“So,you’retheli.le
womanwhowrote
thebookthat
startedthisgreat
war.”–Abraham
LincolntoHarriet
BeecherStowe
Last week, we constructed a theory of the slave
narrative and the aesthetic and political strategies it
deployed to critique slavery. In what ways in UTC
similar? And in what ways is it different?
What are the political and aesthetic strategies UTC
uses to critique slavery?
Fugi'veSlaveAct
“Any person who shall knowingly and willingly obstruct, hinder, or
prevent such claimant, his agent or attorney, or any person or
persons lawfully assisting him, her, or them, from arresting such a
fugitive from service or labor, either with or without process as
aforesaid, or shall rescue, or attempt to rescue, such fugitive from
service or labor, from the custody of such claimant, his or her
agent or attorney, or other person or persons lawfully assisting as
aforesaid, when so arrested, pursuant to the authority herein given
and declared; or shall aid, abet, or assist such person so owing
service or labor as aforesaid, directly or indirectly, to escape from
such claimant, his agent or attorney, or other person or persons
legally authorized as aforesaid; or shall harbor or conceal such
fugitive, so as to prevent the discovery and arrest of such person,
after notice or knowledge of the fact that such person was a
fugitive from service or labor as aforesaid, shall, for either of said
offences, be subject to a fine not exceeding one thousand dollars,
and imprisonment not exceeding six months”
“The slave Hamlin , the first fugi've
that came under the new law, was
given up by the bloodhounds of the
north to the bloodhounds of the
south”-Jacobs,155
AmericanCivilWar
1861-1865
States that seceded before April 15, 1861
States that seceded after April 15, 1861
Union states that permitted slavery
Union states that banned slavery
Territories
Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Senitments, 1758
An ethics of sympathy
“By the imagination we place
ourselves in his situation, we
conceive ourselves enduring all the
same torments, we enter as it were
into his body, and become in some
measure the same person with
him…His agonies…when we have
thus adopted and made them our
own, begin at last to affect us, and
we then tremble and shudder at the
thought of what he feels” (9).
“If it were your Harry, mother, or your Willie, that were
going to be torn from you by a brutal trader, tomorrow
morning,—if you had seen the man, and heard that the
papers were signed and delivered, and you had only from
twelve o’clock till morning to make good your escape,—
how fast could you walk? How many miles could you make
in those few brief hours, with the darling at your bosom,—
the little sleepy head on your shoulder,—the small, soft
arms trustingly holding on to your neck?” (105)
“oh! Mother that reads this, has there never been in your
life a drawer, or a closet the opening of which has been to
you like the opening of a little grave? Ah! happy mother
that you are, if it has not been so.” (116)
“ ‘You ought to be ashamed, John! Poor, homeless,
houseless creatures! [The Fugitive Slave Act] is a shameful,
wicked, abominable law, and I’ll break it, for one, the first
time I get a chance; and I hope I shall have a chance, I do!
Things have got to a pretty pass, if a woman can’t give a
warm supper and a bed to poor, starving creatures, just
because they are slaves and have been abused and
oppressed all their lives, poor things!” (144)
“ ‘My friend’ he said [to Haley …] ‘how can you, how dare you carry on a trade like this?
Look at those poor creatures. Here I am, rejoicing in my heart that I am going home to my
wife and child; and the same bell which is a signal to carry me onward towards them will
part this poor man and his wife forever. Depend upon it, God will bring into judgment for
this’
[…]
‘Oh, but nobody thinks anything of these traders! They are universally despised,--never
received into any decent society.’
But who, sir, makes the trader? Who is most to blame? The enlightened, cultivated,
intelligent man, who supports the system of which the trader is the inevitable result, or the
poor trader himself ? You make the public statement that calls for his trade, that debauches
and depraves him, till he feels no shame in it; and in what are you better than he?
Are you educated and he ignorant, you high and he low, you refined and he coarse,
you talented and he simple?
In the day of a future Judgment, these very considerations may make it more
tolerable for him than for you.”
- “Incident of Lawful Trade”
“There stood the two children representatives of the
two extremes of society. The fair, high-bred child, with
her golden head, her deep eyes, her spiritual, noble brow,
and prince-like movements; and her black, keen, subtle,
cringing, yet acute neighbour. They stood the
representatives of their races. The Saxon, born of ages
of cultivation, command, education, physical and moral
eminence; the Africa, born of ages of oppression,
submission, ignorance, toil and vice!” (362)
Ethics of resistance:
Eva: “promise me, dear father, that Tom shall have his
freedom as soon as’ – she stopped, and said, in a
hesitating tone- ‘I am gone!’” (404)
Topsy: “Topsy was at first despised and contemned by
the upper servants. They soon found reason to alter
their opinion. It was very soon discovered that whoever
cast indignity on Topsy was sure to meet with some
inconvenient accident shortly after” (365)
Essays – arguments vs. observation
“It is startling to notice how much Simon Legree’s plantation –
Stowe’s very archetype of the Slave South – looks like Lowell,
Massachusetts, or any of the other mill towns that ha sprung up
in the industrializing Northeast in the 1830s and 1840s. […Stowe
fully realizes the Slave South as the dark Satanic field of US
industrial modernity. In the decade before the Civil War, the
novel most definitively about and definitional of the South
actually obliterates it, as Stowe writes the dystopic visions of the
modernizing national center over the imaginative terrain of its
Southern other” –Our South
looks like North (observation) thus displaces problem of
industrialization on the South (argument)