Palmetto-Leaves (1873)

AUTHOR: Stowe, Harriet Beecher

KEYWORDS: animals, food

SUMMARY (Aïcha Bouchelaghem, edited Deborah Madsen)

Palmetto-Leaves is a collection of essays and letters that document Stowe’s view of and life in  Florida, where she acquired a cotton plantation south of Jacksonville and, in 1867, a nearby cottage where she wintered from 1868 to 1884. Relevant chapters are: “Nobody’s Dog,” “A Letter to the Girls,” “A Water-Coach, and a Ride in It,” “Picnicking Up Julington,” “Yellow Jessamines,” and “The Grand Tour Up River.” These stories either challenge the use and/or capture of animals or they problematize hunting as a sport versus for food. Stowe promotes animal welfare and repeats that non-human animals lead individual, worthwhile lives.

“Nobody’s Dog” (1-15):
Stowe promotes the establishment of shelters for stray dogs. She argues that stray dogs, if they were cared for as pets and became separated from their owners by way of accident or death, are particularly vulnerable because they are accustomed to receiving love and attention. Stowe calls on the sympathy of the implied reader. She praises the fund-raising efforts of female activists “for ‘Our Dumb Animals’” in Boston, emphasizing that the money will “be used in keeping a home for stray dogs” (original emphasis, 11).

Stowe believes that caring for stray dogs is inherent to civilization: “To give such a refuge, till they find old masters or new, seems only a part of Christian civilization … The more Christ’s spirit prevails, the more we feel for all that can feel and suffer” (11). Stowe compares nonhuman animals to humans – “The poor brute struggles and suffers with us” (11) – in a rhetorical move that evokes the welfare argument presented by Jeremy Bentham, i.e., that any individual who can feel pain deserves sympathy. Stowe uses anthropomorphism more directly to extend the discourse of rights to stray dogs. She argues that a dog with no master or “nobody’s dog” possesses “no rights to life, liberty, or pursuit of happiness” (10) and yet deserves to have such rights.

Stowe reclaims the individual interests of stray dogs by making Jack, a stray dog she encounters onboard a steamer bound for Savannah, the protagonist and focalizer of more than two thirds of the chapter. She insists that Jack has his own story or “romance” (9), which “it becomes us not to forget” (11). Stowe presents him as an active agent in his own narrative: he “choose[s]” his own mistress or “protectress” on board and repeatedly “[fights] his way” back to her.

“A Letter to the Girls” (40-52):
Stowe discusses the perspectives and individual interests of animals of burden and of pets. In her descriptions of Fly, a mule used for transportation by cart, Stowe challenges the use of animals to draw heavy loads. She speculates on Fly’s internal life, saying that he “is a worn-out, ancient patriarch, who, having worked all his days without seeing any particular use in it [the work], is now getting rather misanthropic in his old age, and obstinately determined not to put one foot before the other one bit faster than he is actually forced to do” (42). She revises the popular perception of mules as stubborn by tracing Fly’s stubbornness to his resentment of being forced to perform work that interests him in no way. Stowe expresses empathy with Fly’s predicament: “Well, I don’t blame him, poor brute! Life, I suppose, is as much a mystery to him as to the philosophers; and he has never been able to settle what it is all about, this fuss of being harnessed periodically to impertinent carts, and driven here and there, for no valuable purpose that he can see” (43). Stowe places Fly’s consciousness a little below that of humans: whereas Fly resents his forced labor, he cannot formulate an explanation for it and his captivity is reduced to the state of an unsolvable query about life, rather than about systemic injustice. Nonetheless, Stowe’s construction of Fly’s experience questions the moral legitimacy of using animals of burden.

Stowe also tells of the domestication of a red-bird, whom Aunt Katy, a local African American woman, names Phoebus. Stowe advocates against catching wild birds and keeping them as pets: “We do not approve of putting free birds in cages” (46). Yet Phoebus is a “sensation”; “such a beautiful fellow, that we couldn’t resist the desire to keep him a little while, just to look at him” (46). Stowe offers two arguments that support this exception. First, she vindicates Aunt Katy’s moral credibility by highlighting her extensive knowledge of – and thus her proximity to – her local environment and its non-human residents: “she [Aunt Katy] was born and brought up, and has always lived, in this neighborhood, and knows every bird in the forest as familiarly as if they were all her own chickens; and she has great skill in getting them to come to her to be caught” (47). Second, Stowe insists that Phoebus becomes content with his new life in captivity, hence her argument is more about pet welfare than the validity of pet-keeping: “he [Phoebus] seems to have accepted the situation; and, when nobody is in the veranda, he uplifts his voice in song. ‘What cheer! what cheer!’ he says, together with many little twitters and gurgles for which we have no musical notes” (51). In addition to speculative direct speech, Stowe uses free indirect discourse to draw attention to pets’ individual interest. When the house cats have noticed and attempted to eat Pheobus, Stowe wonders, seemingly on behalf of Phoebus: “Was it for this he left his native wilds, — to be exposed in a prison to glaring, wild-eyed hyenas and tigers?” (51).

"A Water-Coach, and a Ride in It” (53-68):
Stowe tells of a fishing trip to a bayou near Jacksonville. The tale of this expedition launches Stowe into a reflection that challenges the assumption that humans should head the food chain. Elsewhere Stowe makes a point of naturalizing meat eating when it is inherent to the dietary behavior of a species. In this chapter Stowe emphasizes the exceptional status that humans claim: "It is ‘catch who catch can’ through all the animal kingdom till it comes up to man; and he eats the whole, choosing or refusing as suits his taste. One wonders why there was not a superior order of beings made to eat us. Mosquitoes and black-flies get now and then a nip, to be sure; but there is nobody provided to make a square meal of us, as we do on a wild turkey, for example" (60). Stowe relativizes the common trope of the “monstrous” animal of prey: “when we saw him rise with a wriggling fish in his claws, he struck us as a monster. It seemed a savage proceeding, and we pitied the struggling fish, while ours were yet flapping in the basket. This eating-business is far from pleasant to contemplate” (60). If she does not reach a veg*n conclusion, Stowe problematizes carnivorism through the awareness that eating animals has ethical implications.

“Picnicking Up Julington” (69-86):
Stowe tells of a fishing outing to Julington Creek, near her Florida home of Mandarin. She reflects on the ways in which human behaviors in uncultivated environments impact other animal communities. Like elsewhere, she draws attention to the moral dimension of flesh-eating. Stowe is external to the fishing activity that she recounts: “I sit in the bow, … being good for nothing in the fishing-line” (72). She identifies her outsider position as an opportunity for philosophical reflection: while “the professional fishermen and fisherwomen become all absorbed in their business” Stowe “deliver[s her]self to speculations on Nature” (73). When referring to the fish that her party are catching, Stowe outlines a tension between sympathy with the hunted and the natural instinct or need to eat. Stowe considers what she deems humans’ inherent carnivorous drive as morally incovenient.

We shout like people who are getting hungry, as in truth we are. And now Elsie starts in our boat; and all is commotion, till a fine blue bream, spotted with black, is landed. Next a large black, trout, with his wide yellow mouth, comes up unwillingly from the crystal flood. We pity them, but what are we to do? It is a question between dinner and dinner. These fish, out marketing on their own account, darted at our hook, expecting to catch another fish. We catch them; and, instead of eating, they are eaten.
    After all, the instinct of hunting and catching something is as strong in the human breast as in that of cat or tiger; and we all share the exultation which sends a shout from boat to boat as a new acquisition is added to our prospective dinner-store (75-76).

As elsewhere, Stowe is eager to ascribe nonhuman animal textual entities their own perspective, most typically through the use of perceptual markers such as “unwillingly” and “expecting.” Stowe uses the same technique when discussing the fish-hawks who hunt in the same area. While she anthropomorphizes the birds, she is careful to make visible and nuance her speculations about their emotional response to the presence of human hunters in the creek:

We can see the white head and shoulders of the bird perched upon her nest; and already they perceive us. The pair rise and clap their wings, and discourse to each other with loud, shrill cries, perhaps of indignation, that we who have houses to dwell in, and beef and chickens to eat, should come up and invade their fishing-grounds (77).

On the one hand, the characterization of Stowe and her human peers as “invade[rs]” seems constricted to the fish-hawks’ perspective. On the other hand, Stowe goes on to destabilize a human-exceptionalist view of meat eating more assertively:

The fish-hawk — I beg his pardon, the fisheagle; for I can see that he is a bird of no mean size and proportions — has as good a right to think that the river and the fish were made for him as we; and better too, because the Creator has endowed him with wonderful eyesight, which enables him, from the top of a tree eighty feet high, to search the depths of the river, mark his prey, and dive down with unerring certainty to it. He has his charter in his eyes, his beak, his claws; and doubtless he has a right to remonstrate, when we, who have neither eyes, beaks, nor claws adapted to the purpose, manage to smuggle away his dinner (77-78).

Here Stowe uses a trope commonly used by advocates of veg*nism, such as Russell Thacher Trall, who argue that plants are the natural human diet: physiologically, human bodies are not equipped to eat other animals. According to Stowe, this anatomical fact questions the legitimacy claimed by humans to eat meat, and in particular to hunt other animals.

Stowe opposes unncessary violence against nonhuman animals: “Thankful are we that no mighty hunter is aboard, and that the atrocity of shooting a bird on her nest will not be perpetrated here” (78).

“Yellow Jessamines” (97-115):
In this chapter, Stow recounts a “flower-hunting” walk in the woods (105). As shown elsewhere, Stowe argues that meat-eating is excused in view of alleged human nutritional requirements. Here, however, she critiques the (excessive) use of nonhuman animals for fashion and sartorial decoration. She opens by critiquing a young woman recently arrived in Florida, who denies the common observation that Florida is “a land of flowers” (97). Stowe disagrees and characterizes her as presumptuous, based on her own visits to the Florida woods. Stowe emphasizes the young lady’s superficiality through her attire, which is extravagant and rich with animal-based adornment:

She had provided herself with half a dozen different palmetto-hats, an orange-wood cane tipped with an alligator’s tooth, together with an assortment of cranes’ wings and pink curlews’ feathers, and talked of Florida with the assured air of a connoisseur. She had been on the boat up to Enterprise; she had crossed at Tekoi over to St. Augustine, and come back to the St. James; and was now prepared to speak as one having authority: and she was sure she did not see why it was called a land of flowers. She hadn’t seen any (original emphasis, 98).

The woman’s seemingly grotesque use of animal body-parts contrasts with her assumed but deficient knowledge of Florida’s natural environment. This abundant use of non-human animals for non-dietary consumption appears as a symptom of arrogance and vanity.

“The Grand Tour Up River” (247-266):
Stowe recounts another boating trip. She complains about a group of men who take pleasure in shooting local animals, such as birds and alligators. This chapter reiterates Stowe’s argument that killing other animals for food is problematic but ultimately valid if it is necessary for human sustenance; however, hunting as a sport is morally reprehensible because it assumes that human lives are superior to those of non-human animals, whereas humans should really regard the uniqueness of and sympathize with nonhuman animals. Stowe condemns the glorification hunting as entertainment:

One annoyance on board the boat was the constant and pertinacious firing kept up by that class of men who think that the chief end of man is to shoot something. Now, we can put up with good earnest hunting or fishing done for the purpose of procuring for man food, or even the fur and feathers that hit his fancy and taste. But we detest indiscriminate and purposeless maiming and killing of happy animals, who have but one life to live, and for whom the agony of broken bones or torn flesh is a helpless, hopeless pain, unrelieved by any of the resources which enable us to endure. A parcel of hulking fellows sit on the deck of a boat, and pass through the sweetest paradise God ever made, without one idea of its loveliness, one gentle, sympathizing thought of the animal happiness with which the Creator has filled these recesses. All the way along is a constant fusillade upon every living thing that shows itself on the bank. Now a bird is hit, and hangs, head downward, with a broken wing; and a coarse laugh choruses the deed. Now an alligator is struck; and the applause is greater. We once saw a harmless young alligator, whose dying struggles, as he threw out his poor little black paws piteously like human hands, seemed to be vastly diverting to these cultivated individuals. They wanted nothing of him except to see how he would act when he was hit, dying agonies are so very amusing! (258-260).

Stowe acknowledges the individuality of all animals by emphasizing they have only “one” life, not only can non-human animals feel pain, their life is unique and valuable because, Stowe speculates, it is enjoyable to them: "If the object were merely to show the skill of the marksman, why not practise upon inanimate objects? An old log looks much like an alligator: why, not practise on an old log? It requires as much skill to hit a branch, as the bird singing on it: why not practise on the branch? But no: it must be something that enjoys and can suffer; something that loves life, and must lose it. Certainly this in an inherent savagery difficult to account for. Killing for killing’s sake belongs not even to the tiger. The tiger kills for food; man, for amusement" (260-261).

Stowe concludes that the appeal of hunting is the killing rather than the shooting skill (she develops her earlier claim that the main goal for sport hunters is to “shoot something”). Stowe closes this discussion by challenging the routine association of tigers with violence and therefore moral degradation (in much Abolitionist writing, similes using carnivorous mammals like tigers, lions, and hyenas are frequent in the characterization of physically abusive enslavers). Stowe denies that the human-nonhuman divide corresponds to a distinction between “savage” (immoral) and cultivated (moral, respectful, sympathetic).