Studies in American Fiction
Volume 36 Number 1 (Spring 2008)
Northeastern University, Boston, Mass. Year 2008
"Enslaving you, Body and Soul": the
uses of temperance in Uncle Tom's Cabin
and \Anti-Tom" ction
Ryan C. Cordell
University of Virginia
This paper is posted at IRis.
http://iris.lib.neu.edu/saf 36 1/5

Studies in American Fiction is a journal of articles and reviews on the prose fiction
of the United States. Founded by James Nagel and later edited by Mary Loeffelholz,
SAF was published by the Department of English, Northeastern University, from
1973 through 2008. Studies in American Fiction is indexed in the MLA Bibliography
and the American Humanities Index.



Studies in American Fiction
Volume 36 Spring 2008 Number 1
Ryan C. Cordell, “Enslaving you, Body and Soul”: The Uses of
Temperance in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and “Anti-Tom” Fiction

Copyright © 2008 Northeastern University ISSN 0091-8083

“ENSLAVING YOU, BODY AND SOUL”:
THE USES OF TEMPERANCE IN
UNCLE TOM’S CABIN AND “ANTI-TOM” FICTION
Ryan C. Cordell
The University of Virginia
A people corrupted by strong drink cannot long be a free people.
—Benjamin Rush, “An Inquiry Into the Effects of Spirituous Liquors”
Late in the afternoon of a chilly day in February, two gentlemen were
sitting alone over their wine, in a well-furnished dining parlor, in the
town of P——, in Kentucky.
—Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin
“Let Every Man Mind His Own Business,” one of Harriet Beecher
Stowe’s early short stories, begins with two young, recently-married
couples, as three of their number press a lone dissenter, Edward Howard,
to sign the temperance pledge. At one point in the belabored conversa-
tion, Edward’s wife exclaims:
This tiresome temperance business! One never hears the end of it
nowadays. Temperance papers—temperance tracts—temperance
hotels—temperance this, that, and the other thing, even down to
temperance pocket-handkerchiefs for little boys! Really, the world is
getting intemperately temperate.1
She is, of course, not entirely serious, and dutifully plays her part in her
husband’s ensuing fall and reclamation. However, her flippant remark
does echo what critics have, in recent years, begun to discover about
temperance. Unlike abolition, temperance was a well established, thriving
reform movement in 1852, and had been so since at least the 1830s. By
the time Stowe penned her “Life Among the Lowly,” contemporary read-
ers, parishioners, and theater-goers alike were quite familiar with another
class of degraded souls: slaves to the bottle, rather than the planter. Scholarly
focus on abolition and women’s rights has obscured the vast range and
influence that temperance activism had in antebellum America. Indeed,
much literary criticism of Stowe’s era fails to account for—or even no-
tice—temperance at all, though in reach, scope, and longevity it was the
dominant reform movement of its day, especially in the middle classes.

4 Ryan C. Cordell
Carol Mattingly notes that “the largest group of rhetorically active
women in nineteenth-century America was comprised of temperance
women,” and this claim resonates strongly with John Frick, who ob-
serves that “In the first half of the nineteenth century, no single issue—
not even the abolition of slavery—had a greater capacity for arousing the
American passion than did the cause of temperance.”2 Temperance soci-
eties such as the Washingtonians and the Sons (or Daughters) of Tem-
perance multiplied in every major town and city, both North and South,
claiming tens of thousands of members. In 1842, 11 percent of Baltimore’s
free population, and 7 percent of New York City’s, were members of the
Washingtonians, and Ian Tyrell conjectures that “probably hundreds of
thousands of American women supported the temperance movement”
during this same time period.3 These numbers demonstrate what sway
this phenomenon had in the America of the 1840s and 1850s: temperance
was widely disseminated, and manifest in all aspects of American life.
Temperance was not a political and social movement only, however;
it was also immensely popular entertainment. As implied by Stowe’s de-
lightful self-commentary in “Let Every Man,” there were temperance tracts,
sermons, songs, paintings, short stories, novels, plays, and so forth pro-
duced almost ad infinitum. Temperance stories were printed in daily newspa-
pers from New York to New Orleans, and temperance plays sold out theaters.
William H. Smith’s play The Drunkard “was probably America’s most suc-
cessful play” before George Aiken’s adaptation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin suc-
ceeded it, and Uncle Tom was later shaken—albeit temporarily—from this
perch by William W. Pratt’s Ten Nights in a Bar-room.4 Before, during,
and after the wild success of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s abolitionist novel,
another discourse of reform absolutely saturated American society.
The tropes, figures, plots, and characters of temperance reform were
so pervasive—and, one must suspect, so powerful and persuasive—that
other nineteenth-century reform movements drew upon them, perhaps
even unconsciously, when articulating their own concerns. Harriet Beecher
Stowe infuses her great antislavery work, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, with what
might be called a “familiar radicalism”: the language, figures, and plot
devices of temperance fiction, as do many of the proslavery novelists
who wrote in response to Uncle Tom’s success. Recognizing the form of
temperance in narratives on both sides of the slavery debate offers insight
into the workings of protest literature itself and offers scholars of Stowe a
new reading of her most famous protagonist, Uncle Tom.
Carol Mattingly notes that “unlike most fiction written by women in
the nineteenth century, temperance fiction does not end with the marriage

Studies in American Fiction 5
of the heroine, but, instead, generally begins with the wedding,” and it is
almost universally true that the temperance tale “explores the very real
problematic circumstances women must face after the ceremony,” rather
than the drama preceding the vows.5 The marriage in question begins as
a happy, promising, and decidedly middle-class arrangement. The new
husband has grand prospects: Smith’s Edward Middleton is a business-
man and landowner, Stowe’s Edward Howard is, somewhat more vaguely,
“first in the society in which he moved,” and the husband in T. S. Arthur’s
“The Drunkard’s Wife” is Doctor Harper. Caroline Lee Hentz’s Mr.
Franklin is even more considerable: “a member of Congress, a distin-
guished lawyer.”6 Consequently, the wife in each story has good reason
to believe that her marital decision has been made wisely; she, her friends,
and her proud parents expect domestic bliss to follow in turn.
Then, inevitably, come the bottle and the descent, usually traced
through three tiers of depravity. First, the happy and prosperous family is
unbalanced, but only slightly, by the introduction of “demon” alcohol.
Importantly, the first drink is never entirely the husband’s fault; his es-
sential goodness, despite the dark turns each narrative will take, is not at
question. This plot contrasts with what David S. Reynolds describes as a
strand of “dark temperance” narratives, in which the characters are usu-
ally working-class, and the story focuses on the lurid, even prurient re-
sults of their alcoholic debasement. In these “dark temperance” tales,
“individual drunkards [are] often portrayed as morally reprehensible and
personally disgusting,” and the end result is almost always a gruesome
death for the drunkard.7 Amanda Claybaugh refers to these as “caution-
ary temperance tales,” which pushed folk toward temperance out of sheer
horror, but Reynolds implies that the appeal of these stories to readers
may well have been more voyeuristic than reformist.8
In what I will call “domestic temperance” stories, however, the fallen
husband begins as a paragon of bourgeois perfection, and never—even at
his most degraded—entirely sheds a dimmed halo of his former good-
ness.9 Domestic temperance stories maintain continual hope for refor-
mation, and so the drunkard retains enough humanity to warrant such
an outcome. This narrative shaping begins early, as each story empha-
sizes the husband’s non-complicit or uninformed entrance into the dark
night of spirits. In The Drunkard a begrudging lawyer, Cribbs, first
leads Edward into the tavern and buys his first drink, feigning friendly
collegiality. In “The Drunkard’s Wife” the doctor is offered “a good
stiff glass of brandy” or wine when making house calls during winter,
as a buffer against the cold.10 The first step is always minute and inad-
vertent, and the wife bears it with only moderate concern, if she is con-
cerned at all.

6 Ryan C. Cordell
The second movement of the domestic temperance narrative is more
dramatic or, for many modern readers, melodramatic. The husband has
become a lush, though perhaps not a drunk, and his tippling has become
public knowledge. His business suffers as a result, and money begins to
hemorrhage due to both the expense of his new habit and his flailing
business concerns. “Mr. Franklin’s downward course” in “The Drunkard’s
Daughter” is summarily described: “Since the night of his public exposure
he had gone down, down, with a fearfully accelerated motion. . . . Public
confidence was gradually withdrawn, clients and friends forsook him,
and ruin trod rapidly on the steps of shame.”11 An essential trope of tem-
perance fiction is acted out during this liminal stage. Out of pure love and
concern for her family, the “angel of the house”—usually the new-minted
drunkard’s wife, but sometimes a devoted daughter—confronts the lapsed
man about his condition, and appeals for reform.
When Grace Harper confronts her husband midway through “The
Drunkard’s Wife,” she exemplifies this moment of appeal. Doctor Harper’s
drinking, until this moment unacknowledged, is finally laid bare: “Doctor,
I cannot conceal from myself, much as I desire to do so, the fact that you
are not in a condition to go into company . . . [b]ecause you have been
drinking too much.” The results of his degradation are likewise uncov-
ered: “If all this seems strange to you, think why it is that Mr. Mabury
sent for Doctor Elwell last week, to attend his little girl. There must be
some good reason why he did not call you.”12 The doctor, to his credit, is
“in part, sobered” by his wife’s revelations. Typically, the temperance
wife’s plea leads to confessions of guilt and resolutions of reform from the
errant husband and father, resolutions that are soon discarded.
The third stage of the domestic temperance story displays, between
tales and authors, the most variety. The family sinks into poverty and
severe want, and is abandoned by the husband and father—“Alas, alas!
my dear, lost husband!”13—as he pursues his vice every waking moment.
The family moves to a shanty home as the angel of the house, be she
daughter or wife, begins working to maintain room and board. The chil-
dren usually become wan and ill, and the father universally becomes a
bum and a wretch. At this moment, even in domestic temperance tales,
the spectacles of dark temperance manifest themselves. In the preface to
The Drunkard the author, who acted the title role in the play’s original
production, brags about his own “terribly real” portrayal of Edward
Middleton’s “malady,” noting that “the scene of delirium tremens” was
particularly effecting.14 Scenes of drink-inspired madness and violence
erupt at this low point in the temperance story, and the father’s neglect
can lead even to the lingering death of a child or the wife and mother.
Whatever the exact details of their respective climaxes, in every tem-

Studies in American Fiction 7
perance story it seems true that “the morality of temperance sentiments
was strongly reinforced . . . most powerfully, by the suffering of his wife
and children,” and that this suffering climaxes in the third movement of
the drunkard’s decline.15 In dark temperance narratives, these scenes of
deprivation and destruction lead inexorably to death for the drunkard him-
self. However, the end of domestic temperance tales is redemption, as
the husband and father finally steels himself to reform—often with the
help his friendly local temperance activist—and finds renewal in both his
life and business.
Michael Booth summarizes this ending well: “the hero signs the pledge
and is rewarded by unexpected wealth, the imprisonment of the villain, a
devotion to the cause of temperance, and renewed tenderness from his
ever-faithful, ever-suffering wife.”16 The greatest sin of the drunken hus-
band and father in temperance fiction is deeply rooted in the sentimental
tradition; it is his abandonment of familial duties, his resignation of the
joys and comforts of the domestic sphere, his exposure of his wife and
children to evil surroundings and evil men. Jane P. Tompkins claims that
in sentimental fiction tears serve as indicators of the higher, inexpressible,
spiritual “experiences they point to—salvation, communion, reconcilia-
tion.”17 The most successful temperance tales ended in perfect sentimen-
tal fashion, with tears as both salve and salvation, and prospects of a
return to respectable, if not affluent, middle-class life for the long-suffer-
ing family and the sobered male at its head.
The application of such tales to the story of an African-American
slave may seem far-fetched, but a careful reading of Uncle Tom’s Cabin
reveals that temperance rhetoric and figures are intricately woven into
Stowe’s seminal abolitionist work. First and most obvious is the
demonization of alcohol itself throughout the novel. Nicholas O. Warner
sees Stowe’s treatment of alcohol in Uncle Tom as more measured, and
“sympathetic to the inner processes of the alcoholic’s mind,” than most
temperance fiction or, indeed, Stowe’s own earlier stories such as “Let
Every Man.”18
This is to some degree true, as neither Cassy nor the “old-rusk woman”
Prue are condemned for imbibing. Prue’s pathetic conversation with Tom
is used to interrogate the horrors of slavery far more than drink. Drinking
does, for these characters at least, emerge “from the understandable des-
peration of those needing some anodyne from physical and psychic suf-
fering;” as Eva says of Prue, “the poor creature was unhappy; that’s what
made her drink.”19 Drinking in Uncle Tom’s Cabin is always subsumed
under slavery, the great evil of the novel. Characters drink more or less

8 Ryan C. Cordell
based upon their own relationship to the peculiar institution, and their
own participation, voluntary or otherwise, in its worst emanations.
Taverns dot the landscape of Stowe’s novel, serving as havens for
the book’s most wretched characters: they are hives of scum and villainy.
The bounty hunters Loker and Marks, for example, appear first in a bar-
room scene:
“Let’s go to business. Now, Mr. Haley, what is it?—you want us
to undertake to catch this yer gal?”
“The gal’s no matter of mine—she’s Shelby’s; it’s only the boy. I
was a fool for buying the monkey!”
. . . . . . . . . .
After exchanging a few words of further arrangement, Haley,
with some visible reluctance, handed over the fifty dollars to Tom,
and the worthy trio separated for the night. (Tom 72, 76)
When Simon Legree rounds up his posse to pursue Cassy and Emmeline
later in the book, that posse consists of “overseers of plantations” and
“some of Legree’s associates at the tavern-bar of a neighboring city” (418).
In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, taverns are where runaway slaves are advertised,
where bounty hunters seal contracts, and where slave hunters can be
roused. That is to say, the only business available in Stowe’s barrooms is
dirty business, soul-destroying business.
Given the prevalence of temperance fiction in the years prior to Uncle
Tom, the placement of Haley, Loker, and Marks in a saloon immediately
tags them as suspect men to her readers, and their inebriation serves as “a
conventional marker of moral decay.”20 If their mere presence in a tavern
is not sufficient to raise readers’ hackles, their comfort and ease in such a
place should. As Marks stands to leave, “That worthy cast a rueful look
at the comfortable quarters he was leaving,” and this affectionate glance
jars radically with the temperance reader’s, who knows that same space
as “a low den, where virtue was ignored and decency forgotten.”21 Stowe’s
villains look longingly at scenes Stowe’s readers would know to despise,
and their antagonistic relationship to both the good characters of the novel
and the reader is highlighted by this incongruence.
Stowe does not align these base men with the titular drunkards of
domestic temperance fiction—they are too far degraded, and at ease with
their degradation, for that—but they certainly do stand in a line of succes-
sion to temperance villains, such as Lawyer Cribbs in The Drunkard. As
this latter scoundrel plots to disrupt and disband the Middleton family, so
do Loker and company plan the rending of Eliza from little Harry. That
they plot this in a tavern may seem incidental, as the actual evil here is
their enthusiastic participation in the slavery system. And yet, that they

Studies in American Fiction 9
plot this in a tavern is also, for Stowe’s readers, an immediate cue that
what they plot is legal but still despicable, and ultimately of the same cloth
as the machinations of familiar temperance villains. While every drinker is
not demonized in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the presence of spirits in a scene
does point inexorably toward the evil of slavery, and reminds readers that
demons rarely travel unaccompanied. To put it another way, drink is
always a sign of degradation—whether forced or chosen—as a product
and a cohort of slavery, the novel’s overarching evil.
Frick notes of temperance rhetoric that “its emotionality and affective
structure, when pitched to a popular audience that was struggling with
the daily hardships of life, . . . was easily radicalized.”22 This easy
radicalization is precisely what Harriet Beecher Stowe’s use of temper-
ance tropes in Uncle Tom’s Cabin gestures towards, perhaps even ex-
ploits. The difficulty with generic elements like these, however, is that
they can be both generic—pertaining to a genre—and, by only a slight
shift in valence, generic—vague, unspecific. Reynolds asserts that for
some writers in the 1850s “the imagery of temperance reform had be-
come . . . a colorful shell, largely devoid of didactic content,”23 and this
observation forces readers to ask whether Stowe’s appropriation of tem-
perance might be likewise meaningless or ineffectual. Are the tropes and
figures of temperance that she employs simply shells: convenient, mal-
leable figures, easily shaped to serve any political or ideological purpose?
Might Stowe’s use of temperance obscure the issue of abolition and re-
place it with emptied sentimental archetypes, devoid, by virtue of their
prevalence or displacement, of explicit ideological or political content?
These disturbing possibilities seem plausible when one notices the
very same temperance tropes, plots, and figures that Stowe employs in
Uncle Tom’s Cabin at work in texts didactically opposed to it, in the so-
called “anti-Tom” novels published in the months and years following
Stowe’s success. There were almost thirty novels published against Uncle
Tom’s Cabin, employing a variety of tactics to assail, refute, antagonize,
and bewail the claims it made about the evils of slavery.24 Railton com-
ments that “It’s . . . perhaps surprising to see how many similarities exist”
between Stowe’s novel and those of her opponents and “how little some
aspects of Stowe’s protest novel had to be changed in order to serve the
other side of the issue she was protesting against.”25 In many of these
oppositional tales, that uncomfortable similitude is marked, and one spe-
cific parallel between Stowe and her opponents is their appropriation of
temperance rhetoric. Much like Stowe, these pro-slavery authors redirect
figures from temperance tales—figures well-honed to speak opposition to

10 Ryan C. Cordell
societal evil—toward their own political ends, toward the evil that is, for
them, abolition.
The most obvious nods that anti-Tom novels make toward the tem-
perance tradition are in the degraded, drunken, escaped slaves that appear
in so many of them. It is the freed African-American, unmoored in the
unforgiving, industrial north, who drinks in these stories, rather than the
horror-scarred slave—Prue or Cassy—of Uncle Tom. In Vidi’s Mr. Frank,
the Underground Mail-Agent, Mr. Frank encounters two slaves he helped
escape, Tom and Suse, in the North. Suse reports to Mr. Frank that,
“Tom spent all de money you gib’d him, for whiskey,” and Tom, who
“was a well-dressed, obedient, steady” slave, is now “dirty, ragged, and
saucy; and presented, in every respect, most unquestionable appearances
of leading a drunken, vagabond life.”26
This type of drunkard is borrowed directly from dark temperance
tales, and appears frequently in these reactionary novels. In W. L. G.
Smith’s Life at the South, Uncle Tom—yet another Tom—escapes to
Canada, where the only work he can find is tending bar.27 Although Smith’s
Tom never becomes a drunkard himself, to avoid that fate he must avoid
the example of Jim Hard—a former slave who “never does anything but
drink, and loiter around the tippling shops”—a feat Tom finally accom-
plishes by returning voluntarily to his master’s plantation.28 The former
slave in the anti-Tom novel is easy prey to the bottle, evoking the “body
and soul” enslavement decried in temperance rhetoric. These books char-
acterize that utopian state of “freedom” as far more degraded than the
slavery of the South is or ever could be.
As in Stowe’s novel, in many anti-Tom novels the presence of alco-
hol in a scene indicates the moral state of either the characters present or
the situation itself. Spirits in a scene direct the reader’s indignation; they
make explicit the evil. The drunkards are different in these anti-Tom tales—
unfortunate freed slaves, opportunistic politicians, and fallen ministers—
but the results of drink are the same as in The Drunkard or Uncle Tom’s
Cabin: violence, lust, and other assorted vices. Billy R. Dixey, in Vidi’s
Mr. Frank, is an abolitionist, politician, and a leader on the “Underground
Mail-line,” and he is introduced as “a gentleman sitting alone in the back
parlor of the only tavern in the village of Liberty, Pennsylvania. . . . In the
centre of the room stood a small, round pine table, which was covered
with quite a variety of pitchers, tumblers and bottles; thus affording rather
strong presumptive evidence that the occupant of the apartment was not
an advocate of the temperance reformation” (Frank 9). In the unfolding
scene, Dixey will declare his repugnance toward former slaves—“the very
thought . . . is enough to make a man of fine feelings throw up”—admit
his purely superficial political allegiance to abolitionism—“my patent move-

Studies in American Fiction 11
able platform”—and take several long swigs of whiskey while so ex-
pounding (Frank 14–15). When a knock is heard on the door, Dixey
scrambles to clean up the proofs of his indulgence, afraid that they would
“scarcely go down” with the titular Mr. Frank, “with his total abstinence,
woman’s rights, spiritual rappings, vote-yourself-a-farm, general reform,
ideas” (Frank 16). Dixey’s character is established in the first pages of
Mr. Frank, just as Haley’s is in Uncle Tom, in large part through his easy
association with heavy drink.
Were Vidi’s novel a temperance tale, Bill R. Dixey’s role would be to
seduce Mr. Frank into the tavern and away from his beautiful daughter,
Emma. And he does indeed separate the family, but the inducement is not
spirits but abolition. Mr. Frank himself is virtuous: “A kinder, nobler
heart than his, never beat in a human breast. It beat in harmonious unison
with misery and suffering” (Frank 36). His virtue, however, misleads
him toward activism in the South. He mistakes slavery for the ultimate
“misery and suffering,” while ignoring abundant needs near his own home.
His daughter sees more clearly, as do the household angels in temperance
stories; “We are weak, erring, fallible creatures, and may magnify evils
which we do not fully understand,” she pleads as she attempts to dis-
suade her father from leaving home (Frank 38). This heartfelt plea is
ineffective, however, and Mr. Frank’s subsequent abandonment of her
sets in motion the primary plot of the novel. The unfortunate, misguided
drunkard-father is replaced by the unfortunate, misguided, abolitionist-
father, the forms of temperance applied to the evil of emancipation.
Note that Mr. Frank, before he is even introduced, is identified as a
temperance man, pointing toward his virtue as counter to Dixey’s vice.
This figure—the virtuous temperance man—also appears frequently in
anti-Tom literature, usually in the character of the plantation owner. Doc-
tor Boswell, the hero of J. W. Page’s tongue-tying Uncle Robin in His
Cabin in Virginia, And Tom Without One in Boston, is just such a man.
When Mr. Frazer, a drunkard in the strictest temperance tradition, asks
for a bit more than coffee during a visit—“Coffee’s very good, Doctor,
but when a body’s thoroughly chilled, there is something better than cof-
fee to take off the chill”—the good doctor replies indignantly, “I belong,
Mr. Frazer, to the temperance society, and only keep spirit for medicinal
purposes.”29 The Doctor and Mrs. Boswell will spend the entire novel
worrying about Mr. Frazer’s wife and children, and pressing the de-
graded man to sign the temperance pledge.
The plantation owners in anti-Tom novels also fill the role of “tem-
perance man” more metaphorically. As the temperance man often appears
in domestic temperance fiction to point out the error of the drunkard’s
ways and lead him toward the light, so do these virtuous plantation own-

12 Ryan C. Cordell
ers appear in anti-Tom novels to expose the follies of abolition to good-
hearted but deluded Yankees. In Mr. Frank this figure is Doctor Manley—
another Doctor with a particularly honorific name—who exposes the
machinations of Dixey, enlightens Mr. Frank as to the truly benevolent
nature of the South’s peculiar institution, and marries Emma Frank in the
novel’s penultimate chapter. Temperance is a marked feature of the slave-
owner in anti-Tom novels, and, as in both temperance fiction and Uncle
Tom, a character’s aversion to drink in these pro-slavery works is a
marker of moral clarity and trustworthiness.
Perhaps the most subtle use of temperance rhetoric in an anti-Tom
novel can be found in V. G. Cowdin’s Ellen; or, the Fanatic’s Daughter.30
Ellen is, almost verbatim, a temperance story, complete with a neglectful
husband and father, a home ripped apart, a longsuffering wife, an ailing
but angelic child, and a descent from affluence to poverty. Here, how-
ever, the father’s monomania is directed not toward drink, but toward
emancipation; he is no drunkard but rather one of “those devilites, the
abolitionists.”31 Like Vidi’s Mr. Frank, Ellen’s father leaves home for mis-
sions on the Underground Railroad instead of the tavern, but the effects
on his family are exactly those with which readers of temperance tales
were familiar.
Like the temperance father, Horace Layton is a good man led astray
by the guile of another, in this case the conniving Parson Blake, a nominal
abolitionist, “not from any real sympathy he had for the African race…but
the abolition of slavery was the popular theme of the day in his locality,
and popularity, in his estimation, was an important object” (Ellen 5).
Reynolds notes that, by the 1850s, the “intemperate temperance man”
had become a common target of anti-temperance satire, and anti-Tom
novels constantly evoke this character, creating the “racist-abolitionist”
who is, by association, often a drinker. Parson Blake, though his drinking
is never specifically mentioned, is described as red faced, sensual, and
forward, and his influence over Horace in the novel is a species of intoxi-
cation.
Ellen never follows Horton south; the story is, like the domestic tem-
perance story, that of the wife and children left behind. The object of
Horace’s wanderings matters little to Cowdin’s tale, as the effects of abo-
litionism on his family are identical to that of alcohol. Midway through
Ellen, after Horace’s forays South have bereft his family of money and his
young son has died from overwork at a local mill, his wife Mary enacts a
scene quite familiar to the reader of midnineteenth-century fiction:
“My husband,” she continued, as kneeling before Horace, she clasped
his hands within her own, “will you—oh! will you forsake this wicked
man? See how he has dragged us down to poverty and wretched-

Studies in American Fiction 13
ness, by enslaving you, body and soul.” (Ellen 56)
“Body and soul”—these three words resonate. Mary employs the lan-
guage of slavery to describe her husband’s tie not to the slave system, but
to its abolition. The language of the temperance tale is here comman-
deered to describe a wayward husband, slave not to the bottle, but to
misguided philanthropy.
In Uncle Tom’s Cabin it is slave-traders and plantation owners who
drink, whereas in anti-Tom novels it is crooked abolitionist politicians and
escaped slaves. The Quakers—that is, the most thoroughgoing abolition-
ists—in Stowe’s novel are teetotalers, while in anti-Tom novels the dry
characters are almost universally the slave-owners themselves. Never-
theless, temperance figures work in anti-Tom novels in much the same
way they do in Stowe’s original. The moral function of alcohol is identical
in both Uncle Tom and Mr. Frank: the presence of alcohol in a given
scene indicates the depravity or foolishness of its characters, and instructs
the reader to see the evil of the moment. The moral-indicative function of
spirits is identical in the two works, though the political-ideological func-
tion is polarized.
While both Stowe and her detractors refer to the “familiar radicalism”
of temperance, there is an important distinction to be made between them.
The pro-slavery texts are far less interested in revising temperance tropes;
their drunkards are all men, their longsuffering victims all women and
children. Even in Ellen, the most inventive proslavery interpreter of tem-
perance tropes, the temperance formula remains relatively static; abolition
is condemned because of its effects on a Northern family and the hypoc-
risy of the story’s primary abolitionist, but the actual institution of slavery
receives no attention. Ellen elides asking real questions or advancing sub-
stantive arguments about slavery or abolition by focusing instead on the
domestic temperance-inspired drama of Horace Layton and his family.
The temperance figures of anti-Tom fiction, in other words, are often
the generic outlines that Reynolds calls “empty shells.” Through the fig-
ure of Uncle Tom, however, Stowe inventively reshapes and reenergizes
one of temperance’s most familiar figures. Looking through the lens of
these anti-Tom texts allows us to see Stowe’s incorporation of temper-
ance figures in Uncle Tom’s Cabin as more finely crafted, even more
radical than it would perhaps seem in a vacuum. While she usually uses
temperance tropes just as straightforwardly as do the anti-Tom texts—as
we have seen in her characterizations of Haley, Loker, Marks, and
Legree—the most interesting emanation of temperance rhetoric in Stowe’s

14 Ryan C. Cordell
novel is found not in the tavern with Loker, but in the progress of Tom
himself, toward the Deep South and his own martyrdom.
In chapter 18 of Uncle Tom’s Cabin there is an extraordinary ex-
change between Augustine St. Clare and Uncle Tom, which bears quot-
ing at some length:
“Why, Tom, what’s the case? You look as solemn as a coffin.”
“I feel very bad, Mas’r. I allays thought that Mas’r would be
good to everybody. . . . But there is one that Mas’r isn’t good to.”
“Why, Tom, what’s got into you? Speak out; what do you mean?”
“Last night, between one and two, I thought so. I studied upon
the matter then. Mas’r isn’t good to himself.”
Tom said this with his back to his master, and his hand on the
door-knob. St. Clare felt his face flush crimson, but he laughed.
“O, that’s all, is it?” he said, gaily.
“All!” said Tom, turning suddenly round and falling on his knees.
“O, my dear young Mas’r! I’m ‘fraid it will be loss of all—all—body
and soul. The good Book says, ‘it biteth like a serpent and stingeth
like an adder!’ my dear Mas’r!”
Tom’s voice choked, and the tears ran down his cheeks.
“You poor, silly fool!” said St. Clare, with tears in his own eyes.
“Get up, Tom. I’m not worth crying over.”
But Tom wouldn’t rise, and looked imploring.
“Well, I won’t go to any more of their cursed nonsense, Tom,”
said St. Clare; “on my honor, I won’t. I don’t know why I haven’t
stopped long ago. I’ve always despised it, and myself for it,—so now,
Tom, wipe up your eyes. . . . There, I’ll pledge my honor to you,
Tom, you don’t [sic] see me so again. . . .” (Tom 211–12)
Here Augustine St. Clare evokes the wayward husband and father of
temperance infamy, tripping off to the tavern instead of the church. He is
no drunkard—yet—but his drinking is aligned with his carelessness, “shift-
lessness” (in Ophelia’s often-used term of censure), and sloppy manage-
ment of his business, his plantation. The Southern Quarterly Review, in a
lengthy review-cum-indictment of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, pointed sarcasti-
cally at St. Clare: “This . . . humane and cultivated gentleman, beside an
occasional habit of being ‘helped home in a condition when the physical
had decidedly attained the upper hand of the intellectual,’ seems to do
nearly nothing but lie upon sofas.”32 The Quarterly notices, perhaps be-
cause of its opposition to Stowe’s novel, Augustine’s alignment with the
drunken fathers of temperance tales.
Uncle Tom, of course, notices the same congruence; in the very
scene the Quarterly refers to above, Tom decides that “Mas’r wasn’t a

Studies in American Fiction 15
Christian” because St. Clare attends, among other things, “wine parties”
and “a convivial party of choice spirits” from which he is assisted home in
the manner so mocked by the journal (Tom 211). In lovingly confronting
his master about these worrisome habits, Tom performs the longsuffering
temperance wife’s role—left vacant by Marie, who is unloving, narcissis-
tic, and herself something of a lush—of imploring the wayward husband
to discard the hellish bottle. Chapter 18 was, in the original two-volume
printing of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, situated at the very end of the first vol-
ume; this exchange between Tom and St. Clare happens halfway through
the book, at the very spot where one would expect to find the “wife’s
appeal” in a temperance narrative.
Tom’s bodily posture in this moment, as he drops to his knees before
the man of the house, echoes that of the angelic woman in countless
temperance tales. Consider, for example, Hentz’s “The Drunkard’s Daugh-
ter,” in which the titular character confronts her father: “Excited beyond
her power of self-control, Kate slid from her father’s relaxing arms, and
taking the Bible, which lay upon her chair, in both hands, prostrated
herself at his feet.”33 Tom’s appeal is Kate’s appeal, full of love and re-
spect, rather than revulsion. Like Kate, clasping her Bible to her as she
falls, Tom appeals to scripture, quoting Proverbs 23:32, common in tem-
perance tracts, sermons, and as an epigraph for temperance stories.
Tom becomes, in essence, the angel of the St. Clare house, a surro-
gate wife to Augustine and, as her playmate and spiritual advisor, a sur-
rogate mother to Little Eva. St. Clare’s response to Tom during this
exchange also gestures toward temperance rhetoric. He does not prom-
ise, but rather says, “I’ll pledge my honor to you” (my emphasis), recall-
ing the temperance pledges signed at meetings and printed in newspapers
and tracts; the signing of the temperance pledge is the climax of many
temperance stories, and Stowe’s choice of the word pledge seems pur-
posefully chosen to recall those familiar documents.
Commonplace as these elements would have been, though, there is
also something unmistakably revolutionary here—or there would have
been to contemporary readers—as the slave asserts moral authority over
his master, instructing him as an angelic wife should. Moreover, the scene’s
nod toward temperance texts is precisely what both allows and diffuses
the radicalism implicit in this confrontation. An uncanny feeling of rever-
sion—power roles switched or in flux—is also what infuses the “wife’s
appeal” moment in temperance fiction. After an early, embarrassing epi-
sode of drunkenness in “The Drunkard’s Wife,” Grace Harper realizes
that her husband “had fallen from his noble, manly character, and be-
came degraded in intellect. . . . She felt that she could no longer regard
him with the unalloyed pride and admiration, which had ever made him

16 Ryan C. Cordell
seem to her, unlike other Men.” A few pages later, after she urges her
husband to reform, the narrator notes, “Here, then, were the first fruits of
conscious degradation. The husband felt humbled in the presence of his
own wife. . . . ”34
Tom’s confrontation with St. Clare echoes this unease. Tom is em-
barrassed; he first speaks “with his back to his master,” and only falls to
his knees and cries when emotion assumes control of the moment. St.
Clare also begins crying, but attempts to deflect Tom’s earnest probes,
first by forced laughter, and then by calling the slave a “poor, silly fool.”
Both of these reactions read as anxiety; they acknowledge the paradox of
the scene’s power relations: Tom’s humble posture belies his moral supe-
riority, which in turn unbalances the normative line of authority from
master to slave. Both men are uncomfortable, as are both spouses in
similar temperance scenes, with the role reversal that initiates the ad-
monitory encounter.
This observation can be pushed even farther. Carol Mattingly argues
persuasively that the temperance issue offered female activists a proto-
feminist platform, “an ideal vehicle for speaking about women’s concerns.”
Despite these stories’ apparent roots in conservative, domestic ideology,
they also gave voice to “women’s often dangerous dependency on men.”
The focus of temperance stories on “[w]omen’s inability to protect them-
selves or their children from abusive, irresponsible husbands” demon-
strates, for Mattingly, a particular concern with women’s lives and women’s
issues, a concern that paved the way for later, more radical, movement
toward equal rights.35 Claybaugh goes so far as to call “female vulnerabil-
ity within the family and within the domestic sphere” the “fundamental
concern” of domestic temperance fiction, above even concerns about the
moral, spiritual, or physiological effects of alcohol itself.36
As both Mattingly and Tyrell note, much temperance rhetoric bor-
rowed terms of slavery to describe the dysfunctional marital relationship.
Clarina Howard Nichols, in a speech delivered at the “Whole World’s
Temperance Convention” in September of 1853, said of the American
wife, “The laws of this country have bound her hand and foot, and given
her up to the protection of her husband. They have committed her soul
and body to the protection of her husband, and when he fails from imbe-
cility, misjudgement, misfortune, or intemperance, she suffers.”37 This
speech was delivered a year after Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published, but
by this time, the metaphor linking slavery and marriage was well devel-
oped; Tyrell notes that by the early 1840s “[s]lavery was undoubtedly
useful in developing imagery which could capture female discontent with
male domination.”38 The moment of the wife’s plea, while always cast as
a moment of absolute submission—bent knee and lowered head—is also,

Studies in American Fiction 17
paradoxically, a moment of empowerment.
The wife’s plea enacts what Tompkins describes as the sentimental
“theory of power in which the ordinary or ‘common sense’ view of what
is efficacious and what is not . . . is simply reversed.”39 While both woman
and narrator are ostensibly horrified that the wife must assert spiritual,
moral, and reasonable authority over her husband, the scene powerfully
typifies the injustice of her absolute dependence on a degraded man, and
the mere emotional and rhetorical defense available to her against his
caprices. If not a clarion call to sexual equality, temperance fiction did
expose imbalances in familial power structures, “articulate a range of oth-
erwise inarticulable complaints about marriage,” and address issues of
immense concern to middle-class women.40
Given this framework, then, Stowe’s placement of Tom, an African-
American slave and a man, in the position of the temperance wife is
remarkable. If temperance fiction cast the wife as a slave, then Tom’s
placement here recalls and reclaims that metaphor.41 Tom’s appeal, while
ostensibly—and again, from Tom’s perspective, honestly—arising from
concern about St. Clare, also serves to point directly toward Tom’s abso-
lute vulnerability. St. Clare is kind, he is indulgent, but he is also airy and
negligent, and his slaves, however well treated under his benevolence,
stand as ready victims to his “shiftlessness.”
Ophelia tries on several occasions to point out the exposure of St.
Clare’s slaves, asking if he has “ever made any provisions for your ser-
vants, in case of your death?” and warning, “all your indulgence to them
may prove a great cruelty, by and by” (Tom 318). St. Clare makes light of
Ophelia’s warnings, but it is interesting that she, a female character, is
able to identify the precarious position that his slaves stand in, as abso-
lutely tied to her nephew’s good or bad fortunes. Tom worries in his
appeal that drink “will be loss of all—all—body and soul” for St. Clare
and, though he never mentions it, he also speaks of his own body and
soul, which are inexorably tied to his careless master’s. Like the temper-
ance wife, Tom pleads for his master, but the plea is also by cruel and
necessary extension a plea for himself, and a familiar plea to Stowe’s
readers.
This moment of appeal is the most apparent intersection between
Tom’s story and temperance tales. However, once one recognizes the
congruence of the two strains, then Tom’s entire narrative can be read as
a retelling of the temperance tale, with Tom in the wife’s role throughout;
Uncle Tom’s Cabin in this reading emerges as a new protest narrative
modeled closely and purposively on the familiar radicalism of its ideologi-

18 Ryan C. Cordell
cal and political predecessors. Tom’s story is not a downward spiral tied
to one rapidly dilapidating, authoritative man, but his successive masters
each resemble the temperance drunkard at increasingly depraved stages
of his condition. And the novel makes clear that each master is a bit more
liberal with spirits than the last; though the drinks are props to the main
drama, they point readers toward the temperance figure that Arthur Shelby,
Augustine St. Clare, Simon Legree, and George Shelby each in turn em-
body. The demon of slavery, once again, is closely hitched to demon
rum, and the two symbols are knit in the succession of masters shaping
Uncle Tom’s tragedy.
The reader first encounters Tom in what is, given his enslavement,
a scene of comfort and security—surrounded by his family, both immedi-
ate and, given his intimacy with young George, extended. That Tom is
introduced surrounded by children has led many critics to argue that Stowe
is purposefully working to feminize, or at least domesticate, his charac-
ter.42 That Tom is introduced with his master’s son, George, indicates
metaphorical familial ties with Mr. Shelby himself. In the house nearby
this scene of contentment and peace, however, “two gentlemen were
sitting alone over their wine. . . . There were no servants present” (Tom
7; my emphasis). As there are no women in temperance-tale taverns,
there are no servants—read slaves—present as Mr. Shelby and Haley do
their sordid business. Mattingly presciently notes that, by placing alcohol
so prominently in the scene, “Stowe quickly reveals the nature of the
slave trader Haley”: the wine is centered between the men, however, and
its presence reveals Arthur Shelby’s role in the budding drama as well.43
Like first-stage temperance drunkards, Mr. Shelby is no villain but
rather “a fair average kind of man, good-natured and kindly.” He has,
however, “speculated largely and quite loosely,” and now, over a glass of
wine, he initiates Tom’s long descent (Tom 15). George Aiken’s theatri-
cal adaptation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin emphasizes the alcoholic presence in
this scene; Haley is specifically directed to drink twice and fill his own
glass two times, and another prompt directs both men’s glasses to be
filled, indicating that Mr. Shelby is also drinking. Shelby’s glass of wine
speaks volumes: the well-trained temperance reader knows that a single
drink quickly multiplies, attended by miseries.
By the time Tom falls to his knees before Augustine St. Clare, his
trajectory, as mapped onto temperance tales, is already plotted. Despite
St. Clare’s pledge to Tom, and despite his private resolution, “I’ll keep my
faith with him, too,” the temperance reader knows he will not (Tom 212).
To be fair, it is not clear that St. Clare leaves home on his fateful final night
to drink, but when he decides, “I believe I’ll go down street, a few mo-
ments, and hear the news, to-night,” and then refuses Tom’s accompani-

Studies in American Fiction 19
ment, the wheels of temperance fiction, already turning, begin to spin.
The domestic temperance drunkard often vacillates between “alternations
of short-lived reformations, exciting hopes only to be destroyed,” and the
news St. Clare wishes to hear was often, in the mid-nineteenth century,
discussed at the tavern.44 That St. Clare will not allow Tom to come along
also hints that his destination is questionable; by leaving Tom behind, St.
Clare leaves behind his conscience, the angel of his house.
And indeed, St. Clare is once again brought home, near death, under
the support of other men—“several men, bringing a body, wrapped in a
cloak, and lying on a shutter”—explicitly recalling the drunken state which
inspired Tom’s temperance appeal (Tom 324). St. Clare “had turned into
a café” when two men, “who were both partially intoxicated,” began to
fight, fatally stabbing St. Clare as he attempted to separate them. If the
word “café” is ambiguous here, the scene apparently was not so to read-
ers and later interpreters. Theatrical versions of Uncle Tom seem to have
staged St. Clare’s fatal blow in a tavern, and in the first film of version of
the story (1903), St. Clare’s death-knell falls in what is unmistakably a
barroom.45 Augustine’s decision to return to the site of drinking, even if
he did not himself imbibe, points once again to his “shiftlessness.” More-
over, his consistent refusal to provide insurance for his slaves heightens
the peril of his return to or even toward alcohol.
St. Clare’s trip to the tavern, in the footsteps of countless temperance
drunkards, invokes that earlier tradition, and instructs readers how to
read the scene. Tom, helplessly following his master “to the passage, out
of the court,” and then, later, pitifully supporting his dying frame, is both
dutiful and vulnerable. “The Drunkard’s Daughter,” Kate, “had learned
that endurance, not happiness, was her allotted portion,” and this is pre-
cisely Tom’s disposition during St. Clare’s death, as he “proceeded com-
posedly with his work, amid the lamentations and sobs and cries of the
affrighted servants.”46 Once again, Aiken further dramatizes this tension:
as St. Clare realizes, “Tom, one thing preys upon my mind—I have for-
gotten to sign your freedom papers. What will become of you when I am
gone?” Tom only replies, “Don’t think of that, mas’r.”47 St. Clare embod-
ies the mid-stage temperance lush and, as countless temperance tales
maintain, there is a very short leap from the lush to the reprobate drunk-
ard, and short leap for the angel of the house into filth and despair.
In domestic temperance fiction this second, more dramatic fall ushers
in the worst depravities of the tale—the shanty-home, hard labor for the
wife or child, disease and death—and these are precisely the scenes that
St. Clare’s death initiates for Tom. Notably, Tom’s next and final travail is
where most readers see the obvious condemnation of the bottle in Uncle
Tom’s Cabin, marked “in the horrid activities at Simon Legree’s planta-

20 Ryan C. Cordell
tion.”48 Simon Legree is nothing if not a nasty drunk. He drinks through-
out his section of the novel: to put himself in a good mood—“Legree had
been drinking to that degree that he was inclining to be very gracious”—
or to keep himself in a bad mood—“Legree was just mixing himself a
tumbler of punch . . . grumbling, as he did so” (Tom 352, 378). The very
substance of Legree’s house is tainted by his wicked habit—“The wall-
paper was defaced, in spots, by slops of beer and wine”—as are his
slaves Quimbo, and Sambo:
Legree was often wont, when in a gracious humor, to get these two
worthies into his sitting-room, and, after warming them up with
whiskey, amuse himself by setting them to singing, dancing, or fight-
ing, as the humor took him. (Tom 377, 383)
Legree’s abandonment to drink typifies his absolute abandonment to the
slavery system, his whole-hearted embrace of its darkest realities.
When last seen, Legree is apparently dying in the throes of delirium
tremens. The narrator reports, after Cassy and Emmeline begin perform-
ing their “authentic ghost story,” that “Legree became a harder drinker
than ever before. He no longer drank cautiously, prudently, but impru-
dently and recklessly.” Soon he is desperately ill, and “[n]one could bear
the horrors of that sick room, when he raved and screamed, and spoke of
sights which almost stopped the blood of those who heard him” (Tom
431). The fall of Legree takes a page directly out of the sensational dark
temperance story. A dark temperance strain is prominent during the last
stage of Tom’s journey as well; the redemptive impulse of domestic tem-
perance remains, however, in the figure of Tom’s fourth and final master,
George Shelby.
Even as Legree disintegrates, physically and morally, “the Young
Master,” as Stowe names the chapter in question, arrives on Legree’s
plantation to repurchase Tom. The reader knows from the novel’s rein-
troduction of George that he has, with the aid of his mother, spent the
past several months repairing the damage his father did to their home and
business. Most important, however, is the transformative power of this
scene; if Arthur Shelby stands in the place of the early drunkard, care-
lessly indulging in minor excesses of both spirit and enslavement, his son
is the reformed drunkard, the new-minted temperance man. In a parallel
scene in “The Drunkard’s Wife,” the newly-pledged Dr. Harper kneels—
in an echo of his wife’s kneeling plea earlier—by the decrepit form of his
wife, who is sick and worn from overwork and abuse. She declares un-
conditional love, “I’ve given it all to you, Doctor . . . and I’d give you my
heart’s blood if it would do you any good,” and then her husband declares
his reformation:

Studies in American Fiction 21
“From this hour I am a changed man—from this hour I will be to
you what I was in years long passed away: the remembrance of
which is still dear to me. Last night I threw myself within the sphere
of the great moral reformation that is now progressing—the temper-
ance reformation—and I feel, I know, that there is in that sphere a
sustaining power that will keep me true to my pledge. For the past, I
dare not ask you to forgive me. If you can, let its deeds sink as much
as possible into oblivion. But for the future, take hope. In the strength
of Him whose divine power is present in every good resolution, I will
be true to my wife, my children and myself!”49
Similarly, George Shelby kneels beside Uncle Tom, who overflows with
charity toward all, including the succession of masters who have brought
him to this low point: “Give my love to Mas’r, and dear good Missis, and
everybody in the place! Ye don’t know! ‘Pears like I loves ‘em all! I loves
every creatur’ everywhar!—it’s nothing but love! O, Mas’r George!” (Tom
427). This statement, perhaps difficult for the modern reader to accept, is
remarkably similar to the temperance wife’s sickbed declaration, and
George’s response to Tom echoes that of the reformed husband. As he
kneels a few pages later on Tom’s grave, George Shelby makes his own
proclamation: “Witness, eternal God…oh, witness, that, from this hour,
I will do what one man can to drive out this cause of slavery from my
land!” (Tom 429). Again, the main horror in Uncle Tom’s Cabin is not
drink, but slavery, and here the former slave master in essence signs a
pledge for abolition, a pledge Stowe urges her readers to ratify.
If temperance fiction served “to point out women’s precarious posi-
tion with regards to the law,” then Stowe’s reinsertion of temperance
tropes into the abolition debate attempts to equate, in the minds of her
readers, the plight of the slave, male or female, with that of the white,
middle-class wife and mother.50 Writing about the “novel of purpose” in
the nineteenth century, Claybaugh draws a direct parallel between the
aims of period fiction and reformist writing, seeing in both a shared “com-
mitment to expanding the domain of representation, to depicting persons
and experiences that [had] hitherto been ignored or treated unseriously,
such as poverty, drunkenness, and disease . . . laborers, servants, and
slaves.” Moreover, this shared purpose was understood by both writers
and readers as “novels were written, published, read, and reviewed ac-
cording to expectations learned from social reform,” expectations that the
novel could “act on its readers—and, through its readers, the world.”51
We must remember, though, as Cynthia Griffin Wolff helpfully reminds

22 Ryan C. Cordell
us, that in 1850 abolition was in the United States “an unpopular, minor-
ity cause,”52 while temperance activism—perhaps because drink was a
problem across class and geographic boundaries, including the middle-
class communities to which Stowe primarily wrote—saturated mainstream
American society. Stowe’s feat in Uncle Tom’s Cabin is that she makes
slavery, as intemperance had been, “an immediate enemy” to women and,
one must assume, men too, when it had previously been pushed aside in
favor of a more “direct” social concern, the bottle.53 In so doing, she
creates space for an antislavery novel to “act on” readers who have been
largely unmoved by the claims of abolition heretofore.
If “[t]he great strength of temperance leaders was their ability to
meld a progressive message with a rhetorical presentation and image
comfortable to a large number of women and men,” then Stowe’s use of
said rhetoric and images can be read as an attempt to replicate that com-
fort and bring it to bear in an abolitionist project.54 Stowe uses temper-
ance figures to bring an alien hero into her middle-class, white readers’
parlors, to make the evil of slavery more obviously, patently evil, and to
make Tom’s predicament tenuous and terrifying. Casting her dark, mus-
cular, African-American, male protagonist in a familiar, sentimental, middle-
class, female character role, Stowe uses a familiar radicalism to guide her
readers’ primed responses toward an unfamiliar one. In the role of the
temperance wife, Stowe seems to hope, the wide reading public would
receive Tom into their thoughts and sympathies, recognize the imme-
diacy of his plight, and take action against the evil it represents.
Notes
I would like to thank the members of the Harriet Beecher Stowe Society, Steven
Knepper, and especially Stephen Railton for their comments and suggestions about
earlier versions of this essay.
1 Harriet Beecher Stowe, “Let Every Man Mind His Own Business,” in The May-
flower; or, Sketches of Scenes and Characters among the Descendents of the Pil-
grims (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1843), 113 < http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/
etcbin/eafbin2/toccer-eaf?id=eaf383&tag=private&data=/texts/eaf/browse
&part=0>.
2 Carol Mattingly, Well-Tempered Women: Nineteenth-Century Temperance Rheto-
ric (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1998), 6, and John Frick, Theater,
Culture and Temperance Reform in Nineteenth-Century America (Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003), 1.
3 Jack S. Blocker, American Temperance Movements: Cycles of Reform (Boston:

Studies in American Fiction 23
Twayne Publishers, 1989), 41, and Ian Tyrell, “Women and Temperance in Antebel-
lum America,” Civil War History 28 (1982), 132.
4 See Stephen Railton, “Online Commentary,” in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American
Culture: A Multi-Media Archive, ed. Stephen Railton (Charlottesville: Univ. of
Virginia, 2005) <www.iath.virginia.edu/utc/>. I will refer to Railton’s archive fre-
quently here, and will hereafter cite it as UTCAC. Interestingly, Aiken was ap-
proached to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin by the Howards, whose daughter Cordelia was
acting the role of the drunkard’s daughter, Julia, in The Drunkard; she later became
the first child to assume the role of Eva St. Clare in Aiken’s smash hit.
5 Mattingly, Tempered, 127, 24.
6 William H. Smith, The Drunkard; or, the Fallen Saved: A Moral Domestic Drama
in Five Acts (New York: Wm. Taylor and Co., 1850), UTCAC <www.iath. virginia.edu/
utc/sentimnt/drunkardhp.html>; T. S. Arthur, “The Drunkard’s Wife,” in Temper-
ance Tales: Or, Six Nights with the Washingtonians, Vol. 2 (Philadelphia: Leary &
Getz, 1848); Carolyn Lee Whiting Hentz, “The Drunkard’s Daughter,” in Water
Drops from Women Writers: A Temperance Reader, ed. Carol Mattingly
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 2001), 94.
7 Nicholas O. Warner, “Temperance, Morality, and Medicine in the Fiction of Harriet
Beecher Stowe,” in The Serpent in the Cup: Temperance in American Literature,
ed. David S. Reynolds and Debra J. Rosenthal (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts
Press, 1997), 141.
8 Amanda Claybaugh, The Novel of Purpose: Literature and Social Reform in the
Anglo-American World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 2007), 47.
9 The plot I describe is quite similar to what Claybaugh calls the “plot of doubled
promises” (94) which she identifies almost exclusively with temperance fiction writ-
ten by women. She makes a convincing case for the predominance of women writers
among those who penned redemptive temperance stories, but as two of the major
temperance authors I treat here, T. S. Arthur and William H. Smith, are men, I will
use “domestic temperance” where Claybaugh often uses “women’s temperance.”
10 T. S. Arthur, “The Drunkard’s Wife,” 7.
11 Hentz, 94.
12 Arthur, 15–16.
13 Smith, 35.
14 Smith, v.
15 Michael R. Booth, “The Drunkard’s Progress: Nineteenth-Century Temperance
Drama,” Dalhousie Review (1999), 211.
16 Booth, 207.

24 Ryan C. Cordell
17 Jane P. Tompkins, “Sentimental Power: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Politics of
Literary History,” Glyph 8 (1981), 87.
18 Warner, 143.
19 Warner, 143 and Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Oxford: Oxford
Univ. Press, 1998), 241; hereafter cited parenthetically.
20 Frick, 16.
21 Stowe, Tom, 76, and Anonymous, “Eddie Harold,” tract (National Temperance
Society, ca. 1870), Alcohol, Temperance, and Prohibition archive, Brown University
<http://pike.services.brown.edu/repository/repoman.php?verb=render&id=
1090959217922875>.
22 Frick, 6.
23 Reynolds, 38.
24 Even Caroline Lee Hentz, author of “The Drunkard’s Daughter” above, wrote
her own response to Mrs. Stowe: The Planter’s Northern Bride (Philadelphia: T. B.
Peterson, 1854), UTCAC <http://www.iath.virginia.edu/utc/proslav/hentzhp.html>.
25 Railton, “Online Commentary.”
26 Vidi, Mr. Frank, the Underground Mail-Agent (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo
& Co., 1853), 47, 49, UTCAC <http://www.iath.virginia.edu/utc/proslav/vidihp.html>;
hereafter cited parenthetically.
27 This coupling of work and the site of drinking recalls Stowe’s placement of Haley,
Loker, and Marks in a tavern as they discuss their sordid business.
28 W. L. G. Smith, Life at the South; or, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” As It Is (Buffalo: Geo.
H. Derby and Co., 1852), 391, UTCAC <http://www.iath.virginia.edu/utc/proslav/
smithhp.html>.
29 J. W. Page, Uncle Robin in His Cabin in Virginia, and Tom without One in Boston
(Richmond: J. W. Randolph, 1853), 55, UTCAC <http://www.iath.virginia.edu/utc/
proslav/pagehp.html>.
30 Recalling, in its very title, Hentz’s “The Drunkard’s Daughter.”
31 V. G. Cowdin, Ellen; or, the Fanatic’s Daughter (Mobile, Alabama: S. H. Goetzel
& Company, 1860), 172, UTCAC <http://www.iath.virginia.edu/utc/proslav/
cowdinhp.html>; hereafter cited parenthetically.
32 L. S. M., “[Review of Uncle Tom’s Cabin],” Southern Quarterly Review (January
1853), 100, UTCAC <http://iath.virginia.edu/utc/reviews/rere113bt.html>.
33 Hentz, “The Drunkard’s Daughter,” 103.

Studies in American Fiction 25
34 Arthur, 8, 11.
35 Mattingly, Tempered, 13, 123, 14.
36 Claybaugh, 88.
37 Quoted in Mattingly, Tempered, 35.
38 Tyrell, 131.
39 Tompkins, 84.
40 Claybaugh, 48.
41 Later, as Claybaugh shows in Purpose, both the abolition and temperance move-
ments would contribute to the campaign for women’s rights “a powerful rhetoric
for articulating the suffering that took place within the home” (90). That the two
could be so effectively blended in that later movement stems in part from the
frequent borrowings between temperance and antislavery rhetoric during the hey-
day of each. These movements grew organically through, around, and into each
other, and many of the same reformers championed each.
42 Most famously in Elizabeth Ammons, “Heroines in Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” American
Literature 49, vol. 2 (1977).
43 Carol Mattingly, Water Drops from Women Writers: A Temperance Reader
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1998), 207.
44 Stowe, “Let Every Man,” 129.
45 The stage directions for several theatrical versions of Uncle Tom indicate bottles
and the like as props for this scene, but the setting is not explicitly drawn. However,
there are good reasons to believe the scene was set in a tavern. The bottles are one,
but the scene’s setting in the first movie is another, stronger reason. The first
several Uncle Tom films were based directly on nineteenth-century stage produc-
tions, and drew their aesthetic from those earlier performances. The popular read-
ing of this scene seems to have been that St. Clare returns to a tavern on the night
of his death, though not to drink.
46 Hentz, 96, and Stowe, Tom, 325.
47 George L. Aiken, Uncle Tom’s Cabin; a Domestic Drama, in Six Acts (New York,
Samuel French, 1858), 41, UTCAC <http://iath.virginia.edu/utc/onstage/scripts/
aikenhp.html>.
48 Mattingly, Drops, 207.
49 Arthur, 43–44.
50 Mattingly, Tempered, 14.

26 Ryan C. Cordell
51 Claybaugh, 6, 7.
52 Cynthia Griffin Wolff, “‘Masculinity’ in Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” American Quarterly
47, no. 4 (1995), 598.
53 Tyrell, 131.
54 Mattingly, Tempered, 2.