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.