Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, published 1851 in newspaper installments, then in 1852 as a two-volume book |
The best way to take negroes to your heart is to get as far away from them as possible. As far as I can see, Southern women do all that missionaries could to prevent and alleviate the evils. The social evil has not been suppressed in England or New England, London or Boston. And they expect more virtue from a plantation African than they can practice with all their high moral surroundings—light, education, training, and supports....
There are true, graceful, beautiful mothers of angelic Evas—North as well as South, I daresay. The Northern men and women who came here have always been hardest, for they expect an African to work and behave as a white man. We do not....
Topsys I have known—but none that were beauties—or ill-used. Evas are mostly in the heaven of Mrs Stowe's imagination. People can't love things dirty, ugly, repulsive, simply because they ought, but they can be good to them—at a distance. You see, I cannot rise very high. I can only judge what I see."