SOURCE: "Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin: Women and Blacks Revolutionizing Society," in Women, Ethnics, and Exotics: Images of Power in Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Fiction, The University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville, 1983, pp. 102-20.

In the excerpt that follows, Herzog discusses the women and African-American characters in Uncle Tom's Cabin, focusing on their role in the author's vision of a new religious and political order.

A well-known social history of the nineteenth-century South [William R. Taylor's Cavalier and Yankee] features a chapter entitled "Women and Negroes: One and Inseparable." Certainly women and blacks in the Old South shared an inferior social status. Both groups, along with whites of ethnic descent, were subservient to an empowered group of cavalier gentlemen of English ancestry and unmixed blood. But women and blacks were also believed to have an affinity of character: "Let women and negroes alone, and instead of quacking with them [by...