In brief
A Kentucky farmer in debt sells two people to a trader: Tom, his most trusted slave, and Harry, the small son of his wife’s maid. The mother, Eliza, runs north with the child and crosses the Ohio on floating ice. Tom stays, is sold south, passes through a charming and useless owner in New Orleans, and is beaten to death on a Red River plantation for refusing to tell where two runaways have gone. Stowe wrote it in anger at the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, and it became the best-selling American novel of its century.
Two easy readings are on offer: the heroic book that helped end slavery, and the racist relic that gave the language an insult. Both are true of parts of it. The book itself is more interesting than either: a furious, shrewd, often very funny political argument, built on assumptions about race that its own evidence keeps contradicting.
The argument
It does not open on a monster. Chapter 1 is titled “In Which the Reader Is Introduced to a Man of Humanity”, and the man of humanity is both of the men at the table, the trader who boasts of “just as much conscience as any man in business can afford to keep” and, more damagingly, Mr Shelby, a decent owner who sells Tom anyway because he owes money. Stowe’s point is structural. So long as the law treats human beings “only as so many things belonging to a master”, the kindest owner’s kindness lasts until his next bad debt, his death, or his heir.
That is why the plot sends Tom through three owners who differ in every way except the one that matters. Legree, the brute, is the one readers remember, but Stowe knew that a brute proves nothing, since any defender of slavery could call him an exception. So she has a young man on a steamboat tell a genteel planter what she thinks: “It is your respectability and humanity that licenses and protects his brutality” (ch. 31). Her cleverest slaveholder, St. Clare, says the same thing about himself: “Talk of the abuses of slavery! Humbug! The thing itself is the essence of all abuse!” (ch. 19). He sees everything and frees nobody, and when he dies with Tom’s freedom papers unfinished, his good intentions become a sale at auction.
The North does not escape. Mrs Bird, wife of an Ohio senator who has just voted for a fugitive law, calls it “a shameful, wicked, abominable law” (ch. 9), and the senator himself ends up driving Eliza through the night. Miss Ophelia, the Vermont cousin who disapproves of slavery on principle, cannot bear to be touched by a Black child. The confession, “I’ve always had a prejudice against negroes” (ch. 25), is one of the most honest moments in the book and is aimed straight at Stowe’s Northern readers. And when she comes to tell them what to do, her answer is a strange one: “they can see to it that they feel right” (ch. 45). Sympathy is the book’s whole politics, its great strength and its obvious limit.
The shape of the book
Two journeys run from one Kentucky farm in opposite directions. Eliza and later her husband George Harris go north: the ice (ch. 7), the Quakers (ch. 13), a gunfight (ch. 17), and Lake Erie to Canada (ch. 37). Tom goes south and down: the riverboat, New Orleans, the warehouse (ch. 30), Legree’s swamp.
What holds the book together is the broken family. Almost every episode is a parent parted from a child or a wife from a husband. Lucy on the riverboat (ch. 12) has her sleeping baby sold while she looks for her husband on the wharf, and drowns herself, and the trader enters her “under the head of losses”. Stowe had a precise target: an audience that believed in the Christian home, shown that its law destroyed homes for a price. In the chapter of Eliza’s flight she addresses it outright: “If it were your Harry, mother, or your Willie, that were going to be torn from you by a brutal trader”.
The ending is the weakest part, and revealing. Over a few pages a French lady on a steamboat turns out to be George’s sister, and Cassy turns out to be Eliza’s mother (ch. 43). Melodrama can reunite the families that the law has scattered, but only the families who got away. Tom’s wife Aunt Chloe, who hired herself out for years to raise his price (ch. 21), hands the money back when George Shelby brings the news (ch. 44).
The voice
Stowe’s narrator talks to you, pleads with you, and very often mocks you. “In Which Property Gets into an Improper State of Mind” is the title for George Harris’s anger (ch. 11); “Select Incident of Lawful Trade” is the one for Lucy. When George fires on the slave-catchers, the narrator observes that had he been a Hungarian defending fugitives from Austria, “this would have been sublime heroism” (ch. 17), but that American readers are too well instructed to see any heroism in this. George’s words to the catchers just before it, “now I’m a free man, standing on God’s free soil”, are a claim the whole country was then arguing over.
The sentimental passages are real and they are excessive. Eva’s death runs over chapters and closes on “O! love,—joy,—peace!” (ch. 26). But Stowe’s readers had buried children, and so had she. Tears in this book are an argument: if you have wept at a small white deathbed, you can no longer say that a mother on the block feels less.
The dialect is a harder case. Black speech is spelled out at length and played for comedy, as with Sam and Andy misleading the trader (ch. 6), and those scenes borrow openly from the minstrel stage even when the joke is on the white man.
The man and the insult
“Uncle Tom” now means a Black person who fawns on white power. How far is that from the page?
The Tom of the novel is “a large, broad-chested, powerfully-made man” (ch. 4) with small children. He does not betray anyone. He refuses to flog another slave (ch. 33), and tells Legree “You haven’t bought it,—ye can’t buy it” of his soul. He dies because he will not say where Cassy and Emmeline are hiding, and he forgives the men who kill him: “there ain’t no more ye can do! I forgive ye, with all my soul!” (ch. 40). The old stooped flatterer came mainly from the stage. The Tom shows, often played by white actors in blackface, kept the name and changed the man, and they reached far more people than the novel did.
Yet the insult is not only a misreading. Tom will not run when he has the chance, so that the others are not sold: “Mas’r always found me on the spot” (ch. 5). He will not defend himself; offered an axe and a drugged Legree, he answers “Not for ten thousand worlds” (ch. 38). Stowe admired this as Christ-like, and in her terms it is. But William Lloyd Garrison saw the problem in 1852, asking whether she held white men to the same duty of non-resistance. She did not. George Harris, light-skinned, gets the pistols and the speech. Tom’s courage is real, and it is also the kind that frightens no white reader. Baldwin’s charge in “Everybody’s Protest Novel” (1949), that Tom’s salvation is bought with the loss of his humanity, is overstated, but it is aimed at something in the text.
What Stowe could not see
Stowe believed in racial essences, and said so in her own voice. Africans are “naturally patient, timid and unenterprising” (ch. 10); Tom in New Orleans is described as “an exotic of the most gorgeous and superb countries of the world”, with a passion for splendour (ch. 15). The historian George Fredrickson called this outlook romantic racialism: Black people as gentle, childlike and naturally Christian, which was meant as praise and works as a cage. The book’s contradictions show around the edges. The people who plan, fight and escape are nearly all of mixed ancestry, and the book puts their fire down to white blood, through St. Clare (ch. 23) and through George himself (ch. 43). Her theory has no place for the courage her own plot needs.
White characters use the slur constantly, though there Stowe is mostly reporting what she hates. The worse fault lies in what she does with freedom. George Harris, in the last pages, announces “I want a country, a nation, of my own” and sails for Liberia, adding that the African race may prove “of even a higher type” morally (ch. 43). This was the programme of the American Colonization Society, and most Black abolitionists loathed it, because it told free Black people they had no future in the country they had built. Stowe hedges in her last chapter, urging the North to take in and educate those who escape, but the one hero she trusts with a full life is sent out of the country to live it.
The people
Eliza and George Harris
The runaways, and the book’s adventure story. George is its one real political voice: asked to respect the laws of his country, he answers “what country have I, but the grave” (ch. 11).
Topsy
Bought by St. Clare to test Ophelia’s principles. “I spect I grow’d. Don’t think nobody never made me” (ch. 20) got the laughs, and it is also an exact statement of a child with no recorded mother. Her conversion by Eva is the book’s most improbable turn.
Eva and St. Clare
Eva is an angel in a pinafore, and the book needs her: only a dying child can shame adults into touching Topsy. Her father is its best talker and most complete moral failure, who has read all the arguments and finds them a reason for doing nothing.
Simon Legree
Not a Southerner. Stowe gives him a pious New England mother, whose dying forgiveness and lock of hair he burned (ch. 35), so that Northern readers cannot keep him at a distance.
Cassy
The most frightening person in the book. Educated, sold, abused, she has killed one of her own children to save it, and she terrifies Legree into letting her escape by playing on his superstitions (ch. 39, ch. 42).
How it was made
Harriet Beecher, daughter of the preacher Lyman Beecher, lived for eighteen years in Cincinnati, on the border with slave Kentucky, heard stories from fugitives, and paid a short visit south. She never saw a Deep South plantation. Her eighteen-month-old son Charley died of cholera there in 1849, and she said later that this loss taught her what a slave mother feels when her child is taken. The family moved to Brunswick, Maine, in 1850, the year of the Fugitive Slave Act. She reported a vision of a dying slave during a church service there, and said the death of Tom came first.
It ran in forty weekly parts in The National Era, an antislavery paper from 5 June 1851 to 1 April 1852. John P. Jewett issued it in two volumes on 20 March 1852, and about 300,000 copies sold in the United States within a year. Stowe insisted on its truth in the closing chapter (“The incident of the mother’s crossing the Ohio river on the ice is a well-known fact”), and when attacked published A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1853), a heap of documentary evidence. Josiah Henson’s narrative of 1849 is among its sources, though Tom is not simply Henson.
Readers and critics
The South answered with fury and with a shelf of anti-Tom novels of contented slaves, Mary Eastman’s Aunt Phillis’s Cabin (1852) among them. In Maryland a free Black minister, Samuel Green, was sentenced in 1857 to ten years in prison for owning a copy. Lincoln’s supposed greeting to Stowe in 1862, as the little woman who started the great war, is probably a later invention.
Black readers were split from the first. Frederick Douglass promoted the book and defended it, and also printed Martin Delany’s objections to its Liberia ending and its white authority over Black experience. Henry James remembered it as less a book than a state of vision, and Tolstoy ranked it among the highest art of the moral kind. Baldwin’s essay made it a byword for bad faith in protest fiction. Edmund Wilson in Patriotic Gore (1962) was startled to find it so much stronger than he had been told, and Jane Tompkins in Sensational Designs (1985) argued that its sentimentality is a serious political strategy, dismissed because it was women’s work.
Afterlives
Stowe had no control of the stage. George Aiken’s version appeared in 1852, and Tom shows toured America for some eighty years, with Topsy as a comic turn and bloodhounds on the ice that the novel never mentions. Edwin S. Porter filmed it in 1903, with white actors in blackface. English speakers say something “growed like Topsy” without knowing the source.
The insult ran separately. Malcolm X used it against civil rights leaders, and Muhammad Ali against Joe Frazier. Black artists have taken the material back: Ishmael Reed’s satire Flight to Canada (1976), and Kara Walker’s silhouette installation The End of Uncle Tom and the Grand Allegorical Tableau of Eva in Heaven (1995).
How to read it
- Read the book, not the insult. Note what Tom actually does at each choice, and decide for yourself how much of the later word he earns.
- Watch who is blamed. Legree is easy. Read Shelby in chapter 1 and St. Clare in chapter 19 as the ones she most wants you to recognise.
- Read the racial passages as evidence, not as noise. Do not skip them, and do not excuse them as of their time, since Delany and others objected at that time.
- Finish with chapter 45. Stowe’s direct address, ending on the millstone that sinks “in the ocean”, shows what the novel was for.
Read next
- Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845). The authority Stowe borrowed, in the first person, with a fight in it.
- Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). What Cassy’s story could only hint at, told by a woman who lived it.
- Martin Delany, Blake (1859–62). A Black novelist’s answer: a hero who organises revolt rather than forgiving his killers.
- James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (1955). Collects “Everybody’s Protest Novel”, still the hardest attack on the whole genre.
- Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987). The mother and child from inside, drawn from the real case of Margaret Garner, who crossed the frozen Ohio in 1856.