Uncle Tom's Cabin

Initially published in installments, from 1851 to 1852, this American classic is a work of power. Stowe herself disclaimed authorship, attributing the book to God’s hand; and, it isn’t hard to understand why. Uncle Tom’s Cabin would be a wonderful read if only because of Stowe’s excellent skill as a writer, but the true power of the story lies much deeper than literary skill. With bold passion, Stowe calls an entire nation (North and South alike) to carry it’s ways before the great throne of God. She urges humans to feel for the humanity of others, often breaking the “fourth wall” to challenge the reader, “Now, how would you feel if it were you?” She tries her society in the great court of God’s impending judgment, show more as she writes of one slave-master, “His Master’ll be sending for him, and then see how he’ll look!” Or, again from the closing sentence, “Not surer is the eternal law by which the millstone sinks in the ocean, than that stranger law by which injustice and cruelty shall bring on nations the wrath of Almighty God!” The whole of the book is an unrelenting challenge to see the world through the eyes of Heaven. And, above all else, it is a proclamation of living Gospel. If Stowe believes the world has any hope at all, she believes it is the Gospel of Christ, which she places at the very core of this book. She offers two Christ-figures, one white and one black, in the persons of young Evangeline (a play on the Greek word for “gospel”) and Uncle Tom. The score of characters who find salvation through the life, love, and death of these two figures is the point of the book, as Stowe essentially asserts that man’s only hope against the darkest evils of this world is the Gospel of Christ, received and lived by those who will fully lay down their lives for Him. As a side note, it is terribly unfortunate that “Uncle Tom” has become a derogatory label in our society, as Stowe’s Uncle Tom was the most powerful, Christlike character in the book. It is my understanding that later theatrical adaptations of Uncle Tom cast him in a different light, but to misunderstand Stowe’s Uncle Tom as a weak man is to misunderstand the Gospel of Christ. The true Uncle Tom broke racism on an incredible scale; he did not further it’s cause. show less

To truly appreciate the enormity of Harriet Beecher Stowe's opus we must keep in mind that it was written over 175 years ago by a woman who lived at a time when slavery was still an accepted albeit contentious institution in America. Weaving together several separate but interrelated storylines the plights of Stowe's fictional characters were all based on truthful accounts, often first-hand accounts, from actual slaves, slave owners, and those who crossed paths with both of them. Not an easy read, "Uncle Tom's Cabin" is many things: a collection of harrowing survival tales encompassing love, triumph, and tragedy; an impassioned set of Abolitionist arguments; a condemnation of not only the practice of owning human beings but of the show more mindsets (political, social, and religious) which allowed it to flourish; and a biblical allegory with Uncle Tom's Christ-like presence underlining both the good and bad around him. Yes, Stowe's praise of her black subjects' moral attributes are at times simplistic, even patronizing; yes, some of her characters are over the top (Little Eva and Topsy come immediately to mind), and yes she does go overboard with the Methodist bible-thumping especially towards the end....but as previously stated these stories were written in a very different time by a woman determined to move an entire nation towards a new social justice. It's sad to note that 100 years later Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird" would show America just how far it hadn't come. show less

One reason I was drawn to read this work is, like The Prince gives us an etymologically unsound adjective, so the crude pejorative of an "Uncle Tom" does not gibe with this title character who is really a caricature of a slave buying the Christian message that supported slavery (slavery is bible-supported, we must suffer, reward is pie-in-the-sky eaten after death). Of course, the Xtian faith was also enlisted by the abolitionists and here Harriet Elizabeth Beecher Stowe (June 14, 1811 – July 1, 1896) attacked the cruelty of slavery with an imagined pantheon that became influential, even in Britain, and made the political issues of the 1850s regarding slavery tangible to millions, energizing anti-slavery forces in the American North. show more While Uncle Tom is practically a crucified saint under Simon Legree's whip, Evangeline St. Clare the daughter of Augustine St. Clare and called Eva is a true visitiation of an angel. Eva often talks about love and forgiveness, even convincing the dour slave girl Topsy (a degraded stereotype that recalls to me Sheronda from Jackie Brown) that she deserves love.

Before dying, a terminally ill Eva gives a lock of her hair to each of the slaves, telling them that they must become Christians so that they may see each other in Heaven. On her deathbed, she convinces her father to free Tom... All of this is really over the top and one-dimensional, but Stowe is so earnest, so entertaining in her quaint descriptions, and so on the right side, that it is all warm and heartening.

This edition includes a conclusion where Stowe reveals from what sources most of the events are sourced from real slavery culture. show less

Although the character Uncle Tom has been criticized for being too meek and utterly subservient, and too gentle and religious when maybe a real person would have been bitter and rebellious instead, that's hardly the point of this book.

Stowe, the daughter of a preacher, opposed slavery on the grounds of her faith. That is evident throughout the book, and regardless of the reader's religious persuasion, the truth about slavery and its inherent injustice is brought to light and boldly condemned.

In this book, she represented an entire range of slaves and slave-owners, from the persistent superlative meekness and gentleness of Uncle Tom to the desperate rebellion of others, and from the kindness of one slave-owner to the insane cruelty of show more Simon Legree. She draws special attention to the tragedy of mothers and children being separated and the inability of slaves to protect themselves or their families, and even the futility of a kind master's good intentions. show less

Where to start.
Stowe's intended audience were white Americans who had the power to begin the changes necessary to abolish slavery. As a protest novel Stowe appealed to her readers' emotional reactions. Throughout the course of the novel Stowe works to gain her readers' emotional trust and investment in the story and characters, relating closely to common personality types and values of her time.
Stowe works to persuade her audience to see slavery through the lens of motherhood and Christianity. Something about how we're all children under God and finding equality there. Since I'm a mother myself, the moves Stowe employs hit home pretty hard.
As readers we give authors a little of our trust and Stowe methodically and intentionally betrays show more that trust. Definitely a book I love to hate. show less

If this was the bright shining light of American social liberalism in 1851, it's easy to see why achieving racial equality continues to be an uphill battle. When even the abolitionists who want to free the slaves don't seem to have any respect or liking for African Americans, something seems wrong.

It's obviously a mistake to judge this book by the standards of today but I think it's equally wrongheaded to consider the book a faithful document of American slavery, as we are sometimes asked to do. It's not. It's pure melodrama and should be regarded as such. Its importance lies in its role as the first American bestseller and in the fact that many people bought its veracity as a document of slave life--it helped create intellectual and show more cultural conditions in which your ordinary middle class northerner wasn't made to feel like a radical freak for hazarding an abolitionist opinion. It's deeply problematic, but it got the point across.

So how is it as a novel? It's okay. It's more entertaining (if less harrowing) than the autobiography of Frederick Douglass and more captivating (if less convincing) than its own factual final chapter written strictly from Stowe's point of view. Be prepared for Dickensian levels of coincidence and a truly nauseating amount of Christian propaganda. There are some interesting characters and it's very accessible. Without its historical legacy, though, there is no way anyone in 2016 would still be reading this for its literary value. I give it a rating compatible with its symbolic, rather than actual, worth. show less

Stowe seems to have two main goals in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The first is to demonstrate that slavery as an institution is wrong. Buying and selling human beings is abhorrent, and arguments about how well slaves are treated are missing the point.

The other goal seems to be to humanize slaves of African origin, especially for those in the North who might oppose slavery but still retain a feeling of prejudice against people of African origin. In large part, Stowe does this by showing how slaves can act just like white people if they are taught and treated like white people.

She offers this as proof that Black people are just as human as white people are, but this is troublesome because it a very narrow scope of behavior. Stowe goes to show more lengths to show that those slaves who lie or cheat or act brutally are doing so only as products of a system that treats them as subhuman. She offers a similar explanation for the behavior of white people towards slaves: they are products of an abhorrent institution as much as the slaves themselves are. (Of course, the difference is that white people don't need to prove their humanity through their actions; their humanity is a given no matter how inhumanely they act.) This is a reasonable hypothesis, but the way that Stowe presents it seems to suggest that the goal is for all people in the United States to act the same, or rather, for all people to act white, which is very limiting to people who are not white.

I don’t actually get the sense that Stowe herself believes this, but rather that she’s started along this track and has to take it to its conclusion. Indeed, near the end of the novel is a letter from the character George Harris, who has escaped slavery with his wife and son and after several years in Canada has decided to move to Liberia. George lists as one of his weaknesses that half of his blood is "hot and hasty" Anglo-Saxon blood, which is at odds with his African side, which is by nature "affectionate, magnanimous, and forgiving." (616) This is a limitation of Stowe’s abolitionist argument. Black people don’t deserve to be free because the African race is somehow superior to or more moral than the white race but because they are human beings who should not be bought and sold as commodities.

Through George Harris, Stowe also points out that no matter how well George assimilates, as a man of African descent, he will always be treated differently within the United States’ white-dominant culture unless he denies all connection to his African heritage. And this leads me to the most uncomfortable part of reading this novel. With as unpleasant (but not surprising) as it was to read about the horrible treatment of people a society has decided for economic reasons to treat as not-quite-human, the most uncomfortable part was how some of the words of her characters echo of the things people say today in defense of violence against Black people. About halfway through the book, one of the white characters says in reference to the circumstance of a slave in another family being beaten to death by her owner, “I don’t feel a particle of sympathy for such cases. If they’d only behave themselves, it would not happen.” (331)

After Michael Brown’s shooting death in Ferguson, Missouri, I had conversations in which the other person expressed nearly this exact sentiment. If he’d just done what the officers said, it wouldn’t have happened.

Or the unarmed teens who were thrown to the ground at the pool in McKinney, Texas. If they’d cooperated, this wouldn’t have happened.

Or Sandra Bland, who was stopped for a minor traffic violation, arrested for not putting out her cigarette, and later was found dead while in jail in Hempstead, Texas. If she’d behaved herself, meaning, if she’d done what the white police officer said even though she was within her rights to refuse, this wouldn’t have happened.

Combine this with the way that Stowe lets no one off the hook---no matter how far a person is from slavery, if they’re not actively acting against it, if they’re benefitting from the system at all, they are complicit. Holding the view that the system is broken isn’t enough. As a white person who’s constantly struggling with what I can do to help change the racist culture of my home country, that’s pretty difficult to read.

Even with the difficulty, there was beauty in this novel. I found the entire center section when Tom is living with the St. Clares in New Orleans to be particularly poignant, especially the relationship Tom has with the young, too-perfect-to-believe Eva. The transcendent nature of the spirituality that Eva and Tom share with one another and then with everyone they encounter was melodramatic, but it was also quite moving to me.

The brand of nonviolent resistance in which Tom engages at Simon Legree’s plantation sounds very similar to what little I’ve read about Adin Ballou’s Christian nonviolence (which led to the nonviolent resistance of the 1960’s Civil Rights Movement via Martin Luther King, Jr, who learned it from Gandhi, who learned it from Tolstoy, who learned it from the writings of Adin Ballou).

Stowe writes about how, once Tom is infused with the divine spirit, the physical abuse he receives no longer reaches him in the way it had: “But the blows fell now only on the outer man, and not, as before, on the heart.” (559)

Was this a parallel idea of Stowe’s, or was she in conversation with Ballou before or during the writing of Uncle Tom’s Cabin?

It seems that Ballou was writing widely about non-resistance at the same time that Stowe was writing her novel, so I suppose the influence could have gone either way (or happened in parallel).

Along with the echoes of Ballou, there are also echoes of Stowe’s ties to Unitarianism, including a line that is nearly identical to the Unitarian Universalist First Principle.

The First Principle is “The inherent worth and dignity of every person.”

The line from Augustine St. Clare is that his mother impressed upon him the “idea of the dignity and worth of the meanest human soul.” (323)

Although Stowe appears to have ties to the Unitarians of her time, I haven’t been able to discover the origin of the wording of the First Principle, which wasn’t adopted officially by the Unitarian Universalist Association until 1985. Was this wording common in the mid-nineteenth century when Stowe was writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin? I don’t know, but the similarity is striking. show less