Enlightening the Enlightened: How Death Is Used To Promote Abolition in Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Hannah Edwards
Where there is life, there is death. From the second we are born, we are dying, forever pushing toward that final, earthly end where we must pass from one state to the next in the moments between breaths and prayers. It happens to everyone, but in the twenty-first century, death is a taboo subject, because acknowledgment of ever-impending death only reminds us that our time on Earth is limited, and that we are completely mortal, vulnerable, temporary physical beings. Instead, we would rather think about the beauty and joys of life. We prefer cheating death, evading death, rather than experiencing death. In literature, we often want to read about a child who is miraculously cured of all ailments, instead of a child who dies of tuberculosis. We want to read about a man who is chosen by God to live, to thrive, to gain inhuman strength at the last moment in order to fight back against a captor, rather than a man who is beaten to death. In the text, our twenty-first century spiritual empowerment comes from the saved, the living, rather than the dead, as, for many of us, religiosity and death are too much at once for our evolving tastes. But this was not so in the nineteenth century, when death was used as a tool in literature to spread spiritual enlightenment. It was used as a way to open eyes, minds, hearts, and arms to a cause, a religion, a movement, and a people. In Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, depictions of death act to promote abolition by showing that slavery is incompatible with Christianity, challenging Christian slaveholders to rethink their actions.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, written during the height of abolitionism, is a novel depicting the cruelties and casualties of the slave trade in nineteenth-century America. From the start, the reader follows the stories of two main characters who are torn away from the same Kentucky plantation and benevolent masters: Tom, a trustworthy husband and father who is sold and sent away from his home and family, and Eliza, a mother who flees the plantation with her very young, recently sold son in attempts to save him. Though both characters face their share of troubles, it is Tom, arguably the “heart” of the novel, whose experiences are the most harrowing. Sold on a ship to the kind, yet slaveholding, Augustine St. Clare, Tom’s life from then on becomes a series of ups and downs. Page after page, the reader follows along with his journey through the harsh reality of slavery, along the way meeting death head-on and, by experiencing death as depicted by Stowe, coming to terms with a world of injustice and hearing the humble voice of a Christian woman calling for change.
The first depicted death that the reader encounters is that of Prue, an enslaved woman described as “cross” and “old,” and who is seemingly so tormented, so mentally damaged by her enslavement that she has become convinced that “[she is] ugly—[she is] wicked—[she is] gwine straight to torment”—that is, Hell (198). She has taken up drinking, drowning her sorrows and depression “to get shet o’ [her] misery,” and repeatedly declares that she wishes to be dead—that when she dies, she wants to “go to torment, and get away from Mas’r and Missis” because “white folks is gwine” to Heaven (198-199). Others attempt to share the gospel with Prue, but she will not listen, preferring instead to be obstinate in her slavery-caused beliefs.
A mere scene following Prue’s initial appearance in the novel comes word of her death. It is told that the white “folks have whipped [her] to death,” and that, after being left in the cellar all day, “the flies [have] got to her” (200-201). Though news of her death comes second-hand, and though her death is not the most pronounced or graphic in the novel, it can be argued that hers is one of the most effective for the Christian reader. As Prue tells us of her desire to spend eternity in Hell rather than Heaven, as she alludes to the fact that she would rather burn in a lake of fire than be with white people in veritable paradise, Stowe is speaking directly to Christian slaveholders. She is showing them how, through slavery, Christianity is skewed. Souls are being lost because of slavery. People desire death as a quick avenue to Hell, rather than life and eventual Heaven, because slavery and the white race have abused them so terribly. By reading about Prue’s death, Christian, slaveholding readers have the opportunity to be struck with the realization that this woman may have gone to Hell by the hand of people like them. And that is a troubling thought, to be sure.
The next death in the novel—the death of little beloved Eva St. Clare, sweet, angelic, loving daughter of Augustine and Marie St. Clare—is without a doubt one of the most poignant scenes in the novel. Stricken by tuberculosis and foretelling of her death weeks in advance, it is Eva’s mission to love others, to treat everyone equally, and to have her father free Tom, her favorite of his slaves. Her sickness is mourned greatly, with much sadness, and when she is on her deathbed, the enslaved people of the St. Clare household crowd around her, wait on her, and love her.
In the novel, Eva is a Christ figure, a little child who “would be glad to die, if her dying would stop all [the] misery” of slavery—who “would die for [slaves] . . . if [she] could” (252). She tells this to Tom prior to her death, as she knows fully well in her heart that she will soon be doing just that. By depicting Eva as a Christ figure, and by having her eventually die, before doing so telling the slaves that “[they] must become Christians,” and that “Jesus will help [them],” Stowe is presenting the ideal Christian response to slavery (252). She is showing readers that slavery is wrong, and that Christians should be opposed to slavery (264). Christians should be willing to “stop all [the] misery,” to give enslaved people their freedom, to help them become educated so that they will be able to read their Bibles, to learn about Jesus, and to become saved (252).
And the lessons from little Eva’s death do not end there. Augustine St. Clare, a self-professed non-religious man, is brought to his knees under the influence of his daughter’s message and death. Eva, his only child, is everything to him. Before she dies, she speaks to him about his salvation, asking, “You are a Christian, are you not, papa?” only to be answered with a negative (264). But after her death—after she proclaims while passing that she sees “love—joy—peace!”—St. Clare, as any person touched by a figure of Christ, begins to read the Bible (270). He begins to truly try to become a Christian. He even tells Tom that he “[wants] to believe [the] Bible” and enlists his help in learning the ways of the Lord (275). Day after day he reads “little Eva’s Bible seriously and honestly,” and as he is doing so, as he is growing in faith and getting closer and closer to Christianity, he becomes more and more dissatisfied with his slave-holding ways (279). Even though St. Clare is incredibly kind to his slaves, the fact still remains that he has them. But after Eva’s Christ-like death drives him toward Christianity, he begins to “[think] more soberly and practically of his relations to his servants—enough to make him extremely dissatisfied with both his past and present course” (279). Eventually, he makes plans to free Tom.
It is Eva’s death that causes all of this. It is Eva’s little voice during her last moments, saying, “love—joy—peace!” and showing her father Heaven and the way there, that ignites the fire within St. Clare (270). And with St. Clare’s impending Christianity comes his regret of his slave-owning ways. Through this, Stowe is telling her readers that it is the duty of Christians to free their slaves, and that slavery is something over which Christians should feel disdain. St. Clare’s own death scene, after he is fatally stabbed, seals Stowe’s point. As St. Clare is dying—as he is working out the last bits of his salvation, coming to truly know Christ before his death—he is holding the hand of Tom and asking him to pray for him: “The black hand and white hand hold each other with an equal clasp” as Tom prays for St. Clare, and St. Clare is finally saved, stating that his mind is “coming home, at last” (290). When there is equal footing amongst two individuals of different races, Christ’s work can be done.
Finally comes the death of Tom, one of the most heartbreaking deaths in the novel. After being sold to the utterly cruel Simon Legree, following St. Clare’s untimely death and his wife’s sheer horribleness and greed, it is all downhill for Tom. He is constantly mistreated on the terrible plantation, and yet he never fully gives up. He takes everything thrown at him and keeps his Christian principles in tact. At one point, two slaves, Emmeline and Cassy, escape, and Tom refuses to speak a word to Legree about the matter, never backing down. Legree sends his two drivers—slaves themselves—Sambo and Quimbo to beat him to what will lead to his eventual death.
But like Eva, Tom is also a Christ figure. His process of dying for a cause speaks wisdom to others, including those who beat him. Tom prays as he is being beaten, forgives those who do terrible things unto him “with all [his] soul,” and Sambo and Quimbo cannot help but be affected. After Tom “[faints] entirely away” from injury, Sambo, newly enlightened to the ways of Christianity, says that it is certain that “[they have] been doin’ a drefful wicked thing,” and he and Quimbo set off to “[wash Tom’s] wounds” and place him in a bed. They apologize, saying that they have “been awful wicked to [him].” And as Tom is terribly injured, lying on the bed in which he will eventually die, he tells Sambo and Quimbo about Jesus, and they become Christians. They are kind to Tom now that he has prayed for them and shown Christian love toward them, further showing how Christianity and slavery are not compatible, and that slavery is wrong, especially for Christians (377).
When Tom finally dies, he breathes the words, “what a thing ‘t is to be a Christian!” and the novel’s death scenes could not be summed up in a better way (381). Every scene of death in Uncle Tom’s Cabin serves a Christian abolitionist purpose, appealing to Christians in particular and proclaiming the evils of slavery. The death of Prue grabs Christians’ heartstrings; the death of Eva shows them a better way; the death of St. Clare shows how Christianity calls for equality, not slavery; and the death of Tom shows how Christian love should cure evils, not fuel them. While some Christian slaveholders in the nineteenth century firmly believed that slavery was ordained by God, Stowe, in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, attempts to show these slaveholders that the exact opposite is true. The duty of the Christian is to love and to be kind. And in the age where spiritualism and the afterlife were regarded as major parts of culture, and where burying a child was commonly the rule rather than the exception, the best way for Stowe to speak to her readers was through death, appealing to the heart as well as the mind.
Works Cited
Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom’s Cabin. 1852. Ed. Elizabeth Ammons. 2nded. New York: Norton, 2010. Print.