GRAAT Anglophone Studies Book reviews

Gerardo Del Guercio, The Fugitive Slave Law in The Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin: American Society Transforms Its Culture (Lewiston, N.Y.: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2013). $49.95, 186 pages, ISBN 978-0773445185—Anne-Claire Lévy, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris III.

In The Fugitive Slave Law in The Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin: American Society Transforms Its Culture, Gerardo Del Guercio offers an astute and in-depth examination of the implications of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 and a fresh scholarly look at the impact that Frederick Douglass’ 1845 Narrative and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom Cabin (1852) had on Antebellum America. Relying on the research of leading twentieth and twenty-first century historians such as Henry Louis Gates and Eric J. Sundquist, Del Guercio’s well-written book explores the various ways in which two outstanding American writers bore witness to the events of their age. The author, who has been teaching English at the College Royal Military, St. Jean, Canada, is specialized in nineteenth and twentieth century American literature. The newness of his approach lies in his comparison of two works which have up to now never been put into parallel by historians. Stowe is a white American woman, Douglass is a black slave. Her work is a novel, his is an autobiography. Despite their many differences both Douglass and Beecher Stowe show that slavery existed because of the belief in the inherently superiority of the white race. Whereas both works challenge the morality of the Fugitive Slave Law and urge Americans to break it not through violence but through words, Del Guercio contends that they offer differing viewpoints on race and gender relations not only to slavery but also to abolition.

Divided into two parts and six chapters, this comparative study applies Garrisonian abolitionist, Marxist and feminist perspectives to the two texts, which allows the author to give a detailed look at the opinions of the American people regarding the place of the slave in the antebellum period. Through the lens of nineteenth-century race and gender ideology, Gerardo Del Guercio focuses on the American north, domesticity and emancipation. He contends that most American policymakers did not care much about slavery in itself but aimed at preserving the Union and American economy. He also and notably stresses that moral suasion was an important abolitionist technique, that education and literacy triggered resistance against civil government, and finally that both race and gender played an important role in determining one’s identity in Antebellum America. He throws light on his various arguments by exploring the writings of leading nineteenth century political thinkers, such as William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Philips, William Hosmer, and Henry David Thoreau, who just like Douglass and Stowe did, participated in the restructuration of American ideology. Nineteenth-century American slavery, Del Guercio claims, is actually what defines today’s American race relations.

By and large, The Fugitive Slave Law in The Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin: American Society Transforms Its Culture is remarkable in a variety of respects. It is an illuminating and learned book that addresses a large audience thanks to its clarity. It makes interesting reading for those concerned with slavery, abolition, gender and race; for professors, graduate students and advanced undergraduate students.