Stowe, Harriet Beecher

Autograph manuscript, 2 pages (8 1/2  x 6 7/8 in.; 215 x 175 mm), recto and verso of a leaf of ruled paper expertly detached from its conjugate, [Brunswick, Me., ca. 1850–51], being a fragment of chapter 6 of Uncle Tom's Cabin; vertical central fold, three horizontal folds.  Red buckram chemise and half brown morocco gilt clamshell case with red buckram covers.

A rare manuscript leaf from a crucial chapter of Uncle Tom's Cabin, perhaps the most influential work of fiction of the 19th century.

Scarce.  Only eight other autograph fragments from Uncle's Tom's Cabin appear to be known to scholars. Of these, two are held by the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center in Hartford, with one each in the New York Public Library, the C. W. Barrett Collection at the University of Virginia, the Connecticut State Library, and the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe Institute.  Two other fragments are known to be in private hands (for one of these, see our sale of the collection of Mrs. Philip D. Sang, 27 March 1985, lot 134—evidently the last time a leaf appeared on the market).  The scarcity of autograph leaves from the novel is explained by Stowe herself in a letter dated 11 May 1874: "I am not as methodical as Mrs Lewes who writes in books & whose manuscripts stand side by side of her printed works in trimly bound volumes. The manuscript of Uncle Tom went where it pleased the printer's Devil & in those days neither I or they deemed it worth asking for.  Now I would give a pretty sum for it but it is asking for last year's leaves.  How all that is of the past."

The present manuscript comprises 47 lines in Stowe's hand from chapter 6 of the novel.  In this chapter, the Shelbys discover that the slave Eliza, Mrs. Shelby's personal maid, has run away with her baby after discovering that Mr. Shelby, heavily in debt, has offered to sell her young son along with Uncle Tom to the slave trader Haley to alleviate the situation.  This manuscript is the passage in which Black Sam and Andy share information on the situation and confirm that Mrs. Selby is sympathetic to Eliza's plight and wishes the two slaves to do what is in their power to hamper the efforts to track down the mother and  child.  Sam and Andy devise a way to excite the horses and cause them to run wild, delaying the search party.

While this passage clearly demonstrates Stowe's sympathy for the slaves of the American South and their plight, it also shows her reliance on stereotypes about African-Americans, common in nineteenth-century America and Europe.  In several places, she has written Sam and Andy's dialogue in standard English and then gone through and revised it to adhere to her conception of black American dialect.  The first paragraph reads (before manuscript revisions), "Good now! — thats the time of day said Sam — Its Sam thats called for in these times — hes the nigger — see if I dont catch her — Massr will see what Sam can do".  Stowe has scored through words and changed "thats" (sic) to "dats", "the" to "de" (twice), "these" to "diese", and "catch" to "cotcth."  As can be deduced from this passage, spelling and punctuation were not special interests of Stowe's.  Present-day readers may be made uncomfortable by Stowe's characterizations of her black characters.  In this fragment alone, she has Sam and Andy both use the term "nigger" and both refer to Mr. Shelby as "Mas'r." The author also describes Sam's head as "a wooly pate, which if it did not contain very profound wisdon, still contained a great deal of a particular species much in demand among politicians of all complexions ...." (that is, common sense).  Though these touches may be jarring for a modern reader, the strong conviction of Stowe's abolitionist beliefs comes across in this powerful passage as the desires of Sam, Andy, and Mrs. Shelby to save Eliza and her child from a cruel slave trader becomes strikingly clear.

Apart from a few minor incidentals of spelling and punctuation, the published text conforms closely to Stowe's manuscript.

The leaf is accompanied by the envelope in which it was stored for many years.  It is inscribed in ink, "This envelope contains one original page of 'Uncle Tom's Cabin', exactly as it came from the pen of the author.  It was given by Mrs. Stowe to Georgiana. H. T. S."  Georgiana was Stowe's daughter, who died in 1886 after a series of illnesses and rest cures.  "H. T. S." may be Georgiana's sister Harriet, known as Hattie in the family. 

Scarce.  One of the few remaining leaves from the manuscript of a book of paramount importance in American history and literature.  One hundred years after its publication, the authors of Printing and the Mind of Man were to write, "In the emotion-charged atmosphere of mid-nineteenth-century America  Uncle Tom's Cabin exploded like a bombshell.  To those engaged in fighting slavery it appeared as an indictment of all the evils inherent in the system they opposed; to the pro-slavery forces it was a slanderous attack on 'the Southern way of life' .... Whatever its weakness as a literary work—structural looseness and excess of sentiment among them—the social impact of Uncle Tom's Cabin on the United States was greater than that of any book before or since."