1852

Date uncertain: In 2007, a woman at a flea market in Nashville, Tn. turns up a cotton sack in a bin of old fabric scraps. Now known as “Ashley’s Sack,” it evokes profound emotions regarding slavery. The sack carries an embroidered inscription – about which almost nothing beyond the inscription is known. 

Decades later, Ashley’s granddaughter Ruth embroidered the sack with an inscription that announces its provenance: 

My great grandmother Rose
mother of Ashley gave her this sack when
she was sold at age 9 in South Carolina
it held a tattered dress 3 handfulls of
pecans a braid of Roses hair. Told her
It be filled with my Love always
she never saw her again
Ashley is my grandmother
Ruth Middleton
1921

 

(Tiya Miles, a historian, has now written a book, All That She Carried, with the simple cotton sack as a starting point. “Ashley” is a name rare among slaves, although “Rose” is not. Miles has uncovered, an inventory from 1852, when a slave owner named Robert Martin died. In it are two slaves listed as property, a “Rose,” and an “Ashley.” Since the death of an owner often meant division of his worldly goods, including his walking, talking, feeling worldly goods, Miles thinks this may be where the story of the sack began.)

Screenshot of the sack.

NOTE TO TEACHERS: I saw this story after I retired; but I know my students could have done a great job writing about Ashley’s and Rose’s emotions at the time of their separation.

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March 20: Uncle Tom’s Cabin is published. John Bach McMaster says the book “was so powerfully written that everybody read it, and thousands of people in the north who hitherto cared little about the issue of slavery were converted to abolitionism.” (97/328) 

 

A Pen Stronger than the Fugitive Slave Laws. 

Halleck gives us a picture of Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896): 

It was, however, left for the daughter of an orthodox Congregational clergyman of New England to surpass every other antislavery champion in fanning into a flame the sentiment against enslaving human beings. Harriet Beecher, the sister of Henry Ward Beecher, the greatest pulpit orator of anti-slavery days, was born in Litchfield, Connecticut. When she was twenty-one, she went with her father, Lyman Beecher, to Cincinnati. Her new home was on the borderland of slavery, and she often saw fugitive slaves and heard their stories at first hand. In 1833 she made a visit to a slave plantation in Kentucky and obtained additional material for her most noted work.

 

In 1836 she married Calvin E. Stowe, a colleague of her father in the Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati. During the next twelve years she had six children to rear.

 

In 1850 Professor Stowe and his family moved to Bowdoin College, in Brunswick, Maine. This year saw the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, which required the citizens of free states to aid in catching and returning escaped slaves. This Act roused Mrs. Stowe, and she began Uncle Tom's Cabin, which was published in book form in 1852.

 

Perhaps no other American book of note has been written under so great a handicap. When Mrs. Stowe began this work, one of her large family of children was not a year old, and the others were a constant care. Nevertheless, she persevered with her epoch-making story. One of her friends has given us a picture of the difficulties in her way, the baby on her knee, the new hired girl asking whether the pork should be put on top of the beans, and whether the gingerbread should stay longer in the oven.

 

In Uncle Tom's Cabin Mrs. Stowe endeavored to translate into concrete form certain phases of the institution of slavery, which had been merely an abstraction to the North. Of Senator John Bird, who believed in stringent laws for the apprehension of fugitive slaves, she wrote:

 

“… his idea of a fugitive was only an idea of the letters that spell the word, – or, at the most, the image of a little newspaper picture of a man with a stick and bundle, with ‘Ran away from the subscriber’ under it. The magic of the real presence of distress, – the imploring human eye, the frail, trembling human hand, the despairing appeal of helpless agony, – these he had never tried. He had never thought that a fugitive might be a hapless mother, a defenceless child….”

 

In chapters of intense dramatic power, Mrs. Stowe shows a slave mother and her child escaping on the floating ice across the Ohio. They come for refuge to the home of Senator Bird.

 

“Were you a slave?” said Mr. Bird.

 

“Yes, sir; I belonged to a man in Kentucky.”

 

“Was he unkind to you?”

 

“No, sir; he was a good master.”

 

“And was your mistress unkind to you?”

 

“No, sir,—no! my mistress was always good to me.”

 

Senator Bird learned that the master and mistress were in debt, and that a creditor had a claim which could be discharged only by the sale of the child. “Then it was,” said the slave mother, “I took him and left my home and came away.”

 

Mrs. Stowe’s knowledge of psychological values is shown in the means taken to make it appear to Senator John Bird that it would be the natural thing for him to defeat his own law, by driving the woman and her child seven miles in the dead of night to a place of greater safety.

 

Halleck, writing in 1911, notes that Stowe’s work remained “controversial.” In his own era, of course, lynching was common. Jim Crow laws predominated. The K.K.K. would soon have a resurgence. 

He must therefore add: 

All sections of the country do not agree in regard to whether Uncle Tom's Cabin gives a fairly representative picture of slavery. This is a question for the historian, not for the literary critic. We study Macbeth for its psychology, its revelation of human nature, its ethics, more than for its accurate exposition of the Scottish history of the time. We read Uncle Tom’s Cabin to find out how the pen of one woman proved stronger than the fugitive slave laws of the United States, how it helped to render of no avail the decrees of the courts, and to usher in a four years’ war. We decide that she achieved this result because the pictures, whether representative or not, which she chose to throw on her screen, were such as appealed to the most elemental principles of human nature, such as the mother could not forget when she heard her own children say their evening prayer, such as led her to consent to send her firstborn to the war, such as to make Uncle Tom’s Cabin outsell every other book written by an American, to cause it to be translated into more than thirty foreign languages, to lead a lady of the Siamese court to free all her slaves in 1867, and to say that Mrs. Stowe “had taught her as even Buddha had taught kings to respect the rights of her fellow creatures.”

 

…We may say with W. P. Trent, a Virginian by birth, and a critic who has the southern point of view: “Uncle Tom’s Cabin is alive with emotion, and the book that is alive with emotion after the lapse of fifty years is a great book.”

 

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Growing divisions, North vs. South, were beginning to split the political parties. In 1852, the Democrats tried to find a candidate for president who would offend the fewest possible voters. 

“The Convention at last, on the forty-ninth ballot, nominated General Pierce (Purse, his friends called him), a gentleman of courteous temper, highly agreeable manners, and convivial nature. He had served in the recent war with Mexico; he had never given a vote or written a sentence that the straightest Southern Democrat could wish to blot; and he was identified with the slave-power, having denounced its enemies as the enemies of the Constitution.” Benjamin Perley Poole, Reminiscences; Volume 1, pp. 414

 

“Mr. Buchanan was unusually active in his opposition to the Whig ticket. ‘I should regard Scott’s election,’ he wrote to a friend, “as one of the greatest calamities which could befall the country. I know him well, and do not doubt either his patriotism or his integrity; but he is vain beyond any man I have ever known, and, what is remarkable in a vain man, he is obstinate and self-willed and unyielding. His judgment, except in  conducting a campaign in the field, is perverse and unsound; and when, added to all this, we consider that, if elected at all, it will be under the auspices of Seward and his Abolition associates, I fear for the fate of this Union.”  Benjamin Perley Poole, Reminiscences; Volume 1, pp. 419-420

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