Uncle Tom's Cabin

by Harriet Beecher Stowe

For some singular reason, an impression seemed to reign among the servants generally that Missis would not be particularly disobliged by delay; and it was wonderful what a number of counter accidents occurred constantly, to retard the course of things.

There are in this world blessed souls, whose sorrows all spring up into joys for others; whose earthly hopes, laid in the grave with many tears, are the seed from which spring healing flowers and balm for the desolate and the distressed. Among such was the delicate woman who sits there by the lamp, dropping slow tears, while she prepares the memorials of her own lost one for the outcast wanderer.

“Are you the man that will shelter a poor woman and child from slave-catchers?” said the senator, explicitly. “I rather think I am,” said honest John, with some considerable emphasis. “I thought so,” said the senator. “If there’s anybody comes,” said the good man, stretching his tall muscular form upward, “why here I’m ready for him, and I’ve got seven sons, each six foot high, and they’ll be ready for ’em. Give our respects to ’em,” said John; “tell ’em it’s no matter how soon they call,—make no kinder difference to us,” said John, running his fingers through the shock of hair that thatched his head, and bursting out into a great laugh.

“I hope, my good sir, that you are not exposed to any difficulty on our account,” said George, anxiously. “Fear nothing, George, for therefore are we sent into the world. If we would not meet trouble for a good cause, we were not worthy of our name.”

In short, you see,” said he, suddenly resuming his gay tone, “all I want is that different things be kept in different boxes. The whole framework of society, both in Europe and America, is made up of various things which will not stand the scrutiny of any very ideal standard of morality.

“Woe unto the world because of offences, but woe unto them through whom the offence cometh.”1

the very day after the Sabbath we have described, St. Clare was invited out to a convivial party of choice spirits, and was helped home, between one and two o’clock at night, in a condition when the physical had decidedly attained the upper hand of the intellectual.

The kitchen was a large brick-floored apartment, with a great old-fashioned fireplace stretching along one side of it,—an arrangement which St. Clare had vainly tried to persuade Dinah to exchange for the convenience of a modern cook-stove. Not she. No Puseyite,4 or conservative of any school, was ever more inflexibly attached to time-honored inconveniences than Dinah.

“It does seem to me, my dear, that something might be done to straighten matters. Suppose we sell off all the horses, and sell one of your farms, and pay up square?” “Oh, ridiculous, Emily! You are the finest woman in Kentucky; but still you haven’t sense to know that you don’t understand business;—women never do, and never can.” “But, at least,” said Mrs. Shelby, “could not you give me some little insight into yours; a list of all your debts, at least, and of all that is owed to you, and let me try and see if I can’t help you to economize.” “Oh, bother! don’t plague me, Emily!—I can’t tell exactly. I know somewhere about what things are likely to be; but there’s no trimming and squaring my affairs, as Chloe trims crust off her pies. You don’t know anything about business, I tell you.” And Mr. Shelby, not knowing any other way of enforcing his ideas, raised his voice,—a mode of arguing very convenient and convincing, when a gentleman is discussing matters of business with his wife.

“Because now is the only time there ever is to do a thing in,” said Miss Ophelia. “Come, now, here’s paper, pen, and ink; just write a paper.” St. Clare, like most men of his class of mind, cordially hated the present tense of action, generally; and, therefore, he was considerably annoyed by Miss Ophelia’s downrightness. “Why, what’s the matter?” said he. “Can’t you take my word? One would think you had taken lessons of the Jews, coming at a fellow so!”

“There, now, she’s yours, body and soul,” said St. Clare, handing the paper. “No more mine now than she was before,” said Miss Ophelia. “Nobody but God has a right to give her to me; but I can protect her now.” “Well, she’s yours by a fiction of law, then,” said St. Clare as he turned back into the parlor, and sat down to his paper.

Those who have been familiar with the religious histories of the slave population know that relations like what we have narrated are very common among them. We have heard some from their own lips, of a very touching and affecting character. The psychologist tells us of a state, in which the affections and images of the mind become so dominant and overpowering, that they press into their service the outward senses, and make them give tangible shape to the inward imagining. Who shall measure what an all-pervading Spirit may do with these capabilities of our mortality, or the ways in which he may encourage the desponding souls of the desolate? If the poor forgotten slave believes that Jesus hath appeared and spoken to him, who shall contradict him? Did He not say that his mission, in all ages, was to bind up the broken-hearted, and set at liberty them that are bruised?

Whatever unsettling questions are raised are evanescent, titillating; remote, for this has nothing to do with us… finally we receive a very definite thrill of virtue from the fact that we are reading the book at all.

The grandeur of Leslie Fiedler’s claim that ‘for better or worse, it was Mrs. Stowe who invented American Blacks for the imagination of the whole world’ does not belie its essential truth.