AMERICA REVISITED
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And (same letter):
Bless the Lord, 0 my
soul~
that with all my strong relish for
brandy and wine, and all my indescribable admiration and most over–
flowing delight in handsome young ladies, no offenses of this kind
[he had been writing about lapses among the clergy] have yet been
written down against me in God's
book.
In another letter to her:
You should be as regular in the kitchen as
ill
the garden.
I suffer amazingly every day I live.
On and on it goes, this passionately devoted man and wife, examining
their consciences, pointing out weaknesses, and wrestling-daily, visibly
-with the forces of Evil. All his life Calvin Stowe underwent hal–
lucinations, usually devilish, and once, like Luther, actually routed the
Devil by shouting at him some things from
Ephesians:
"I tell you it
made him bark like a dog, and he took himself off. He won't trouble
me again." Or, to go to the other extreme, the life of amorphous
homosexual Francis Grierson is certainly more striking and "original"
than the destiny of any fictional character of the time.
_
To move to the Southern side, Mrs. Stowe herself wrote no more
gruesome indictment of slavery, again on Negro and white alike, than
did Mrs. Qhestnut, an aristocratic and intelligent North Carolinian
who moved
in
the highest Confederate circles and kept a diary. In
fact Mrs. Chestnut thought that Mrs. Stowe had missed the most
telling argument, the sexual horrors of slavery that no one ever
mentioned:
Under slavery, we live surrounded by prostitutes, yet an abandoned
woman [a white one, she means] is sent out of a decent house. Who
thinks any worse of a Negro or mulatto woman for being a thing we
can't name. God forgive us, but ours is a monstrous system and an
iniquity! .
And what is a plantation owner:
A magnate who runs a hideous black harem with its consequences
under the same roof with his lovely white wife, and his beautiful and
accomplished daughters? He holds his head as high and poses as the
model of all human virtues to those poor women whom God and the
laws have given him. From the height of his awful majesty, he scolds
and thunders at them as if he never did wrong in his life. Fancy such
a man finding his daughter reading
Don Juan.
'¥ou with that im-
