She made her novel's villain a Northerner who moved South, Simon Legree, and made her Southern whites generally admirable, if weak and flawed, figures.
Of course, slaveowners bent on secession would take Stowe for a South-hater and a villain, but they'd say that about anybody who didn't whole-heartedly support slavery.
Anyone who said or wrote a critical word about slavery was assumed to be an enemy and a devil.
That in this, as in so many other things, you automatically take the slavers' side, is yet another reason why conversations with you tend not to be worth the time.
One might get that impression as a consequence of her works. It certainly had damaging consequences for the South.
Anyone who said or wrote a critical word about slavery was assumed to be an enemy and a devil.
Well, focusing on the whippings and the beatings and the murders and the chains and the separations of families and so forth is probably intended to make readers believe this is a widespread and common practice.
I may be mistaken, but it doesn't strike me as rational for people who were making money off of slaves to whip, beat, or murder them. I have no doubt that it happened, but I would be shocked to discover that it happened to the degree it is always portrayed in movies or literature. That treating people this way should be common place simply doesn't make any sense, and therefore I believe it is inaccurate. I believe they took what examples of abuse they could find and spread word of them as far as they possibly could. This is the sort of thing that political activists do, and I do not doubt they did it.
That in this, as in so many other things, you automatically take the slavers' side, is yet another reason why conversations with you tend not to be worth the time.
Stop trying to put words in my mouth. I don't take the slavers side, I merely recognize the legal conditions that existed at the time. With Harriet Beecher Stowe whom Lincoln said (In Jest, I think) caused the war, he is not far wrong. It was this sort of agitation that exacerbated the tensions between the Puritan abolitionists and the people who's economics depended upon this "peculiar institution." It helped bring about an ugly and probably unnecessary war.
But pray tell, why didn't this abolitionist fervor extend to the Caribbean where slavery was far worse than in the Southern states, and where the Navy Gun ships could easily reach it? Why did their abolitionist zeal cool so quickly after they had subdued the financial threat?
Was this not a moral crusade? Why, pray tell, was it so important to the North to stamp out slavery in the South, (But not in the North) but to leave it unharmed in the Caribbean? Could it be because the Caribbean Islands were no financial threat to the power brokers in the North Eastern part of the Union?
Could it be that those North Eastern power brokers were making profits off the Caribbean plantations?
I am a huge history buff, though my degrees are not in history. When you read about the changes in thought about slavery in the south from the founding of the country until 1860 it is really disheartening. Most of the founding fathers north and south did not think of slavery as a positive good. Thomas Jefferson went so far as to call it “a moral depravity” and a “hideous blot” on the country. In fact they were so embarrassed by it that they did not even use the word slavery in the constitution. Most of them were hoping it would eventually be abolished.
Fast forward to the 1830’s and the slaveocracy is now saying that slavery is a positive good and the natural state for the slaves. By 1860 the south was almost united in their belief that slavery was a positive good. In fact in violation of many of their state constitutions, they passed laws limiting free speech (abolitionist speech). Then when the rest of the states had the audacity to elect a party to the presidency that was against slavery,(and it would not have mattered which republican was the candidate, they would have reacted the same way) they decided to not accept the outcome of a free and fair election and instead rebel.