing his whip, he came up to her. “What! what!” he said to the woman, with an air of triumph, “You a-foolin! Go along! yer under me now—mind yourself, or ye’ll cotch it!” A glance like sheet-lightning suddenly flashed from her dark eyes; and facing about, with quivering lip and dilated nostrils, she drew herself up, and fixed a glance, blazing with rage and scorn, on the driver. “Dog!” she exclaimed, “touch me, if you dare! I’ve power enough yet to have you torn by the dogs, burnt alive, cut to inches!—I’ve only to say the word!”

“What de debel you here for, den?” said the man, cowed, and retreating a step or two. “Didn’t mean no harm, Misse Cassy!” and he slinks to another quarter of the field.’

Weighing time comes in the evening.

‘“So,” says Legree, to his myrmidon, “Misse Cassy did her day’s work?”

“Iss! she pick like de debil and all his angels!”

“She’s got ’em all in her, I believe!” said Legree; and growled a brutal oath.’

At length it is Cassy’s time, and she delivers her basket to be weighed with a haughty, negligent air: Legree looking in her eyes with a sneering, yet inquiring glance. She fixed her black eyes on him steadily—her lips moved slightly, and she said something in French. What it was, no one knew, but the expression of Legree’s face became demoniacal; and he half-raised his hand, as if to strike—a gesture which she regarded with fierce disdain, and turned, and walked away. Then Tom comes up; and—poor fellow—for once we rejoice to say, shows something like a spirit: for being ordered to try his hand on flogging the poor female slave—falsely accused of not having picked her quantity—he steadily refuses; and after having received a shower of blows from Legree, firmly repeats, “This yer thing I can’t feel it right to do,” wiping the blood from his face; “and massa, I never shall do it—never!” All the shivering wretches around exhibit consternation at his audacity; and Legree looked stupefied and confounded; but at last he burst forth:⁠—

‘“What, ye blasted black beast! tell me ye don’t think it right to do what I tell ye! What have any of you cussed cattles to do with thinking what’s right? I’ll put a stop to it. Why, what do ye think ye are? Maybe ye think ye’r a gentleman, Master Tom, to be a-telling your master what’s right, and what an’t; so you pretend it’s wrong to flog the gal?”

“I think so, mas’r,” said Tom; “the poor crittur’s sick and feeble, ’twould be downright cruel, and it’s what I never will do, nor begin to, mas’r. If you mean to kill me, kill me; but as to my raising my hand agin any one here, I never shall: I’ll die first.” Tom spoke in a mild voice, but with a decision that could not be mistaken. Legree shook with anger; his greenish eyes glared fiercely, and his very whiskers seemed to curl with passion; but, like some ferocious beast that plays with its victim before he devours it, he kept back his strong impulse to proceed to immediate violence, and broke out into bitter raillery. “Well, here’s a pious dog, at last, let down among us sinners! a saint, a gentleman, and no less, to talk to us sinners about our sins! Powerful holy crittur he must be! Here, you rascal; you make believe to be so pious, didn’t you never hear out of yer Bible, ‘Servants, obey your masters’? An’t I your master? Didn’t I pay down twelve hundred dollars cash for all there is in yer old cussed black shell? An’t yer mine now, body and soul?” he said, giving Tom a violent kick with his heavy boot; “tell me!” In the very depth of physical suffering, bowed by brutal oppression, this question shot a gleam of joy and triumph through Tom’s soul. He suddenly stretched himself up, and looking earnestly to heaven, while the tears and blood that flowed down his face mingled, he exclaimed—“No, no, no! my soul an’t yours, mas’r! You havn’t bought it; ye can’t buy it; it’s been bought and paid for by one that’s able to keep it. No matter—no matter, you can’t harm me!”

“I can’t!” said Legree, with a sneer; “we’ll see. Here, Sambo! Quimbo! give this dog such a breakin in as he won’t get over this month.”

The two gigantic negroes that now laid hold of Tom, with fiendish exultation in their faces, might have formed no unapt personification of powers of darkness. The poor woman screamed with apprehension, and all rose, as by a general impulse, while they dragged him unresisting from the place.’

Sambo and Quimbo are two huge black fiends, each savage, sycophantic towards Legree, rivals of each other in his good graces, and abhorring poor Tom, whom some expressions of Legree show to have been designed to become his chief overlooker.

While Tom is lying in an exposed outhouse at midnight, groaning and bleeding, alone, the night damp and close, the thick air swarming with myriads of musquitoes, which increased the restless torture of his wounds, whilst a burning thirst—a torture beyond all others, filled up the uttermost measure of physical anguish⁠—

“Oh, good Lord, do look down! Give me the victory—give me the victory over all!” prayed poor Tom, in his anguish, when a footstep is heard behind him—the light of a lantern flashes in his eyes, and he recognises Cassy, come to him like a ministering angel. At length she sits beside him, when he has become somewhat more easy and composed for a while under the soothing applications of his companion; and she mutters a few words, in rejoinder to his feeble but trustful exclamations, of despair and atheism—“There’s no God, or he’s taken sides against us; all goes against us, heaven and earth! Everything is pushing us into hell! Why shouldn’t we go?” In a few scorching words of misery she tells him that she, “a woman delicately bred,” has been for four long years in the hell—of Legree’s presence and power—her whole body and soul, cursing every moment of her life—the slave of his brutal passions; “and now he has got a new one—a young thing, only fifteen! And she’s brought her Bible here—here, to hell with her!” She adds, that she has witnessed scenes of savage cruelty, of mortal cruelty, which “would make any one’s hair rise, and teeth chatter to hear—but it is useless resisting. There’s not a white person who could testify if you were burned alive!” She lets fall a hint that sweet Emmeline is trying bravely to struggle against her fate—at present!

She gives Tom an outline of her history. She had been the idolised daughter of a lovely slave, and educated in the most expensive manner at a convent; but her father, before he could fulfil his intention of freeing her, died of cholera; and she was sold to a man, who concealed from her that he had given two thousand dollars for her. Imagining that she was his free choice, and he handsome, fond, and indulgent, she lived a little while with him as in Paradise, and had two children—a boy, Henry, and a girl, Elise. A cousin of his caught sight of her, and resolved to possess her, succeeded by shameful arts in alienating his affection from her, and then persuading him to sell her, with her two children. He forced her, recoiling from his embraces, to live with him, and sold off her two idolised children. In a moment of frenzy——All she recollects is, that “something snapped in her head—there was a great bowie-knife gleaming on the table.... She caught it—flew upon him—all grew dark, and she knew nothing more till she woke, long afterwards, when she found that he had left her to be sold; and, to realise the most from her, had secured her good attendance. As the fever left her, “they made her get up and dress every day; and gentlemen used to come in, and stand, and smoke their cigars, and look at me, and ask questions, and debate my price!—They threatened to whip if I were not gayer, and didn’t take pains to make myself agreeable.” She was ultimately bought by a planter, a Captain Stuart; and the child she had by him—so like her lost Henry!—when, two weeks old, she kissed, cried over, and—poisoned with laudanum—“I held him close to my heart, while he slept to death!” At length, Captain Stuart dies of fever. “Everybody died that wanted to live; and I, that wanted to die, lived” to be “sold, passed from hand to hand, till I grew faded, wrinkled, had a fever—and—this wretch (Legree) bought me, and—here I am!... In the judgment-day, I will stand up before God a witness against them that have ruined me and my children, body and soul!—When I was a girl, I thought I was religious. I used to love God and prayer! Now, I’m a lost soul, pursued by devils that torment me day and night. They keep pushing me on—and—I’ll do it, too, some of these days!” she said, clenching her hand, while an insane light gleamed in her heavy black eyes.

Legree in his lair resembles a huge tiger. As painted by the author, with graphic force,—sitting in his desolate apartment, drowning reflection in brandy-and-water,—admitting Sambo and Quimbo to his savage debauches,—and in their absence having his fierce bloodhounds for his companions—(anything better than being alone)—it seems wonderful that any human being could obtain over him any kind of influence, and much less ascendancy; yet Cassy has, in spite of himself, acquired—“the kind of influence which a strong impassioned woman can ever keep on the most brutal man.” Of late, however, she had become “more irritable and restless under the hideous yoke of her servitude, and her irritability sometimes burst forth in the ravings of insanity; and this liability made her an object of dread to Legree, who had that superstitious horror of insane persons which is common to coarse and uninstructed minds. When he brought Emmeline to the house, all the smouldering embers of womanly feeling flashed up in the exhausted heart of Cassy, and she took part with the girl.”

One night, very late, she was gliding about unknown, and came to the window of the room where he was wildly carousing with the twin-fiends, Sambo and Quimbo. “She rested her small slender hand on the window behind, and looked fixedly at them—a world of anguish, scorn, and fierce bitterness in her black eyes,” as she saw them “singing, whooping, upsetting chairs, and making all manner of ludicrous and horrid grimaces at each other. ‘Would it be a sin to rid the world of such a wretch?’ said she to herself.” Many subsequent scenes in his career passing before us must more and more have inclined Cassy to answer the fearful question in the negative; as though it had shaped itself—“Is it any harm to kill a rattlesnake that has located itself near your house?”

‘When he first bought her, Cassy was, indeed, a woman delicately bred; and then he crushed her without scruple beneath the hoof of his brutality. But as time, and debasing influences, and despair, hardened womanhood within her, and waked the fires of fiercer passions, she had become, in a manner, his mistress; and he alternately tyrannised over, and dreaded her. This influence had become more harassing and decided, since partial insanity had given a strange, weird, unsettled cast to all her language.’

In fact, her tormentor was on one occasion much nearer a ghastly climax than he had any idea of; for she had drugged his brandy—left him helpless—the back door unlocked—and then gone silently, at midnight, to Tom, to tell him that the hour of liberty was at hand.

‘“I shall have it, Misse, in God’s time,” said he.

“Ah, but you may have it to-night!” said Cassy, with a flash of sudden energy. “Come on!”

Tom hesitated. “Come!” she whispered, fixing her black eyes on him. “He’s asleep—sound! an axe is there! I’ll show you the way! I’d have done it myself—only my arms are so weak! Come along!”

“Not for ten thousand worlds, Misse!” said Tom firmly, stopping, and holding her back.... He flings himself on the floor, grasping her arms, imploring her for the love of God to abstain. “We must suffer, and wait the Lord’s time!”

“Wait!” said Cassy. “Haven’t I waited? till my head is dizzy, and my heart sick? What has he made me suffer? What has he made hundreds of poor creatures suffer? Isn’t he wringing the life blood out of you? I’m called on! I’m called on! they call on me! His time’s come, and I’ll have his heart’s blood!”

“No! no! no!” exclaimed Tom, holding her small hands, which were clasped with spasmodic violence.’

The slave triumphed, and saved the life of—his murderer. He suggests to Cassy the attempt to escape, however desperate, “without blood-guiltiness;” and while he is speaking to her, “there flashed through her mind a plan so simple and feasible in all its details, as to awaken an instant hope.” We suspect that our readers will hardly be of her opinion. This was the nature of “the stratagem” which had occurred to her. Legree was very superstitious; and it is evident that some not very recent and barbarous murder of one of his slaves had largely developed his superstitious fears, and especially with reference to a particular apartment. Cassy, having taken Emmeline into her counsels, resolves to terrify Legree with the idea of this room being haunted, in order that, having a secret access to it, she may, when the proper time arrives, make it her safe and undisturbed retreat. She forthwith commences operations by training Legree’s mind into a more and more terrified mood with reference to this apartment, causing all sorts of strange, dismal, unearthly noises to issue from it, ghosts to be seen gliding in white out of it, and so forth. Thus far she succeeds; and having, in the meanwhile, made up two little beds in a huge box in the dreaded room, and provided food, candle-light, and clothes for their journey, she puts her scheme in operation. Late in the evening, she and Emmeline affect to make their escape, contriving to be seen in the act by Legree; on which he gallops homeward—orders out Sambo and Quimbo, and a posse of other willing myrmidons, and also the bloodhounds, and away they start on their cruel and perhaps bloody errand. In the meantime, the supposed fugitives have returned home unobserved, and taken up their abode in the haunted chamber. There they listen to the hunting party—men, horses, dogs—returning wearied and disappointed. The next day the search is renewed, with the like ill success; and, after a day or two’s seclusion in their hiding-place—near which ghosts are seen to glide, and from which unearthly noises issue—the adventurous pair start on their perilous journey—Cassy disguised as a Creole Spanish lady, dressed entirely in black, and Emmeline as her servant. She found no difficulty in assuming and sustaining the character. “Brought up from early life in the highest society, her language, air, and movements were all in accordance with it; and she had still sufficient left of her once splendid wardrobe and sets of jewels, to enable her to complete her personation. A small black bonnet on her head, covered by a veil thick with embroidery, concealed her face.” It was near sunrise when the two terrified and breathless travellers paused, for a moment, in a little knot of trees near the town. Having purchased a trunk in the outskirts, she requested the seller to send it with her; and thus, escorted by a boy wheeling her trunk, and Emmeline behind her carrying her carpet-bag and sundry bundles, she made her appearance at a small tavern, like a lady of consideration, and there encountered George Shelby, who, with herself, was awaiting the arrival of the boat. He handed her courteously to it, and provided her with a good state-room; but Cassy found it expedient, on the plea of indisposition, to keep her room, and her bed—sedulously attended, it may be imagined, by her maid Emmeline—during the whole time they were on the Red River. Arrived at the Mississippi, they entered the good steamboat Cincinnati. How she disclosed herself to George Shelby, and became acquainted with Madame de Thoux—how the latter proved to be Emily, the long-lost sister of George Harris, and Cassy the mother of George’s wife—somewhat compendious work, it must be owned—has been seen. It was, in truth, as the author seems to have suspected, rather “a singular coincidence in their fortunes.” In due time they find their way to Montreal, where George and Eliza had established themselves in a neat tenement in the outskirts of the town, very happy and contented, he having found constant occupation in the shop of a worthy machinist. Cassy is now ending her days happily, “a devout and tender Christian.” Emmeline continued with them; and, on her passage to France, her beauty captivated the first mate of the vessel, and, shortly after entering the port, she became his wife. Before, however, this happy result has been effected, has occurred the crowning act of the tragedy—the martyrdom of poor Tom; who, being suspected by Legree of knowing of their escape, will not deny that he was privy to it, but will afford him no information. On this Legree, mortally infuriated, tells him that he “means to kill him”—“I’ve made up my mind to kill you.”

“‘It’s very likely, Mas’r!’ said Tom, calmly.”

We shall spare our readers the frightful scene, as one of simple butchery. One might as well describe, in detail, the slaughter of an ox by the slaughterer and his two assistants. He is felled to the ground by a blow of Legree, and Sambo and Quimbo flog him to death. These two grim instruments of their master’s murderous vengeance are filled with sudden remorse, when they shortly after revisit their victim, and hear from him words of resignation and forgiveness. They ask him “Who is Jesus, anyhow?” and on Tom, in a heavenly spirit, telling them, they ask Him for mercy.

“Poor critturs!” said Tom, “I’d be willing to bar all I have, if it’ll only bring you to Christ! O Lord! give me these two more souls, I pray!” To very many of our readers, these expressions will appear somewhat forced and peculiar; whilst others may recognise in them language with which poor Tom had become familiar in those scenes of religious exercise to which, we are told, he had been accustomed for four years before his introduction to the reader. “‘Tom,’ said Mr Shelby to Haley, ‘is a good, steady, sensible, pious fellow. He got religion at a camp meeting, four years ago; and I believe he really did get it. I have trusted him, since then, with everything I have: money, house, horses—and let him come and go round the country; and I always found him true and square in everything.” If such results follow “camp meetings,” they might be advantageously tried, and on a large scale, too, in this country. Some little time afterwards occurs the interview between dying Tom and young Mr Shelby, who had come to ransom him.

“‘Who—who—who shall separate us from the love of Christ?’ he said, in a voice that contended with mortal weakness; and with a smile he fell asleep.”

Regarded merely as a stroke of art, this closing scene may be contemplated with qualified feelings; but we shall offer no remarks upon what has evidently been conceived in a high religious, a nobly human spirit, and executed with no little power. Viewed in this light—and it ought to be viewed in no other, by a critic who has seized the scope and entered into the spirit of his author—objections to the development of Uncle Tom’s character melt away. He is not drawn to meet the views, or satisfy the exacting spirit of mere worldly persons, sickly novel-readers, or conceited supercilious critics. No, Tom is conceived in a lofty spirit, and adorned with all the meekness, the gentleness, the long-suffering, which can be drawn from the inexhaustible sources of our holy religion alone; he is set sublimely on a pinnacle to attract towards his oppressed race, represented by his crushed and bleeding form, the pitying eye of Christendom—to awaken, to encourage, to warn. “Suffering is,” indeed, “the badge of all their tribe;” and Europe has felt it to be so more strongly and directly, since the publication of this work, than it ever felt before. In the soft, glorious sunlight of Christian sympathy, the blackness of our poor brother’s skin—his skin torn with the incessant lash—disappears. Uncle Tom is actuated by religious principles which will not admit of his speaking or doing otherwise than he is represented as speaking and doing. His condition was that of a slave; it was a very hard one often, but had not always been such; and he was on the eve of escaping from it by lawful means, more than once, but the will of Providence had decreed otherwise. The sudden death of St Clare was permitted to consign unoffending Tom to the hideous Legree. But is not such an occurrence frequent in God’s ordinary all-wise, but inscrutable direction of human affairs? Presented to us under the conditions dictated by the objects and purposes of Mrs Stowe, how could she, without outraging propriety and defeating her whole, her only, and righteous purpose, have represented him, for instance, organising a revolt against the oppressor, in the course of which he and his maddened fellow-sufferers would have imbrued their hands in the blood of Legree? With Mrs Stowe’s proved powers of description, and her mastery over the feelings, she could have flashed before our eyes characters, scenes, and actions which only St Domingo could have paralleled! Instead, however, of playing the part of a mad incendiary, she has calmly and magnanimously addressed herself to the tribunal of public opinion, to the sense of justice, and of religion, by which all civilised mankind profess to be guided. She solemnly appeals to “the whole American church, of all denominations, unitedly to seek the entire abolition of slavery throughout America and throughout Christendom.” To “every individual Christian, who wishes to do something for the abolition of slavery,” she says—“Begin by doing what lies in your power for the coloured people in your vicinity.... The contest is to be carried on ‘with love unfeigned’—‘through every degree of opposition and persecution, a divine unprovokable spirit of love, which must finally conquer.... We must love both the slaveholder and the slave, never forgetting that both are our brethren.... We must use, as means, an earnest application of all straightforward, honourable, and just measures, for the removal of the system of slavery. Every man in his place should remonstrate against it. All its sophistical arguments should be answered, its biblical defences unmasked, by correct reasoning, and interpretation. Every mother should teach the evil of it to her children; every clergyman should fully and continually warn his church against any complicity with such a sin.” These are the weapons, not carnal, but of holy temper, with which Mrs Stowe would enter upon this warfare; and who shall rebuke her, and say her Nay? Not we. We say to her, with a tender recollection that it is a WOMAN of whom we are writing, All hail, thou impersonation of Christian love and purity! Thou very genius of philanthropy! Verily thou wilt have thy reward. Not merely in the praises of men, though they have been accorded already with an almost unanimous and universal assent; but in the reflections of a chastened and subdued—a warm, a loving, and devout spirit.

Taken as a literary whole, Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a work standing before the critical eye in large proportions, but somewhat irregularly and inartificially disposed; exhibiting, here and there, minor and easily removable marks of haste, and inexperienced workmanship. It would have been easy to contrive incidents, and that without deranging her general scheme, which would have kept curiosity on the stretch from first to last, and secured a sort of poetical justice which might have satisfied the minds of many of her readers;—by dealing, for instance, with Marie St Clare, a beautiful but venomous little reptile,—and the huge speckled monster Legree,—in a spirit of retribution, making their own acts entail upon them condign and appropriate punishment; but how could that have aided the declared moral purpose of the writer? She has done well, on the contrary, in representing a Haley, a Legree, a Marie St Clare, as still—cumbering the ground, as so many of the centres of innumerable circles of despotic barbarity.

The main defect of the construction of her work as a “story”—for such she terms it—is, its want of connectedness. The reader is hurried incessantly from side to side of the dividing line between the fortunes of Uncle Tom, and those of George and Eliza Harris, with the episodical incidents depending on them; coming to each with sympathies attuned to the other; which, again, as soon as they have begun to be attracted to the new object, are suddenly dissociated, to address themselves to the one which they had but recently quitted so abruptly.

With all its defects, however, this book is an instrument worthy of contributing to effect a grand purpose, to attack and subvert A SYSTEM: the only condition, in this view, being, that it is founded, not upon exaggeration and misrepresentation, but upon TRUTH. The moment that the work had attracted universal notice, it was obvious that it must challenge attention to the point of—TRUE, or FALSE, in its representations of the condition of American slavery. Mrs Stowe has cheerfully accepted the challenge thrown out to her—accepted it in a calm and temperate spirit, and with the resolute confidence of one believing herself right. She formally consents to have her book tried by the test proposed, always protesting that she has painted slavery as it is—has done ample justice to large portions of humane Southern slaveholders; but insisting that that is no answer to her case, which is, that the SYSTEM is one altogether opposed to the spirit of Christianity, and subversive of the rights, and destructive of the best interests, of man. It is one, she would say, that tends to stamp out, in every newly-born slave, the noble image of his Maker, to depress him beneath the level of humanity; and it is no answer to this to assert, as is asserted by one of the keenest and sternest of her opponents, that “the peculiar falsity of the book consists in making exceptional or impossible cases the representatives of the system.”⁠[12] To establish her great principle, on the one hand, and to controvert by evidence, on the other, the charge in point of fact, of having made the exception the rule, she has published what she calls A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which is, in fact, simply a series of Proofs and Illustrations of the truth of her representations. We have examined this Key to the Cabin with some attention, and are of opinion that its alleged facts are such as must be answered; or those whose accusations provoked its publication, will have succeeded in only placing a professed Fiction upon the solid basis of Fact. No one who reads this Key will tolerate being simply told, that Uncle Tom’s Cabin is founded on falsehood. She quotes (evidently, and even avowedly,) under the guidance of gentlemen of adequate experience and knowledge of the subject, from the authentic records of judicial decision, dealing with cases so appalling as, for a moment, even to make one think Legree painted in colours less dark than he might have been;—and also exhibits a vast mass of documents which cannot be disposed of, but by counterproof. We, of course, can deal with such statements but as we find them; knowing that they derive their value from the trustworthiness of a conscientious writer, conclusively confirmed by the absence of substantial disproof.—This volume, in a word, we commend to the serious consideration of every reflecting European and American reader of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

It were idle to class among these latter those who read simply to indulge a spurious whimpering sentimentality, or to have a morbid curiosity stimulated and inflamed by scenes of suffering and horror. But the Christian statesman, the enlightened politician, in either hemisphere, is bound, we think, to deal with the existence of this book, and the extensive effects produced by it, as a signal FACT. Great as are its literary merits, they are by no means sufficient, of themselves, to account for the universal attention which it has excited. It is because—to descend to a homely illustration—this book has acted like the sudden flash of the policeman’s lantern on a scene of secret midnight crime; it has painted in such vivid colours a condition of humanity hidden from European observation, as has attracted and fixed upon it the startled eyes of thinking Europe—of a FREE Christian people. In vain is it to hang beside it hasty recriminatory daubs of countervailing white slavery, or of the charms of slavery, as exhibited by a quasi paradisaical state, where such monsters as Legree, Mrs St Clare, Haley, Marks, and Tom Loker, exist not. All such attempts have already proved, as might have been anticipated, ridiculous failures, as far as they had been designed to stultify and falsify Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and divert from it the stern eye of public morality. How to deal with slavery is a tremendous problem for enlightened Christian statesmanship. It cannot tolerate the meddling of an unfortunate, impulsive, unreasoning, unreflecting, however ardent and generous, so-called humanity. True humanity, in this instance, consists in a sincere, comprehensive, deliberate, and resolute effort to rouse the PUBLIC OPINION of America on behalf of its slave population; and we believe that that public opinion will ere long find—with more embarrassment and danger the longer the discovery takes to be made—that slavery is an ulcer, a foul spreading ulcer, eating its way, perilously, to the very vitals of the body politic.

Will slavery—American slavery—will slavery at all—be in existence on the earth, a century hence? It is a vast question, and we will not presume to answer it. Perhaps our imaginary brother of the twentieth century may read what is here being written by his brother of the nineteenth, and applaud our caution. Slavery may then have become a thing of the past; or, in the fortunes of the world, in the mysterious, sublime, and even then unaccomplished destiny of the human race, that institution may still have its monstrous strangling coils encircling large and helpless sections of the family of man.

But if our shadowy brother of 1953 come to any other conclusions than are favourable to the intelligence of us of 1853, in respect of our reception of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, as Maga will doubtless be then in flourishing existence, we look to our lineal successors, in our seat of critical justice, to take up the cudgels for us, and vindicate our opinions and cautious vaticinations. And, in the mean time, Harriet Beecher Stowe, be it known a century hence, that we are ashamed of neither yourself, nor our reception of your book; that one not of the least important names of the present century is your own—already, and though you should never write another book. We doubt, indeed, whether you ever will do so—whether, at least, it will, or can be, a great book; for this one embodies your life-long experiences, heart-yearnings, and long-cherished thoughts. Your whole soul is wrapped up in its single noble purpose; so, Sis fœmina Unius Libri.

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