The Deterritorialization of African Americans in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Geography Textbooks and Abolitionist Novels

Yael Ben-zvi

In Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) Harriet Beecher Stowe famously sends her surviving African American characters to Liberia. In her second antislavery novel, Dred (1856), she suggests that African American communities could thrive only outside the United States. Like Stowe, many white abolitionists believed that while emancipation should begin in the U.S., it better end elsewhere. Indeed, William Lloyd Garrison and Lydia Maria Child were considered too radical by many supporters of the antislavery cause since they stressed the Americanness of African Americans--their ties to the United States and their right to lead free, equally valued lives on U.S. soil.

By reading Stowe’s antislavery novels in conjunction with her lesser-known textbooks, Primary Geography for Children (1833) and First Geography for Children (1855), this paper offers a new vocabulary for conceptualizing the deterritorialization of African Americans in antebellum U.S. culture. I argue that this deterritorialization was an effect of a new geopolitical focus articulated through the notion of geographic interiority. While the new U.S. Department of the Interior was busy containing the territories captured in the wake of the U.S.-Mexican War, most of Africa’s space was considered a dangerous, unknown interior that defied containment. Barred from belonging to the U.S. interior and threatened by the African one, African Americans were portrayed as quintessentially alien. This paper analyzes and contextualizes this alienation through a geographically sensitive critique of abolitionist thought. This perspective is particularly productive because of the centrality of geographic discourses for antebellum thought, in which the concept of interiority was instrumental for defining terms of spatial belonging, rights, and, in nineteenth-century parlance, “destinies.”