Harriet Beecher Stowe

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Harriet Beecher Stowe

Harriet Elizabeth Beecher Stowe, (June 14, 1811 – July 1, 1896) is an American writer and reformer, best known as the author of the anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin. The sensationally popular novel presented a emmpathetic portrait slave life and played a significant role growing opposition to slavery prior to the outbreak of the American Civil War. Stowe wrote the work in reaction to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which made it illegal to assist an escaped slave. In the book she expresses her moral outrage at the institution of slavery and its destructive effects on both races and especially on maternal bonds.

Stowe was born into a family with deep religious convictions and a social conscience that would leave a historical legacy in educational reform, the revision of Calvinist theology, abolition, literature, and women’s suffrage.

After the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin, Stowe became an international celebrity and a popular author. In addition to novels, poetry and essays, she wrote non-fiction books on a wide range of subjects including homemaking and the raising of children, and religion. She wrote in an informal conversational style, and presented herself as an average wife and mother. Her realistic style and her narrative use of local dialect predated works like Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn by 30 years.

Early Life

Born in Litchfield, Connecticut and raised primarily in Hartford, Harriet Beecher Stowe was the seventh of 11 children born to Rev. Lyman Beecher, an abolitionist Congregationalist preacher, from Boston and Roxana Foote Beecher, a granddaughter of General Andrew Ward who was a member of General George Washington’s staff in the Revolutionary War. Many of her brothers and sisters became famous reformers. Henry Ward Beecher(1813-1887), a noted minister in Brooklyn, New York, was active in the abolitionist movement. Catharine Beecher (1800-1878) founded many schools for young women throughout the country and was a prolific author while her half-sister, Isabella Beecher (1822-1907), became active in the women's suffrage movement.

Her mother died of tuberculosis at 41, when Harriet was only four. Two years later a stepmother took over the household. Stowe was named after her aunt, Harriet Foote, who deeply influenced her thinking, especially with her strong belief in culture. Samuel Foote, her uncle, encouraged her to read works of Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott.

When Stowe was eleven, she entered the seminary at Hartford, Connecticut, kept by her elder sister Catherine. The school had advanced curriculum and she learned languages, natural and mechanical science, composition, ethics, logic, and mathematics. At that time, Hartford Female Seminary was one of only a handful of schools that took the education of girls seriously. Four years after entering as a student she became an assistant teacher.

Her father married again and in 1832 the family moved to Cincinnati, Ohio where he became the President of Lane Theological Seminary. Cincinnati was a hotbed of the abolitionist movement and this is where she gained first-hand knowledge of slavery and the Underground railroad that led her to write Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Catherine and Harriet founded a new seminary in Cincinnati, the Western Female Institute and together they wrote a children's geography book.

Marriage and family

In 1836 Harriet Beecher married Calvin Stowe, a clergyman and widower who was a professor at Lane Theological Seminary. Calvin's wife Eliza befriended Harriet Beecher when she first arrived. When Eliza died young, Harriet and Calvin were drawn together by a shared loss. Their first children were twin girls whom they chose to name Harriet and Eliza. Throughout their marriage, Calvin encouraged Harriet in her career as an author.

Six of the Stowe's seven children were born in Cincinnati. The twin girls were born on September 29, 1836. They were followed by her son Henry Ellis (1838), Frederick William (1840), Georgiana May (1843), Samuel Charles (1848), and Charles Edward (1850).

In 1850 Professor Stowe joined the faculty of his alma mater, Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. The Stowe family moved to Maine and lived in Brunswick until 1853. From Brunswick, the Stowes moved to Andover, Massachusetts, where Calvin became a professor of theology at Andover Theological Seminary from 1853 to 1864. After his retirement, the family moved to Hartford, Connecticut.

During the Hartford years Calvin wrote the Origin and History of the Books of the Bible (1867). This scholarly work was one of the first books to examine the Bible from an historical point of view. Calvin received $10,000 in royalties from the book, considered a large amount of money in those days.

In the 1860s the Stowes purchased property in Mandarin, Florida, and began to travel south each winter. While in Florida Stowe helped establish schools for African American children and fostered the development of an ecumenical church open to members of all denominations. Her brother Charles (a minister, composer of religious hymns, and prolific author) joined the Stowes in Florida, to help the cause of the newly freed people.

Final years

In Hartford Harriet Beecher Stowe built her dream house, Oakholm, but the high maintenance cost and the encroachment of factories caused her to sell it in 1870. In 1873, she moved to her last home, the brick Victorian Gothic cottage-style house on Forest Street.

While living on Forest Street in Hartford Stowe and her family became acquainted with Samuel Clemens. Clemens and his family moved into a house adjacent to theirs and under the pen name Mark Twain wrote some of his most famous books while living in this house. Clemens was just about the same age as the Stowe twins, Harriet and Eliza.

Stowe died in 1896, two years after her husband, in Hartford. She is buried on the grounds of Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts.

The Harriet Beecher Stowe House in Cincinnati, Ohio is the former home of her father Lyman Beecher on the former campus of the Lane Seminary. Harriet lived here until her marriage. It is open to the public and operated as an historical and cultural site.

Writing career

In Cincinnati Stowe became a member of the Semi-Colon Club, a local literary society in which members wrote articles which were read and discussed by other participants. Her experiences in this club sharpened her writing style. During her early married years, Harriet began to publish stories and magazine articles to supplement the family income.

In 1834 Stowe began her literary career when she won a prize contest of the Western Monthly Magazine, and soon she was a regular contributor of stories and essays. Her first book, The Mayflower, appeared in 1843.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

While she lived in Cincinnati, Stowe co-authored a book with her sister, Primary Geography for Children. After the publication of this book Stowe received a special commendation from the Bishop of Cincinnati because it conveyed a positive image of the Catholic religion. Stowe's religious tolerance was unusual for Protestants at the time.

Stowe's most successful book, and the reason she is remembered in history, was Uncle Tom's Cabin. First published in serial form from 1851 to 1852 in an abolitionist organ, the National Era, Uncle Tom's Cabin sold more than 10,000 copies the first week it was published as a book. In the story 'Uncle Tom' is bought and sold three times and finally beaten to death by his last owner. The book was quickly translated into 37 languages and it sold over half a million copies in the United States over five years. It was turned into a play that also became very popular.

Speaking of her experience of writing the book she once said, "I could not control the story, the Lord himself wrote it. I was but an instrument in His hands and to Him should be given all the praise." It is reported that when Abraham Lincoln met the Stowe he joked, "So you're the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war."

Stowe's fame opened doors to the national literary magazines. She started to publish her writings in The Atlantic Monthly and later in Independent and in Christian Union. For some time she was the most celebrated woman writer in The Atlantic Monthly and in the New England literary clubs. In 1853, 1856, and 1859 Stowe made journeys to Europe, where she became friends with George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Lady Byron. However, the British public opinion turned against her when she charged Lord Byron with incestuous relations with his half-sister. In Lady Byron Vindicated (1870) she publicly declared her accusation. Both The Atlantic Monthly and Stowe suffered serious criticism after it was published.

Attacks on the veracity of her portrayal of the South led Stowe to publish The Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1853), in which she presented her source material. A second anti-slavery novel, Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856), told the story of a dramatic attempt at slave rebellion.

After the Civil War the popularity of Uncle Tom's Cabin began to decline. 'Uncle Tom' became a pejorative term, meaning undue subservience to white people on the part of black people.

Stowe's later works did not gain the same popularity as Uncle Tom's Cabin. She published novels, studies of social life, essays, and a small volume of religious poems. The Stowes lived in Hartford in summer and spent their winters in Florida, where they had a luxurious home. The Pearl of Orr's Island (1862), Old-Town Folks (1869), and Poganuc People (1878) were partly based on her husband's childhood reminiscences and are among the first examples of local color writing in New England.

Uncle Tom's Cabin

Published in 1852, Uncle Tom's Cabin, or, Life Among the Lowly, profoundly affected attitudes toward slavery in the United States in the years prior to the Civil War. A sensationally popular work, eventually the best-selling novel of the 19th century, Uncle Tom's Cabin presented a sentimental and moralistic perspective of life in the antebellum South, depicting the cruel reality of slavery while also affirming the redemptive power of Christian love.

Stowe wrote the novel as a response to the 1850 passage of the second Fugitive Slave Act (which punished those who aided runaway slaves and diminished the rights of fugitives as well as freed Blacks). Stowe was influenced by the autobiography of Josiah Henson, a slave on a 3,700 acre tobacco plantation in North Bethesda, Maryland owned by Isaac Riley. Stowe also evidently drew on American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses, a volume co-authored by Theodore Dwight Weld and the Grimké sisters, as a source of some of the novel's content. She also said she based the novel on a number of interviews with escaped slaves during the time when Stowe was living in Cincinnati, Ohio, across the Ohio River from Kentucky, a slave state. In Cincinnati the Underground Railroad had local abolitionist sympathizers and was active in efforts to help runaway slaves on their escape route from the South.

Uncle Tom's Cabin first appeared as a 40-week serial in National Era, an abolitionist periodical, on June 5, 1851. Because of the story's popularity, the publisher contacted Stowe about turning the serial into a book. While Stowe questioned if anyone would read Uncle Tom's Cabin in book form, she eventually consented to the request.

Fullpage illustration by Hammatt Billings for Uncle Tom's Cabin (First Edition: Boston: John P. Jewett and Company, 1852). The engraving shows Eliza telling Uncle Tom that she has been sold and is running away to save her child.

Published in book form on March 20, 1852, the novel soon sold out its complete print run. A number of other editions were soon printed.

In the first year of publication, 300,000 copies of Uncle Tom's Cabin were sold. Uncle Tom's Cabin sold equally well in England, with the first London edition appearing in May, 1852 and selling 200,000 copies. In a few years over 1.5 million copies of the book were in circulation in England, and the book eventually was translated into every major language and became the best-selling novel in the world during the 19th century.

Plot summary

The book opens with a Kentucky farmer named Arthur Shelby facing the loss of his farm because of debts. Even though he and his wife, Emily Shelby, believe that they have a benevolent relationship with their slaves, Shelby decides to raise the needed funds by selling two of them—Uncle Tom, a middle-aged man with a wife and children, and Harry, the son of Emily Shelby’s maid Eliza—to a slave trader. Emily Shelby hates the idea of doing this because she had promised her maid that her child would never be sold; Emily's son, George Shelby, hates to see Tom go because he sees the man as his friend and mentor.

Simon Legree assaulting Uncle Tom.

When Eliza overhears Mr. and Mrs. Shelby discussing plans to sell Tom and Harry, Eliza determines to run away with her son. The novel states that Eliza made this decision not because of physical cruelty, but by her fear of losing her only surviving child (she had already lost two children due to miscarriage). Eliza departs that night, leaving a note of apology to her mistress.

While all of this is happening, Uncle Tom is sold and placed on a riverboat, which sets sail down the Mississippi River. While on board, Tom meets and befriends a young white girl named Eva. When Eva falls into the river, Tom saves her. In gratitude, Eva's father, Augustine St. Clare, buys Tom from the slave trader and takes him with the family to their home in New Orleans. During this time, Tom and Eva begin to relate to one another because of the deep Christian faith they both share.

Eliza's family hunted, Tom's life with St. Clare

During Eliza's escape, she meets up with her husband George Harris, who had run away previously. They decide to attempt to reach Canada. However, they are now being tracked by a slave hunter named Tom Loker. Eventually Loker and his men trap Eliza and her family, causing George to shoot Loker. Worried that Loker may die, Eliza convinces George to bring the slave hunter to a nearby Quaker settlement for medical treatment.

Back in New Orleans, St. Clare debates slavery with his Northern cousin Ophelia who, while opposing slavery, is prejudiced against Black people. St. Clare, however, believes he is not biased, even though he is a slave owner. In an attempt to show Ophelia that her views on Blacks are wrong, St. Clare purchases Topsy, a young black slave. St. Clare then asks Ophelia to educate Topsy.

After Tom has lived with the St. Clares for two years, Eva grows very ill. Before she dies she experiences a vision of heaven, which she shares with the people around her. As a result of her death and vision, the other characters resolve to change their lives, with Ophelia promising to throw off her personal prejudices against Blacks, Topsy saying she will better herself, and St. Clare pledging to free Uncle Tom.

Tom sold to Simon Legree

Fullpage illustration by Hammatt Billings for Uncle Tom's Cabin (First Edition: Boston: John P. Jewett and Company, 1852). Cassy, another of Legree's slaves, is shown ministering to Uncle Tom after his whipping.

Before St. Clare can follow through on his pledge, he dies after being stabbed while entering a New Orleans tavern. His wife reneges on her late husband's vow and sells Tom at auction to a vicious plantation owner named Simon Legree. Legree (who is not a native southerner but a transplanted northerner) takes Tom to rural Louisiana, where Tom meets Legree's other slaves, including Emmeline (whom Legree purchased at the same time). Legree begins to hate Tom when Tom refuses Legree's order to whip his fellow slave. Tom receives a brutal beating, and Legree resolves to crush Tom's faith in God. But Tom refuses to stop reading his Bible and comforting the other slaves as best he can. While at the plantation, Tom meets Cassy, another of Legree's slaves. Cassy was previously separated from her son and daughter when they were sold; unable to endure the pain of seeing another child sold, she killed her third child.

At this point Tom Loker returns to the story. Loker has changed as the result of being healed by the Quakers. George, Eliza, and Harry have also obtained their freedom after crossing into Canada. In Louisiana, Uncle Tom almost succumbs to hopelessness as his faith in God is tested by the hardships of the plantation. However, he has two visions, one of Jesus and one of Eva, which renew his resolve to remain a faithful Christian, even unto death. He encourages Cassy to escape, which she does, taking Emmeline with her. When Tom refuses to tell Legree where Cassy and Emmeline have gone, Legree orders his overseers to kill Tom. As Tom is dying, he forgives the overseers who savagely beat him. Humbled by the character of the man they have killed, both men become Christians. Very shortly before Tom's death, George Shelby (Arthur Shelby's son) arrives to buy Tom’s freedom, but finds he is too late.

Final section

On their boat ride to freedom, Cassy and Emmeline meet George Harris' sister and accompany her to Canada. Once there, Cassy discovers that Eliza is her long-lost daughter who was sold as a child. Now that their family is together again, they travel to France and eventually Liberia, the African nation created for former American slaves. There they meet Cassy's long-lost son. George Shelby returns to the Kentucky farm and frees all his slaves. George tells them to remember Tom's sacrifice and his belief in the true meaning of Christianity.

Major characters in Uncle Tom's Cabin

Uncle Tom

Illustration of Tom and Eva by Hammatt Billings for the 1853 deluxe edition of Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Uncle Tom, the title character, was initially seen as a noble long-suffering Christian slave. In more recent years, his name has become an epithet directed towards African-Americans who are accused of selling out to whites (for more on this, see the creation and popularization of stereotypes section). Stowe intended Tom to be a "noble hero" and praiseworthy person. Throughout the book, far from allowing himself to be exploited, Tom stands up for his beliefs and is grudgingly admired even by his enemies.

Major themes

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"The fugitives are safe in a free land." Illustration by Hammatt Billings for Uncle Tom's Cabin, First Edition. The image shows George Harris, Eliza, Harry, and Mrs. Smyth after they escape to freedom.

Uncle Tom's Cabin is dominated by a single theme: the evil and immorality of slavery. While Stowe weaves other subthemes throughout her text, such as the moral authority of motherhood and the redeeming possibilities offered by Christianity, she emphasizes the connections between these and the horrors of slavery. Stowe pushed home her theme of the immorality of slavery on almost every page of the novel, sometimes even changing the story's voice so she could give a "homily" on the destructive nature of slavery (such as when a white woman on the steamboat carrying Tom further south states, "The most dreadful part of slavery, to my mind, is its outrages of feelings and affections—the separating of families, for example."). One way Stowe showed the evil of slavery was how this "peculiar institution" forcibly separated families from each other.

Because Stowe saw motherhood as the "ethical and structural model for all of American life," and also believed that only women had the moral authority to save the United States from the demon of slavery, another major theme of Uncle Tom's Cabin is the moral power and sanctity of women. Through characters like Eliza, who escapes from slavery to save her young son (and eventually reunites her entire family), or Little Eva, who is seen as the "ideal Christian", Stowe shows how she believed women could save those around them from even the worst injustices. While later critics have noted that Stowe's female characters are often domestic clichés instead of realistic women, Stowe's novel "reaffirmed the importance of women's influence" and helped pave the way for the women's rights movement in the following decades.

Stowe's puritanical religious beliefs show up in the novel's final, over-arching theme, which is the exploration of the nature of Christianity and how she feels Christian theology is fundamentally incompatible with slavery. This theme is most evident when Tom urges St. Clare to "look away to Jesus" after the death of St. Clare's beloved daughter Eva. After Tom dies, George Shelby eulogizes Tom by saying, "What a thing it is to be a Christian." Because Christian themes play such a large role in Uncle Tom's Cabin—and because of Stowe's frequent use of direct authorial interjections on religion and faith—the novel often takes the "form of a sermon."

Style

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Eliza crossing the icy river, in an 1881 theater poster

Uncle Tom's Cabin is written in the sentimental and melodramatic style common to 19th century sentimental novels and domestic fiction (also called women's fiction). These genres were the most popular novels of Stowe's time and tended to feature female main characters and a writing style which evoked a reader's sympathy and emotion. Even though Stowe's novel differs from other sentimental novels by focusing on a large theme like slavery and by having a man as the main character, she still set out to elicit certain strong feelings from her readers (such as making them cry at the death of Little Eva). The power in this type of writing can be seen in the reaction of contemporary readers. Georgiana May, a friend of Stowe's, wrote a letter to the author stating that "I was up last night long after one o'clock, reading and finishing Uncle Tom's Cabin. I could not leave it any more than I could have left a dying child." Another reader is described as obsessing on the book at all hours and having considered renaming her daughter Eva. Evidently the death of Little Eva affected a lot of people at that time, because in 1852 alone 300 baby girls in Boston were given that name.

Despite this positive reaction from readers, for decades literary critics dismissed the style found in Uncle Tom's Cabin and other sentimental novels because these books were written by women and so prominently featured "women's sloppy emotions." One literary critic said that had the novel not been about slavery, "it would be just another sentimental novel," while another described the book as "primarily a derivative piece of hack work." George Whicher turned his nose up at the book in his Literary History of the United States by saying it was "Sunday-school fiction" and full of "broadly conceived melodrama, humor, and pathos."

However, in 1985 Jane Tompkins changed this view of Uncle Tom's Cabin with her landmark book In Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction. Tompkins praised the very sentimental style so many other critics had dismissed, noting that sentimental novels showed how women's emotions had the power to change the world for the better. She also said that the popular domestic novels of the 19th century, including Uncle Tom's Cabin, were remarkable for their "intellectual complexity, ambition, and resourcefulness"; and that Uncle Tom's Cabin offers a "critique of American society far more devastating than any delivered by better-known critics such as Hawthorne and Melville."

Despite this changing view of Uncle Tom's Cabin's style, because the book is written so differently from most modern novels, today's readers can find the book's prose to be dense, overdone, or even "corny".

Reactions to the novel

Uncle Tom's Cabin has exerted an influence "equaled by few other novels in history." Upon publication, Uncle Tom's Cabin ignited a firestorm of protest from defenders of slavery (who created a number of books in response to the novel) while the book elicited praise from abolitionists. As a best-seller, the novel heavily influenced later protest literature (such as The Jungle by Upton Sinclair).

Contemporary and world reaction

Immediately upon publication, Uncle Tom's Cabin outraged people in the American South. The novel was also roundly criticized by slavery supporters.

Acclaimed Southern novelist William Gilmore Simms declared the work utterly false, while others called the novel criminal and slanderous. Reactions ranged from a bookseller in Mobile, Alabama who was forced to leave town for selling the novel to threatening letters sent to Stowe herself (including a package containing a slave's severed ear). Many Southern writers, like Simms, soon wrote their own books in opposition to Stowe's novel (see the Anti-Tom section below).

Some critics highlighted Stowe's paucity of life-experience relating to Southern life, which (in their view) led her to create inaccurate descriptions of the region. For instance, she had never set foot on a Southern plantation. However, Stowe always said she based the characters of her book on stories she was told by runaway slaves in Cincinnati, Ohio, where Stowe lived. It is reported that, "She observed firsthand several incidents which galvanized her to write [the] famous anti-slavery novel. Scenes she observed on the Ohio River, including seeing a husband and wife being sold apart, as well as newspaper and magazine accounts and interviews, contributed material to the emerging plot."

In response to these criticisms, in 1853 Stowe published A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, an attempt to document the veracity of the novel's depiction of slavery. In the book, Stowe discusses each of the major characters in Uncle Tom's Cabin and cites "real life equivalents" to them while also mounting a more "aggressive attack on slavery in the South than the novel itself had." Like the novel, A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin was also a best-seller. It should be noted, though, that while Stowe claimed A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin documented her previously consulted sources, she actually read many of the cited works only after the publication of her novel.

Despite these supposed and actual flaws in Stowe's research, and despite the shrill attacks from defenders of slavery, the novel still captured the imagination of many Americans. According to Stowe's son, when Abraham Lincoln met her in 1862 Lincoln commented, "So this is the little lady who started this great war." Historians are undecided if Lincoln actually said this line, and in a letter that Stowe wrote to her husband a few hours after meeting with Lincoln no mention of this comment was made. Since then, many writers have credited this novel with focusing Northern anger at the injustices of slavery and the Fugitive Slave Law and helping to fuel the abolitionist movement. Union General and politician James Baird Weaver said that the book convinced him to become active in the abolitionist movement.

Uncle Tom's Cabin also created great interest in England. The first London edition appeared in May, 1852, and sold 200,000 copies. Some of this interest was because of British antipathy to America. As one prominent writer explained, "The evil passions which 'Uncle Tom' gratified in England were not hatred or vengeance [of slavery], but national jealousy and national vanity. We have long been smarting under the conceit of America—we are tired of hearing her boast that she is the freest and the most enlightened country that the world has ever seen. Our clergy hate her voluntary system—our Tories hate her democrats—our Whigs hate her parvenus—our Radicals hate her litigiousness, her insolence, and her ambition. All parties hailed Mrs. Stowe as a revolter from the enemy." Charles Francis Adams, the American minister to Britain during the war, argued later that, "Uncle Tom's Cabin; or Life among the Lowly, published in 1852, exercised, largely from fortuitous circumstances, a more immediate, considerable and dramatic world-influence than any other book ever printed."

The book has been translated into almost every language, including Chinese (with translator Lin Shu creating the first Chinese translation of an American novel) and Amharic (with the 1930 translation created in support of Ethiopian efforts to end the suffering of blacks in that nation). The book was so widely read that Sigmund Freud reported a number of patients with sado-masochistic tendencies who he believed had been influenced by reading about the whipping of slaves in Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Literary significance and criticism

As the first widely read political novel in the United States, Uncle Tom's Cabin greatly influenced development of not only American literature but also protest literature in general. Later books which owe a large debt to Uncle Tom's Cabin include The Jungle by Upton Sinclair and Silent Spring by Rachel Carson.

Despite this undisputed significance, the popular perception of Uncle Tom's Cabin is as "a blend of children's fable and propaganda." The novel has also been dismissed by a number of literary critics as "merely a sentimental novel," while critic George Whicher stated in his Literary History of the United States that "Nothing attributable to Mrs. Stowe or her handiwork can account for the novel's enormous vogue; its author's resources as a purveyor of Sunday-school fiction were not remarkable. She had at most a ready command of broadly conceived melodrama, humor, and pathos, and of these popular cements she compounded her book."

Other critics, though, have praised the novel. Edmund Wilson stated that "To expose oneself in maturity to Uncle Tom's Cabin may … prove a startling experience." Jane Tompkins states that the novel is one of the classics of American literature and wonders if many literary critics aren't dismissing the book because it was simply too popular during its day.

Over the years scholars have postulated a number of theories about what Stowe was trying to say with the novel (aside from the obvious themes, such as condemning slavery). For example, as an ardent Christian and active abolitionist, Stowe placed many of her religion's beliefs into the novel. Some scholars have stated that Stowe saw her novel as offering a solution to the moral and political dilemma that troubled many slavery opponents: whether engaging in prohibited behavior was justified in opposing evil. Was the use of violence to oppose the violence of slavery and the breaking of proslavery laws morally defensible? Which of Stowe's characters should be emulated, the passive Uncle Tom or the defiant George Harris? Stowe's solution was similar to Ralph Waldo Emerson's: God's will would be followed if each person sincerely examined his principles and acted on them.

Scholars have also seen the novel as expressing the values and ideas of the Free Soil Movement. In this view, the character of George Harris embodies the principles of free labor, while the complex character of Ophelia represents those Northerners who condoned compromise with slavery. In contrast to Ophelia is Dinah, who operates on passion. During the course of the novel Ophelia is transformed, just as the Republican Party (3 years later) proclaimed that the North must transform itself and stand up for its antislavery principles.

Feminist theory can also be seen at play in Stowe's book, with the novel as a critique of the patriarchal nature of slavery. For Stowe, blood relations rather than paternalistic relations between masters and slaves formed the basis of families. Moreover, Stowe viewed national solidarity as an extension of a person's family, thus feelings of nationality stemmed from possessing a shared race. Consequently she advocated African colonization for freed slaves and not amalgamation into American society.

The book has also been seen as an attempt to redefine masculinity as a necessary step toward the abolition of slavery. In this view, abolitionists had begun to resist the vision of aggressive and dominant men that the conquest and colonization of the early 19th century had fostered. In order to change the notion of manhood so that men could oppose slavery without jeopardizing their self-image or their standing in society, some abolitionists drew on principles of women's suffrage and Christianity as well as passivism, and praised men for cooperation, compassion, and civic spirit. Others within the abolitionist movement argued for conventional, aggressive masculine action. All the men in Stowe's novel are representations of either one kind of man or the other.

Creation and popularization of stereotypes

Illustration of Sam from the 1888 "New Edition" of Uncle Tom's Cabin. The character of Sam helped create the stereotype of the lazy, carefree "happy darky."

In recent decades, scholars and readers have criticized the book for what are seen as condescending racist descriptions of the book's black characters, especially with regard to the characters' appearances, speech, and behavior, as well as the passive nature of Uncle Tom in accepting his fate. The novel's creation and use of common stereotypes about African Americans is important because Uncle Tom's Cabin was the best-selling novel in the world during the 19th century. As a result, the book (along with images illustrating the book and associated stage productions) had a major role in permanently ingraining these stereotypes into the American psyche.

Among the stereotypes of Blacks in Uncle Tom's Cabin are:

• The "happy darky" (in the lazy, carefree character of Sam);
• The light-skinned tragic mulatto as a sex object (in the characters of Eliza, Cassy, and Emmeline);
• The affectionate, dark-skinned female mammy (through several characters, including Mammy, a cook at the St. Clare plantation).
• The Pickaninny stereotype of black children (in the character of Topsy);
• The Uncle Tom, or African American who is too eager to please white people (in the character of Uncle Tom). Stowe intended Tom to be a "noble hero." The stereotype of him as a "subservient fool who bows down to the white man" evidently resulted from staged "Tom Shows," over which Stowe had no control.

In the last few decades these negative associations have to a large degree overshadowed the historical impact of Uncle Tom's Cabin as a "vital antislavery tool." The beginning of this change in the novel's perception had its roots in an essay by James Baldwin titled "Everybody’s Protest Novel." In the essay, Baldwin called Uncle Tom’s Cabin a "very bad novel" which was also racially obtuse and aesthetically crude.

In the 1960s and '70s, the Black Power and Black Arts Movements attacked the novel, saying that the character of Uncle Tom engaged in "race betrayal," making Tom (in some eyes) worse than even the most vicious slave owner. Criticisms of the other stereotypes in the book also increased during this time.

In recent years, though, scholars such as Henry Louis Gates Jr. have begun to reexamine Uncle Tom's Cabin, stating that the book is a "central document in American race relations and a significant moral and political exploration of the character of those relations."

In the decade between the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin and the start of the American Civil War, between twenty and thirty anti-Tom books were published. Among these novels are two books titled Uncle Tom's Cabin As It Is (one by W.L. Smith and the other by C.H. Wiley) and a book by John Pendleton Kennedy. More than half of these Anti-Tom books were written by white women, with Simms commenting at one point about the "Seemingly poetic justice of having the Northern woman (Stowe) answered by a Southern woman."

Dramatic adaptations

Tom shows

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1886 poster for "Stetson's Uncle Tom's Cabin"

Even though Uncle Tom's Cabin was the best-selling novel of the 19th century, far more Americans of that time saw the story as a stage play or musical than read the book. Eric Lott, in his book Uncle Tomitudes: Racial Melodrama and Modes of Production, estimates that at least three million people saw these plays, ten times the book's first-year sales.

On the plays

All Tom shows appear to have incorporated elements of melodrama and blackface minstrelsy. These plays varied tremendously in their politics—some faithfully reflected Stowe's sentimentalized antislavery politics, while others were more moderate, or even pro-slavery. Many of the productions featured demeaning racial caricatures of Black people, while a number of productions also featured songs by Stephen Foster (including "My Old Kentucky Home," "Old Folks at Home," and "Massa's in the Cold Ground"). The best-known Tom Shows were those of George Aiken and H.J. Conway.

The many stage variants of Uncle Tom's Cabin "dominated northern popular culture… for several years" during the 19th century and the plays were still being performed in the early 20th century.

One of the unique and controversial variants of the Tom Shows was Walt Disney's 1933 Mickey's Mellerdrammer. Mickey's Mellerdrammer is a United Artists film released in 1933. The title is a corruption of "melodrama", thought to harken back to the earliest minstrel shows, as a film short based on a production of Uncle Tom's Cabin by the Disney characters. In that film, Mickey Mouse and friends stage their own production of Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Mickey Mouse was already black-colored, but the advertising poster for the film shows Mickey dressed in blackface with exaggerated, orange lips; bushy, white sidewhiskers made out of cotton; and his now trademark white gloves.

See also

• Origins of the American Civil War
• History of slavery in the United States
• Timeline of the American Civil Rights Movement
• Uncle Tom
• Ramona, a novel that attempted to do the same for Native Americans in California that Uncle Tom's Cabin did for African Americans
• Onkel Toms Hütte, a Berlin U-Bahn station named for the book

Bibliography

• Gates, Henry Louis; and Appiah, Kwame Anthony. Africana: Arts and Letters: an A-to-Z reference of writers, musicians, and artists of the African American Experience, Running Press, 2005.
• Jordan-Lake, Joy. Whitewashing Uncle Tom's Cabin: Nineteenth-Century Women Novelists Respond to Stowe, Vanderbilt University Press, 2005.
• Lott, Eric. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
• Lowance, Mason I. (jr.); Westbrook, Ellen E.; De Prospo, R., The Stowe Debate: Rhetorical Strategies in Uncle Tom's Cabin, Univ of Massachusetts Press, 1994.
• Rosenthal, Debra J. Routledge Literary Sourcebook on Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin Routledge, 2003.
• Sundquist, Eric J., editor New Essays on Uncle Tom's Cabin, Cambridge University Press, 1986.
• Tompkins, Jane. In Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860. New York: Oxford UP, 1985.
• Weinstein, Cindy. The Cambridge Companion to Harriet Beecher Stowe, Cambridge University Press, 2004.
• Williams, Linda. Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O. J. Simpson, Princeton Univ. Press, 2001.

Online resources

• University of Virginia Web site "Uncle Tom's Cabin and American Culture: A Multi-Media Archive" Ed by Stephen Railton, covers 1830 to 1930, offering links to primary and bibliographic sources on the cultural background, various editions, and public reception of Harriet Beecher Stowe's influential novel. The site also provides the full text of the book, audio and video clips, and examples of related merchandising.

External links

Wikisource has original text related to this article:

Uncle Tom's Cabin

• Uncle Tom's cabin: or Life among the lowly; frontispiece by John Gilbert; ornamental title-page by Phiz; and 130 engravings on wood by Matthew Urlwin Sears, 1853 (a searchable facsimile at the University of Georgia Libraries; DjVu & layered PDF format)
• Pictures and stories from Uncle Tom's cabin; "The purpose of the editor of this little work, has been to adapt it for the juvenile family circle. The verses have accordingly been written by the authoress for the capacity of the youngest readers …" 1853 (a searchable facsimile at the University of Georgia Libraries; DjVu & layered PDF format)
• Uncle Tom's Cabin, available for free via Project Gutenberg
• Uncle Tom's Cabin, available at Internet Archive. Scanned, illustrated original editions.
• Uncle Tom's Cabin Historic Site
• Free audiobook of Uncle Tom's Cabin at Librivox
• More on the lack of international copyright

Template:American Civil War

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Partial list of works

• Uncle Tom's Cabin (1851) ISBN 0679602003
• A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1853) ISBN 1557094934
• Dred, A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856) ISBN 0807856851
• The Minister's Wooing (1859) ISBN 1418105198
• The Pearl of Orr's Island (1862) ISBN 040300280X
• As "Christopher Crowfield"
  • House and Home Papers (1865) ISBN 1417947543
  • Little Foxes (1866)
  • The Chimney Corner (1868)
• Old Town Folks (1869)
• The Ghost in the Cap'n Brown (1870)
• Lady Byron Vindicated (1870) ISBN 1414257287
• My Wife and I (1871) ISBN 1591070570
• Pink and White Tyranny (1871) ISBN 155709960X
• We and Our Neighbors (1875) ISBN 1591070481
• Poganuc People (1878) ISBN 1419142437

References and further reading

• Adams, John R. Harriet Beecher Stowe. Twayne Publishers, 1963., ISBN 0808401505
• Hedrick, Joan. Harriet Beecher Stowe, A Life. Oxford University Press, USA, 1995.

ISBN 0195096398

• Margolis, Anne, Jeanne Boydston, and Mary Kelley. The Limits of Sisterhood: The Beecher Sisters on Women's Rights and Woman's Sphere. University of North Carolina Press, 1988. ISBN 0807842079
• Matthews, Glenna. "'Little Women' Who Helped Make This Great War" in Gabor S. Boritt, ed. Why the Civil War Came. Oxford University Press, 1993. ISBN 0195113764
• Rourke, Constance Mayfield. Trumpets of Jubilee: Henry Ward Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Lyman Beecher, Horace Greeley, P.T. Barnum. (1927).
• Thulesius, Olav. Harriet Beecher Stowe in Florida, 1867-1884. McFarland and Company, 2001. ISBN 0786409320
• Weinstein, Cindy. The Cambridge Companion to Harriet Beecher Stowe. Cambridge Companions to Literature (Cctl). Cambridge, England: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004. ISBN 0521533090
• White, Barbara A. The Beecher Sisters. Yale University Press, 2003. ISBN 0300099274

External links

• Harriet Beecher Stowe House & Center - Stowe's adulthood home in Hartford, Connecticut
• Harriet Beecher Stowe Society—Scholarly organization dedicated to the study of the life and works of Harriet Beecher Stowe
• Brief biography at Kirjasto (Pegasos)
• An American Family: The Beechers
• Harriet Beecher Stowe Quotes
• Beecher-Stowe Family Papers
• The Online Books Page (University of Pennsylvania)
• Works by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Project Gutenberg
• Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe Compiled From Her Letters and Journals by Her Son Charles Edward Stowe, available for free via Project Gutenberg
• Harriet Beecher Stowe Bibliography
• Harriet Beecher Stowe's brief biography and works
• Women in History
• Lady Byron Vindicated

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