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 19th 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!
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