Joy Jordan-Lake examines the ways in which antebellum women novelists tried to counter Harriet Beecher Stowe s enormously popular Uncle Tom's Cabin by preaching a theology of whiteness from within the pages of the books - but were ultimately undermined by their own proslavery agendas. Including a discussion of twentieth- and twenty-first-century novels that revisit plantation mythology, Whitewashing Uncle Tom's Cabin casts new light on the ethical and moral disaster of securing one group s economic strength at the expense of other groups access to dignity, compassion, and justice.