| The Roots of "Uncle Tom's Cabin"... | |
"I have
been the mother of seven children, the most beautiful and most loved of whom
lies buried near my Cincinnati residence. It was at his dying bed and at his
grave that I learned what a poor slave mother may feel when her child is torn
away from her. In those depths of sorrow which seemed to me immeasurable, it
was my only prayer to God that such anguish might not be suffered in vain. There
were circumstances about his death of such peculiar bitterness, of what seemed
almost cruel suffering that I felt I could never be consoled for it unless this
crushing of my own heart might enable me to work out some great good to others.
I allude to this here because I have often felt that much that is in that book
had its root in the awful scenes and bitter sorrow of that summer. It has left
now, I trust, no trace on my mind except a deep compassion for the sorrowful,
especially for mothers who are separated from their children."
Harriet Beecher
Stowe to Eliza Cabot Follen
December 16, 1852
To Georginan, in June of 1838, she wrote, "My children I would not change for all the ease, leisure, and pleasure that I could have without them. They are money on interest whose value will be constantly increasing."
In her "Concluding Remarks" of "Uncle Tom's Cabin," Stowe writes:
And you, mothers of America, -- you who have learned, by the cradles of your own children, to love and feel for all mankind, -- by the sacred love you bear your child; by your joy in his beautiful, spotless in- fancy; by the motherly pity and tenderness with which you guide his growing years; by the anxieties of his education; by the prayers you breathe for his soul's eternal good; -- I beseech you, pity the mother who has all your affections, and not one legal right to protect, guide, or educate, the child of her bosom! By the sick hour of your child; by those dying eyes, which you can never forget; by those last cries, that wrung your heart when you could neither help nor save; by the desolation of that empty cradle, that silent nursery, -- I beseech you, pity those mothers that are constantly made childless by the American slave-trade! And say, mothers of America, is this a thing to be defended, sympathized with, passed over in silence?
... If the mothers of the free states had all felt as they should, in times past, the sons of the free states would not have been the holders, and, proverbially, the hardest masters of slaves; the sons of the free states would not have connived at the extension of slavery, in our national body; the sons of the free states would not, as they do, trade the souls and bodies of men as an equivalent to money, in their mercantile dealings. There are multitudes of slaves temporarily owned, and sold again, by merchants in northern cities; and shall the whole guilt or obloquy of slavery fall only on the South?
