Читать книгу The Art of Democracy - Jim Cullen - Страница 19

The boardinghouse was shopworn and oppressive, and Ruth Hall was faint with hunger. Ever since her husband had died the previous winter, leaving her with two daughters to raise, her financial straits had become increasingly desperate. There were no jobs for schoolteachers, sewing did not pay enough to support the children, and there were no other leads. Time and hope were running out.

SARA WILLIS PARTON, C. 1868

Hall’s family was of little help—in fact, it was downright hostile. Since her mother’s death, Ruth’s father only reluctantly gave her a pittance and urged her to give up the children. Her in-laws, who had never liked her when their son was alive, now schemed to gain custody of the girls. And former friends avoided her. When she finally turned to writing for newspapers and sought help from her brother, a prominent editor, he told her she lacked talent and should “seek some unobtrusive employment.” Working women, it seemed, should be neither seen nor heard.

Ruth Hall was a fictional character. But her creator—Sara Willis Parton, a.k.a. Fanny Fern—was not. In many important ways, Ruth Hall’s story was Fanny Fern’s story, and Fanny Fern’s story, one of the best known and most controversial of the mid-nineteenth century, opens a window on some of the less visible aspects of women’s lives in the Victorian era.

The life of the future novelist and columnist began in relative privilege. Grata (soon changed to Sara) Payson was born in Portland, Maine, in 1811, the daughter of an anti-Federalist newspaper editor who relocated the family to Boston when Sara was a child. Given a nickname of “Sal Volatile,” she impressed her classmates at Catherine Beecher’s seminary in Hartford, Connecticut, and after graduating wrote pieces for the Youth’s Companion, a magazine founded by her father. In 1837, she married a well-to-do banker, and over the next seven years bore three daughters.

Then things began to fall apart. Her mother, eldest daughter, and husband died between 1844 and 1846, leaving her with unsympathetic relatives and without a means of supporting herself and her two remaining children. She turned to teaching and sewing, but neither earned her enough to support her family, and she was forced to relinquish one daughter to her in-laws. In 1849, she reluctantly entered a marriage of convenience to a Boston widower, but when he enlisted his children to spy on her, she left him and moved to a hotel (he then left town to avoid supporting her, and subsequently divorced her for desertion).

Widow, divorcee, and single mother, Sara was again left to her own resources, now more than ever a pariah to her relatives. In 1851, she turned to writing and succeeded in selling pieces to small Boston newspapers, adopting the pen name “Fanny Fern” (a joke on the florid style of women writers popular at the time). But when she asked one of her two brothers, poet Nathaniel P. Willis, editor of the New York Home Journal, to publish her work, he refused. Her brother’s assistant, James Parton, then printed them without her brothers knowledge. When Willis found out, he demanded Parton stop; Parton tried to persuade Willis of the worth of his sisters work, but when he failed, he resigned. Eleven years Fern’s junior, he became her third and final husband in 1856. She kept her pen name, however, and the two signed a prenuputial agreement to protect her assets for her children.

Meanwhile, Fern had an easier time with her other brother, Richard Willis, editor of the New York Musical World and Times. Its publisher, Oliver Dyer, sought Fern’s services for his paper, unaware that she was related to his employee. Richard Willis was not as implacable as his brother, and cooperated when Dyer hired her to write a weekly piece on the issues of the day. As such, she became the first woman in the United States to work as a professional columnist.

Fanny Fern’s columns, which covered a wide variety of topics, many of them personal, were pirated and reprinted in newspapers and magazines around the country; soon, she had a national reputation. Her writing had a humorous, ironic, and sometimes sarcastic edge that was considered unusual for a woman writer. In fact, there was speculation about whether she was a woman at all. While not generally considered a women’s rights activist, she consistently argued that women must seek to provide for themselves financially, develop their creative talents, and take, rather than ask for, the same rights men enjoyed in marriage. “You see, you had no ‘call,’ Mrs. Tom Cabin, to drop your babies and darning-needle to immortalize your name,” Fanny Fern wrote of Harriet Beecher Stowe amid the clamor surrounding Uncle Tom’s Cabin. “Well, I hope your shoulders are broad enough and strong enough to bear all the abuse your presumption will call down upon you.”

In 1853, an upstate New York publisher collected a series of Fern’s columns into a collection called Fern Leaves from Fanny’s Portfolio, which became an instant bestseller. A second Fern Leaves appeared the next year, as well as a book for children, Little Ferns for Fanny’s Little Friends. The three books together sold over 130,000 copies in the United States and almost 50,000 abroad, finally giving her financial security.

Fern was now able to write Ruth Hall: A Domestic Tale of the Present Time. The novel, based closely on the events of Fern’s life, appeared at the end of 1854. She assumed no one would know her true identity, but a former employer who saw himself unfavorably portrayed in the book let the cat out of the bag. This created an immediate sensation, and readers scooped up the novel, especially because of Fern’s portrayal of Hyacinth Ellet, a pretentious fop who was clearly modeled on her brother Nathaniel. While some revelled in the controversy, others were appalled, for revealing reasons: “If Fanny Fern were a man, a man who believed that the gratification of revenge were a proper occupation for one who has been abused, and that those who have injured us are fair game, Ruth Hall would be a natural and excusable book,” wrote a reviewer for the New York Times in December 1854. “But we confess that we cannot understand how a delicate, suffering woman can hunt down even her persecutors so remorselessly. We cannot think so highly of [such] an author’s womanly gentleness.”

Yet it was also clear that whatever they may have thought about the writer and the publicity surrounding her, there were those who found Ruth Hall a compelling piece of work. Nathaniel Hawthorne, who had little patience for the “d-d female scribblers” who were so popular in the 1850s, held the novel in high regard. “The woman writes as if the devil was in her; and that is the only condition under which a woman ever writes anything worth reading,” he wrote his publisher. “Can you tell me anything about this Fanny Fern?” he concluded at the end of his letter. “If you meet her, I wish you would let her know how much I admire her.”

Fern followed Ruth Hall with Rose Clark (1856), a novel loosely based on her second marriage. But her primary occupation remained that of newspaperwoman. In 1855, Robert Bonner of the New York Ledger, the fabulously successful story paper, sought her services for a weekly column, offering the princely sum of $25 a week. When she declined, he doubled the figure. When she declined again, he raised his offer to $75. She finally agreed to do it for $100, making her the most highly paid newspaper writer of her time. She wrote the column without fail for the next sixteen years, a champion of everything from women’s suffrage to the poetry of Walt Whitman (though a financial dispute would poison her relationship with the poet). Her last piece appeared two days after her death in 1872.

Fanny Fern was an American original. At a time that saw a celebration of the working man, she lived and described the travails of the working woman. At a time that embraced the myth of the happy family, she frankly depicted the power struggles and conflicts that lay at the heart of domestic life. And at a time of often rigid gender roles, she expanded the scope of what it was possible for women to do. “I cherish the hope,” she wrote in the preface to Ruth Hall, “that, somewhere in the land, it may fan into a flame, in some tried heart, the fading embers of hope, well-nigh extinguished by wintry fortune and summer friends.” In art as in life, Fanny Fern achieved that goal for many American women.

While the appeal of dime fiction was broad, it seems to have been produced with an eye toward a white working-class clientele. The stories were typically written in a mode of artisan radicalism, whereby good-natured, diligent workers were preyed on by feckless, hypocritical, and exploitative owners. Good triumphs over evil, often either with the help of poor heroines who turn out to be wealthy heiresses or through the foiling of dastardly plots that are revealed in the nick of time. The class accents in dime novels invoked the ideological energy and moral outrage that animated reform literature: they claimed to perform a social mission even as they diverted and entertained.⁶¹

One of the most interesting of the dime novelists was George Lippard. A Philadelphia newspaper writer who turned to fiction, Lippard wrote a number of historical novels before his most famous work, The Quaker City, or the Monks of Monk Hall (1844). A lurid expose of aristocratic lechery and corruption, Quaker City tells the story of an upright young woman tricked into marriage by a rake. He takes his bride to an old mansion called Monk Hall, where members of an evil fraternity carry on all kinds of perversions. In the end, virtue emerges victorious, but not before the reader can voyeuristically observe the villains gloating over the “snowy globes” and “voluptuous limbs” of their victims. Lippard’s class-conscious stories were laced with such erotic overtones.⁶²

Lippard was not alone. The stereotypical image of the Victorian American is that of a comically uptight prude who cannot tolerate even a hint of sexuality. In fact, however, pornographic popular fiction was avidly consumed by dime-novel readers. (Of course, prudery and lechery can be seen as two sides of the same sexual coin, but at the very least, the prevailing view does not suggest the dynamic element of Victorian sexual tensions.) One of the most popular erotic writers was George Thompson, author of works with titillating titles like The Gay Girls of New York and Fanny Greeley: or, Confessions of a Free Love Sister (both 1853). In these novels, as in such other works as George Foster’s New York by Gaslight (1850) and Ned Buntline’s The G’hals of New York (1850), homosexuality, group sex, child pornography, and sadomasochism were vividly evoked or openly described. Much of this writing catered to male fantasies, although it should be noted that Thompson and Lippard also depicted women with strong sexual drives, which made their work more textured, even if such characters can also be seen as a form of male fantasy. Many of these writers defended their work on the grounds that they were reformers trying to root out moral corruption. But like the reformers from whom they borrowed their rhetoric and imagery—the most ardent Washingtonians were those most likely to lapse back into drinking—they protested too much.⁶³

Cheap fiction was not solely for, by, or about men. One of the most prolific and beloved novelists of the mid-nineteenth century was E.D.E.N. South-worth, the so-called queen of American novelists, who overcame early poverty to become an enormously successful writer for Bonner’s Ledger. Southworth’s serialized novels, later published in book form, featured strong heroines who performed daring exploits, sometimes by disguising themselves as men. For instance, in The Hidden Hand (1859), Southworth’s most popular novel, her protagonist Capitola dons the garb of a newsboy to support herself and evade grasping men. How He Won Her (1868; originally serialized as Britomarte, or The Man-Hater), features a woman who cross-dresses as a Union soldier in order to fight alongside her lover in the Civil War and then rises through the ranks on the strength of her bravery under fire. Southworth’s protagonists often settled down to conventional marriages, but not before they provided both escapism and imaginative possibilities for male and female factory workers caught in the grip of increasingly grim industrial conditions. After the Civil War, these conditions themselves became the topics of dime-novel fiction.⁶⁴

Southworth is an important figure in antebellum literary history because her audience overlapped with that of the so-called “sentimental novelists” (as they were then known), or “domestic novelists” or “literary domestics” (as they are now known), who occupied a prominent place on the cultural landscape. These writers had a largely middle-class orientation, but their writing affected the racial and gender dynamics of the period and therefore bear examination. To do so, however, it is necessary to place them in the context of the standard literary history of the period.

As noted at the end of Chapter 1, fiction in the United States was poised for takeoff in the early nineteenth century. New forms of production and distribution, a rapidly growing population, and a rising literacy rate created large new audiences for novels and new ways for authors to provide these novels.

It should be noted, however, that there was not necessarily a direct connection between a growing number of books and a growing number of readers; nor did a national print culture evolve in a straightforward way. In the Northeast, for example, the coming of the railroads brought about a centralization of the publishing industry, which increasingly focused on New York; but in the Midwest, where the literary infrastructure was less developed, publishing became decentralized. This meant, for instance, that a novel needed to sell far fewer copies in the less-literate South to have a major regional (or even national) impact than in the North. It also meant that a novel with a large number of Northern readers would be perceived as national even when it was regional.⁶⁵

Nationally, British novelists remained popular throughout the century. Charles Dickens was probably the most widely read, but Sir Walter Scott’s medieval romances were embraced, especially among well-to-do Southern whites who fancied their plantations as latter-day Camelots. Indeed, Scott spawned a host of imitators dedicated to portraying the beneficence of the slave system, and in the process helped found the myth of the “happy darky” that would persist straight through to Gone with the Wind a century later. Mark Twain would later dub this tendency “Sir Walter’s Disease.”⁶⁶

Beginning in about 1820, a growing number of writers were able to make a living from their art. One of the most important was Washington Irving. Irving began his career as a New York humorist, part of a circle of writers known as the “Knickerbocker Group,” a name that evoked the city’s Dutch origins. He became famous on the strength of The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819-20), a collection of essays and stories that included his classic tales “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” The former, about a man who falls asleep for twenty years, and the latter, a Gothic horror story, were both based on German sources but evince characteristically American preoccupations with country bumpkins, the decline of the republic, and the supernatural. Together with Brown, Irving paved the way for Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe. Poe, often cited as the first mystery writer, was also known for his horror tales and the supernatural: his long poem “The Raven” (1845) won him critical as well as commercial success. Poe was moody and probably mentally ill, and his melodramatic life and premature death made him something of a celebrity.⁶⁷

The other writer who received much attention, in this period and ever since, was James Fenimore Cooper. Cooper first came to prominence with The Spy (1821), a novel about the American Revolution. But he was best known for what came to be called his “Leatherstocking” tales, a series of novels about an eighteenth-century frontiersman that included The Last of the Mohicans (1826), The Prairie (1827), and The Deerslayer (1841). Much of Cooper’s work focused on relations with Indians, especially Leatherstocking’s loyal sidekick Chingachgook, and were written in the tragic mode characteristic of such dramas as Metamora. However, his Indians were relatively textured: good and evil, resilient and vulnerable, they were handled with more sympathy than were the urban and poor whites whom he regarded with increasing condescension and contempt. Nominally a Democrat, by the end of his life Cooper was an avowed elitist.⁶⁸

The most popular work about Native Americans, however, was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Hiawatha,” a long epic poem that peddled the usual stereotypes. Longfellow was considered a literary giant in his time, although his stock has dropped sharply ever since. By and large, however, formal poetry was not a major form of popular culture for working people, although comic verse was a fixture of the performing arts. But Walt Whitman, a Brooklyn journalist and author of the temperance novel Franklin Evans (1842), synthesized a number of strands of antebellum vernacular language into Leaves of Grass (1855), one of the great artistic expressions of democratic sensibility in the nineteenth century. Leaves of Grass went through numerous revisions before the final edition of 1892, by which time Whitman had become an American icon.⁶⁹

For most of the twentieth century, writers like Irving, Cooper, Longfellow, and Whitman (as well as Emerson, Melville, Hawthorne, and a handful of others) were the focus of historians and critics of the literary culture of the nineteenth century. Dime novels were either ignored or treated as the dross these authors had struggled to rise above, rather than as an important source of rhetorical and thematic inspiration. And perhaps the most scorned were the women writers, even though they dominated the literary scene and wrote the most popular works. In 1855, Nathaniel Hawthorne complained to his publisher that “America is now wholly given over to a d-d mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is preoccupied with their trash—and should be ashamed of myself if I did.” Almost a century later, literary historian Frank Luther Mott asserted that it was difficult for a “modern reader to find qualities in these novels sufficient to account for their great popularity.” Only since the 1970s has this work been sympathetically reassessed by women’s historians and literary scholars.⁷⁰

Women’s literary culture was grounded not only in novels, but in a number of magazines that catered to specifically middle-class interests, notably Godey’s Ladies Book, founded in the 1820s under the editorship of Sara Josepha Hale, and Peterson’s Lady’s Magazine, which began in the 1840s. Women readers were also an important constituency for Harper’s and The Atlantic, both begun in the 1850s. (Harper’s, a monthly, should not be confused with Harper’s Weekly, a more broadly based publication with a newspaper flavor. Its illustrations and dispatches were particularly prized during the Civil War.⁷¹) In addition to poetry and nonfiction, these periodicals published stories and serialized novels, launching the careers of Ann S. Stephens, Rebecca Harding Davis, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps.

These women came of age at a time of reconfigured gender relations. The ideal of Republican Motherhood that had circulated during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had gradually evolved into what historians have called “separate sphere ideology.” This construct was more class-bound than Republican Motherhood because it was predicated on the formation of a proto-managerial class of men who could earn enough for their wives to raise children without engaging in wage-earning labor. For those who subscribed to separate spheres, life was divided into the aggressive, dynamic world of work (the male sphere) and the placid, nurturing world of home (the female sphere). After a day in the industrial jungle, a man would return to his pastoral refuge, where the woman spent her time raising children—who, unlike their working-class counterparts, would never work in factories.

“Separate spheres” can be a misleading phrase. Although it was widely used and understood by nineteenth-century women, the separate spheres were far more an ideal than a reality. One intriguing hint of this emerges from the circulation statistics of an elite private lending library, which showed no major distinction between the kinds of novels read by men and women.⁷² On the other hand, the prevalence of the phrase gave it a kind of reality. One consequence of the growing acceptance of separate sphere ideology was a “feminization” of print culture, as women began to play a discernibly greater role in teaching, reading, and writing books.

The fiction that described this culture and reflected its values, from Hale’s Northwood (1827) through Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World (1850), has been classified by scholars under the rubric of the “domestic novel.” Domestic novels have been criticized as sickly sweet, hidebound in their conservatism, and boring—The Wide, Wide World, stuffed with the bromides Warner acquired as a colporteur for the American Tract Society, daunts even the most committed reader of nineteenth-century women’s fiction—but such a view overlooks some significant aspects of this writing. First, these books represent a notable departure from the seduction-and-abandonment tales of the late eighteenth century. Like the works of Richardson and Rowson, domestic novels place women front and center, but their protagonists are not victims but resilient people who triumph over all kinds of adversity. The heroines of Maria Cummins’s The Lamplighter (1854) and Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall (1855) demonstrate a wiliness, and even sauciness, that stretched the boundaries of Victorian propriety.⁷³

Indeed, a vein of subversion runs through many domestic novels. The morally powerful and assertive women who inhabit their pages were an oblique commentary on the decline of male religious authority at a time when the immoral reformer was an archetype in the sensational and reform literature.⁷⁴ And while separate spheres was a confining model of behavior, some women used it to argue for their responsibility to speak out on public issues, especially temperance and slavery, that affected their lives at home.

In fact, after a certain point the very phrase “domestic fiction” becomes inaccurate, for women writers—who in any case transgressed spheres by writing books—depicted characters who strayed far from hearth and home. Rebecca Harding Davis anticipated the rise of literary realism with her grim look at women’s labor in Life in the Iron Mills (1861), first published in The Atlantic. Racial issues were also explored. Lydia Maria Child, a member of Washington Irving’s Knickerbocker circle, won renown for Hobomok (1824), a novel about a (temporary) interracial romance between a white woman and an Indian chief. Catherine Sedgewick also explored red-white romance in Hope Leslie (1827), a novel that depicts a spirited black woman who rescues a white man being held captive by Indians and defeats the attacker who tries to stop her. Such feats—like Harriet Tubman’s celebrated real-life rescues of slaves during the Civil War—may have been considered permissible because black women were not really “ladies” anyway. But relative to the often vicious stereotypes depicted on the stage, such characters were a step in a more liberal direction.⁷⁵

By the 1830s, a number of domestic novelists were being drawn into the growing abolitionist movement. Child was active as a journalist throughout this period, an involvement that culminated, in the aftermath of John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry in 1859, in the publication of an exchange of letters about the raid with the governor of Virginia.⁷⁶ She also explored black-white interracial relationships in her later fiction, notably Waiting for the Verdict (1867).

Both male and female abolitionists were influenced by the black writers who began to surface before the Civil War. The foundation for this African-American literary culture was the slave narrative. The first of these stories appeared in 1701, when Judge Samuel Sewall of Boston published the anonymous The Selling of Joseph, a description of the horrors of the slave trade and a call for the end of the institution. Beginning in the 1830s, the slave narrative grew in visibility as the abolitionist movement gained new momentum and as attention became focused on the problem of the slaveholder. The most famous work of this type was the Narrative of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself (1845), which was revised and expanded during Douglass’s long and eventful life. Recent scholars have focused on Harriet Jacobs’s autobiographical Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), which was edited by Child. Slave narratives, which were based on fact but necessarily rooted in unverifiable memory, were the forerunners of the first novels written by African Americans: William Wells Brown’s Clotel (1853) and Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig (1859). Both challenged the optimistic endings of domestic fiction and also took Northerners to task for the racism they considered a Southern problem.

While New England abolitionists showed the most interest in reading books about African Americans (and writing them on their behalf), these books reached other audiences as well. A magazine writer in the 1850s lamented that “the whole literary atmosphere has become tainted” with “literary nigritudes.”⁷⁷ Perhaps even more striking, the hugely successful dime novel firm of Beadle and Adams, which published books for the soldiers at the front in the Civil War, published Metta Victor’s Maum Guinea and her Plantation “Children”; or Holiday Week on a Louisiana Estate (1861), a novel that clearly was influenced by slave narratives.⁷⁸

Whatever the interest in these works, none compared in impact with Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which was serialized in the abolitionist newspaper The National Era in 1851 and published in book form in 1852. The daughter, sister, and husband of clergymen (her brother Henry Ward Beecher would be ridiculed as the stereotypical immoral churchman after a marital scandal in the 1870s), Stowe was deeply immersed in the religious culture of the early nineteenth century and was a professional writer who struggled to support her husband and raise their children. Uncle Tom’s Cabin distilled into one potent whole the swirling currents of gender and racial politics, the moral fervor of reform literature, and the graphic realism of slave narratives.⁷⁹

Uncle Tom’s Cabin gave U.S. culture a series of characters—some would say stereotypes—that became household names over the following century: Little Eva, the angelic child whose death scene was the ultimate tearjerker; Simon Legree, the slavetrader whose very name became a virtual synonym for calculating, heartless evil; Augustus St. Clare, the ineffectual intellectual who recognizes that slavery is wrong but fails to do anything about it until it is too late; and the stoic Uncle Tom, whose utter sinlessness is meant to stand as a rebuke to the slave system and as a statement that black people deserved freedom. By the twentieth century, “Uncle Tom” had taken on thoroughly pejorative connotations for blacks, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin was more generally seen as typifying the worst sentimental excesses of nineteenth-century women’s fiction. In its own day, however, it was a powerful polemic of moral rigor and political significance. One African-American critic, comparing Stowe favorably to Alice Walker, recently noted that “Stowe pleads just as strenuously and far more effectively for the humanity and protection of women and children and for the assertion of the values of home against the values of the marketplace that have dehumanized and debased all human relationships.” Far from being a dreamy idealist, “Stowe knows that conversions like the one experienced by St. Clare are rare; most people who participate in a comfortable social order will not change until they are forced to.” Abraham Lincoln was joking—but only half joking—when, on meeting Stowe at the height of the Civil War, he greeted her by saying, “So you’re the little woman who made this great war.”⁸⁰

It would be hard to overstate the effect that Uncle Tom’s Cabin had on U.S. culture. The book sold 3,000 copies on the first day it was published, over 300,000 within a year, and half a million by the time of the panic of 1857—not counting pirated editions. By 1861, it had become the most popular novel ever written by an American, and a tremendous international success as well. Yet such numbers can only begin to suggest its reach. Perhaps more revealing is the fury it provoked in the South, where it was widely banned. By the standards of what followed, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a moderate document, at least as harsh on the North as it was on the South and notable in that the evil Simon Legree was a Northerner while the slave-owning St. Clare was portrayed somewhat sympathetically. Nevertheless, the power of Stowe’s moral indictment was unmistakable, as was her point of view. The novel was rebutted in a flurry of “Anti-Tom” novels, such as Aunt Phyllis’s Cabin; or Southern Life as It Is (1852) and The Planter’s Northern Bride (1854). Stowe’s rejoinder, The Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1853), attempted to prove that the scenes she had depicted were, if anything, too mild. “Tom” literature, pro and con, became a kind of subgenre of its own in the years preceding the Civil War, although no work came close to Stowe’s in articulating a political critique that both drew on and reconfigured the conventions of domestic fiction.

“Tom” also became a staple of the stage for the rest of the nineteenth century. The first dramatic version, which opened in 1853, retained the antislavery spirit of the novel, but it was soon challenged, and then supplanted, by a pro-Southern version that ended happily and turned Tom into a comic caricature of Stowe’s character. Satiric minstrel versions, with titles like “Happy Uncle Tom,” also flourished. One comic song, first performed after the novelist made a trip to England, revealed the class tensions that divided Democrats from abolitionists: “When us happy darkies you pity in your prayer/Oh don’t forget de WHITE SLAVES dat’s starvin’ over dar!”⁸¹ It may be, however, that the minstrels and other critics paid Stowe the ultimate compliment through their preoccupation with her work. Indeed, the only works of twentieth-century popular culture that have rivaled the impact of Uncle Tom’s Cabin are Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind—and both represent active attempts to refute the imagery, rhetoric, and message of Stowe’s novel. Long before the Civil War and long after it, the issues and perceptions at the heart of the conflict have continued to be fought out in U.S. popular culture.⁸²

It is always a question for historians whether wars cause or simply reflect the underlying transformations that often accompany them. The Civil War was clearly the culmination of a long process of sectional friction that involved industrial development, commercial competition, racial ideology, and regional identity, all of which were amply documented in the popular culture of the time. But the war also dramatically accelerated these trends, and its immediate effects were so great that one can reasonably say that certain events—from the creation of the modern banking system to the Emancipation Proclamation—were directly attributable to the war. In any case, the last third of the nineteenth century had a distinctly different tenor in popular cultural terms than the first two-thirds. If the antebellum period witnessed the emergence of many popular cultural forms, the postbellum decades were a period when culture became an industry in the modern sense of the word. Some of this was becoming apparent even before the war. In the 1840s, men of humble backgrounds like P.T. Barnum and Horace Greeley were able to found their enterprises with a little bit of credit and a lot of pluck; a decade later, the New York Times was capitalized for $100,000, half of which went for technology that had not even existed a few years before.⁸³ At the same time, however, the Civil War would not mark the end of the poor boy (or, occasionally, girl) who could make good. In fact, for African Americans, this period was about to begin. More important still, the late nineteenth century would not mark the end of the cultural innovation that had characterized the antebellum period. Now, that innovation would take place in a world that was becoming increasingly recognizably modern.