A Response to Uncle Tom's Cabin -

[packman]

"Mary Eastman would not be swayed from the belief that the slave’s lot was not unhappy, human bondage was benign and life in the South represented the natural order of God-made things. Slavery was ordained by God and sanctioned by Scripture. To Stowe and her self-declared “vocation to preach on paper”, Christianity was the main means of black integration. But the God of slavery was not open to persuasion, closed to the idea that freedom, as PJ O’Rourke defined it, is “the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.” To Eastman slavery was empowering, enlightening, a partnership between needy, simple-minded blacks and needed, knowing whites. To anyone sane it was extermination.

As Eastman writes in a long and winding Preface to her book Aunt Phillis’s Cabin; Or, Southern Life As It Is (1852):

However inexplicable may be the fact that God would appoint the curse of continual servitude on a portion of his creatures, will any one dare, with the Bible open in his hands, to say the fact does not exist? It is not ours to decide why the Supreme Being acts! We may observe his dealings with man, but we may not ask, until he reveals it, Why hast thou thus done?.."

Eastman goes on - basically justifying slavery as God's will:




Article has other "justifications" and romanticizing slavery as benign and elevating in the pre-Civil war era:

https://flashbak.com/aunt-philliss-cabin-a-pro-slavery-response-to-uncle-toms-cabin-1852-401033/

[Sneederbunk]

1. Not exactly a best seller.

[appalachiablue]

2. This racist POS sold 20-30,000 copies. Wonder what Mary H. E. thought of

the first marriage of her husband Seth Eastman, a military officer from Maine. Eastman's first wife was Native American and they had a child, both of whom he abandoned. If she knew.

Wiki: During his first posting at Fort Snelling near what is now Minneapolis, Seth Eastman in 1830 married Wakan Inajin-win (Stands Sacred), the fifteen-year-old daughter of Cloud Man, a Dakotah (Santee Sioux) chief of French and Dakota ancestry.
Eastman was reassigned from Fort Snelling in 1832, soon after the birth of their daughter Winona (meaning First-born daughter).
He declared his marriage ended when he was reassigned, as was typical of many European-American men who abandoned Indian women and their children. His daughter Winona was also called Mary Nancy Eastman. Later she was named Wakantakawin in the Sioux tradition of marking life passages...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seth_and_Mary_Eastman

[oberliner]

3. The Bible is definitely pro-slavery

Can't really argue with that.

[struggle4progress]

4. Really? Passover, the central Jewish holiday, celebrates liberation from slavery.

The story re-appears in the early Jewish law as an explanation:

Also you must not oppress a foreigner; for surely you know the heart of the foreigner, having been foreigners in Egypt

Psalm 137 recounts the sorrow and rage of captives:

We sat down and, yes, wept beside the waters of Babylon, when we remembered Zion. In the midst of the willows, we hung up our harps. For they, who had carried us away there as prisoners, demanded songs from us; and those who tormented us insisted, Sing for us your songs from Zion

[oberliner]

5. Yes, really

Exodus 21

21 “Now these are the rules that you shall set before them. 2 When you buy a Hebrew slave,[a] he shall serve six years, and in the seventh he shall go out free, for nothing. 3 If he comes in single, he shall go out single; if he comes in married, then his wife shall go out with him. 4 If his master gives him a wife and she bears him sons or daughters, the wife and her children shall be her master's, and he shall go out alone. 5 But if the slave plainly says, ‘I love my master, my wife, and my children; I will not go out free,’ 6 then his master shall bring him to God, and he shall bring him to the door or the doorpost. And his master shall bore his ear through with an awl, and he shall be his slave forever.

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Exodus+21&version=ESV

Leviticus 25:44-46

‘Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves. 45 You may also buy some of the temporary residents living among you and members of their clans born in your country, and they will become your property. 46 You can bequeath them to your children as inherited property and can make them slaves for life, but you must not rule over your fellow Israelites ruthlessly.

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Leviticus+25%3A44-46&version=NIV

[struggle4progress]

6. The text is certainly full of conflicts, representing various layers of editing

Leviticus 25 earlier also says:

And you must treat every fiftieth year as holy, and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants; it must be for you the Year of Joy; and you must return to every man his ancestral possessions, and you must return every man to his family