“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)