SOURCE: Hamilton, Cynthia S. “Dred: Intemperate Slavery.” Journal of American Studies 34, no. 2 (August 2000): 257-77.

In the following essay, Hamilton explores Stowe's use of the structure and rhetoric associated with temperance literature in her antislavery novel.

In 1825, Harriet Beecher Stowe's father, Lyman Beecher, gave a series of six sermons which helped to launch the temperance movement. In these sermons, published in 1826 and much reprinted thereafter, Beecher used the slave trade as a moral yardstick for the evils of intemperance. In doing so, he built on the moral outrage which brought an end to the legal importation of African slaves in 1808, and further criminalized the trade in 1820 when it was declared piracy. Beecher concluded that, morally reprehensible as the slave trade had been, intemperance was the greater evil, for it did greater damage to the individual soul, and cast a wider shadow of suffering. “We have heard of the horrors...