(March 24, 2021) Two years after the 1851 release of Uncle Tom’s Cabin author Harriet Beecher Stowe moved from Ohio to Connecticut. Notwithstanding her newly created wealth and status she rejected a proposal by black abolitionist Frederick Douglass to aid in building a black vocational school in New Haven. She explained her objection in a letter to white abolitionist Wendell Phillips:
Of all the vague unbased fabrics of a vision this floating idea of a colored industrial school is the most illusive. If [black people] want one, why don’t they have one—many men among the colored people are richer than I am & better able to help in such an object—will they ever learn to walk?
While it is debatable that “many” colored men were “richer” than Stowe, Alabamans should be credited with the original $2,000 funding for Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee institute in 1881 when the impoverished state was controlled by Southern whites of the post-carpetbagger era. Stowe should have been able to do better, particularly given the near universal condemnation of postbellum Southern whites in academia.
Two years after the Civil War ended, Stowe moved to Florida in 1867 to a cotton plantation on the St. John’s River that she had given her son $10,000 to lease. Although the venture quickly failed, it provided Harriet firsthand observations for plantation life and black workers—perspective she had never before had. She wrote in her 1872 book, Palmetto Leaves, “As a class [blacks] are more obedient, better natured, more joyous and easily satisfied [than whites.]” Blacks, she fooled herself, enjoyed toiling in the hot Florida sun. Her summation evokes a Gone With the Wind narrative:
The thermometer these three days past has risen to over ninety every day. No white man dares stay in the field later than ten o’clock . . . Yet, the black laborers whom we leave in the field pursue their toil. If anything, more actively and cheerfully, than during the cooler months. The sun awakens all their vigor and all their boundless jolly. . . A gang of negroes—great brawny muscular fellows—seemed to make a perfect frolic of this job which . . . would have threatened sunstroke to any white man.
Those who understand and know how to treat the negroes seldom have reason to complain of their ingratitude. But it is said, by Northern men who come down with Northern habits of labor, that the negro is inefficient as a laborer.
The Northern man when he first arrives . . . looks with impatient scorn on what seems to him the slow shilly-shally style in which both black and white move on. It takes an attack of malarial fever or two to teach him that he cannot labor the day through under the tropical sun as he can in the mountains of New Hampshire. After a shake or two of this kind, he comes to be thankful if he can hire a [negro or two] to plough and hoe his fields.
Stowe did not think that black children were fit for anything more than the most practical education. To be sure, she attributes much of the black child’s indifferent attitude toward learning as a legacy of dependence linked to slave culture. Although the adults wanted so-called book learning, it was too hard. Unfortunately, they did not sufficiently motivate their children.
The teaching in the common schools ought to be largely industrial, and do what it can to prepare the children to get a living by doing something well. Practical sewing, cutting and fitting, for girls and the general principles of agriculture for boys, might be taught with advantage.
Although her son and his partners only harvested two bales of cotton at the end of the plantation’s growing season, Harriet purchased an orange grove on the east bank of the St. Johns River where she lived during the winter season until 1884. Notwithstanding that her white neighbors had supported the Confederacy during the War Between the States she wrote in 1873, “I came to Florida the year after the war and held property in Duval County ever since. In all this time I have not received even an incivility from any native Floridian.” Since Uncle Tom’s Cabin had left her a famous author she sometimes corresponded with notable historical figures. In 1866 she wrote the Duchess of Argyle:
My brother Henry has talked with [President Andrew Johnson] earnestly. Henry takes the ground that it is unwise . . . to force negro suffrage on the South. His policy would be to hold over the negro to the protection of the Freedmen’s Bureau until the great law of free labor shall . . . draw the master and servant together . . . [Massachusetts Senator] Charles Sumner is simply looking at the abstract right of the thing. Henry looks at the actual probabilities.
I am sorry that people cannot differ on such great and perplexing public questions [as black suffrage] without impugning each others motives. . . I think our President [Andrew Johnson] is much injured by the abuse that is heaped on him and the selfish and unworthy motives that are ascribed to him by those who seem determined to allow nobody an honest unselfish difference in judgement from their own.
While her writings indicate that the postbellum Harriet Beecher Stowe had a good heart, two points stand out. First, she had a Gone-With-the-Wind attitude toward the black man’s physical constitution. Second, she often felt that the Radical Republicans that imposed carpetbag regimes on the South had woefully distorted expectations for both Southern blacks and whites. They chiefly coveted the temporary political power that black suffrage and Confederate disfranchisement could provide until the organically Republican territories of the West could be admitted as states.
Civil War Chat 