Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue Part 10

Notwithstanding that eighty-five per cent of the colored people in the South live by agriculture in some form, aside from what has been done by Hampton, Tuskegee, and one or two other inst.i.tutions practically nothing has been attempted in the direction of teaching them about the very industry from which the ma.s.ses of our people must get their subsistence.

Friends have recently provided means for the erection of a large new chapel at Tuskegee. Our students have made the bricks for this chapel.

A large part of the timber is sawed by students at our own sawmill, the plans are drawn by our teacher of architecture and mechanical drawing, and students do the brick-masonry, plastering, painting, carpentry work, tinning, slating, and make most of the furniture. Practically, the whole chapel will be built and furnished by student labor; in the end the school will have the building for permanent use, and the students will have a knowledge of the trades employed in its construction. In this way all but three of the thirty buildings on the grounds have been erected.

While the young men do the kinds of work I have mentioned, the young women to a large extent make, mend, and launder the clothing of the young men, and thus are taught important industries.

One of the objections sometimes urged against industrial education for the negro is that it aims merely to teach him to work on the same plan that he was made to follow when in slavery. This is far from being the object at Tuskegee. At the head of each of the twenty-five industrial departments we have an intelligent and competent instructor, just as we have in our history cla.s.ses, so that the student is taught not only practical brick-masonry, for example, but also the underlying principles of that industry, the mathematics and the mechanical and architectural drawing. Or he is taught how to become master of the forces of nature so that, instead of cultivating corn in the old way, he can use a corn cultivator, that lays off the furrows, drops the corn into them, and covers it, and in this way he can do more work than three men by the old process of corn-planting; at the same time much of the toil is eliminated and labor is dignified. In a word, the constant aim is to show the student how to put brains into every process of labor; how to bring his knowledge of mathematics and the sciences into farming, carpentry, forging, foundry work; how to dispense as soon as possible with the old form of ante-bellum labor. In the erection of the chapel just referred to, instead of letting the money which was given us go into outside hands, we make it accomplish three objects: first, it provides the chapel; second, it gives the students a chance to get a practical knowledge of the trades connected with building; and third, it enables them to earn something toward the payment of board while receiving academic and industrial training.

Having been fortified at Tuskegee by education of mind, skill of hand, Christian character, ideas of thrift, economy, and push, and a spirit of independence, the student is sent out to become a centre of influence and light in showing the ma.s.ses of our people in the Black Belt of the South how to lift themselves up. How can this be done? I give but one or two examples. Ten years ago a young colored man came to the inst.i.tute from one of the large plantation districts; he studied in the cla.s.s-room a portion of the time, and received practical and theoretical training on the farm the remainder of the time. Having finished his course at Tuskegee, he returned to his plantation home, which was in a county where the colored people outnumber the whites six to one, as is true of many of the counties in the Black Belt of the South. He found the negroes in debt. Ever since the war they had been mortgaging their crops for the food on which to live while the crops were growing. The majority of them were living from hand to mouth on rented land, in small, one-room log cabins, and attempting to pay a rate of interest on their advances that ranged from fifteen to forty per cent per annum. The school had been taught in a wreck of a log cabin, with no apparatus, and had never been in session longer than three months out of twelve. With as many as eight or ten persons of all ages and conditions and of both s.e.xes huddled together in one cabin year after year, and with a minister whose only aim was to work upon the emotions of the people, one can imagine something of the moral and religious state of the community.

But the remedy. In spite of the evil, the negro got the habit of work from slavery. The rank and file of the race, especially those on the Southern plantations, work hard, but the trouble is, what they earn gets away from them in high rents, crop mortgages, whiskey, snuff, cheap jewelry, and the like. The young man just referred to had been trained at Tuskegee, as most of our graduates are, to meet just this condition of things. He took the three months' public school as a nucleus for his work. Then he organized the older people into a club, or conference, that held meetings every week. In these meetings he taught the people in a plain, simple manner how to save their money, how to farm in a better way, how to sacrifice,--to live on bread and potatoes, if need be, till they could get out of debt, and begin the buying of lands.

Soon a large proportion of the people were in condition to make contracts for the buying of homes (land is very cheap in the South), and to live without mortgaging their crops. Not only this: under the guidance and leaders.h.i.+p of this teacher, the first year that he was among them they learned how, by contributions in money and labor, to build a neat, comfortable schoolhouse that replaced the wreck of a log cabin formerly used. The following year the weekly meetings were continued, and two months were added to the original three months of school. The next year two more months were added. The improvement has gone on, until now these people have every year an eight months' school.

I wish my readers could have the chance that I have had of going into this community. I wish they could look into the faces of the people and see them beaming with hope and delight. I wish they could see the two or three room cottages that have taken the place of the usual one-room cabin, the well-cultivated farms, and the religious life of the people that now means something more than the name. The teacher has a good cottage and a well-kept farm that serve as models. In a word, a complete revolution has been wrought in the industrial, educational, and religious life of this whole community by reason of the fact that they have had this leader, this guide and object-lesson, to show them how to take the money and effort that had hitherto been scattered to the wind in mortgages and high rents, in whiskey and gewgaws, and concentrate them in the direction of their own uplifting. One community on its feet presents an object-lesson for the adjoining communities, and soon improvements show themselves in other places.

Another student who received academic and industrial training at Tuskegee established himself, three years ago, as a blacksmith and wheelwright in a community, and, in addition to the influence of his successful business enterprise, he is fast making the same kind of changes in the life of the people about him that I have just recounted.

It would be easy for me to fill many pages describing the influence of the Tuskegee graduates in every part of the South. We keep it constantly in the minds of our students and graduates that the industrial or material condition of the ma.s.ses of our people must be improved, as well as the intellectual, before there can be any permanent change in their moral and religious life. We find it a pretty hard thing to make a good Christian of a hungry man. No matter how much our people "get happy" and "shout" in church, if they go home at night from church hungry, they are tempted to find something before morning. This is a principle of human nature, and is not confined to the negro.

The negro has within him immense power for self-uplifting, but for years it will be necessary to guide and stimulate him. The recognition of this power led us to organize, five years ago, what is now known as the Tuskegee Negro Conference,--a gathering that meets every February, and is composed of about eight hundred representative colored men and women from all sections of the Black Belt. They come in ox-carts, mule-carts, buggies, on muleback and horseback, on foot, by railroad: some traveling all night in order to be present. The matters considered at the conferences are those that the colored people have it within their own power to control: such as the evils of the mortgage system, the one-room cabin, buying on credit, the importance of owning a home and of putting money in the bank, how to build schoolhouses and prolong the school term, and how to improve their moral and religious condition.

As a single example of the results, one delegate reported that since the conferences were started five years ago eleven people in his neighborhood had bought homes, fourteen had got out of debt, and a number had stopped mortgaging their crops. Moreover, a schoolhouse had been built by the people themselves, and the school term had been extended from three to six months; and with a look of triumph he exclaimed, "We is done stopped libin' in de ashes!"

Besides this Negro Conference for the ma.s.ses of the people, we now have a gathering at the same time known as the Workers' Conference, composed of the officers and instructors in the leading colored schools of the South. After listening to the story of the conditions and needs from the people themselves, the Workers' Conference finds much food for thought and discussion.

Nothing else so soon brings about right relations between the two races in the South as the industrial progress of the negro. Friction between the races will pa.s.s away in proportion as the black man, by reason of his skill, intelligence, and character, can produce something that the white man wants or respects in the commercial world. This is another reason why at Tuskegee we push the industrial training. We find that as every year we put into a Southern community colored men who can start a brick-yard, a sawmill, a tin-shop, or a printing-office,--men who produce something that makes the white man partly dependent upon the negro, instead of all the dependence being on the other side,--a change takes place in the relations of the races.

Let us go on for a few more years knitting our business and industrial relations into those of the white man, till a black man gets a mortgage on a white man's house that he can foreclose at will. The white man on whose house the mortgage rests will not try to prevent that negro from voting when he goes to the polls. It is through the dairy farm, the truck garden, the trades, and commercial life, largely, that the negro is to find his way to the enjoyment of all his rights. Whether he will or not, a white man respects a negro who owns a two-story brick house.

What is the permanent value of the Tuskegee system of training to the South in a broader sense? In connection with this, it is well to bear in mind that slavery taught the white man that labor with the hands was something fit for the negro only, and something for the white man to come into contact with just as little as possible. It is true that there was a large cla.s.s of poor white people who labored with the hands, but they did it because they were not able to secure negroes to work for them; and these poor whites were constantly trying to imitate the slave-holding cla.s.s in escaping labor, and they too regarded it as anything but elevating. The negro in turn looked down upon the poor whites with a certain contempt because they had to work. The negro, it is to be borne in mind, worked under constant protest, because he felt that his labor was being unjustly required, and he spent almost as much effort in planning how to escape work as in learning how to work. Labor with him was a badge of degradation. The white man was held up before him as the highest type of civilization, but the negro noted that this highest type of civilization himself did no labor; hence he argued that the less work he did, the more nearly he would be like a white man.

Then, in addition to these influences, the slave system discouraged labor-saving machinery. To use labor-saving machinery intelligence was required, and intelligence and slavery were not on friendly terms; hence the negro always a.s.sociated labor with toil, drudgery, something to be escaped. When the negro first became free, his idea of education was that it was something that would soon put him in the same position as regards work that his recent master had occupied. Out of these conditions grew the Southern habit of putting off till to-morrow and the day after the duty that should be done promptly to-day. The leaky house was not repaired while the sun shone, for then the rain did not come through. While the rain was falling, no one cared to expose himself to stop the leak. The plough, on the same principle, was left where the last furrow was run, to rot and rust in the field during the winter.

There was no need to repair the wooden chimney that was exposed to the fire, because water could be thrown on it when it was on fire. There was no need to trouble about the payment of a debt to-day, for it could just as well be paid next week or next year. Besides these conditions, the whole South, at the close of the war, was without proper food, clothing, and shelter,--was in need of habits of thrift and economy and of something laid up for a rainy day.

To me it seemed perfectly plain that here was a condition of things that could not be met by the ordinary process of education. At Tuskegee we became convinced that the thing to do was to make a careful systematic study of the condition and needs of the South, especially the Black Belt, and to bend our efforts in the direction of meeting these needs, whether we were following a well-beaten track, or were hewing out a new path to meet conditions probably without a parallel in the world.

After fourteen years of experience and observation, what is the result?

Gradually but surely, we find that all through the South the disposition to look upon labor as a disgrace is on the wane, and the parents who themselves sought to escape work are so anxious to give their children training in intelligent labor that every inst.i.tution which gives training in the handicrafts is crowded, and many (among them Tuskegee) have to refuse admission to hundreds of applicants. The influence of the Tuskegee system is shown again by the fact that almost every little school at the remotest cross-roads is anxious to be known as an industrial school, or, as some of the colored people call it, an "industrus" school.

The social lines that were once sharply drawn between those who labored with the hand and those who did not are disappearing. Those who formerly sought to escape labor, now when they see that brains and skill rob labor of the toil and drudgery once a.s.sociated with it, instead of trying to avoid it are willing to pay to be taught how to engage in it.

The South is beginning to see labor raised up, dignified and beautified, and in this sees its salvation. In proportion as the love of labor grows, the large idle cla.s.s which has long been one of the curses of the South disappears. As its members become absorbed in occupations, they have less time to attend to everybody else's business, and more time for their own.

The South is still an undeveloped and unsettled country, and for the next half century and more the greater part of the energy of the ma.s.ses will be needed to develop its material opportunities. Any force that brings the rank and file of the people to a greater love of industry is therefore especially valuable. This result industrial education is surely bringing about. It stimulates production and increases trade,--trade between the races,--and in this new and engrossing relation both forget the past. The white man respects the vote of the colored man who does $10,000 worth of business, and the more business the colored man has, the more careful he is how he votes.

Immediately after the war, there was a large cla.s.s of Southern people who feared that the opening of the free schools to the freedmen and the poor whites--the education of the head alone--would result merely in increasing the cla.s.s who sought to escape labor, and that the South would soon be overrun by the idle and vicious. But as the results of industrial combined with academic training begin to show themselves in hundreds of communities that have been lifted up through the medium of the Tuskegee system, these former prejudices against education are being removed. Many of those who a few years ago opposed general education are now among its warmest advocates.

This industrial training, emphasizing as it does the idea of economic production, is gradually bringing the South to the point where it is feeding itself. Before the war, and long after it, the South made what little profit was received from the cotton crop, and sent its earnings out of the South to purchase food supplies,--meat, bread, canned vegetables, and the like; but the improved methods of agriculture are fast changing this habit. With the newer methods of labor, which teach promptness and system, and emphasize the worth of the beautiful,--the moral value of the well-painted house, and the fence with every paling and nail in its place,--we are bringing to bear upon the South an influence that is making it a new country in industry, education, and religion.

THE STORY OF UNCLE TOM'S CABIN by Charles Dudley Warner

On the 29th of June, 1852, Henry Clay died. In that month the two great political parties, in their national conventions, had accepted as a finality all the compromise measures of 1850, and the last hours of the Kentucky statesman were brightened by the thought that his efforts had secured the perpetuity of the Union.

But on the 20th of March, 1852, there had been an event, the significance of which was not taken into account by the political conventions or by Clay, which was to test the conscience of the nation.

This was the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Was this only an "event,"

the advent of a new force in politics; was the book merely an abolition pamphlet, or was it a novel, one of the few great masterpieces of fiction that the world has produced? After the lapse of forty-four years and the disappearance of African slavery on this continent, it is perhaps possible to consider this question dispa.s.sionately.

The compromise of 1850 satisfied neither the North nor the South. The admission of California as a free State was regarded by Calhoun as fatal to the balance between the free and the slave States, and thereafter a fierce agitation sprang up for the recovery of this loss of balance, and ultimately for Southern preponderance, which resulted in the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, the Kansas-Nebraska war, and the civil war.

The fugitive slave law was hateful to the North not only because it was cruel and degrading, but because it was seen to be a move formed for nationalizing slavery. It was unsatisfactory to the South because it was deemed inadequate in its provisions, and because the South did not believe the North would execute it in good faith. So unstable did the compromise seem that in less than a year after the pa.s.sage of all its measures, Henry Clay and forty-four Senators and Representatives united in a manifesto declaring that they would support no man for office who was not known to be opposed to any disturbance of the settlements of the compromise. When, in February, 1851, the recaptured fugitive slave, Burns, was rescued from the United States officers in Boston, Clay urged the investment of the President with extraordinary power to enforce the law.

Henry Clay was a patriot, a typical American. The republic and its preservation were the pa.s.sions of his life. Like Lincoln, who was born in the State of his adoption, he was willing to make almost any sacrifice for the maintenance of the Union. He had no sympathy with the system of slavery. There is no doubt that he would have been happy in the belief that it was in the way of gradual and peaceful extinction.

With him, it was always the Union before state rights and before slavery. Unlike Lincoln, he had not the clear vision to see that the republic could not endure half slave and half free. He believed that the South, appealing to the compromises of the Const.i.tution, would sacrifice the Union before it would give up slavery, and in fear of this menace he begged the North to conquer its prejudices. We are not liable to overrate his influence as a compromising pacificator from 1832 to 1852.

History will no doubt say that it was largely due to him that the war on the Union was postponed to a date when its success was impossible.

It was the fugitive slave law that brought the North face to face with slavery nationalized, and it was the fugitive slave law that produced Uncle Tom's Cabin. The effect of this story was immediate and electric.

It went straight to the hearts of tens of thousands of people who had never before considered slavery except as a political inst.i.tution for which they had no personal responsibility. What was this book, and how did it happen to produce such an effect? It is true that it struck into a time of great irritation and agitation, but in one sense there was nothing new in it. The facts had all been published. For twenty years abolition tracts, pamphlets, newspapers, and books had left little to be revealed, to those who cared to read, as to the nature of slavery or its economic aspects. The evidence was practically all in,--supplied largely by the advertis.e.m.e.nts of Southern newspapers and by the legislation of the slaveholding States,--but it did not carry conviction; that is, the sort of conviction that results in action. The subject had to be carried home to the conscience. Pamphleteering, convention-holding, sermons, had failed to do this. Even the degrading requirements of the fugitive slave law, which brought shame and humiliation, had not sufficed to fuse the public conscience, emphasize the necessity of obedience to the moral law, and compel recognition of the responsibility of the North for slavery. Evidence had not done this, pa.s.sionate appeals had not done it, vituperation had not done it. What sort of presentation of the case would gain the public ear and go to the heart? If Mrs. Stowe, in all her fervor, had put forth first the facts in The Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, which so b.u.t.tressed her romance, the book would have had no more effect than had followed the like compilations and arraignments. What was needed? If we can discover this, we shall have the secret of this epoch-making novel.

The story of this book has often been told. It is in the nature of a dramatic incident of which the reader never tires any more than the son of Ma.s.sachusetts does of the minutest details of that famous scene in the Senate Chamber when Webster replied to Hayne.

At the age of twenty-four the author was married and went to live in Cincinnati, where her husband held a chair in the Lane Theological Seminary. There for the first time she was brought into relations with the African race and saw the effects of slavery. She visited slaveholders in Kentucky and had friends among them. In some homes she saw the "patriarchal" inst.i.tution at its best. The Beecher family were anti-slavery, but they had not been identified with the abolitionists, except perhaps Edward, who was a.s.sociated with the murdered Lovejoy.

It was long a reproach brought by the abolitionists against Henry Ward Beecher that he held entirely aloof from their movement. At Cincinnati, however, the personal aspects of the case were brought home to Mrs.

Stowe. She learned the capacities and peculiarities of the negro race.

They were her servants; she taught some of them; hunted fugitives applied to her; she ransomed some by her own efforts; every day there came to her knowledge stories of the hunger for freedom, of the ruthless separation of man and wife and mother and child, and of the heroic sufferings of those who ran away from the fearful doom of those "sold down South." These things crowded upon her mind and awoke her deepest compa.s.sion. But what could she do against all the laws, the political and commercial interests, the great public apathy? Relieve a case here and there, yes. But to dwell upon the gigantic evil, with no means of making head against it, was to invite insanity.

As late as 1850, when Professor Stowe was called to Bowdoin College, and the family removed to Brunswick, Maine, Mrs. Stowe had not felt impelled to the duty she afterwards undertook. "In fact, it was a sort of general impression upon her mind, as upon that of many humane people in those days, that the subject was so dark and painful a one, so involved in difficulty and obscurity, so utterly beyond human hope or help, that it was of no use to read, or think, or distress one's self about it." But when she reached New England the excitement over the fugitive slave law was at its height. There was a panic in Boston among the colored people settled there, who were daily fleeing to Canada. Every mail brought her pitiful letters from Boston, from Illinois, and elsewhere, of the terror and despair caused by the law. Still more was the impressed by the apathy of the Christian world at the North, and surely, she said, the people did not understand what the "system" was. Appeals were made to her, who had some personal knowledge of the subject, to take up her pen.

The task seemed beyond her in every way. She was not strong, she was in the midst of heavy domestic cares, with a young infant, with pupils to whom she was giving daily lessons, and the limited income of the family required the strictest economy. The dependence was upon the small salary of Professor Stowe, and the few dollars she could earn by an occasional newspaper or magazine article. But the theme burned in her mind, and finally took this shape: at least she would write some sketches and show the Christian world what slavery really was, and what the system was that they were defending. She wanted to do this with entire fairness, showing all the mitigations of the "patriarchal" system, and all that individuals concerned in it could do to alleviate its misery. While pondering this she came by chance, in a volume of an anti-slavery magazine, upon the authenticated account of the escape of a woman with her child on the ice across the Ohio River from Kentucky. She began to meditate. The faithful slave husband in Kentucky, who had refused to escape from a master who trusted him, when he was about to be sold "down river," came to her as a pattern of Uncle Tom, and the scenes of the story began to form themselves in her mind. "The first part of the book ever committed to writing [this is the statement of Mrs. Stowe] was the death of Uncle Tom. This scene presented itself almost as a tangible vision to her mind while sitting at the communion-table in the little church in Brunswick. She was perfectly overcome by it, and could scarcely restrain the convulsion of tears and sobbings that shook her frame. She hastened home and wrote it, and her husband being away, read it to her two sons of ten and twelve years of age. The little fellows broke out into convulsions of weeping, one of them saying through his sobs, 'Oh, mamma, slavery is the most cursed thing in the world!' From that time the story can less be said to have been composed by her than imposed upon her. Scenes, incidents, conversations rushed upon her with a vividness and importunity that would not be denied. The book insisted upon getting itself into being, and would take no denial."

When two or three chapters were written she wrote to her friend, Dr.

Bailey, of Was.h.i.+ngton, the editor of The National Era, to which she had contributed, that she was planning a story that might run through several numbers of the Era. The story was at once applied for, and thereafter weekly installments were sent on regularly, in spite of all cares and distractions. The installments were mostly written during the morning, on a little desk in a corner of the dining-room of the cottage in Brunswick, subject to all the interruptions of house-keeping, her children bursting into the room continually with the importunity of childhood. But they did not break the spell or destroy her abstraction.

With a smile and a word and a motion of the hand she would wave them off, and keep on in her magician's work. Long afterwards they recalled this, dimly understood at the time, and wondered at her power of concentration. Usually at night the chapters were read to the family, who followed the story with intense feeling. The narrative ran on for nine months, exciting great interest among the limited readers of the Era, and gaining sympathetic words from the anti-slavery people, but without making any wide impression on the public.

We may pause here in the narrative to note two things: the story was not the work of a novice, and it was written out of abundant experience and from an immense ma.s.s of acc.u.mulated thought and material. Mrs. Stowe was in her fortieth year. She had been using her pen since she was twelve years old, in extensive correspondence, in occasional essays, in short stories and sketches, some of which appeared in a volume called The Mayflower, published in 1843, and for many years her writing for newspapers and periodicals had added appreciably to the small family income. She was in the maturity of her intellectual powers, she was trained in the art of writing, and she had, as Walter Scott had when he began the Waverley Novels at the age of forty-three, abundant store of materials on which to draw. To be sure, she was on fire with a moral purpose, but she had the dramatic instinct, and she felt that her object would not be reached by writing an abolition tract.

"In shaping her material the author had but one purpose, to show the inst.i.tution of slavery truly, just as it existed. She had visited in Kentucky; had formed the acquaintance of people who were just, upright, and generous, and yet slave-holders. She had heard their views, and appreciated their situation; she felt that justice required that their difficulties should be recognized and their virtues acknowledged. It was her object to show that the evils of slavery were the inherent evils of a bad system, and not always the fault of those who had become involved in it and were its actual administrators. Then she was convinced that the presentation of slavery alone, in its most dreadful forms, would be a picture of such unrelieved horror and darkness as n.o.body could be induced to look at. Of set purpose, she sought to light up the darkness by humorous and grotesque episodes, and the presentation of the milder and more amusing phases of slavery, for which her recollection of the never-failing wit and drollery of her former colored friends in Ohio gave her abundant material."

This is her own account of the process, years after. But it is evident that, whether consciously or unconsciously, she did but follow the inevitable law of all great dramatic creators and true story-tellers since literature began.

For this story Mrs. Stowe received from the Era the sum of three hundred dollars. Before it was finished it attracted the attention of Mr. J. P.

Jewett, of Boston, a young and then unknown publisher, who offered to issue it in book form. His offer was accepted, but as the tale ran on he became alarmed at its length, and wrote to the author that she was making the story too long for a one-volume novel; that the subject was unpopular; that people would not willingly hear much about it; that one short volume might possibly sell, but that if it grew to two that might prove a fatal obstacle to its success. Mrs. Stowe replied that she did not make the story, that the story made itself, and that she could not stop it till it was done. The publisher hesitated. It is said that a competent literary critic to whom he submitted it sat up all night with the novel, and then reported, "The story has life in it; it will sell."

Mr. Jewett proposed to Professor Stowe to publish it on half profits if he would share the expenses. This offer was declined, for the Stowes had no money to advance, and the common royalty of ten per cent on the sales was accepted.

Mrs. Stowe was not interested in this business transaction. She was thinking only of having the book circulated for the effect she had at heart. The intense absorption in the story held her until the virtual end in the death of Uncle Tom, and then it seemed as if the whole vital force had left her. She sank into a profound discouragement. Would this appeal, which she had written with her heart's blood, go for nothing, as all the prayers and tears and strivings had already gone? When the last proof sheets left her hands, "it seemed to her that there was no hope; that n.o.body would read, n.o.body would pity; that this frightful system, which had already pursued its victims into the free States, might at last even threaten them in Canada." Resolved to leave nothing undone to attract attention to her cause, she wrote letters and ordered copies of her novel sent to men of prominence who had been known for their anti-slavery sympathies,--to Prince Albert, Macaulay, Charles d.i.c.kens, Charles Kingsley, and Lord Carlisle. Then she waited for the result.

She had not long to wait. The success of the book was immediate. Three thousand copies were sold the first day, within a few days ten thousand copies had gone, on the 1st of April a second edition went to press, and thereafter eight presses running day and night were barely able to keep pace with the demand for it. Within a year three hundred thousand copies were sold. No work of fiction ever spread more quickly throughout the reading community or awakened a greater amount of public feeling. It was read by everybody, learned and unlearned, high and low, for it was an appeal to universal human sympathy, and the kindling of this spread the book like wildfire. At first it seemed to go by acclamation. But this was not altogether owing to sympathy with the theme. I believe that it was its power as a novel that carried it largely. The community was generally apathetic when it was not hostile to any real effort to be rid of slavery. This presently appeared. At first there were few dissenting voices from the chorus of praise. But when the effect of the book began to be evident it met with an opposition fiercer and more personal than the great wave of affectionate thankfulness which greeted it at first.

The South and the defenders and apologists of slavery everywhere were up in arms. It was denounced in pulpit and in press, and some of the severest things were said of it at the North. The leading religious newspaper of the country, published in New York, declared that it was "anti-Christian."

Mrs. Stowe was twice astonished: first by its extraordinary sale, and second by the quarter from which the a.s.sault on it came. She herself says that her expectations were strikingly different from the facts.

"She had painted slaveholders as amiable, generous, and just. She had shown examples among them of the n.o.blest and most beautiful traits of character; had admitted fully their temptations, their perplexities, and their difficulties, so that a friend of hers who had many relatives in the South wrote to her: 'Your book is going to be the great pacificator; it will unite both North and South.' Her expectation was that the professed abolitionists would denounce it as altogether too mild in its dealings with slaveholders. To her astonishment, it was the extreme abolitionists who received, and the entire South who rose up against it."

There is something almost amusing in Mrs. Stowe's honest expectation that the deadliest blow the system ever suffered should have been received thankfully by those whose traditions, education, and interests were all bound up in it. And yet from her point of view it was not altogether unreasonable. Her blackest villain and most loathsome agent of the system, Legree, was a native of Vermont. All her wrath falls upon the slave-traders, the auctioneers, the public whippers, and the overseers, and all these persons and cla.s.ses were detested by the Southerners to the point of loathing, and were social outcasts. The slave-traders and the overseers were tolerated as perhaps necessary in the system, but they were never admitted into respectable society. This feeling Mrs. Stowe regarded as a condemnation of the system.