There has been much speculation as to the origins of "Uncle Tom's Cabin".
Academics have reconstructed her upbringing, her religious, moral, and philosophical influences. They have delved into her reading list, her correspondence, her intimate relationships. Her family have been exhaustively researched. Feminist have looked at her writings, and the themes within the novel from a feminist perspective. As she has been hailed as one of the greatest voices in the abolitionist movement, she never was a formal member of any of the hundreds of abolitionist societies. Some have asked about her absence from the front lines of the feminist movement.
The story first appeared in 1852 in the abolitionist newspaper National Era. Soon her account created great interest and lead to a large, faithful readership. in the days before radio, television and even in-home libraries, serialized accounts in newspapers, passed from person to person perhaps 30 or more times, were the nations primary cultural infusion.
By the time the novel came out it sold 300,000 copies the first year, and by 1865 had sold a million. today It's been translated into over 60 languages and remains the nations best selling book of all time save the bible. liberal thinkers and artistic writers hailed it as a masterpiece. traditional male writers derided her work for "sentimentality", it's romantic elements and for what they saw as the improper public airing of issues by a woman no less. Needless to say the South found endless faults with the novel.
African-Americans have both hailed the novel and taken great solace in it's message as a form of vindication and advocacy (the majority). Some African-Americans at the time took umbrage at her passages where the character George and Eliza repatriate themselves in Africa after sojourns in France and New England. The idea of colonization was controversial issue prior to emancipation. Some felt that Blacks had no place in America. Though they wanted an end to slavery, they did not see Blacks as equal. Other's saw colonization as a right. In their paternalistic view, it was best for freed slaves to be "free" in Africa, their homeland. (Frederick Douglass' only objection to the book was the section on colonization. He felt it was problematic and harmful to the notion that Blacks were U.S. citizens and should not be placed, as a political solution, in Africa.)
Today, most criticism of the novel is in reality a reflexive reaction to the time established stereotypes based upon the novel. The idea of an "Uncle Tom" perhaps the 2nd most caustic insult to an African-American following the n-word. There's Jim Crow, now associated with black codes and racist demogoguery. Many of the stage plays as well as art based on the world, is in the form of the romantic paternalistic myth as justification for the peculiar institution -indistinguishable- from racist advertisements for grits, watermelon, minstrel shows. Many stage adaptations of the play were authentic to it's nature, yet far more stripped the novel of it's abolitionist leanings and rhetoric and preserved, distorted and enhanced the stereotypes and stripped the intelligence and humanity from it's characters in a way that southern and racist northern audiences found benignly entertaining.
James Baldwin voiced perhaps the most famous criticism of the novel. Baldwin read the novel several times in his youth. Seemingly he was obsessed with it. Ultimately, after much consideration, he simply said it was a "very bad" novel. he accused it of not only being sentimental, but in it's depiction of George and Eliza, a slap at dark-skinned Blacks and playing into the harmful stereotype of light-skinned Black superiority. In the character of Uncle Tom, he saw a weak, feeble, god-fearing ignorant man. Unable to stand on his own. In fear of God, and subservient and servile to his master.
More pointedly, as a work of fiction, Baldwin holds Beecher Stowe fully accountable for the characters she created, seemingly with no credit or leeway given to her for the fact that virtually every situation she depicted, represented thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of Black lives in slavery. Baldwin's passion is heartfelt as it is heart-rending. Baldwin, well-aware of his "double-consciousness" as an African-American, yearns for a definition which seamlessly encompasses his Blackness, his Man-ness and his American-ness outside of the history of slavery and racism in America.
Baldwin's desire is admirable, and understandable, yet, in Beecher-Stowe's time, let alone Baldwin's, such a definition did not exist within popular culture, and certainly not within the psyche of those that publicly ached for more.
The scholarship and research that has gone into the novel and it's origins is perfectly understandable. Yet, as it is thorough and true. At times humans are wont to make more of something than is evident, supportable, or even comprehensible to the artists themselves.
In my reading of Beecher-Stowe, my research and reading, as well as understanding-intuition-, as well as experience and professional training, has brought me to a more simplified conclusion regarding her work.
Harriet Beecher Stowe grew up in one of America's greatest families, and in one of the most dynamic times and geographic areas at a crucial time in history. She was a witness to the birthplace of one of the most incredible and gripping movements in the United States and free world. Due to her father's, and then husbands active religious lifestyle. She live in and traveled to several different regions of the United States. Most notably Kentucky, Ohio, New York and Maine.
She had an incredible memory. At age 6 she had memorized 27 hymns and 2 chapters of the bible. In a sense it was not so much her memory, as natural ability to fully absorb that which she had been introduced. A skill that played into the creation of her novel. In terms of literature, philosophy and religious studies, she had a voracious appetite, and prescient existentialist perception. She was deeply religious and yearned to be closer to God. This desire played a role in her understanding of the fell nature of the peculiar institution.
In the Beecher house there was frequent debate, discussion and opinioning of the days events and major ideas and movements of the day. This passion for discussion and critical reasoning, is seen in the dialectical nature of her work. Characters frequently have discussion where moral, life experience and strategies and plans, as well as motivations are discussed and debated.
having lost her mother at age 6, and a dear friend (her future husband's wife), a black washer woman, and child as well as others, she understood the capricious nature of slave ownership. No slave was "safe" regardless of how petted they were by their master, for death or pecuniary crisis could suddenly lead to sale, perhaps "down south" and separation from all they knew, and often times their entire family. Other factors that played into Beecher Stowe's make-up was that she was prone to states of reverie, where she would appear blank to the world. not speak, and appear distant and absorbed. During these times there is evidence that she was integrating and synthesizing information that would later pour out of her in her writings, most notably, Uncle Tom's Cabin.
Beecher Stowe may have been manic-depressive. She once left for hydrotherapy for 18 months to treat an intransigent depression. She herself was prone to depression, and lead a hard life of hand to mouth existence and rapid increase in her family with serial childbirth (the average woman for her time had 5.1 children, not all of which survived childhood). As she worked, cooked, performed chores, often with her husband away on business, she also had to find time to engage in her passion of writing. snatching a few moments here and there to write -much in the same manner as former slave and author Harriet Jacobs, aka Linda Brent. Her depression, reverie, hard-scrabble life, appetite for knowledge and regional influences were all in addition to her flights of imaginative prowess -she insisted that she had not written Uncle Tom's Cabin, rather, as she had consecrated herself to God and confirmed her faith, he had used her to produce the novel.
Beecher Stowe's father was the President of Lane Seminary at the same time her husband was one of the advanced professors of old testament literature. In fact he was one of the world's leading scholars on the old testament.
the famous Lane debates on slavery, while Theodore Dwight Weld was a student, took place while she was in residence in Cincinnati. She remarked at the time that she felt after hearing about slavery that one must "do something" in response. her religious influences had taught her that all men, quite literally, were equal and sons and brothers before God. she also felt that one must work to find salvation after having been born into sin. She believed that faith without works, was hollow and meaningless. She also believed in the equality of women and men, and spoke proudly of how her and her husband would discourse on numerous subjects and reach important decisions on their family together.
No doubt the heavy Quaker influence in the abolitionist movement, no doubt informed her perspective on the equality of men and women, which placed her in direct conflict with the antebellum idea of a woman's dependence, pedestal like position, while also being forced to turn a blind eye to the philandering of her husband, and the multitude of mulatto children running about the plantation.
Her own sister married a wealthy planter, and upon her marriage she returned to his plantation, to find several mulatto children, whom he admitted that he was the father. He was simply increasing his stock. Stowe's sister soon returned to the family and left the husband. This event no doubt made a strong impression on Stowe. For a the same time southern ladies were put on a pedestal, and were thought should not engage in any menial work, their homes were torn apart from the inside by promiscuity, adultery, rape, unacknowledged step-children and violence in the form of whippings, floggings, beatings and verbal *assaults.
Stowe had lost one of her own children to cholera. it was a slow, agonizing, painful death and she felt helpless to soothe or help her child. This experience she admitted, allowed her the empathy and compassion to imagine the pain of a slaver mother violently separated from her child. A much loved black washer-woman died suddenly of cholera. This also, like all other mortal events, deeply affected Stowe.
Other events, such a the Kansas-Nebraska act, the Missouri Compromise, the Dred Scott decision and finally, the Fugitive Slave act, had slowly, methodically and forcefully placed Stowe, irrevocably to take up her pen, and spill forth a tale, which was the culmination and perfection of the moral and ethical arguments, the personal narratives, her readings, religious upbringing, and literary artistic powers to meld and spin all of the above elements seamlessly through her humanity, her sentiment, and her goal to bring home, the full emotional and humane impact of the slave system upon the cultural institution of America.
The vital elements as well as the stars were in proper alignment. All that was needed, was a Harriet Beecher Stowe to bring it all together.
The work, was wholly intentional. Calculated, and yet, so beautifully intertwined, as to place doubt in the minds of many as to what exact role the author, and luck had to do with it -that is- if one believed the novel to be any good to begin with.
*[one book Stowe read thoroughly and used for background was American Slavery as it is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses by Theodore Dwight Weld, a former student of her husband. In it is recounted a scene where a slave woman is thought to have spooned out too much molasses to a slave owners son. She is beaten by the slave owner, first with his fists, forearms and elbows. When he tires of this and the slave reflexively raises her arms in defense, the slave owner is further enraged and has her arms held behind her by another slave and he proceeds to beat her with his shoe, until her face is unrecognizable and her ears are swollen to the size of a man's palm. All of this occurred in front of his young son and wife as well as a visitor from the north. To add to the indignity, when this slave woman was finally excused, she had to utter, "Thank You Massa"]
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