“Just as a Chair or Table”

ONE of the most telling passages in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) appears just after Tom has been sold to his final owner, Simon Legree, and just before he has arrived at Legree's nightmarish plantation. The subject of this “middle passage” is what Stowe calls “one of the bitterest apportionments” of slavery – the slave's liability to be sold from a “refined family” from which he has acquired “the tastes and feelings which form the atmosphere of such a place” to the “coarsest and most brutal” master, and sold, moreover, “just as a chair or table, which once decorated the superb saloon comes, at last, battered and defaced, to the bar-room of some filthy tavern, or some low haunt of vulgar debauchery.” But more significant for our purposes, it is just the uneasy pertinence of the analogy between slave and chair or table that leads Stowe, at this point, to reassert the absolute difference that forms the more fundamental subject of her story: put simply, the difference between a person and a thing. “The great difference is,” Stowe goes on to state, “that the table and chair cannot feel, and the man can.”

What is remarkable about this passage, of course, is not what it says but rather the perverse necessity of stating what ought to go without saying, a perversity necessitated by slavery's monstrous denial of the “great difference” between a sentient person and a thing like a chair. Yet it is just the self-evident status of this difference that Stowe's novel ultimately and disturbingly suggests is possibly somewhat too self-evident.