Chapter XIV. “Evangeline”
What a beautifully crafted chapter this is! And how well it
exemplifies the narrative virtues that help account for the
unprecedented success of Mrs. Stowe’s great achievement. For one
thing, the chapter—like the novel throughout—is full of action.
Chapter 14 sets a compact world in motion, flowing north to south down
the Mississippi and bound for New Orleans 160 years ago, when the
Crescent City at the mouth of the great river appeared poised to rival
New York as America’s greatest port. For by means of the Mississippi
River, New Orleans received, as the chapter tells us, the wealth and
enterprise of “a country whose products embrace all between the tropics
and the poles!”
A steamboat is bearing cotton to market. On board, much is happening,
as we learn through Stowe’s admirable lucidity and economy of style. A
slave has won the privilege of moving unshackled around the boat and,
with his little bit of literacy, has retreated to where he can piece
out the words and consolation of his prized possession, a Bible. A
child of five is flitting about the vessel, winning the hearts of
everyone, even the gruffest of the crew. The little white girl, Eva,
and the black slave, Tom, meet and learn each other’s names. Later the
little girl falls off the boat, and Tom leaps into the water and saves
her. The child urges her father, a wealthy southern gentleman, to
purchase her rescuer for their household; and after haggling a bit with
a trader who is bringing a coffle of slaves to sell in New Orleans, the
gentleman, St. Clare, does buy Tom. He means to make him his coachman,
an enviable position of ease for a slave, so that by the end of the
chapter, Tom’s fortunes have taken a sharp turn for the better.
These many happenings are rendered with great vividness. At the
start, in proposing to write her sketches of slave life that would
become Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Mrs. Stowe had presented herself primarily as
a painter. “There is no arguing with pictures,” the author wrote to
her editor, “and everybody is impressed by them, whether they mean to
be or not.” So her novel will show us this world in which so much is
going on, and let us hear what we see as well, and feel it, as in the
present chapter, where Stowe describes the turbid waters of the mighty
Mississippi as “hurrying, foaming, tearing along,” and shows us the
light “quivering” on the water at sunset, and the “shivery” sugarcane
along the shore, and the dark cypresses hung with “funereal” Spanish
moss. On board, amid cotton bales on the upper deck, Tom is pictured
poring over his Bible, having lifted his head from the page to gaze far
off at the fields back from the river and “the distant slaves at their
toil,” and at the “huts gleaming out in long rows”—slave cabins—set
apart from the plantation owner’s mansion. The scene on shore has
brought to Tom’s mind the Shelby mansion in Kentucky—his former
master’s dwelling “with its wide, cool halls”—and caused him to muse on
his own humble slave cabin, which fate has forced him out of. Now far
from Kentucky, Tom in his homesickness pictures “his busy wife,
bustling in her preparations for the evening meals,” and he imagines he
hears “the merry laugh of his boys at their play, and the chirrup of
the baby at his knee”—all that cheerful activity that he will never
return to or be part of again.
Stowe’s novel is filled with such clearly described actions, all in
motion for the reader to see, hear, and feel. And—in addition to
action and vivid images— she fills her world with colorful characters.
Four such dominate this chapter. There is Tom of the novel’s title,
Uncle Tom, as Eva agrees to call him—she a second major character. And
there is Eva’s father, St. Clare, a prosperous gentleman returning home
to New Orleans after a visit up North. Last, there is the dealer in
human flesh, the slave trader Haley, whom readers will remember having
met at the very beginning of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
About Tom, even in this single chapter, we find a great deal confirmed
that we have already come to know. This particular slave is a splendid
worker, good-natured, one you can trust with responsibility. He is
young and strong: a “broad-chested, strong-armed fellow”—”Just look at
them limbs,” Haley says to St. Clare: “broad-chested, strong as a
horse.” In addition, Tom is kindly, “ever yearning toward the simple
and childlike,” and thus is drawn to little Eva’s liveliness and
innocence. And he is quietly, deeply religious.
Evangeline, the five-year-old who befriends the slave, is altogether
different. Consider the contrasts between the two—and how much more
interesting stories are when filled with contrasts, how much duller
they would be if everybody in them thought alike, valued the same
values, spoke the same way. Eva is female, Tom is male. Eva is young,
Tom is mature. Eva is white, Tom is black. Eva is rich, Tom is poor.
Eva is free and light-footed and welcomed wherever she goes; Tom is
enslaved, condemned to move about only at his owner’s sufferance. And
Tom at the time of the story was regarded by most white people as
inferior and near-beastial, to be put to work as one would put an ox or
a mule to work, whereas Eva, the little golden-haired, blue-eyed
Evangeline, is adored by all as though she were an angel.
Eva St. Clare, the “Little Eva” introduced in this chapter of Stowe’s
novel, was to become one of the most celebrated characters in all of
nineteenth-century American fiction. Her beauty, her purity, her
kindliness, the “airy and innocent playfulness” she brings into every
place she alights struck a chord in the hearts of millions of
Americans, so that as soon as Eva entered the story, which was
unfolding week by week in the National Era, her presence alone all but
assured a phenomenal success for Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Eva’s father St. Clare looks something like his daughter—the same hair
and eyes, “the same noble cast of head”—but in him, innocence is
replaced by sophistication and skepticism. Moreover, a wealthy white
gentleman in 1851 was at the opposite end of the social spectrum from
the slave Tom. And unlike the pious Tom, St. Clare is lacking in
religious faith. The wonder is that Harriet Beecher Stowe—daughter,
sister, and wife of ministers—could write with sympathy of such an
irreligious person; for she will make St. Clare, despite his
sgnosticism and fondness for irony and sarcasm, into a wonderfully
attractive figure: witty, humane, compassionate, and wise.
And there is Haley, leading his grubby existence at the furthest
extreme from that of the adorable Eva: Haley the trader always looking
for the main chance, for what he can squeeze out of others, driving the
hardest bargain and happy only when he has done so. It is Mrs. Stowe’s
accomplishment to have brought such disparate figures to authentic
life, put entirely credible words in their mouths, and made each of
these four totally different people convincing. And she will do the
same for many others, again and again, in the bustling pages ahead.
Uncle Tom's Cabin in the National Era 
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