Small House of Uncle Thomas

Amid the hustle and bustle of uploading the Books chapter of the Media Survival Guide this morning, I paused to examine one of the external links a little closer.

One of the chapter’s “key players” is Harriet Beecher Stowe. And as standard practice (to increase student comfort with the material) I’ve been including Wikipedia entries. Stowe’s just happened to have a “this article may include inaccuracies” flag at the top, so I hopped over to the discussion section to see what the problem was.

As if I didn’t already know. And yes, there they were. Crypto-racist trolls insisting that the entry should include a mention that “Stowe never actually visited a plantation.”

Problems with this argument:

1. It implies that you can’t accurately depict the horrors of slavery unless you’ve seen them first-hand. I hope the next stop on the troll journey was over to George Lucas’s Wikipedia entry, demanding that it point out that Lucas has never actually been to outer space. Though Star Wars includes no end of disconnect with reality, Stowe’s writing was based not only on proximity to the problem (she lived right across the river from a slave state) but also on extensive research.

2. It implies that Stowe unfairly portrayed slavery as an unending hell of pain and misery. Not so. The protagonists begin Uncle Tom’s Cabin on a relatively benign plantation. But their owner falls on hard times and has to sell some human beings in order to make ends meet (breaking promises to them in the process). And that’s when the trouble really starts.

3. It side-steps the issue. What’s the counter argument to Stowe’s abolitionist thesis? That slavery wasn’t all bad? That some slaves were happy just like Stowe’s contemporary detractors claimed? Are such claims subject to proof? How could you possibly reliably demonstrate the happiness of a slave?

More directly to the point, is anyone really claiming that it should be okay for one person to be the legal property of another, to be forced to work without compensation, to be bought and sold at will, to be treated in whatever manner the master sees fit? Even under the best of conditions, on a hypothetical plantation on which a kindly, generous master provides good food and comfortable homes, plenty of time off to rest and pursue cultural activities of the slaves’ choosing, and never overworks, sells, tortures, rapes or murders any of them, slavery is still wrong.

A century and a half later, are we still having this debate?

No we aren’t. The entire Confederacy-was-misunderstood jerkweed coalition needs to come to grips with the rotten roots of this belief. If you think slavery is such a hot idea, go to one of the countries where it’s still legal and sell yourself to someone. Send us all a postcard letting us know how it works out for you.

Until then, take your traitor flags down and join the rest of us in the 21st century.