"Uncle Tom's Cabin", though a pre-Civil War, bestselling "novel"--for sake of a better description--engages far more than fiction in its portrayals, depictions and stories.
It ever so subtly weaves in history and even scriptural eschatology for the few readers who are capable of knowing its wisdom when they see it on the written page, if they read !
She refers to the slave Tom, "in his well-brushed broadcloth suit, smooth beaver , glossy boots, faultless wristbands and collar, with grave, good-natured black face , looking respectable enough to be a Bishop of Carthage , as men of his color were in other ages."
This Carthage reference employed by Harriet Beecher Stowe, refers to a series of black bishops of the Latin-Christian era, centuries after the iconic "Hannibal of Carthage" whose war elephants whipped Rome for 16 years before his defeat at Zama, Tunisia, by Rome, whose main allies were African Numidians.
Stowe's footnote 140 reads : "'Bishop of Carthage ' --ancient city in North Africa near Tunis. Colonizationists often appealed to the achievements of the Egyptian, Ethiopian, and Carthaginian civilizations to prove that repatriated African Americans could thrive in Liberia."
Back in the text , Stowe continued:
"If ever Africa shall show an elevated and cultivated race--and come it must, sometimes, her turn to figure in the great drama of human improvement--life will awake there with a gorgeousness and splendor of which our cold western tribes faintly have conceived ....In all these they will exhibit the highest form of the peculiarly 'Christian life ,' and, perhaps, as God chastened whom he loveth, he has chosen poor Africa in the furnace of affliction, to make her the highest and noblest in that kingdom, which he will set up, when every other kingdom has been tried, and failed; for the first shall be last and the last first."
P.167, UNCLE TOM'S CABIN by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Wordsworth edition (1852, 1987)
Monday, April 30, 2018
"BISHOP OF CARTHAGE"
"Uncle Tom's Cabin", though a pre-Civil War, bestselling "novel"--for sake of a better description--engages far more than fiction in its portrayals, depictions and stories.
It ever so subtly weaves in history and even scriptural eschatology for the few readers who are capable of knowing its wisdom when they see it on the written page, if they read !
She refers to the slave Tom, "in his well-brushed broadcloth suit, smooth beaver , glossy boots, faultless wristbands and collar, with grave, good-natured black face , looking respectable enough to be a Bishop of Carthage , as men of his color were in other ages."
This Carthage reference employed by Harriet Beecher Stowe, refers to a series of black bishops of the Latin-Christian era, centuries after the iconic "Hannibal of Carthage" whose war elephants whipped Rome for 16 years before his defeat at Zama, Tunisia, by Rome, whose main allies were African Numidians.
Stowe's footnote 140 reads : "'Bishop of Carthage ' --ancient city in North Africa near Tunis. Colonizationists often appealed to the achievements of the Egyptian, Ethiopian, and Carthaginian civilizations to prove that repatriated African Americans could thrive in Liberia."
Back in the text , Stowe continued:
"If ever Africa shall show an elevated and cultivated race--and come it must, sometimes, her turn to figure in the great drama of human improvement--life will awake there with a gorgeousness and splendor of which our cold western tribes faintly have conceived ....In all these they will exhibit the highest form of the peculiarly 'Christian life ,' and, perhaps, as God chastened whom he loveth, he has chosen poor Africa in the furnace of affliction, to make her the highest and noblest in that kingdom, which he will set up, when every other kingdom has been tried, and failed; for the first shall be last and the last first."
P.167, UNCLE TOM'S CABIN by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Wordsworth edition (1852, 1987)