The misrepresentations in "Uncle Tom's Cabin" of the character of the negro and his usual treatment in southern slavery have been taken as true by the best-informed and most unprejudiced everywhere outside of the south. The quotations which I make above from Prof. Barrett Wendell's _bahnbrechend_ work on American literature[81] show a rare and exemplary freedom from sectional bias. But he is a most convincing witness to the statement with which I begin this chapter, as I shall now show by two other excerpts from the same book, making it appear that even Professor Wendell has accepted without question the misrepresentations mentioned. In these excerpts I italicize the important statements, and I follow each with a contradictory one of my own. I invite close attention to what Professor Wendell says on one side and I on the other, for they make up issues of fact that must be rightly settled before the historical merit of the work which is the subject of this chapter can be accurately judged. This is the first excerpt: "Written carelessly, and full of crudities, 'Uncle Tom's Cabin,' even after forty-eight years, remains a remarkable piece of fiction. The truth is that almost unawares Mrs. Stowe had in her the stuff of which good novelists are made. Her plot, to be sure, is conventional and rambling; but her characters, even though little studied in detail, have a pervasive vitality which no study can achieve; _you unhesitatingly accept them as real. Her descriptive power, meanwhile, was such as to make equally convincing the backgrounds in which her action and her characters move. What is more, these backgrounds, most of which she knew from personal experience, are probably so faithful to actual nature that the local sentiment aroused as you read them may generally be accepted as true._"[82] I say as to the characters in the novel that the negroes are monstrous distortions, being drawn in the main with the leading peculiarities of whites and without those of negroes; and that as to her most representative southern whites Mrs. Stowe is utterly untrue to fact by making them all anti-slavery. I say as to the "backgrounds," that she knew as little of them as she did of the negroes. I expect to demonstrate that the "personal experience" claimed for her by Professor Wendell was scanty and inadequate in the extreme. I now give the second and last excerpt: "She [Mrs. Stowe] differed from most abolitionists _in having observed on the spot all the tragic evils of slavery_."[83]