American Experience; The Abolitionists; Interview with R. Blakeslee Gilpin, part 5 of 5

So how did Harry respond to the law? I mean, Harry is a moderate, so she's not immediately outraged in the sense of she thinks these are violations of American patriotism, the sort of principles of freedom that the country has founded on, but it's not like she's going to say, well, we need to respond with violence. I mean, this is when I think of her as a seeker, she's trying to find a solution that's not going to basically escalate the stakes, but it's going to convert people to the cause. I think that's a really, really curious thing that she wants people to agree with anti-slavery. She doesn't want to force them to. That process of conversion is very, very important to her. And I mean, this is based in her own religious experience because she kind of had this religious conversion when she was a young girl, that there was always some doubt, I think even within herself, whether it was genuine,

the sort of relationship with God constantly needs to be mediated, but this relationship with abolitionism is kind of the same. You need to find means that are not going to be like theater well. You need to find means that are going to be encouraging, that they're going to make people enthusiastic, passionate about ending slavery, that that's not going to be something that happens with force, that happens with outrage. Outrage of a particular kind. You need to channel that rage into something productive. I mean, that's a real puritanical thing. Channel that rage into something that's going to be a positive reform-minded thing. That's really the way she reacts. In a sense, she's more of a propaganda saying that to us. Yeah, I mean, I think that there's, I mean, the love joy murder definitely spurs her on a little bit more in this direction. And again, there's a lot of intimacy with familial connections there. You know, her brother actually is the one who is kind of an unfortunate status.

Her brother's the one who encouraged love joy to move to Alton, Illinois, who said, you know, get out of St. Louis. But then he later writes the sort of the account of, you know, the riots at Alton. This is book he publishes. So there's this intimacy there. But I think that there you go. There's the propaganda's impulse. You write a book about the riots. You don't go and hold up an anti-slavery riot, you know. You try to, you answer force with the pen. That's really, I think, a real powerful impulse on her part to find a way to convert people, not by force. You know, make them think that they're kind of coming to it on their own. Get their sympathy. That's going to be really the way she starts to think about this. Great. I get the impression that she was, you know, she talks about Manning, a window at Bernie's press and stuff. But she, was she first converted really by the, as many northerners, were by the threat

to her own right, her own right, or by my slavery itself, by the injustice of slavery? I mean, I think Harriet's conversion is a slow process. And it's something that, you know, it's triggered by certain events. So, you know, the riots in Cincinnati, particularly with Bernie, who she is a pretty intimate relationship with in terms of, you know, she's there at some of these occasions, that helps move her along. But I think that it's a slow process. And I think another huge part of it is the servants, you know, getting, getting intimate with them or seeing that they're human beings helps sort of bring her more and more into this world where she's saying, OK, this is something that's wrong and that I can contribute something. I can do something about it that's going to be positive. That's a real, that's a slow process. I don't think it's sort of an overnight thing or, you know, from on high, this moment comes down just like that.

It's something that takes place over months and years. But the things that push her, you know, dramatically in those directions are things like the Bernie ride or things like love, joy, murder. Because they're things that obviously would arouse outrage in any sympathetic individual. I mean, anybody who wants to preserve law and order, these are not good things. But in terms of her feeling that her own rights are threatened, I think maybe she's thinking about this in terms, in the same terms as her father when he moves to Ohio and like, here's the fight. And we're participating in the great fight, like sort of injecting your own life with this sense of grand drama. That becomes more and more true. But as to whether that's threat to her, probably not. I don't think she feels like her, she's in danger and physical danger. But she feels like here's where I can be of use. Here's the big thing that I can be a part of. Great. Thank you.

Why did she so jumping forward to 1851? Why did she decide to write that he's sleeping now? Well, I mean, basically everything that comes out of the Mexican war is a disaster. And the Mexican war is really what sets up the 1850s. And you can't understand anything that's happening in the 1850s, particularly the drift into a much stronger prominent supportive abolitionism, more radical abolitionism becoming, you know, at least notable, not necessarily popular, is because of the Mexican war. And because we get all this land, the United States gets all this land, all of a sudden. And now you have this political fight going on over what's going to happen with that land. And that becomes very, very divisive, very quickly. And sort of the ham-fisted compromise that emerges in the Compromise of 1850, which is sort of the last gas, I mean, this is basically the death of the Compromise party in American politics. The wig party dies with the Compromise of 1850, because they're basically, they're

sort of rewriting previous Congress anything to get this country to stay together, anything to preserve this American democratic experiment. We're going to do anything we can. Even if it means undoing things that we promised we would never undo, OK? And so in the Compromise of 1850, the most notable of those things, they're going to admit California for statehood. That has to happen. It's going to be a free state. But what else has to happen? Well, the southerners want something in return. And what they want to return is strong enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act. And the Fugitive Slave Act is just the most outrageous thing to Northerners, to anyone who is against slavery, the Fugitive Slave Act. It basically, the absurd thing is that it's just trying to live up to the letter of the law and the Constitution. It's basically saying, OK, these people are defined as property. And now they're going to actually be treated as property under the laws of the nation. But Northerners don't like that because they've kind of had this set up that is fine.

Because as long as a slave can get onto Northerners soil, they're then free. southerners have a sort of a right to be outraged about that. And what happens in 1850 is they say, we want some federal backup. And there's going to be monetary rewards for capturing fugitive slaves. And they're going to be the series of prominent cases that emerge across the 1850s, where this actually happens. Slaves are going to be pursued by federal authorities. This is outrageous to New Englanders and just in the eyes of southerners. But for people like Harry Beatrice Stowe, they see the Fugitive Slave Act as an outrage of abomination. I mean, it is really, it's just viscerally wrong to her. And she wants to do something about it. And I think that's really that moment when everything comes together for her, which is that there's a need for people to speak to how bad slavery is, to convert people to that. Because she looks around her.

In Cincinnati, this is going to be pretty easy to do. She's going to look around her and see a bunch of people who don't really care. Fugitive Slave Act, that's fine. And she's going to say, I need to convert those people. That's really powerful because other abolitionists basically just want to get other abolitionists on their side. But what Stowe wants to do is get neutral people to basically align themselves against slavery. And that's what she's going to do in response to the Fugitive Slave Act. Great. So we're starting the second day, the broadcast, with all the Tom's Cab and Garrison attending the performance of one of the plays. I wonder if you could just orient the audience in this game tonight, too, to kind of commit a quick sketch of the state of the abolition movement at that point, who's winning,

what props do they face? I mean, at the time of the publication of Uncle Tom's Cab and Garrison is still, he's the man in American abolitionism. There are fringe. There's the radical abolitionists that are sort of gaining momentum, but they definitely don't have it at the time of the publication of the book. And what the publication of Uncle Tom's Cab and really provides is this broad base of support. It's going to convert millions of Americans, not to being for immediate abolitionism, not to being for racial equality, but for being against slavery. Now, that's a huge thing. That's a sea change. Whereas if the Northern public is previously, they don't care what Stowe's novel does is make them care. I mean, there are so many sort of borderline apocryphal things that about the book that every copy was drenched with tears.

I mean, it's the sort of emotional response on the part of the Northern public to this book. It's pretty hard to exaggerate. I mean, no matter what apocryphal statements are made about the book, it's selling 300,000 copies in just an incredibly short period of time. It's going to sell a million copies in the first seven years, a million copies of a book when there are only 25 million Americans. I mean, that kind of, if you sold a book to that scale today, I mean, you would be a god of publishing. I mean, that is, it's unprecedented. It is the most popular book and the most influential book in American history. There's no competition for that title. But the thing that it does, it's not just popular. They're not just reading, eat, pray, love, OK? What these people are doing is they are being converted to something. And that thing that they're being converted to is being against slavery. I mean, Stowe is just brilliant the way she does that, because she realizes, like, Garrison never could, that the way to do this was by playing on the hard strings.

You don't do it by playing on the outrage. You do it by convincing them that there are human beings in peril, OK? And then America's, not only America's foundational sin, but it's living hell, OK? It's living tablo of fire and brimstone. You just travel a couple hundred miles south, and there it is. That's how close this awfulness is to you. And she's going to depict that through these characters that Northern readers just grasp onto in this visceral way. And they say, you know what, I didn't care before, but now slavery is wrong. I don't know what that I'm going to do anything about it, but I think it's wrong. That's a sea change in Northern public opinion. Why, what it happened in Harriet's life, that she, I mean, what this did that was new, as you say, is audience, because audiences could empathize with the play of the slave mother and the baby.

What it, and Harriet and I don't get the impression that it didn't particularly big on empathy for it. It wasn't for defying your state. What, how did Harriet get empathy? And why was, why was she able to protect Subruin? Yeah, I mean, I think it's a complicated process through which Harriet sort of arrives at these strategies. I mean, whether, I mean, narrative strategies, but also personal strategies of bringing out human characters to illustrate the horrors of slavery. I mean, that's what Uncle John's cabin is doing. I think the way that she arrives at that is partly personal. I mean, her own personal life is kind of filled with drama. I mean, her husband is kind of this very unreliable, wacky, religious scholar. I mean, Calvin Beacher is pretty wild. I mean, he's this sort of prominent religious intellectual. He's a Dartmouth, and he decides to come to Cincinnati.

Again, we're thinking about this as being the locale for the fight, whatever that fight may be. But Calvin becomes very unstable. His first wife dies. That's why he marries Harriet. But he becomes a sort of wacky spiritualist care. He's always having visions. I mean, the most notable thing about Calvin to me is that he's always imagining this is not happening infrequently that his wife, his dead wife, is plucking on guitar strings. This is pretty wacky stuff. And but this is something that's totally acceptable to a mid 19th century American. Oh, that's totally normal. Your dead wife is playing the guitar. That's fine. And Harriet, I think, really encourages this. I mean, there are these moments in their interchanges where she's saying, like, Calvin, if you want to sort of get your life on the right track, you really need to really need to get more of this. It's the other, you don't need to take some medicine to get it away. You need to see more of your dead wife. I mean, and the two of them have these sort of holidays

where they celebrate the dead wife. And I mean, the dead sons. I mean, these people are communicating to them. And I think that that process going on throughout the 1830s and 1840s, also coupled with financial hardship, is a great little cocktail for Harriet to become more attuned to these things. That she sees there's a need, partly just that she's mediating with her husband to get some kind of personal connection, but also the intimacy of their household. So their servants really become huge, hugely influential in this. That she actually spends a lot of time sort of with her servants in the house talking to them. She spends a lot of time in her kitchen. And I think part of that is because she's kind of a, she's a weird, kind of, depressive character. And she's not necessarily a social butterfly that sort of drawing inward, looking to these people in her own household, who obviously most antebellum Americans didn't,

probably didn't acknowledge even really existed. They were sort of ghosts. She really kind of became intimate with those people. And I think that process really brought out, revived these memories and brought in these memories of Kentucky, these sort of tabloas of slavery. I mean, I think you're hard-pressed to find in Uncle Tom's cabin. Those characters aren't necessarily really three-dimensional. They're kind of, they're tools being moved around to prove a point, but they have a human element. And she was getting that from the people in her own life, whether it was, her husband's widow, this sort of departed people in her life or the intimates in her own household, the sort of house servants. She was gonna bring all of that into this sort of combination to tell this story about slavery's awfulness. But I found the price of Uncle Tom's cabin to do ring. True. 100% true are, I mean, apart from the technique of breaking the fourth wall,

which is if there isn't a drawer in your house that you open and... Oh, yeah, this is, yeah, okay. So, I mean, the thing that Harry Beacher so recognizes is that no one in New England, I mean, her readers won't have encountered these people, okay? And that, I mean, there are stories like this from across the, I mean, especially following the fugitive slave act where even people who are dedicated to following the fugitive slave act, that is they are gonna return slaves to slavery when confronted with a human being in rags on their doorstep can't bring themselves to send that person back to the south, okay? That in those moments, it's that human confrontation, that intimacy, the intimacy of those stories, and this happens in Cincinnati a lot because it's so close to slavery. And so those stories, you know, of the ice flow of getting across, you know,