What we've made of Uncle Tom

The book, with its dramatic storytelling, no-holds-barred discussions of the hot-button issue of the day, and heart-rending conclusion, was an instant bestseller. By year's end, it had sold an astonishing 1.5 million copies worldwide.

The novel had "a great impact on people's notions of the evils of slavery," says Thomas Gosset, author of "Uncle Tom's Cabin and American Culture." Many Northern soldiers in the Civil War had read it, he says. When Abraham Lincoln met Stowe at the White House in 1862, according to Stowe's daughter, he said, "So this is the little lady who wrote the big book that made this great war." Much later, writer Langston Hughes would call "Uncle Tom's Cabin" America's "first protest novel."

But its fame and success was also the start of trouble for the image of Uncle Tom. The novel was made into a number of highly successful theatrical shows. Stowe held no copyright to prevent stage adaptations, which were done without her approval and without compensation. At one point, nearly 500 "Tom companies" were performing around the country, including one by showman P.T. Barnum. These shows removed some characters in the book, enlarged the roles of others, and added song and dance, even comedy, to conform the story to the elements popular in the minstrel shows of the day.

The story was "seized by popular culture, and people ran away with it and basically did what they wanted to with it," says Kathleen Hulser, curator of a new exhibition, "Reading Uncle Tom's Image: a Reconsideration of Harriet Beecher Stowe's 150-Year-Old Character and His Legacy," which runs through Feb. 9 at the New York Historical Society. "The Uncle Tom that we know as an insult – as an old man who is meek, submissive, doesn't stick up for himself, desexualized – that really isn't who the person is in the novel. It's who he became on stage."

Some of these spectacles even ended with the actors portraying Tom and Little Eva, a sympathetic white child who dies tragically in the novel, literally ascending together to heaven. No mention was made of the novel's end, in which several slaves manage to escape to Canada and study to become Christian missionaries to Africa.

These shows, usually played in blackface by white actors, lingered well into the 20th century. But by the 1930s, blacks began to gain the ear of white Americans with word that this version of Uncle Tom was not appreciated. In reaction to "Uncle Tom's Cabin," for example, Richard Wright wrote "Uncle Tom's Children" (1938), a portrait of life under Jim Crow laws in which black characters take strong, sometimes violent, actions in their own defense.

Perhaps the most famous black critic of the novel has been James Baldwin, who in 1948 criticized what he saw as a desexualized Uncle Tom, while at the same time charging Stowe with a prurient interest in the sex and violence of the slavery system.

By the 1960s, Uncle Tom had gone from being simply weak to being a "race traitor" in the minds of black leaders such as Malcolm X, Hulser says.

Page: 1 | 2 | 3