"Uncle Tom" Today: From Slavery to Obscurity?

George Stuteville
for National Geographic magazine
and National Geographic News

February 17, 2005

Most of the year he's hardly around, except for brief appearances in the
occasional literature or history class.

But in February, during the United States' Black History Month, he usually returns—the controversial main character of Uncle Tom's Cabin, the antislavery novel that drove a deep wedge into America's pre-Civil War consciousness.

This year is no different. Numerous references to Uncle Tom appear in Internet search engines as news articles and broadcasts reexamine the legacy of slavery in the U.S. and the racist heritage that lingered until the civil rights movement of the 1950s and '60s. (Share your thoughts on civil rights in National Geographic magazine's forum, and then cast your vote about affirmative action in a poll.)

Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 novel is an undisputed classic that helped change the course of U.S. history.

However, the book appears to be in danger of becoming a relic. Last year, about 18,000 copies of Uncle Tom's Cabin were sold—roughly half of the total in 2001.

Yet some scholars insist there is a resurgence of interest in the book, its author, and its real-life Uncle Tom model, a slave who toiled at a farm in what is now a Washington, D.C., suburb.

The Real Uncle Tom

That man was Josiah Henson, who spent more than 30 years as a slave on a Montgomery County, Maryland farm, just north of the nation's capital. After publishing his own memoirs in 1849 as a free man in Canada, it was Henson who served as Stowe's primary model for Tom.

Through Tom's experiences, many of which were remarkably similar to Henson's, Stowe put human faces on the institution of slavery. Its white and black characters were shown in all their cruelty, courage, compassion, and cowardice.

Stowe's vignettes ranged from the pitiful sale of Uncle Tom to settle his master's business debts to a woman's desperate escape to freedom by dashing across the frozen Ohio River, her baby in her arms.

Moving across the range of human emotions, the book describes the childlike relationship between Tom and the dying daughter of yet another owner and the fatal beating he suffered at the order of his final master. It contrasted the base violence of slave hunters with the benevolence of those who risked home and safety to help thousands of slaves reach freedom.

The book was an immediate best seller, with more than 300,000 copies sold in its first year of publication. With its easy-to-grasp message and its mid-1850s sentimental style, it became a cultural icon.

In 1853 Stowe published another book, A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin: Presenting the Original Facts and Documents Upon Which the Story is Founded. The book documents the interviews, research, and factual events she had used in constructing her narrative.

By then Uncle Tom's Cabin was well on its way to selling a million copies. It was translated into several languages, and was the inspiration for popular songs, poems, and theatrical productions.

Revered and Reviled

Stowe said a complete picture of slavery would be too repugnant for the public. Still, she presented unflinching depictions of interracial sex, hypocrisy within the northern antislavery movement, pro-slavery duplicity preached from Southern pulpits, gender biases endured by white and black women, and even of economic class differences. It made the book both revered and reviled.

For a time, in Kansas, it was a capital offense to own a copy. A decade after its publication, when the Civil War was beginning to rage, President Abraham Lincoln welcomed Stowe to the White House. He reportedly greeted her as "the little woman who wrote the book that made this Great War."

After the war the book's popularity plummeted, according to the U.S. literary critic Edmund Wilson in his 1962 book, Patriotic Gore. "What were the reasons for this eclipse? It is often assumed in the United States that Uncle Tom was a mere propaganda novel which disappeared when it had accomplished its purpose and did not, on its merits, deserve to live. … [B]y the early 1900s, few young people had any at all clear idea of what Uncle Tom's Cabin contained. One could in fact grow up in the United States without ever having seen a copy—up to the time when it was reprinted, in 1948, in the Modern Library Series, it was actually unavailable except at secondhand," Wilson wrote.

Meanwhile, the public persona of Uncle Tom was undergoing a dramatic change. Instead of the symbol of a strong, spiritual man, whose disobedience to his master caused his death, Uncle Tom became a metaphor for a submissive, weak black person who wanted to be white.

By 1919 prominent African-American leaders began using "Uncle Tom" as a pejorative term to stigmatize blacks who betrayed the cause of their race, said Stephen Railton, an English professor at the University of Virginia. Railton maintains an exhaustive online archive dedicated to the book's role in U.S. culture.

By the time the civil rights movement was marching along, the term Uncle Tom easily overshadowed the reality of the book.

In the 1960s and early '70s, Railton said, the classic was seldom ever taught. Literature teachers preferred complex and ironic texts to Stowe's sentimentalism. History instructors were more interested in political and analytical works rather than fiction. Its frequent use of the "N-word" shooed away still others.

Resurgence

Railton said general interest in the book began to resurface on its own merits by the mid 1970s, as a result of burgeoning interest in U.S. women writers by feminist academics.

"The book arrived on the scene once more because there was a political agenda being served. In this case it was emancipating the classroom from the minds and the almost exclusive attention on male writers," Railton said.

Railton points to an active reader-feedback feature of his Uncle Tom's Cabin Web site as his main indicator of the growing interest.

Walter B. Hill, Jr., is a senior archivist at the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration who specializes in African-American history. He said that, regardless of the book's popularity, it will always occupy a crucial role in history.

"It is not in any danger of passing out of the American memory," Hill said. "You cannot teach the history of slavery without a reference to Uncle Tom's Cabin. It belongs in any discussion on the civil rights movement, which came about in rejection of laws that discriminated against people of color. Those laws were connected to slavery."

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