Jussie Smollett and the Hazards of Moral Sentimentality
Narratives about ‘racism’ and ‘homophobia,’ stoked by news and social media, stir self-affirming rage.
A well-known story says that when President Lincoln met Harriet Beecher Stowe, he remarked, “So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.”
Stowe’s 1852 novel, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”—with its melodrama of Eliza’s flight across the ice, of Simon Legree’s cruelty, of Uncle Tom’s martyrdom—had so roused American feelings on the subject of slavery that nothing less than a great civil war could have done justice to either the crime or the novel.
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