American Experience; The Abolitionists; Interview with Joan D. Hedrick, part 2 of 3

So, yeah, so the abolition movement had been oiling the waters for 10 years now for more insulation and ironing and hadn't made much headway. And how is it that Harry managed to convert parts and lines where they have been? When Stowe got the idea to write Uncle Tom's cabin, she wrote to her editor that her vocation was simply to paint pictures that people were persuaded by them whether they meant to be or not. So, in that way, she got behind the defenses of her audience. And she's a very visual writer, so to see pictures of slaves running away, to see pictures of what slavery was actually like, she was able to bring people to an awareness both of the cruelty of slavery, and also the damage it did to family life, to a country that presumably made family and motherhood a very important value to see the destruction in

slaves' family lives was very painful for her readers. So she really knew where to aim her arrows and was very effective in sending them out. In the course of her story, Eliza, a young slave woman, realizes that her son Harry is going to be sold to a slave trader, so she resolves to run away with him in the middle of the night, and makes her way until she comes to the Ohio River, which is the boundary between the slave state of Kentucky and the free state of Ohio, must get across it. So she goes to the fairy man and she tells him she wants to cross, and he points to the ice cakes that are breaking up on the river and says, if we put a boat in there, it'll be

smashed to pieces. At this point, she hears the slave catchers coming in hot pursuit, so in a desperate act, she holds tight to her child and leaps on to an ice cake and manages to get from that ice cake to the next one and the next one and to reach the other side of the river. And it was said that when the novel was put on stage, the National Theater in New York, there was not one dry eye when Eliza reached the other side of the river. And Harriet knew that if she could get that response from her readers, she didn't need to make arguments about slavery. It's so interesting because so much about programs, the Constitution, Pro-Slavery, or Anti-Slavery. You know, between Garrison and Douglas and the higher levels of abolition and these rather airy-dite arguments, the union and so on, and she cuts through it, yeah. Did she conceive the work all at once?

You mentioned that she went home and wrote the last scene first. She wrote the book over the course of a year in installments, weekly installments for an anti-slavery newspaper. So as she wrote one installment, she did not know what was going to happen next week and her readers were all waiting to see what would happen to her characters. How she kept track of all that, I have no idea. But she wrote the entire four or five hundred page novel in a year in this manner. It sounds almost that she was being transported. It's just so remarkable she hadn't written anything for five years, it, you know, she herself seems to have described it to a higher power. Yes, she wrote about it in a way that suggests that she really was taken over by the characters and the story, that they just pressed themselves upon her and demanded to be written.

She could hear their voices, they were talking, they were arguing. She just had to get them down. It was an extraordinary experience of really being taken over by the artistic process, which she described to God at one point. She said really God wrote the novel because she did feel so completely taken over by it. Right, right. What role did American slavery, as it is, play in inspiring and crafting novel? So used various sources to give her accurate details about slave life and one of the sources she used was Theodore Weld's Slavery as it is, which was a very important anti-slavery compilation of documents, many of them written by slaveholders themselves, such as hand bills for runaway slaves, which would describe the marks of physical abuse on a slave.

My slave, Sam, missing a finger, heavily scarred on his back, still used those to suggest that this supposedly patriarchal benevolent institution had a very dark side to it. So that was a very important source for her. That's great. I wonder if you said it was Theodore Weld's book, and we're also detailing the role of the cremkey play in writing it to them, Stan, that she and Sarah spent, according to Theodore Weld, they played almost people roles in cremkey together. So if you'd just say Theodore Weld, then Angelina, the cremkey's connected ideas. Still relied on various sources that described slavery as she was writing Uncle Tom's cabin, and one of them was slavery as it is written by Theodore Weld and Angelina Grimkey, which was a compilation of documents.

Many of them written by slaveholders themselves that described in some cases the marks of brutality on the bodies of slaves, for example, in the hand bills that they put in the papers to advertise runaway slaves that would often say things like, my slave, Sam, missing a finger, heavily scarred on his back, and so forth. So that was a very important document. No, I understand. You're writing as you go, just like still. Right. You mentioned the kind of apocalyptic ending or closing remarks, and one of you could put those remarks in the context of her faith, and just want to tell us about their remarks. Still ended Uncle Tom's cabin with what she called concluding remarks, where she directly addressed the readers and this nation, and it's a kind of Jeremiah where she says, if

we don't do something, the wrath of the Almighty God is going to come down on this country. He's writing in that apocalyptic tradition that was part of the millennial faith of this country at that time. Many people believe that the world was going to end. The more hopeful post-millennialists like Lyman Beacher thought that there would be a thousand years of peace first, and then the world would end, and that he and all the progressive revivals and temperance movements were part of creating that. There was a darker apocalypticism, which believed, no, Jesus Christ is going to come to the earth now, and in his wrath he's going to destroy it, and it's going to happen really soon. The ending of Uncle Tom's cabin, I think, written out of her fury and horror at the institution of slavery and that this could go on in a democratic country, really was tuning into that dark

apocalyptic strain, which actually, in some ways, presages the horrible civil war that was going to break out. I'm sure you know, we're also quoting an article that she wrote in the paper of 61, I think, just after the beginning of the war, and she kind of says as much that this is payback. Well, I didn't know you were quoting that, you know, it's God's will, the Slate Mothers, whose tears no better. Wow. And did she believe that the war was divine retribution? I think that was an element of divine retribution and her understanding of the civil war, yes, because the contradiction between Christian principles, what it meant to imitate the life of Christ and what the nation was doing to the slave, were so far apart.

I think she did find herself in an old testament place where God was going to send fire and judgment down on the country. And I wonder if you just can tell me a bit about the success of Uncle Tom's Cabin again, for our audience, just how big was this book, any place? Uncle Tom's Cabin had a very big readership as it was being serialized over the course of 1851, 1852. It was published in 1852 and within a week, 10,000 copies had been sold. And during the first year, 300,000 copies, it was a runaway bestseller.

It sold better than any book had except the Bible. And in Great Britain, where slavery had been abolished, it was even more popular. Figures suggested a million and a half copies were sold there. It was quickly translated into many languages. It was immediately put on stage and it became one of the longest running, perhaps the longest running stage play ever. It ran continuously as a Tom play as it was called for 90 years. In the 20th century, the Uncle Tom's Cabin play was what many people knew rather than the novel. What did an average bestseller, 300,000 copies in a year, over the good bestseller in 1852? You know, I wouldn't be able to tell you that. Yeah, it's a good question because of modern day numbers, which are so much bigger than that.

It's hard to kind of make clear just what the novel was. Is there anything beyond numbers? I can say something about that. This was a time when books had been very expensive, but they were becoming a lot less expensive because of the methods of reproducing them. Stereotyping had come in so they could be printed very rapidly. And the communication system, the railroads could bring the books across the country very rapidly. Still lived at just the right time to make a big splash with a book, and it was able to be both printed rapidly and transported rapidly. So it was one of the first of the books that really became immensely popular in this way because of those developments. Looking at the big picture, how did the book change the cause of this struggle for abolition?

The main effect of Uncle Tom's cabin was to change people's consciousness. It really created a moral revolution that made it much, much harder to believe in the old arguments in favor of slavery. One of the most common was to say that slaves weren't like white people. They didn't feel pain. They were happy to go lucky. They liked life on the plantation. Her book made it very hard to hold those views. She also focused very explicitly on the legal slave trade in this country. The international slave trade had been abolished, so the only way that a plantation could increase its stock was either by reproduction or buying slaves in this country. She has a number of slave auctions in her book which look at the reality of a human being examined like a horse or a cow people looking into a slave's mouth and thumping them as you would the flanks of a horse.

This was very hard for people to see. So by changing that sense of the slave as not a thing but a human being, she really changed the whole debate. Again, you touched on this before. What did she describe as she said this might be rush of wind with this unprecedented inspiration in her life? She later wrote that God wrote the book that she had been taken over by a force really outside of her. She was so transported by the scenes, by the characters, by the lives, by the extraordinary spiritual life of her hero, Tom, who like Christ gives his life for others.

It was almost as if she were a prophet writing down the words that were being dictated to her. That's the way she felt. Jumping ahead. Do you know how what she felt, how she responded to her was very in the news? I don't. I find nothing on John Brown. Yes, I wish I could make those connections. 1859, she's in England for one thing. That's part of it, I think. And how did we talk about her seeing the war, whether she's not a war, is the violent commotion? Was she, you know, some of our people, you know, Douglas was belated in Darius and was troubled, but basically hopeful.

How did she feel about the outbreak of war? When the Civil War broke out, she immediately got behind it. Her son, Fred, enlisted. She was hopeful that the Union cause would be victorious. She was patriotic about the war and also very aware of all the pain and suffering that it was causing in families and in her family too, because her son was wounded at Gettysburg. Never was really quite the same after that. How did she feel about Lincoln? Lincoln announced the emancipation proclamation as something he intended to do in the summer of 1862. She wanted to write about this and give it a boost, but she wanted to be sure that he was really going to follow through on that.

So she went to Washington and had an interview with him and it was said that when he greeted her, he said, so you're the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war. Which one can imagine him saying because he was so tall and lanky and Harriet stood less than five feet. Although there's no documentation of that. It's a wonderful story. She wrote back to her family that she had had a real funny interview. That's the word she used with Father Abraham and that she would tell them all about it when she got home. I know. I've had a number of those moments in research. Excuse me. Actually, I just want to go back and do a couple of those questions before we got rolling.

And since we have a few minutes, she pointed out she had six brothers in the ministry. For all of our characters, it seems that her fate was perhaps the most important aspect of how they saw themselves. Was that true of her and what was that fate? How did she see that, what rolled it up to her life? She had a very intense faith. In the 1840s, she was drawn more and more to a very simple primitive kind of Christianity, which emphasized imitation of the life of Christ, which is a very demanding pattern.

And she did put a lot of pressure on herself in terms of her spiritual life. That understanding of the importance of simply doing what Christ would do, influenced the way she saw the slavery issue, the way she saw the food of slave law. What would Christ do if a slave came knocking on his door, asking for help? And she drew on that to energize her readers and most of whom were Christian, most of whom profess Christianity, to get them to square their faith with their actions. A lot of what she believed was not uncommon, it wasn't radical. But what was radical was the fierceness with which she believed one should practice, one's religion, should really live it out. Yeah, it's interesting. And she also shares, I mean, as you say, as a timelage,

a lot of people had very millennial view of the world. And the expectation that Christ was only was coming to the judgment, seemed to move different people in different ways. How did it improve that sense of eminent judgment? In 1843, William Miller was preaching that the end of the world was imminent. He even projected a certain date upon which this would happen. And Harriet was very taken up in that kind of millennial expectation that the world could really end at any moment. And one had to be prepared. And that meant preparing yourself spiritually, making sure that your actions were right, that your attitudes were right. It brought a very intense scrutiny to her life and to the lives of others during this time.

And I think that that carried over into the late 40s when she was writing Uncle Tom's cabin. And what, growing up in the future house, what did she absorb, what was received feeling on slavery as a young woman, say, since then? She grew up understanding the slavery was a terrible thing. There was an aunt Mary who lived in the West Indies where she was part of a family that had slaves. And that was talked about as a very difficult, immoral thing. She knew that her father, she probably heard her father preaching against slavery in his church in Boston. So it was definitely held up as a moral evil in the Beecher family.

I get the impression she also inherited a suspicion of radicalism. Well, you know, when she writes about abolitionistness and sedatives, you know, that's the class of abolitionist. It's a really tiny, tidy issue. She's looking down on it. I wonder if you could talk about that. The Beecher family, although they were very fiery evangelicals or her father was, were in a lot of ways quite conservative in their social views. Her sister, Catherine, didn't think women should speak out like Angelina Grimke. Her father was originally a colonizationist, which was the most conservative wing of the anti-slavery movement. They believed that the slaves should be sent back to Africa and until that could be arranged,

one had to simply put up with slavery. Garrison changed all that with his immediate emancipation in the 1830s, which really radicalized and energized the anti-slavery movement. So Harriet grew up with a kind of conservative politically correct abolitionism and then was moved to a much more dramatic radical kind by her own experiences, by her own immersion in the culture of the 1830s, when she was, after all, a woman in her 20s, being profoundly influenced by that. And I wonder if you could describe a scene, that she's eight months pregnant during the riots in 36, that she's eight months pregnant with twins. And it's one of the most striking quotes, is that you're a man of women. Right, Harriet had a very pronounced heroic streak to her.

And during the riots in Cincinnati against Bernie's abolitionist paper, when the mob was threatening various houses, she wrote to Calvin, who was out of town, that she wished she were a man because she would take a rifle and she would man a window as well as anybody else. And she's at this point eight months pregnant with twins, but that didn't seem to stop her. Was she being motivated at that point by empathy for the slave? It's a striking evolution from, you know, she's the person who actually managed to finally convey empathy to the American public. But in person, since then, in Cincinnati, she wasn't being moved so much by empathy for the slaves. She wasn't at that point being really,

she wasn't really identifying herself with the slaves and the way that she would later. She was much more moved by constitutional issues, free speech, mobocracy is not the way to go, this is a democracy. It was a much more rational approach, much more intellectual approach than the one she would take later. And it's a threat to people like her brothers and her father yourself. Exactly. It is a threat to the respectable population, the property owners, all of this. So it's a fairly conservative approach, yes. And so what changes by, I won't take a second, what changes, what changes, what, how does she go from a, like many white people to be motivated by threats to constitutional liberties to something so much deeper?

Slavery became a very personal issue for her later in the 1840s when she lost a child. And it made her understand what a slave parent felt. When their child was taken away at the auction block. So this personalized the issue in a way it hadn't been earlier for her. I think the cultural architecture, this way, go to it. That's really, that's about all I need. Just that line, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And Angelina Grimke grew up in a, a, a slave owning family in South Carolina and experienced slavery firsthand. Had the experience of walking down the street past a slave warehouse one day and heard the cries of slaves who were being whipped inside. And she said that that experience just sunk into her heart and she became a traitor to her family and her class

by leaving the South and coming north and engaging in a speaking career against the institution of slavery. This was a highly unusual act for a woman of her class and her background. She converted to Quakerism, which enabled, well, as a religion it prized women's speaking as well as men. So it enabled her public speech in a way that perhaps another religious tradition would not. But she was, she was very unusual in speaking out and in breaking with her family. And neither, you know, leaving one's family's church or leaving home for a 24-year-old with young woman today is not exactly news. But both of those things, I would think, it would be hard for her to think more of the values.

Right, it's true. Was that too much detail? Do you want just that sentence? I can do that sentence at this. If you want to take another crack out, we don't probably don't need the details, really. Yeah, I can do it again. Yeah, all right. Angelina Grimke grew up in a plantation owning family in South Carolina. And when she was 24, she made the decision to leave her family because she was so distressed by the institution of slavery. She wanted nothing to do with it. So she came north, and this was a highly unusual act for a woman of her age and her class. Great, thank you. Back to Harry Feature Stone. Yes. The woman of the road book. Yes. I'll just keep testing it over here. You can go ahead. Tom Rady. What did Harry hope to achieve?

What was she promoting online? The leaders of Bumble Bumble Cabin. This is a similar speaking idea. You mentioned on the phone, which we hope it did. It's actually proxyl with the media. In the first 13 chapters of Uncle Tom's Cabin, you can see Stowe taking aim at the fugitive slave law in incident after incident, and basically urging her readers to defy what she thought was an anti-Christian, underocratic law. Urging a matter of... Oh, sorry. Yeah. Stowe made slavery a matter of conscience for the nation. She made it an issue that nobody could ignore, and brought behind it a kind of prophetic voice that mobilized people's Christian beliefs and their beliefs in family and motherhood and apple pie,

and threw it all at the institution of slavery in such a way that made it intolerable for people to hold their previous views of that institution. So she just unsettled everything. It's like a lot of stories that there's all these things working away in the media or coming out of nowhere. Yeah. Because we have all these very characters who spend their life doing it and the one who makes... This is the watershed. I wonder if you just take one more. Pass it back. I'm not quite sure how to do it. I'm not sure what you're getting at that I haven't gotten at.