"Uncle Tom’s Cabin" by Harriet Beecher Stowe

            Where is one to begin?

            How is one to open a discussion of a written book deemed a classic, and deservedly so,  which changed the consciousness of a nation with a more complete understanding of the human soul and a more thorough embrace of the true freedom that soul requires to thrive?  “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” is more than a simple historical narrative on the indignity of human bondage, the evils of slavery.  People can be rightly thrown into jail for crimes committed against other peoples’ freedom; but no man can rightly own another man’s soul.

            Apparently, such notions were far from any prevailing rule of thought during the 1850s in which the story is cast.  Wicked plantation masters like Simon LeGree can freely admit to working his slaves to death until they are all used up; while good masters like Mr. Shelby, Tom’s original owner from the start of the tale, who, while being a “good” man, easily turns a blind eye to not only the break in trust with Tom, but even more so the immorality of selling his most trusted worker when financial hardships strike.  There was no mention of “loaning him” to the slave trader Haley, or anyone else for that matter, as Tom’s wife, Aunt Chloe, became hired out at a later date to earn money for Tom’s release.  Shelby merely knows of Tom as a valuable commodity; he weighs him in the balances against his debt; and Tom is dispensed as nothing more than a piece of furniture, faithfully serviceable to the Shelby family, over the generations it has been in use.

            The worth of a human soul is never taken into account from either extreme – and from Mr. Shelby’s side, Stowe illustrates such with the first household where Eliza discovers refuge: the home of a Senator, only recently returned to his house after passing a bill forbidding any Northern families to assist runaway slaves escaping into the North.  He is sympathetic to the slaves’ plight; and yet, though he aids in Eliza’s further progress northward, his attitude underneath is one of  ‘some other home; not mine’ – the apparent prevailing attitude of Northerners of that day.

Somewhere between these two extremes of LeGree and Shelby rests the enigma of Augustus St. Clare, a man who loathes the idea of slavery, though slaves he does own; and yet hypocrite is no designation one could easily lay upon the man.  Being from the South, and likewise being a man of means, the forgone conclusion for slaves as a part of his household is evident.  Yet unlike Shelby or LeGree, St. Clare implicitly acknowledges the soul with each of these persons kept as servants/slaves in his home.  For him, the hypocrites are the religious zealots who speak out against the institution; but, in action, they do nothing to countermand it.  It is a reality leaving absent an army in which to fight, impotent to do little more than chide the system which perpetuates these societal ills, while permitting his slaves the freedom to live as if indeed free, while the reality of their bondage to him persists.

Eliza, another slave to the household of the Shelby Kentucky plantation, runs away with her child, Harry, when he is inadvertently added by Haley to the package with Uncle Tom.  Eliza is still a part of the Shelby household; yet when she overhears the sale of her precious Harry she acts as any mother would.  Her husband George, a slave from another plantation, already announced to her his intention of escaping to Canada.  To lose her child is not something she cannot abide, knowing his existence would undoubtedly reek with slavery’s worst experiences.

This theme of family breakup introduced - additional examples appear that further strengthen its ever-present reality in the slave’s life.  A slave’s family could no more be assured than a dog with its new litter of pups.

Old Prue is a slave woman addicted to drink.  Others scorn her as a profligate who can never be trusted with responsibility; but Tom addresses her with compassion, asking her why she behaves as she does, and has she ever heard of Jesus.  Her story, as Tom learns, is one of being a babymaker for her masters.  None of her children is she ever permitted to keep, much less even see, save her last, who became ill.  When Prue pays more attention to the welfare of the child, than the welfare of her master, the child is ultimately locked away in a separate room with Prue refused her motherly access.

My personal belief system, for the longest time, has taught me that people of one era cannot judge people of another era because the circumstances of life run fluid.  What one generation may experience and know quite well, a succeeding generation may remain oblivious to.  In other words, judging prior generations by our own contemporary standards and understanding is a fatuous task.  If we do not live underneath the same conditions as did they, within the same environments as did they, we cannot deem ourselves superior simply from our own inflated sense of self-importance.  Though the acts of that previous generation may be so abhorrent or even vulgar as to cause us to picture the people with disdain, we cannot ever claim we would behave any differently if the same circumstances of life faced us.

Now in regards to the issue of slavery, Bondage is a reality suffused throughout human time.  It did not make its appearance with the creation of this country.  One can read of slavery as far back as one can read into history’s spark.  Indentured servitude operated as a means by which the poor could find transport to the land of the free and the home of the brave. 

Even so, somewhere along history’s way, something occurred to degenerate the quality and very existence of the human souls those cast into bondage were given by God to possess; something took place within the constitution of mankind to pervert their conception of these people they held in bondage.  They were not merely people who were different; they were people who were not even people. Something happened to equivocate those slaves onto the level of the master’s horse, or his cow, or even a stray dog that wandered in off the field.  They were nothing more and nothing less than the proverbial piece of property to be used in whatsoever manner the person who bought them deemed right.

This mindset is inconceivable.  It is one generational difference which cannot be excused.  People of any generation, demeaning the existence of a person’s human s0ul, no matter how different they might be, a soul given them by God at conception, is a point that cannot even be argued.

Yet it was a fact which existed, poignantly laid out by Harriet Beecher Stowe in this tale, of a time when one man could look upon another and claim, ‘That is not human!  There is no soul within its form!  It is a mere beast!’

Was it due to the obvious physical difference between white and blacks?  Could it have stemmed from the different environment of the European climate to the African climate from where blacks were taken?  Or did the incongruity of black persons being held in bondage, within the whites’ land of freedom, demand a creating of the canard of blacks being something else?

The fallacy of accepting this fatuous bit of logic is found throughout the entire story of Uncle Tom’s Cabin; but for the purpose of illustrating my point here, I would like to focus on one small, subtle facet of this truth.  It is a subtle facet of the story, never addressed through all the arguments over relations between blacks and whites, a reality of that era people today may not even be cognizant of.

Sadly I must declare myself in this number, as I failed to stand aware of this reality until just recently.  It initially struck me following my second visit to Thomas Jefferson’s home at Monticello.  During one of the tours, a particular slave was referenced who carried a first name and a surname.  This puzzled me because all the other slaves mentioned, and from my limited understanding of the institution, slaves were given only a singular name.  Why did this particular slave, a man of certain note on the grounds of Monticello, why did he live with both?

A bit of research quickly revealed the answer.  This man was a mulatto.  His father was white, whose name he adopted, and his mother was a slave.  Even so, in spite of his being half white, he still was placed into bondage like his mother, a fact I still fail to wrap my mind around even now.  How can any father permit his own son to live life in slavery?  How can others continue with this fallacy of blacks being something less than human?  Was not this particular person flesh of his white father’s flesh (though it contained a bit of swarthier hue) and bone of his white father’s bone?

Harriet Beecher Stowe interjects this idea of blacks, other than the pure-bred African, as also being subjected to the bondage of slavery when she introduces not just mulatto (I believe George, Eliza’s husband was a mulatto – of light skin who could pass for a Spaniard), she also adds quadroon into the storyline, a designation I found myself turning to the dictionary to look up.

A quadroon, of which I believe Eliza was one, was the offspring of a white and a mulatto, meaning a person who was one-fourth black – and still, they were sold into slavery!  As something less than human!  As a creature absent a redeemable soul.  A person, who today we would view as someone with either a swarthy complexion of just a nice year-round tan, such a person, in 1854, would have been sold at the slave market as a piece of property to be used up by whomever had the money to pay.  Astounding.  The blithe ignorance of mankind.  Simply astounding.

It’s not enough to simply declare Uncle Tom’s Cabin as one remarkable book.  What Harriet Beecher Stowe accomplishes, by exposing such practices in the penning of this great American novel, a person can glaze their eyes over and offer a bland “good book” commendation once they are finished with the final page.  To do so, however, is to commit the same dense response as George Friedrick Handel received from a member of the aristocracy following a performance of one of his compositions (it may have been ‘the Messiah’, I’m not entirely sure). 

When asked what he thought of the performance, the member of the aristocracy responded with what I’m sure he believed was a compliment, by telling Handel “the public should be very well entertained”.  To which Handel countered by declaring, “I do not wish to make the people entertained; I wish to make them better.”

Harriet Beecher Stowe, with the penning of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”, clearly intended on making “the people better”.  All superior works of art strive for that sublime mark; and through the advent of time, those who attain it are revealed.  Those people of the era in which they are created, who fail to recognize the significance of what is before them, remain as oblivious to what is real as those in the North remained to the plight of the slaves in the south.  Uncle Tom’s Cabin filled the heavens with God’s reflecting mirror of truth, illuminating into the countenances of the people of 1854 America the stark facts of human being denied the existence of their souls.

Man’s inhumanity to man – a conundrum if there ever was such a thing.  Man’s greedy self-centered desire for power to lord himself over his fellow, to draw all attention to him, to be adored and worshipped as someone of note, as a god of the heavens even.

Tom is a direct contrast to such a man.  He is simple, though not stupid.  He knows how to read.  He reads his Bible every day.  He is trusted by every master he serves as one who can carry out with skill whatever task is set before him, earning rightful respect he deserves as the honorable and noble man he is, seeking the welfare, in his simple way, of even the worst and most wicked of sinners, with a heart bigger than the plague of slavery dominating the country at that time.

Every soul should be proud to wear the name of Uncle Tom.

Yet in 2013, such is far from the established case.  Uncle Tom is used a pejorative to demean and belittle any black person who takes a side of an argument contrary to established black doctrine, the contrary view of the “white” side – whatever that might be.

Whatever the “black” side is in America today, I have to say I do not see it accompanying the plight of 1854 slaves, people whom Tom, and Eliza, and Cassy, and the rest of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s cast were drawn on to represent.  I write this because I avoided ever entertaining the thought of reading the book simply on the basis of the pejorative Tom’s name had become.  Why waste my time reading about a despicable character who sold out his own people and would not fight for them in their direst time of need?

Well, Tom is far removed from any despicable character one might envision; and he most certainly fights for that which is right in a truly honorable and noble way.  He is a good man all people should desire to emulate.  He is smart enough to know when his actions can evoke change and save another soul from threat, and when anything he might say or do could invoke wrath.

Unfortunately, the leaders of today, who charge themselves with the banner of leading the former slaves’ rights forward, apparently prefer to demean a Godly soul, like Tom, and embrace the dense brutality of the harsh taskmasters Sambo and Jimbo.  They seem to renounce the refinements adopted by characters like Cassy, and Eliza, and George, and even Tom to a degree (Tom may not have spoken with the precise elocution to his words one well educated might; nevertheless, his speech was a grand step beyond the crude and illiterate blacks encountered in the slums and at the slave markets.  His manner of speech was Shakespeare compared to the barbarism in their words and manners) as the formula for an indiscernible vernacular with which the uneducated spoke persists in our own era today.  They laud the frivolous entertaining talents of Topsy, a girl who was a product of the slave traders’ babymaking enterprise, thus never knowing the presence of a father or a mother.  Yet she learned to play the role of the wicked little nigger girl who could sing them their raucous songs, and dance to make of herself quite a show, and then lie like the line between what was truth and what was falsehood, God never did draw.  Love never did exist within Topsy’s world; why should she ever know to abide by anything of truth?

Such are the impressions thrust upon society as to what the world of the former slave was.  Any soul who disagrees with it, by either practicing precise speech, embracing a well-manner decorum where they display evident respect to others by the clear respect they show for themselves, adopting a Godly character, or simply accepting the reality of a soul no man has the right to purchase, they are labeled as an “Uncle Tom” – and not Tom as he was in truth, but Tom who was a fallacy, a self-centered character created out of their own imagination to combat the nobility and honor the real Tom conveyed.  No man has the right to own another’s soul; no man has the say to declare another person without.  Everyone possesses the freedom to experience, to learn, to grow, and to become better tomorrow than they were today.  To deny such freedom to any is to advance the same bondage of slavery portrayed within these pages.

I would be utterly remiss in my responsibilities as a writer of this piece to omit one last extraordinary character of Stowe’s grand ensemble.  Augustus St. Clare has a daughter, Evangeline, ‘Eva’ for short, the only daughter of himself and his wife.  To say Eva was a precious child would be to utter the grossest of understatements.  Eva was an angel.  She knew incredible insight into the grandeur of life, traits the majority of adults, in their insular self-centered little worlds walk about completely oblivious to.

In many ways, though a mere child, she was more mature than the adults who cared for her, the people who experienced her breath of life quenching their dry souls with the pure dew of heaven falling from the unreachable sky overhead.  She was a definitive gift from God. She was His Spirit dwelling amongst mankind, a quiet, pure, grace-filled reminder that God has not given up on us yet.