It is just as well Harriet Beecher Stowe knew nothing about Mary Chesnut.
The child of fervently puritanical parents and driven by her abolitionist beliefs to write "Uncle Tom's Cabin," Stowe created an incredibly successful and influential novel although she had no firsthand knowledge of her subject. It was serialized in the National Era in 1851, in the year before it appeared in book form.
Stowe was convinced that all slaveholders were brutish oppressors (as some undoubtedly were), but what would she have made of Mary Boykin Miller, who as a young girl taught slaves on two plantations to read and write although this was strictly forbidden in South Carolina? Both she and the man she married were opposed to slavery.
Yes, the Chesnuts were so opposed to slavery that they taught the slaves they owned to read.
Because I'm opposed to violence, I'll drive Peter Cliffe to the hospital after I beat the shit out of him. And then I'll do it again.
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