Enchanting and Disenchanting: Orientalism Among American Abolitionists

Zaina Ujayli, The University of Virginia, Charlottesville, U.S.A, zu7hu@virginia.edu

I read Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin for the first time this year and found

myself fascinated by a simple detail: the Moorish arches of a slaveholder’s home. For those of

you unfamiliar with the novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin follows Stowe’s enslaved black protagonist,

Tom, as he is sold South down the Mississippi River . For this presentation, I want to concentrate

on the chapters Tom spends within the St. Clare mansion, the home of the first Southern family

that purchases him.

(change slide)

While at first romantically described, as both Tom and the reader spend time within the

St. Clare mansion, Stowe reveals the disorder, decadence, and cruelty inherent to a household

maintained by slaves. Both beautiful and terrible, Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s representation of a

Southern home invites readers to see beyond the building’s captivating façade and focus on the

immorality within. As a first-time reader, I expected Stowe’s description of the mansion to

reflect the Grecian-style of popular neoclassical homes. However, I was startled by its markedly

“Oriental” 1 aesthetics. Stowe builds the St. Clare mansion in the “Moorish fashion” with

“Moorish arches, slender pillars, and arabesque ornaments, [that] carried the mind back, as in a

dream, to the reign of Oriental romance in Spain” (Stowe 156).

In the spirit of our discussion today about the visible and the overlooked, I argue we

cannot assume that Stowe incorporated the “Oriental” quality of the mansion merely so we could

enjoy the decadent descriptions. When we consider nineteenth-century American Orientalism,

Stowe’s decision to Orientalize the St. Clare mansion appears as not merely an aesthetic choice,
1
Like Said in Orientalism, I use the term “Orient” to reflect the language of eighteenth and nineteenth century
European readers and writers who used “Orient” and “Oriental”, while recognizing that the “Orient” is composed of
human-willed and created sets of assumptions, paradigms, and stereotypes, which pooled the Middle East and North
Africa especially, but also broadly speaking Africa and Asia, into the same region with similar racist characteristics
(Said 1,2). I put the word in quotation marks in recognition of the stereotypes implicit to the term.
but instead a rhetorical decision which both emerges from and contributes to abolitionist

arguments. Given the limited scope of today’s discussion, I am going to contextualize the St.

Clare mansion’s “Oriental” aesthetics with the rhetoric of The Liberator. Published in Boston by

William Lloyd Garrison, The Liberator produced weekly abolitionist periodicals from 1831-

1865. Like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the periodical applied a Christian approach to abolition and

appealed to its readers moral conscience. Articles from The Liberator reveal that abolitionists

frequently posed the Islamic and Ottoman worlds as antitheses to Christian America in order to

highlight the effect of slavery on American morality. Today, I will demonstrate that by

connecting the St. Clare mansion and its inhabitants to the “Orient”, Stowe argues that the

Southern slaveholder’s house is no longer Christian and American and has instead transformed

into the worst kind of Other and slavery is to blame.

(change slide)

Edward Said seminally defined Orientalism as “a style of thought based upon an

ontological and epistemological distinction made between ‘the Orient’ and (most of the time)

‘the Occident’” with the ultimate goal of not only defining and studying the Orient, but

“dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” (Said 2,3). The “Orient”

represented the Occident’s “cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and most recurring images

of the Other. (Said 1,2).  Given the imperial hierarchy explicit in Orientalism, in this paradigm,

the reverse also meant worse; tyrannical rather than democratic, debauched rather than moral,

heathenish rather than religious. In other words, a transformation from Christian to Muslim,

Occidental to “Oriental”, was a transformation to the worse.

(change slide)
 As early as 1837, The Liberator’s abolitionists argued that supporting slavery made you

not Christian, but Muslim. One man writes “We would sooner recognize a minister of Jesus

Christ a disciple of Mahomet…[than] a man who maintains slavery is not in itself a sin”

(“Multiple News Items”). Slavery’s supporters were dubbed “not Christians, but infidels”

(“Public Opinion”). In 1847, one abolitionist noted: “ it will not be long before people will begin

to think Popery and Mahometanism better than American Christianity!” (“The Pope, the Bey,

and the President”). The abolitionists’ worry, that eventually American Christianity would seem

as bad as Islam, ultimately came true with the passing of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, which

legalized hunting fugitive slaves.

The rhetoric analogizing the Middle East/North Africa to America peaked in 1852 as the

Fugitive Slave Act’s impact played out weekly in The Liberator’s columns in news of kidnapped

escapees and the court trials of those who helped them. For The Liberator’s abolitionists, the

Fugitive Slave Act signaled a fundamental change in America, and they captured the spirit of

that change through the language of Orientalism. The Liberator characterized the Act as an

affront to American ideals which changed the nation from a free, Christian nation, to a Muslim

one. In a parody of the Islamic profession of faith, one abolitionist suggests that “Congress, the

Priest, the Nation, should adopt this formula of faith: ‘There is no god but Slavery and the

Compromise – and the Fugitive Slave Law is his prophet” (“Noble Sentiments”). The Fugitive

Slave Act also galvanized Stowe to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe 422). While Stowe never

mentions Islam nor names its current face, the Ottoman Empire, she uses her aesthetic

descriptions and literary references to evoke the “Orient”, just as The Liberator’s abolitionists

analogized America it.

(change slide)
 As Stowe herself never journeyed far South, she drew her inspiration for the St. Clare

mansion from her brother’s account of Louisiana. Charles Beecher took a steamboat down the

Mississippi, much like Tom, and wrote that Louisiana reminded him of Spain and Italy, “so it

was the ‘Spanish’ and ‘Moorish’ quality of the mansion that Harriet emphasized” (Hendrick

222). In addition to labeling the mansion as “Moorish”, one the clearest ways Stowe Orientalizes

Tom’s first southern home is by alluding to the most widespread portrait of the Middle East and

North Africa available to her – A Thousand and One Nights. Stowe’s biographies and obituaries

speak to the Nights’ influence on Stowe as a reader and writer (“Harriet”). As a young girl,

Stowe found a copy of Nights at the bottom of a barrel and used it to “sail forth into fairy land on

her bit of an enchanted carpet” (Stowe, Charles 14). Years later, Stowe reflected on the escapist

merit of the Nights in her introduction to A Library of Famous Fiction. She writes that in reading

the Nights, she “ knew every jewel in the windows of Aladdin’s palace, and became adept in the

arts of enchanting and disenchanting” (vii). Her introduction demonstrates that Stowe was not

merely a casual reader of the Nights and indicates that the text may have acted as both a source

for aesthetic and thematic inspiration for the St. Clare mansion.

(change slide)

Stowe composes the St. Clare mansion with gorgeous images of light, water, and flora.

(Stowe 156). The verdant gardens all conjure the images of courts and palaces in the Nights – a

comparison Stowe herself draws. As Tom reflects on his life among the St. Clare family, Stowe

writes that “the birds, the flowers, the fountains, the perfume, and light and beauty of the court,

the silken hangings, and pictures, and lustres, and statuettes, and gilding, made the parlors within

a kind of Aladdin’s palace to him” (Stowe 172). 

 However, just as the Nights stories provide an aesthetic template for “Oriental” mansions,

so do they evoke the obsessions with luxury, idleness, and sensuality which undermine their

beauty.  Many of the most popular Nights tales focus on wealth, whether it is justly or unjustly

earned, and feature both enslaved characters and the often morally corrupt individuals who

exploit them. Aladdin, the son of a poor tailor, refuses to learn a trade because he prefers idleness

and mischief. When Aladdin finds a genie, Aladdin uses its power to give him what he desires.

As Stowe “knew every jewel in Aladdin’s palace”, she must have recognized they were put there

by slaves. Nineteenth-century readers of Nights rarely finished the tales with a favorable outlook

towards their subjects. As one Dr. Arnold exclaims in an 1845 review of Nights: “How destitute

[the Arabs] all seem of any higher purpose or thought than the enjoyments of time and sense

demand!” (“Eastern Tales”).

change

Dr. Arnold’s failure to distinguish characters from Nights tales and living Arabs emerges

from the fact that Nights would have represented Dr. Arnold’s, and in turn Stowe’s, most

extensive and accurate portrait of the “Orient”.  Oriental scholars introduce the bulk of early

Nights editions by advocating for the narrative’s merit as not only an imaginative fiction, but an

accurate portrait of life and customs across Asia and Africa (Haddaway xxi). Even A Library of

Famous Fiction features a quote from an Orientalist claiming the stories describe “the manners

and customs of the East in general, and of the Arabians in particular” (Stowe, Library 955). By

the end of the nineteenth-century, the Nights became so characterized as an authentic portrait of

the Islamic world that Richard Burton prefaced his translation with the importance of the text to

Britain’s imperial project because of its capacity to educate imperialists on the peoples they now

ruled (Burton xix). 

 Consequently, when Stowe draws a comparison between the St. Clare mansion

and Nights, she draws a parallel not only between the mansion and a fiction, but between the St.

Clare mansion and the “Orient” at large. Nights provides a good representation of how

Orientalism functioned. Exotic, sensuous descriptions were enjoyable to read, but also served as

examples of the West’s superiority over the East. The mansions and palaces in Moorish Spain

may have been beautiful and romantic, but their presumed despotism, tyranny, and heathenism

made them inferior to those in the Christian West in the eyes of American readers. The St. Clare

mansion’s likeness to Aladdin’s palace is not a compliment, but rather a warning that cruelty

hides behind its filigreed windows. By Orientalizing the St. Clare mansion, Stowe creates a

setting whose aesthetics makes space for its criticism, and when we consider the implications of

those aesthetics, exemplifies her greater narrative argument about the absence of true

Christianity in the South. We can largely see this through the way she Orientalizes the St. Clares.

Stowe paints the mansion’s matriarch, Marie St. Clare, with the same brush as an

Orientalist painter picturing a woman in a harem. Stowe refers to Marie St. Clare as a “sultana”

(Stowe 148); a picture of idle, selfish beauty, Marie lies amidst silks and pillows as slaves wait

on her day and night. In one scene, Marie speaks “in a faint and lady-like voice, like the last

dying breath of an Arabian jessamine” (Stowe 166). Augustine St. Clare, while better than his

wife, also lives a life of ease, uninterested in maintaining the house (Stowe 194). In other words,

Stowe peoples her “Oriental” mansion with “Oriental” people, highlighting their carelessness

with money, idleness, and disorganization. Despite these many faults, above all else, Stowe

critiques the St. Clare’s irreligiosity. A visitor remarks about the mansion that “Tis a pretty place,

though it looks rather old and heathenish” (Stowe 156). The label of “heathenish” emphasizes

the “Orient’s” most defining feature – Christianity’s absence. Marie St. Clare practices a self-
serving, performative Christianity and Augustine St. Clare openly declares his atheism (Stowe

176). The fact that the St. Clare’s are both unchristian in their own ways, further Orientalizes

them, distancing them from the Christian morality Stowe ascribes to Tom. 

From Tom’s first moments among the St. Clares, Stowe notes how Tom’s race allows

him to enjoy the mansion’s beauty (Stowe 157, 172). Stowe reminds the reader that he “is an

exotic of the most gorgeous and superb countries of the world, and he has, deep in his heart, a

passion for all that is splendid, rich, and fanciful.” Comments such as these represent one of

Stowe’s most defining Orientalist moves: her frequent characterizations of the “negro race,”

which she identifies as possessing “an Oriental character” which “betrays its tropical origin”

(Stowe, A Key, 73). Stowe’s broad stroked analyses of racial qualities, differentiating peoples

based on race, coincides with what Said dubs “academic Orientalism”, characterized by “the

impulse to classify nature and man into types” (Said 119). However, despite being an “Oriental

character” in the “Orient”, Tom instead acts more like the Christian missionary trying to bring

salvation to its inhabitants.\\ Primarily, Tom sets out to convert Augustine and succeeds - in his

dying breaths, St. Clare finds his faith and dies a Christian (Stowe 290).

The rhetorical strategy, of casting a white slave-holding family as non-Christians in need

of salvation and a black slave as the missionary who comes into their non-Christian home,

powerfully critiques Southern Christianity among slaveholders by inverting the Orientalist

paradigm which would cast Tom as the character in need of salvation and the St. Clares as his

saviors. In characterizing Tom as the Christian missionary in a Southern Orient, despite his own

race and “Oriental character”, Stowe implies how slavery denigrates Southern homes and slave

owners. Whereas the Liberator’s abolitionists spell out the transformation directly by

analogizing Americans to Muslims, Stowe uses aesthetics and literary allusions to render the
same transformation on the page. By Orientalizing America under the Fugitive Slave Act, both

Stowe and the Liberator’s abolitionists argued that slavery was transforming America into its

antithesis. From Christian to Muslim, Western to Eastern, abolitionists applied Orientalist

stereotypes to critique America under slavery. 

Fundamental to both the arguments in The Liberator and Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the

assumption that an indication of America’s moral failing was its descent into Islam and the

“Orient”. In other words, to be Muslim was incongruous with being American. Scholars like

Helen Jun have argued that nineteenth-century discourses of black citizenship “demanded

Christian morality” as the “precondition” to becoming a “modern political subject” (Jun 1056).

Tom wins his American moral right by remaining Christian in contrast to an Orientalized South

– his faith negates the “Oriental character” supposedly inherent in his race. Nearly 100 years

after Stowe argued for Tom’s right to being an American on the basis of his faith, a Muslim

Yemeni immigrant, Ahmad Hassan, lost the case for his when the judge ruled: “Apart from the

dark skin of the Arabs, it is well known that they are a part of the Mohammedan world and that a

wide gulf separates their culture from that of the predominantly Christian peoples of Europe”

(Gualtieri158). Less than a hundred years after that, people called President Barack Obama Arab

and Muslim to discredit his Americanness. Abolitionists use of Orientalist rhetoric poses

questions still salient today about how opposing slavery and searching for America’s soul took

not only race, but religion, into account.  When explored, it begins to frame modern rhetoric

which paints Islam as “antithetical to the United States Constitution” (Abdelaziz). Behind the

“Moorish arches, slender pillars, and arabesque ornaments” of the St. Clare mansion, exists an

untapped history of complex arguments about slavery, race, Islam, and the American identity, of

which, today, we’ve only scratched the surface.

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