New Orleans daily crescent. [volume] ([New Orleans, La.]) 1851-1866, 1854-01-05
THE DAILY CRESCENT.
THURSDAY MORNING. JANY s, 1854.
\ LIVE AND LET LIVE. \


LIFE AND LET LIFE.
Iii briefly reviewing, last week, Mrs. Stoves
= Uncle Tom," we were compelled to break of,
in the middle of our subject We return to -
not 30 much for the purpose Of completing our
criticism Of . work, in our eyes worthy q Ht.ie
attention, as in order to set before the puohc
what it has great occasion to consider--the true
but Unexplained causes which hare given, to q
book 10 senseless, go much of adventltious I'M
portance. Before we can, however, come to this
latter part Of the subject we must yet little
further point cut those folles Of fact and afro
cities of opinion in the composition, which should
at once have stamped it, in every body's eyes, as
a shallow yet criminal rhapsody, an absurdity
half mad and half malignant, of which the au-
thoress, being extremely benevolent, would
gladly destroy everything else in order to des-
troy slavery. Todo that, she would have every
humane and Gcd- fearing man put the law at de-
fance; shoot down its ministers; overset
churches, the State, the Union; and wrap one
half Of it in the flames and blood Of that direst
Of hellish calamities, q servile war of extermi-
ton. All this. Mistress Stowe plainly breaches,
a. to be preferred to any postponement of Abo-
lition. Tell her that q murderous resistance to
the laws. such as she inculcates, would only
bring about Disunion, not Emancipation; she
will only answer you, that &c the Union ought to
be pulled down, for tolerating slavery Show
her that the resort, by every slave, to what she
advises-fight and the killing of all who at
tempt to stay it--can only end in the promis-
cuous slaughter Of the entire body Of the slaves,
and sweet, pious, benevolent, feminine Mistress
Stowe shall tell you, in the fag lend of some scrap
out of the wisdom Of P1utarch or Of those the
guardian Of whose Freedom was the guillotine,
that ss'Tis better to die than to live a slave"
Mrs Stowe, in short, part quack and part cut
throat, comes to us, in her charity, to be our
family physician for diseases she has never wit
messed. With one hand she presents arsenic;
with the other, pistol and if we don't take
her physic, she'll take our lives. Mrs. Stowe,
without having ever in her life beheld even a
mouse, is a great rat-catcher; and therefore
modestly insists upon burning down our house,
In order to rid us of o rat.
Wehaye already suggested the case Of Legree
as an extraordinary instance of both Mrs.
Stoves extreme facility of belief and fertility
of invention. The slightness Of hint upon which
she can, as a fast foundation, build up the most
enormous structure Of fiction, is really marvel
GUS Another prodigious example of this facul-
ty is found in the tale of the second male char
acter Of her epopee, George the mulatto, the
husband Of the girl Eliza George may be said
to be the hero, as Tom is the saint and martyr
Of the story. George is an Adonis in face and
form, Chesterfield in manners, Whitney or
Fulton in mechanical genius, ar Amadis de
Gaul in amorous devotion, o William Tell in
spirit, and more than q Charles Mathews in
powers ofself- transformation Ofcourse, being
thus all-accomplished, he is bru tally treated in
proportion. His master hates him for being
we'll behaved, and misuses him, because he is
valuable Thence ensues for him a long series
ofadventures. And now, what is the founda-
ton Of fact, in this most veracious chronicle,
for all Georges beauty, talents, and wrongs
This authentic historian Of slavery herself tells
it, clearly without suspicion that the slender
ness of the real incident {even If real) ought
utterly to discredit her as anything but
boundless fiction maker. She iusti6es her
whole delineation Of George and his rare
gifts and cruel wrongs, out Of the single fact
that she has been fold Heaven knows where or
by whom that negro IN Kentucky once an
pented ualtiable machine for cleaning hemp!
Such is the relation and the ratio, in Mrs
Stowe, Of the simple matter Of fact to the tissue
which she creates out of it. She stops not to
verify the single stray circumstance which she
hears: why should she 1t suits her: that's
enough: true or false is of no sort of conse-
quence. She has been fold that o negro once
invented machine Of course, it must be true
and, this being thus established, quite to
Mistress Stoves satisfaction, she arrives, by
sure inference, at all the rest: the inventor was
not only young, fair, graceful, and all that lit
being, as every body knows, the inyariable GUS
tom among mechanicans and patentees to be
handsomer, more graceful and younger than all
other folks) but was most inhumanely treated
And, inasmuch as Mistress Stowe had neper
heard Of Fulton nor Whitney, nor Of any
other ,ohite inventor who was ill-rewarded,
Mistress Stowe thinks, very properly, that we
ought all to have our threats cut, because she,
out of the smallest fibre of fact, can weave an
endless tissue of falsehoods and follies With
this murderous leyity as to the reality of facts,
from which she is presently to preach general
sedition to the whites and general massacre to
the blacks, does she construct her narrative.
There never before was any thing so detestable
or 50 monstrous among women as this. Men,
often barbarous and bloody, have sometimes
been known to preach the like: but never until
now did q female SO far forget all the sweet and
sacred instincts of her sex, as to do what Mrs.
Stowe has done--endeayor to whet the knife Of
domestic murder and shake over the innocent
head of every matron, maid and babe in the
South, the blazing torch of midnight confagra-
ton, the brutal and merciless instruments Of
death, that are struck to the heart or dash out
the brains of the sleeping or the helpless, in
the bursting-out of slaye-insurrection
How it is thatmen, and still more, women,
have not, instead Of extolling and exalting
Mrs. Stowe been shocked and reyolted at the
abomination of 0 creature who--weaks and cow
ardly herself-ean incite and sanotify by all
the tricks of the novelist, every thing of house.
hold butchery that it freezes the heart of even
cruel men to think of, would probably seem to
us inexplioable, but for one very simple solution.
This is an exceedingly philanthropic century
and as we have long since come to perceive that
the cruelest, the most bloodthirsty of all earthly