Because marriage and property laws, along with the lack of suffrage, denied women rights thought to accompany republican citizenship, in feminist writings the analogy of woman to slave was seen as particularly apt, despite the fact that it was, after all, metaphorical. As Angelina Grimké remarked in Letters to Catharine E. Beecher (1838), "The investigation of the rights of the slave has led me to a better understanding of my own." Margaret Fuller, in her impassioned and poetical celebration of woman's potential, Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), published the same year as -142- Frederick's Narrative, likened woman to a slave and man to a slave trader. In Letters on the Equality of the Sexes (1838), Sarah Grimké pictured the situation of the typical wife in this way: "man has exercised the most unlimited and brutal power over woman, in the peculiar character of husband, — a word in most countries synonymous with tyrant." At the epochal Seneca Falls women's rights convention of 1848, the early culmination of organized feminist activity, Stanton, in her resounding "Declaration of Sentiments," therefore revised Jefferson's Declaration, substituting male for British tyrannical authority, in order to call attention to the ways in which the nation's social institutions and legal codes mainly served the interests of America's white male citizenry. That same year, the New York State Legislature, in response to thoughtful women critics like Stanton, passed the nation's most liberalized married women's property act, which made it legal for women to maintain control over property they brought to their marriages.
The Married Women's Property Act of 1848 followed in the wake of the land reforms modifying the near feudal control New York's upstate landholding families held over their tenants. The antirent agitation leading up to these reforms prompted James Fenimore Cooper's Littlepage trilogy — Satanstoe (1845), The Chainbearer (1845), and The Redskins (1846) — which forecast a reign of demagoguery should the landed gentry lose its leaseholds — and the land reforms, along with the married women's property act, lay behind his The Ways of the Hour (1850). - In portraying in this late novel a woman who deserts her husband, is falsely accused by a mob of murder, and is eventually revealed to be insane, Cooper suggests that allowing women too much liberty could lead to the breakdown of civilization itself. (A similar argument informed the pseudonymous Fred Folio's Lucy Boston; or, Women's Rights and Spiritualism [1851].) During the 1850s, divorce was addressed from a very different perspective by women writers, who remained convinced of the need for liberalized divorce laws. Fanny Fern (Sarah Payson Willis Parton), whose first novel, Ruth Hall (1855), touched on the wretched marriage and eventual death in a mental hospital of Ruth's friend Mrs. Leon, focused in Rose Clark (1856) on a divorced woman who, hardly debilitated by her condition, develops her self-possession and self-reliant virtue to the point where she remarries her former husband on egalitarian -143- terms. More boldly, Mary Sargeant Nichols, in her autobiographical novel Mary Lyndon (1855), presented the eponymous protagonist divorcing her tyrannous and cloddish husband, and eventually attaining a happier second marriage with a man who shares her ideals of the primacy to marriage of free, unconstrained love.
Of all the novels published before the Civil War, Harriet Beecher Stowe's million-copy best-seller, Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), the novel Lincoln credited with making "this big war," most compellingly interwove the major strands of antebellum reform: feminism, temperance, and antislavery. Temperance, for example, is central to the novel's representation of power relationships — between masters and slaves and, analogously, between men and women. The novel begins with Shelby signing over the slaves Tom and Harry to the obnoxious slave trader Haley, as the men sit together drinking wine and brandy. By the end of the novel we descend from this relatively restrained scene of intemperance to the unrestrained hell of the harddrinking brute Simon Legree's plantation. Along the way Stowe depicts a typical Kentucky tavern, wherein a crowd of slave hunters, "free-and-easy dogs," spit gobs of tobacco juice, drink tumblers "half full of raw spirits," and, significantly, wear hats, what Stowe terms "the characteristic emblem of man's sovereignty." White male sovereignty, rather than a prohibitionary politics, is the central issue here, with temperance blending into feminism, as Stowe presents male enslavers rendered intoxicated (and dangerous) less by alcoholic beverages than by their seemingly unlimited power over slaves and women. Representing "home-loving and affectionate" slaves, male and female, as admirably domestic and womanly, Stowe not only places the slaves at the center of her culturally revisionary idealization of matriarchy but also, in the tradition of the Grimkés, Fuller, and Stanton, points to the "enslaved" status of women in patriarchal society. The tragic destiny of the slave Prue, therefore, who was raised as a "breeder," speaks in part, Stowe implies, to the situation of all women in America. In this respect, the slave warehouse, where "stubbed-looking, commonplace men" physically examine the slaves Susan and Emmeline, provides a metonymic picture of race and gender relationships in America, with the suggestion that Simon Legree should be taken as the representative American man in extremis (just as the antipatriarchal Simeon Halliday of the Quaker settlement rep-144- resents the bright reverse image that Stowe hoped would accompany America's regenerative transformation). Violating women and slaves alike in the secluded space of his unregulated plantation, insisting in blasphemous ways on his mastery — "I'm your church now," he proclaims to Tom — Legree, having rejected the spiritual guidance of his mother (and thus of God), revels in his mastery until Cassy resourcefully debilitates the enfeebled, guilt-ridden drunkard.
As suggested by Cassy's rage, and also by Stowe's analogizing of George Harris's armed battle against fugitive slave hunters to the American and Hungarian Revolutions, natural rights theory figures prominently in the feminist politics of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Moreover, in addressing the evils of the Fugitive Slave Law, the novel offers critiques of Northern capitalism's implication in slavery, and of the implication of Northern and Southern organized religion as well. Reform must be national and wide-ranging, according to Stowe, or dreadful consequences will follow. For one, as St. Clare prophesies, America under slavery risks falling into a bloody, apocalyptic race war. For another, as Stowe's sermonic final pages portend, America under slavery, as a nation of sinners, risks God's apocalyptic wrath. In this sense evangelical reform — as embodied by Eva and Tom — is of special urgency. As Stowe explains, if readers can "feel right," as Eva makes Miss Ophelia and St. Clare (and the reader) feel right, or as Tom makes the slave overseers Quimbo and Sambo (and the reader) feel right, conversion of self and society would proceed naturally, thereby fending off the various cataclysms — racial and eschatological — informing the dark imagination of the novel. In important ways, then, the emphasis on evangelicalism, with its millennial promise, serves to contain the novel's more troubling insurrectionary dimension, particularly as embodied by the rebels George Harris and Cassy. The novel concludes with a series of Christian conversions on the part of the rebels, and with Stowe, through Harris, endorsing African colonization as a possible solution to America's racial problems — as a safety outlet, as it were, provided less by moderate racialists, such as her father Lyman Beecher, with whose politics Harriet disagreed, than by God, who has a larger design.