Garrison v. Stowe
A Comparison of Moderate and Radical Abolitionism
In the decades leading up to the Civil War the cause of abolitionism took many forms and a variety of opinions. Two of the most prominent figures of the abolitionism movement in America were William Lloyd Garrison and Harriet Beecher Stowe. “As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another” says Proverbs[1] and, “He who is not against us is for us,” said Christ.[2] As much could be said of American abolitionism. Garrison, himself, was a fiery prophet calling America back to holiness, lest God should visit calamity on the nation. To him, slavery represented the cancer of sin. It so deeply threatened the whole American body that, in his mind, it must be mercilessly removed no matter the cost. Stowe, however, saw the evil of slavery in the way that it disturbed the divinely sanctioned familiar institutions and enabled the unchecked physical appetites of slave masters. These two individuals, while joined in common cause, are a compelling example of the diversity and heterodoxy of antebellum abolitionism.
William Lloyd Garrison became personally acquainted with servitude in the form wage-slavery from an early age.[3] This experience informed his conviction that forced labor was “not only a crime, but the sum of all criminality,”[4] and he resolved to vigorously work toward the demise of the institution in all of its forms. Garrison’s writings reflect a man possessed with the singular purpose of egalitarianism in America. With respect to his uncompromising nature and his radical – and unpopular – rhetoric, Garrison has been often compared to British MP William Wilberforce. It is with their common revulsion in regards to chattel slavery, however, that the comparisons might end. Whereas Wilberforce worked within the halls of government to achieve abolition, Garrison decried the Constitution of the United States – the very foundation of the American government – as a “covenant with death and an agreement with hell.”[5] Government, in the mind of Garrison, was inherently dependent on the practice of compromise. The Constitution, itself as a legally binding government document, and its particular injunctions on the institution of slavery were rife with compromise. These compromises not only represented acquiescence to evil but he also regarded the Constitution as “the infamous bargain which… virtually dethroned the Most High God”[6] and declared, while burning a copy of it, “So perish all compromises with tyranny!”[7]
While Garrison looked to the radical social ethics of the New Testament for inspiration, he drew most heavily from the Declaration of Independence. The rhetoric of this document led him to insist that the American union was founded on the belief that “all men are created equal” and that all men lay claim to the inalienable rights of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” including the African slave population. Garrisonian abolitionism was certainly the most radical variation of abolitionism. It required not only the immediate abolition, but also demanded the education of blacks and believed in the equality of the sexes.[8] For his time, William Lloyd Garrison was certainly on the fringe of the movement.
His crusade against slavery led him not only to denounce the whole of human government – claiming, “the governments of this world… they are all Anti-Christ”[9] – but also the American body of Christianity. “What has Christianity done, by direct effort, for our slave population? Comparatively nothing.”[10] He ridiculed American institutional Christianity by claiming that it could tame the foreign wilderness but was powerless to emancipate the African slaves of a Christian nation. Garrison also levels a finger at the so-called free states on the Union. “We are all alike guilty. Slavery is strictly a national sin.”[11] Later he even accuses the North of being even more prejudiced than the South, because the “criminal timidity” of the North in confronting Southern slavery was the enabling force behind the entire institution.[12] Garrison’s avant-garde rhetoric and style was unsettling, even to other abolitionists, and was especially alarming when he attacked the virtue of American life. “Before God, I must say, that such a glaring contradiction as exists between our creed and practice the annals of six thousand years cannot parallel. In view of it, I am ashamed of my country.”[13] Garrison’s views were delivered both in the way of editorial columns and sermon-esque public speeches. William Lloyd Garrison is a polemic demagogue, both in his critical evaluation of ecclesiastical behavior in regards to slavery, but also his hostile disputation of the political reality. His inflammatory rhetoric, his avant-garde style, and his uncompromising principles hearken to the prophetic tradition of the Old Testament. This convention lends itself to reinforce Garrison’s particularly confrontational tone and cloaks his abrasiveness in a mantle of prophetic authority. Noting, however, that his brand of abolitionism never enjoyed a wide popularity, it seems that his polemic style came with the cost of sharing the pariah status of the prophets as well.
Harriet Beecher Stowe, daughter of Protestant evangelical preacher Lyman Beecher, was never a stranger to abolitionism or prolific writing. Her brother, Henry Ward Beecher, was a famous abolitionist theologian and her sister, Catherine Beecher, was also a noted abolitionist writer. Her father, Lyman Beecher, was not known for his sympathies to the abolitionist cause, but his contribution to the movement by way of progeny cannot be overlooked. Harriet’s own contributions – Uncle Tom’s Cabin chief among them – came to her audience in the form of the sentimental novel. This style of novel, also called “domestic fiction” was most prevalent in the late eighteenth to the mid nineteenth and placed a high value on an appeal to the emotional virtues, directly contrasting the rationalist arguments of the time. Through this convention, we can see that Stowe’s attitudes toward slavery were not so radical as Garrison’s and were born of an entirely different host. Whereas Garrison’s chief concern in abolitionism was the utter equality of mankind and the fulfillment of the Declaration of Independence, Stowe was troubled by the effect the institution of slavery had on the institution of the family. In this respect, among others, Stowe was very much a moderate – or centrist – abolitionist.[14] In her popular and influential novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Stowe portrays the chief sin of slavery as an interruption of the family. Slavery separated Uncle Tom from his wife Chloe; it separated George Harris from his wife Eliza and their son Harry and threatened to detach Harry from both of his parents. Slavery had orphaned poor Topsy, had divided Emily from her brother George, and Cassy from her daughter Eliza. Speaking directly to the issue Stowe states plainly, “The note-book of a missionary, among the Canadian [former slave] refugees, contains truth stranger than fiction. How can it be otherwise, when a system prevails which whirls families and scatters their members… These shores of refuge, like the eternal shore… may bring tidings of mother, sister, child or wife, still lost to view in the shadows of slavery.”[15]
Yet, in direct contrast to Garrison’s charge that every slaveholder is a “man-stealer,” Stowe offers us not only a spectrum of evil in slavery, but also “exploits the reader’s capacity for tenderness, compassion, or sympathy by presenting… an unrealistic view of its subject.”[16] In Stowe’s understanding of slavery, not all slaveholders were evil and not all expressions of the institution were malevolent. The slavery of Kentucky is called “the mildest form of the system” – a concession Garrison would have balked at – and Stowe also refers to the relationship between master and slave there as “goodhumored indulgence” and “affectionate loyalty.”[17] Both George Shelby and his son are presented as the paragon of Christian slaveholders.[18] They are kind, treat their slaves well – if perpetuating their slavery did not, in fact, contradict that estimation – and George, Jr. eventually frees the entire estate.[19] Augustine St. Claire, while not particularly religious, was also good-natured and treated his slaves well, some of them even sharing his own wardrobe and supply of little luxuries.[20] Certainly Garrison never conceived of this lax sort of environment in a Deep South plantation. These kind slaveholders are presented, in Stowe’s narrative, as men never willing to break up the stability and family of their African charges, but only forced to do so when confronted with hard circumstances. It was only in the last pages of the novel that the slaveholder of Garrison’s imagination was revealed for her readers in the form of Simon Legree. While far from relieving the institution of slavery of its earned reproach Stowe, unlike Garrison, was willing to acknowledge that there was a complex and heterogeneous reality that accompanied it. In this, Stowe must have been hoping to gain recognition from both camps by presenting herself as an honest purveyor of social reality. In this, she and Garrison could never have agreed.
Her attitudes on the equality of all mankind were, likewise, divergent. In her narrative, Stowe never outright challenges the legitimacy of the slaveholders nor does she give us a single African character that would be considered an equal to a white character. The slaves are described with intrinsically inferior labels, such as “loyal,” “favored,” or “petted” and only the radical George Harris insists on his right of being a freeman. George is certainly given the position of a protagonist, yet only as it pertained to the preservation of his family and the reclamation of his own unique manhood. Tom, on the other hand, is obviously the favored hero of the novel and is given very passive and acquiescent characteristics. It is in Tom, however, that Stowe intends to formulate her own imaginations of the African race.
Garrison describes blacks in terms of “complexion”, “hue”, “color”, and “clime” whereas Stowe readily assigns each man a “race.” This is, perhaps, the fundamental difference between the two. The clearest presentation of this belief is in George Harris’ speech given near the end of the novel. “To the Anglo-Saxon race has been intrusted [sic] the destinies of the world,” claims Stowe.[21] On the other hand, she trusts “that the development of Africa is to be essentially a Christian one. If not a dominant and commanding race, they are, at least an affectionate, magnanimous and forgiving one.”[22] Whereas she ordains the white race with the administration of the world’s governmental order, she proclaims that the black race will evolve along a path of Christian piety and be vessels of redemption, which shares the personality of Christ wherever they go.[23] The genre that Stowe utilizes is the novel. Prior to the naturalistic writers of the late nineteenth century, such as Theodore Dreiser and Stephen Crane, American novels were meant to be vehicles by which a series of didactic ethical lessons could be introduced. Intentionally sentimental novels, like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, have the advantage of establishing their ethical principles within an allegorical framework. The persuasive efficacy of a novel like Stowe’s is dependant, almost solely, upon the skill of the author in cultivating a connection – via the characters and plot – with the readership. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the best-selling novel of the nineteenth century, selling “more copies than any other book in the world except the Bible.”[24] While Mark Twain blames the Civil War on the romantic writings of Sir Walter Scott, Abraham Lincoln attributed it to Stowe. Upon meeting her at the White House, President Lincoln is claimed to have said, “So you’re the little lady that wrote the book that made this great war.”[25]
There is no doubt that both William Lloyd Garrison and Harriet Beecher Stowe wanted the unconditional abolition of slavery in America. But there can also be no doubt that they both wanted to achieve this end by incompatible means and for incompatible reasons. Garrison would see the governments of the world burn to the ground in order that all men and women be free, a truly liberal position. Stowe, however, would see slavery removed in order to preserve the more fundamental social institution of the family, a fairly conservative position. These positions are as different as their two conventions and it is illustrated in each of their writings. While both Garrison and Stowe are appealing to the more emotional sensibilities of their readership, one could hardly imagine Garrison parceling up his “truth” and hiding them among several hundred pages of domestic fiction. Likewise, we can see Stowe’s attempt to portray her views to American readers as anything but confrontational. Yet, despite their exclusive and unique ideologies, they found common cause together for the elimination of slavery in America.
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