[In the following essay, Yellin discusses the influence of mid-nineteenth-century feminist thought on the writing of Uncle Tom's Cabin, emphasizing the roles that Angelina E. Grimké and Catharine Beecher had on the creation of Stowe's female characters.]

The trembling earth, the low-murmuring thunders, already admonish us of our danger; and if females can exert any saving influence in this emergency, it is time for them to awake.

-Catharine E. Beecher

But, what can any individual do?

-Harriet Beecher Stowe

The question the narrator of Uncle Tom's Cabin posed to her audience—whom she repeatedly addressed as "mother"—was not new. By 1851, the debate over what American women could do to end chattel slavery had raged for more than a decade. The major positions had been staked out in the 1830s by the abolitionists Sarah and Angelina Grimké and their opponent, Harriet Beecher Stowe's sister, the educator Catharine Beecher. Organization of a feminist movement in 1848 and passage of a new fugitive slave law requiring northerners to cooperate in the capture of fugitive slaves in 1850 gave the inquiry new significance.

Uncle Tom's Cabin is primarily a Christian novel; most importantly, it frames the mundane struggle for black emancipation in the United States in the universal spiritual struggle for Christian salvation. In contrast to the slave narratives, which focus on the efforts of black people to achieve freedom, Stowe's novel explores the moral dilemma of white Americans who must decide how to act in the face of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law: whether to obey the law and apprehend escaped slaves or to act on their feelings of charity, help the fugitives, and break the law. Repeatedly, the free white individuals faced with these moral dilemmas are women. This essay explores the ways in which Uncle Tom's Cabin, written three years after the meeting at Seneca Falls where feminists had spelled out their demands for full participation in American life, dramatizes women's roles in the fight against chattel slavery in America.

In 1836, public debate over the place of women in the life of the young republic was transformed when Angelina E. Grimké, youngest daughter of an aristocratic slaveholding Charleston family, identified herself with the Garrisonian abolitionists and published An Appeal to the Christian Women of the South. Almost immediately, her effort to assume the leadership of American women was challenged by the northern educator Catharine Beecher. In An Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism, with Reference to the Duty of American Females, Addressed to A. E. Grimké, Beecher presented the basic tenets of an ideology that she developed to counter Grimké, an ideology historian Kathryn Sklar has dubbed "domestic feminism." The Garrisonian abolitionists Angelina Grimké and her sister and co-worker Sarah responded with three polemics spelling out the basic tenets of nineteenth-century American feminism. By the time Stowe wrote her novel, the ideas on both sides had been elaborated. In her Treatise on Domestic Economy and elsewhere, Beecher had developed the notion of the moral superiority of females and the argument that by dominating domestic life, women could redeem American culture. Followers of the Grimkés' doctrine of sexual equality had organized the woman's rights movement, implementing their belief that women should reform American life by acting within the public sphere as well as within the home.

The polemics by the Grimké sisters and Catharine Beecher agree on a number of points. All concur that slavery is a sin, that America is in danger, that Christian women have the power to end slavery and save the nation, and that they have a duty to act in this crisis. They clash, however, when they discuss how and where women should act. Their dispute is grounded not only in differing ideas about race and abolitionism but also in their divergent ideas about women and American democracy.

In her Appeal to the Christian Women of the South, Grimké had suggested that free white southern women oppose slavery by performing a series of unexceptional private acts within the domestic circle—reading, praying, being kind, convincing the males in their families that slavery is wrong, and persuading the slaves to remain submissive. But she had also urged these southern women to perform exceptional acts—to break state laws and emancipate their slaves, pay them wages, and teach them to read and write. She had proposed that these women flaunt the statutes forbidding emancipation and literacy in obedience to a Higher Law, and counseled that, if apprehended, they should practice the doctrine of Christian resignation: "If a law commands me to sin I will break it; if it calls me to suffer, I will let it take its course unresistingly." Suggesting that southern women pattern themselves on the biblical Queen Esther and on the members of contemporary British Ladies' Anti-Slavery Societies, Grimké urged them specifically to risk engaging in political action and appealing to their legislators to end chattel slavery.

Catharine Beecher, asked to circulate the Appeal and learning of Grimké's plans to organize northern women in the abolitionist cause, responded by challenging Grimké directly. Postulating an aristocratic order in which "Heaven has appointed to one sex the superior, and to the other the subordinate station," and asserting that "woman holds a subordinate relation in society to the other sex," in a pamphlet framed as a letter to Grimké, Beecher defines the appropriate behavior for women:

A man may act on society by the collision of intellect, in public debate; he may urge his measures by a sense of shame, by fear and by personal interest; he may coerce by the combination of public sentiment; he may drive by physical force, and he does not outstep the boundaries of his sphere. But all the power, and all the conquests that are lawful to women, are those only which appeal to the kindly, generous, peaceful and benevolent principles.

Woman is to win every thing by peace and love. . . . But this is to all be accomplished in the domestic and social sphere.

Accordingly, Beecher asserts that women should limit the expression of their oppression to slavery to the domestic circle, where they should use their influence to mediate between opponents and advocates of slavery. Predictably, she is "entirely opposed to the plan of arraying females in any Abolition movement."

As for Grimké's proposal that southern women petition their legislators to end slavery, Beecher asserts that "in this country, petitions to Congress . . . seem IN ALL CASES, to fall entirely without the sphere of female duty." Arguing that the crucial need is not for women to exert political power but to use their female force to promote a national "spirit of candour, forbearance, charity, and peace," Beecher urges Christian women to recognize their true calling as the guardians of American morals and American youth. By assuming this role, she argues, they can "exert a wise and appropriate influence, and one which will most certainly tend to bring an end, not only of slavery, but unnumbered other evils and wrongs."

The Grimkés responded in three polemics setting forth the basic ideas of nineteenth-century American feminism. Grounding their arguments in the philosophy of natural rights and in a radical reading of the Bible, they assert woman's equal role with man as God's reasonable creature and as citizen of the Republic.

The cover of An Appeal to the Women of the Nominally Free States, their first pamphlet, suggests both its connections to and its quarrels with Beecher's polemic. Her call for women to respond to the current crisis is quoted, but her conclusions are countered by a text urging women to become abolitionist partisans within the political arena; an antislavery quatrain by the black poet Sarah Forten signals that instead of ignoring the role of black women, as Beecher had, this polemic pleads for unity among women of all races. It proposes that white women end their prejudice and urges black women to "mingle with us whilst we have the prejudice, because it is only by associating with you that we shall ever be able to overcome it."

Angelina Grimké's fullest answer to Beecher, however, is Letters to Catharine E. Beecher, in Reply to An Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism, Addressed to A. E. Grimké. Written as Grimké was traveling on her historic lecture tour during the summer of 1837, this polemic radiates the energy sparked by her controversy with Beecher and fueled by her encounters with "promiscuous" audiences of men and women throughout New England. Grimké concludes with three essays on woman's role in the national struggle against chattel slavery and white racism. Presenting a natural rights argument that "woman's rights are . . . an integral part of her moral being" and asserting that "the mere circumstance of sex does not give to man higher rights and responsibilities than to women," she reasons that "whatever it is morally right for a man to do, it is morally right for a woman to do." It follows that women, like men, have a duty to end the sin of slavery by acting within both the domestic and public spheres. Similarly, women, like men, can appropriately engage in sharp argument, and they most certainly should join the abolitionists' petition campaigns:

The right of petition is the only political right that women have. . . . Surely, we ought to be permitted at least to remonstrate against every political measure that may tend to injure or oppress our sex.

Attacking Beecher's Letters as an effort "to quench the flame of sympathy in the hearts of their fathers, husbands, brothers and sons," Grimké accuses her of lacking "deep sympathy for thy sister in bonds." "Where, oh where," she asks—exposing the raw nerve joining feminist politics and female culture—"are the outpourings of a soul overwhelmed with a sense of the heinous crimes of our nation, and the necessity of immediate repentance?"

This polemic inspired two others. Sarah Grimké expanded its discussion of women into a comprehensive argument in Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Woman, the fullest statement of American feminism to precede the Declaration of Sentiments adopted at Seneca Falls in 1848. In addition, the Grimké sisters, working with Angelina's husband, Theodore Weld, apparently used its inclusion of southerners' descriptions of slavery as a model for American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses. Composed of clippings from southern newspapers and statements from observers of southern slavery, this best-selling abolitionist fact book became an effective weapon in the abolitionist campaign for signatures on antislavery petitions to Congress.

American Slavery As It Is fulfilled an additional function: Harriet Beecher Stowe later wrote that she kept it "in her work basket by day, and slept with it under her pillow by night, till its facts crystallized into Uncle Tom."

The women Stowe portrays in Uncle Tom's Cabin do not merely exist within the system of chattel slavery; they are largely defined by their various relationships to this system. Repeatedly—inevitably—they make choices and engage in actions that relate to the slavery question. In the beginning, these dramas of moral choice are acted out by Emily Shelby and Marie St. Clare, free white "Christian women of the South"; they are later reenacted by Mary Bird and Rachel Halliday, white women of the "nominally free states." Although Stowe includes among her characters female slaves—mulatto women like Eliza Harris and Cassy and black females like Aunt Chloe and Topsy—she does not present them with similar moral seriousness.

Because slavery determines the texture of their home life, Stowe's white southern ladies need not stray beyond their own walls to engage in this drama of moral choice. Mrs. Shelby is seated at her dressing table when she learns, from her husband's sale of Eliza's little Harry and Uncle Tom, the lesson she could have learned by reading Angelina Grimké's Appeal to the Christian Women of the South. She learns that slavery is

"A bitter, bitter, most accursed thing!—a curse to the master and a curse to the slave! I was a fool to think I could make anything good out of such a deadly evil. It is a sin. . . . but I thought I could gild it over,—I thought, by kindness, and care, and instruction, I could make the condition of mine better than freedom,—fool that I was!"

Watching her efforts to oppose these slave sales, we see an equivocal dramatization of Catharine Beecher's program. As if following Beecher's restrictions, Emily Shelby temperately asks permission to intercede for the slaves within her own home. But she is unsuccessful (and, in her distress, sounds the harsh tones of abolitionist reprovers, as her husband notes). Mrs. Shelby, although a member of the slaveholding class, as a married woman is powerless to prevent these sales. Forbidden by her husband from using her "practical mind" to right their financial affairs and to buy Tom back, only after Mr. Shelby's death is she able to settle the debts and try to redeem the old slave. It is Mrs. Shelby's son, young Mas'r George (whom she has raised to be a Christian), who then plays the role of the earthly emancipator of the Shelby slaves, but he has learned his part from his Christian mother. Although Mrs. Shelby fails to influence her husband—thus setting into motion the events of the novel—she persists in following Beecher's instructions and succeeds at last by influencing her son, who completes the action.

It has been pointed out that Uncle Tom's Cabin develops according to a typological pattern. Stowe presents a series of free white Christian mothers (including St. Clare's and Legree's) who, in accordance with Beecher's restrictions, attempt to influence their sons' actions in regard to slavery. What is striking is not that this pattern is repeated but that their influence is sometimes effective and sometimes not. This fact, centrally dramatized in the uncertainty of Mrs. Shelby's influence on her husband and son, resonates with significance. Is the problem of slavery in Uncle Tom's Cabin finally inseparable from the problem of women's political impotence? Is a hidden issue in the novel the feminist issue of political power for women?

The example of Marie St. Clare suggests that the problem of slavery in Uncle Tom's Cabin cannot be resolved by a simple shift of power to women because—unlike Emily Shelby, who has always felt that slavery is wrong—Marie St. Clare has always felt it to be right. In the world of Uncle Tom's Cabin, although Christianity and sin are shown in active and deadly opposition, although most women appear to be morally superior to most men, and although women bear the responsibility of instilling Christian values in their sons, husbands, and slaves, Christian sympathy is not gender specific. Both women and men are capable of Christian feeling and its opposite. Marie's false religion and callousness toward her female slaves echo Angelina and Sarah Grimké's testimony about female slaveholders in American Slavery As It Is; she would whip a whole plantation of slaves if her husband did not prevent her. Although it is true that the idyllic center of Stowe's novel is the Quaker matriarchate of Rachel Halliday's kitchen, it is not only some men (like the reformed slave catcher Tom Loker) who fail to develop the morality essential for participation in such a society; Marie St. Clare dramatizes that women, too, can be immoral.

Marie St. Clare and Emily Shelby are not, however, the only female members of the slaveholding class in Uncle Tom's Cabin. Little Eva, whose drama fundamentally addresses the issue of spiritual salvation rather than earthly emancipation, is another—perhaps surprising—member of this group. (Stowe implicitly admits this kinship when she makes Little Eva assert her preference for the southern way of life over that of New England: "it makes so many more round you to love, you know.") The uniqueness of Evangeline's character as a member of this class is underscored by the fact that she lacks the guidance of a Christian mother. The St. Clare ménage, like the Legree plantation, is an antihome. Until the advent of Miss Ophelia, it had contained no woman who organized its kitchen and ordered its morals; Marie's refusal to do the former is directly related to her inability to do the latter. Although the "shiftless" chaos of Aunt Dinah's kitchen is countered by Mammy's warmth and "respectability"—and although Mammy is a Christian—neither of these women of color functions as a center in this mistressless house. Uncle Tom, who remains uncorrupted by slavery, is not the only "moral miracle" in Stowe's book. As her father states, Little Eva, who rises above her domestic environment and who remains uncorrupted by mastery, is another.

Although it is perhaps difficult to conceive of any development in Little Eva's character, she is not a completely static figure. We first see her acting out Grimké's suggestions to Christian female slaveholders, going among the slaves on the riverboat "with her hands full of candy, nuts, and oranges, which she would distribute joyfully to them." Two years later, a slightly more mature Eva responds differently to the evils of slavery. Learning to read, she comes to love the Bible, and she develops her antislavery sympathies into antislavery proposals. Eva voices her belief that slaves should be taught to read Scripture; then she wishes she had money to "buy a place in the free states, and take all our people there, and hire teachers, to teach them to read and write." Powerless to effect this modest program for emancipation and literacy, she nonetheless teaches Mammy her letters. When exposed to her cousin's tyrannical actions toward his slave, she confronts Henrique and condemns him: "How could you be so cruel and wicked to poor Dodo?" "I don't want you to call me dear Eva, when you do so." Later, physically ill but spiritually ecstatic, Eva "had vague longings to do something for . . . [the slaves], to bless and save not only them, but all in their condition."

Addressing Uncle Tom, the child speaks in the classic phrases of a martyr: "I would be glad to die, if my dying could stop all this misery. I would die for them, Tom, if I could." Talking with her father, however, Eva outlines a more prudential plan to end slavery in America. Explaining that she is sad "for our poor people" and wishes "they were all free," Eva proposes that St. Clare become an antislavery leader (one who does not, like William Lloyd Garrison, denounce his opponents):

"Papa, you are such a good man, and so noble, and kind, and you always have a way of saying things that is so pleasant, couldn't you go all round and try to persuade people to do right about this? When I am dead, papa, then you will think of me, and do it for my sake."

She then announces,

"I would do it, if I could."

Eva's distressed reactions to the slave culture in which she lives recall the agonies of Angelina Grimké's South Carolina childhood—which she and other abolitionists had publicized widely. In American Slavery As It Is, Grimké had written that she had "fainted away" at the age of thirteen, after seeing a boy whose head had been shaved and who had been "dreadfully whipped," and that a slave woman's accounts of whippings at the work house "smote me with such horror that my limbs could hardly sustain me." She wrote she had prayed mat she might be permitted to be sacrificed to end slavery, and she believed it "the Lord's doing" that she "did not become totally hardened, under the daily operation of the system." Passionately, she recounted "the recollections of my childhood, and the effaceless imprint upon my riper years, with the breaking of my heart-strings," and recorded her misery when finally she recognized herself "powerless to shield the victims" of slavery.

Like the juvenile Angelina, Stowe's little Evangeline—whose given name suggests Grimké's—is mentally and emotionally tortured by the violence of slavery that surrounds her. Are we to read her announcement that "I would do it, if I could" to mean that she would become an antislavery lecturer if she were an adult male like her father? Or does Stowe here more radically imply that if Eva were to grow into womanhood, she herself would become an antislavery lecturer—like Angelina Grimké, that other young Christian girl who, although a member of the slaveholding aristocracy, was also physically and mentally sickened by slavery?

Stowe's characterization invites such conjecture. Eva is (as her mother laments) hopelessly democratic. Always seeming "somehow to put herself on an equality with every creature that comes near her," she embodies an egalitarian Christian love. Her vision undermines the authoritarian religiosity endorsed by Marie's proslavery minister, who preaches that "all the orders and distinctions in society came from God; and that it was so appropriate, you know, and beautiful, that some should be high and some low, and that some were born to rule and some to serve, and all that, you know." Although addressing the issues of race and slavery and not the condition of women, this celebration of aristocracy recalls the hierarchical postulates of Catharine Beecher. If Little Eva's radically egalitarian Christianity encompasses issues of sex and gender as well as race and class—if in her eyes, as in Angelina Grimké's, social "orders and distinctions" concerning women are as ungodly as those concerning nonwhites and slaves—then, perhaps, had she lived, Eva might have assumed the role she proposes to St. Clare. She might, like Angelina Grimké, "go all around and try to persuade people to do right about this."

Stowe's illustrators implied the connections between Eva and the antislavery activists by rendering her conversion of Topsy in terms of an emblem the abolitionists had popularized showing a standing neoclassical figure of Justice as a white-skinned, white-gowned female rescuing a black female supplicant. But Little Eva's importance rests elsewhere. She lives and dies a divine child. Powerless on earth, powerful in heaven, Stowe's female exemplar is less an advocate of mundane emancipation than a model of heavenly salvation. As her conversion of Topsy demonstrates, she is a spiritual, not a political, liberator.

Uncle Tom is Stowe's martyr. His tortured figure does not—like Eva's—recall the sacrificial aristocratic white Christian female Angelina Grimké had evoked in her first Appeal. Tom's passion echoes instead Sarah Grimké's testimony in American Slavery As It Is. She reported that a male black South Carolina slave had refused to deny Christ when ordered by his master as a test of his religious sincerity. Although "terribly whipped, the fortitude of the sufferer was not to be shaken; he nobly rejected the offer of exemption from further punishment at the expense of destroying his soul, and this blessed martyr died."

Raised in what the Grimkés called a "nominally free state," Miss Ophelia seems a more likely candidate than Little Eva for the role of female abolitionist. But as the action unfolds, it becomes clear that Ophelia St. Clare is not representative of the northern women the Grimkés had recruited into female antislavery societies, much less of those who had joined the "promiscuous" abolitionist organizations composed of both men and women, and who had recently endorsed the feminist convention at Seneca Falls.

Although she deplored slavery, in Vermont Miss Ophelia had not been a member of the local abolitionist society. As a guest in the St. Clare household, she initially follows Beecher's advice by restricting her activities to the domestic sphere and attempting to moderate the inflammatory opinions around her. But her discussions parody the dialogues Beecher had projected. Ophelia's mildest comments enfiarne Marie's advocacy of slavery, and her debate with St. Clare becomes an occasion for him to echo the denunciatory testimonials of antislavery southerners in American Slavery As It Is. In Uncle Tom's Cabin, slavery is condemned by a southern male, not a northern female; when Miss Ophelia attempts to soften St. Clare's militant male rhetoric, she is vitiating a southerner's attack on slavery.

Her relationship with Topsy, however, recalls An Appeal to the Women of the Nominally Free States; as the Grimkés' second polemic had argued, the northern woman's racism is a crucial problem. Indeed, the sign of Miss Ophelia's conversion after Eva's death is her eradication of this bias.

When Miss Ophelia gains legal title to Topsy, she is transformed from a representative "woman of the nominally free states" into a slaveholding "Christian woman of the South." In her role as slaveholder, Ophelia St. Clare appears to conform to the outlines Grimké had suggested in her first Appeal: She converts and educates her slave. Further, as a Christian slaveholding woman, Miss Ophelia shows that she has learned the lesson mat Mrs. Shelby left unlearned until too late: that it is futile to educate and Christianize her slave unless she can also guarantee emancipation. Because Miss Ophelia has absorbed this lesson (and because, although a woman, she has control of her property), Topsy will never be persecuted like Emily Shelby's Eliza.

But because Ophelia takes Topsy with her to the free North, it becomes unnecessary for her to act out the more radical program Grimké had proposed to slaveholding women: to break the laws forbidding education and emancipation. Miss Ophelia succeeds in converting, educating, and emancipating Topsy without following either Grimké's radical proposal to southern women that they violate unjust laws or Grimké's radical proposal to northern women that they enter the political arena. In the world of Stowe's novel, the example of Miss Ophelia appears to validate Beecher's argument that women can work effectively against slavery within the domestic circle.

Although Ophelia St. Clare may serve as a model for southern women by Christianizing, educating, and emancipating her slave, and for northern women by overcoming her racism, perhaps Mary Bird is the most important model for Stowe's readers among women of "the nominally free states" whose involvement with slaves and slavery was less intimate. Stowe's dramatization of the invasion of Mrs. Bird's Ohio home by slavery's evil presence demonstrates that slavery shapes not only southern homes like the Shelbys' and the St. Clares' but also northern domestic life. In this scene, Stowe's narrator expresses surprise at Mrs. Bird's abrupt first words to her husband: "and what have they been doing in the Senate?" In apparent approval of the housewife's characteristic lack of involvement with the political sphere, she comments:

Now, it was a very unusual thing for gentle little Mrs. Bird ever to trouble her head with what was going on in the house of the state, very wisely considering that she had enough to do to mind her own.

Nevertheless, Mrs. Bird persists in questioning her husband about the passage of a new fugitive slave law, explaining, when he accuses her of "getting to be a politician, all at once," that her concern is not political, but spiritual:

"I wouldn't give a fig for all your politics, generally, but I think this is something downright cruel and unchristian."

Although Senator Bird asserts that because the abolitionists have been harrassing Kentucky slaveholders, the fugitive slave law seemed "necessary . . . to quiet the excitement," his wife condemns the measure and—defying Beecher's warning—attacks her husband's political position in the clear accents of a "reprover": "You ought to be ashamed, John! . . . It's a shameful, wicked, abominable law."

Nor does she stop there. Mary Bird announces her intention to follow the radical path Angelina Grimké had urged:

"I'll break it, for one, the first time I get a chance; and I hope I shall have a chance, I do!"

Refusing to take seriously her husband's arguments and explanations, Mrs. Bird rests her case like Grimké solely on Holy Scriptures, asserting, "Now, John, I don't know anything about politics, but I can read my Bible; and there I see that I must feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and comfort the desolate; and that Bible I mean to follow." Not satisfied with proclaiming her defiance, she attacks her husband's position until an interruption signals the appearance of the runaway Eliza and her son. It is only after the female fugitive has successfully appealed to the northern woman for protection, only after the free woman and the female fugitive slave have established their sisterhood as bereaved mothers, that the senator suggests a plan for Eliza's escape. Although Stowe's treatment of Mrs. Bird follows Catharine Beecher's strictures that women should act within the domestic sphere, Mary Bird's condemnations of the attempts by her husband (and the rest of the Senate) to mediate between the proslavery and antislavery forces, her proclamation of her defiance of unjust laws, and her actual defiance of them are contrary to Beecher's instructions.

But the world of Uncle Tom's Cabin is a fortunate world for northern white women who oppose chattel slavery within the domestic sphere. Mrs. Bird's husband, swayed by her argument, her actions, or Eliza's desperate situation, does not oppose his wife. Neither slave catchers nor United States marshals arrive at her door. Mrs. Bird is not forced to take the next step Grimké had outlined; she is not judged a criminal. Like the women of the slaveholding states, this northern woman encounters slavery in her home. Stowe shows her remaining there, permits her to take a moral antislavery position and—despite the immorality of this world—to avoid suffering any adverse consequences whatever.

Catharine Beecher's pamphlet had ignored the presence of women of color in the struggle against slavery. Although in her first Appeal Angelina Grimké had simply counseled both male and female slaves to be patient, in the second she had urged free Afro-American women to participate in the abolitionist movement despite its racism. Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin includes a number of nonwhite female characters—slave, fugitive, and free—but although it follows their physical actions with some attention, it expresses little interest in their moral choices. Indeed, in Uncle Tom's Cabin neither male nor female nonwhite characters are seriously treated as rational creatures engaged in the human activity of making moral choices, but instead are seen as natural creatures reacting to events. Like all of Stowe's characters, however, they have the duty to be Christians and to help others follow Christ.

Accordingly, Eliza Harris is shown as a Christian wife and mother who influences the spiritual salvation of her husband and children. In relation to the issue of earthly emancipation, her role is less clear. While a slave, Eliza first echoes Grimké's advice by counseling her outraged husband to be patient; when her little son Harry is threatened, she automatically obeys the voice of nature and attempts his rescue; finally free and safe, after converting her husband to Christianity, she happily follows him to Africa in an effort to save the pagans. In the process, we are presented with a detailed description of her efforts to elude her catchers. But we are not shown Eliza agonizing over her decisions; these are presented as simple reactions, not reasoned moral choices. Even Cassy, the prototypical "tragic mulatto" on the Legree place who, maddened by sexual abuse, once killed her baby to save him from a life of slavery, receives similar treatment. Although it is this dark female who tempts Tom to abandon his faith, her abrupt conversion occurs within the space of a single sentence.

Stowe consistently presents her blacker female figures with even less complexity. Although Topsy and Aunt Chloe, the most important ones, are first seen as comic and then shown as Christians, the moral choices inevitably involved in their transformations are scanted. Stowe's serious concern with the morality of free white aristocratic "Christian women of the South" and free white "women of the nominally free states"—women like Emily Shelby, Marie St. Clare, Ophelia St. Clare, Mary Bird and Rachael Halliday—contrasts dramatically with her summary treatment of the moral conflicts of black and mulatto female characters like the hard-working Chloe, the battered child Topsy, the heroic slave mother Eliza, and even the sexually abused Cassy.

There is one thing that every individual can do,—they can see to it that they feel right.

Uncle Tom's Cabin, it has been pointed out, is a jeremiad. Harriet Beecher Stowe's narrator does not assume "the office of a mediator," presenting herself as "the advocate of charity and peace," as one who takes "every possible means to soothe exasperated feelings, and . . . [avoids] all those offensive peculiarities that in their nature tend to inflame and offend," as Beecher said females should. Instead (although she is not, as her enemies charged, a "reprover" of the South), Stowe's narrator certainly is a reprover; she exacerbates the slavery issue—as Beecher charged the abolitionists did, and as she asserted women must not do.

Further, although writing in a literary form traditional to women and addressing a female audience (who surely read her words wimin the domestic sphere), Stowe echoed me Grimkés and other abolitionist-feminists by raising her woman's voice on the most volatile political issue of the day; and she compounded this brazenness by serializing her novel in the pages of an antislavery newspaper. Clearly, her intention was to politicize a female audience. But in this, she echoed not only the feminist Grimkés; she also repeated a contradiction at the heart of her sister's Letters. Immediately after their appearance, the Grimkés' defenders had pointed out mat Beecher violated her own strictures on female behavior by engaging in public debate on a political issue.

In Uncle Tom's Cabin, none of the characters—black, mulatto or white, male or female—becomes involved in the public struggle against slavery, as Grimké had urged. Although both Miss Ophelia and Mrs. Bird refuse to obey unjust laws, the New Englander simply takes her slave north, where slavery is illegal and education available, and proceeds to conform to the enlightened local statutes. Although the Ohioan does indeed run a risk by violating the new fugitive slave law, she fortunately escapes apprehension and punishment, as do Rachel and the other members of the Quaker community. If mere are any legal consequences for the Kentuckian Mrs. Shelby caused by the actions of her son George, who plays the role of southern emancipator Grimké had urged on her female audience, we never hear of them. In contrast to the fugitive, emancipated, and freeborn Afro-American participants in the Convention of American Women Against Slavery whom Grimké had addressed in her second Appeal, Stowe's free black and mulatto women—Eliza Harris, Cassy, even Topsy—embrace colonization and become expatriates.

The narrator's announcement that her objective is "to awaken sympathy and feeling for the African race, as they exist among us," suggests that sympathy is a force essentially destructive of human injustice. Despite the negative example of Marie St. Clare (who is incapable of sympathizing with anyone), both the action and the narration of the novel demonstrate that women have easy access to this revolutionary power. Yet none of Stowe's female characters uses it, as had the Grimkés and their followers, collectively to challenge institutionalized injustice in the public sphere. Instead, Uncle Tom's Cabin shows individual women using the power of sympathy to enable them to act effectively in private against slavery when the servile institution threatens the domestic sphere. Stowe's female Christians act successfully against slavery without walking out of their own front doors.

To the extent that, within the process of defending Christian domestic values, Stowe's emphasis on individual sympathy and on the doctrine of Higher Laws functions not only as a critique of chattel slavery but also as a critique of racist patriarchal capitalist culture in America, and to the extent that it suggests an alternative society grounded in egalitarian Christianity and proposes a loving maternal ethic in opposition to patriarchal values, Uncle Tom's Cabin endorses nineteenth-century radical ideas.

In this regard, the crucial connections between sex and race in Uncle Tom's Cabin demand examination. The primary distinctions in Stowe's book are between non-Christians and Christians. Stowe assigns intellectual superiority and worldly power to the first group and spiritual superiority and otherworldly power—seen as infinitely more important—to the second. In the process, she conflates race and sex. Her first group consists primarily of white males. Her second group includes essentially white females and all nonwhites.

The connections between Uncle Tom, the cultural type of the True Woman, and Stowe's view of Jesus Christ have been repeatedly noted. But these connections involve more than Stowe's black martyr; in her book, nonwhites as a group, like women as a group, possess special religious attributes. In Letters to Catharine E. Beecher, Grimké had articulated her awareness of parallels between the oppression of slaves and the oppression of women, announcing that "the investigation of the rights of the slave has led to a better understanding of my own." Stowe's novel echoes other nineteenth-century analyses, however, in connecting "women and Negroes" not only in terms of their earthly powerlessness, but also as the reservoirs of a sympathy that signals their heavenly power and revolutionary potential. To the extent that we take seriously the radical implications of Stowe's book, we can perhaps take seriously the connections between her divine child Evangeline and her feminist antiracist contemporary Angelina Grimké, and find in Stowe's heavenly child a budding social activist.

At issue here is not how forceful and revolutionary we judge the power of sympathy to be: Stowe echoes both Beecher and the Grimkés in dramatizing its regenerative force. At issue here is how Christians should use that power.

A dozen years ago, writing in the shadow of the modern freedom movement and examining Uncle Tom's Cabin as a response to the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, I concluded that Stowe's "sentimentalized racialism" (the term is George Fredrickson's) opposed the active resistance of black and white abolitionists and insurrectionists. Created in the context of radical abolitionist and insurrectionist responses to the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, Stowe's book apotheosizes a black man who triumphs in heaven after practicing Christian resignation when tortured on earth (and pointing others toward eternal salvation) while celebrating more ordinary slaves who escape and expatriate themselves to Africa. Today, writing in the midst of the modern feminist movement and examining the treatment of female characters in Uncle Tom's Cabin as a response to the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, I can only conclude that Stowe makes a similar move in relation to women. Created in the context of feminist demands for equal rights for women, Stowe's book apotheosizes a juvenile white female who triumphs in heaven after practicing Christian charity on earth, ameliorating the suffering of the slaves (and pointing them toward eternal salvation) while celebrating more ordinary women who practice not feminism and abolitionism but "domestic feminism" and colonization.

Although on a spiritual level Stowe's attack on the patriarchal institution challenges all oppressive earthly authority, ultimately both the spiritual and the mundane dramas in Uncle Tom's Cabin counter the practical measures urged by the black and white activists following the Grimkés' lead—women like Abby Kelley Foster and Sojourner Truth, who, for more than a decade, had been invading American public life, going "all around" trying "to persuade people to do right about this." Catharine Beecher must have been pleased.

Notes

1 An Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism, with Reference to the Duty of American Females, Addressed to A. E. Grimké, (Philadelphia: Henry Perkins; Boston: Perkins & Marvin, 1837); quoted in [A. E. Grimké et al], An Appeal to the Women of the Nominally Free States, Issued by an Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women (New York: W. S. Dorr, 1837).

2 Uncle Tom's Cabin appeared as a serial in the National Era, June 3, 1851-April 2, 1852, and was published in book form in 1852. Parenthetical references in my text refer to the edition edited by Kenneth Lynn (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962); the passage quoted is in chap. 45.

3 Angelina Grimké, Appeal to the Christian Women of the South, The Anti-Slavery Examiner 1 (September 1836): [l]-35. For the Grimké sisters, see Gerda Lerner, (1967; rpt. New York: Schocken Books, 1971); and Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin, The Emancipation of Angelina Grimké (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1974). For the situation of women, see, for example, Barbara Welter, American Quarterly 18 (1966): 151-74; Nancy Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977); and Linda Kerber, Women of the Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980).

4 Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1973).

5 See which appeared as a statement of the 1837 Convention of American Women Against Slavery; A. E. Grimké, Letters to Catharine E. Beecher, in Reply to An Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism, Addressed to A. E. Grimké (Boston: Isaac Knapp, 1838); and Sarah Grimké's Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Women, Addressed to Mary S. Parker, President of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society (Boston: Isaac Knapp, 1838). Catharine Beecher's Treatise on Domestic Economy for the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School (Boston: t. H. Webb, 1834), revised by Beecher and Stowe, appeared as The American Woman's Home, or Principles of domestic Science (New York: J. B. Ford, 1869). For recent controversy concerning feminism and female culture in nineteenth-century America, see Ellen DuBois, M. J. Buhle, T. Kaplan, G. Lerner, and C. Smith-Rosenberg, Feminist Studies 6 (Spring 1980): 26-64. Although sensitive to the problems of terminology raised in these comments, in this essay I use "feminist" when referring both to supporters of the nineteenth-century women's rights movement who were essentially reformist and to those radicals who proposed an end to patriarchy. I do so because my purpose here is simply to differentiate between the Grimkés' "feminism" and Beecher's "domestic feminism," a crucial distinction inexplicably ignored in Ann Douglas's Introduction to a recent edition of Uncle Tom's Cabin (New York: Penguin Books, 1981).

6 Grimké, Appeal to the Christian Women of the South, p. 20.

7 Beecher, An Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism, pp. 99- 100.

8 Ibid, pp. 104, 128, 145. Further, Beecher implicitly attacks Grimké's efforts to win northern women to abolitionism by attacking the proposal that women lecture in public. Her revulsion at Fanny Wright's public appearances was surely telling in a pamphlet addressed to Grimké, newest and most prominent of the female speakers: "If the female advocate chooses to come upon a stage, and expose her person . . . it is . . . right to express disgust at whatever is offensive or indecorous" (p. 121).

9 [Grimké et al,] Appeal to the Women of the Nominally Free States, p. 61.

10 Grimké, Letters to Catharine E. Beecher, pp. 108, 115, 112, 128-29.

11 For Letters on the Equality of the Sexes, see note 5. American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses (New York: American Anti-slavery Society, 1839).

12 From an unpublished manuscript by Sarah Weld of reminiscences of her mother, Angelina Grimké Weld, quoted in Gilbert Hobbs Barnes, The Antislavery Impulse, 1830-44 (1933; rpt. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1964), p. 231.

13 See chap. 19, and American Slavery As It Is, pp. 56, 24. For the matriarchal Utopian impulse in Uncle Tom's Cabin, see Elizabeth Ammons, American Literature 49 (May 1977): 161-79; also see Gillian Brown, American Quarterly 36 (Fall 1984): 503-23.

14 American Slavery As It Is, pp. 53, 55; also see Grimké's letter to William Lloyd Garrison, August 30, 1835, published in the Liberator and widely reprinted, and the many press reports of Grimké's speeches describing her childhood suffering.

15 American Slavery As It Is, p. 24.

16 For a different view of Eliza, see Nina Baym, (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1978), p. 16; for Cassy as a quintessential figure in woman's fiction, see Sandra Gilbert and S. Gubar, (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 533-35.

17 See Jane Tomkins, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 122-46; cf. also Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978).

18 Beecher, Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism, pp. 128, 129, 138-39.

20 Preface to Uncle Tom's Cabin, ed. Lynn.

21 Grimké, Letters to Catharine E. Beecher, p. 114. The issue of the commonality of the oppressed is complex. Grimké, for one, did not confuse the brutality of black slavery with the condition of free women like herself in noting that the former led her to examine the latter. For the complicated comment of another antislavery feminist, see L. Maria Child, National Anti-Slavery Standard, April 27, 1843, p. 187: "In comparison with the Caucasian race, I have often said that they [the Africans] are what woman is in comparison with man. The comparison between women and the colored race as classes is striking. Both are exceedingly adhesive in their attachments; both, comparatively speaking, have a tendency to submission; and hence, both have been kept in subjection by physical force, and considered rather in the light of property, than as individuals." For an interpretation asserting the radical character of sentiment that argues Uncle Tom's Cabin subverts the patriarchy, see Tompkins,

22 Jean Fagan Yellin, The Intricate Knot (New York: New York University Press, 1972), chap. 7; George Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind (New York: Harper & Row, 1971).