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Uncle Tom’s Cabin, first published to colossal success in 1852, has been in reputational free fall ever since. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel about the trials of an enslaved man named Tom who accepts his suffering with Christian equanimity proved a boon to the abolitionist cause, though its actual depictions of Black people skimp on providing them with much humanity. Even in its time, the book was vulgarized via stage adaptations that reduced Stowe’s story to minstrelsy and her characters to caricatures. Today, a work that did so much to shake white northerners out of their complacency is remembered mostly as a slur. But in an essay for The Atlantic’s October issue, Clint Smith surprised himself by discovering the original power of the book—along with what remains so limited and prejudiced about it. His article uncovers the story of Josiah Henson, the “original” Uncle Tom, Stowe’s real-life inspiration for the character. In his 1849 memoir, Henson described what it was like to be an overseer on a Maryland plantation and all of the moral compromises he had to make to survive slavery. Becoming acquainted with Henson’s story also gave Smith a new perspective on Uncle Tom’s Cabin. I talked with Smith about this aspect of his essay, and how he was able to brush so much accumulated dust off the book.
First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic’s Books section:
Smith spoke with me from South Korea, where he was doing research for his new book. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Gal Beckerman: What was your sense of Uncle Tom’s Cabin before you opened it up again for the essay—or was it maybe the first time you read it?
Clint Smith: I’d only read excerpts in high school. I’d never read the book in full. But most of my relationship to the book was through James Baldwin’s essay about it. He had written it in 1949; he was just 24. And this was his first big essay, the one that puts him on the national scene. And he just really—
Beckerman: He was not a fan.
Smith: He was not a fan of Harriet Beecher Stowe, of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. He makes the case that it’s more a political pamphlet than a book. That it is a reductive attempt at literature that renders the characters as two-dimensional. And it’s not art so much as it is part of an ideological project. So I was primed for that, going into the reading of the book. And as I’m making my way through I’m observing a lot of the moments in which Stowe stereotypes Black people, in which the white characters are presented as having more humanity, more complexity than the Black characters. But there also are parts of the book that I thought were really fascinating in the way they presented the moral complexity of slavery in ways that perhaps no other writer was doing in that way at that time.
Beckerman: Did this change your ultimate assessment of the book?
Smith: I think my relationship to the book, by the time I got to the end of it, was a sort of a both/and. On one hand, you know, the way that some of the Black characters are presented is really unsettling. She has this thing where she breaks the fourth wall a lot. And those are the moments that I thought were actually imbued with the most stereotypes. But when she’s just letting the characters just be human beings or as close as possible, you’re seeing some of the nuance.
Beckerman: You mentioned in the piece that there were ways in which the book showed the white characters trapped in supporting slavery in spite of themselves, or understanding that this was an evil that they were involved in but going along with anyway, not knowing how to extract themselves.
Smith: Exactly. And I thought that those scenes were really valuable, because I think they speak to a very human thing. Obviously, there are gradations of it. But we all do, we all participate in things that are not aligned with our values. And once you understand that the genre Harriet Beecher Stowe was working in was very much a sort of popular fiction—it was commercial fiction, in the way that we kind of understand it today—it’s remarkable how the message reached the masses. Given the technology of the day, it went viral in a 19th-century context. And it served as a catalyst to conversation and discussions and awareness that simply weren’t happening. And so I think you can examine it on a literary level and have many critiques. And I think you can examine it on a historical level and recognize that amid its shortcomings, it played an enormous role in shaping the public consciousness of the mid-to-late 19th century. You can’t really overstate the impact that it had on our society.
Beckerman: What about the Uncle Tom stereotype? You talk in the piece about that being one of the legacies of this book—not even the story, but just the concept of an Uncle Tom. Did you feel that was also complicated by the actual character when you encountered him?
Smith: Part of what happened is that I realized that my understanding of Uncle Tom, or what an Uncle Tom is, was shaped more by everything that followed the publication of the book than the character itself. As I write in the piece, there were no copyright laws when Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote this book. And so there were … many plays that were created without her permission, or without her input. And some people tried to stay true to the essence of the book and the characters. But there were many people who turned Uncle Tom’s Cabin into a minstrel show, and turned Uncle Tom into a minstrel. But in the book, Uncle Tom—despite the fact that in many ways, he is not given the sort of texture and complexity as some of the white characters—he’s still someone who is kind and sensitive, and who, toward the end of the book, refuses to give up the location of two Black women who are trying to escape, and is ultimately beaten and killed for it. And so, in so many ways, he’s a martyr, which is very different from what the term Uncle Tom has come to mean today. It has become this slur, even within the Black community, that people use toward one another to indicate that someone is a sellout, that someone is working on behalf of white people rather than their community. Which again, is the opposite of who Uncle Tom, the character in the book, was—someone who sacrificed his life to save the lives of enslaved folks who were trying to escape.
Beckerman: That’s also a function of virality, when an artistic work gets taken out of the hands of its creator. But Josiah Henson’s autobiography: What was the experience of reading that like, after reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin? Had you known about it before?
Smith: No, I’d never heard of Josiah Henson. I’d never read or heard of his book. And I’m someone who spent six years writing a book on the history of slavery. But when I did encounter him, and encountered his book, I was just left wondering, Why didn’t I read this in school? It would have been such a valuable resource for me, and I think it would be a valuable resource for so many teachers. Because when we learn about Harriet Tubman, when we learn about Frederick Douglass, it is part of an effort to resist the pathology, the feeling of despair, that exists among the history of slavery—of 250 years of being subjected to ubiquitous violence and oppression and surveillance. And then we get to their stories, and they are emblematic of the sense of resistance that exists within the Black community. I think that that’s so important. I think, though, if those are the only types of stories of resistance that we get, that we inadvertently gain a distorted sense of what the experience of slavery was like for the vast majority of people. And I think the value of Josiah Henson’s book is that he is a profoundly imperfect person, in the way that we all are. I mean, he does his best to be a good person—he is a man of faith, a man of conviction, a man who wakes up every day and tries to do the right thing on behalf of his loved ones, on behalf of his community. And he also does a lot of things that he later regrets. He does a lot of things that he later is ashamed of, and he makes a decision and then he’s like, I don’t know if that was the right decision. And he tries to work in the best interest of both his enslaver and the enslaved people around him when that is an impossible thing to do, given the system. I just think that that is more reflective of the sort of moral complexity of the institution and the position it put people in than any other account of slavery that I’ve read.
Beckerman: Do you think there’s a context within which you can imagine younger people in particular reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin? Is that still a book that should be opened up and understood? How high should the guardrails be for somebody coming to it today?
Smith: I think it could be really valuable to read it alongside an educator who understands the sort of mixed bag that it is. I’m not someone at all who believes that simply because a book presents people in a way that feels unsettling to us we shouldn’t read it. If anything, I think it offers an opportunity to interrogate the way that somebody has written it and to wrestle with some of the things that I’m wrestling with in my piece. What I came away with after reading the book is that Harriet Beecher Stowe was genuinely trying to do something really important and something that, frankly, had not been done in the mid-19th century. And in many ways, she succeeded in that. She wrote this book that made white people, particularly white people in the North, aware of slavery in ways that they simply had never been. And it also offers the opportunity to interrogate: Why did they need to read that book versus some of the slave narratives that already existed? Why were these people more inclined to believe the stories of a white woman writing about this than the stories of Black people who experienced it themselves? And it could be really generative to read that book alongside Josiah Henson’s memoir, in particular, in order to put the two in conversation with one another, to see what the differences were, what the similarities are, and to examine why one of these books is more popular than the other. I used to teach high-school English in my previous life, and I would love to spend a few weeks with students doing exactly that: reading the memoir and the book.
The Man Who Became Uncle Tom
What to Read
Berlin, by Jason Lutes
In September 1928, two strangers meet on a train headed into Berlin: Marthe Müller, an artist from Cologne looking for her place in the world, and Kurt Severing, a journalist distraught by the dark political forces rending his beloved city. Lutes began this 580-page graphic novel in 1994 and completed it in 2018, and it’s a meticulously researched, gorgeous panoramic view of the last years of the Weimar Republic. The story focuses most attentively on the lives of ordinary Berliners, including Müller, Severing, and two families warped by the increasing chaos. Certain panels even capture the stray thoughts of city dwellers, which float in balloons above their heads as they ride the trams, attend art class, and bake bread. Throughout, Berlin glitters with American jazz and underground gay clubs, all while Communists clash violently with National Socialists in the streets—one party agitating for workers and revolution, the other seething with noxious anti-Semitism and outrage over Germany’s “humiliation” after World War I. On every page are the tensions of a culture on the brink. — Chelsea Leu
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The private-equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts announced that it would buy Simon & Schuster. Because the firm doesn’t already own a competing publisher, the deal is unlikely to trigger another antitrust probe. But KKR, infamous as Wall Street’s “barbarians at the gate” since the 1980s, may leave Simon & Schuster employees and authors yearning for a third choice beyond a multinational conglomerate or a powerful financial firm. “It may be a stay of execution, but we should all be worried about how things will look at Simon & Schuster in five years,” says Ellen Adler, the publisher at the New Press, a nonprofit focused on public-interest books.
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