What the most important and influential book in American history still teaches us, despite its flaws.
What the most important and influential book in American history still teaches us, despite its flaws.
T oday marks the 210th birthday of Harriet Beecher Stowe — the most important and influential woman in American history, by virtue of having written the most important and influential book in American history. Indeed, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was more influential in the 19th century than any other book written in that century. We should commemorate its landmark significance.
We should also read it. Despite its flaws, Uncle Tom’s Cabin remains a powerful contemporary testimony to the immorality of slavery in the United States, and a compelling piece of writing. It combines a novelist’s flair for storytelling with both political polemic and Christian evangelism. It was also the first American novel to feature African-American protagonists, and arguably the only lasting novel written during the time of slavery to do so. It is impossible to read Stowe’s book and not come away with a seething hatred of the entire institution of slavery.
Rising to the Occasion
When Stowe began writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life among the Lowly (its full title) in the spring of 1851, she was a mother of six just shy of her 40th birthday. She had never published a novel, although she had published a number of short stories and essays. Her children ranged in age from 14-year-old twins to a baby just shy of a year old. She was also still grieving the loss of seventh child who died of cholera at 18 months in 1849. She wrote at night, after the children had at last been put to bed.
A house full of children separated Stowe’s outlook and experience from that of most of the other major female writers of her era. Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson, and Louisa May Alcott never married. Charlotte was the only one of the Brontë sisters to marry, and only after producing her major novels; the same was true of George Eliot. Mary Shelley’s first child had died before she wrote Frankenstein. There were women who wrote some of their works with a child or two in the home — such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning and George Sand — but Stowe was unusual for her time in producing her most significant novel while a full-time mother of a large brood. A motherly sensibility pervades Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and was crucial to the book’s emotional impact on her readers, many of them mothers.
Another reason why Uncle Tom’s Cabin was so effective in its time — why it is out of fashion today — is its passionate and unabashed Christianity. On that score, Stowe was well-versed, and had plenty of help. Her father was a minister, as were each of her seven brothers, and her husband was a professor of theology.
By her own description, Stowe had “for many years of her life . . . avoided all reading upon or allusion to the subject of slavery, considering it too painful to be inquired into,” hoping that it would wither away. Many in the North felt the same way before the Mexican War reopened debates over expanding slavery westward. The Compromise of 1850 shattered that complacency. While the anti-slavery forces got the better end of the deal, the really major concession to slavery was an expanded Fugitive Slave Law that created unprecedentedly high-profile enforcement of bondage in the free states. Fugitive slave enforcement in the North in 1850–51 radicalized Stowe, as it did many others. A new era of militant American anti-slavery was born. Harriet Tubman made her first venture south into Maryland to rescue slaves at the end of 1850. John Brown organized his first armed resistance to slave-catchers in Springfield, Mass., in 1851.
Stowe struck an agreement with abolitionist publisher Gamaliel Bailey to write, for his Washington newspaper The National Era, a serial that would “paint a word picture of slavery.” Stowe “expected to write three or four installments, but Uncle Tom’s Cabin grew to more than 40.” Readership of The National Era surged from 17,000 to 28,000 during the story’s run. It debuted on June 5, 1851, and was released in book form on March 20, 1852.
Stowe had never lived in the South, but she had lived for almost 20 years in Cincinnati, on the Ohio River across the border from Kentucky. The Underground Railroad was born in Cincinnati during the years that Stowe lived there, reflecting Cincinnati’s status as the free city closest to slave territory. Stowe is not known to have been actively involved in the Underground Railroad at the time, but living in Maine shortly after passage of the Fugitive Slave Law, she harbored a fugitive slave named John Andrew Jackson. As Jackson wrote in his memoirs, published in 1862:
During my flight from Salem [Massachusetts] to Canada, I met with a very sincere friend and helper, who gave me a refuge during the night, and set me on my way. Her name was Mrs. Beecher Stowe. She took me in and fed me, and gave me some clothes and five dollars. She also inspected my back, which is covered with scars which I shall carry with me to the grave. She listened with great interest to my story, and sympathized with me when I told her how long I had been parted from my wife Louisa and my daughter Jenny, and perhaps, for ever.
Stories collected by Stowe’s brothers and others close to her, as well as some sensational accounts in the news, formed much of the factual basis for Uncle Tom’s Cabin. So did other narratives told by ex-slaves themselves, including the memoir of Josiah Henson, published in 1849. Stowe met personally with Henson and quizzed him about the world of slavery. Stowe always insisted that the book was a fictionalized retelling of actual events.
Uncle Tom’s Triumph
The cheap and easy way to write a polemic is to attack the very worst people on the other side of your argument. The most devastating critique is to go after the most respectable — and show how they are inextricably entwined with things that are indefensible. That is how Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Simon Legree, the book’s ultimate villain, would become a watchword for cruelty, but he does not even appear until chapter 31, three-quarters of the way through the book.
The book’s structure is a panorama. Its two main protagonists, Tom and Eliza, begin as slaves on the Kentucky property of Mr. and Mrs. Shelby. We then follow their separate odysseys: Tom is sold south to Louisiana and to his ultimate death, while Eliza escapes north to Canada with her husband George and her son Harry.
Stowe very deliberately begins her tour of slaveowners with sympathetic characters. Mr. Shelby, we are given to believe, is a decent-hearted man who would not mistreat his slaves, and resists selling them. His wife professes to dislike slavery, has a familial devotion to Eliza, and tries to instruct the slaves in Christianity. To be a slave of such people, a defender of the institution might argue, is no worse a life than that of a household servant or factory worker of the same era, and might in some cases be better. Rather than quarrel with that premise, advanced by some of the book’s characters, Stowe shows how slavery could be barbarous even if it were true. When faced with financial difficulties that force him to choose between selling slaves and having a mortgage foreclosed on his property, Mr. Shelby sells Eliza’s son away from her, and sells Uncle Tom down the river, away from his wife and children and everything he has ever known.
The lesson is clear: So long as slaves are property to be freely bought and sold, even the most benevolent of intentions will not protect the enslaved from the breakup of families and from falling into the hands of less scrupulous men. Over and over throughout the book, we meet slaves who tell the same story: A kind and virtuous master treated them well or promised them freedom, then died before putting it in writing, forcing them to be ripped from their families and sold to the likes of Simon Legree.
The book’s title is deliberately ironic: Like many Americans of his day, Tom lives in a log cabin on the Shelby property that he built with his own hands. The cabin is his home, his creation, the place where his children are raised and his friends come to hear him expound the Gospel. But it is not his cabin, not so long as he could be sold away from it at the drop of a hat. We first meet Tom with a vivid description of his humble but homely cabin. By the time he reaches Simon Legree’s plantation in Louisiana, he asks Sambo, the vicious black overseer, where he will live:
The quarters was a little sort of street of rude shanties, in a row, in a part of the plantation, far off from the house. They had a forlorn, brutal, forsaken air. Tom’s heart sunk when he saw them. He had been comforting himself with the thought of a cottage, rude, indeed, but one which he might make neat and quiet, and where he might have a shelf for his Bible, and a place to be alone out of his laboring hours. He looked into several; they were mere rude shells, destitute of any species of furniture, except a heap of straw, foul with dirt, spread confusedly over the floor, which was merely the bare ground, trodden hard by the tramping of innumerable feet. “Which of these will be mine?” said he, to Sambo, submissively. “Dunno; ken turn in here, I spose,” said Sambo; “spects thar’s room for another thar; thar’s a pretty smart heap o’ n*****s to each on ’em, now; sure, I dunno what I’s to do with more.”
We censor the N-word here, but Stowe uses it unexpurgated over a hundred times in the book, sometimes even in the mouths of slaves describing themselves. That is reason enough not to use the book with young children, but it is impossible to give a realistic portrayal of the language of slavery in the 1850s without its brutalizing clatter. Harder on the modern reader is her use of dialect for her black characters (and a few of her low-class white characters). Stowe was deeply devoted to making her white audience empathize with her black characters, but she was not entirely free of the conventions and prejudices of her own day. The same could be said of some of her more-patronizing generalizations.
“Uncle Tom” would later become shorthand for black passivity and collaboration with white oppression, for reasons mostly having to do with the mutation of stage plays of the book into minstrel shows in the post–Reconstruction era. But that was not at all how Stowe wrote the character of Tom. Our first real glimpse of Tom’s ethos is when Eliza overhears news of the sale and decides to escape with her son, and Tom’s wife Chloe urges him to escape, too. He refuses:
I an’t going. Let Eliza go — it’s her right! I wouldn’t be the one to say no — ‘tan’t in natur for her to stay; but you heard what she said! If I must be sold, or all the people on the place, and everything go to rack, why, let me be sold. I s’pose I can bar it as well as any on ’em. . . . I never have broke trust, nor used my pass no ways contrary to my word, and I never will. It’s better for me alone to go, than to break up the place and sell all.
There is more afoot here than craven submission. Tom understands that if he escapes, the consequences will be worse for those left behind — including his wife and his children. He is willing to sacrifice himself for them. Then, there is the second reason he advances: He will not break his word. This carried much more emotional freight in the 1850s than it would today. To a gentleman, a respected member of society, his honor was a precious thing, to be guarded even at the expense of a duel to the death. The contemporary reader expecting a low-born, servile black man to have no such considerations will immediately recognize Stowe’s point: Tom is a man of honor. A slave, but still a gentleman.
As the book proceeds, Stowe lays out much more directly that Tom is more than that: He is a Christ figure. That alone is revolutionary: Writing the first novel in American history built around a black man, she places him on a footing with the divine. This is not subtle, and it is not just symbolic. At every point of crisis, Tom asks what Jesus would have him do, and he clings for support to the Good Word for strength to endure his trials without breaking. He talks other slaves out of killing Simon Legree, and he is ultimately killed for refusing to whip his fellow slaves or inform on runaways. On his deathbed, he converts the cruel Sambo and Quimbo — a better conversion rate than Christ, who is recorded having won over only one of the two thieves at the crucifixion.
But Stowe is realistic: Tom is the Christian ideal, but he is not most of us. When discussing the souls of slave traders, Chloe has the natural human reaction, while Tom offers something more elevated and harder to attain:
“Sarves him right!” said Aunt Chloe, indignantly. “If he don’t mend his ways. His master’ll be sending for him, and then see how he’ll look!” “He’ll go to torment, and no mistake,” said little Jake. “He desarves it!” said Aunt Chloe, grimly . . .
“Chil’en!” said a voice, that made them all start. It was Uncle Tom, who had come in. . . . “Chil’en!” he said, “I’m afeard you don’t know what ye’re sayin’. Forever is a dre’ful word, chil’en; it’s awful to think on ’t. You oughtenter wish that ar to any human crittur.” . . .
“Don’t natur herself kinder cry out on ’em?” said Aunt Chloe. “Don’t dey tear der suckin’ baby right off his mother’s breast, and sell him, and der little children as is crying and holding on by her clothes,—don’t dey pull ’em off and sells ’em? Don’t dey tear wife and husband apart?” said Aunt Chloe. . . . Lor, if the devil don’t get them, what’s he good for?” . . .
“Pray for them that ’spitefully use you, the good book says,” says Tom. “Pray for ’em!” said Aunt Chloe; “Lor, it’s too tough! I can’t pray for ’em.” “It’s natur, Chloe, and natur ’s strong,” said Tom, “but the Lord’s grace is stronger; besides, you oughter think what an awful state a poor crittur’s soul’s in that’ll do them ar things, — you oughter thank God that you an’t like him, Chloe. I’m sure I’d rather be sold, ten thousand times over, than to have all that ar poor crittur’s got to answer for.”
In the end, Stowe presents Tom as defiant and victorious: He may be stripped of everything he has and beaten to death, but he refuses as a Christian martyr to surrender his soul. That, he tells Legree, no man may own. This is as much a doctrine of religious liberty as it is a defense of free labor.
Tom is not, however, the only positive model of black manhood in the book. George Harris is a much more conventional action hero, willing to die with a pistol in each hand rather than let himself or his wife and child be taken alive back to slavery. It is George, in one of the more controversial passages at the end of the book, who gives an impassioned black-nationalist declaration in favor of decamping to Liberia. (Stowe herself suggests in the epilogue an openness to colonization of Liberia as the best answer for black freedmen — a tragically impractical idea — but scorns the folly of just dumping black Americans in Africa without paying “reparations” first in the form of proper education.)
The contrast of Tom and George is a motif that recurs with other characters. Mrs. Shelby is a model of Christian womanhood; Tom’s next mistress, Marie St. Clare, is a totally self-absorbed hypochondriac. Miss Ophelia is a proxy for Stowe herself, an industrious anti-slavery New Englander who has to overcome her own racial prejudices; but Legree, too, is a New Englander. Yet, Stowe takes her pains to emphasize that barbarous black characters (Sambo, Quimbo, Topsy) and white slave-traders alike are corrupted by the system.
Stowe’s writing style is not for everyone; as with many 19th-century writers, she could have used some editing, particularly later in the book as she got in the wordy habit of writing for a serialized audience. But she was an expert at sketching vivid scenes and characters quickly, drawing readers in. Eliza’s flight across the ice-choked Ohio River is justly one of the most indelible and evocative scenes in American letters.
One of her small masterpieces, even with a plot twist any reader can see coming a mile away, is the scene at Senator Bird’s house. The Kentucky state senator is in the midst of lecturing his wife on the need for a law he supported to criminalize aid to fugitive slaves — a logical position, but one his wife rightly finds inhumane — when Eliza and Harry arrive at their door, and the senator’s bluster gives way to his basic humanity in offering assistance. This is Stowe at her most optimistic, suggesting that a lot of people who coexist with slavery in theory could not bear to assist it when confronted with its human realities. The reaction to her book suggests that she had a point.
Both Senator Bird and his wife are cut to the bone when Eliza intuits something in the Bird household and asks a question that was all too real to Stowe and many of her readers: “Ma’am, have you ever lost a child?” Mrs. Bird ends up giving Harry the clothes of her deceased little boy, a process Stowe describes with words that pierce any parent to the core:
[Mrs. Bird] opened the little bed-room door adjoining her room and, taking the candle, set it down on the top of a bureau there; then from a small recess she took a key, and put it thoughtfully in the lock of a drawer, and made a sudden pause. . . . And oh! mother that reads this, has there never been in your house a drawer, or a closet, the opening of which has been to you like the opening again of a little grave? Ah! happy mother that you are, if it has not been so.
Mrs. Bird slowly opened the drawer. There were little coats of many a form and pattern, piles of aprons, and rows of small stockings; and even a pair of little shoes, worn and rubbed at the toes, were peeping from the folds of a paper. There was a toy horse and wagon, a top, a ball, — memorials gathered with many a tear and many a heart-break! She sat down by the drawer, and, leaning her head on her hands over it, wept till the tears fell through her fingers into the drawer; then suddenly raising her head, she began, with nervous haste, selecting the plainest and most substantial articles, and gathering them into a bundle.
Stowe’s brief against slavery targeted, with surgical precision, two overlapping audiences: faithful Christians and mothers. The separation of mothers from children by slave-traders hit both audiences right where it hurt the most, and defenders of slavery could neither deny that this happened nor defend it. The breaking up of marriages, and slaveowners callously expecting the couples to find new partners, ran contrary to core Christian teachings. As Stowe noted in her companion volume, the Catholic Church, for example, had enjoined slaveowners since the eighth century not to deny slaves access to the sacrament of marriage, nor to dissolve marriages so solemnized. Stowe also repeatedly references, in the veiled language of the Victorian age that her audience would not mistake, the moral degradation of enslaved women from being forced to be sexual playthings for white masters or handed around to slave men for the same purpose. Worst of all is when Legree mocks Tom’s faith, denies him his Methodist hymnal, and tells him, “I’m your church now!”
Over and over, she drives home the question: As a Christian, how can you condone this? Stowe is not above sarcasm in describing Christians who defend slavery, in a passage on Tom’s reaction to seeing a woman’s child torn from her, which shortly after resulted in her despairing suicide:
To [Tom], it looked like something unutterably horrible and cruel, because, poor, ignorant black soul! he had not learned to generalize, and to take enlarged views. If he had only been instructed by certain ministers of Christianity, he might have thought better of it, and seen in it an every-day incident of a lawful trade; a trade which is the vital support of an institution which an American divine tells us has “no evils but such as are inseparable from any other relations in social and domestic life.” But Tom, as we see, being a poor, ignorant fellow, whose reading had been confined entirely to the New Testament, could not comfort and solace himself with views like these. His very soul bled within him for what seemed to him the wrongs of the poor suffering thing that lay like a crushed reed on the boxes; the feeling, living, bleeding, yet immortal thing, which American state law coolly classes with the bundles, and bales, and boxes, among which she is lying.
The Right Book at the Right Moment
Uncle Tom’s Cabin went off like a bomb when it was published, selling 5,000 copies in two days — more copies than Moby-Dick, published in 1851, sold in the 40 years after its publication. Uncle Tom’s Cabin sold 300,000 copies in the first year, a staggering figure in 1852, and 1.5 million in Britain. Queen Victoria had a copy, and British prime minister, Lord Palmerston, who scarcely ever read anything but official dispatches and newspapers, read it three times. It outsold every book in the 19th century but the Bible. On a per-population basis, no American book has ever matched its sales. Even in South Carolina, booksellers could not stock enough copies to meet demand. More than two dozen efforts at rebuttals were published, all to no effect. Stowe had redefined the terms of debate.
She followed up in 1853 with A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which combined factual support for the book’s picture of slavery with a prosecutorial brief on how various aspects of American slavery were condemned in the theology of every significant Christian sect.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin was popular in part because it was not “literary,” in the way that Melville was; it was feminine, emotional, and devotional. This is also one reason why it has failed to earn scholarly respect in more recent times. But it was embraced by the literary lights of its day for its effect and its art. “Never was there such a literary coup de main as this,” wrote Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Leo Tolstoy was just beginning his writing career before packing off to the trenches of the Crimea when Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published; years later, he lauded it as among “the highest art flowing from love of God and man.” Henry James described it as “much less a book than a state of vision.” Frederick Douglass enthused of the book’s impact that it “baptized with holy fire myriads who before cared nothing for the bleeding slave.”
Stowe’s timing was perfect, and not only in publishing during the heat of the Fugitive Slave Act controversy. Improvements in printing technology such as the steam-powered printing press created a newspaper boom in the 1830s, combining with growing literacy rates to make the “penny press” a fixture of the American scene. The arrival of the telegraph in 1844 made news travel much faster. Where newspapers went, books followed.
Novels, before 1800, were something of the neglected stepchild of literature, but they came roaring into their own by mid century. The British publishing sensation of Charles Dickens’s first novel, The Pickwick Papers, in 1836 revolutionized the commercial possibilities of novels packaged and sold to the middle class. The colossal sales of Uncle Tom’s Cabin would have been unthinkable 20 years earlier. British novelists in the 1840s had also brought into vogue the use of novels to convey a moral message. Novels and politics did not take long to mix. In 1852, Nathaniel Hawthorne — fresh from the 1850 success of The Scarlet Letter — became the first celebrity endorser in American politics, boosting the presidential candidacy of his college friend Franklin Pierce. Across the Atlantic that same year, sometime novelist Benjamin Disraeli became the leader of the House of Commons.
Abraham Lincoln may or may not have told Stowe in 1862 that she was “the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war.” There is no question, however, that Uncle Tom’s Cabin was recognized in its time as a watershed in the moral and political anti-slavery movements in the United States. It stands today as an eloquent testimony to one woman with a conscience and a pen.