Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), the novel Lincoln credited with making 'this big war,' most compellingly interwove the major strands of antebellum reform: feminism, temperance, and antislavery. Temperance, for example, is central to the novel's representation of power relationships — between masters and slaves and, analogously, between men and women. The novel begins with Shelby signing over the slaves Tom and Harry to the obnoxious slave trader Haley, as the men sit together drinking wine and brandy. By the end of the novel we descend from this relatively restrained scene of intemperance to the unrestrained hell of the harddrinking brute Simon Legree's plantation. Along the way Stowe depicts a typical Kentucky tavern, wherein a crowd of slave hunters, 'free-and-easy dogs,' spit gobs of tobacco juice, drink tumblers 'half full of raw spirits,' and, significantly, wear hats, what Stowe terms 'the characteristic emblem of man's sovereignty.' White male sovereignty, rather than a prohibitionary politics, is the central issue here, with temperance blending into feminism, as Stowe presents male enslavers rendered intoxicated (and dangerous) less by alcoholic beverages than by their seemingly unlimited power over slaves and women. Representing 'home-loving and affectionate' slaves, male and female, as admirably domestic and womanly, Stowe not only places the slaves at the center of her culturally revisionary idealization of matriarchy but also, in the tradition of the Grimkés, Fuller, and Stanton, points to the 'enslaved' status of women in patriarchal society. The tragic destiny of the slave Prue, therefore, who was raised as a 'breeder,' speaks in part, Stowe implies, to the situation of all women in America. In this respect, the slave warehouse, where 'stubbed-looking, commonplace men' physically examine the slaves Susan and Emmeline, provides a metonymic picture of race and gender relationships in America, with the suggestion that Simon Legree should be taken as the representative American man in extremis (just as the antipatriarchal Simeon Halliday of the Quaker settlement rep-144- resents the bright reverse image that Stowe hoped would accompany America's regenerative transformation). Violating women and slaves alike in the secluded space of his unregulated plantation, insisting in blasphemous ways on his mastery — 'I'm your church now,' he proclaims to Tom — Legree, having rejected the spiritual guidance of his mother (and thus of God), revels in his mastery until Cassy resourcefully debilitates the enfeebled, guilt-ridden drunkard.
As suggested by Cassy's rage, and also by Stowe's analogizing of George Harris's armed battle against fugitive slave hunters to the American and Hungarian Revolutions, natural rights theory figures prominently in the feminist politics of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Moreover, in addressing the evils of the Fugitive Slave Law, the novel offers critiques of Northern capitalism's implication in slavery, and of the implication of Northern and Southern organized religion as well. Reform must be national and wide-ranging, according to Stowe, or dreadful consequences will follow. For one, as St. Clare prophesies, America under slavery risks falling into a bloody, apocalyptic race war. For another, as Stowe's sermonic final pages portend, America under slavery, as a nation of sinners, risks God's apocalyptic wrath. In this sense evangelical reform — as embodied by Eva and Tom — is of special urgency. As Stowe explains, if readers can 'feel right,' as Eva makes Miss Ophelia and St. Clare (and the reader) feel right, or as Tom makes the slave overseers Quimbo and Sambo (and the reader) feel right, conversion of self and society would proceed naturally, thereby fending off the various cataclysms — racial and eschatological — informing the dark imagination of the novel. In important ways, then, the emphasis on evangelicalism, with its millennial promise, serves to contain the novel's more troubling insurrectionary dimension, particularly as embodied by the rebels George Harris and Cassy. The novel concludes with a series of Christian conversions on the part of the rebels, and with Stowe, through Harris, endorsing African colonization as a possible solution to America's racial problems — as a safety outlet, as it were, provided less by moderate racialists, such as her father Lyman Beecher, with whose politics Harriet disagreed, than by God, who has a larger design.
A fear of uncontained racial violence informed a number of the novelistic 'responses' to Uncle Tom's Cabin, such as Caroline Lee Hentz's The Planter's Northern Bride (1854) and -145- William Gilmore's Woodcraft (1854), though, unlike Stowe, slavery apologists insisted that the well-ordered plantation could control such violence. In her subsequent novel, Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856), Stowe countered this notion, and in doing so revealed even more clearly than in Uncle Tom's Cabin the social fears and desires underlying her antislavery position, and the underlying elitism as well. In A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1853), Stowe worried over the debilitating effects of slavery on Southern whites, and remarked on the pervasiveness in the South of what she termed 'Poor White Trash': 'This miserable class of whites form, in all the Southern States, a material for the most horrible and ferocious of mobs. Utterly ignorant, and inconceivably brutal, they are like some blind, savage monster, which, when aroused, tramples heedlessly over everything in its way.' In Dred, while sympathetically addressing the revolutionary perspective of the escaped slave Dred — presented as the son of the historical slave conspirator Denmark Vesey and modeled, as millennialist revenger, on Nat Turner — Stowe's principal focus is on the increasingly intemperate mobs of 'poor white trash' under the control of demagogues. For, after the death of the newly converted plantation mistress Nina Gordon, who, under the guidance of her beloved Edward Clayton, had begun to adopt antislavery beliefs, her plantation and slaves fall into the hands of her brother Tom Gordon, a Legree-like enslaver intoxicated by alcohol and power. The novel concludes with the picture of an utterly degenerate mob under the control of Gordon, and a despairing sense of the nation falling apart under the pressure of the insurrectionary energies of the proslavery rabble. Clayton, who had wanted to reform slavery from within by educating and freeing his slaves, flees to Canada where he sets up a model township; Dred is shot and killed when he attempts to rescue an escaped slave from the drunken Tom's drunken mob.
Anxieties similar to Stowe's about the poor and working classes arguably lie behind much of the middle-class reforms of the period. In this respect, reform could sometimes serve the interests both of change and of the status quo — that is, preserving the hegemony of white Protestant elites. Desires to preserve and control can be viewed at an unattractive extreme in the period's pervasive nativism, itself a kind of Protestant reformism. For it was the opinion of a considerable number of Protestants that the increasing Catholic immigration -146- of the period was the greatest cause for alarm about social decay, signaling America's need for a 'Protestant reformation': 54,00 °Catholics arrived in the 1820s, 200,000 in the 1830s, 700,000 in the 1840s, and 200,000 in the year 1850 alone. To meet the challenge posed by these immigrants, the evangelical community developed the vast publishing network of the American Tract Society (founded in 1825) and related organizations to disseminate and perpetuate Protestant-republican values. Lyman Beecher, in his widely read nativist tract Plea for the West (1835), emphasized the role of the word in this 'reformatory' campaign: 'Whatever European nations do, our nation must read and think from length and breadth, from top to bottom.' And read Americans did, as they made best-sellers of numerous convent captivity novels dramatizing putative Catholic plots to undermine the values and institutions of the Republic. In their popular first-person narrative accounts, Rebecca Theresa Reed's Six Months in a Convent (1835) and Maria Monk's notorious Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery (1836) presented sadistic nuns and priests, violations in the confessional, evidence of Roman Catholic conspiracies, and, ultimately, a summons to Protestant reform (and to spend money on this kind of fiction) by remaining vigilant to Catholic subversives. Monk's sensational book of horrors sold upwards of three hundred thousand copies through 1860, spawned numerous other convent captivity novels, such as Charles Frothingham's The Convent's Doom (1854) and Josephine Bunkley's Miss Bunkley's Book: The Testimony of an Escaped Novice from the Sisterhood of Charity (1855), and helped to legitimize nativist discourse, which played an important role in the founding of the Republican Party, as a discourse of social reform.
Nativism and fears of insurrectionary disorder from the poor and working classes also played an important role in the urban reform movement of the period. Like Southerners concerned about the possibility of slave revolts and abolitionist conspiracies, Northerners remained concerned about the dangers lurking beneath the surface of what came to be regarded as the mysterious and wicked city — a trope central to a number of antebellum urban novels, such as Ned Buntline's Mysteries and Miseries of New York (1848) and Ann Stephens's Fashion and Famine (1854). Especially worrying to cultural elites was the marked upsurge in riots in Northeast cities between 1830 and -147- 1860, and the upsurge during the same period of labor organizing and discontent — or, we might say, urban reform from below. Frances Wright and leaders of the New York Workingman's Party, for example, spoke out against 'wage slavery,' and writers as diverse as Orestes Brownson, in The Laboring Classes (1840), Theodore Parker, in A Sermon on Merchants (1846), and George Lippard, in such urban reform novels as The Quaker City and New York: Its Upper Ten and Lower Million (1853), excoriated the rich for exploiting the working
