Dismantling the Sentimental in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp

Abstract:In this essay, I analyze Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Dred to show how Stowe’s confrontation with Protestant religious institutions in the 1850s led her to deconstruct the sentimental techniques she had previously relied on in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Scrutinizing Presbyterian leaders’ response to slavery both at a public camp meeting and at a private gathering of Northern and Southern ministers, Stowe assigns the main responsibility for slavery to Protestant ministers fearful of losing cultural power amid the intense denominational competition of the nineteenth century. In particular, she shows how the clergy justified silence on the issue of slavery by assigning slavery to a secular, civil sphere and narrowly defining the Christian church’s realm as purely spiritual, even as those same clergy advanced a nationalist political agenda.