The Racial Swamps of Reconstruction: Harriet Beecher Stowe's Life in Post-Civil War Florida

Harriet Beecher Stowe, the internationally known U.S. author and abolitionist, whom President Abraham Lincoln famously called "the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war," referring to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) and the American Civil War (1861-1865), (2) was also t...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of international women's studies 2023-10, Vol.25 (7), p.1-15
Main Author: Armbruster, Elif S
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Abolition of slavery
Abolitionists
African Americans
American Civil War
American literature
Beecher, Henry Ward (1813-1887)
Civil war
Civil War, 1861-1865
Criticism and interpretation
Feminism
Life
Postwar reconstruction
Racial justice
Readership
Reconstruction period-US
Stowe, Harriet Beecher
Stowe, Harriet Beecher (1811-1896)
Tourism
United States history
War
White people
Women
Writers
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Summary:Harriet Beecher Stowe, the internationally known U.S. author and abolitionist, whom President Abraham Lincoln famously called "the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war," referring to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) and the American Civil War (1861-1865), (2) was also the author of numerous other works, many of them much lesser known today. Stowe's Palmetto Leaves (1873), the subject of this essay, was, for example, a best-selling travel narrative about life in Florida after the American Civil War and is considered to have been an impetus behind the modern tourist industry in Florida. Today, however, Palmetto Leaves has been mostly overlooked or forgotten by scholars. In spite of this oversight, Stowe's text about life in Florida during the post-war period of Reconstruction merits close evaluation because it exposes Stowe's racial, political, and gendered views as they evolved after the Civil War. Because the author and her work were so popular in their day, Palmetto Leaves makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the politics of Northern White women writers and post-Civil War sentiment in the North. As I offer in this essay, Stowe, and her largely White and female readership in the North, increasingly saw the benefits of, and helped enable, a racially hierarchical society during the period of Reconstruction. Thus, in spite of Stowe's "pioneering" decision to go south in the years after the war ended, my essay complicates our understanding of the proto-feminist author and shows how Stowe ultimately eschews new frontiers in Palmetto Leaves and instead embraces racially regressive views.
ISSN:1539-8706
1539-8706