A fear of uncontained racial violence informed a number of the novelistic "responses" to Uncle Tom's Cabin, such as Caroline Lee Hentz's The Planter's Northern Bride (1854) and -145- William Gilmore's Woodcraft (1854), though, unlike Stowe, slavery apologists insisted that the well-ordered plantation could control such violence. In her subsequent novel, Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856), Stowe countered this notion, and in doing so revealed even more clearly than in Uncle Tom's Cabin the social fears and desires underlying her antislavery position, and the underlying elitism as well. In A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1853), Stowe worried over the debilitating effects of slavery on Southern whites, and remarked on the pervasiveness in the South of what she termed "Poor White Trash": "This miserable class of whites form, in all the Southern States, a material for the most horrible and ferocious of mobs. Utterly ignorant, and inconceivably brutal, they are like some blind, savage monster, which, when aroused, tramples heedlessly over everything in its way." In Dred, while sympathetically addressing the revolutionary perspective of the escaped slave Dred — presented as the son of the historical slave conspirator Denmark Vesey and modeled, as millennialist revenger, on Nat Turner — Stowe's principal focus is on the increasingly intemperate mobs of "poor white trash" under the control of demagogues. For, after the death of the newly converted plantation mistress Nina Gordon, who, under the guidance of her beloved Edward Clayton, had begun to adopt antislavery beliefs, her plantation and slaves fall into the hands of her brother Tom Gordon, a Legree-like enslaver intoxicated by alcohol and power. The novel concludes with the picture of an utterly degenerate mob under the control of Gordon, and a despairing sense of the nation falling apart under the pressure of the insurrectionary energies of the proslavery rabble. Clayton, who had wanted to reform slavery from within by educating and freeing his slaves, flees to Canada where he sets up a model township; Dred is shot and killed when he attempts to rescue an escaped slave from the drunken Tom's drunken mob.
Anxieties similar to Stowe's about the poor and working classes arguably lie behind much of the middle-class reforms of the period. In this respect, reform could sometimes serve the interests both of change and of the status quo — that is, preserving the hegemony of white Protestant elites. Desires to preserve and control can be viewed at an unattractive extreme in the period's pervasive nativism, itself a kind of Protestant reformism. For it was the opinion of a considerable number of Protestants that the increasing Catholic immigration -146- of the period was the greatest cause for alarm about social decay, signaling America's need for a "Protestant reformation": 54,00 °Catholics arrived in the 1820s, 200,000 in the 1830s, 700,000 in the 1840s, and 200,000 in the year 1850 alone. To meet the challenge posed by these immigrants, the evangelical community developed the vast publishing network of the American Tract Society (founded in 1825) and related organizations to disseminate and perpetuate Protestant-republican values. Lyman Beecher, in his widely read nativist tract Plea for the West (1835), emphasized the role of the word in this "reformatory" campaign: "Whatever European nations do, our nation must read and think from length and breadth, from top to bottom." And read Americans did, as they made best-sellers of numerous convent captivity novels dramatizing putative Catholic plots to undermine the values and institutions of the Republic. In their popular first-person narrative accounts, Rebecca Theresa Reed's Six Months in a Convent (1835) and Maria Monk's notorious Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery (1836) presented sadistic nuns and priests, violations in the confessional, evidence of Roman Catholic conspiracies, and, ultimately, a summons to Protestant reform (and to spend money on this kind of fiction) by remaining vigilant to Catholic subversives. Monk's sensational book of horrors sold upwards of three hundred thousand copies through 1860, spawned numerous other convent captivity novels, such as Charles Frothingham's The Convent's Doom (1854) and Josephine Bunkley's Miss Bunkley's Book: The Testimony of an Escaped Novice from the Sisterhood of Charity (1855), and helped to legitimize nativist discourse, which played an important role in the founding of the Republican Party, as a discourse of social reform.
Nativism and fears of insurrectionary disorder from the poor and working classes also played an important role in the urban reform movement of the period. Like Southerners concerned about the possibility of slave revolts and abolitionist conspiracies, Northerners remained concerned about the dangers lurking beneath the surface of what came to be regarded as the mysterious and wicked city — a trope central to a number of antebellum urban novels, such as Ned Buntline's Mysteries and Miseries of New York (1848) and Ann Stephens's Fashion and Famine (1854). Especially worrying to cultural elites was the marked upsurge in riots in Northeast cities between 1830 and -147- 1860, and the upsurge during the same period of labor organizing and discontent — or, we might say, urban reform from below. Frances Wright and leaders of the New York Workingman's Party, for example, spoke out against "wage slavery," and writers as diverse as Orestes Brownson, in The Laboring Classes (1840), Theodore Parker, in A Sermon on Merchants (1846), and George Lippard, in such urban reform novels as The Quaker City and New York: Its Upper Ten and Lower Million (1853), excoriated the rich for exploiting the working poor. In "The Laboring Classes" Brownson went so far as to predict a violent uprising from the workers similar to a slave revolt, "the like of which the world as yet has never witnessed, and from which. . the heart of Humanity recoils with horror"; and in The Quaker City Lippard presented a dream vision of God wreaking vengeance on "the factory Prince" for his crimes against "the slaves of the city."
Fearful of confronting rebellious "slaves" in their own region, urban reformers of the middle and upper classes invoked the putative republican ideals of hierarchy and order and sought to perpetuate these ideals through the creation of reformatory institutions — prisons, mental asylums, almshouses, juvenile delinquent homes, and, relatedly, schools and factories. These new institutions of social reform, so argued their promoters, for the most part Whigs convinced of the malleability of human nature (and concerned about the Democrats' mobilization of Catholics and other "undesirables"), would make model republicans of the dangerous working classes. At the very least, these institutions would keep in check, as reformer Horace Mann put it, the "mutinous" tendencies of those down below.
Indeed, with their emphases on discipline, hierarchy, and custodial isolation, the new asylums, prisons, and other self-contained reform institutions resembled not only the slave plantation but also the institution afloat of the period's popular nautical romances — the wellordered ship at sea. A tension between the claims of the "organic" state and the claims of the aggrieved and exploited individual — the tension, as it were, between urban reform from above and urban reform from below — is therefore central to much of the "escapist" sea fiction of the period. In many of these nautical narratives the hierarchical ship, like the idealized Northern reform institution, endows impoverished young men with a sense of place and purpose. In -148- Charles Briggs's popular The Adventures of Harry Franco: A Tale of the Great Panic (1839), Franco recuperatively takes to sea to escape bankruptcy. Similar financial situations motivate Melville's narrators in Redburn and White-Jacket, who bear some resemblance to the greenhorn of Richard Henry Dana's best-selling Two Years Before the Mast (1840). Like the ship in Dana's Two Years and the reform institutions of America's urban centers, the ship in White-Jacket, compared to "a city afloat," "a sort of state prison afloat," and an "asylum," adopts the order of the factory and the prison, not only because it houses sailors in search of purposive order, but also because it houses the disorderly poor — a rough lot of sailors — that urban reformers wanted isolated and enclosed.