The Real Uncle Tom and the Unknown South He Helped Create
Readers of Uncle Tom’s Cabin had no idea that there was a real Uncle Tom. His name was Josiah Henson. He was born a slave in Maryland in 1789. Harriet Beecher Stowe admitted more than once that his story was part of the inspiration for her novel. But she never adequately explained why her fictional Uncle Tom was so different from the real one.1
The difference was and is profound. The real Tom should prompt modern readers to reevaluate slavery’s impact on American blacks. The traditional story runs something like this: Slavery was a degrading, humiliating, demoralizing experience. Any black man or woman who endured it was reduced to subhuman status. Therefore they and their descendants, even when emancipated, would have to be treated like children, at best, or creatures from an alien planet at worst. Before and after the Civil War, this idea played no small part in poisoning the idea of black equality in the American public mind, North and South.
Mrs. Stowe never spent any serious time in the South. Almost everything she knew about the slave system was acquired from reading Theodore Weld’s Slavery As It Is, from conversations with abolitionist friends, and from visits to nearby plantations during the ten years she and her husband spent in Cincinnati, across the Ohio River from Kentucky.
During her visits to plantations in Kentucky, Mrs. Stowe saw blacks doing a remarkable variety of things. Often a black managed an entire plantation as the overseer. Others were blacksmiths, shoemakers, or tailors. But this, Mrs. Stowe believed, was only true of Kentucky, a border state. Elsewhere, especially on the Deep South’s cotton plantations, slaves remained subhuman automatons.
To inspire outrage and pity, Mrs. Stowe portrayed her fictional Uncle Tom as an impossible mixture of competence and servility. She mentioned almost casually that he ran his master’s plantation. But she never gave readers a glimpse of him at work. Instead she spent pages describing Tom as so kind-hearted that he verges on being a pathetic yes-man who rarely challenged his master’s decisions.
Josiah Henson gives us a different picture of slavery in his autobiography, which was published in 1849. Henson left no doubt that the system could be brutal. His father got into a fistfight with an overseer who tried to molest his wife. He was given a hundred lashes and one of his ears was amputated. After that, the elder Henson became a morose sullen ghost of his previously cheerful self. A few years later, the master was drowned crossing a river on horseback and his slaves were sold by his heirs. Josiah and his mother were separated until she persuaded her new master to buy her son too.
These experiences did not break Henson’s spirit. When he was still in his teens, his new master, Isaac Riley, began calling him “a smart fellow.” His fellow slaves predicted he would do “great things” when he became a man. Soon he was vowing to “out-hoe, out-reap, out-husk, out-dance, out-everything every competitor.” He did not hesitate to compete with white men as well as fellow slaves. He had a low opinion of the farm’s sloppy, careless overseer. When he caught the man defrauding the master, Henson reported him.
Isaac Riley fired the thief, and Henson asked for a chance to oversee the farm. He was soon raising “more than double the crops, with more cheerful and willing labor, than was ever seen on the estate before.” Not only did he superintend the day-to-day work, he brought the harvested wheat and tobacco to market and bargained skillfully to bring home astonishing profits.2
The fictional Uncle Tom admired his incompetent master, even after he sold him south. “Set him ’longside of other masrs—who’s had the treatment and the livin’ I’ve had?” he told his wife. The real Uncle Tom had no such high opinion of Isaac Riley. He was “coarse and vulgar in his habits, unprincipled and cruel in his general deportment.” Riley sometimes cursed Henson for not getting a better price for a crop, and yet boasted to friends about his new overseer’s skill at the marketing table. “He was quite incompetent to handle the business himself,” Henson added.
Riley was always short of money, thanks to his bad habits. He gave his slaves a minimum diet of cornmeal and salt herring. Henson secretly supplemented their allowances with selections from “the superior crops I was raising.” He soothed his conscience by reminding himself that he was saving Riley a “large salary” for a white overseer.
At the age of twenty-two, Henson married “a very well-taught girl, belonging to a neighboring family.” By this time he had become a devout Christian, thanks to the influence of his mother and a white man named McKinney, who was a part-time preacher to local slaves. Henson’s religion helped him put up with Riley. Henson considered it his duty to be “faithful to him in the position in which he placed me.” For many years he made enough money to finance Riley’s dissolute lifestyle.
Riley became involved in a lawsuit with his brother-in-law over some jointly owned property. This blunder created a scene that was the opposite of the slave servility so often pictured in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Stumbling into Henson’s cabin well after midnight, a drunken Riley fell on his knees before the fire and moaned, “O Sie [Josiah] I’m ruined, ruined!”
“How so, Master?” asked Henson.
“They’ve got a judgment against me and in less than two weeks every nigger I’ve got will be put up and sold.”
Riley began to curse his brother-in-law, who had won the lawsuit. Frantically, he threw his arms around Henson. “You can do it, Sie. Won’t you help me? Won’t you?”
Henson asked what he was talking about. Riley said he wanted Henson to take the farm’s slaves to his brother Amos’s plantation in Kentucky. There they would be safe from seizure and his brother would give Riley enough money for their services for him to survive in Maryland. Henson agreed to take the eighteen slaves (including his wife) beyond the reach of the Maryland court. He plotted a route, bought a wagon, and stocked it with food. They rode overland to Wheeling, West Virginia, where Henson sold the wagon, bought a boat, and sailed down the Ohio River to Cincinnati. There they encountered several free blacks, who urged them to head for Canada. Henson refused to double-cross his master.3
By mid-April 1825, they reached Amos Riley’s Kentucky plantation. It was a large operation, with over a hundred slaves. Amos Riley, too, made Josiah Henson his overseer, and he successfully managed this much bigger business. A friendly Methodist clergyman gave Henson lessons in the art of preaching and urged him to seek his freedom. Henson persuaded Amos Riley to let him return to Maryland to visit Isaac Riley and black friends on nearby plantations. He had earned enough money from preaching in black churches in his Kentucky neighborhood to negotiate with Isaac Riley for his freedom. They agreed on $450, and Henson gave him $350 and a note for the balance.
Back in Kentucky, Henson learned from Amos Riley that he would have to raise another $650 to be a free man. Henson quietly planned and executed an escape to Ohio with his wife and four children. In a few weeks he was safe in Canada. There he started a sawmill that was soon selling thousands of feet of black walnut lumber in Boston and New York. He persuaded the Canadian government to let him start a manual-labor school to teach escaped slaves skills that would increase their earning power.
With help from affluent Canadian and American friends, Henson sailed to England to raise money for his school and to display the timber from his sawmill. He exhibited the gleaming wood at the 1851 London World’s Fair. With a mixture of pride and ruefulness, he noted that “among all the exhibitors from every nation in Europe, from Asia and America and the Isles of the Sea, there was not a single black man but myself.”
Toward the end of this visit to England, the Archbishop of Canterbury invited Henson to his palace and chatted with him for about ninety minutes. The prelate was amazed to learn that Henson had spent most of his life as a slave. “Will you tell me, sir, how you learned our language so well?” he asked.
Henson said he had always listened closely to the way white people talked and learned to imitate those who spoke most correctly. The contrast between this extraordinary black man’s conversation and Uncle Tom’s crude dialect is final proof of how different the real Tom was from his fictional counterpart.4
• • •
Josiah Henson was not some sort of mysterious exception to the rule in the slave world of the South. There were black men like him in almost every southern state. In South Carolina, William Ellison’s master (perhaps also his father) apprenticed him to a cotton gin maker. Ellison swiftly learned this technology and soon had enough money from repairing gins to purchase his freedom and then the freedom of his wife and children. By 1860, he owned a thousand acres of land and sixty-three slaves. He was one of the richest planters in the state.
We have seen that George Washington appointed slave overseers at Mount Vernon in the 1790s. By the 1850s, black overseers were far more common than most Northerners of that era—and most Americans of the twenty-first century—have realized. Some historians estimate that blacks predominated in that position on roughly 70 percent of the plantations with a hundred or more slaves. On smaller plantations, the overseer was almost always black.5
The importance of these black men can be glimpsed in a cry of distress from a Louisiana planter when his slave overseer died. “I have lost poor Leven, one of the most faithful blacks that ever lived. He was truth and honesty and without a fault that I ever discovered. He has overseen the plantation nearly three years, and has done better at it than any white man had ever done before.”6
Managing plantations was by no means the only goal to which a black man might aspire in the Deep South, in spite of being a slave. Twenty-seven percent of the adult male slaves in the city of Charleston were skilled artisans such as blacksmiths, carpenters, and coopers. They operated as virtually free men. A slave carpenter or shoemaker would and could advertise his services, negotiate his own contracts, receive and pay money, and even live in his own house. His slave status required him to pay a percentage of his income to his owner. Otherwise he was a relatively free man.
Slave artisans frequently made enough money to buy their freedom. In the 1850s, with cotton soaring on the commodity exchanges, the price of a slave was high, perhaps $1,700 for a blacksmith. That a black artisan could earn this much money and pay his own living expenses and a portion to his owner is impressive. His slave status was in many ways more an artificial legality that a daily reality.
Skilled slaves were equally common on the plantations. About 25 percent of the bondsmen had jobs that required expertise. They ranged from overseers to artisans to teamsters and gardeners. The idea that all slaves were menial workers is false. Even some women slaves held jobs as seamstresses and nurses for the master’s children.7
The South’s 260,000 free blacks had an even more impressive net worth. They owned property worth $25,000,000. About one in every hundred owned slaves. Even more surprising to modern readers is the number of slaves who worked in factories, displaying a gamut of industrial skills. The papers of David Ross, who operated the Oxford Ironworks in Campbell County, Virginia, one of the largest factories in the nation, reveal that the business was staffed and run entirely by slaves. A black man named Abram was responsible for the highly technical and demanding day-to-day management of the blast furnace. The furnace keepers, Abram’s chief assistants, had to know precisely how much charcoal and limestone to put into the furnace when it was in blast. All the other skilled workers—blacksmiths, potters, hammer men, miners—were slaves.
David Ross was proud of the many workers who had mastered more than one skill. His blacksmiths could double as potters and were adept at repairing or rebuilding the machinery of the forges, furnaces, or mills. Of manager Abram, Ross wrote that he “supports an unblemished character, for his integrity, good understanding, and talents.” Like Josiah Henson, Abram had revealed these gifts virtually from his infancy, and still retained them in spite of his “gray hairs.”
Once a white overseer of a nearby Ross farm complained that the owner had compared him unfavorably to Abram. Ross replied the man must be mistaken. “It is hard to compare a farmer with an ironmaster.” If Abram were a free man, Ross said, he would earn twice as much as the overseer, whether he was working in the North, South, or West.8
• • •
As the profitability of cotton culture grew in the 1850s, money became an ingredient in raising productivity on many plantations. Owners frequently paid between $40 and $110 a year to experienced slaves for doing a good job. Slaves were also permitted to grow fruit and vegetables in their gardens, and sell the produce. One industrious field hand made $309 in a single year selling peaches and apples on the side. In modern money that sum would be about $5,000.
In tobacco farming, where a high degree of skill was necessary, planters frequently paid slaves as much as $300 a year to guarantee a good performance. Rice cultivation required equal amounts of savvy. The plantations were divided into dozens of small watery plots surrounded by dikes. One traveler visited a rice farmer in Georgia and found a slave engineer who received “considerably higher wages” (in the form of presents) than the white overseer for his skill in building and maintaining the dikes.9
On cotton plantations, the “gang” system required another group of leaders, who functioned as assistant overseers, somewhat like foremen in a factory or sergeants in an army. Before his gang went to work, the leader had to measure out their tasks for the day—no small job in fields that were often shaped irregularly. With a boy helper and the aid of a five-foot measuring rod, the leader would set stakes that usually covered about forty acres. Once his gang went to work, he watched them closely to make sure they were not “overstrained.” If he saw they were seriously tiring, he had the authority to call a halt to the day’s work. The next day he would order part of his gang to finish the previous day’s assignment, while the rest moved on to another section of the field.10
Some planters, to increase productivity, entered into profit-sharing arrangements with their slaves. One Alabama owner permitted his bondsmen to keep two thirds of the profits of the plantation, setting aside a third for his private use. From the slaves’ share came the cost of clothing and food for him and his family, the taxes for the farm, and medical bills. “What clear money you make shall be divided equally amongst you in a fair proportion agreeable to the services rendered by each hand,” the contract stated. “Those that earn most shall have most.”11
These startling facts have come to light in the last three or four decades, thanks to in-depth research by a new generation of historians, who are trying to get beyond the myths perpetrated by abolitionist critics and southern defenders of slavery.
• • •
Perhaps the most startling fact these statistic-minded scholars have uncovered is the South’s breathtaking wealth. In the 1850s, the fifteen slave states were by far the most prosperous section of the nation. Southern farms, many of them slave-managed, were between 35 and 50 percent more profitable than comparable farms in the free North and Midwest. In 1860, the South, if considered as a separate country, would have ranked as the fourth-richest nation in the world. Southern whites had a higher per capita income than citizens of France, Germany, or Denmark.
Instead of the pleasure-wallowing wastrels portrayed by the abolitionists in their assaults on The Slave Power, most southern planters were hardworking businessmen who studied the latest techniques in scientific farming and did their best to keep their slaves contented in spite of the restrictions and confinements of the system.
A man who owned fifty slaves and managed them well with the help of a good overseer could clear $7,500 a year—the equivalent of $250,000 today. This was sixty times the average white American’s per capita income, North or South, in the 1850s. The black slave overseer might get a bonus of $50 or $60 and a new suit at the end of the year, but he continued to live in a humble cabin in the slave quarters, starkly different from the master’s “Big House.”12
Inevitably, this inequality bred resentment in black Americans. They were being cheated out of a fair share of the profits. Historians estimate the average field worker was underpaid by three or four thousand modern dollars annually. Overall, the South’s slaves would have earned $84 million each year, if they had been given a fair share of the profits they were making for the owners.13
Perhaps most remarkable is how much the South’s four million slaves were worth as property: $3 billion. That sum exceeded the North’s investment in railroads and factories. This figure does not include the value of the land that the South’s farmers owned, worth at least another $3 billion. If we study the income of those men who owned twenty slaves or more and qualified as “planters”—some 46,274 individuals—the picture is even more astonishing. These men owned half of all the slaves, which means their net worth was at least $1.5 billion. Put another way, a mere 0.58 of the South’s population composed 70 percent of the richest people in the United States in 1860.
On a per capita basis, the four wealthiest states in the Union were South Carolina, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Georgia. In the top twelve were only two northern states, Connecticut and Rhode Island. These newly discovered facts demolish the standard abolitionist assumption that the North was the dynamic section of the country and the slave-encumbered South was mired in backwardness and poverty.14
In the past, black men and women have been given very little credit for the South’s remarkable wealth. It is time to revise that mindset. The slaves participated in the system, not as mere automatons, but as achievers, frequently mastering the technology of the South’s agriculture as well as the psychology of leadership. A substantial number of black men and women did not succumb to the worst tendencies of the system. Their industrious lives within the unjust institution of slavery were frequently a triumph of the human spirit over adversity that should no longer be overlooked.
• • •
Among the many ironies of this new information about the South’s wealth is the almost total ignorance about it that prevailed in both sections in the 1850s. The classic example is an 1857 book by a North Carolinian, Hinton Rowan Helper, The Impending Crisis in the South. Helper claimed to draw on statistics from the 1850 census to prove that the South was far poorer and less economically developed than the North. Helper said he spoke for “the Plain Folk of the Old South” who were in the grip of the wealthy minority of slave owners. The New York Tribune, eager to prove that slavery was an economic as well as a moral plague, gave it an eight-column review, making the author famous.15
• • •
The new facts about the economic success of southern slavery lead to an interesting and possibly significant conclusion: slavery was evolving. Overall it remained a deplorable institution. But American freedom, sometimes disguised as business enterprise, was constantly seeping into the system. Would it have continued to move toward more and more freedom? Many planters did not like slavery but were baffled by the problem of how to eliminate it. Haunted by the specters of Haiti and Nat Turner, they did not think the black and white races could live in peace if both were free. This was a view that was shared by almost everyone in the North as well as the South. In most northern states, blacks could not vote, serve on juries, or obtain decent jobs. They lived a segregated way of life in housing, schools, and even churches.
It seems inevitable that, sooner rather than later, southern masters would have had to confront American slavery’s greatest failure: its lack of freedom, not only for gifted leaders like Josiah Henson and skilled artisans and factory managers like David Ross’s Abram, but for the children and grandchildren of these men. Slaves with above-average intelligence and abilities would find it harder and harder to tolerate a system that did not reward them adequately and that condemned their descendants to the caprices of being sold to settle a dead master’s estate or of paying the debts of a dissolute living owner. More and more individuals like the Louisiana planter who mourned the death of his black overseer might have become ready to risk emancipation rather than to live with such gross injustice on a day-to-day basis.
Alas, the momentum of the multiple diseases of the public mind, North and South, would prove too strong for this fragile hope to acquire substance. The myths of The Slave Power and genetic black inferiority twisted in this deadly wind while the South’s unspoken fear of a race war was visible night after night in the slave patrols that continued to ride the shrouded southern roads. As the 1850s lurched toward a close, a perfect storm of deadly emotions was poised to engulf the United States of America.
What the nation desperately needed was a leader who would confront these aberrations with a voice of sanity and moderation. This savior was on the scene, but before he could speak with the needed political power, John Brown and his wealthy secret backers triggered an explosion of hatred and fear that shattered all hope of a peaceful solution.