SOURCE: Crozier, Alice C. “Dred: and Harry Gordon's Dilemma.” In The Novels of Harriet Beecher Stowe, pp. 34-54. New York: Oxford University Press, 1969.

In the following essay, Crozier discusses Stowe's treatment of Harry Gordon as a character torn between the desire for vengeance represented by Dred and the call for Christian patience and love represented by Milly.

Judging from the opening chapters of Dred, published in 1856, one might conclude that in the four intervening years since Uncle Tom's Cabin Mrs. Stowe had relaxed the pressure for immediate entrance into the millennium and had found herself in a conciliatory, even nostalgic mood. Dred is set entirely in North Carolina, and the author's descriptions of the beauty of the Gordon and Clayton plantations could satisfy the fondest defender of the region. Herself a passionate gardener, Mrs. Stowe allows her imagination to linger over flowers and blossoming trees which would grow...