Day 292 365 days toward Racial Change Uncle Tom's Cabin Chapter 45 Part 3

Brief Notes Uncle Tom’s Cabin Chapter 45 Concluding Remarks Part 3 1850 Fugitive Slave Act and Harriet’s Further Motivation Stowe’s saga of a slave named Tom was always percolating near the top of her psyche. Her abolitionist loyalties were well defined by the time she encountered Josiah Henson’s story. She tells us that it was the 1850 Fugitive Slave act that pushed her off of the fence to take pen to paper to advocate for the segment of American citizens under siege in the land. The 1850 Fugitive Slave Act was a measure to frustrate the near exodus of slaves from the South and those finding refuge and aid from the free North. Until 1850, northern officials could choose whether to help escaping slaves or help slave trackers return slaves to the South. After the Act, it became national law that officials were required to send suspected fugitive slaves back to their southern plantations and masters. The sad irony was that there was no requirement for proof that a Black citizen was slave or not. A simple accusation was enough to send a Black person to the hell in the South. I imagine that there was a lot of this kind of homegrown terrorism going on in the North and was used to keep Black people locked into a certain segment of society. We learned from Harriet’s book that the North had its own special kind of racism going on at the time. Sure, the northern states were ‘free’, but it did not mean that Whites necessarily wanted to have equal existence with Black people. Even Stowe betrays having this sentiment when she advocates for Blacks going to Africa – not returning because the slave, by then, was probably not from Africa. To her credit, Stowe sees through this power grab and influence on northern designs on abolition. The bigger political backstory is how the Fugitive Slave Act was wrapped in compromises for new territory opening up in the West. Because of her overt religious ties woven throughout the book, we are not surprised to read her testimony that she needed this book to reach her idea of the church at the time. Protestant Religion was not convinced that slavery was an evil to be resisted in America. The church enjoyed a kind of insulation from witnessing the evils of slavery. Harriet felt this and believed the church needed to be the sharp point of the offensive to bring change to the land. She encountered Christians, unaware of the evils of slavery, who condoned the institution as a benign way of doing business. Her Christian peers did not think that rape and murder were a part of a slave’s life. Incidents like these were rare occurrences. Stowe undoes those myths through Uncle Tom’s Cabin.