On Uncle Tom's Cabin

This is a hard book to review, in large part due to its historical importance. Legend says that Abraham Lincoln, meeting with Harriet Beecher Stowe during the Civil War, started the conversation by saying, “So you’re that little woman who started this great war.” This is a long book and it is also a slow book filled with racial stereotypes. Nevertheless, I do think Stowe is doing her best here.

Stowe’s interest in the topic actually emerged during a cholera outbreak during the 1840s in her city of Cincinnati, where she lost one of her sons. This experience shows itself time and time again throughout the book, giving a really focus to the experience of the loss of children by slaves. When children did not die due to hard labor, family separation was effectively a constant of life, and there was no legal “marriage” enjoyed by slaves because they were not considered citizens. As a result, slave families were tenuous structures, and this was a particularly painful experience.

The bulk of Stowe’s abolitionism here comes from her religious faith, which she (obviously rightly) believes endows all human beings with souls, making them equal in the eyes of God. As a result, they ought to be treated equally in the body as well. This appears often, when Christian characters ask slaveholders whether they believe that their slaves have souls, and their answer is a weak “well, I suppose so, but. . .” Stowe is having none of this. However, the weakness with this angle is that so many of the slaveholders, slavetraders, and pro-slavery activists here are portrayed as Godless atheists. The failure here is that the vast majority of slaveowners were Christians, and Stowe’s portrayal forces her to ignore confronting the disgusting theology held by slaveholders.

She does do a good job of confronting slavery as a system rather than individual experience. While she does discuss “good” slaveholders like the Shelbys and Augustine St. Claire, there is the implication that there is no so thing as a good slaveholder, because their deaths or failed finances can put slaves in precarious circumstances (as happens time and time again with Tom). She also is heavily critical of Northerners who oppose slavery but continue to be racist against black people—Miss Ophelia is probably the best example of this.

If I had to guess, Eliza’s story here is the one that Stowe feels most close-to-home for her, given the centrality of Eliza’s future loss of child reflecting Stowe’s experience in the cholera epidemic. At the same time, Eliza’s story is probably the least fleshed out—she receives a few chapters at the beginning but, in the last third of the book, Stowe displaces the narrative (which is generally framed around Tom) to make nods toward Eliza’s story. In the end, I feel that Stowe is guilty of the same practices that she criticizes other Northerners for. After all, Eliza’s story ends with

Spoiler

her family making their way from Canada to Liberia, effectively justifying the cause of the American Colonization Society and, in turn, segregation—the idea that white Americans either cannot or should not be around black people.

I also don’t understand why Stowe had to give multiple characters the same name. There are at least two Toms here and two Georges, and that added to a bit of confusion on my part.

The book is worth reading to make sense of the perspective of a white, Christian abolitionist, as well as for its historical significance, but the narrative has major issues.