ABSTRACT
In The Minister’s Wooing, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s rather sticky sentimental romance, slavery looms like a pestilent shadow over the quaint Newport cabin where Stowe’s heroine, the saintly Mary Scudder, innocently entertains the attentions of an ascetic Puritan scholar, intrigues of an unprincipled U. S. Senator, devotions of a New England farm-boy, and curiosity of an errant but delightful French lady. A milk-white New England girl just awakening to the realities of her troubled post-revolutionary town, Mary bears silent witness to the initial articulations of moral indignation over the practice of enslaving Africans in America. Privy to the attentions of her mother’s scholarly boarder, Dr. Hopkins, Mary observes the Puritan minister as he publicly declares his moral opposition to slavery. Confessing his new-found conviction, Dr. Hopkins reveals both his shame and his sense of complicity in the corrupt institution’s presence in New England. Admitting the inconsistency of slavery in a nation dedicated to individual liberty, Dr. Hopkins tells Mary’s practical mother-who understands that the Doctor is a “superior being, possessed by a holy helplessness in all things material and temporal”—that, despite the fact that the town is largely sustained by the slave trade, he must preach against the institution without delay.2
