Stowe’s Slavery and Stowe’s Capitalism: Forced Reproductive Labor in Uncle Tom’s Cabin

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ For slavery’s apologists, see Harper, Memoir on Slavery or Fitzhugh, Sociology of the South; for free-labor advocates, see Weston, Progress of Slavery or Cairnes, The Slave Power.

² For historians arguing for a precapitalist South, see Beard, Rise of American Civilization or Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll. Du Bois, in Black Reconstruction, had special criticism for the Beards’ progressive narrative for excluding the return to conditions of enslavement after Reconstruction (714–715). Williams, contra the Beard opposition of slavery and capitalism, saw slavery in the Caribbean driving capitalist development in England. For recent assessments of a capitalist system of slavery, see Johnson, “The Pedestal and the Veil”; River of Dark Dreams; Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told; Beckert, Empire of Cotton. For critical accounts of the slavery’s capitalism interpretation, see Nelson, “Who Put Their Capitalism in My Slavery?”; Clegg, “Capitalism and Slavery”.

³ For the Beards, Stowe’s attention on slavery distracted nineteenth-century society from the problems of industrial capitalism (Beard and Beard 785); Williams, in Capitalism and Slavery, highlighted the hypocrisy of British capitalists who celebrated Stowe while manufacturing textiles from US Southern cotton (Williams 176).

⁴ Foster, in a 1954 biography of Stowe, describes the novel’s concern as “the conflict between cruel laissez-faire capitalism and Christian democracy” (56); Reynolds, in his 2011 cultural biography of the novel, suggests that Stowe might have been familiar with Marx’s writings and writes that novel “demonizes capitalism, speaks of working-class revolution, and holds established churches responsible for oppression,” but does not “endorse dialectical materialism” (72).

⁵ For antislavery argument against “slave-breeding” and the history of the concept in postbellum memory, see Smithers, Slave-Breeding: Sex, Violence, and Memory in African American History; for comparison to forced reproductive labor outside of the US, see Turner, Contested Bodies: Pregnancy, Childrearing, and Slavery in Jamaica (2017).

⁶ This feminist analysis has, so far, found partial explicit inclusion among the self-described new historians of capitalism, but Beckert and Rockman note “women’s reproductive labor as the fundamental mechanism of wealth creation for American slaveholders” in the introduction to the 2016 collection Slavery’s Capitalism (11).

⁷ For accounts of slaveholders attempting to effect population increase, see the example of Thomas Jefferson in Sublette (36–50) or James Henry Hammond in Faust (71–85). For the value of reproductive capacity, see Berry (10–32).

⁸ David Weimer, in an account of how Stowe worried that analysis of economic self-interest threatened social morality, concludes that “Uncle Tom’s Cabin engages with these theories of political economy in order to argue that society can maintain a religious foundation only by purifying its institutions from the corruption of political economy” (251).

⁹ For a discussion of the sexual abuse of enslaved men, as well as the question of a parallel male market for a “fancy” trade, see Foster (15–16).

¹⁰ See Jennings, “‘Us Colored Women Had to Go Through A Plenty: Sexual Exploitation of African-American Slave Women”; Camp, Closer to Freedom; Jones-Rogers, “Rethinking Sexual Violence and the Marketplace of Slavery”.

¹¹ A series of 1850s plantation instructions in the proslavery press – meaning not just instructions but documents meant for a national audience – were univocal in recommending “all the men, if practicable, should be accommodated with wives at home” (Powell 217). See also, De Bow’s Review articles from 1851 to 1862: “Agricultural Department: 1. Management of Negroes” (Vol. 10); “Management of Negroes” (Vol. 11); “Management of Slaves” (Vol. 17); “Management of Slave” (Vol. 18); “Management of Negroes,” (Vol 19); “Management of a Southern Plantation” (Vol. 22); “Management of Cotton Estates” (Vol. 26); “Essay on the Management of Slaves” (Vol. 32).

¹² Collins’s 1803 Practical Rules for the Management and Medical Treatment of Negro Slaves in the Sugar Colonies had a sixth chapter titled “On Breeding” (30). For advertisements on “breeders” see Berry (18–20).

¹³ For family propaganda in the set of proslavery novels written in response to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, see Burleigh (125–142).

¹⁴ From the 1855 version to the 1893 Life and Times there are no changes to the first paragraph and very few substantive changes to the second, though the pattern of heightening the moral outrage continues, for example, by adding “debasing” to the already “unchaste and demoralising character of slavery” (Douglass, Life and Times 571–572).

¹⁵ For examples, see Morgan (6–7); Baptist (xix-xxiii).