Uncle Tom's Cabin

Discussion

Maryemma Graham is a professor of English at the University of Kansas. She served as Langston Hughes Centennial Committee cochair and symposium director. Founder and director of the Project on the History of Black Writing, she has published more than twenty-five journal articles and essays, and six critical studies, including edited collections on nineteenth- and twentieth-century American and African American literature and pedagogy. Recipient of numerous grants and fellowships from NEH, the Ford Foundation, the Smithsonian, and the New York Public Library, she is a frequent director of international seminars and public symposia. Her most recent works include Fields Watered with Blood: Critical Essays on Margaret Walker (Georgia, 2001), and Conversations with Margaret Walker (Mississippi, 2002). With the support of an ACLS fellowship, she is currently completing The House Where My Soul Lives: A Biography of Margaret Walker (forthcoming, University Press of Virginia).

Listen to the discussion of Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Susan Harris: I'm an Americanist. I specialize in the nineteenth century, focusing on American women writers. I've written and talked a lot about women writers in that period, and I'm also a Mark Twain scholar. So I have two groups of people that I interact with on the national scene. It's very interesting to move back and forth between the groups and watch them evolve—to look at the similarities, and look at the differences. In my teaching I mostly do nineteenth-century work. I tend to work with upper-level and graduate students, although every once in a while, I teach a basic literature course to the younger students.

There are many, many editions of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Editions that have been published in the last 10 years tend to have a lot of useful apparatus. The edition I just taught has among other things, a novella that Frederick Douglass, the escaped slave, wrote in response to Uncle Tom's Cabin called The Heroic Slave. The Norton editions include a lot of criticism so you can read reviews that came out in 1852, when the book was published. They also include some of the sources from which Stowe took the stories.

Joan Hedrick's Harriet Beecher Stowe Reader includes a selection of Stowe's other writings, as well as a very good chronology. In response to criticism, Stowe wrote A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, after people said, "These things never happened. You made them all up." She responded rather defensively by writing the Key, which provides many of the items that she picked up from newspapers and from legal reports that verified what she put together in a fictional guise in Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Here are six areas where it's useful to know things about Stowe. First of all her family: You can't read anything of Stowe's without thinking about where she comes from, in a family sense. She is one of the daughters of Lyman Beecher, who was one of the most important and forceful Congregationalist ministers who ever lived in the United States. He was a very important person in the antebellum United States. He held pastorates in Connecticut and in Boston. For twenty years he was president of Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati. All of his children (he had thirteen) became, in one way or another, preachers. The best known are Catharine Beecher, who was one of the founders of female education in the United States and Henry Ward Beecher —and there's our connection to Bleeding Kansas. Henry Ward Beecher became in his own right the most famous preacher in the nineteenth century. And after holding pastorates in Indiana for several years, he was invited to the pulpit at Plymouth Congregationalist Church in Brooklyn, where, among other activities, he delivered a series of fiery abolitionist speeches and raised money for rifles to send out to Kansas —hence the name Beecher Bible. Our John Brown Jayhawk—which I love—is holding a Bible in one hand and a rifle in the other. Having been to see the Curry mural in Topeka this summer, I maybe like it even better. The third child of Lyman Beecher who became famous was, of course, Harriet Beecher, whose married name was Stowe.

The Beecher family, on the whole, is remarkable for its zealousness in taking its sense of social

Harriet Beecher Stowe was an American writer and philanthropist. Her popular book Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly was a causal factor in the Civil War.

activism into the public sphere. They were all preachers, and they were all social activists in one way or another. All the boys became ministers, and the girls, either through education, writing, or social reform were activists in whatever arena a woman could participate.

Area number two is still in the same sphere; it's religion. Daddy Lyman expected all of his children to be saved. By that he meant to have an active conversion experience, like Saint Augustine, to meet God in the garden, to know they were saved in what was a latter-day Puritan tradition. This puts incredible stress on the family. It's not enough to have Dad looking over your shoulder with everything else, but also interrogating your soul on a weekly basis. Most of the children did eventually experience conversion. You never know how sincere that kind of conversion is, but they still lived under tremendous anxiety that friends and other members of the family would be damned.

For instance, Catharine Beecher's fiancé drowned before experiencing conversion. She went through years of depression about this, not only that her fiancé—she never married—died, but that he died unconverted, which to her, meant he was damned. If you like Stowe and want to continue reading her work, her novel The Minister's Wooing describes that incident and the psychological pressure that it caused at its core.

Harriet herself probably escaped the worst psychological effects of this, but you can see her adult life as a quest for a more comfortable way of practicing Christianity. Like many American writers, when she went to Italy and found herself surrounded by Catholicism for the first time, she was torn in many ways. This is always a fascinating thing with American writers—the Protestant Americans. They grow up thinking of the Catholic Church as the enemy, and then they go to Italy and it's beautiful. There is music. And there is art. And there are mountains. And they say, wait a minute, this can't be all bad. It throws their values into a turmoil. That's what happened to Harriet Beecher. You can see Catholic imagery over and over again in her subsequent works. Towards the end of her life, she began attending the Episcopal Church. Her daughters had both converted. There's no documentation that she actually did formally convert, but she attended services.

Areas three, four, and five are education, marriage, and children. Stowe was educated in her sister Catharine's Hartford Female Seminary. She became a teacher there when she finished her own studies. In 1832, when her father became president of Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati , she went with him with several of her siblings and spent the next eighteen years there. That's something that people don't realize about Stowe, that she lived eighteen years in southern Ohio. The important event that happened to her was that she became a writer there. There was a group of would-be writers who brought their productions to the group to read and critique—they called themselves the Semi-Colon Club. She started to publish in small magazines in the area and then in larger national magazines. So that was a very important circumstance for her, and it's one that Hedrick's biography treats quite extensively.

Stowe also saw slaves in Cincinnati. Cincinnati wasn't in a slave state, but it's right on the Ohio River. Kentucky 's on the other side. Stowe never went to the South. She did visit a plantation in Kentucky once. But she saw a lot of escaped slaves in Cincinnati. She heard their stories. And she read. Students at Lane Seminary were also pro-abolition, and that affected her. But beyond the visit to Kentucky, she never experienced life in a slave state.

Stowe married in Cincinnati. She married Calvin Stowe, a theologian who taught at Lane. In 1850 she and Calvin moved to Bowdoin College in Maine, which is where she wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin. Meanwhile she was having children, in all, seven, only three of whom survived her. The Stowes were always poor. A theologian's salary and a college teacher's salary then, as now, were not munificent. During her early years, before she started bringing in money as a writer, when the children were small and Calvin was away teaching most of the day, she took in boarders to make ends meet. She wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin while sharing the housework with her one servant, cooking for the boarders, and not only caring for her children, but home-schooling them as well. So this was a busy lady who was not, according to Hedrick, a terrific housewife in terms of neatness in the house.

Area six concerns publication. Uncle Tom's Cabin was written in direct response to the Compromise of 1850 and the Fugitive Slave Law. It was serialized first. That's an interesting fact to think about it in terms of where the chapters end, where they begin, and cliffhangers. It was serialized in 1851 in the National Era, edited by abolitionist Gamaliel Bailey. This was a weekly magazine, so you didn't have to wait a whole month as you often did with serialized novels. Uncle Tom's Cabin ran for 10 months and then was published in book form in 1852. In book form it sold 10,000 copies in the first week and 300,000 by the end of the first year. Stowe did not have a great royalty and copyright arrangement, so she didn't get the amount of money that she should have for a book that was this popular. Nevertheless, she did make money on it. You sometimes hear that she didn't make any money; it's not true. More importantly maybe, it made her famous. It was possibly the first international bestseller and it was translated quickly into many languages. If you go to a major research library anywhere, even one like the New York Public Library, and go through the card catalog for Uncle Tom's Cabin, you find it in languages you've never heard of. It's probably in almost every language in the world.

Stowe subsequently published 30 more books and essays and short stories. These are widely ranging in subject matter. She wrote a very bad novel titled Agnes of Sorrento, which is set in Italy. You can see her love affair with Italy coming through it. She wrote wonderful stories set in New England and novels about middle-class domesticity. With her sister Catharine, who had done an earlier version in the 1840s, she wrote The American Woman's Home, which was one of the best-known household manuals. It is a wonderful thing to read. If you want to know how to do your laundry so that it can take you two days, how to raise your calf for veal, how to treat your servants, especially if they are Irish immigrants, read The American Woman's Home.

She earned enough money to build an extremely nice house in Hartford, Connecticut. Nearby in the same community are houses built by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner. These houses still exist, and you can visit them. If any of you are planning a trip east and you're in the Hartford vicinity, I very much recommend spending an afternoon—you can buy a dual ticket—and go into the Twain house and the Stowe house. They're right across from each other, across a little common, and you can see how they're very different. The Twain house is very opulent. The Stowe house is scientific domesticity all the way. There's no kitchen in the Twain house—that's because the people who manage it made that into offices—but it's all public rooms and opulence. In Stowe's kitchen there are cabinets labeled "flour," "sugar," "dried beans." Everything is done in terms of making housewifery as clear, precise, and scientific as it can be.

She was also one of the first Americans to start making winter sojourns in Florida. So, if you think about Flagler and the development of Florida and American tourism in the nineteenth century, she and Calvin are right in there.

In her very late life, she developed Alzheimer's and used to wander—Twain wrote some pathetic little memoirs about her wandering around among the houses. If the door wasn't locked, she would walk in, put her hands over people's eyes, and say, "Boo!" She died in 1896. She was quite old and very revered.

We might if we have time, read the last couple of pages simply because those pages are pretty important in American literature in a very broad sense. I often say to my students, a way to begin thinking about something you've read is "Do you like it? Do you not like it?" And then, "Why?" So feel free to say, "I love it. I hate it," and why.

Participant: I missed it in school, and I've heard several people say they've never read it before. How in the world did we miss this book? Why was it never assigned?

Susan Harris: It was never assigned to me. I read it well into adulthood for the first time.

Participant: Me too, and I think that's strange.

Participant: I actually had a lot of tears as I read it. This is the first time I've read it. It's very touching.

Susan Harris: Tears. Do you want to talk about tears? How many people will admit to trying not to cry and being pulled by those elements of the book? Why does she do that? What are your feelings? I think this is one of the most problematic elements of Uncle Tom's Cabin. As you sit there reading "The Death of Little Eva," or "Prue," or any of the things that make you weep, how are you feeling as you're undergoing that? Is it simply that you're weeping or is there another part of you pulling back from that?

Participant: Manipulated is how I felt. Especially when the title told you they were gone.

Susan Harris: Do other people feel that way? Manipulated? You don't? So you don't mind being taken in.

Participant: I thought she just made the point of humanity, of what we do to each other. I think it's just incredible. I think people should read it now. I think Christians should read it now.

Susan Harris: Why should Christians read it now?

Participant: They may have some of the same problems that Christians had back then. And maybe they need to take a look at that and see how far we've really come.

Susan Harris: Sentimentality and Christianity or Christians are two really important elements, I think, in this book.

Participant: As I was reading the book, I imagined myself as basically who I am now, only in the nineteenth century, going about my daily life, treating what's going on in Bosnia or Africa with some sort of benign neglect. It doesn't affect me, so I'm not going to think about it a lot. As I was putting myself in that place, it made me realize whom she was speaking to when she was writing the book. Because certainly the people who may have been most affected as they read the book were those who thought of slavery as something that didn't affect their daily lives, and that it was benign and not really important to them. Maybe she did manipulate, but I do feel like there was a reason.

Susan Harris: Who is her audience? So that's another thing that's really important there.

Participant: Are you looking for the word "sermonizing?" I cry at Hallmark card ads. While it was a sad, sad tale, this book did not pull on my heartstrings. I think it was the manner of telling. She was preaching at us and saying, "See? See what a mistake this is? See what dangers and piteous situations are caused by this." I agree with it, but she didn't make me feel the pain.

Susan Harris: That's really interesting.

Participant: I think she telegraphed everything that was going to come about two or three pages ahead of time, so you knew, it wasn't any surprise when it finally happened.

Susan Harris: That's right. She does that. Do you know what typology is? Typology, in a general sense, is dividing things into categories, into types. For example, there's all these pine trees out there, but someone who knows about pine trees knows how to divide them into various types. In religious terms, typology is looking at everything that happens in terms of other events. In Christian typology, you can go through, for example, both the Old and the New Testament in terms of the great New Testament story, the story of Jesus. For instance, in Christian typology, Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt to the new promised land, into a kind of salvation, is a type of the Christ leading Christians to salvation. What you all are noticing is that she's telling you what happened before you ever get there. There's not a lot of suspense in this book. It's not a mystery. It's not a whodunit. We know. We know through a lot of the characters because they are characters that are created within an already-known story.

One influential critic named Jane Tompkins talks about Uncle Tom's Cabin in terms of Stowe's design on Christian America to bring people back into the fold. That's why I started talking about Lyman Beecher and the influence of religion in this household. Here we have somebody who is going out into the world and trying to save the world, which is very much what Lyman Beecher's children are supposed to do, to not only be saved yourself, but then to get other people to be saved. What does she use? She uses a cultural story. The story of Jesus' sacrifice, and she uses a narrative that constantly hammers at people, "You have done wrong! You have done wrong! You have to come back. You cannot walk around and just do your own business. You can't pretend you're not conscious of this." And she uses sentiment, tearing at your heartstrings in order to bring you back.

Participant: Speaking as the daughter of a preacher who was very adept at this type of preaching, there's a preacher's rhythm to this, and it's what I call the old "fire and brimstone preacher." He talked very softly so that everybody has to get really close so they can hear, and then he just gets in the pulpit and starts screaming and says, "You're going to hell!" and things like that. He's waiving the Bible. That's the rhythm here. Calm, trying to convince you, and then just hitting you with all the emotion that he can.

Susan Harris: That's right. That's why the last few pages—let's look at them for a minute—are really important. There is a form of sermon that became very prevalent. It's still around, but it's more in politics now than it is in sermons. It's called the "jeremiad," after the Old Testament Book of Jeremiah. Jeremiah was a prophet who went around saying, "Woe. Woe betide this city if you don't get your act together. Everything is going to be destroyed." A jeremiad is a three-part sermon that starts with a biblical text. It focuses on the covenant with God and the need for not only individuals but the whole community to be sanctified, to be saved, to be in the right place spiritually. Sermons in the jeremiad form go through the whole list of sins of the community. They harangue the audience to come back into the fold, putting great stress on the fact that everyone has to be there, that there cannot be national salvation without every individual being within that fold.

What has happened with the jeremiad, which started in the 1630s in the little New England Congregationalist community, is that it became—a scholar named Sacuan Bercovitch wrote some wonderful books about this in the late 1970s—a kind of the national form. Think about the story of American exceptionalism: we are the great democratic nation. It is not only our right but our duty to take American democracy out into the world. This is why we're in Iraq right now. Because we believe we have something nobody else has. We are more sanctified than anybody else in the world. It's the same story. It's just changed from the spiritual into the political. You can hear it especially when elections are coming up and you get all the contenders for the presidential primaries. You listen to them talk about the city on the hill, which is one of the great phrases from Winthrop —actually Winthrop wasn't even a preacher—the sermon on the Arbella. He says, "And we shall be as a city on the hill and the eyes of the world shall be upon us." You hear that phrase today in political speeches and political ideology.

Uncle Tom's Cabin is written in that jeremiad mode. The concluding remarks start, "This is an age of the world when nations were trembling." Rather than having me read it, would you begin and everybody read a paragraph--and read it dramatically.

Take it away, with drama!

Participant: "This is an age of the world when nations are trembling and convulsed. A mighty influence is abroad, surging and heaving the world, as with an earthquake. And is America safe? Every nation that carries in its bosom great and unredressed injustice has in it the elements of this last convulsion.

Participant: "For what is this mighty influence thus rousing in all nations and languages those groanings that cannot be uttered, for man's freedom and equality?

Participant: "O, Church of Christ, read the signs of the times! Is not this power the spirit of Him whose kingdom is yet to come, and whose will to be done on earth as it is in heaven?

Participant: "But who may abide the day of his appearing? 'for that day shall burn as an oven: and he shall appear as a swift witness against those that oppress the hireling in his wages, the widow and the fatherless, and that turn aside the stranger in his right: and he shall break in pieces the oppressor.'"

Participant: "Are not these dread words for a nation bearing in her bosom so mighty an injustice? Christians! every time that you pray that the kingdom of Christ may come, can you forget that prophecy associates, in dread fellowship, the day of vengeance with the year of his redeemed?

Participant: A day of grace is yet held out to us. Both North and South have been guilty before God; and the Christian church has a heavy account to answer. Not by combining together, to protect injustice and cruelty, and making a common capital of sin, is this Union to be saved,—but by repentance, justice and mercy; for, not surer is the eternal law by which the millstone sinks in the ocean, than that stronger law, by which injustice and cruelty shall bring on nations the wrath of Almighty God!"

Susan Harris: Thank you. That's exactly it. This is a classic jeremiad ending. It's calling everyone to come back into the fold, and it's saying that we have to repent. It's a call for repentance and for rectifying. It's not only repenting, but solving the problem in some way.

An interesting element of this book is how Stowe sees solving the problem within that Christian frame. Do you want to speak to that?

Participant: I can't give you the name of the author, but I have read about a biography of Stowe. In that she claimed that she didn't write the book, God did. To me, that underlines the whole Christian viewpoint of it because, if he wrote it, it's got to be through those lines.

Susan Harris: Yes. She felt that she was an amanuensis. She was just an instrument. She was sitting there at the kitchen table with the children all around and the dishes undone, writing this book. Obviously, she wrote the book in a dead heat. She wrote it very much in response to the Fugitive Slave Law and to the politics that were going on at the time. And that's the story she told about it.

Participant: Were there editors who edited manuscripts like there are today when you submit them to a publisher? This doesn't seem like an editor ever touched it.

Because the average fugitive slave was valued at about one thousand dollars. slaveowners sought to track down and recapture the escapees. Under the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, anyone caught harboring a fugitive slave would be sentenced to serve six months in prison and pay a $1,000 fine.

Susan Harris: That makes me wish I were more of a Stowe scholar than I am. I would think that between Gamaliel Bailey, who was the editor of the National Era, where it was published and serialized, and John P. Jewett, who published the first edition, it would have gone through editing. I don't know how much. There were editors, and they not only edited the way they do now, but they edited without asking the author. This is one of the reasons Emily Dickinson did not like to publish. You sent in a poem and it appeared in the paper, and those were not the words that you had written. The editors decided that they were wiser than you. People were very upset about that, but I don't know how much this text was edited. That's a very good question. The power seems to come from the author, but most publications are collaborative efforts, then as now.

Participant: I was amazed this book was written over 150 years ago, and when you turn on Fox TV, there are the same arguments about homosexuality, for instance. Is it a sin? What does the Bible say? Isn't it a sin? We talk in maybe a little different emphasis, but the same kinds of arguments.

Susan Harris: I was just at a conference where I went to various Stowe panels. One of the things somebody remarked on was the prevalence of people saying, "Well, this is the Uncle Tom's Cabin of (fill in the blank)": homosexual rights, environmentalism, protect your pet, whatever it is. It really speaks to the lasting power of the text. It's an incredibly powerful text.

Participant: Why was it so interesting to so many different countries? Was our slavery that interesting to all the nations of the world?

Susan Harris: This was a period when all kinds of slavery were being attacked. There's a wonderful publication from the 1840s and 1850s called The Liberty Bell. It qualifies as a gift book. These were annuals or semi-annuals that were very pretty. People gave them as gifts for Christmas or birthday presents. They included stories, essays, and poetry.

The Liberty Bell was dedicated to freedom all over the world. It's a wonderful document to look at for this period because it includes stories from Russia, France, Germany, Italy, some Asian countries and the Middle Eastern countries, which were not well known at that time. But people were talking—in Russia they were freeing the serfs, in Italy they were, first of all, trying to unify. I'm referring to the Italian Risorgamento, which in part focused on the status of the Italian peasant. England had abolished slavery in 1833. Abolition was the watchword of this period. So here is this huge country, the United States, which already had become very powerful. I've been reading David McCullough's biography of John Adams. I'm reading about the 1770s through 1790s, and Stowe was only 50 years later. Already, this was a huge, powerful country in just that very brief time. It went from being very shaky on its feet, not sure it was going to exist, to power. There were slaves, and there was a lot of controversy over slavery. We were the ones who started talking about it. We were fighting about it. And everyone else on the outside was looking in, as always. We were being very public about it, and this became the place where everybody was looking.

Participant: Didn't the American Indians' situation fit into issues of freedom at that time too?

Susan Harris: The Indian Removal Act was passed in 1830, and that's when the white power structure starting moving the tribes west of the Mississippi.

Participant: Then we had the book Ramona.

Susan Harris: The book Ramona comes later in the century. Helen Hunt Jackson wrote that in the 1880s, but prior to Ramona she had written A Century of Dishonor, which indicted the government for its treatment of the Indians.

Participant: Did she send that to the members of Congress too?

Susan Harris: I don't know.

Participant: We came rather late to the slavery freedom question because the Western Hemisphere started abolishing slavery in 1821, when the Spanish were defeated in a lot of their colonies. We were one of the last countries in the Western Hemisphere to officially abolish slavery. Not only were they looking us to us because we were arguing comically, but they were looking at us as if we were backward children.

Susan Harris: Exactly.

Participant: Susan, could you talk about the politics of the Fugitive Slave Law? When I read about it even now, I think, how could this have happened? But I read this morning's paper and saw what happened in California, so the country doesn't always do sensible things. Another question is, "How did Southern readers react to this book?"

Susan Harris: They hated it! Let me take that one first. The spin-offs from Uncle Tom's Cabin are enormous. You could spend a whole scholarly life looking at everything from popular culture. A student of mine just did a presentation on popular culture responses to Uncle Tom's Cabin from paper dolls through china, plays, and movies. There's an amazing amount of stuff that echoed, reflected, turned upside down, distorted everything about Uncle Tom's Cabin. Southerners said, "You're lying. It's not like that. Every once in a while you get a Simon Legree, but really, mostly it's the Shelbys."

And they wrote—there was a whole bunch of novels that were written in response to it by Southern writers. I think the best known is Caroline Lee Hentz's The Planter's Northern Bride. Caroline Lee Hentz had been in the Semi-Colon Club with Stowe in Cincinnati. They were beginning writers together, but she then moved south and became a defender of slavery. So part of the brouhaha that the book stimulated had to do with the South's absolutely furious response.

Regarding the politics of the Fugitive Slave Law, there you've got me. I am not a historian. One of my students provided us with information from a website on laws that deny human rights and promote containment of African Americans starting in 1619. In reading this, you begin to see how the Fugitive Slave Law could have evolved, that there was restriction after restriction after restriction. In the seventeenth century there were slaves and indentured servants and all kinds of servitude, and they didn't necessarily look that different, and then things began to separate. As indentured servitude declined, slavery became more and more rigid. Americans clung to it and shored it up with laws. And I think the Fugitive Slave Law comes out of the whole stew of laws—the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Missouri Compromise, all of these laws in the 1840s and 1850s that eventually led to the war.

Participant: If you go to the KU Law Library and read the book that has the original Dred Scott decision and the arguments of the Supreme Court judges, the Chief Justice is especially hard to read because you can't imagine anyone thinking the way he did. It's interesting to read it if you can stand to read it. I have a paperback copy of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee that I throw against the wall. Every third paragraph, I throw it against the wall, and that's what I felt like doing when I was reading the Dred Scott decision.

Susan Harris: What is the Chief Justice saying?

Participant: I can't remember details now because it's been 20 years since I've read it, but I remember getting viscerally upset. My stomach started acting up and my chest tightened, and I couldn't imagine anybody thinking the way he did. Actually, it's a lot like my reaction to John Ashcroft.

Susan Harris: Something is happening with me politically as I read these books. I've been very involved in recovering American women writers who disappeared from print in the 1920s. What I've been seeing lately is that there is a clear line from a lot of them, their politics and their religion, to John Ashcroft. What we're seeing is a certain conservative strain in American life, and I'm not talking about the judge in the Dred Scott case. I'm talking about people like Stowe, and I'm talking about people like one of my favorite writers, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, during this period. What they were proposing as the right values for Americans, if you look at it 150 years later, leads to Ashcroft. For me, this is very uncomfortable. Right now, I'm trying to come to terms with this as a scholar, and it's a real problem for me.

Participant: From the very beginning of the country, when they sat down and started to draft the Constitution, the South used the slavery issue and the North used it as a compromise and a bargaining chip. The North always allowed the South to get a leg up on slavery in return for something financial. At the beginning of the Constitution, it was to push through Hamilton's financial plans. The North gave in on the slavery issue. Every time the North wanted something, they gave in on the slavery issue. The Fugitive Slave Act was another case of the North compromising and saying, "Yes, you're upset over this, we'll give you this; in return, you will grant what we need on other issues." It was always used that way until finally it got to the point where compromise was no longer a possibility. It had to be dealt with. The Fugitive Slave Act was just another compromise, as was the Dred Scott decision. It was a compromise with the South in order to get something in return.

Susan Harris: Actually when you think about it, it is still going on. It certainly went on in 1877, when, during a disputed presidential election, the North, in return for the South letting Congress decide for Hays instead of Tilden, took reconstruction out of the South so whites could regain supremacy. It's been happening ever since.

Participant: We still do it today. We use affirmative action as a compromise. Maybe the religious right will want something. We'll give them that; we'll give you this.

Susan Harris: It's a continuing rhythm in American life.

Maryemma Graham: What this masks is the conflict among what I would call the planter class. The Fugitive Slave Act also represents one group of planters winning out over the smaller planters because people are losing slaves. They were, in fact, escaping by the dozens. For a long time there was no law that protected the larger planter class who stood to lose an awful lot when a dozen slaves sneaked away by night. A small farm that had two or three people where everybody's working was not going to be hit as hard as a big farm that had almost an industry going on in its midst. As the slavery issue began to become so intense, people began escaping. That was a struggle inside the South over the small farmers and the big planter class. The planter class imposed these laws because their interests had to be served. The bargaining chip represented that group and not the small farmer.

Susan Harris: So it's big business versus small business.

Maryemma Graham: Absolutely, at that level.

Participant: I think it's interesting to look at the conversation between Mr. and Mrs. Bird in Uncle Tom's Cabin. Mr. Bird reports that he's participated in the legislature, and they had passed a law forbidding getting meat and food and assistance to runaway slaves. Mrs. Bird is appalled. This is his response to her, "But Mary, just listen to me. Your feelings are all quite right here and interesting and I love you for them. But then, dear, we mustn't suffer our feelings to run away with our judgement. You must consider it's not a matter of private feeling, there are great public interests involved. There is such a state of public agitation rising that we must put aside our private feelings." Mr. and Mrs. Bird have a tremendously interesting dichotomy between the two of them.

Susan Harris: What do you make of that? Here we have a woman standing up for the injustice and we have a man standing up for the law.

Participant: Stowe uses the feminine perspective to argue the feelings and the injustices that are caused by slavery. And she uses the masculine as the perpetrator, if you will, of slavery. They're the ones that are moving forward.

Susan Harris: Yes. Something that people talk about a lot in this book is how Stowe makes opposites between men and women. If we think back to some of those things we were flagging earlier, for example, the sentimental and the Christian, here are the women, and Mrs. Shelby is in the same camp. The women are the spokespeople for the heart, the good, the family, the intactness of families. The men are not evil, but they are involved in the public world, and they're involved with law. Another strain that goes right through American thinking and American literature is the question of what are the limits to justified authority? You can see this beginning in the 1750s in sermons, and it leads to the Revolutionary War. Americans were saying, "Yes, England is the justified authority, but they've overstepped their bounds. And we have the right [and very often this is imaged in family terms, fathers and sons during a revolution] we are grown sons and we now have the right to take over our responsibilities and to defy our fathers." This persists in American culture. People saying, on the one hand, "There is law. We are a people of the law. We believe in the law. We live by the law." Other people saying, "No, there is something higher than the law. There is another kind of law." This is a dual strain, and I think that too works in this text. Stowe genders it so that the women are saying that there is something higher than the law.

Participant: With one exception.

Susan Harris: Yes, horrible Marie Sinclair, yes.

Participant: This is a time when men's and women's fears were still very sharply delineated. When men's fear was outside the home, in the public, in the workplace, and women's fear was at home taking care of the family. Stowe does contrast those. She uses those differences that existed and works in her philosophy.

Susan Harris: Think about what she does with it. Where is the good life in this book? If the book has a political future or future, not in theological terms, but for reforming American life, forget slavery. Where does the good life happen? Home and family. What's the place, the location where all the good things of life are in this book?

Participants: In the kitchen.

Susan Harris: Whose kitchen? Rachel Halliday, the lady in Indiana where Eliza and George and the baby end up. There's Rachel Halliday, and she's a sort of Madonna figure. She gets everybody working and cooperating and loving one another. The food is good and the light is pouring in; everything is quiet and everything works. This is Stowe's ideal woman—she gets up in the morning and does all the housework and by afternoon she can read a book on astronomy. And it looks like nobody ever walked through the kitchen, and that's Rachel Halliday's kitchen.

Participant: Did anybody else think that Stowe put herself in the book as Miss Ophelia?

Participant: Miss Ophelia is sort of a segue into where we're going in the next three weeks. To me, Miss Ophelia represents New England, the abolitionists, the presence that then gets transferred to Kansas down the road. I found her one of the most complicated, fleshed-out characters of the whole book. She was fascinating.

Participant: From what I've read about Harriet Beecher Stowe, it seemed to me that there were some similarities.

Susan Harris: There are. I think she's a New England type, there is no question about it. Stowe wrote in other contexts. She wrote New England stories as many people did. New England is created as a region through the stories people write about the peculiar people who live there. That's what regionalism is: writing about the peculiar people in any region—be it Georgia, Kansas, California. And New England was one of the first places. So she knows what her type is and she has made Ophelia one of these types. She shares, in a way, Ophelia's character—a lot of her values.

If you think about kitchens, there's Rachel Halliday's kitchen, there's Dinah's kitchen, there's Ophelia going into Dinah's kitchen and trying to make it Rachel Halliday's kitchen. It's what makes the right environment. It is complicated in that Ophelia is not just a clean, well-ordered, right-thinking woman; she's also a racist, a Northern racist. I think that's one of the really interesting points that Stowe brings up. Northerners may be against slavery, but that doesn't mean they want to live with blacks or touch them. The South is much more tactile.

Participant: You also have to figure in the context of the district of that period. While there may have been an abhorrence of slavery in the North, there was still a substantial number of people, including Lincoln himself, who thought the preferred solution was the retention of the Union, even if it meant tolerating slavery, just to keep it from spreading. Obviously, the Civil War changed all that.

Participant: Part of the Compromise of 1850 was California

Just prior to the Civil War, the Underground Railroad was increasingly active in bringing slaves out of Missouri. "Stations" in Kansas, Iowa, and Illinois moved these former slaves to freedom. This 1844 Chicago Western Citizen advertisement thinly disguised its purpose by announcing the "Liberty Line" with "regular trips" running "during the present season between the borders of the Patriarchal Dominion and Libertyville, Upper Canada."

coming in as a free state. In return for the Compromise of 1850 was the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which ties in to what we were talking about.

Susan Harris: We need to factor the Mexican War of 1848 in here. Suddenly there were a lot of Mexicans who were part of the territorial United States as well. There were all kinds of racial things that were happening that are very, very complicated. I don't think anybody's told the story in all its complexities yet.

Participant: There is a woman buried in Elk Falls in Elk County. I believe her name is Phyllis Caldwell. She was a New Englander who started a school for Negro girls in New England. Her own neighbors, in fact, some of the abolitionist community, reacted so strongly against it that she had to close it. She eventually moved to Kansas with her brother. She's buried in the cemetery at Elk Falls.

Susan Harris: That was not an unusual incident. It happened over and over again in proud, brave, and abolitionist New England. Trying to get a black child into a white school created tensions. White school parents sent money south, thinking they were brave and liberal, but putting a black child in a New England school sometimes caused parents to withdraw their children and created all kinds of hysteria.

Participant: Remember the reaction of people in Lawrence when black people started moving to Lawrence.

Participant: We see Uncle Tom as a kind person in the book, and he's almost like a Christlike figure. How has that changed and why has he been seen as a negative symbol in African American society?

Susan Harris: You're talking about 150 years of evolution. That was the first thing that came up in my class discussion. The students only know Uncle Tom as a really negative image, and here they meet this kindly loving Christ figure. Why are people so negative when they call somebody an Uncle Tom? To track that, you have to examine, among other things, popular culture. For instance, in plays—and I don't know this history very well—plays of Uncle Tom's Cabin started happening right away. There was one in 1852. They were serious replications of the plot. Then people appropriated them and they changed the plot and they did all sorts of things. Then suddenly later in the century appeared minstrels, the Ethiopian delineators. They were white guys in black face who were created incredible stereotypes of black people in this country. They would do little Uncle Tom bits. Suddenly Uncle Tom was this grinning coon.

Later, in the twentieth century, some very powerful black writers came along. James Baldwin for example, in 1949 wrote an essay called "Everybody's Protest Novel." This was before he was well known as a writer or had published his own first novel. He was in France at the time. It is a virulent attack on Uncle Tom's Cabin, and on the sentimentality and Christianity of it. Baldwin too is a P. K., a preacher's kid. There's a book to be written about P. K.s in American literature. Stephen Crane is another one. Baldwin says that Uncle Tom is a creation of a white Christian world that is a travesty and a betrayal of everything that is human about African Americans. Baldwin was influenced by Henry James, a nineteenth-century writer who had very different ideas about what a novel does than Harriet Beecher Stowe. James thought a novel should explore character and demonstrate the humanness of a character.

Stowe doesn't do that. She has characters who are types, and she puts them through their paces because she has a design. She wants to grab you with a story you already know and make you understand that you've done wrong and you have to solve the problem. Baldwin wants her to take a character like Uncle Tom and explore his humanity. That's not her approach. For Baldwin, Uncle Tom becomes an undermining of everything there is about being human and also being black. It's a long history, it's popular culture, it's high culture, it's the evolution of what is an American icon through a whole lot of different stages that brings us to what we know as an Uncle Tom, which is a negative figure. But certainly it's not a negative figure for Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Participant: I'm troubled by the comments you made. I don't know about Catharine Maria Sedgwick, I've never heard of her, but I certainly don't see a line between Harriet Beecher Stowe and John Ashcroft. I think if Harriet Beecher Stowe were alive today, she would be aghast at Guantanamo. She would be aghast at picking up Middle Eastern-looking men and shipping them overseas away from their families without hearings and due process. I just don't see it.

Susan Harris: I was thinking of Ashcroft in terms of things like faith-based charity moves. I'm thinking in terms of the definition of an American as being basically only a Christian, and a protestant Christian at that. I'm thinking about a mindset that defines this country in a very narrow mold. I think she participates in that. In that way I see a very clear continuity between the nineteenth century and right now. For me, it's a scary continuity. I think you're right that she would protest many of the things that are obvious injustices, but it's the grounds on which she would protest them that makes me very nervous. We have these two strains. On the one hand, there's the enlightenment strain in American culture that thinks in terms of reason and tries to figure out what is true and what is good on that basis. On the other hand, there is the evangelical strain, which is trying to understand what American culture is only in terms of a Christian paradigm. It doesn't really move outside that paradigm. In which case, it's justified to take Middle Eastern Muslim men and put them in Guantanamo Bay because they're outside that box.

Participant: John Ashcroft—the justice department—spent thousand dollars draping a nude statue rather than move the podium from which he spoke five feet to the left or five feet to the right, which would have cost nothing.

Susan Harris: Have you ever been to Florence? In the nineteenth century— Florence is full of naked male statues—they put little fig leaves over all the genitals.

Participant: I might have picked up a different line on some of this. The Uncle Tom that I perceive in the book was a very submissive, know-my-place, don't-rock-the-boat type person. And to me, that was the image that a lot of people objected to. That image continued for many, many years. The black race had a problem breaking out of that tradition, of being submissive, and saying, "This is my place, I can't do that, and I'm not going to argue with anybody. I'm going to be like Uncle Tom and just take my medicine and keep quiet."

Susan Harris: Even more than that, sacrifice themselves basically for white people. People point out that Tom was really much more concerned about his white families than about his black families. You're absolutely right. That's a piece that I left out. I thank you for raising it.

Participant: Uncle Tom never rebelled against slavery. He rebelled against being forced to do something that was not consistent with his reading of the Good Book. He was a martyr to Christianity.

Susan Harris: In many ways, it depends on who you are as a reader. What do you bring to the text? He is a martyr, he is a Christ figure, he is a saint. But he is also a black man who is made in a white image. He's a white woman's idea of what the ideal black man should be. Stowe has another black man in this text, George Harris, who's almost white and who's rebellious and angry. What does she do with him? She sends him to Africa, to Liberia.

Participant: She has another wonderful black character, Sam, early in the book. It's because of his shenanigans that Eliza gets away.

Susan Harris: He's a great trickster.

Maryemma Graham: Nothing is more interesting than the revisions and reversals of Uncle Tom because yet one more evolution occurred by the 1970s-1980s. There was a reclaiming of Uncle Tom as a great trickster figure, a person who in the guise of submission and acceptance and absolutely against rebellion was in fact extremely skilled. He was a skillful manipulator of a system that he understood very well. So there's been a continuing discussion of who, in fact, was Uncle Tom. He became an iconic figure; he was then rejected; then he was re-thought as a new way of looking at what happened in slavery and how survival strategies operated among people. Uncle Tom is a classic example of this great survivor. So he's continued to evolve.

Participant: When I was about half-way through Uncle Tom's Cabin, I thought that Harriet Beecher Stowe's primary motive was to generate a strong feeling against slavery and an uprising to abolish slavery. But by the time I got to the end of the book, I revised what I thought her primary motive was. I thought she was using slavery as a technique for evangelizing Christians. Do you have an opinion on this?

Susan Harris: I agree with you. This is part of my problem with the book. I don't know how many times I've read it. Not only does one bring whatever one's position is to the text, readings of a text are different over time. The Uncle Tom's Cabin that I read 20 years ago is not the Uncle Tom's Cabin I read today because I've changed and my world has changed. My reading right now is very much the same as your reading. That's why I'm uncomfortable with it. As a text, I think it's incredibly powerful. I still do cry and I resist it all the way. So I find it very difficult to read this text these days. I'm very glad to have finished it. We're now on to Moby Dick in my class. But to have that struggle with the text is an incredibly healthy thing. Airing that kind of a struggle in a group like this is what it's really all about. How does what we read fall in with various value systems? What is a book trying to move us to do? Who are we as we respond to it? What are we going to do? These are wonderful questions to bring up.

Participant: There are at least a couple of Southerners in this group. When did you first read this book? I presume you may have read it, for example, as a junior in high school, in an American literature course or in college. How is it to read this book in that environment when you're growing up?

Participant: I did not read this book until I was in college. I didn't read it as a child. I read it for a philosophy class. Besides the obvious moral issues—there is a moral issue raised on every page in this book—and that was more than characterization or characters representing certain things. It was assigned to me to read as a moral treatise by my Jewish professor, so Christianity was important in his discussion and all the different moral issues that Stowe deals with throughout the book.

Susan Harris: That sounds like a wonderful way to use this book.

Participant: But it is odd to come to it so late. By the time I read this book, I read it in a scholarly atmosphere, and there simply wasn't any issue of history because I was reading it in the ivory tower of the university setting. There weren't too many rednecks sitting around saying what a bunch of bull that is.

Susan Harris: It is a very rarified experience to read the text in the university classroom. That's absolutely right.

Maryemma Graham: That's really interesting because I did read the book when I was younger and growing up in a very segregated South. I encountered the term "Uncle Tom" as a child, and I wanted to know what it meant. I was in a family of readers so my father said, "Here. Read this book. This is where it comes from." So he imposed, much to my mother's chagrin, this book on me. Some of you have met my mother. She's a very quiet submissive lady, but don't let her get angry. I was told to read the book, so I could understand the origin of Uncle Tom. That was my introduction to the book. This was the turbulent 1960s when I was growing up, so I was hearing that phrase, people being called Uncle Tom. This was before the reiteration of Uncle Tom in the new evolution that I just described. I read it in that context and then read it again as an adult and as a scholarly read. Therefore, I have always been interested in this notion of Uncle Tom. Another thing I remember very distinctly is the film Imitation of Life, because I had to go see it in a theater balcony. At that point we weren't going to movies at all, but my mother loved the movies. So she took me with her and vowed me to secrecy not to tell anybody in the community, especially my father, that she had sat upstairs in a theater to watch Imitation of Life. So I remember these images. We were given money to go see Gone with the Wind when I was in sixth or seventh grade. Every single year, in the whole town, kids from the public schools got to see Gone with the Wind. So I grew up with images like that. I was always curious about what they were. I had Uncle Tom in my head for a long time as I began to hear the revision of the concept of Uncle Tom. I don't know if that's a common experience, but I did read it very early.

Participant: That's a great question because I think, like Eva, all children want to know these stories. This book should be read by young people. They should have to think about that black tree and how it got black and what went on in that room. It made Eva ill, but she had to hear those stories. I wish I'd read it as a child and carried it with me all that time as you carried the images.

Participant: I wonder if it can be used in very different kinds of ways.

Maryemma Graham: Depending on those earlier readings. Might you read this book and see it as an apology for slavery? I'm curious about the different reads one might give to this book because this has a very interesting history.

Participant: Evangelism overwhelmed so much of the story that it was hard to even keep it focused on the slavery issue. It kept saying, so what if we suffer in this life, we're going to die and we're all going to heaven. That part was distracting from the slavery issue.

Susan Harris: Have any of you read Toni Morrison's introduction to Huckleberry Finn?

Participants: No.

Susan Harris: Some years ago a scholar named Shelley Fisher Fishkin published with Oxford University Press a wonderful series of facsimiles of Twain's major novels, and she enlisted a famous writer to write the introduction to each one. Then she invited scholars to write the afterwards. People bought them, of course, for the famous writers writing the introductions. She invited Toni Morrison to write an introduction to Huckleberry Finn. Morrison talks about reading it in school when she's a child and how she felt about it and how she kept coming back to it almost obsessively through adolescence and then in adulthood and how each reading is different and how she learned to process it being black, American, and a writer. Her writerliness is very much at the core of what she's saying in the essay and the way she's reading the book. It's a very interesting from-childhood-to-adulthood reader response to this particular text by a very smart person.

Participant: It's interesting to think about how the founders of Lawrence may have used this book.

Susan Harris: Does anybody know anything about that?

Participant: What would Richard Cordley have said?

Participant: I think I've read everything Cordley wrote and he makes no reference to it. He came to Lawrence in 1857, five years after it was written. It's difficult to believe that he hadn't read it, but then there're no records.

Participant: I know Francis Snow grew up with an image in his head of the train in the basement because his family served on the Underground Railroad. He had that image as a child.

Participant: Francis Snow was really important in early Lawrence, and he came from these people who founded Lawrence.

Participant: He was one of the first chancellors, one of the first three faculty members.

Participant: John Brown was here quite a bit in Lawrence in 1855 and 1856. When he left Boston in 1857 after a fundraising tour that didn't garner any money for him for the fight on Kansas, he wrote a scathing letter about old Brown's farewell to Bunker Hill and Uncle Tom's Cabin. It was a scathing review of the Boston literati.

Susan Harris: Do you know that he was a student of Lyman Beecher's and that in many ways his activism came from Beecher 's preaching?

Participant: Maryemma said the book was an apology for Christian attitudes towards slavery. Recently, a politician was quoted in the newspaper as saying that some forms of slavery were justified because—he used his Christian background as an explanation of why slavery wasn't always bad—it existed in the Bible. Therefore, it couldn't be wrong.

Participant: This is 2003 and people are still doing it.

Participant: I have a question on a specific subject in the book: the subject of literacy. Until I read this book, it was always my impression that it was forbidden to teach a slave to read. Yet, we have several slaves who do, even Uncle Tom, who although he struggles mightily, does read. But little Eva doesn't seem to have any education at all. She knows how to read, but she has real trouble writing, and her father doesn't seem to care about her education. What's going on here?

Susan Harris: Several things. Little Eva is the sinless child. It's a figure in nineteenth-century literature. These are children who are born to save us and die and go to heaven. The death of little Nell in Dickens is another one. They're all over the place, especially in quasi-religious and sentimental literature. That's why she doesn't need a tutor. I think there is a tutor in the background because that whole episode takes place over several years. In the beginning, Eva can't read or write any better than Tom. Later, she is reading and writing. The second or third time that you read this book, you begin to pick up on details like that. George Shelby, for instance, is in school all the time. How often a slave learns to read, whether or not you could teach a slave to read, had a lot to do with what time we're talking about and what state we're in.

Maryemma Graham: The laws against slavery came in periodic waves. There were laws that prevented slaves from reading. But slaves were frequently, by stealth, learning how to read and taught each other how to read. Stowe pointed out that this horrible system did, in fact, have loopholes through which people could move. Those laws on the books weren't necessarily applied nor were they applied evenly. Although it made a strong case in the abolitionist movement, many slaves could read. They did not let on that they could read. That's more important. But they could.

Participant: Was Kentucky one of the states that seceded from the union?

Participant: It's a border state.

Participant: It had a lot more people in the army of the North than in the Southern army.

Susan Harris: I'm from a border state— Maryland —and I know border states were always torn. It was brother against brother, but I don't know the history of Kentucky.

Participant: It didn't formally secede.

Participant: George Harris yearned for an African nationality. What is this about?

Susan Harris: This is one of the places where Stowe was slammed. Colonization was a big movement during this period. Everybody's got a different stance on it. The biggest contemporary criticism against this book came from what she did to the Harrises. Here is an articulate, literate guy who could run IBM, and she gets him out. That happens a lot in literature with people of color. The Indians, not only the Indian Removal Act, but in a lot of novels the Indians are dead and dying, whereas in fact, there were Indians saying, "Hey, we're here, I'm alive. I'm well, I've got a tribe here." In poetry and fiction they're all dead and dying. It's a way of getting people out. The colonization society was very large, very powerful, divided in terms of people who were for it, people who were against it, people who actually went to Africa, and people who refused to go.

Stowe is slammed by Martin R. Delany, who was a radical black writer of the time, for that aspect as well as her portraiture of black people generally when Uncle Tom's Cabin was published. But the situation, the criticism, is complicated because people like Delaney were also trying to find, in the Western Hemisphere, a place for free blacks to go to create their own society. He looked in Central and South America. So it's a really complicated question. One of the things you can see with Stowe's discomfort with race—this is where Stowe is like Ophelia—is when somebody is not submissive, what do you do with them? How do you integrate them into American society? Stowe's answer is, "You don't!" You send them back to Africa. Let them missionize the Africans, and leave us with this nice, pure white society. So it's a very dicey question. I'm glad you brought it up.

Participant: Ophelia talks about taking Topsy up to New England with her.

Participant: Topsy's going to go back to Africa by the time the book is over.

Maryemma Graham: Uncle Tom was the one we talked about, and I grew up with images of Topsy. And that's the one that jumps out for me. That was used an awful lot. If you weren't dressed properly, you looked like Topsy. If you didn't have your hair pressed back in those days, you looked like Topsy. So, Topsy was a figure we often dressed against.

Susan Harris: There's Topsy, who's an out-and-out rebel. She's from way left field. And then there are figures like Rosa, who is a back-talking servant. Is there a history of black female characters who talk back? In the male history, it's pretty evident. But I don't know if anybody has written about the female history.

Maryemma Graham: It became a popular image through film. That's Hattie McDaniel, who's the sassy, hands-on-the-hip figure. It's usually the cook who emerges as the figure with a certain amount of power and control. I don't think there's a lot written about it, but it does emerge in popular culture.

Susan Harris: There's a difference between the Dinah figure, who's a cook figure, a mammy figure, and the figure I'm thinking about, the Topsy, the Rosa. These are younger; they're not fat, they're not mother figures. They don't take care of me.

Maryemma Graham: That's one of the reasons Their Eyes were Watching God is very popular because a young, single woman with her own voice emerges in that novel. And we don't have a lot before that. That's what singles that out. But I think you're right. There's not a prominent display of that particular figure. The cook figure is the one that makes it into television.

Susan Harris: The cook figure is the one that's manageable, but this other one is an unmanageable figure. It's not a trickster figure. And it's female.

Participant: Harriet Beecher Stowe mostly uses types that are unchanging. But she has a few characters that really do change and develop. Topsy is one. Ophelia is another.

Participant: St. Clare?

Participant: St. Clare is a little too passive. Unfortunately, he doesn't do what he's supposed to do. I want to give her credit for creating some very vivid characters. And, of course, the insufferable Maria is such a wonderful type.

Susan Harris: Someone else recently said they loved her for her type; she's such an awful character.

Participant: The way that Ophelia and August deal with her is so interesting. I think Stowe was a wonderful psychologist.

Susan Harris: This was much better than staying home and preparing class. Thank you.

Credits
Illustration of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Liberty Line Railroad announcement, and fugitive slave reward announcement: used with permission of the Kansas State Historical Society, copy and reuse restrictions apply.

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