1Antislavery literature includes “works in every genre, ranging from poems, plays, novels, and short stories to slave narratives, orations, editorials, essays, letters, and petitions, as well as sermons and children’s books.” These were produced by men and women of both races, from different sections of the country, which leads James G. Basker to highlight the “democratic inclusiveness” of this type of literature.1 In The Slave’s Cause, Manisha Sinha rightly notes that in the decade that preceded the Civil War, “The abolitionists created a literature of protest that popularized antislavery and replaced newspapers, pamphlets, and petitions as the most potent tools in abolitionist print culture.”2 Slave narratives and fiction of the late 1840s and of the 1850s exemplify what Sinha calls a “romanticist turn.”3

2This essay focuses on fiction, more specifically novels, and more specifically again, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, published in 1852, which established the power of fiction in the fight against slavery. I explore its main strategies, its immediate reception and the many fictional proslavery works which were produced in an attempt to counter the picture of slavery provided in the novel. I also take a brief look at novels penned by African Americans before the Civil War.

Antislavery fiction before Uncle Tom’s Cabin: an overview

3Fiction came in late as an instrument in the antislavery debate and, until the 1850s, most of it was short fiction and written by whites. Indeed, most of the antislavery fiction published before Uncle Tom’s Cabin was in the form of short stories or, as they were often called then, sketches or tales. Basker’s anthology of antislavery writings includes quite a few, starting as early as 1792, with an anonymous story published in the Massachusetts Magazine. Yet antislavery short fiction did not really take off before the 1830s.

4Most of it appeared in antislavery papers or in gift books and literary annuals, i.e. elegantly-bound collections of poems and prose ornamented with engravings which became very popular in both England and the United States in the 1820s.4 While some of them were devoted to temperance reform, others, like The Liberty Bell, Freedom’s Gift and Liberty Chimes, specialized in antislavery writings. The longest-lived was The Liberty Bell, which was published in Boston from 1839 to 1858 and capitalized on the popularity of annuals. It was edited by white abolitionist Maria Weston Chapman and sold at the yearly antislavery fair in Boston. For financial reasons, antislavery annuals included fewer engravings than other annuals, and none of the contributors was paid. Still, The Liberty Bell boasted pieces by William Lloyd Garrison himself, Lydia Maria Child, Frederick Douglass, Harrier Beecher Stowe, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller.5 As Yohanna Alimi-Levy notes in her contribution to this volume, there was also an impressive list of foreign contributors (which sets The Liberty Bell apart from most of the other annuals of its day), including British abolitionists Thomas Clarkson and George Thompson and French political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville. Unsurprisingly, “writers for the Bell always pictured the slave as a hero and the owner as a villain.”6

5Among the writers of antislavery short fiction, Lydia Maria Child is a major figure. The author of popular novels and a bestselling advice manual entitled The Frugal Housewife (1829) and the founder of the first children’s magazine in the United States (The Juvenile Miscellany, launched in Boston in 1826), she wrote an impressive amount of antislavery literature. In addition to her 1833 essay, An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans, she produced a number of short stories aimed at adults or children which appeared in periodicals, including her own, and gift books, including The Liberty Bell. Some of her stories focus on children who have been kidnapped into slavery, describe the pain of their heart-broken parents, and invite white children and their mothers to put themselves in the place of their black counterparts. Other stories denounce the sexual abuse of slave women, here again asking the white female reader to identify with the slave character. To make this identification possible, or at least easier, Child depicts her female slave characters as very light-skinned and ladylike, with strong moral values.7

6If we now turn to works penned by African Americans, we find that they wrote petitions, poems, essays, spiritual narratives, slave and other autobiographical narratives, sermons, works of history, and issued pamphlets, newspapers and other forms of antislavery literature.8 Yet few seem to have used fiction, whether long or short, at least until the 1850s. Anthologies usually list a very limited number of short works of fiction by African Americans before the Civil War; the list includes Victor Séjour’s short story “Le mulâtre” (1837).9 The Oxford Companion to African American Literature lists only two other short stories published by African Americans before the Civil War. The first one is Frederick Douglass’s novella “The Heroic Slave,” issued in Autographs for Freedom—an antislavery gift book edited by Douglass’s English-born friend and collaborator Julia Griffiths—in 1853 and reprinted the same year in Frederick Douglass’ Paper. “The Heroic Slave” is loosely based on the story of Madison Washington. A fugitive slave who was recaptured as he tried to help his wife escape from Virginia, Washington led a successful slave mutiny on board the Creole, the ship that was taking him to Louisiana in 1841.10 The second short story is Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s “The Two Offers,” issued in 1859 in the Anglo-African Magazine, but it looks at the status of married women more than at slavery itself.11

7Daniel Hack notes that the paper edited by Frederick Douglass as The North Star (1847-1851), then Frederick Douglass’ Paper (1851-1860), included very little fiction, with the notable exception of Douglass’s own “Heroic Slave” in 1853 and of Dickens’s Bleak House serialized between April 1852 and December 1853.12 There might be more short fiction to be uncovered in pre-Civil War African American newspapers, but the search is made more complicated by the fact that many of the contributions were anonymous.13 Whatever the case, these early antislavery works rarely reached beyond an immediate audience that was already favorable to the cause.

Antislavery novels

8In his dissertation on the antislavery novel, Donald Liedel notes that, “Of all literary forms used by antislavery writers, the novel was the last to be developed into an effective instrument of argumentation and persuasion.”14 Early references to slavery can occasionally be found, for example in Redwood by Catharine Maria Sedgwick (1824), which includes a clear criticism of slavery as a brutal system which separates families. Yet scholars generally agree that the first antislavery novel is a work called The Slave; or, Memoirs of Archy Moore, which white historian Richard Hildreth published anonymously in 1836. As the title indicates, this first-person narrative purports to be the autobiography of a slave. According to Sarah Roth, the initial publication of Hildreth’s novel coincided with the publication of proslavery novels by such writers as William Gilmore Simms, Joseph Holt Ingraham and Robert Montgomery Bird; these novels, some of which sold very well and were adapted to the stage, were issued in 1835-1836 as a reaction to the massive abolitionist propaganda campaign of 1835.15 These works promoted an image of the savage slave that had been common in texts produced after the Haitian Revolution but had been replaced by the stereotype of the docile, simple-minded and loyal slave. Of course, the revived image also had to do with Nat Turner’s 1831 rebellion.16

9There seem to have been about a dozen antislavery novels published before Uncle Tom’s Cabin.17 Yet, they have hardly left a mark save, perhaps, for Hildreth’s novel. While not a bestseller, it ran through several editions, before a revised version was issued in 1852 under the title The White Slave; or, Memoirs of a Fugitive, in the wake of the success of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.18 The scarcity of novels dealing with slavery may have to do with the status of the novel which, in the first half of the nineteenth century, was still frowned upon. One Dr. J. Henry Clark delivered the following warning in 1856: “The practice of incessant novel-reading, so common among our young people, is believed to result in injury to the sight […] thus this fruitless, profitless, pernicious habit, while it poisons the imagination, dissipates the mind, and wastes precious time; often deprives the reader of the opportunity for acquirements afterwards in a better direction, by leaving him with enfeebled eyesight.”19 Yet, as Nina Baym has noted, the same hostility to fiction was expressed in England, and “a great many novels were written and published in America at this time of supposed hostility to fiction, and a great many more were being read.”20 The fact remains that the temperance movement seems to have understood the power of fiction in reform somewhat earlier: in 1836, the American Temperance Union endorsed temperance fiction to gain converts to the cause.21

“The Story of the Age”: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin

10Uncle Tom’s Cabin was written by Harriet Beecher Stowe, a white woman from New England, partly to denounce the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which imposed heavy fines and jail terms on Northerners who failed to assist in the recovery of fugitive slaves. Another reason was that she needed money to supplement her husband’s income. By the time she wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which was her first novel, Stowe had been producing stories and sketches for magazines and gift books for some twenty years. Most of that production did not deal with slavery, with a few exceptions. Thus, while at Cincinnati, she wrote a letter to denounce the attacks on the presses of James Birney in 1836 and rued the fact that as a woman she could not take up arms to defend Birney’s offices. She signed the letter “Franklin” and addressed it to the editor of the Cincinnati Journal and Luminary, her brother Henry Ward Beecher. However, she felt abolitionists were too extreme,22 and it was not until the following decade that Stowe started writing antislavery fiction, with three short stories. “Immediate Emancipation: A Sketch” (1845) is set in Cincinnati and tells the story of a slave called Sam who, brought by his master to the city, takes advantage of Ohio as a free state to claim his freedom. His master is talked into giving him his freedom as well as that of his wife and children. Stowe concluded by emphasizing the need to denounce the “system” instead of assailing the “persons” who, as she had demonstrated, could be enlightened and generous. The second story, entitled “The Freeman’s Dream: A Parable,” and signed “Harriet Beecher Stowe,” was published in August 1850 in the National Era, the antislavery weekly that would the following year begin serializing Uncle Tom’s Cabin. A very short tale printed on the first page of the weekly, “The Freeman’s Dream” is a stern warning aimed at those who heed human laws (and fail to help fugitive slaves) rather than the word of Jesus. It heralds the ominous last words of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in which the entire nation is threatened with God’s wrath if the sin of slavery is not eradicated; like the novel, this short parable calls for civil disobedience, and exposes those churches that defend slavery. Stowe’s third short writing against slavery, “The Two Altars,” appeared in two parts in the New York Evangelist in June 1851, when Uncle Tom’s Cabin had just begun its run in the National Era. It denounces the contradiction between the founding principles of the nation and the lack of liberty endured by part of its population, in a tone that ranges from bitter irony to pathos. “The Two Altars” unambiguously exposes the North’s complicity in the institution, justified by the hollow argument that this is needed to preserve the Union.

11Uncle Tom’s Cabin offers a double plot and a double journey: the journey toward the North and liberty undertaken by fugitive slaves Eliza, George and their son Harry, a journey that follows the usual South/North trajectory of slave narratives; and a very different journey that takes the main protagonist, Uncle Tom, from the upper South to the deep South and his death. Uncle Tom lives rather happily and comfortably with his wife and children on the plantation of Mr. Shelby in Kentucky. Unfortunately, Shelby has debts and must sell some of his slaves. Uncle Tom is the most valuable, he will therefore have to go, along with little Harry, the four-to-five-year-old son of a young and beautiful quadroon slave, Eliza, and her husband George, who lives on a neighboring plantation. Tom is separated from his family and taken down the Ohio and the Mississippi to be sold in the deep South, in a clear illustration of the consequences of the domestic slave trade. On the boat, he saves a child, little Eva, from drowning and is bought by her grateful father, Augustine St. Clare. In spite of his grief at being so far from his family, Tom spends some not unpleasant months in New Orleans, and grows always fonder of Eva, who is as pious as he is. Eva eventually dies of consumption in one of those protracted death scenes that are reminiscent of Dickens and typical of Victorian fiction. Shortly after this, St. Clare is stabbed to death while trying to separate two drunken men (Stowe was also a temperance writer), and Tom is sold again, this time to the man who is the real villain of the story, a Yankee named Simon Legree who owns a cotton plantation on the Red River. Legree vainly tries to have Tom flog slaves and has him beaten to death when he refuses to reveal the hiding place of two fugitives. Tom dies a Christian death, forgiving Legree as well as the two slaves who tortured him and who undergo an immediate conversion.

12Meanwhile, Eliza has decided to flee with little Harry; her husband George has already run away, unaware of the projected sale of his son. After the Fugitive Slave Act was passed in 1850, the Northern states were no longer safe, so George will head for Canada and try to buy Eliza and Harry. Eliza escapes her pursuers by crossing the Ohio river on blocks of ice, in one of the most dramatic and most frequently illustrated scenes of the novel; she receives help on the way and is taken in by a family of Quakers where, quite by accident, George joins her; after a fight with slave catchers, George, Eliza and Harry make their way to Canada. In a series of unlikely reunions, George is reunited with his sister and Eliza with her mother. George decides to go to Liberia with his family. This is the bare skeleton of a novel which abounds in secondary characters, and incidents of all kinds.

13The work was first serialized in an antislavery weekly published in Washington, DC, the National Era. The story, at first intended for a few issues of the paper, ran for almost a year, from June 1851 to April 1852. The number of subscribers to the paper increased significantly during the serialization23 and word of mouth no doubt played a role in the success of the work when it was issued in book format in Boston in March 1852. Finding a publisher had not been easy, evidence that American publishers approached antislavery literature with extreme caution, in the South naturally but also in the North. The first publishers who had been offered the work, the leading Boston firm of Phillips, Sampson, rejected it because they did not want to alienate their Southern customers. In addition, they doubted the success of an antislavery novel serialized in an abolitionist journal. John P. Jewett, who accepted the work, was a small publisher but he was a staunch antislavery man. He had told the writer’s husband that he would promote the novel as no work had been promoted before, and made good on his word.24 While Jewett cannot be credited with devising entirely new promotional and marketing strategies, he did bring an entire battery of marketing ploys and tactics to bear upon a single work, and created a genuine marketing blitz which would later be widely imitated. In countless ads, he created an element of suspense over the date of publication of what he touted as “The Story of the Age” or “The Great American Tale.” After Uncle Tom’s Cabin came out, and when an extraordinary 10,000 copies had been sold in a week, then an astounding 50,000 copies in eight weeks, Jewett purchased entire pages in newspapers to boast of the sales. The press reported on the incredible sales figures of the novel, on the numbers of binders (between 125 and 200) and machines (three or four of Adam’s power presses) working round the clock without quite meeting the demand, as well as on the remarkable quantity and weight (90,000 pounds) of the paper consumed in the enterprise. After all, all this was news. And it further enhanced the sales.

14The publisher also initiated one of the first if not the first of many byproducts of the novel, by commissioning a poem from antislavery poet John Greenleaf Whittier, then paying a composer to write the music to the song, entitled “Little Eva.” This was followed—and the other byproducts were not commissioned or inspired by the publisher—by songs, engravings, statues, spoons, plates, scarves printed with scenes from the novel, puzzles and card games in which children had to bring the slave families together.25 Theatrical adaptations added to the popularity of the work, as did the huge controversy over the truth of its portrayal of slavery. In March 1853, a year after the first publication of the novel, Jewett announced that 305,000 copies had been sold in the United States. As a contemporary commentator noted, it was nothing short of “a miracle.”26 If we compare sales figures of books that were published in the same period and that were also considered bestsellers, we find that about 11,000 copies of Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter sold in five years after the first publication in 1850; in 1851, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s semi-autobiographical novel The Sunny Side; or, The Country Minister’s Wife, which was very popular, sold 100,000 copies within a year. The 305,000 copies of Uncle Tom’s Cabin sold in the United States were indeed unprecedented, all the more so as the novel dealt with a topic which so far had not been very popular. As one scholar put it, in the first half of the nineteenth century, “Reform was in the air and one could not avoid it, but except for a particularly striking novel or two, its fiction was generally read only by extremists.”27 Uncle Tom’s Cabin is one of these exceptions. The strategies of an inventive and imaginative publisher, anger at the Fugitive Slave Act which affected all free states, and authorial strategies all played a part in the “miracle.”

Authorial strategies

15Letters from readers to the National Era while the work was being serialized in the paper, provide evidence of the great interest it raised. They thought the novel would greatly contribute to the antislavery cause, they felt it was a true account of slavery, but also and most importantly perhaps, readers found the narrative thrilling (as one of them put it, “We don’t get sleepy reading it”) and moving (“Some of the passages […] go straight down into the depths of the soul, stirring up its purest, best emotions”).28 Stowe used a whole array of strategies to achieve this result while calling upon all the staples of antislavery rhetoric: slavery as inhuman, unchristian and a violation of the nation’s founding principles. The writer knew her audience extremely well and, because the novel appeared as a serial, she was able to adapt her unfolding novel to the reactions of the readers.29 Gladys Sherman Lewis explains that because Stowe mixed the three great traditions of Puritanism, sentimentality, and melodrama, the work was “programmed for reader response.”30

16Indeed, Stowe wrote in the tradition of the sentimental or domestic novel. According to Shirley Samuels, “Sentimentality is literally at the heart of nineteenth-century American culture. […] The reform literature associated with sentimentality works as a set of rules for how to feel ‘right,’ privileging compassion in calibrating and adjusting the sensations of the reader in finely tuned and predictable responses to what is viewed or read.”31 Sentimental fiction dominated the marketplace in the United States between the 1840s and the 1880s,32 and Stowe offered her audience a type of literature they were familiar with. She used it in order to allow for reader identification, which in turn would allow the humanizing of slaves in the eyes of the audience (the first subtitle of Uncle Tom’s Cabin was “The Man That Was a Thing”33).

17The domestic novel centers on the family, viewed as sacred by nineteenth-century Americans, and slavery leads to the separation of families.34 Uncle Tom’s Cabin contains several scenes of auction sales, which emphasize the grief of mothers when their children are sold away. On the boat which is taking him down South, Tom sees one of these mothers commit suicide because her baby has just been sold. Stowe systematically emphasizes the feelings of slaves at a time when a common proslavery argument was that feelings ran less deep among slaves, that they suffered less than whites would have when their children died or were sold away. Stowe shows that the first concern of a woman is her children, whether she be black or white. Identification and empathy are also facilitated by the fact that her slave characters often share the same values as her white audience: religion, education, purity. Thus, for instance, George remembers his sister being whipped for refusing to have sexual relationships with her master— “for wanting to live a decent Christian life,” Stowe writes.35 George’s sister indeed has a lot in common with the (presumably) white middle-class reader of the novel: she is pious, well-educated, and light-skinned, which again facilitates identification. In her initial manuscript, Stowe had described Eliza as a “mulatto”; she then changed her character to a “quadroon” in the text she gave the Era.36 This “whitening” of Eliza may have made it easier for the contemporary reader to identify or at least sympathize with the character. Should this fail, Stowe uses direct addresses to the reader: “If it were your Harry, mother, or your Willie, that were going to be torn from you by a brutal trader […] how fast could you walk?”37 She also frequently hints at the reaction expected of her audience: Mr. Wilson, a white man to whom George tells his sad tale (at a very young age, he was separated from his parents and siblings, starved and mistreated for years) cannot help crying: “This speech […] was altogether too much for the good-natured old body to whom it was addressed, who had pulled out a great yellow silk pocket-handkerchief, and was mopping up his face with great energy.”38 This is definitely what the reader should do at this point, and many others in the novel. The aim was to create what Stowe’s biographer Joan Hedrick calls “a revolution in sentiment.” Hedrick contends that it worked because much of the novel “was tailored to her white audience.”39 According to Philip Fisher, by appealing to emotions, by extending humanity to slaves, Uncle Tom’s Cabin reversed “the process of slavery itself which has at its core the withdrawal of human status from a part of humanity,” and thus radically changed the reader’s vision of slaves.40

18Religion permeates the novel, which describes slavery as a sin and ends on the announcement of a “day of vengeance,” when “injustice and cruelty” will bring upon the country “the wrath of Almighty God.”41 Stowe criticizes the churches that condone slavery, and sees civil disobedience—resisting the Fugitive Slave Act and helping fugitive slaves—as the duty of any true Christian.

19Among her various strategies, Stowe also uses another staple of antislavery literature, the fact that slavery violates the founding principles of the nation, and most notably the Declaration of Independence, which states that all men are created equal. Frederick Douglass famously denounced the hypocrisy of the nation in his 1852 speech, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” Stowe goes a step further and raises slaves to hero status by having George announce “I’ll fight for my liberty to the last breath I breathe. You say your fathers did it; if it was right for them, it is right for me! ”42 This is evidently meant to remind the reader of patriot Patrick Henry’s famous 1775 speech “Give me liberty or give me death.” George, like Patrick Henry and the other Founding Fathers, is determined to fight tyranny, and violence is thereby justified in the case of fugitive slaves, as it was for the patriots of the American Revolution.

20Yet, Stowe carefully tries to avoid antagonizing Southerners.43 The arch-villain of the story is a Yankee, and both Shelby and St. Clare are what could be deemed “good” masters. However, good masters can run into debt, as Shelby does, they can die like St. Clare. Even exceptionally bright slaves have no hope: George is described as extremely smart, as an inventor. However, his master feels inferior to the clever and well-spoken slave and, out of pure spite, sends him to work in the fields and threatens to sell him. The reader should not fail to understand that the system is inherently bad, and that the only solution is to abolish it. Pathos and melodrama are mixed with more intellectual appeals to the reader, caustic remarks (and chapter headings, such as “A Man of Humanity” applied to a slave trader, or “Feelings of Living Property”) and relieved with touches of humor and funny incidents here and there. What did Stowe expect her readers to do once they had finished the novel? In true sentimental tradition, in the last chapter which also serves as an afterword, she urges her readers to “feel right,” and exert their influence to see that those around them also feel right.44

21Much more would have to be said on the strategies used in the novel, as well as on its sources.45 Manisha Sinha rightly notes that “Stowe’s novel reproduced sectional, racial, and gendered stereotypes” and is “suffused with romantic racialism.”46 As George Fredrickson has theorized it, by the 1840s, “romantic racialism” had evolved into “a doctrine which acknowledged permanent racial differences but rejected the notion of a clearly defined racial hierarchy.”47 Anglo-Saxons were superior in intellect, action and leadership, but African Americans were better Christians, and this was best exemplified by the Christ-like character of Uncle Tom.48

22Some antislavery activists and especially African Americans had mixed feelings about the novel. While there was no doubt that it would help the cause, its colonizationist stance (Stowe sends George off to Liberia at the end of the novel) was criticized, as was the fact Uncle Tom seemed too good and too submissive.49 As Sinha indicates, Douglass vigorously supported the novel because he “felt it could be appropriated for the benefit of the movement.” Martin Delany, another black activist and also an amateur historian who, unlike Douglass, had never been a slave, saw Stowe as having wrongly appropriated what truly belonged to slaves—their story—and condemned the novel for its support of colonization.50

Impact of Uncle Tom’s Cabin

23The tremendous sales figures of the novel and the intense controversy it raised—mostly over the truth of its depiction of slavery—mean that Uncle Tom’s Cabin placed the topic of slavery at the center of the national debate, at least more so than any work before, or after for that matter. Evidence is to be found in the contemporary press with its countless articles on the subject, but also in the many proslavery novels that were issued in reaction to it. These generally showed slavery as a benevolent institution in which slaves were loyal to their masters who treated them with a fatherly affection. Twenty-seven such novels were issued by Southerners and Northerners, bearing such eloquent titles as Life at the South; or, Uncle Tom’s Cabin as It Is or Uncle Robin in His Cabin in Virginia and Tom Without One in Boston.51 The novel thus drew an unwilling South and an often indifferent North into a discussion of what slavery was really like. Furthermore, though within a few months after its publication, the novel was banned in the South, copies secretly circulated there.

24The novel has been credited with playing a role in bringing about the Civil War and Lincoln may or may not have said “So this is the little lady who made this big war.”52 What impact it had on readers can of course never be assessed. What can be asserted, however is that 1) it proved that fiction could be a tremendous weapon in the fight against slavery;53 2) it placed slavery on the national stage, and caused a national discussion over the issue; 3) it showed the full extent of the marketability of antislavery literature, even if publishers continued to be cautious.54 Solomon Northup and his publishers made good use of the novel to promote Twelve Years a Slave in 1853.

25Other antislavery novels were written by white authors before the Civil War, including one by Stowe, Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856), in which the title character is modeled after Nat Turner, or Ida May: A Story of Things Actual and Possible, penned by Mary Hayden Green Pike and issued in 1854 under the pen name Mary Langdon; it tells the story of a young white girl who is kidnapped and sold down South as a slave. She is beaten so badly that she loses her memory. She is rescued at the end of the novel.55 While both novels sold well, they were not as popular as Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Pre-Civil War novels by African Americans

26In May 1853, the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society held its anniversary meeting at Exeter Hall, the London headquarters of a number of reform societies. Many people attended, including two American luminaries of antislavery literature: William Wells Brown, a former fugitive slave, had been in the British Isles for the past four years, lecturing and selling his Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave. Written by Himself (1847); the other luminary of antislavery literature was Stowe, whose Uncle Tom’s Cabin was selling even better in Britain than in the United States.56 Brown did not speak at the meeting, nor did Stowe, but Brown wrote to William Lloyd Garrison that seeing Mrs. Stowe had compensated for the overcrowding at the meeting.57 A few months earlier, Brown had given some very successful lectures on Uncle Tom’s Cabin,58 and according to Brown’s latest biographer Ezra Greenspan, Stowe’s novel was one of the sources of inspiration for Brown’s novel Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter. A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States, the first antislavery novel published by an African American author, which was issued in London in 1853.59

27This is a fine example of reciprocal influences: Uncle Tom’s Cabin was partly based on slave narratives, most notably those of Josiah Henson (1849), Lewis and Milton Clarke (1845), and Henry Bibb (1849).60 The novel in turn helped shape the narrative tradition as such after 1852 and partly inspired Clotel, the first African American novel. In the novel, Clotel, one of the daughters Thomas Jefferson had with one of his slaves (the story was based on Jefferson’s real-life liaison with Sally Hemings, a steady rumor since the 1800s), escapes slavery but dies by jumping into the Potomac River while being hunted by slave catchers; her mother is sold down South, her sister dies too and only a daughter of that sister successfully escapes before making her way to England. Brown denounces the hypocrisy of the nation, the cruelties of slavery, and the separation of families, among others. The novel has an interesting publishing history: Brown published it four times, each time in an enlarged version that took into account events that had occurred in the United States since the last version. The second edition was issued in 1860 in the New York Weekly Anglo-African as Miralda; or, The Beautiful Quadroon; the ultimate version was issued in book form as Clotelle; or, The Colored Heroine in Boston in 1867, and the story includes the Civil War.61

28Clotel is one of only four novels produced by African Americans before the Civil War.62 Another novel, by Frank J. Webb, The Garies and Their Friends, also published in England in 1857, explores the fortunes of the rising African American middle class and the violence of Northern racism. It is the first novel that describes the lives of free African Americans in the North, addresses interracial marriage and makes passing a major theme. However, there is no direct attack on slavery in the novel.63 Toward the end of the decade, Harriet E. Wilson, in the first novel by an African American published in the United States, also exposed Northern hypocrisy and racism in Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, in a Two-Story White House, North. Showing that Slavery’s Shadows Fall Even There (1859). The partly autobiographical novel recounts the plight of a black servant, “[w] atched by kidnappers, maltreated by professed abolitionists, who didn’t want slaves at the South, nor niggers in their own houses, North.”64

29The fourth novel is Martin Delany’s Blake; or, The Huts of America, which appeared in installments in the Anglo-African Magazine in 1859, then as a complete tale in the Weekly Anglo-African in 1861 and 1862. It tells the story of a Mississippi slave whose wife has been sold away to Cuba, and who travels through various Southern states and the Indian Territory to organize a slave rebellion. He then goes to Cuba, frees his wife, works on a slave ship and attempts to turn Africans against the slave trade. As Sinha writes, Blake describes “an international, Pan-African revolution.”65 According to Bernard Bell, it was written for a black rather than a white audience. Bell sees it as “the most radical black novel of the nineteenth century” and “the antithesis of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”66

30Black and white antislavery writings, whether fiction or nonfiction, are closely interrelated. A case in point is Uncle Tom’s Cabin, inspired by slave narratives and which in turn exerted an influence over later slave narratives but also novels, both by whites and African Americans (whether it served as a model or a foil). Why a novel by a white New England woman should have weighed more heavily on the American mind than all authentic slave narratives put together is a question that has long perplexed and irritated critics.

31Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised at the small number of antislavery novels by African Americans before the Civil War. There were few antislavery novels anyway, at least until 1852. Moreover, as Donald Liedel writes, “[c] harges of fiction were hurled by slaveholders” at antislavery writings and the issue of authenticity was especially vital for African American authors, hence the authenticating documents that preceded slave narratives and were meant to reassure the reader that the author had indeed been a slave and was telling the truth about his experience of slavery.67 In that light, the use of fiction raised evident problems. Testimonies may have seemed more likely to convince reluctant readers. Breaking into print was never easy for African Americans, and publishing long works of fiction may have made the enterprise even more uncertain. For whatever reason or reasons, African Americans took a belated interest in fiction.