The Columbia History of the American Novel

to the temptation to drink while serving customers, and by the end of the novel is an impoverished patricide. The town's fathers and sons suffer similarly dire fates, while the town's women, acutely aware of what the narrator calls 'moral consequences,' can only watch helplessly as the town falls apart: one mother dies grief-stricken over the body of her murdered son, and Mrs. Slade herself ends up in an asylum. Among the female characters, only Mary Morgan, the eleven-year-old daughter of Slade's former mill worker Joe Morgan, possesses the power to influence events. Mortally wounded by an empty glass Slade had thrown at the drunken Morgan, Mary on her deathbed, in the manner of little Eva, extracts a promise from her father to free himself from the enslaving clutches of alcoholic beverages. By the end of the novel the still-abstinent Morgan has the one neat and clean house in the neighborhood.

Concerns about social decay, the ill effects of materialism, the tyranny of the patriarch, and, especially, apocalyptic violence — central to much temperance activity — were also central to the antislavery movement. For abolitionists, as for other reformers of the period, America had betrayed its founding ideals and millennial promise, and was drifting toward barbarism. Like the temperance and communitarian movements, antislavery grew in large measure out of the 'ultraist' perfectionism of the 1820s and 1830s revivals, while owing a considerable debt to Enlightenment ideals of selfcontrol and natural rights. As a reform movement, antislavery had important eighteenth-century sources in the work and writings of the Quaker humanitarian Anthony Benezet, who enlisted Benjamin Franklin to the cause, though antislavery took a somewhat conservative turn in 1816 with the formation of the American Colonization Society. Galvanized by the evangelical movements of the 1820s and 1830s, however, William Lloyd Garrison and many others came to view slavery as a national sin that, as long as it persisted, compromised the nation's hopes of achieving its millennial potential. Unlike Finney, who counseled his parishioners to avoid 'angry controversy -140- on the subject,' Garrison adopted a bold and confrontational rhetoric intended to develop in his readers a conviction of slavery's evil and an immediate need to abolish it. Writing in the inaugural issue of The Liberator (January 1, 1831), which appeared less than a year before Nat Turner's bloody slave rebellion in Southampton, Virginia, Garrison drew on the injunctions of the Bible and the Declaration of Independence to assert the moral imperatives of antislavery, warning that 'till every chain be broken, and every bondman set free. . let all the enemies of the persecuted blacks tremble.' Garrison's mobilization of antislavery forces contributed to an upsurge in antislavery publications, most notably Richard Hildreth's The Slave; or, Memoirs of Archy Moore (1836) — one of approximately twelve antislavery novels published before Uncle Tom's Cabin — and Theodore Weld's Slavery As It Is (1839), an important documentary source for Stowe's antislavery fiction.

Although most antebellum Northerners opposed to slavery were far more moderate than Garrison in their opposition, by the mid1840s there was shared common ground among a range of groups and individuals opposed to slavery. It was viewed as an affront to republican ideals of free labor, as an act of great hypocrisy on the part of a supposedly Christian and democratic nation, and as an indication of an apparent quest by a small group of states, or plantation owners, for national power — hence the currency of a 'slave power' conspiratorial fear during the late 1840s and 1850s, especially after Congress passed the Compromise of 1850. Perhaps the dominant rhetorical concern of antislavery texts, however, was with the unchecked mastery of the slaveowner over the slave. Endowed with godlike power, but hardly gods, enslavers, according to antislavery writers, found it nearly impossible to keep their passion for mastery under control. 'Intoxicated' by their power, 'enslaved' by slavery, they brutally inflicted cruelties on their slaves, who, for good reason, became increasingly vengeful. Inevitably, then, slavery undermined civilized restraint and promised to bring forth the most catastrophic breakdown of all: an apocalyptic war of extermination between the races.

Given the centrality of concerns among abolitionists about the ways in which slavery undermined self- control, it is not surprising that many of the leading antislavery writers were also involved in -141- temperance reform — Garrison, Theodore Weld, Gerrit Smith, and the African American writers Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, William Wells Brown, and Frances Harper, among numerous others, saw the temperance movement and antislavery as intimately related. And given that slavery was viewed as a manifestation of unchecked, brute patriarchal power, it is not surprising that antislavery, like temperance, drew heavily on women participants.

Women's involvement in antislavery activity became a significant phenomenon in the early 1830s, as 1832 saw the formation of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society and 1833 the publication of Lydia Maria Child's seminal An Appeal on Behalf of That Class of Americans Called Africans. Angelina and Sarah Grimké, South Carolina Quaker sisters of a slaveholding family, presented their antislavery views during an 1837 public speaking tour of New England, thereby prompting the critical condemnation of the Congregationalist churches and of Catharine Beecher, who argued that women should exercise their moral influence within the privacy of the domestic sphere. As the hostile response to the Grimké sisters might suggest, women in antislavery remained in subordinate roles within the institutional structures of the movement. The refusal by the 1840 World's Anti-Slavery Convention in London to seat or give voice to women delegates from America intensified feminist thinking among Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, and others (as the refusal by an 1851 New York temperance convention to allow Susan B. Anthony the right to speak would help to raise her feminist consciousness). Abolitionism, as an ideology and social practice, therefore taught many of the 'feminist-abolitionists' about their own subordinate status, and, arguably, together with temperance, helped to fuel the emerging women's movement of the period.

Because marriage and property laws, along with the lack of suffrage, denied women rights thought to accompany republican citizenship, in feminist writings the analogy of woman to slave was seen as particularly apt, despite the fact that it was, after all, metaphorical. As Angelina Grimké remarked in Letters to Catharine E. Beecher (1838), 'The investigation of the rights of the slave has led me to a better understanding of my own.' Margaret Fuller, in her impassioned and poetical celebration of woman's potential, Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), published the same year as -142- Frederick's Narrative, likened woman to a slave and man to a slave trader. In Letters on the Equality of the Sexes (1838), Sarah Grimké pictured the situation of the typical wife in this way: 'man has exercised the most unlimited and brutal power over woman, in the peculiar character of husband, — a word in most countries synonymous with tyrant.' At the epochal Seneca Falls women's rights convention of 1848, the early culmination of organized feminist activity, Stanton, in her resounding 'Declaration of Sentiments,' therefore revised Jefferson's Declaration, substituting male for British tyrannical authority, in order to call attention to the ways in which the nation's social institutions and legal codes mainly served the interests of America's white male citizenry. That same year, the New York State Legislature, in response to thoughtful women critics like Stanton, passed the nation's most liberalized married women's property act, which made it legal for women to maintain control over property they brought to their marriages.

The Married Women's Property Act of 1848 followed in the wake of the land reforms modifying the near feudal control New York's upstate landholding families held over their tenants. The antirent agitation leading up to these reforms prompted James Fenimore Cooper's Littlepage trilogy — Satanstoe (1845), The Chainbearer (1845), and The Redskins (1846) — which forecast a reign of demagoguery should the landed gentry lose its leaseholds — and the land reforms, along with the married women's property act, lay behind his The Ways of the Hour (1850). - In portraying in this late novel a woman who deserts her husband, is falsely accused by a mob of murder, and is eventually revealed to be insane, Cooper suggests that allowing women too much liberty could lead to the breakdown of civilization itself. (A similar argument informed the pseudonymous Fred Folio's Lucy Boston; or, Women's Rights and Spiritualism [1851].) During the 1850s, divorce was addressed from a very different perspective by women writers, who remained convinced of the need for liberalized divorce laws. Fanny Fern (Sarah Payson Willis Parton), whose first novel, Ruth Hall (1855), touched on the wretched marriage and eventual death in a mental hospital of Ruth's friend Mrs. Leon, focused in Rose Clark (1856) on a divorced woman who, hardly debilitated by her condition, develops her self-possession and self-reliant virtue to the point where she remarries her former husband on egalitarian -143- terms. More boldly, Mary Sargeant Nichols, in her autobiographical novel Mary Lyndon (1855), presented the eponymous protagonist divorcing her tyrannous and cloddish husband, and eventually attaining a happier second marriage with a man who shares her ideals of the primacy to marriage of free, unconstrained love.

Of all the novels published before the Civil War, Harriet Beecher Stowe's million-copy best-seller,