Manifest Destiny, Manifest Domesticity, and the Leaven of Whiteness in Uncle Tom's Cabin

Abstract

ISABELLA FÜRTH Manifest Destiny, Manifest Domesticity, and the Leaven of Whiteness in Onde Tom's Cabin Another glow than sunset's fire Has filled the west with light, Where field and garner, barn and byre, Are blazing through the night. John Greenleaf Whittier, "At Port Royal" The west that glows so in John GreenleafWhittier's "At Port Royal" signifies more than the scorched-earth retreat of Southerners in the face of the Union army's occupation of the town. Coming as it does in the midst of a poem that celebrates the liberation of the local slave population and the commencement of "that work of civilization which was accepted as the grave responsibility of those who had labored for freedom," the glow in the west marks not only the rout of a confederacy "wild with fear and hate," but also the light of the nation's progress towards the day "ob jubilee."1 As such, it functions as a sign among signs in keeping with the abolitionist movement's traditional reliance on typological exegesis. The millennium of freedom has been foretold by God sing the "dusky gondoliers" of the poem, and all of nature concurs in pronouncing its inevitable arrival: "De norf-wind tell it to de pines, / De wild-duck to the sea. . . . / De rice-bird mean it when he sing, / De eagle when he scream" (lines 61-68). That a glow in the west should stand among these signs as harbinger of emancipation is Arizona Quarterly Volume 55, Number 2, Summer 1999 Copyright © 1999 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004-1610 32Isabella Fürth hardly surprising, but it does raise questions as to the extent and nature of the "progress" heralded by the poem, for Whittier's light-filled west also invokes the golden West, rich in natural resources and "luminous with the accumulated lights of European and American civilization" that is one of manifest destiny's signal promises (Benton 46). As political ideologies, the predominantly Republican espousal of abolitionism and the predominantly Democratic invocation of manifest destiny display some striking convergences. Each doctrine was indebted to a sense of the United States as a chosen land and Americans as chosen people, and adherents of each tended to present their mission as an inexorable progress mandated by God, a progress that would culminate in the conversion of the entire country into a redeemed nation —one free of slavery or one that would extend republican institutions across the American continents. Just as John O'Sullivan declares that the United States is driven by "our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence" and prophesies the day when "two hundred and fifty, or three hundred millions—and American millions —[are] destined to gather beneath the flutter of the stripes and stars, in the fast hastening year of the Lord 1945!" (28, 30; emphasis added), for Harriet Beecher Stowe emancipation serves as a sign of the millennium. It is, she says, "one of the predicted voices of the latter day, saying under the whole heavens, 'It is done: the kingdoms of the world are become the kingdoms of our Lord and ofhis Christ'" ("Reply" 285). Likewise, both the discourse of abolition and that of manifest destiny emphasize the link between physical migration across the landscape and spiritual migration towards a perfected nation. In Stowe's account , the nation's movement towards perfection would have been an unstoppable progress if not for Southern extremism. In her defense of Union policy, she recounts the Republican rationale for prohibiting slavery's expansion rather than eliminating it altogether as based on a teleological evolutionary logic: "They reasoned thus: Slavery ruins land, and requires fresh territory for profitable working. Slavery increases a dangerous population, and requires an expansion of this population for safety. Slavery, then, being hemmed in by impassable limits, emancipation in each State becomes a necessity" (274-75). hn this optimistic view, both territorial expansion and emancipation are presented more as divinely ordained forces of nature than as matters requiring direction through policy. The most telling congruence of all, however, is that by ?a??/est Destiny, Manifest Domesticity33 the 1850s proponents of both ideologies, both manifest destiny's boosters and abolitionist...