The novel was both influential and commercially successful, published as a serial from 1851 to 1852 and as a book from 1852 onward.[4][5] An estimated 500,000 copies had sold worldwide by 1853, including unauthorized reprints.[6] Senator Charles Sumner credited Uncle Tom's Cabin for the election of Abraham Lincoln, an opinion that is later echoed in the apocryphal story of Lincoln greeting Stowe with the quip, "So you're the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war!"[4][7] Frederick Douglass praised the novel as "a flash to light a million camp fires in front of the embattled hosts of slavery."[4] Despite Douglass's enthusiasm, an anonymous 1852 reviewer for William Lloyd Garrison's publication, The Liberator, suspected a racial double standard in the idealization of Uncle Tom:
A Day With Dad And Uncle Tom By
According to Debra J. Rosenthal, in an introduction to a collection of critical appraisals for the Routledge Literary Sourcebook on Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin", overall reactions have been mixed, with some critics praising the novel for affirming the humanity of the African American characters and for the risks Stowe assumed in taking a very public stand against slavery before abolitionism had become a socially acceptable cause, and others criticizing the very limited terms upon which those characters's humanity was affirmed and the artistic shortcomings of political melodrama.[10]
Stowe drew inspiration for the Uncle Tom character from several sources. The best-known of these was Josiah Henson, an ex-slave whose autobiography, The Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave, Now an Inhabitant of Canada, as Narrated by Himself, was originally published in 1849 and later republished in two extensively revised editions after the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin.[12] Henson was enslaved at birth in 1789.[12] He became a Christian at age eighteen and began preaching.[12] Henson attempted to purchase his freedom for $450, but after selling his personal assets to raise $350 and signing a promissory note for the remainder, Henson's owner raised the price to $1000; Henson was unable to prove that the original agreement had been for a lesser amount.[12] Shortly afterward Henson was ordered on a trip south to New Orleans. When he learned that he was to be sold there, he obtained a weapon. He contemplated murdering his white companions with the weapon, but decided against violence because his Christian morals forbade it.[12] A sudden illness in one of his companions forced their return to Kentucky, and shortly afterward Henson escaped north with his family, settling in Canada where he became a civic leader.[12]
In the public imagination, however, Henson became synonymous with Uncle Tom.[12] After Stowe's death her son and grandson claimed she and Henson had met before Uncle Tom's Cabin was written, but the chronology does not hold up to scrutiny and she probably drew material only from his published autobiography.[12]
The term "Uncle Tom" is used as a derogatory epithet for an excessively subservient person, particularly when that person perceives their own lower-class status based on race. It is similarly used to negatively describe a person who betrays their own group by participating in its oppression, whether or not they do so willingly.[1][13] The term has also, with more intended neutrality, been applied in psychology in the form of "Uncle Tom syndrome", a term for the use of subservience, appeasement and passivity to cope with intimidation and threats.
The popular negative connotations of "Uncle Tom" have largely been attributed to the numerous derivative works inspired by Uncle Tom's Cabin in the decade after its release, rather than the original novel itself, whose title character is a more positive figure.[4] These works, often called a "Tom show," lampooned and distorted the portrayal of Uncle Tom with politically loaded overtones.[6]
Although not every minstrel depiction of Uncle Tom was negative, the dominant version developed into a character very different from Stowe's hero.[6][15] Whereas Stowe's Uncle Tom was a young, muscular, and virile man who refused to obey his cruel master, Simon Legree, when Legree ordered him to beat other slaves, the stock character of the minstrel shows was degenerated into a shuffling, asexual individual, with a receding hairline and graying hair.[15] For Jo-Ann Morgan, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin as Visual Culture, these shifting representations undermined the subversive layers of Stowe's original characterization by redefining Uncle Tom until he fitted within prevailing racist norms.[14] Particularly after the Civil War, as the political thrust of the novel which had arguably helped to precipitate that war became obsolete to actual political discourse, popular depictions of the title character recast him within the apologetics of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy.[14] The virile father of the abolitionist serial and first book edition degenerated into a decrepit old man, and with that transformation the character lost the capacity for resistance that had originally given meaning to his choices.[14][15] Stowe never meant Uncle Tom to be a derided name, but the term, as a pejorative, has developed based on how later versions of the character, stripped of his inherent strength, were depicted on stage.[16]
Many of you often refer to Uncle Tom in unflattering terms even though you do not know about him. You see him as someone who will sell out his people to get ahead. Today, there are people that many of us have labeled Uncle Tom. But I want to suggest that many have been improperly labeled. Where am I going with this? Let me take you back to the days when I was the director of the Management Training School founded by the Rev. Dr. Leon H. Sullivan, who also founded Opportunities Industrialization Center (OIC).
Later, Stowe heard first-hand accounts from formerly enslaved people and employed at least one fugitive in her home. Her husband and brother helped shelter a man and helped along the informal underground railroad. And she was appalled by the stories of cruel separations of mothers and children. As a woman who had lost her mother and one of her own children, Stowe felt a kinship with these women.
"A poetry collection I've really been enjoying lately is Harmony Holiday's A Jazz Funeral For Uncle Tom. It is a book of both curiosity and invention. But more than that, it's also deeply rooted in history and artifacts. The work unearths both of these things, but also the text is interwoven with actual, touchable imagery. This is a book that requires such a full and immersive investment from a reader, and I will hold it close for many years to come."
Here the door opened, and a small quadroon boy, between four and five years ofage, entered the room. There was something in his appearance remarkablybeautiful and engaging. His black hair, fine as floss silk, hung in glossycurls about his round, dimpled face, while a pair of large dark eyes, full offire and softness, looked out from beneath the rich, long lashes, as he peeredcuriously into the apartment. A gay robe of scarlet and yellow plaid, carefullymade and neatly fitted, set off to advantage the dark and rich style of hisbeauty; and a certain comic air of assurance, blended with bashfulness, showedthat he had been not unused to being petted and noticed by his master.
The subject appeared to interest the gentleman deeply; for while Mr. Shelby wasthoughtfully peeling an orange, Haley broke out afresh, with becomingdiffidence, but as if actually driven by the force of truth to say a few wordsmore.
Perhaps the mildest form of the system of slavery is to be seen in the State ofKentucky. The general prevalence of agricultural pursuits of a quiet andgradual nature, not requiring those periodic seasons of hurry and pressure thatare called for in the business of more southern districts, makes the task ofthe negro a more healthful and reasonable one; while the master, content with amore gradual style of acquisition, has not those temptations to hardheartednesswhich always overcome frail human nature when the prospect of sudden and rapidgain is weighed in the balance, with no heavier counterpoise than the interestsof the helpless and unprotected.
The traveller in the south must often have remarked that peculiar air ofrefinement, that softness of voice and manner, which seems in many cases to bea particular gift to the quadroon and mulatto women. These natural graces inthe quadroon are often united with beauty of the most dazzling kind, and inalmost every case with a personal appearance prepossessing and agreeable.Eliza, such as we have described her, is not a fancy sketch, but taken fromremembrance, as we saw her, years ago, in Kentucky. Safe under the protectingcare of her mistress, Eliza had reached maturity without those temptationswhich make beauty so fatal an inheritance to a slave. She had been married to abright and talented young mulatto man, who was a slave on a neighboring estate,and bore the name of George Harris.
After the birth of little Harry, however, she had gradually becometranquillized and settled; and every bleeding tie and throbbing nerve, oncemore entwined with that little life, seemed to become sound and healthful, andEliza was a happy woman up to the time that her husband was rudely torn fromhis kind employer, and brought under the iron sway of his legal owner.
A cook she certainly was, in the very bone and centre of her soul. Not achicken or turkey or duck in the barn-yard but looked grave when they saw herapproaching, and seemed evidently to be reflecting on their latter end; andcertain it was that she was always meditating on trussing, stuffing androasting, to a degree that was calculated to inspire terror in any reflectingfowl living. Her corn-cake, in all its varieties of hoe-cake, dodgers, muffins,and other species too numerous to mention, was a sublime mystery to all lesspractised compounders; and she would shake her fat sides with honest pride andmerriment, as she would narrate the fruitless efforts that one and another ofher compeers had made to attain to her elevation. 2ff7e9595c
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