When E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime—a kaleidoscopic novel that features a cast of historical characters including Henry Ford, Sigmund Freud, Emma Goldman, Harry Houdini, and Booker T. Washington—came out, in 1975, he was asked whether those figures had ever actually met or spoken with one another. “They have now,” he replied.
So it is with a story that when President Abraham Lincoln finally met Harriet Beecher Stowe, in November 1862, he asked: “Is this the little woman who made this great war?” He never said that, but he has now. Two hundred years after Stowe’s birth, and nearly 160 after the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, it is worth revisiting the question Lincoln might have asked and considering the ways in which author and novel matter.
As David S. Reynolds reminds us in his astute new work, Mightier Than the Sword: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Battle for America (W.W. Norton & Co.), the novel was a cultural phenomenon. A portrait of both the dehumanization of slavery and the saving grace of Christianity, it was published in 1852 after beginning as a serial the previous year in The National Era, a leading antislavery newspaper. It sold 10,000 copies the first week, and thereafter presses were kept running around the clock, with 300,000 books bought by the end of the year. Readers in England purchased more than a million copies. German, French, Spanish, Italian, Danish, and Portuguese editions quickly appeared. It was said to have sold more copies than any work other than the Bible in the 19th century.
Reynolds argues that “no book in American history molded public opinion more powerfully than Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” That prompts the questions: Whose opinions, and in what ways? The daughter of Lyman Beecher, one of the leading evangelical ministers of the day, Stowe claimed not so much to have written the novel as to have taken dictation from God: “It all came before me in visions, one after another, and I put them down in words.” Rich with sentimentality and emotion, as well as with romantic ideals about racial harmony, Uncle Tom’s Cabin reached out to Northern, middle-class, evangelical, female readers. It called for the immediate renunciation of sin, made salvation a reality, the Bible a guide, and spoke to mothers by making home and the unbreakable love of child the benchmark of a Christian life.
In a chapter titled “The Mother’s Struggle,” for example, Stowe spoke directly to the reader after the slave Eliza, learning that she was to be sold, ran off: “If it were your Harry, mother, or your Willie, that were going to be torn from you by the brutal trader, tomorrow morning,—if you had seen the man, and heard that the papers were signed and delivered, and you had only from twelve o’clock till morning to make good your escape,—how fast could you walk?”
Stowe turned what was an abstraction for most of its readers—slavery—into an assault upon the family and the soul, upon faith and salvation. But her portrait was always a mosaic, never a simple story of struggle. Little Eva, the sweet daughter of a slaveholder, would die seeing only goodness in people, white or black; Uncle Tom would be martyred at the hands of Simon Legree, a Northerner who abused alcohol. There was evil in the system of slavery, but Stowe argued that it was an evil that beset the entire nation: “But who, sir, makes the trader? Who is most to blame? The enlightened, cultivated, intelligent man who supports the system of which the trader is the inevitable result, or the poor trader himself?”
All that was a long way from causing the Civil War, and, of course, the novel did no such thing. What it did was fortify antislavery feeling and despair over the national sin of slavery—while compelling proponents to defend the institution. A literary countermovement emerged: anti-Tom novels that sought to offset the claims of Stowe’s fiction by showing slaves as content, denouncing the treatment of free blacks in the North, and portraying slaveholders as good Christians. The best-known of those included W.L.G. Smith’s Life of the South; or, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” as It Is and Mary H. Eastman’s Aunt Phillis’s Cabin; or, Southern Life as It Is. Reynolds observes that those novels did not sell particularly well; one of the reasons is that Stowe seemed to anticipate all the proslavery responses.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin has been both derided and praised as a work of sentimental fiction. For a very long time, the traditional literary canon of the era—Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, Whitman—yielded little shelf space to the best-selling women of the time, Sarah J. Hale, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Stowe, Susan Warner. It may be that the female writers, except for Stowe, are now read mainly in seminar rooms. But as the literary critic Jane P. Tompkins argued in a well-known essay, “Sentimental Power: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Politics of Literary History,” published in Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860 (1985), “this body of work is remarkable for its intellectual complexity, ambition, and resourcefulness.”
As we might expect from the prize-winning author of such important works as Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (1988) and Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography (1995), Reynolds, a professor of American studies and English at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, carefully reads Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Illuminating Tompkins’s insight, he explores how “Stowe gave voice to women,” both white and black, and how she manipulated various literary stereotypes, like the feminist criminal who subverted virtue or the rapacious seducer who was a staple of pulp fiction. Reynolds’s chapter “Taming Cultural Beasts” should be required reading for all students of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, because he shows better than anyone before him how, on such topics as intemperance and illicit sex, the novel “advocated controversial, sometimes subversive reforms without straying into the merely sensational or the openly transgressive.”
Stowe’s novel is especially remarkable to me for one reason not always given the attention it deserves: its basis in fact. Indeed, its importance may be not as a work of romance buttressed by facts, but as a work of realism encased in romance. Pressed to provide evidence for her depictions, Stowe published A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in 1853. It focuses on the characters in the novel and provides testimony from newspapers, slave narratives, letters, and other sources to support its portrayal of slavery. She argued that Uncle Tom’s Cabin, “more, perhaps, than any other work of fiction that ever was written, has been a collection and arrangement of real incidents, of actions really performed, of words and expressions really uttered, grouped together with reference to a general result. ... This is a mosaic of facts.”
It is little more than a telling detail, but on June 16, 1862, Lincoln borrowed Stowe’s Key from the Library of Congress. He was moving toward issuing an emancipation proclamation, and the book may have helped remind the wartime president of the horrors of slavery. His decision to act on emancipation not only led to the eventual freedom of millions of slaves but also helped bring the war to an end by enlisting black soldiers and making the conflict explicitly a war against slavery. Stowe’s novel may have played less of a role in starting the war than in helping to end it.
From the start, Uncle Tom’s Cabin also entered the culture in other ways, particularly as theatrical performance, drawing on an already established tradition of black minstrelsy. Its life on stage and, later, on film has continued to shape cultural attitudes toward slavery and race, nation and faith. Reynolds is especially deft in his discussion of George L. Aiken’s version, first staged in 1852. As he notes, it “became the most-watched play ever written by an American.” While Aiken remained true to the spirit of the novel, however, by the turn of the century the war and its aftermath had come to be seen as a time in which Northerners and freed blacks reveled in gaining power and oppressing white Southerners. D.W. Griffith’s film The Birth of a Nation (1915) depicted a society upended by Stowe’s novel. Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind (1936) glorified the South and served, the critic Edmund Wilson noted in Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (1962), as “a curious counterbalance to that of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”
But the novel was too protean to be constrained. For every minstrel version that depicted shuffling, ignorant slaves unworthy of freedom, there were versions that displayed empowered black men and women. For every Tom burlesque that caricatured blacks as dancing dandies, those same performances, Reynolds argues, “affirmed a new kind of democracy by showing both blacks and whites onstage singing songs from each other’s cultures.” For every cartoon, like Minnie Mouse as Little Eva and Mickey in blackface as her enslaved friend Topsy in Mickey’s Mellerdrammer (1933), racial stereotypes also provided an opportunity for a subversive message about race and gender. For example, the 1927 film version of the musical comedy Topsy and Eva presented Topsy as a strong character who fought back against oppression.
It was across the ocean and in another century that Uncle Tom’s Cabin may have had its greatest impact. Reynolds suggests that it contributed to both the Russian and Chinese revolutions (it could be read as a call for the rights of the working classes). There was even a Yiddish version, in which Tom read from the Talmud.
The debate over the cultural meaning of the book and its title character is a continuing affair, and one wishes that Reynolds had brought his discussion of what he calls “Tom in Modern Times” up to the present. As recently as 2010, in an attempt to expose what has become the stereotype of black submissiveness and obedience (“Uncle Tom” as an epithet entered the culture as early as 1865, spread in the 1920s and 1930s, and reached a crescendo in the 1960s), the Metropolitan Playhouse in New York staged Aiken’s version of the play.
This year, in a documentary about the University of Michigan’s 1991 Fab Five basketball team, Jalen Rose said, “Schools like Duke didn’t recruit players like me. I felt like they only recruited black players that were Uncle Toms.” Grant Hill, a Duke player, responded: “In his garbled but sweeping comment that Duke recruits only ‘black players that were Uncle Toms,’ Jalen seems to change the usual meaning of those very vitriolic words into his own meaning, i.e., blacks from two-parent, middle-class families.”
By the time Stowe died, in 1896, at the age of 85, the debate over her title character was already a familiar one. She had long given up social themes for tales about New England homes, biblical literature, and children’s stories. She suffered after the war—her son, wounded at Gettysburg, became an alcoholic; her brother, Henry Ward Beecher, was tried in a very public adultery case. In 1873, she confessed to the novelist George Eliot, “The longer I live the deeper and sadder becomes my sense of the hopeless, essential, unutterable sorrowfulness of living this present life taken by itself.”
Whatever the outcome of her life, and the uses to which her novel was put, author and novel remain relevant today. Seemingly out of nowhere, a woman wrote a book that changed history. A work of literature entered the households of millions, and generations of readers continue to grapple with—and battle over—the meaning of its characters’ lives. Stowe showed just how powerful words could be. She made it acceptable to weep and to think simultaneously, to sympathize but also to indict. She knew that writing was the riskiest profession of all, and many a Southern slaveholder no doubt put a price on her head. But she wove fact into fiction and, in doing so, helped awaken the world.
That legacy carries on. This year, the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, in Hartford, awarded the inaugural Harriet Beecher Stowe Prize for Excellence in Writing to Advance Social Justice to Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide (Knopf, 2009), a work that exposes the violent oppression of women around the globe. The book tells powerful, true stories. Stowe would have recognized the genre.
