To some extent she may even have resisted an emotional involvement which, ill and dependent as she was, could have exhausted her energies in a harrowing struggle she was simply not equipped to carry on at that time. This is suggested by her response to Uncle Tom’s Cabin when it flamed across the world and shook the nation’s conscience as nothing else had. She had read the book, she mentioned in a letter, but didn’t think much of it.54
Chattel slavery was evil enough, in all conscience, but it was not the form of enslavement that was to call forth her own astounding generalship. That was still a long way off, and meanwhile she struggled with personal circumstance. Later she would become convinced that if one went deep enough one might find in the most private circumstance the common source of every form of slavery.55
In a famous passage in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe put into the mouth of St. Clare, the idealistic Louisiana slaveholder, a pronouncement which throws much light on the times:
One thing is certain,—that there is a mustering among the masses, the world over; and there is a dies irae coming on, sooner or later. The same thing is working in Europe, in England, and in this country. My mother used to tell me of a millennium that was coming, when Christ should reign, and all men should be free and happy. And she taught me, when I was a boy, to pray, “Thy kingdom come.” Sometimes I think all this sighing, and groaning, and stirring among the dry bones foretells what she used to tell me was coming. But who may abide the day of His appearing?56
54 Mary Baker Glover to Daniel Patterson, January 1853 [Peel’s estimate: January 1, 1853], L08901, MBEL. [Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin; Or, Life among the Lowly, 2 vols., (Boston: John P. Jewett, 1852).]
55 See especially Eddy, Science and Health, p. 225.
56 [Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, vol. 2, p. 25.] A valuable modern assessment of this book is to be found in the work of a Christian Science writer, Henrietta Buckmaster, Let My People Go: The Story of the Underground Railroad and the Growth of the Abolition Movement (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1941).