Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Nineteenth-Century Slave Narrative

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin has been much studied and much-maligned since its publication in 1852. Its powerful impact and influence on history are practically legendary if a bit overstated. Part of a growing abolitionist movement, it was written at a time when a number of narratives were published by former slaves. Their stories shook the conscience of the people who read them, and Stowe’s book was based on them. These narratives still have an impact today and speak powerfully to a modern audience. In particular, the stories of Frederick Douglass, Solomon Northup, Harriet Ann Jacobs, and Josiah Henson provide an interesting counterpoint and comparison to Stowe’s famous novel. As a work of fiction, Uncle Tom’s Cabin is encumbered by its polemical and sentimental presentation. As part of a social movement, it offers a view of the slave system in moralistic terms, through the lens of religion, sexuality, and the role of Christianity. To current sensibilities, for all its good intentions, it seems racist in its portrayal of the black characters, and modern writers such as James Baldwin have criticized it for this reason. However, as a nineteenth-century protest novel with a transparent abolitionist agenda, it can best be understood as a product of the period in which it was written, and some aspects of it can be compared quite favorably to contemporaneous accounts written by former slaves.

One of the most famous and powerful nineteenth-century slave narratives was written by Frederick Douglass and was published in 1845. Douglass offers quite a contrast to Stowe’s submissive Uncle Tom and conveys the profound full-throated anger and discontent of the slave. While Uncle Tom speaks in a “negro” dialect full of grammatical errors that seem like a lampoon, Douglass writes like a college professor. In the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, the former slave complains bitterly about his master and notes with irony that when he “experienced religion” at a Methodist camp-meeting in 1832 it did not improve his behavior:

It neither made him to be humane to his slaves nor to emancipate them. If it had any effect on his character, it made him more cruel and hateful in all his ways; for I believe him to have been a much worse man after his conversion than before. Prior to his conversion, he relied upon his own depravity to shield and sustain him in his savage barbarity; but after his conversion, he found religious sanction and support for his slaveholding cruelty. (Douglass 768)

It is likely that Harriet Beecher Stowe read Douglass’ book, but her Uncle Tom’s Christian ideology leads him to tolerate the abuses of this world and to expect freedom and justice in the next life. He seems bland by comparison to Douglass. Uncle Tom is an archetypal character whose very name invokes the stereotype of a weak and pliant black man who is passive in the face of insults, yields too readily to the whims of the white power structure, and acquiesces to the social hierarchy. But in addition to showing the evils of slavery, Stowe was also attempting to make a larger point about the redemptive value of Christian morality. She wanted her Uncle Tom to be a Christ-like figure and ultimately a martyr.

In the narrative of his enslavement, Twelve Years a Slave, Solomon Northup tells a gritty tale of a slave auction in 1841 that is very similar to parts of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Stowe places a great deal of emphasis on the separation of families, particularly mothers and their children, that was an especially cruel part of the “peculiar institution” of slavery. For instance, her female protagonist Eliza risks life and limb to avoid losing her son when their master sells him along with Uncle Tom to pay a debt. Northup’s description of the slave auction includes such a separation, and his account of it is heart-rending. A woman, also named Eliza, was witness to the sale of her son Randall and then set about begging his new owner to purchase her and her daughter as well. When the man answered that he could not afford it, “Eliza burst into a paroxysm of grief, weeping plaintively…She kept begging and beseeching him, most piteously, not to separate the three. Over and over again she told them how she loved her boy.” The mother's promises of faithful labor “day and night” were insufficient. Northup concludes that “it was a mournful scene indeed. I would have cried myself if I had dared” (Northup 436). In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Stowe uses the separation of spouses and of parents and children to demonstrate that even under the most benign circumstances for slaves, the dissolution of families was a real and constant fear. In this, Stowe’s novel is actually very true to life.

Sexuality's role in slavery plays a major role in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. While it is not described explicitly, sexual relations and their implications form one of the main undercurrents that propel the story. The novel does a good job of reminding the reader that slavery consisted of more than enforced agricultural labor; many female slaves were used for sex and were forced to serve as concubines to indulge the sexual appetites of white men. Stowe acknowledges this reality implicitly by identifying mixed-race female characters by such terms as “mullato” and “quadroon,” and by describing in detail the desirability of attractive young female slaves and the high prices they could fetch when they were sold. The slave narrative of Harriet Ann Jacobs, published in 1861, revolves around this issue. Jacobs describes the end of childhood as an initiation to this arena for girls, writing that “even the little child, who is accustomed to waiting on her mistress and her children, will learn before she is twelve years old…She will be compelled to realize that she is no longer a child. If God has bestowed beauty upon her, it will prove her greatest curse” (Jacobs 995). Stowe presented this as a primary moral outrage of slavery and included stories about a woman who was used as a breeder by a cruel master who sold off her children, effectively treating her like livestock, and another who was cast off when her owner found a new, younger mistress.

Josiah Henson’s narrative, The Life of Josiah Henson, mirrors Uncle Tom’s Cabin in several ways. Stowe might have read Henson’s book, considering that it was published in 1849, just a few years before Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Cinematic in its telling, Henson’s story deals with the conflict between honor, faithfulness to one’s word, and the abiding desire for freedom. Henson was a slave who tried to save enough money to buy his freedom but never considered running away until circumstances provoked him. Given the opportunity to murder his captors in order to gain his freedom, Henson finds himself morally unable to do it. In this, he is much like Uncle Tom. However, he eventually does escape to Canada, and in this, he is reminiscent of Stowe’s character George Harris who is willing to use any means necessary to gain his freedom and protect his family. Henson wrestles with his conscience as he contemplates killing his captors and considers the possibility that committing such an act might be morally acceptable:

It was self defense—it was preventing others from murdering me, it was justifiable, it was even praiseworthy. But now, all at once, the truth burst upon me that it was a crime…I was about to lose the fruit of all my efforts at self improvement, the character I had acquired, and the peace of mind that had never deserted me. (Henson 433)

In Stowe’s Novel, George is less conflicted and does shoot one of his pursuers. “I appeal to God Almighty; I am willing to go with the case to Him, and ask Him if I do wrong to seek my freedom” (Stowe 79). Stowe does a good job of capturing the moral conflict in the mind of a slave contemplating violence in the pursuit of freedom, and although her account is fictional and melodramatic, it is still effective as a reminder of what the antebellum slave system was like for those who lived under its oppressive power.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a bestseller in its day, and it was highly effective as abolitionist literature preceding and culminating during the civil war. For modern readers, however, it can seem dated and even racist. In his 1955 essay, “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” which appeared in his book Notes From a Native Son, writer James Baldwin takes issue with Stowe’s famous book. Baldwin writes that “Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a very bad novel,” and argues that its sentimentality, “the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty” (Baldwin 533). Critical of Stowe’s “lively procession of field hands, house niggers, Chloe, Topsy, etc.—who are stock, lovable figures presenting no problem,” Baldwin objects to Stowe’s presentation of George and Eliza as being “as white as she can make them…a married couple with a wholly adorable child—whose quaintness, incidentally, and whose charm, rather put one in mind of a darky boot-black doing a buck and wing to the clatter of condescending coins” (534). By the same token, Baldwin notes that “the figure from whom the novel takes its name, Uncle Tom, who is a figure of controversy yet, is jet-black, wooly-haired, illiterate; and he is phenomenally forbearing.” For Baldwin, Stowe's enlightened archetype becomes an insulting stereotype. Nevertheless, for a novel to elicit this kind of passion a hundred years after its publication is an impressive feat, and Baldwin's criticism reveals the extent to which the novel continues to provoke thought and remains relevant.

As a celebrated work of protest literature, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was remarkably successful in its time and continues to inspire discussion among readers today. Although it is limited by its style of story-telling and tends to be both overly sentimental and occasionally implausible, it can be seen as a part of the abolitionist literature published during the nineteenth century that included the first-person narratives of former slaves. Like these narratives, it served the function of educating people about the true nature of the antebellum American slave system and its effect on those who lived under it. As a product of its times, Uncle Tom’s Cabin can be forgiven for aspects of it that seem racist to modern readers, although the exploration of its treatment of race is an important part of understanding the novel and its historical context.

Works Cited

Baldwin, James. “Everybody's Protest Novel.” Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Norton Edition. Ed. Elizabeth Ammons. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2010. 532–539. Print.

Douglass, Frederick. “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.” Concise Anthology of American Literature. Ed. George McMichael and James S. Leonard. Boston: Pearson Education, Inc., 2011. 766–782. Print.

Henson, Josiah. “The Life of Josiah Henson.” Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Norton Edition. Ed. Elizabeth Ammons. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2010. 426–435. Print.

Jacobs, Harriet Ann. “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.” Concise Anthology of American Literature. Ed. George McMichael and James S. Leonard. Boston: Pearson Education, Inc., 2011. 990–1012. Print.

Northup, Solomon. “Twelve Years a Slave.” Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Norton Edition. Ed. Elizabeth Ammons. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2010. 435–437. Print.

Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Norton Edition. Ed. Elizabeth Ammons. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2010. 1–411. Print.