Selma: A Bicentennial History

Selma: A Bicentennial History
© 2017 Alston Fitts III
384 pages

On December 4th, 1820, the Alabama legislature granted a town charter to a burgeoning community established on a high bluff overlooking the Alabama river. The place, named after a cities of heroes from a Scottish poem in the romantic period, would quickly create its own heroes and stories. In Selma: A Bicentennial History, longtime Selma resident Alston Fitts delivers a celebratory history of the town and its proud yet troubled heritage, in advance of its 200th birthday.  He builds on his initial history (Selma: Queen City of the Blackbelt),  which was published in the 1980s; here, his initial history is greatly expanded, using references to other works to take readers through the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the 20th century through one city's experiences. The work never shies away from the city's most controversial moments, but strives to be fair to all parties. For a Selmian, this is a history that does the city justice, with a multitude of fascinating little stories based not just on old records, but interviews with the city's residents. Their many contributions to the book, in interviews and photographs, make it a true reflection of the city rather than just the view of one author.

To those only familiar with Selma's modern history, as a small city only remembered for being the site of the Civil Rights movement's crowning moment, Selma  reveals another place -- a center of industry and trade that rivaled Montgomery for prosperity and political influence; a city sure enough of its future to argue for its selection as the Confederate capital during the war between the States.  Selma and its mother county, Dallas,  contained some of the richest soil in Alabama, and both civic and business leaders made the most of that wealth by aggressively pursuing railroads; long after the great river had ceased to be the chief commercial artery of the state, Selma's network of banks and railroads were poised to prosper further in the 20th century. Its rails and river made a commercial center, but it was no slouch in regards to industry:  Selma housed an arsenal rivaling Richmond's as well as a principal naval foundry during the war, making it a target for Union troops; still later, during World War 2, Selma hosted an air force base that survived into the 1970s.    Selma's wealth was not merely monetary, however; her citizens were truly dedicated to the city, pouring themselves into creating civil institutions like schools, hospitals, and the library. They created block after block of magnificent buildings, many of which still stand today: the historic district of Selma is one of the nation's largest. 

Selma's past as an agricultural titan would bear unexpected fruit throughout the 20th century, however. The economic culture of the antebellum South meant that Selma and Dallas County' wealth came from fields worked by slaves,  to the degree that Dallas County  has maintained one of the largest black populations in Alabama for generations. When Reconstruction began in the postwar South, it contributed many black businessmen and politicians.  These gains would fade and be reversed by the end of the 19th century, however, culminating in the establishment of Jim Crow segregation laws and the 1901 Alabama Constitution. The latter document established barriers to voting which included poll taxes, property holdings, and the explication of Constitutional articles; these requirements together reduced the black voting population in Dallas County from several thousand to under a hundred.  These barriers, disenfranchising poor blacks and whites alike -- and flying in the face of Alabama's original constitution, which incorporated universal white male suffrage -- would not fall for over sixty years.   Selma entered the national spotlight again in 1965, when a local voting league invited Martin Luther King, Jr. to help draw attention to the cause of suffrage in the city. Fitts notes that the league was able to accomplish what it did largely because the black community in Selma was so healthy, with a strong middle class supporting several hospitals and two colleges. One of the most dramatic moments of the Selma campaign, for instance, was the mass support black teachers lent to it when they absented themselves from teaching to march instead.  Visiting in 1968, King himself was astonished by the progress of the black community, and the strengthening relationship between it and the city's white population.  Legendary mayor, Joe Smitherman, had just been elected to the office in '65, and continued to sit the big seat throughout the rest of the century in part  because he made himself a ready ally of of the black community. Unfortunately, racial harmony would be disrupted as Selma entered the 1990s,  as a certain group of lawyers created such a hostile atmosphere in the city that one of the state's most integrated systems fell to pieces.  Still, the city is doing what it can to move past that episode, as the actors involved are now dying off. Perhaps their bitterness will buried with them.  The city now has a young mayor in Darrio Melton who has already demonstrated  a strong intent to scrape away the old barnacles and begin making progress once more. 

As a modern history of Selma, Dr. Fitts has done a superb job of presenting the most essential elements of previous histories, connecting them to broader histories of the South and southern institutions (black churches, for instance, via use of Wilson Fallin's Uplifting the People),  His heavy use of interviews and the photographs of Selma citizens make it a community story, almost, and one that the generations are able to contribute to given that he references one older history written by a Selma mayor.   As a native son of the Queen City, I found quite a few questions answered here, learned some interesting tidbits along the way, and finished the book feeling ever more affectionate toward this, my storied hometown.


Related:
Selma 1965, Chuck Fager
Reporter: Covering Civil Rights...and Wrongs in Dixie, Al Benn

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
© 1969 Maya Angelou
304 pages

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is an autobiography in the form of a novel, following a young woman’s coming of age as she journeys from a small town in the South to the big city – and then there and back again.  Functionally abandoned by her parents, and constantly worried about her status as not only an awkward and homely girl from a family full of photogenic frames and faces, but being a racial outcast, Maguerite makes her way by a loving grandmother and brother and books aplenty. I read I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings largely out of peer pressure, since it is always mentioned in the hallowed company of books like The Scarlet Letter and Tom Sawyer, hailed as essential American and Southern literature.

Racism dominates Caged Bird just as the wilderness fills the reader’s experience in The Last of the Mohicans;  Angelou writes that segregation was so complete in Stamps, Arkansas that she hardly ever saw a white person.  In her younger years , Stamps’ white citizenry were phantoms who she scarcely regarded as human.  They were cold and distant authority figures, or ‘powhitetrash’ wretches who behaved like little barbarians yet expected the blacks of Stamps to defer to them.  On the rare occasions that Marguerite and her family entered the white side of Stamps to buy goods unavailable in their own neighborhoods, they ran the risk of being refused service – as happened with a dentist.

This book remains controversial because of several scenes of sexual violence, which I approached with some trepidation – intending to skim over them, if need be. There are three scenes like this within the same chapter, and Angelou renders them in a way to convey a child’s confusion and detachment – the sort of detachment one adopts while at the dentist, or in preparation for a surgery, a self-defense against panic. Following these scenes, Marguerite enters a mute period in which she reads more devotedly than ever, before finding a positive vision of womanhood in her community to guide her out of the darkness.

In her path to womanhood, Marguerite was provided with several examples, strong in their own way.   Central to her life is her grandmother, “Momma”, who operates a general store that is also the community center for Stamp’s black community.  While the store never makes them wealthy,  the family’s frugality and Momma’ adaptability allow them to weather even the Depression in mild comfort, lending money even to white business owners – including the dentist who considers his obligation merely fiscal, and refuses to budge from his policy of not treating blacks.    Momma and her family provide a safe haven for the main character and her brother, a haven not found when they visit or live with their parents.   Marguerite’s mother is beautiful and independent, but her world is full of violence; when Marguerite is raped, it is at the hand of one of her mother’s beaus. Her father, too, is handsome but not altogether reliable;  when he takes Marguerite to Mexico to buy supplies,  his drunken revelries force Maguerite as a young teenager to attempt driving for the first time in literal terra incognita – a mountainous descent in rural Mexico.   A third example for Marguerite is the mysterious Mrs. Flowers, who has a regal bearing and a full library, both of which inspire Maguerite to better things. For the most part, she takes those lessons to heart -- fighting a protracted campaign to become a streetcar conductor, the first black woman to enter the service. Yet at the end, she decides to have sex with a boy to determine that she is not a lesbian, promptly becomes pregnant, and after the delivery of her boy, the novel ends. It's as if a story of King David ended abruptly with his having Uriah killed so he could cover his petty lust with Bathsheba.  I know the person of Maguerite -- Maya Angelou -- went on to greatness, but as a novel by itself, it's a weird way to end things.

Up from Slavery

Up From Slavery
© 1901 Booker T. Washington
332 pages

Up from Slavery is an hopeful reflection by Booker T. Washington on the future of black Americans and the American nation, as he reflects on the thirty-odd years since the abolition of slavery at the time of his writing.  But this is no mere memoir of slavery and reconstruction, for Washington's life as a teacher and founder of the Tuskegee Institute gives him a perspective on education; particularly, what sort of education most befits the cultivation of liberated men and women.  Washington's ideal education, put into practice at the Tuskegee Institute, is 'holistic' in that it places as much value on the practical -- trade skills, agriculture -- as it does book learning. It is moral and social, teaching self-ownership and self-sacrifice,   Although Washington craved knowing how to read even as a child, and his drive for self-improvement was such that he worked his way across a span of a hundred miles to attend school at the Hampton Institute,  he did not see book-learning as a magical solution to the problems of his fellow freedmen.  Some had taken earnestly to the veneer of education, but shared the same disdain towards work that had poisoned the plantation elite.  When he was asked to head the fledgling school for blacks anxious to  uplift themselves, he stressed the dignity of labor, the sense of ownership; he joined students in creating bricks, hewing wood, building the physical structure  of the school.  In this same vein, their practical skills built themselves, gave them the realization that they were capable of producing a good work that they and others could use and value. It is on that foundation that book-learning can rest, and so his students followed a Benedictine schedule of "pray and work", or in his case "study, work, and pray" -- occupied from 5:30 'til 10:00 pm.

Washington was a surprising author in many ways -- opening this memoir up with a joke, and offering insights that I would have never expected. For instance, his writing indicates not a trace of hostility towards the old elite, but rather pity and sympathy ;  his time spent among the wealthy and 'noble', in both America and in England, squelched any notion of viewing them as the enemy.  (If the reader wants to be cynical, he can conclude that Washington is dwelling most on those people like Carnegie who wanted to do some good with their wealth, and putting out of mind the less noble-minded.)   I didn't expect Washington to be as wary of reconstruction as he indicated; he voices suspicion that blacks placed into electoral office were being put there simply out of vengeance against the old aristocrats, and that this would create more racial strife.   On first reading, the Booker T. Washington of Up from Slavery reads rather like saint, a Gandhi-esque figure who endures all things because he hopes and works towards the redemption and progress of all humanity.  I suspect I should read more about Washington to get a better view of the man, but I'm highly partial to his worldview here,  his disdain for the multitude in the cities who "live by their wits" and who would have profited themselves more had they grown up on the land,   living with both body and mind.  His optimism was, alas, misplaced in some respects as the Klan -- which he dismisses as a dead thing which no one would tolerate 'now' -- was reborn with greater power in the 1920s.   His fear that looking to the government for every thing would create a new servility has unfortunately been realized...not just in blacks, but in all of us.   Even so, if illiterate slaves like Frederick Douglass and Booker T Washington could  in their respective youths realize a hunger to conduct themselves like men, sovereign actors in their own lives, there's hope for us all.

Hillbilly Elegy

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis
© 2016 J.D. Vance
272 pages

Imagine a childhood in which the most stable person in your life once methodically marinated her passed-out drunken husband with lighter fluid, then set him on fire. (She did tell him if he came on drunk again, she'd kill him.)   That was J.D. Vance's story, born in an Ohio colony of Kentucky hillbillies, whose residents escaped the desperate poverty of the hills but brought its impoverished habits with them.  In Hillbilly Elegy, Vance recounts his turbulent childhood, his difficult coming of age, and the people through by he was able to escape the pit --  primarily his grandmother and the US Marine Corps.

Thomas Sowell's Black Rednecks and White Liberals introduced me to the idea that a culture of poverty has gripped southern whites and blacks -- that their culture is in fact the same, one brought over from Scotland. Vance's portrayal of that culture is personal and gripping.  It's rendered through his biography;  hill people are impulsive and violent, with an acute appreciation for family honor that leads to savage reprisals with that honor is offended.  Vance witnessed chainsaws used to counter rude suggestions made toward the family women  -- although later on, the brother protecting his sister might later get into a screaming match with her over a trivial issue.   The impulsiveness isn't limited to reactions against insulting remarks; it also expresses itself in a short-sighted view towards work. A profitable job is abandoned if waking up for it  becomes viewed as a hassle.    When this approach to life fails to produce anything, outside factors are to blame: the boss, the economy, the government. Drugs enter the picture, both as pleasures in themselves and as relief from lives filled with screaming relatives, bad ol' bosses,  and the threat of poverty. All this creates an enormous amount of chaos in the lives of people, and children raised in it grow up as emotional basket cases,  with no exposure to any other life that might make the shortcomings of theirs visible.

Vance and his sister were exposed to some of the worst of this through their mother, who -- despite some vocational accomplishment as a nurse --   fell prey to substance abuse. At least five boyfriends were foisted on her children as make-believe dads, and her go-to solution for dealing with arguments in a car was to drive the car into things -- trees, perhaps even others. Vance frequently saw neighbors hauled away by the police, but one night his mother was taken away, too. They only narrowly escaped being dumped on a random family, since their relatives were not licensed state-approved caregivers. For all of his grandmother's violent temper, she believed he could have a future, and she believed he could achieve whatever he wanted if he worked for it. She urged him not to believe the lie that the odds were stacked against him: the world was his for the taking. Only when he began living with her full time did Vance manage to find some emotional stability and make plans for the future. Those plans included the Marine Corps, which taught him self-control and responsibility, and still later Yale.   Along the way Vance continues reflecting on what these moments in his life were teaching him; Yale, for instance,  illustrated to him the power of social capital, of networking. Submitting resumes and waiting is for the underemployed; those who get ahead do so by virtue of who they know.

Hillbilly Elegy has been creating a stir lately, presumably because people want to understand why Trump is popular.  They'll probably find something here, like: "Say, Trump blames other people for our problems. That's what those hillbillies do!". Of course, all parties blame other people for the problems; that's politics.  Vance's book is an eye-opening account of the social life of Appalachia and its Midwest diaspora,  but certain aspects of that culture have much broader appeal.  The complete breakdown of the family is present both here and in accounts of urban poverty. In Ain't No Shame in my Game, for instance,  Katherine Newman documented young couples from broken families who had received so little education in being an adult that they had no idea how to feed and change their baby.  Human civilization depends on knowledge constantly being passed from the old to the new -- without that inculcation, what are we?   Also repeated in both cultures of poverty is the lack of agency -- the idea, that people are not in command of their lives but at the mercy of forces greater than they. They are either in thrall to the government, or constantly point the finger at a political party, an ethnicity, etc.  There is no taking ones fate into own's own hand.  Of course, Vance's story also illustrates that escaping poverty is no matter of pulling one's self by the bootstraps: he needed his grandmother teaching him to look toward the future, as he needed the Marines to show him how to work towards it.

Related:

• "Hillbilly Elegy: Self-Destructive Ideas and Behaviors Among the White Working Class", audio interview with author. (~25 minutes.)
• Black Rednecks, White Liberals.  Thomas Sowell
• Redneck Manifesto, Jim Goad
• The Working Poor, David Shipler
• The Scotch-Irish: A Social History, James Leyburn

Harvest of Empire

Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America
©  2000 Juan Gonzalez
416 pages

Harvest of Empire is a tale of two civilizations, Anglo and Spanish. In general terms, it recounts the history or rather the plight of Latin America, of people and cultures dominated first by European powers, and then by the colonial rebels turned colonial master, the United States.  The author ends by arguing that the United States owes as much its Hispanic tradition as its Anglo, and that it should embrace Hispanic culture  and make amends to foreign policy which has wreaked havoc throughout the eastern hemisphere.  Divided into three parts, Harvest first dwells on the roots of Anglo-American conflict by recounting the age of discovery and rise of American imperialism, moves to the "branches", in which populations disrupted by war and famine (often linked to American foreign policy) migrate to the United States to seek their fortunes, and then ends with a "harvest" that looks towards a stronger role played by Latino culture in the United States.

 Considering that two of the leading recent  Republican candidates for El Presidente were Cruz and Rubio, 'los hermanos cubanos',  there's no denying the book's relevance, despite its sixteen years of age. Even though neither are in the running now,  immigration  -- the causes and consequences of which are explored here -- remains a big-ticket item.  While some of the author's recommendations (that the United Staces embrace its Hispanic heritage and start promoting and protecting Spanish) are likely to fall flat,  at the very least this review of the United States' catastrophic record of international meddling in central America might give American leadership pause about supporting future debacles.  More convincing is the authors' case for settling the matter of Puerto Rico, which for a century has been a bastard, neither  sovereign, nor a territory or a state.  Harvest has a lot to recommend it, first as a general history of Latin America, secondly by focusing on the widely varying experiences of different Latino groups as they moved to the US.  What name recognition does Puerto Rico have with most Americans, other than the film West Side Story? ("Puerto Rico is en America now!")   The author is right when he points out that the United States is scarcely over two hundred years old, a mere blip in the historical perspective, and the past century of exploitation and dominance by D.C. over Latin America are not likely to last. Latinos will play a larger role in the United States as they continue to migrate here, and will shape D.C's policy as they achieve political influence -- and as the descendants of those who have experienced the consequences of foreign-policy imperialism, they are unlikely to support more of it.

Dixie's Forgotten People

Dixie's Forgotten People: the South's Poor Whites
© 1979 Wayne Flynt
200 pgs

Just poor people is all we were, tryin' to make a living out of black land dirt..

When Franklin Roosevelt referred to the forgotten man, he was likely thinking of those men in the city's breadlines. The South, however, was home to a host of forgotten men: poor whites, who lost in the land-grab and who industrialism largely left behind. Dixie is a quick survey into the realm of rural white poverty,  succeeded wholly by Flynt's own Poor But Proud. Despite its brevity,  it provides both flavor and substance.

Myths about displaced Norman cavaliers fleeing England to restore the old order in the South not withstanding, most poor whites came from the same stock as those men who became the masters -- at least those in the 'core south', where Flynt primarily draws from.  They emerged as economic losers, families who either arrived late and got the leftovers or soil that had already been picked clean, or who were out-done by the rising gentry creating their vast fiefdoms.  The Civil War left them with even more crushing poverty in the form of tenant farming, and the ruined south was hard to transform into the "new", industrialized south.  A fierce contempt for accepting charity from outsiders frustrated well-meaning missionaries and social reformers, but they were not altogether left behind.  Some tried to escape rural poverty by working in the mills, which were often more dangerous and no guarantor of comfort, and others lobbied for more political power.   Some even overcame racism to create an race-blind tenant farmers union;  from such a union came the latter Civil Rights marching song, "We Shall Overcome".   Racial cooperation in the realm of labor was one of the dashed hopes of the 19th century populist age, however.  The world wars were kind to the South, bringing more industry and money, but the interwar years consisted of an economic slump so dismal that the Great Depression wasn't even noticed.   While the South as a whole became more productive with the advent of machinery,  added jobs constituted only a quarter of those lost to the machines. After World War 2, the Southern economy finally quickened, but many still remain left behind -- especially in Appalachia, which receives a section unto itself.

Dixie's Forgotten People isn't two hundred pages of labor struggles with a southern twang, though, for he also shares the genuine life of the people. Using interviews with adults remembering their youth, Flynt records here folk stories and music. The music shared is that which is fraught with meaning -- melodies that comment on the plight of the family, of working for nothing but trouble, of hoping for rest and relief in the world to come.  The religion of the rural poor was overtly otherworldly,  constantly challenging the elite with the threatening promise that one day the first would be last, and the meek would inherit the earth.  (If "meek" is the  right word for  estatic snake handlers and Pentecostal preachers in unions..) Some of that culture even became mainstream, in the form of country-western, but as it became popular it lost the edge born of desperate poverty and anger. (This is a trend that has fast continued, with 'country' singers slipping into the pop charts with ease, a la Taylor Swift.)   Despite their poverty, the subjects retain a spine -- they are, to borrow Flynt's later title, 'poor but proud'.  Some of that pride, in racial myths, is misplaced, but much of it is legitimate, invested in the rich musical and artistic heritage that was saved from homogeneity by the mountains of Appalachia and dismal transportation.  Now, with interstates and cookie-cutter suburbs sprawling across the South's coastal plains and rugged hills, one wonders if that heritage itself will become the forgotten Dixie instead of just its poor -- lost to ticky-tacky McAmerica,

In short, Dixie's Forgotten People was a quick and varied survey, albeit one supplanted by the weightier Poor But Proud.  Considering that most people think of that obscene film Deliverance when they think of the country poor, Flynt's time spent with them is well needed among American readers.


Related:

• Poor but Proud: Alabama's Poor Whites, Wayne Flynt
• The Redneck Manifesto, Jim Goad
• Salvation on Sand Mountain, Dennis Covington

The Fiery Cross

The Fiery Cross: The Ku Klux Klan in America
© 1998 Wyn Craig Wade
528 pages

Living in the country as I did,  the bus ride to school always lasted over an hour, and in elementary school I remember being utterly petrified by older students telling we younger horror stories. They spoke of monsters in white sheets, demons from hell, who could rise from the ground, or who lived in the woods, and would come out at dusk or emerge from a fog and snatch little children up,  returning to their lairs to eat them.  This was my earliest exposure to the Ku Klux Klan. After having read The Fiery Cross, I wonder if those stories have some basis in 19th century folk history, of parents warning their young against the obscene danger that continued to erupt in the hundred years that followed the Civil War. The Fiery Cross is a history of America's own hydra, of a hooded  beast that has risen and been slain numerous times,  yet always comes back -- the Invisible Empire,  an organization where sheets hide a confusing jumble of motives, fears, and hatreds.

Although Lincoln's armies prevailed against those of the south, the Confederate cause was not totally lost until Andrew Johnson faced off against a Republican congress and was defeated. A southerner himself, Johnson's plan for quickly grafting South back into the Union  left Congress with a bitter taste in its mouth. What had been the point of the war, of those hundreds of thousands of men and boys dying, of all of the money spent, if the South was simply to be welcomed back with open arms?  Not settling for anything less than a total remolding of the south, Congress introduced its own re-admittance programs, incorporating various amendments and federal administrations like the Freedman's Bureau. Southern resistance manifested itself almost immediately, bristling at outside meddling and the humiliation of having been made second-class subjects of the law in their own land. The most forceful opposition came from shattered remnants of the Confederate army, either refusing to give up the fight or seeing resistance easier than submission, and the ranks of the old slave patrols. Both bands of men moved about and acted autonomously, taking the law into their own hands when they saw fit. Their violence against the new invasion of not only Union troops, but northern lawyers, government agents, and teachers, found a means of easy expression in the white robes of the Ku Klux Klan.

Curiously, the Klan proper did not begin as a political organization; according to the author, six young men formed a secret society complete withe elaborate titles and costumes for the pure purpose of gallivanting around the countryside at night, raising hell and having fun. When they started playing pranks on freedmen, however, pretending to be the ghosts of Confederate dead, things grew far nastier.  As the Klan grew in number, it took a life of its own, one demanding purpose -- and that purpose came to protect the supremacy of white southerners, both against the Yankee invader and against the usurping blacks.  The civil war continued again,  this time under cover of night, and fought more with terror than muskets. Although the Klan would be reorganized as a strict hierarchy, anyone with a bedsheet and the desire for vengeance could cause trouble.   Hooded hooliganism so swept the south that the "Grand Wizard" of the Klan ordered  the organization's self-destruction, and President Grant was forced to declare martial law to quell the anarchy.The Klan collapsed when the North washed its hands of the South, ending reconstruction and allowing the old planters to redeem their nation. Soon attempts at subduing blacks through fear and criminal means would find success in binding them by the law.

The Klan would revive in the early 20th century, but not as simple reaction against one government program. Credit for reviving the group is generally given to The Birth of a Nation,  a highly innovative piece of film-making that depicted the Klan as righteous saviors of civilization against moral bankruptcy. In truth, public response to Birth of a Nation was managed carefully by a evangelical preacher who thought the old clan admirable. Reusing old charters and titles, but adding a bit more organization,  he effected a comeback that was more potent and less obvious. The new Klan still maintained its racial message and support of segregation, but it was heavily influenced by the Fundamentalist movement, and drew support from the rising fear of social and moral anarchy. The early decades were a frightening world for many Americans: organized crime was on the rise, immigration from Europe continued apace and brought with it all kinds of new, strange, and sometimes dangerous ideas. Although from the 21st century it is easy to sit in judgment of our predecessors a century go for panicking about flappers and jazz,  this was an age of labor riots and anarchist assassinations,  in which increasingly very little could be taken for granted.  America was changing -- the country emptying out, the cities swelling. Farmers were in debt and industrial workers utterly at the mercy of their employers. Against this chaos, the Klan pitched itself as a rear guard of civilization. If political machines and bribe-taking cops wouldn't keep bedlam in check, the 'caped crusaders' would -- leaving ominous  messages outside the doors of evil-doers like men failing to support their wives, or blacks attempting to move into a white neighborhood. They held high the cross and flag, offering a social club that gave aid to its ailing members and offered them a chance to 'fight back', either as a political organization or through old-fashioned thuggery. They were a cult, a gang, an invisible empire justified unto themselves and utterly sinister.  Between World War 2 and the revelation that a Klan chieftan had kidnapped a young girl and tried to eat her,  however, the second Klan fell apart. Later iterations have never achieved much more than being vague threats; they have certainly lost whatever reputation they cultivated as guardians of civic order (cannibalism will do that) and settled for being lunatics on the fringe, content merely to stir up trouble.

The Fiery Cross is an exceptionally well-done history of a dismal subject, relying heavily on letters and charters for the 1870s clan, and interviews for the modern iteration.  Despite having grown up in the South, I knew next to nothing about the thing that is the clan, and I say thing because there's never been  just the one organization. It is instead an idea, a symbol -- rather like the V for Vendetta masks, not to slander those activists -- that creates association without unification.  One hopes that the Klan's day is now past, despite its occasional resurfacing.  Given that they have descended to becoming recurring characters on The Jerry Springer Show, there is is room for optimism.  The most fascinating section for me was that on the second Klan, given that its perverse masquerade as a civic organization manages to launch it to national success, flouring not only in the South, but in the northeast and especially the midwest.

Related:
Race with the Devil: My Journey from Racial Hatred to Rational Love, Joseph Pearce

Hanging Curve

Hanging Curve

© 1999 Troy Soos
272 pages

St. Louis, 1922. Babe Ruth reigns as the king of baseball. Mickey Rawlings is no king, not even a prince, but he is at least in the peerage: a utility infielder for the St. Louis Browns.  This season, though, there’s more than  baseball on his mind. A man has been murdered, and his death may plunge the city into bedlam.  The story started when Rawlings,  desperate for a chance to play baseball instead of sitting in the dugout, accepted an intriguing offer to play one game between two local clubs  -- one of them being part of the Negro Leagues.   Professional white  ball players are forbidden from taking the field with black players by MLB management, and Mickey  was eager to test his skills against such obvious talent.  Crawford pitched magnificently, humbling the opposition, and then – days later – he was found lynched, hanging from the stadium’s walls.  There had been a fistfight at the game, and members of the Klan hovered about, but – would anyone murder for a baseball game?   With little else to do on the bench, Rawlings digs for answers.  His search casts a light on the simmering racial tensions in  Missouri, the widespread influence of the Midwest Ku Ku Klux, and a prenatal Civil Rights movement.

The golden age of baseball was not a golden age for its black fans.  Segregation flourished in early 20th century America, especially as southern blacks streamed northward in search of jobs. Rising racial tension led to a burgeoning Klan, and not only in its old home of the South:  the 1920s Klan was strongest in the midwest, practically taking over Indiana.  Racial unrest is the backdrop of Hanging Curve;   five years before its start, labor riots turned into a race war, leaving areas of East St. Louis utterly ruined. The death and mayhem of those hours haunts the memory of those who remain, but matters are rapidly deteriorating once again, apparently instigated by a baseball team. After Rawlings plays his match against members of the Negro League,  matters go awry. He played  unsuspectingly, with a team sponsored by an auto dealership, and many on it held an association with the Ku Klux Klan.  First a black player is hung, then beatings and arsons follow in reprisals and counterstrikes.  Those who survived the riots on both sides know where this is going, and it isn't a road  anyone wants to go down.  Blood feuds can take on a life of their own, though, and Rawlings has to work overtime to find a way to nip this one in the bud. He works closely not only with one of the dealership's Klan members, but with a NAACP lawyer to investigate who killed Crawford...and why. These budding relationships introduce Rawlings to two worlds which he had been otherwise blind to: the widespread popularity and influence of the Klan, and the segregated existence of America's black citizenry. Although the courts maintained segregation as separate but equal, not until Rawlings struck up a friendship with a black lawyer did he realize how factually bankrupt those claims were. In St. Louis, for instance,  the streetcars maintained two seperate lines,  but alloted so few cars and conductors to the black line that passengers were forced to wait far longer than their white counterparts. The Klan, too, was a surprise:  Rawlings thought it just a gang for roughneck racists, not suspecting the organization had a more sinister attraction on the respectable, masquerading as a civic organization.  The pieces of the puzzle indicate to Rawlings that the true motive for that first murder are just as hidden in deception as the Klan members who hovered around the game.

Hanging Curve is one of the most interesting  mysteries I've ever read, with a setting that invokes both warm, sentimental nostalgia for the lovely game of baseball and the sad reality of racial tension in America. Consider: the St. Louis Browns, who played in a city a stone's throw from Ferguson, are these days better known as the Baltimore Orioles. But as Rawlings discovers in Hanging Curve,  there is more to social dramas both in our day and in his than mere racism.  Rawlings was able to tease out the truth,  but will we?

Born Fighting

Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America
© 2004 Jim Webb
384 pages

Born Fighting is a family story of the Scots-Irish, a clan of forgotten men. Beginning with the Celts, author Jim Webb moves swiftly through British history to the establishment of the Ulster Plantation.  Faced with continued resistance to the British crown by the feisty Irish, who were even more suspect by their frequent fraternization with Catholic powers like France and Spain,  King James hit on a novel solution: move in their equally feisty, but virulently Protestant, Scottish cousins.  As anyone remotely familiar with Irish history can guess, that didn't end well;  northern Ireland was a warzone even throughout the 20th century.  But the Scots of the Ulster Plantation didn't stay there;  they emigrated to the United States in large numbers, where they continued being...lively. Constitutionally incapable of bending a knee to a king,  they pushed into the American interior,  driving the frontier of colonization forward, provoking the natives into war and prompting a revolution.  Although  some would eventually make it to the west coast, the hills of Appalachia and the American South were settled in large number by these rebellious Presbyterians.  Settling down didn't change too much, though; when  Abraham Lincoln called for troops to suppress the secession of South Carolina, the size of the nascent Confederacy doubled as the distant descendants of Robert the Bruce closed ranks to defend their land and kinsmen from invasion. Although they were defeated in battle, they continued to shape American history, swelling the ranks of the soldiery and producing country music.

Although Born Fighting has the scope of a historical survey, it's much more personal. As mentioned, this is a family story, and it's framed by Jim Webb's journey into the Appalachian mountains to find his family's bones, and the quest that ends at an ancestral graveyard  causes him to ruminate on how his people came to be in that land, so far removed from the hills of Britain and Ireland. It's thus quite romanticized, its characters assuming airs of heroism or tragedy as the story waxes on. The rough, ornery wildness that Webb celebrates here as an antidote to tyranny is the same 'cracker culture' that Thomas Sowell condemned in Black Rednecks, White Liberals as completely-self defeating.  Webb doesn't completely overlook  his kinsmen's flaws; his defense of the South  owns up to slavery as the cause of secession, but he rightly distinguishes that from the motive for fighting. Slaves, like private jets and palatial estates today, were not owned by most southerners;  most, in fact were owned by a few dozen elite families. The country boys wearing grey weren't fighting to keep their slaves, they were fighting because fighting rule from on high is a family tradition. The Scots-Irish, Webb writes, could respect authority from men who literally led them in battle, but never from enthroned men who dictate from afar, whether they be Caesar and Pope in Rome, or the president in D.C.

Born Fighting makes for fun reading, and it's not immaterial: there are reasonable arguments here, taken from completely respectable surveys like Churchill's History of the English Speaking Peoples, and WJ Nash's The Mind of the South.  There's always more to the story, though, and southern whites have not always been completely opposed to authority on principle. The New Deal that Webb mentions resistance to was much beloved by the poor South, black and white alike. In fact, a song mentioned in Webb's section on country music refers  to Roosevelt "saving us all", creating programs like the TVA that put the singer's family back on its feet. Taken as a fond retelling of family drama, however, its weaknesses can be forgiven. There are other works for the serious readers. Like Cool Hand Luke, this is a celebration of a man, of a people, who can't be told what to do and won't give up going their own way, no matter how many times they're beaten.

Related:
Poor but Proud / Dixie's Forgotten People, Wayne Flynt
The Redneck Manifesto, Jim Goad. Similar in intent, but much more vulgar.
A Renegade History of the United States, Thaddeus Russell

Selma 1965

Selma 1965: the March that Changed the South
© 1974, 1985, 2015 Chuck Fager
257 pages (2nd edition),

Last weekend, my hometown suddenly became host to two presidents, a hundred members of Congress, and enough people to see it swell over ten times in size.The event was the 50th anniversary of the Selma march. In 1965 over half the population of my hometown couldn’t vote; its black populace. Though guaranteed suffrage by the US Constitution,  local registrars threw up impediments in the form of extensive literacy tests and limited registration times to keep the vote restricted. Although  these tests limited poor blacks and whites alike, the effects were especially manifest in the black community: less than 1% of the same were registered to vote. The greatest obstacle in the face of full citizenship, local voting-rights activists thought, was not the scheming of the elite or even the lack of concern of the city's white population: it was the utter resignation of the city's poor blacks, who seemed to have given up hope.  With the aim of inspiring the same, local voting rights leaders, working with national organizations like the Students Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, invited Martin Luther King, Jr. to add his energy and talent to the campaign. That invitation put Selma at the center of a national crisis on Sunday,  March 7th, when King's strategy of provoking responses drew the wrath of the Alabama State Troopers onto a peaceful mob marching towards Montgomery.   Weeks later, another far larger march crossed the bridge and trekked three days to the Capitol, and among its numbers was young Chuck Fager. His history of the Selma movement covers the road from despair to jubilation in a manner respectful of the fact that Selmians, black and white alike, had found their city as the site of the American nation's final attempt to work out its salvation from a history of racial strife.

King, following the dictium of Gandhi that the function of a civil resister is to provoke a response,  launched a series of actions designed to thwart being ignored.  The status quo would be strained, the establishment would be pushed, and either it would give way or fight back in such a way that the sin within could not help but be exposed. A series of increasingly aggressive displays, including night marches on the courthouse, followed.  City leaders fumbled for an appropriate response; they knew pushback was exactly what King wanted, but something had to be done. Nothing good would come of mobs wandering about at night.  Under such stress, rationality proved a poor opponent for human nature; thoughtful indecision gave way to the unfortunate authority invested in Sheriff Jim Clark. Clark was a swaggering lawman whose bellicosity was such that the Council was attempting to divert away his power into a new public safety manager, but in that late winter of  '64-'65, he still had his teeth -- and he knew how to respond to any challenge, with the baton.

On March 7th, the growing movement within Selma began what was to be a march to Montgomery to plead for the Governor to intercede. It didn't matter that the registrar's office and the city council were making timid attempts to appease the movement; this was a drive gaining power, and only sweeping changes would satisfy.  Across the bridge, in Selmont, were waiting a formation of Alabama State Troopers, and a roughneck posse led by the the sheriff. What followed was war, pure and simple. While King had wanted to expose the violence inherent in the system, he awoke the violence inherent in the human animal at war. When the six hundred marchers were ordered to turn back and refused, horror was released. There were no peace officers subduing unruly subjects that day, only Mongols in police uniforms,  striking into the mass with the ferocity of a warband and routing them. Not content to simply turn back the march,  the State's troopers chased the gas-stricken crowed across the bridge and into the city, block after block, hunting down and beating any man, woman, or child on the street around the movement's epicenter within the projects, Brown Chapel.

The horror of that day is remembered  as Bloody Sunday, but it is what followed afterward that makes it one of the pivotal movements in American history. The black people of Selma were beaten, but not broken, by the State's retaliation. King and other leaders upped the ante, calling for ministers and volunteers throughout the nation to join them.  And they came, by the hundreds. Fager places particular importance on the swelling numbers of white 'outside agitators' who joined Selma's black community in fighting for full voting rights:  taking their perspective, Fager writes that the black populace was astonished and moved by so much white support. Here at last was hope that racism  need not forever exist.  Eventually they marched again, though it took several weeks: an immediate attempt on March 9 ("Turnaround Tuesday") was stopped by the State troopers again, but by March 26th the Federal government had moved. It couldn't help but do so:  scenes from March 7 had been broadcast throughout the country which was now demanding action. With National Guard troops  present and the eyes of the nation upon them, King led a third march across the bridge, this time to Montgomery.

Selma 1965 succeeds wonderfully in bringing together two dramas; the struggle of the city's poorer classes to claim the franchise that was their right, under the law, and the culmination of the national Civil Rights movement, being its last and best publicized campaign. Although it began as a local movement, and King aside was being maintained by Selma's own black leaders, after Bloody Sunday it became the object of national attention. Crowds formed in other American cities to 'march with Selma', and three of the four people who lost their lives in connection with the Selma campaign were out-of-state visitors who answered King's call. Some were accidents --  While transporting protesters and supplies,Viola Liuzzo  had the luck to encounter a carload of Kluckers from Birmingham, who seized the opportunity to shoot her down. Other casualties included Jonathan Daniels, a seminarian who defended a young girl from an aggressive lawman in Haynvesville, and another young man named Jimmie Lee Jackson in Marion who shielded his grandmother from the constable's bullets. Only James Reeb died in Selma those dark hours; another clergyman,  he took a wrong turn and was beaten in the streets outside a roughneck bar.  These deaths increased the tensity, and slowly control trickled out of the hands of local governance and into federal courts.

The original version of this work was a triumph, I think, an impassioned history of the Selma march which managed to be fair to its citizens, whose own failures were not extraordinary and who certainly did not ask to become the poster children for racial hatred. The city fathers were just as contemptuous of the Kluckers following King to stir up trouble their way as they were of him stirring up trouble his way.  They were raised in a tradition that was wrong; the bridge forced them to own up to the injustices. Fager notes in his original version that the progress that followed the violence was extraordinary. The additional sections added for the 50th anniversary, however, are not not nearly as strong, dedicated as they are to the noisy fight between  two lawyers and a special interest  group over the placement of a Civil War bust in a cemetery that can only be seen if you go looking for it. It's an ugly fight on the margins, one the city's people are utterly sick of seeing publicized regardless of skin color. This was certainly a worthy read for me, connecting stories I've heard since childhood into a coheisve hole, and filling my home's streets with historical actors.

Related:
A Power No Government Can Supress, The Zinn Reader; Howard Zinn

Runaway Slaves

Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation
© 2000 John Hope Franklin, Loren Schweninger
480 pages

Easily the most horrible aspect of American history, is the institution of slavery.  Indentured servitude had been a historical norm for centuries before, of course,  usually the mark of war, but in America it was paired with racial ideology to become utter evil.  Although it eventually perished in 1865 at the hands of the 13th amendment, those whose lives it claimed were not necessarily willing to wait for freedom to be granted;  instead, they took it. In Runaway Slaves, historians John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger establish how chronic absenteeism and escape were throughout the slave states, revealing the institution's gross unnaturalness and complete incompatibility with the human spirit.

Precious few people in the 21st century need to be convinced that slavery was wretched, and the few who maintain that it was a necessary evil, or that its abuses were exaggerated out of proportion, would do well to confront Runaway Slaves, presenting as it does not only one human story after another about men, women, and even children resisting tyranny over their lives, and 'voting with their feet' by  escaping into the wild, but statistical evidence that reveals how persistent a problem runaways were.  Readers might expect the abused to flee, and so they did, but here too are stories of slaves who were treated 'well' -- plantation pets, like the few Jefferson kept in his mansion and doted on.  Even when provided with an allowance, comfortable quarters,  and easy work, slaves still persisted in running off from time to time ,to the utter bewilderment of owners who concluded that some Africans were simply born mad.  The runaways were not simply driven by some principled insistence that they ought to be free;  the most common motive cited here is reunification with family.  Of course, the data is incomplete; many runaways simply disappeared into history, and their motives and stories will never be told. Most did not attempt to to transverse the entire country to make into a free state, or Canada; instead, Franklin and Schweninger report, they either lingered around the edges of plantations (to be close to family, or help them escape), or migrated to a large city like Baltimore or New Orleans, where they could lose themselves in the masses that included substantial populations of free blacks. Because the data the authors work with spans most of the 19th century, readers will also appreciate slavery evolving as an institution;   legal terms of servitude that expire give way to perpetual bondage, and captured African tribesmen still bearing the tattoos and piercings of their tribe's customs become the fathers of generations born into slavery, knowing nothing else.

Runaway Slaves is a solid piece of historical writing, providing human faces to the many thousands gone,  turning a multitude once viewed as a factor of production into lives who must be reckoned.  As soul-wearying as it can be to realize how many lives were wasted away in bondage, there is also room for hope in the fact that resistance was never absent from the scene. Regardless of beatings or bread and circuses, men are, and of a right ought to be, Free.

The Strange Career of Jim Crow

The Strange Career of Jim Crow
© 1955, 1965 C. Van Woodward
245 pages

            Fifty years ago, racial and civil unrest swept the United States as organized resistance to the morally outrageous and legally dodgy practice of segregation strengthened throughout the country. Ten years before the Civil Rights movement hit its apogee, C. Van Woodward penned a history of segregation as public policy that offered grounds for hope. Far from being a natural and deeply rooted product of the South, Jim Crow laws were a relatively new creation. Dating in the South only to the late 19^th century, Jim Crow’s claims to southern stock were shallow indeed, and could theoretically be destroyed as quickly as it had been instilled.

            Laws prescribing racial separation were not native to the South, Woodward writes, and would have been utterly untenable in the plantation atmosphere where blacks and whites alike ‘worked’ together.  Blacks and whites were accustomed to one another, familiar even. In the north, however, blacks remained a strange ‘other’ that whites sought distance from, and so codes prevented too much social mingling between the two races.  Northerners visiting the South immediately after the war were astonished by the lack of racial uproar.  It took decades for the dust to settle after the war,  for a new universal race-relations norm to be established throughout the region;  unfortunately for blacks, and for the country, such norms were set in an atmosphere toxic to harmony.

            The latter half of the 19^th century was one of constant, dramatic change; the pace of the industrial revolution quickened, throwing all the developed world into an uproar. Millions streamed from the farms into the cities,  national economies reeled in prosperity and fraud; an entire economic system was being rebuilt in the United States as power shifted fully from the farms to the factories, from plantation lords to captains of industry and coal-barons.  Black Americans would feature in this chaos,  as they were seized on as a pliable voting bloc. The alliances that courted them were both strange and hopeful. Not only did the old plantation caste solicit the support of their former slaves against their mutual antagonists, the burgeoning commercial and industrial class that had its own means of exploitation, but the Populists sought to unite poor blacks and whites alike against their foes, both the plantation elite and the railroad titans.  But blacks, like any Americans, could not be counted on to vote universally alike, en bloc – and if they could not be conveniently used , the reconstructionists had little interest in bothering with them. When the old aristocracy returned to the ballot boxes and overturned many of the laws and institutions that maintained civil rights,  nothing was said.  At the same time, the United States had become a global empire,   seizing Cuba and the Philippines from Spanish hands; its civil and military leaders were cast into the positions of being the white masters of colonial inferiors. Just as the power of the slaveholder poisoned him against his fellow man, so to did colonial power poison the soul of America in general,  penetrating not just in the extremities of empire, but shaping racial attitudes in the heartland. As the United States’ leadership grew accustomed to seeing itself as a superior white few managing with benefaction the affairs of a colored multitude, and having to endure the multitude’s constant ungrateful troublemaking,  racial relations in the United States took a dive.  Race codes multiplied and strengthened within a generation’s time.

     That it happened so quickly gives Woodward hope;  surely peace and justice could be restored as quickly as the northerners had adopted the plantation mindset; surely southern society could dismantle its codes as quickly as it had put them up. Segregation could be a momentary madness, a fever like Prohibition;  hate need not be the last word. Indeed, in the reprint of Strange Career produced in the 1960s, Woodward is able to track the history of the Civil Rights movement. Over a half-century old at this point, Strange Career remains of interest to American historians interested race relations, but especially southerners curious about reconstruction; both will find this look at politics and culture quite insightful. 

            

Race with the Devil

Race with the Devil: My Journey from Racial Hatred to Rational Love
© 2013 Joseph Pearce
264 pages

How does a neo-Nazi become a Catholic literary critic?  An act of God?   Joseph Pearce would surely make the claim, his life having become a miserable shambles before he heard the booming voice of Gilbert Keith Chesterton from beyond the grave (albiet through books).  In his youth, Joe Pearce was an influential white supremacist, rising through the ranks of the National Front through his one-man newsletter, Bulldog. Building success by appealing to football hooligans  and punk rockers, it caught the attention of not only the National Front, but of the British government, which twice threw Pearce into prison for inciting racial hatred.  His first time in chains only deepened Pearce's conviction that the state was out to ruin the English race; by his second imprisonment, Pearce was already in turmoil, already doubting the path he had chosen. Turning prison into a spiritual retreat, he emerged from bars and from his own dark night of the soul to a new life.

In his new life, Joseph Pearce is a distinguished author and scholar, having held positions at institutions like Ave Marie University, Thomas More College, and Aquinas College. He has produced not only biographies of men like G.K. Chesterton and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, but works that delve into the deeper meanings of The Lord of the Rings and Shakespeare. This hunger to know the human soul through literature is partially responsible for Pearce's salvation. Although as a teenager he was caught up in reaction against the upswell of immigration, and the enervating influence of modernist politics,  he found little to build on there. His life was filled with passion as he roamed the streets looking for migrant gangs or football clubs to mix it up with, and even some purpose as he became a shaper of the nationalist thinking, but pessimism was a bitter gall to sallow.  Works like Orwell's 1984 diverted his course from fascism, awaking him to the danger of an all-power state,  but unsettled him with its dark vision of Winston Smith's defeat, the spirit of humanity crushed underfoot.  Pearce could not live with it, but an abiding thirst for literature would offer him glimpses of a better world -- particularly Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, a retelling of the author's years spent in the Soviet prison-camp system, which he survived, humanity intact.

 Pearce spent four hours a day reading on trains as he traveled for his duties with the National Front,    but literature took him places he surely never meant to go, like Rome. So against popery was Pearce that he traveled to northern Ireland to work with the Ulster Loyalists and joined the Orange Orange, dedicated to ensuring Protestant supremacy over Irish Catholic culture. As much as Pearce despised the Catholic church, he had a grudging respect for John Paul II’s fight against the Soviet system. It was G.K. Chesterton who coaxed him into the Tiber, however, by presenting an argument against the centralizing tendencies of both capitalism and socialism.  Chesterton offered a third way in which the ownership of the means of production – of shops, farms, tools, and the like – is widely as distributed as possible. Pearce, having grown up in ‘the shire’, a quiet arcadian community far removed from much of modernity, saw in Chesterton an argument for what he longed for.  Pearce’s love for his country, warped by racism,  was redeemed by Chesterton, refashioned into ideals of peaceful cooperation.  Delighting in Chesterton’s personality, Pearce  read everything he could by the man, and through his study came to appreciate the Catholic faith and its transcendent moral order that shed insight on not only personal morality, but our socio-economic structure.

Race with the Devil is a powerful story human redemption, part biography and part literary reflection. While the aspects on British culture were fascinating in themselves, particularly the political loyalties of football clubs and musical subcultures,  Pearce's journey itself is the wonder. Consider how powerful ethnic nationalism can be, that potent mix of primal clannishness and modern ideology; it intoxicates both the brain and the blood. Yet Pearce resisted. Having approached the abyss, he stepped back. Despite all of the anger and fear he subjected himself to, there still remained some shades of grace, memories of that childhood steeped in ordinary decency.  When racial turmoil still fills American papers, it is a comforting notion that there still remains some escape route to sanity and healing.

Race is an extraordinary read.

Uncle Tom's Cabin

Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly
© 1852 Harriet Beecher Stowe        
 500 pages

Written as an indignant response to the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, Uncle Tom's Cabin shook the American landscape in the mid-19th century as few other novels could. A sounding condemnation of slavery, popular conception holds it responsible for fomenting a more strident attitude against slavery in the north and giving the Republican Party its great foothold in American history.  Still controversial today for not living up to 21st century mores, Uncle Tom's Cabin remains a beautiful morality play.

I entered Uncle Tom's Cabin with reservation, thinking it a propaganda piece considering that the author never journeyed into the south herself. Admittedly, it was propaganda the south had coming, but I'm not much for polemics whether they come in nonfiction or fiction. Uncle Tom's Cabin, however, is far more nuanced than I expected.  The story begins when two slaves, Harry and Tom, who are sold by their reluctant owner when his gambling debts erase all his other alternatives. Harry's mother is horrified to learn that her handsome young son will be separated from her, and flees with him north, across icy rivers hoping to find sanctuary in Canada.  The other, Tom, realizes that if he runs, more slaves will be sold and separated from their families to make up for the loss.  In what will become a recurring pattern, Tom sacrifices his own wellbeing for the sake of others, and is sold 'down the river'. Removed from Kentucky's comparatively lenient slavering practices, Tom soon finds himself in the deep south, subject to the worst of human nature. Though it is tempered by meeting people of goodness and mercy, what truly sustains Tom is his Christian faith.  Uncle Tom’s Cabin is at the same time an abolitionist argument and a work of Christian evangelism. The two for Stowe are one and the same. Just as Tom urges one fellow slave or master after another to admit to their sin's slavery  and subject themselves to Christ, Stowe urges her countrymen to admit to slavery's sin and embrace emancipation and colonization.

Stowe’s attack on slavery plays on both reason and the emotions. Throughout the novel, characters are cold-bloodedly separated from their loved ones, including mothers and small children, if the profit motive dictates, and the slave traders are as calculating as can be,  thinking about their slaves as nothing but cattle. Various characters against slavery, and others defend it.  Stowe is fairer to the south than expected; her novel’s most loathsome character is a northerner with a plantation, and  the two other white slaveholders who receive the most attention are utterly decent. Northerners are hypocritical idealists who don’t realize the sin of slavery is on their hands as well.  This harshness is presumably less to soften the blow against the South than it is to prick the northern conscience and call it to action.

 Although its now-dated language and attitudes toward slaves no doubt annoy the modern mind, Uncle Tom’s Cabin rises beyond such petty complaints. This is a story of redemption, of how a man can be bound in body, but not in spirit; degraded by law, but not in person. Just as Harry's mom Eliza  Eliza finds defense for her body in flight and arms, Tom finds defense for his spirit in acts of love;  ultimately he becomes a Christ figure – certainly for characters within the text, and perhaps Stowe hoped, for the American people as well. It's an outstandingly beautiful novel.