SOURCE: Boyd, Richard. “Models of Power in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Dred.” Studies in American Fiction 19, no. 1 (spring 1991): 15-29.

In the following essay, Boyd maintains that Stowe's novel is profoundly pessimistic regarding the possibility of abolishing slavery in a nonviolent way.

Near the conclusion of Harriet Beecher Stowe's second anti-slavery novel, Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856), the cynical Frank Russel propounds a view of personal freedom that seems entirely in keeping with his bleak and, according to the narrator, typically male view of the world: “‘After all, what is liberty, that people make such a breeze about? It's only a pretty name. We are all slaves to one thing or another; nobody is absolutely free, except Robinson Crusoe in the desolate island, and he tears all his shirts to pieces, and hangs them up as signals of distress, in his distracted desire to get back into...