March 20 - Uncle Tom's Cabin Published

Posted on March 20, 2022

Key Points

This is an update of my post published on March 20, 2011:

Can fiction inspire people to do what’s right?

You bet! A white woman from Connecticut and Ohio, Harriet Beecher Stowe, wrote a novel about an enslaved African American—and it became the best-selling novel of the nineteenth century, and the second best-selling book of all types (fiction and non-fiction) of the century, as well.

(The Bible was the top seller. During the year of its publication, Uncle Tom’s Cabin actually outsold the Bible!)

Although the book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, had already been published in serial form in a magazine (each month a new chapter), when it was released in book form on this day in 1852, people snatched up copies, and the first printing of 5,000 books sold out in just a few days. An unprecedented 300,000 copies sold in the first year of publication.

The printers had to keep their presses running 24 hours a day in order to try to keep up with demand. This kind of popularity was so unprecedented, many people consider this book to be the first bestseller.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin was sentimental but realistic in showing the horrific nature of slavery. Stowe actually did research, before writing her book, by reading accounts of enslavement from folks who had freed themselves by escaping on the so-called Underground Railroad. And the book worked as she intended, making many people (especially Northerners) into abolitionists—that is, people who believed that slavery should be abolished entirely. Of course, many people in the South hated the book and protested its publication.

One person whose accounts Stowe read was
formerly enslaved African American Josiah Henson.

Some years later, during the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln met Stowe and (at least supposedly) said, “So you are the little woman who started this great war.”

Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the right book at the right time, and it inspired people to care about the rights of others.

AND NOW, THE DOWN SIDE:

Uncle Tom is one of the most-hated characters for many Black people, especially for African American people. It’s actually an insult to call someone an “Uncle Tom.” It generally means someone who bows down to white people, serves them or deals with them in a really obsequious way – rather than standing up for Black power, having self-respect and dignity, insisting that Black lives matter!

However, this servile version of Uncle Tom isn’t based all that much on the Uncle Tom as Stowe wrote the character. That character was super courageous and very moral. He DID stand up to white oppressors – and he died for his brave stance while also protecting others.

So if Stowe’s character was more admirable than the image many of us have of “Uncle Tom,” what went wrong? Well, in minstrel shows and an early movie, and in other fictional characters that are sorta kinda based on the Uncle Tom from minstrel shows and the movie, Uncle Tom’s courageous final stand and violent death was ditched, and the heroic and praiseworthy character was twisted into a racist stereotype. Darn it!