SOURCE: DeLombard, Jeannine Marie. “Representing the Slave: White Advocacy and Black Testimony in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Dred.” New England Quarterly 75, no. 1 (March 2002): 80-106.

In the following essay, DeLombard discusses Stowe's treatment of the legal system's silencing of black testimony as well as the limitations of white advocacy on their behalf.

In 1853, in part to refute the charge that Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) was riddled with legal inaccuracies, Harriet Beecher Stowe issued A Key to “Uncle Tom's Cabin.”¹ Tucked among the text's voluminous trial transcripts and newspaper clippings is an odd fictional vignette that would have struck Stowe's readers as uncannily familiar. The scene features a legal dispute between a slave, Tom, and a slaveholder, Simon Legree, whose names recall two of the best-known characters in Uncle Tom's Cabin. But, unlike Stowe's first novel, in which the cruel master's brutality leads to the noble slave's death, this scene imagines the...