 Illustration for Frank Freeman's Barber Shop |
In his Uncle Tom's Cabin and American Culture, Thomas F. Gossett lists 27 pro-slavery works written in response to Stowe's novel between 1852 and the Civil War.* These novels were written by men and women, northerners and southerners. They adopt a variety of polemical strategies, from defending the plantation as a good place to attacking the North for its treatment of "white slaves" (the working class) to depicting blacks as either happy in slavery or racially unfit for freedom. None of these novels attained anything like the popular success of Stowe's book, but some went through a number of printings and were widely read in the North. As a group they're interesting for several reasons -- for what they say about race and about sectionalism, and for what they say about Uncle Tom's Cabin. It's telling to see which of Stowe's characters and scenes get evoked, and how they get rewritten. It's also perhaps surprising to see how many similarities exist, how little some aspects of Stowe's protest novel had to be changed in order to serve the other side of the issue she was protesting against. A goal of the site is to include at least chapters from all the "anti-Tom" novels. Here are the texts currently available. (There were even "anti-Tom" children's books. One of them, Little Eva: The Flower of the South, is available in the archive's UTC AS CHILDREN'S BOOK section.) |
