Harriet Beecher Stowe's Preachers of the Swamp: Dred and the Jeremiad

The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose. It shall blossom abundantly, and rejoice even with joy and singing: they shall see the glory of the LORD, and the excellency of our God. Strengthen ye the weak hands, and confirm the feeble knees. --Isa. 35:1-3 And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions. And also upon the servants and upon the handmaids in those days will I pour out my spirit. --Joel 2:28-29 Often dubbed Stowe's "other" antislavery novel, Dred (1856) is generating critical interest, partly because its gaps, contradictions, and inherent flaws create much space for scholarly dialogue. Until recently, most critics found the novel daunting and implausible at best. (1) There is no question that this novel is both complex and, at times, contradictory; however, according to biographers, Stowe's further research into slave life, the beating of her friend Charles Sumner on the Senate floor, the abolitionist retaliation by John Brown in Kansas, and research on Nat Turner's slave revolt turned the domestic, southern plantation novel initially titled Canema into Dred, the jeremiadic tale of slave insurrection and Christian (ir)responsibility. (2) The last ten years have shown an increasing scholarly interest in Dred, beginning with Judie Newman's edition in 1992 and including Robert S. Levine's most recent edition. (3) Stowe uses the South and its plantations, camp-meetings, courtrooms, churches, and swamps to introduce Northern readers to the complexity of the debate and, ultimately, both the church's failure to engage explicitly with the national dilemma and its inability to unite as an ideological system to defeat slavery. Although I plan to contextualize briefly my argument in jeremiadic and swamp studies, it is the scope of this article to focus on the marginalized preachers of the text as new Jeremiahs: Dred, the Old Testament prophet and insurrectionist; Milly, the New Testament Christian; Harry, the Moses-figure; and Clayton, the burgeoning abolitionist. Stowe uses these preachers within a multivocal narrative to attack American society and institutionalized Christianity by situating prophetic voices in the margins that preach to the center. By bringing together Dred, Harry, Clayton, and Milly, Stowe argues for a new national culture based on the communal ties already established in the margins. Although Dred's insurrection ultimately fails (actually, it never really begins), the real rebellion is the utopian establishment outside of and in spite of the controlling center; therefore, the swamp and its preachers are literary tools to convert characters and readers from any ideology that perpetuates slavery to one that abolishes it. Dred and the Jeremiad In its simplest form, the jeremiad is a type of literature that fuses religion with politics for a particular rhetorical purpose. (4) In other words, according to Sacvan Bercovitch, the jeremiad is a political sermon with its "theology wedded to politics and politics to the progress of the kingdom of God" (xiv). Its structure, according to Bercovitch, incorporates three distinct elements: [The jeremiad includes] precedent from Scripture that sets out the communal norms; then a series of condemnations that details the actual state of the community (at the same time insinuating the conventional promises that ensures successes) and finally a prophetic vision that unveils the promises, announces the good things to come, and explains away the gap between fact and ideal. (16) Because Puritans depended so much on the solidity of their dogma, preaching the word seldom met with opposition. At least initially, in the New World, within Puritan faith communities, there was little competition for religious, political, or social identity. …