“I am the personage of Uncle Tom and I feel proud of the title.”: Reverend Josiah Henson and Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852)

“I am the personage of Uncle Tom and I feel proud of the title.”-Rev. Josiah Henson, An Autobiography of the Rev. Josiah Henson (1879)

In a reply written to Lord Carlisle of England in 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe outlines those effects she had hoped Uncle Tom’s Cabin, published in the same year, might have on the American public. She wrote, “1^st. To soften and moderate the bitterness of feeling in extreme abolitionists. 2^nd. To convert to the abolitionist view, many of whom this same bitterness had repelled. 3^rd. To inspire the free colored people with self-respect, hope and confidence. And 4^th. To inspire universally through the country, a kindlier feeling toward the Negro race.”

Uncle Tom, an African American enslaved person, who in the novel’s opening scene is leading prayer among fellow enslaved men and women. He quickly learns that he is to be sold to help pay off his master’s debts. Instead of fleeing (as he was advised to do by friends and family) Uncle Tom resigns himself to the condition he faces. Relying upon his Christian faith and fortitude, the novel depicts Uncle Tom’s heroic endurance of enslavement with the hopes of putting to shame the Christianity of southern slave-owning families. Stowe’s antislavery novel was designed to prick the consciences of both northern and southern readers about the horrors of slavery.

The novel was first published as a serial appearing in the National Era between 1851 and 1852. The story was published in 40 installments and Stowe was paid $300. When the story was published as a two volume novel in March 1852, 300,000 copies were sold in the first year and nearly 2 million copies were sold world wide by 1857. In 1849, three years prior to Stowe’s publication, the Rev. Josiah Henson, a former slave, published his life story which became the partial basis for the most infamous characterization in literary history and, arguably, American cultural history. (Sadly, Henson’s own heroic feats were not used in Stowe’s novel which included successfully escaping from enslavement with his entire family and starting anew in Canada. This he also owed to his Christian faith.) All the same, in his third autobiography written in 1879, Henson boldly announces that “I am the personage of Uncle Tom and I feel proud of the title.”

Despite the novel’s success—including the approbation of Rev. Henson whose life Stowe based the character upon—the extent to which Stowe’s novel successfully achieved her aims was and remains controversial. Particularly, the sentimentalist devices Stowe employed in the work trying to attain these objectives. Chiefly, the depiction of Uncle Tom is the subject that has garnered the most critical (and cantankerous) attention about the novel over the past 175 years especially within the African American intellectual and broader community.

Moreover, in 1853, Stowe published an apologetic to defend her fictional account, titled The Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Presenting the Original Facts and Documents upon Which the Story is Founded. In it, she relays that the depiction of Uncle Tom is largely taken from Henson’s first autobiography published in 1849. Stowe visited twice with Henson, once at her home in Andover in 1849 and a second time in 1850 at her brother’s house in Boston. Despite Stowe’s apologetic and Reverend Henson’s approbation and reclamation of the figure, polarizing African American intellectual views on Uncle Tom persisted even a full century later with James Baldwin and W.E.B. Du Bois possessing opposite views.

James Baldwin who would publish his most famous novel Go Tell It On The Mountain exactly 100 years later in 1952–with a very different figuring of African American Christianity embodied in the Black Masculine Christian Engagement of Gabriel Grimes (see my forthcoming commentary)—severely denounced the novel in his 1949 essay, “Everybody’s Protest Novel.” He labeled Stowe’s and Henson’s Tom so thoroughly unrealistic by suggesting that African Americans must become implausibly pious in order for American whites to recognize their humanity. W.E.B. Du Bois, on the other hand, suggested in an October 27, 1945 article appearing in the Chicago Defender that Stowe’s work was understandable and necessary given the time period. (Du Bois wrote several years earlier in a 1911 article appearing in Crisis Magazine also wrote: “Accordingly, in her writings we find the artist dominated by the preacher and reformer. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was to her a sermon hurled against a great moral evil.”)

All the same, contemporary usage has gone well beyond this history of the figure of Uncle Tom and has degenerated into monikers, labels and pejoratives that have surely gone well beyond what Stowe, Henson, Baldwin and Du Bois would have ever intended.