[In the following excerpt, Strout examines the nineteenth-century theological traditions that informed the writing of Uncle Tom's Cabin, defending Stowe against modernist critics who accuse her of racism.]

"Everybody's Protest Novel," James Baldwin called it in 1949, in order to condemn it and its descendants. Looking at it through the eyes of a modern Negro, he found it a hysterically moralistic melodrama of stereotypes with a cast of genteel mulattoes and quadroons whose lightness of color betrayed Harriet Beecher Stowe's revulsion against blackness. "Tom, therefore, her only black man," he asserts, "has been robbed of his humanity and divested of his sex. It is the price for that darkness with which he has been branded." Her fear of the dark, Baldwin charges, is "a theological terror, the terror of damnation; and the spirit that breathes in this book, hot, self-righteous, fearful, is not different from that spirit of medieval times which sought to exorcise evil by burning witches; and is not different from that terror which activates a lynch mob." The bill as drawn is as plausible as it is unhistorical, as provocative as it is astigmatic—half right for all the wrong reasons.

It is true that Stowe was hot about the crime of slavery and fearful of the doom of her country, as Baldwin is hot and fearful with equally good reason about the race problem today, but her novel deliberately aimed to undercut self-righteous moralizing. While she succumbed in part to the sentimental tradition of the paternalistic plantation with its childlike slaves and their indulgent owner, she did not blink the fact that the inept benevolence of her planter St. Clare could not prevent his wife from selling his slaves down the river. Baldwin takes Miss Ophelia from New England as the author's mouthpiece forgetting that Stowe has St. Clare accuse her of a Yankee prejudice against Negroes, "wanting them out of your sight and smell." The author's postscript lays the heaviest burden of guilt for slavery on the "people of the free states" who have "defended, encouraged, and participated, and are more guilty for it, before God, than the South, in that they have not the apology of education or custom." Her fabled villain, Simon Legree, is a Yankee. If she stacked the cards, she did not deal all the good ones to any section or group, particularly not to her own.

Reading Stowe out of her context, Baldwin misses the relevance of the relative whiteness of her blacks in the novel. Their color dramatizes Stowe's sense of the great horror of slavery—the breaking up of families for exploitative reasons. In a culture which idealized the home as much as hers did, the sexual crossing of the color line, promoted by the system of slavery, was a vivid symbol of evil because the white man who exploited a black woman violated the integrity of two families, his own and hers. It is the tragedy of Misse Cassy, Legree's mulatto mistress, that she has been sold by a white man whom she loved and by whom she bore two children. The planter St. Clare suffers from an unhappy marriage to a coldly respectable woman who breaks up the family life of his slaves, and that sugary confection, little Eva, prefers the Southern plantation to Vermont because "it makes so many more round you to love, you know." The mulatto George, Eliza's husband, begins to recover his faith in the justice of God only when he lives for a while in the Quaker home of Rachel Halliday, who had "so much motherliness and full-heartedness even in the way she passed a plate of cakes or poured a cup of coffee, that it seemed to put a spirit into the food and drink she offered." Stowe gives her the accolade: "This, indeed, was a home,—home, a word that George had never yet known a meaning for." Trust in God's providence soon begins to "encircle his heart, as with a golden cloud of protection and confidence." St. Clare on his deathbed, envisioning "the gates of eternity," knows he has come "Home, at last," and his final word is "Mother!" This unpalatably Victorian cult of the family gags the contemporary reader, but its power to move her audience had much to do with the effectiveness of Stowe's indictment of slavery as an institution which deprived Negroes of their rights to recognized marriage and a stable family. The paleness of her Negro characters dramatically underlined this connection, a heritage from slavery which the controversial Moynihan Report (1965) to President Lyndon Johnson emphasized in the unsentimental sociological language of our own culture.

Baldwin is understandably appalled by Stowe's sentimentality, but he entirely loses sight of the sources of it. This "ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion," he concludes, is "the mask of cruelty," a propensity proved by the fact that her sometimes terrifying story is a "catalog of violence." The linkage of sentimentality and cruelty is common in those journalistic exposés which contrive to titillate the feelings they editorially censor; but the violence in Uncle Tom's Cabin has an extremely realistic basis. Stowe not only relied on documentary accounts of the horrors of slavery, but she was familiar at first hand with the violence of her own period of history. Edmund Wilson points out that on the day her father and her husband were read out of the Presbyterian Church for heresy by the General Assembly in Philadelphia, one of the city's new buildings, dedicated to abolitionism, was burned down by a mob. In 1841 when Harriet began writing stories, a man hiding a runaway slave attacked the owner, a local farmer was murdered by Negro thieves, a white woman was raped, and race riots erupted for a week. When a cholera epidemic broke out in Cincinnati, Harriet lost her most recent baby. She later recalled that it was at his grave that she learned "what a poor slave a mother may feel when her child is torn from her." Much that is in Uncle Tom's Cabin, she felt, "had its root in the awful scenes and bitter sorrows of that summer." Violence was not something she vicariously experienced through her writing; it was part of her life which served her imagination as a writer. Wilson puts it with his usual felicity: "Uncle Tom, with its lowering threats and its harassing persecutions, its impotence of well-meaning people, its outbreaks of violence and its sudden bereavements, had been lived in the Beecher home, where the trials and tribulations, as they used to be called, of the small family world inside were involved with, were merged in, the travail of the nation to which it belonged."

These qualifications, however, do not strike at the heart of Baldwin's misreading of the story as social propaganda with its theological meaning reduced to a medieval terror of witches. Wilson comes much closer to the truth in Patriotic Gore when he points out that the tale "has registered the moment when the Civil War was looming as something already felt but not yet clearly foreseen: an ambiguous promise and menace, the fulfillment of some awful prophecy which had never quite been put into words." Wilson does not extend this crucial insight to the details of the story itself, but he puts the reader on the right track by observing that millennial expectations of a religious nature "blazed up against the twilight of the Calvinist faith, at the beginning of the Civil War." Uncle Tom's Cabin is a great document of the millennial temper of American Protestantism in the first half of the nineteenth century, a prime source for understanding its philosophy of history and revivalist theology.

Traditional Calvinism predicted great trials for the church before the millennium, which would be inaugurated by the Second Coming of Christ. Jonathan Edwards and his New England followers, Joseph Bellamy, Timothy Dwight, and Samuel Hopkins, preached instead the more radical doctrine of a golden age on earth to be fulfilled before Christ came to earth in order to wind things up for the Last Judgment. This more optimistic postmillennial view of the Second Coming was, as Stowe wrote in Poganuc People, "the star of hope in the eyes of the New England clergy; their faces were set eastward, towards the dawn of that day, and the cheerfulness of those anticipations illuminated the hard tenets of their theology with a rosy glow." This "little bit of a woman, about as thin and dry as a pinch of snuff," as she described herself, grew up in this New England world of modified Edwardsianism. Appropriately, her preface foresees "another and better day dawning," foreshadowed by the signs that "the hand of benevolence is everywhere stretched out." The contemporary movement for humanitarian reform which linked the ideals of piety and benevolence was augury of a coming millennium. The turbulent current of the Mississippi River in Uncle Tom's Cabin symbolized the "headlong tide of business" on which her countrymen were afloat, carrying with it "a more fearful freight, the tears of the oppressed, the sighs of the helpless, the bitter prayers of the poor, ignorant hearts to an unknown God—unknown, unseen and silent, but who will yet come out of his place to save all the poor of the earth!" Her passionate faith in the Second Coming wavered between the optimistic hopes of the postmillennialists and the apocalyptic fears of the premillennialists, but the eschatological expectation is always present as a reverberating note of the novel's major thematic chords.

In her pages Negro Christians live in hope, whites live in fear. St. Clare's mother told him of a millennium that was coming, "when Christ should reign, and all men should be free and happy." He concludes that "all this sighing and groaning, and stirring among the dry bones foretells what she used to tell me was coming." He reads the signs in "a mustering among the masses, the world over," a singular observation for a plantation master. St. Clare wonders: "But who may abide the day of His appearing?" His creator completes the portentous quotation in her postscript: "for that day shall burn as an oven: and he shall appear as swift witness against those that oppress the hireling in his wages, the widow and the fatherless, and that turn aside the stranger in his right: and he shall break in pieces the oppressor." Christians might pray for the coming Kingdom, but they should remember in fear and trembling that in this last convulsion "prophecy associates, in dread fellowship, the day of vengeance with the year of his redeemed." The rhetoric is, of course, like that of the storefront Negro churches in Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain, and its judgment on inhumanity is kin to his own apocalyptic preaching in The Fire Next Time.

Stowe was no Calvinist, despite the fact that Calvin was the name of her husband, a professor of biblical literature at Lane Theological Seminary which her father had founded in Cincinnati. Her novel was in large part a protest against the Calvinist doctrine of human inability to merit salvation. One of her brothers had been deeply disturbed by Jonathan Edwards's case against free will, and her sister Catharine had suffered badly from the doctrine of predestined election of the saints. Harriet herself agonized over the fate of the unregenerate soul of her drowned son. By the time the novel was written, the influential revivalist preacher, Charles G. Finney, had assimilated Calvinism to an optimistic Arminianism, emphasizing human ability to work out one's salvation, that would have seemed both heretical and sentimental to Jonathan Edwards. Finney thought men could become converted "in the space of a few minutes" if they only listened to the promptings of the heart instead of to the voice of theological reason. This voluntaristic emotional Protestantism saved Stowe and suffused her story.

The unlettered faith of Uncle Tom, who got religion at a camp-meeting revival, is the true hero of her book. "We does for the Lord when we does for his critturs," he says in the spirit of Finney himself. When Misse Cassy, imprisoned on Legree's brutal plantation, asks why the Lord should have put some people in a situation where "we can't help but sin," Tom replies, "I think we can help it." Even Legree was almost once persuaded by good angels: "his heart inly relented,—there was a conflict,—but sin got the victory, and he set all the force of his rough nature against the conviction of his conscience." Swift conversion, in Finney's fashion, is part of the sentimentality of the novel. Eliza's husband George finds, again in the Quaker house of Rachel Halliday, that there his "dark, misanthropic, pining atheistic doubts, and fierce despair, melted before the light of a living Gospel, breathed in living faces." Tom's faith not only converts St. Clare to a pledge of manumission, but four pages later, suffering from a knife wound inflicted during a tavern brawl, the former agnostic dies with a hymn on his lips and Tom's hand in his own. When Tom himself dies from his beatings, like "One whose suffering changed an instrument of torture, degradation and shame, into a symbol of glory, honor, and immortal life," his triumphant Christian victory over sin and death instantly converts two of the "imbruted blacks" on the plantation belonging to the atheist Simon Legree. The spiritual discipline of Calvinism had become too intellectually rigorous and morally severe for a sentimental people. Stowe's book exemplified the convergence of the popular cults of home, love, and instant salvation which transformed protestantism into a culture-religion.

Baldwin finds in her instead that same "medieval spirit" which burns witches and activates a lynch mob. Stowe's simplistic conception of villainy is exemplified in her picture of Legree as an atheistic, profit-minded, slave-holding alcoholic, a catalog of sins out of the Protestant tracts of her own day. But, though she believed the Bible provided the faithful with an absolute morality, she rose above the tractarian limits of her material in her portrait of the amiable skeptic St. Clare, who complains that "this whole business of human virtue is poor mean trash," because it is "a mere matter, for the most part, of latitude and longitude, and geographical position, acting with natural temperament." As for her superstition, it is Legree's literal fear of the dark which the author exploits as a means to engineer the escape of the slave girls from his plantation. Playing the part of ghosts, they terrify him into his fatal alcoholism, which seemed "to throw the lurid shadows of a coming retribution back into the present life." It is indeed that shadow, which menaces her readers as well for their complicity in the guilt of slavery, that saves her novel from being swamped in the milk of Finney's revivalistic benevolence. Her eschatology strikes the note of judgment which broods over the story, linking it to the Calvinism she hated.

Surprisingly, Baldwin misses his one chance to score directly on target with his charge of a "fear of the dark." He does not relate it to her concluding plea for colonization of the freed Negro in Africa. Stowe's abolitionism was far more conservative than that of her colleagues in the antislavery movement. The churches of the North, she urged, should defy the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 by taking upon their shoulders the Christian duty of educating escaped slaves until they had sufficient "moral and intellectual maturity" to be assisted in their passage to Liberia, where they could "put in practice the lessons they have learned in America." This morally evasive solution conveniently suited a society in which racial prejudice against freed Negroes was strong everywhere in the Union. Stowe's rejection of "integration" was rationalized on the ground that while American Negroes as an injured group ought to have "more than the rights of common men," only a nation of blacks could have the power which effectively would "break their chains." This argument seemingly prefigures the Black Nationalism of Marcus Garvey in the 1920s and of the Black Muslims in the 1960s, but Stowe believed with Eliza's husband that "'a nation has a right to argue, remonstrate, implore, and present the cause of its race,—which an individual has not.'" Only black power could justify Negro protest.

Unlike her distant descendants' views, Stowe's Black Nationalism was linked to her identification of the Negroes with Christian virtues of suffering and tenderness. For this reason "the highest form of the peculiarly Christian life" would be exhibited in Africa when God had chosen it, "in the furnace of affliction, to make her the highest and noblest in that kingdom which he will set up, when every other kingdom has been tried and failed; for the first shall be last, and the last first." Liberia was to be the fulfillment of the expectations which little Eva and Uncle Tom dreamed of in their devoted reading of Revelation or of Tom's heavily marked passage from Matmew describing the Second Coming and the Last Judgment, which inspires his master to manumission and conversion. The dated, conservative policy of colonization was thus buttressed with the radical doctrine of the millennium and rationalized by an inverted racist division between "the hot and hasty Saxon," who would dominate America, and the "affectionate, magnanimous, and forgiving" Negro, who would build a Christian republic in Liberia. This mixture of sentimental piety, millennial hope, romantic racism, and political conservatism not only helps to explain the novel's enormous appeal, but marks its distance from the framework in which responsible thinking about the Negro's position in America must be done today. It is understandable why "Uncle Tom" has become the stereotype of the submissive Negro who plays the role acceptable to his oppressors, radier than the Christian hero who conquers sin and death by the power of his faith, just as it is understandable mat the movement which is closest to her ethics of piety and benevolence, Martin Luther King's Christian nonviolent reformers, should heroically struggle for the integration of Negro Americans into their native society. It is in her policy of exporting free Negroes, which Lincoln also accepted, mat she betrays a moral evasion of the deeper dilemmas inherent in the history of American race relations.

Protest novels, in Baldwin's phrase, "are a mirror of our confusion, dishonesty, panic, trapped and immobilized in the sunlit prison of the American dream." For the histo-rian such mentary value. To misread Uncle Tom's Cabin is not to commit an aesthetic crime, but it is to suffer a major failure of historical comprehension. Baldwin warns us to remember, in defiance of the conventions of protest novels, that "the oppressed and the oppressor are bound together within the same society; they accept the same criteria, they share the same beliefs, they both alike depend upon the same reality." That awareness is precisely the strength of Stowe's novel and the source of its author's agony. Her story dramatizes the confused anxieties of her time with genuine power. She idealized a dream of domesticity which miscegenation and the slave trade ruthlessly violated. As a Christian she responded to the opposite ideal, however, of the hymn sung by slaves on Legree's plantation: "O there'll be mourning, mourning, mourning, at the judgment-seat of Christ! Parents and children there shall part! parents and children there shall part!" For true believers natural bonds, like racial differences, mean nothing. "In the gates of eternity," she believed, "the black hand and the white hold each other with an equal clasp"; yet in this world, she concluded, Negroes must find their home in a separate nation of believers. George, Eliza, and Cassy excite the reader's sympathy by their struggles to escape from slavery; yet Uncle Tom is honored above all for his stoically resigned acceptance of his sufferings. The vector of these contrary forces and feelings is Stowe's escapist dream of a Christian republic in Liberia which will make faith and freedom inseparably one. The postmillennialists were confident of a coming utopia. Stowe fervently hoped it would come, but she transferred it to Africa, fearing in her own country a vast convulsion as punishment for "unredressed injustice."

Stowe's millennialism would in a few years after the publication of her novel be set to martial music in "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" as Yankee soldiers sang of "the glory of the coming of the Lord" who had "trampled out the vineyards where the grapes of wrath are stored." That "fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword," which she had dreaded, was loosed at Fort Sumter. In the beginning it was more like the apocalyptic pessimism of traditional Protestantism man the post-millennial optimism of the religion of her day. Yet the end of the war did bring an end to slavery. The ambivalence in her sense of the future was justified. Now that our own present seems to hold the same ambivalent possibilities of fulfillment or destruction, reinforced by the nuclear dilemma, perhaps we can afford to read her with some sympathy for the poignant tension in which her novel holds conflicting anxieties in dramatic solution. To do so, however, we shall have to be as willing to reconstruct historically her religious tradition as she was anxious to bring it to bear upon the dilemma of slavery in a presumedly Christian and democratic society.

This much historical sympathy may have the paradoxical effect of freeing us from our own tendency, which Baldwin himself has succumbed to, of indulging in apocalyptic thinking. The substitution of abstractions for characters is not the result of what Baldwin calls her "fear of the dark"; it is implicit instead in the eschatological effort to transcend the concrete limitations and responsibilities of the specific demands of the historical hour. To read Uncle Tom's Cabin in this critical way is to see that its confused anxieties and emotional power, as well as its intellectual limitations, stem not from racial prejudice but from the ambivalent encounter of the American Protestant imagination with history. Uncle Tom's Cabin is not "Everybody's Protest Novel"; it is ramer the expression of a specific religious imagination in its desperate attempt both to meet and to escape the dilemmas of American culture in the antebellum years. Baldwin connects it with Little Women, Gentlemen's Agreement, and Native Son. But Stowe's "intense theological preoccupations," as he quite correctly calls them, connect her novel much more relevantly to The Pilgrim's Progress. Read in this light, Uncle Tom's Cabin is not a fantasy, "connecting nowhere with reality," as Baldwin charges, for its images, rhetoric, and ideas are deeply connected with the ideological tensions of the most critical period of our history. The immense popularity of the novel is not only testimony to its power to make slavery a religious and moral issue in antebellum terms. It is proof as well of the pressure Americans felt—and still feel—to exaggerate their guilt, while minimizing their political responsibility, through a vision of history which wavers between a nightmare of doom and a dream of utopia. In this sense Uncle Tom's Cabin is surely one of the most American books in our literature and Baldwin is finally right—for the wrong reasons—in connecting it with our panic and confusion in "the sunlit prison of the American dream."