was rather hazy. My study of
United States history had been confined to those periods which were
designated in my book as "Discovery," "Colonial," "Revolutionary," and
"Constitutional." I now began to study about the Civil War, but the
story was told in such a condensed and skipping style that I gained
from it very little real information. It is a marvel how children ever
learn any history out of books of that sort. And, too, I began now to
read the newspapers; I often saw articles which aroused my curiosity,
but did not enlighten me. But one day I drew from the circulating
library a book that cleared the whole mystery, a book that I read
with the same feverish intensity with which I had read the old Bible
stories, a book that gave me my first perspective of the life I was
entering; that book was _Uncle Tom's Cabin_.

This work of Harriet Beecher Stowe has been the object of much
unfavorable criticism. It has been assailed, not only as fiction of
the most imaginative sort, but as being a direct misrepresentation.
Several successful attempts have lately been made to displace the book
from Northern school libraries. Its critics would brush it aside with
the remark that there never was a Negro as good as Uncle Tom, nor a
slave-holder as bad as Legree. For my part, I was never an admirer of
Uncle Tom, nor of his type of goodness; but I believe that there were
lots of old Negroes as foolishly good as he; the proof of which is
that they knowingly stayed and worked the plantations that furnished
sinews for the army which was fighting to keep them enslaved. But in
these later years several cases have come to my personal knowledge in
which old Negroes have died and left what was a considerable fortune
to the descendants of their former masters. I do not think it takes
any great stretch of the imagination to believe there was a fairly
large class of slave-holders typified in Legree. And we must also
remember that the author depicted a number of worthless if not vicious
Negroes, and a slave-holder who was as much of a Christian and a
gentleman as it was possible for one in his position to be; that she
pictured the happy, singing, shuffling "darky" as well as the mother
wailing for her child sold "down river."

I do not think it is claiming too much to say that _Uncle Tom's Cabin_
was a fair and truthful panorama of slavery; however that may be, it
opened my eyes as to who and what I was and what my country considered
me; in fact