Uncle Tom's Cabin

A book written to change what readers felt

Stowe says plainly in the last chapter what the book was for. She asks what one person can do about slavery, and answers that every individual can see to it that they feel right. The novel is built to produce that feeling. Its worst scenes are families broken up by sale: a mother drowns herself after her baby is sold, and Eliza runs across the ice because her son has been sold.

The book does not let Northern readers off. The senator who hides Eliza in Ohio has just voted for a state law against helping fugitives, and changes his mind only when she is standing in his kitchen. In the closing chapter Stowe writes that merchants in Northern cities also buy and sell enslaved people, and asks whether the whole guilt of slavery should fall only on the South.

Black abolitionists read it at once. Frederick Douglass' Paper noticed the book on 1 April 1852, reporting that the first printing of five thousand copies had sold in four days. The notice praised the touching portrait of Uncle Tom and said the book was destined for every library north of the Mason and Dixon line.

How the novel draws Black characters

Stowe believed that Black people were by nature gentler than white people, and she says so. In Chapter XVI she predicts a great future for Africa, when its people will show their lowly docility of heart, their aptitude to repose on a superior mind and rest on a higher power, and their childlike simplicity of affection. She meant it as praise. Read now, it is a description of a people suited to be ruled.

Tom himself is one result. In the novel he is not an old man. Stowe introduces him as a large, broad-chested, powerfully made man, and he saves Eva by diving into the Mississippi. His strength goes into endurance and forgiveness instead of resistance. He refuses to run, refuses to fight, and dies forgiving the man who had him beaten. Stowe wrote him as a Christian martyr. Many later readers see a man who never defends himself.

The other Black characters are drawn with the comic dialect and physical humour of the period. Topsy, the neglected girl St. Clare buys for his cousin, grins and says she was never born, and that she expects she just grew. Sam and Andy, the two men sent to help Haley chase Eliza, are written as clowns. George Harris, the most defiant character in the book, is described as nearly white. So is Eliza.

The ending sends the Harris family to Liberia, the colony founded to settle freed Black Americans in Africa. George Harris writes that he wants an African nationality, and Stowe's closing chapter suggests educating escaped slaves in the North before helping them to Africa. Martin R. Delany, a Black abolitionist, asked in Frederick Douglass' Paper in May 1853 whether Stowe was a colonizationist. He pointed out that the novel sneers at independent Haiti while praising Liberia.

How Uncle Tom became an insult

Most Americans met the story on the stage, not in the book. Stowe never controlled the plays, and the first stage version appeared in Baltimore in 1852. Touring companies kept playing it for decades, and the Library of Congress notes that the main actors were usually white. The Stowe Center, which keeps her house in Hartford, says the stage versions used minstrel theatre, with white actors in blackface, and changed Tom's character dramatically.

The name turned into an insult in the twentieth century. Stephen Railton's University of Virginia archive finds the earliest public use of "Uncle Tom" as a term of contempt in Marcus Garvey's movement. At the 1920 convention of Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association in New York, marchers carried signs saying Uncle Tom was dead and buried. The Stowe Center now states it directly: "Uncle Tom" is a racial slur for someone thought subservient and passive.

The insult has even changed the name of a museum. Josiah Henson escaped from slavery to Canada, and his 1849 memoir was one of the lives Stowe drew on. The historic site in Dresden, Ontario, where he lived was called Uncle Tom's Cabin Historic Site. In 2022 the Ontario Heritage Trust renamed it the Josiah Henson Museum of African-Canadian History, to move away from the negative meaning of the words.

James Baldwin's attack, published in Paris

The most famous criticism of the novel was written in Paris. James Baldwin was twenty-four and living in Paris when "Everybody's Protest Novel" appeared in Zero, a small Paris magazine, in the spring of 1949. Partisan Review reprinted it that June. Baldwin later collected it as the first essay in Notes of a Native Son (1955).

The essay opens with Uncle Tom's Cabin, which Baldwin calls the cornerstone of American social protest fiction, and then says it is a very bad novel. His complaint is that Stowe was not so much a novelist as an impassioned pamphleteer, and that her book set out only to prove that slavery was wrong. To do it, he argues, she took Tom's humanity away. In his words, Tom, her only black man, has been robbed of his humanity and divested of his sex.

Baldwin then turned the same argument on Native Son, the 1940 novel by Richard Wright. Its hero, Bigger Thomas, is in Baldwin's words Uncle Tom's descendant, flesh of his flesh. Wright was living in Paris too. Baldwin later wrote, in "Alas, Poor Richard", that on the day the magazine came out, before he had seen it, he walked into Brasserie Lipp. Richard Wright was there and called him over. Baldwin wrote that he would never forget that conversation.

Tolstoy's praise, Orwell's shrug

Earlier readers had ranked the novel very high. In What Is Art?, Leo Tolstoy listed the best modern art that flows from love of God and man. His list includes Schiller's The Robbers, Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, several books by Charles Dickens, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Dostoevsky, and George Eliot's Adam Bede.

George Orwell split the difference in a newspaper column of 1945. He called Uncle Tom's Cabin perhaps the supreme example of the good bad book: unintentionally ludicrous and full of melodrama, and also deeply moving and essentially true. He added that he would back it to outlive the complete works of Virginia Woolf.