Where Is Harriet Beecher Stowe When We Need Her?

I recommended Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 anti-slavery novel UNCLE TOM’S CABIN to the Great Books book club to which I belong. Although I received resistance from one book club member (explained below), the recommendation was accepted and I am now rereading the book for the meeting on July 23, 2018. Stowe was a genius at allowing the characters in her story who supported slavery to damn themselves with their own words, including quoting Biblical scriptures to justify their horrendous treatment of slaves.

Because I’m now reading Stowe’s novel, I was brought up short by Margaret Talbot’s closing paragraph in her “Family Values” article in the print edition of the July 2, 2018, New Yorker comment section (boldface mine):

In the meantime, it will be important to remember what the President was willing to do in the name of toughness. It will be important to remember that Attorney General Jeff Sessions justified taking children away from their parents by quoting Biblical Scripture. It will be important to be on guard for what this Administration may try next.

I did an online search for more information on Sessions’ Biblical quote and found the June 15, 2018, Washington Post article “Sessions cites Bible passage used to defend slavery in defense of separating immigrant families” by Julie Zauzmer and Keith McMillan, which begins:

Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Thursday used a Bible verse [Romans 13] to defend his department’s policy of prosecuting everyone who crosses the border from Mexico, suggesting that God supports the government in separating immigrant parents from their children.

And it turns out that my immediate connection to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s UNCLE TOM’S CABIN was correct. The Washington Post article later says (boldface mine):

“There are two dominant places in American history when Romans 13 is invoked,” said John Fea, a professor of American history at Messiah College in Pennsylvania. “One is during the American Revolution [when] it was invoked by loyalists, those who opposed the American Revolution.”

The other, Fea said, “is in the 1840s and 1850s, when Romans 13 is invoked by defenders of the South or defenders of slavery to ward off abolitionists who believed that slavery is wrong. I mean, this is the same argument that Southern slaveholders and the advocates of a Southern way of life made.”

Now as to why a member of the Great Books group did not want us to read UNCLE TOM’S CABIN, which she had not read:

She mistakenly confused the main character of the novel — who is extremely heroic — with the later use of “Uncle Tom” as a derogatory epithet for a subservient person. She thought reading the novel would be anti-black instead of realizing that the book is very pro-black.

(There is the oft-repeated story of when President Lincoln met Stowe he said words to the effect that this was the little lady who started the big war.)

While I doubt that reading UNCLE TOM’S CABIN can do anything about the current immigration crisis, I highly recommend reading the novel now. Click here for a free Kindle format on Amazon (even if you do not have a Kindle Unlimited subscription) or check out the other formats available on Amazon.

And earlier this week I had a different realization in connection with the government’s separation of children from their parents:

My unpublished science fiction novel THE MISSISSIPPI DIVIDE includes the novella THE MOTHER SIEGE. This dystopian story is about one mother’s resistance to the forced separation of all children from the ages of six months to 18 years of age that takes place in the year 2049 in an encapsulated land mass west of the Mississippi River.

Click here to read for free on Wattpad the novella THE MOTHER SIEGE.

Click here to read the New Yorker article “Family Values.”

Click here to read the Washington Post article about Sessions’ Biblical quote.

Phyllis Zimbler Miller (@ZimblerMiller) has an M.B.A. from The Wharton School and is the author of fiction and nonfiction books/ebooks. Phyllis is available by skype for book group discussions and may be reached at pzmiller@gmail.com

Her Kindle fiction ebooks may be read for free with a Kindle Unlimited monthly subscription — see www.amazon.com/author/phylliszimblermiller — and her Kindle nonfiction ebooks may also be read for free with a Kindle Unlimited monthly subscription — see www.amazon.com/author/phylliszmiller