Thank God for Uncle Tom(s)!

It is probably apocryphal, but the story is told that when Pres. Lincoln met Harriet Beecher Stowe near the beginning of the Civil War, he declared, “So this is the little lady who started this great war.”

Think with me now about this “little lady,” who was born 210 years ago (on June 14, 1811), and about Uncle Tom, her best known character.

The Power of the Beecher Family

The Beecher family was highly prominent in the U.S. during the nineteenth century. Lyman Beecher (1775~1863) was one of the best-known preachers in the country, and eight years after his death the still extant Lyman Beecher Lectureship on Preaching at Yale Divinity School was established.

Henry Ward Beecher (1813~87), the eighth of Lyman’s thirteen children, also became one of the premier preachers of the 19th century. In fact, Debby Applegate’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Henry is titled, The Most Famous Man in America (2006).

But neither her father nor her famous little brother exerted as much influence on American society as did Harriet Beecher (1811~96).

She married Lane Seminary professor Calvin Stowe in 1836, and because of one of the many books she authored, the name Harriet Beecher Stowe became a household name.

The Power of the Pen

“The pen is mightier than the sword” were words found in a 1839 play written by English author Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and those words have been used innumerable times since then.

There was a lot of might in Harriet Beecher’s pen as she wrote her powerful novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Before being issued as a complete book, it was published serially in National Era, an abolitionist newspaper published weekly from 1847 to 1860.  

The first chapter of what became the famous book of Harriet Beecher Stowe (HBS) was printed in National Era 170 years ago, on June 5, 1851. (Click here to read the first chapter of HBS’s story as printed in that issue.)

The entire book was published the following year and immediately became a bestseller. In fact, it became the best-selling novel and the second best-selling book of the 19^th century, following the Bible.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin is credited with helping fuel the abolitionist cause in the 1850s, giving rise to the words attributed to Lincoln referring to HBS as the little lady who started the big war.

The Power of “Uncle Tom”

In HBS’s novel, Uncle Tom was a loyal Christian who died a martyr’s death. I read Uncle Tom’s Cabin about 25 years ago, and I remember how impressed I was with Uncle Tom. Indeed, his powerful personality as created by HBS helped forge the determination of many to rid the nation of slavery.

But sadly, Uncle Tom morphed first into a servile old man and then to a racial epithet hurled at African American men deemed, by other Black people, to have betrayed their race.

The story of that unfortunate transition is told by Canadian university professor Cheryl Thompson in her book, Uncle: Race, Nostalgia, and the Politics of Loyalty, published in March. She seeks to show how from martyr to insult, “Uncle Tom” has influenced two centuries of racial politics.

Black writers such as James Baldwin, among many others, came to use the name “Uncle Tom” to refer to Black men who were too submissive to Whites. Jackie Robinson, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Barack Obama have all been accused of being Uncle Toms.

What a shame that the name of the powerful Black man created by HBS was turned into a slur!

But just as the Uncle Tom of the “little lady’s” novel was an important instigator of freedom for Blacks in the 1850s, so have many men called Uncle Toms in modern times been powerful proponents for freedom and justice for all.

So, yes, thank God for Uncle Tom—and for Uncle Toms such as those noted above!