Harriett Beecher Stowe's Abolition Soundtrack in Uncle Tom's Cabin

Introduction In her popular novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin: or Life Among the Lowly (1852), Harriet Beecher Stowe strategically included hymns and hymn singing within the narrative. Hymns appealed to her readers' emotions, fueling their sympathy with the victims of slavery. This rhetorical strategy endorsed abolition; Stowe aimed to mobilize antislavery action. Singing hymns also established relationships among singers and their audience at the same time that hymn performance enacted communities across racial boundaries. Some of the hymn texts in Uncle Tom's Cabin previously had been embedded in other antebellum social visionaries' speeches, memoirs, essays, and newspaper articles.1 These widely-known hymns in essence created a musical language or soundtrack for social action on behalf of the slaves' emancipation and of free blacks' inclusion in American society. Sacred music and sentimental Action In Uncle Tom's Cabin sacred music participated in the cultural work of nineteenth-century sentimental fiction by affirming interpersonal relationships. Characters in this literary genre prized their emotional connections with others in the midst of a cruel, unyielding, impersonal world. Heroes and heroines broke down social barriers and reached out to others creating communities through their emotional alliances. In the antebellum United States with its unpredictable economy and volatile politics, narratives that encouraged a stable and benevolent society attracted a broad spectrum of readers. (2) Like sentimental fiction, hymns also affirmed interpersonal relationships. In the Beecher family before she married, Harriet joined her brothers and sisters singing hymns as a common past time--notably during the arduous trip as they migrated west to Cincinnati. Later, she and her brothers Henry Ward and Charles wrote and published hymn texts as a professional calling. Harriet and her siblings had sung hymns at church, in school, and at home during their childhood; as adults they inculcated the same appreciation for hymns in their families. Stowe knew: people who sang hymns together felt connected as they sang and they felt a common tie when they remembered singing. (3) As the means of establishing and maintaining interpersonal ties, hymns created brief episodes or protracted experiences of equality among singers, moments of egalitarian resonance. In the novel when whites and blacks sang together, they made an emotional connection, even if in some cases it was only temporary. Hymns also provided a bridge between readers and the characters. Readers of the novel who knew the music had an additional means to become emotionally aligned with the characters because they shared the same musical space. (4) By establishing emotional connections among characters and the readers, the text argued for valuing interpersonal relationships and therefore, for elevating black men and women from slaves to Americans. Uncle Tom's Cabin included hymn lyrics written by the Reverends Isaac Watts, John Newton, and Charles Wesley; these hymns had become part of a musical soundtrack used by other social visionaries prior to the American Civil War. These hymn writers had crafted lyrics to articulate Arminian theology (that Jesus died for people, not just the elect). Now Stowe and others used the same words to advocate for equality among people regardless of color based on the idea that all God's children were equals. Social visionaries like David Walker, Maria W. Stewart, and William Lloyd Garrison found the language of oppressed individuals facing hostile opposition in these lyrics to be well-suited for their nineteenth-century campaigns for a multiracial America. Musical silence in Uncle Tom's Cabin While this paper focuses on hymns in Uncle Tom's Cabin, music is notably absent from one of the novel's two narrative strands: Eliza's escape from enslavement north to Canada with her son, Harry. …

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