COMMENTS & QUESTIONS

In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives.The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.

Comments

WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

The appalling liabilities which constantly impend over such slaves as have “kind and indulgent masters” are thrillingly illustrated in various personal narratives; especially in that of “Uncle Tom,” over whose fate every reader will drop the scalding tear, and for whose character the highest reverence will be felt. No insult, no outrage, no suffering could ruffle the Christ-like meekness of his spirit, and shake the steadfastness of his faith. Towards his merciless oppressors, he cherished no animosity, and breathed nothing of retaliation. Like his Lord and Master, he was willing to be “led as a lamb to the slaughter,” returning blessing for cursing, and anxious only for the salvation of his enemies. His character is sketched with great power and rare religious perception. It triumphantly exemplifies the nature, tendency and results of CHRISTIAN NON-RESISTANCE. We are curious to know whether Mrs. Stowe is a believer in the duty of non-resistance for the white man, under all possible outrage and peril, as well as for the black man; whether she is for self-defense on her own part, or that of her husband or friends or country, in case of malignant assault, or whether she impartially disarms all mankind in the name of Christ, be the danger or suffering what it may. We are curious to know this, because our opinion of her, as a religious teacher, would be greatly strengthened or lessened, as the inquiry might terminate. That all the slaves at the South ought, “if smitten on the one cheek, to turn the other also”—to repudiate all carnal weapons, shed no blood, “be obedient to their masters,” wait for a peaceful deliverance, and abstain from all insurrectionary movements—is every where taken for granted, because the VICTIMS ARE BLACK. They cannot be animated by a Christian spirit, and yet return blow for blow, or conspire for the destruction of their oppressors. They are required by the Bible to put away all wrath, to submit to every conceivable outrage without resistance, to suffer with Christ if they would reign with him. None of their advocates may seek to inspire them to imitate the example of the Greeks, the Poles, the Hungarians, our Revolutionary sires; for such teaching would evince a most unchristian and blood-thirsty disposition. For them there is no hope of heaven, unless they give the most liberal interpretations to the non-resisting injunctions contained in the Sermon on the Mount, touching the treatment of enemies. It is for them, though despoiled of all their rights and deprived of all protection, to “threaten not, but to commit the keeping of their souls to God in well-doing, as unto a faithful Creator.” Nothing can be plainer than that such conduct is obligatory upon them; and when, through the operations of divine grace, they are enabled to manifest a spirit like this, it is acknowledged to be worthy of great commendation, as in the case of “Uncle Tom.” But, for those whose skin is of a different complexion, the case is materially altered. When they are spit upon and buffeted, outraged and oppressed, talk not then of a non-resisting Saviour—it is fanaticism! Talk not of overcoming evil with good—it is madness! Talk not of peacefully submitting to chains and stripes—it is base servility! Talk not of servants being obedient to their masters—let the blood of tyrants flow! How is this to be explained or reconciled? Is there one law of submission and non-resistance for the black man, and another law of rebellion and conflict for the white man? When it is the whites who are trodden in the dust, does Christ justify them in taking up arms to vindicate their rights? And when it is the blacks who are thus treated, does Christ require them to be patient, harmless, long-suffering, and forgiving? And are there two Christs?

—from an unsigned article in the Liberator (March 26, 1852)

CHARLES DICKENS

I have read [Uncle Tom’s Cabin] with the deepest interest and sympathy, and admire, more than I can express to you, both the generous feeling which inspired it, and the admirable power with which it is executed.

If I might suggest a fault in what has so charmed me, it would be that you go too far and seek to prove too much. The wrongs and atrocities of slavery are, God knows! case enough. I doubt there being any warrant for making out the African race to be a great race, or for supposing the future destinies of the world to lie in that direction; and I think this extreme championship likely to repel some useful sympathy and support.

Your book is worthy of any head and any heart that ever inspired a book. I am much your debtor, and I thank you most fervently and sincerely.

—from a letter to Harriet Beecher Stowe (July 17, 1852)

SOUTHERN LITERARY MESSENGER

We have said that Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a fiction. It is a fiction throughout; a fiction in form; a fiction in its facts; a fiction in its representations and coloring; a fiction in its statements; a fiction in its sentiments, a fiction in its morals, a fiction in its religion; a fiction in its inferences; a fiction equally with regard to the subjects it is designed to expound, and with respect to the manner of their exposition. It is a fiction, not for the sake of more effectually communicating truth; but for the purpose of more effectually disseminating a slander. It is a fictitious or fanciful representation for the sake of producing fictitious or false impressions. Fiction is its form and falsehood is its end.

—December 1852

GEORGE SAND

In matters of art there is but one rule, to paint and to move. And where shall we find creations more complete, types more vivid, situations more touching, more original, than in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,”—those beautiful relations of the slave with the child of his master, indicating a state of things unknown among us; the protest of the master himself against slavery during that innocent part of life when his soul belongs to God alone? Afterwards, when society takes him, the law chases away God, and interest deposes conscience. In coming to mature years the infant ceases to be man and becomes master. God dies in his soul.

—from La Presse (December 17, 1852)

NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW

It is quite too late in the day to review Uncle Tom’s Cabin; but it is not too late to speak of the subject to which it relates, and from which it derives much of its interest. Upon the discussion of this subject, surrounded as it is with difficulties, and hedged about with sensitive and vehement passions, the publication of Mrs. Stowe’s work has exerted an important influence. It has not merely fanned the excitement of parties; it has induced many sober and reflecting people, who had hitherto stood aloof from a controversy which had too much the aspect of a bitter political feud, managed on both hands with equal indiscretion and acrimony, to turn their thoughts towards it again, in the hope of finding some middle course, or of suggesting some plan which might have an effect to alleviate the evil which it seemed impossible to eradicate. . . . Whatever may be the literary merits of Uncle Tom, they do not account for its success. It exhibits by no means the highest order of genius or skill. It is not to be named in comparison with the novels of Scott or Dickens; and in regard to variety of knowledge, eloquence, imaginative power, and spirited delineations of life and character, manners and events, it is inferior even to those of Bulwer, or Currer Bell, or Hawthorne. Yet none of these have been read and talked of, for months together, by Europe and America, or have sensibly influenced a great moral movement, or have disturbed whole communities by the dread of a social revolution. It is true, that, were Uncle Tom not well written, it would not have produced these effects; but the result is so disproportioned to its merit as a work of art, that we must look to other causes. The book has one idea and purpose to which it is wholly devoted. Its sole object is to reveal to the world the nature of American slavery, and thus to promote the cause of abolition. . . . A work like Uncle Tom, coming at such a moment, so admirably suited to the common mind, teaching, not by abstract reasoning addressed to the intellect, but by actual scenes and events affecting the imagination and the feelings, written, too, with so much power and beauty, is eagerly seized on by one party as a valuable auxiliary, and indignantly resented by the other as a new attack. It becomes at once the topic of animated criticism and discussion, and the result is—it is read by all.

—October 1853

THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY

That a book so generous to the South should have roused that section to such fury is sufficient evidence of its truth and of the Southern consciousness of guilt; but Mrs. Stowe tells us that this fury amazed her, and that it was the indignation of the abolitionists she had dreaded, because she feared that she had softened the tints in her picture of slavery too much.

—March 1879

THE NATION

It is plain that no immediate literary success, tried by the ordinary standards, was ever greater than this. If now the question be asked, how far ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ has vindicated its claim to be one of the great and permanent works of literature, it can only be replied that it is too soon to judge, but that the probabilities now seem rather against such a destiny. . . . A further question has sometimes been raised as to how far the book was correct in its pictures of slavery. One result of this debate was to induce Mrs. Stowe to publish, in 1853, a ‘Key to “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” ’ giving chapter and verse, so to speak, for every incident she had employed. It is certain that many Southerners of high standing, beginning with Senator Preston of South Carolina—in a conversation with Prof. Lieber—admitted that every fact it contained might be duplicated from their observation. All this might be true, and yet the general atmosphere of such a book might be unfair; there might be unfairness also in the omissions. It is stated by Mrs. Stowe herself that she expected more criticism from the abolitionists than from the slaveholders themselves. Perhaps the keenest criticism ever made upon ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ was from a Southern lady who, while conceding the probable truth of all the incidents, complained that Mrs. Stowe had described neither the best nor the worst class of slaveholders. Those who could not accept Legree as a sufficient approach to the latter type must have had a terrible experience. As to the former, it is enough to say that Mrs. Stowe was consciously engaged upon an anti-slavery tract, not, like Frederick Law Olmsted, in an economic study; and that the very impotence of the more humane slaveholders either to emancipate their slaves or to extricate themselves from the toils of the system, is not the least weighty part of the indictment against American slavery. The fury of Southern criticism was and still is directed against the veracity of the picture of the every-day tortures inflicted on chattels over whom the law gave absolute control to the owner. The statutes of the slave States, the advertisements in the Southern press, the burnings at the stake which continue to the present hour, demonstrate the absurdity of the general challenge of the veracity of ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin.’ There is a problem, far more curious, as to the absolute effect of a work whose appeal to the feelings was so powerful and which was so universally read, in producing a real opposition to slavery. In the height of its first impression it did not save the Free Soil vote from dwindling, and how little it has done to remove color prejudice, everybody knows who but looks about him.

—July 9, 1896

Questions

1. What do you make of George Sand’s notion of society chasing away one’s idealism, innocence, and piety? Is this relevant today?

2. Though the North American Review downplays the literary merit of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, hasn’t the novel’s initial enthusiastic reception ensured its status as an American classic? Does the novel prepare the way for later literary works of social protest, such as Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle?

3. What do you think of the charge that Uncle Tom’s Cabin is in fact a diguised work of proto-feminist protest, an allegory of the status of American women? Tom’s traits, after all, are those that at the time were thought to be “feminine.”

4. Margaret Mitchell, author of the novel Gone with the Wind (1936), charged that Stowe showed an unseemly and prurient interest in sexual relations between slaves and masters. What do you think?

5. As well as an abolitionist and what we would now call an Prohibitionist, Stowe was a thoroughgoing puritan. In a book she wrote with her sister we read this:

There is no more important duty devolving upon a mother, than the cultivation of habits of modesty and propriety in young children. . . . yet few mothers are sufficiently aware of the dreadful penalties which often result from indulgent impurity of thought. . . . But the records of our insane retreats, and the pages of medical writers, teach that even in solitude, and without being aware of the sin or the danger, children may inflict evils on themselves, which not infrequently terminate in disease, delirium, and death. . . . Certain parts of the body are not to be touched except for purposes of cleanliness, and . . . the most dreadful suffering comes from disobeying these commands.

Do you see evidence of such thinking in Uncle Tom’s Cabin?