Antislavery Politics in Harriet Beecher Stowe's The Minister's Wooing and The Pearl of Orr's Island

Abstract

Harriet Beecher Stowe established her literary credentials in the early 1850s with the antislavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin. After one more novel of the plantation South, however, she set The Minister's Wooing (1859) and The Pearl of Orr's Island (1861-62) in the North. Historians and literary critics have taken this as a signal that Stowe had moved her focus to the gender and religious issues that would dominate much of her later work. Slavery, however, plays a large role in these two novels. Stowe uses slavery as the most egregious example of inequality in American society, pointing to its detrimental effects before engaging in egalitarian arguments about gender and religion. She also enters into contemporary political debates about slavery. By recognizing the importance of slavery in these novels, we see that Stowe remained a significant voice in the Republican Party's ongoing, public debate over the morality of slavery and the necessity of its immediate abolition.