production of your accomplished pen, which has already called forth such unqualified eulogy from almost every land where Anglo-Saxon literature finds access, and created so sudden and fervent an excitement on the momentous subject of American slavery, has nowhere been hailed with a more cordial welcome, or produced more salutary effects, than in the city of Aberdeen.
Though long ago imbued, with antislavery principles and interested in the progress of liberty in every part of the world, our community, like many others, required such information, suggestions, and appeals as your valuable work contains in one great department of slavery, in order that their interest might be turned into a specific direction, and their principles reduced, to combined practical effort.
Already they have esteemed it a privilege to engage with some activity in the promotion of the interests of the fugitive slave; and they shall henceforth regard with a deeper interest than ever the movements of their American brethren in this matter, until there exists among them no slavery from which to flee.
While they participate in your abhorrence of slavery in the American states, they trust they need scarcely assure you that they participate also in your love for the American people.
It is in proportion as they love that nation, attached to them by so many ties, that they lament the existence of a system which, so long as it exists, must bring odium upon the national character, as it cannot fail to enfeeble and impair their best social institutions.
They believe it to be a maxim that man cannot hold his fellow-man in slavery without being himself to some extent enslaved. And of this the censorship of the press, together with the expurgatorial indices of various religious societies in the Southern States of America, furnish ample corroboration.
It is hoped that your own nation may speedily be directed to recognize you as its best friend, for having stood forth in the spirit of true patriotism to advocate the claims of a large portion of your countrymen, and to seek the removal of an evil which has done much to neutralize the moral influence of your country's best (and otherwise free) institutions.
Accept, then, from the community of Aberdeen their congratulations on the high literary fame which you have by a single effort so deservedly acquired, and their grateful acknowledgments for your advocacy of a cause in which the best interests of humanity are involved.
Signed in name and by appointment of a public meeting of the citizens of Aberdeen within the County Buildings, this 21st April, 1853, A.D.
Geo. Hessay,
Provost of Aberdeen.
Public Meeting In Dundee—April 22.
Mr. Gilfillan, who was received with great applause, said he had been intrusted by the Committee of the Ladies' Antislavery Association to present the following address to Mrs. Stowe, which he would read to the meeting:—
"Madam: We, the ladies of the Dundee Antislavery Association, desire to add our feeble voices to the acclamations of a world, conscious that your fame and character need no testimony from us. We are less anxious to honor you than to prove that our appreciation and respect are no less sincere and no less profound than those of the millions in other places and other lands, whom you have instructed, improved, delighted, and thrilled. We beg permission to lay before you the expressions of a gratitude and an enthusiasm in some measure commensurate with your transcendent literary merit and moral worth. We congratulate you on the success of the chef-d'oeuvre of your genius, a success altogether unparalleled, and in all probability never to be paralleled in the history of literature. We congratulate you still more warmly on that nobility and benevolence of nature which made you from childhood the friend of the unhappy slave, and led you to accumulate unconsciously the materials for the immortal tale of Uncle Tom's Cabin. We congratulate you in having in that tale supported with matchless eloquence and pathos the cause of the crushed, the forgotten, the injured, of those who had no help of man at all, and who had even been blasphemously taught by professed ministers of the gospel of mercy that Heaven too was opposed to their liberation, and had blotted them out from the catalogue of man. We recognize, too, with delight, the spirit of enlightened and evangelical piety which breathes through your work, and serves to confute the calumny that none but infidels are interested in the cause of abolition—a calumny which cuts at Christianity with a yet sharper edge than at abolition, but which you have proved to be a foul and malignant falsehood. We congratulate you not only on the richness of the laurels which you have won, but on the dignity, the meekness, and the magnanimity with which these laurels have been worn. We hail in you our most gifted sister in the great cause of liberty—we bid you warmly welcome to our city, and we pray Almighty God, the God of the oppressed, to pour his selectest blessings on your head, and to spare your invaluable life, till yours, and ours, and others' efforts for the cause of abolition are crowned with success, and till the shouts of a universal jubilee shall proclaim that in all quarters of the globe the African is free."
The address was handed to Mrs. Stowe amid great applause. MR. GILFILLAN continued: "In addition to the address which I have now read, I have been requested to add a few remarks; and in making these I cannot but congratulate Dundee on the fact that Mrs. Stowe has visited it, and that she has had a reception worthy of her distinguished merits. [Applause.] It is not Dundee alone that is present here to-night: it is Forfarshire, Fifeshire, and I may also add, Perthshire:—that are here to do honor to themselves in doing honor to our illustrious guest. [Cheers.] There are assembled here representatives of the general feeling that boils in the whole land—not from our streets alone, but from our country valleys—from our glens and our mountains O! I wish that Mrs. Stowe would but spare time to go herself and study that enthusiasm amid its own mountain recesses, amid the uplands and the friths, and the wild solitudes of our own unconquered and unconquerable land. She would see scenery there worthy of that pencil which has painted so powerfully the glories of the Mississippi; ay, and she would find her name known and reverenced in every hamlet, and see copies of Uncle Tom's Cabin in the shepherd's shieling, beside Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, the Life of Sir William Wallace, Rob Roy, and the Gaelic Bible. I saw copies of it carried by travellers last autumn among the gloomy grandeurs of Glencoe, and, as Coleridge once said when he saw Thomson's Seasons lying in a Welsh wayside inn, 'That is true fame,' I thought this was fame truer still. [Applause.] It is too late in the day to criticize Uncle Tom's Cabin, or to speculate on its unprecedented history—a history which seems absolutely magical. Why, you are reminded of Aladdin's lamp, and of the palace that was reared by genii in one night. Mrs. Stowe's genius has done a greater wonder than this—it has reared in a marvellously short time a structure which, unlike that Arabian fabric, is a reality, and shall last forever. [Applause.] She must not be allowed, to depreciate herself, and to call her glorious book a mere 'bubble.' Such a bubble there never was before. I wish we had ten thousand such bubbles. [Applause.] If it had been a bubble it would have broken long ago. 'Man,' says Jeremy Taylor, 'is a bubble.' Yea, but he is an immortal one. And such an immortal bubble is Uncle Tom's Cabin; it can only with man expire; and yet a year ago not ten individuals in this vast assembly had ever heard of its author's name. [Applause.] At its artistic merits we may well marvel—to find in a small volume the descriptive power of a Scott, the humor of a Dickens, the keen, observing glance of a Thackeray, the pathos of a Richardson or Mackenzie, combined with qualities of earnestness, simplicity, humanity, and womanhood peculiar to the author herself. But there are three things which, strike me as peculiarly remarkable about Uncle Tom's Cabin: it is the work of an American—of a woman—and of an evangelical Christian. [Cheers.] We have long been accustomed to despise American literature—I mean as compared with our own. I have heard eminent litterateurs say, 'Pshaw! the Americans have no national literature.' It was thought that they lived entirely on plunder—the plunder of poor slaves, and of poor British authors. [Loud cheers.]
