The book that started a war

It is now a century and a half since “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was published in the spring of 1852. Within a year of publication, the book had sold 305,000 copies in the United States and something like 2.5 million all over the world. Its impact, among English speakers especially, was phenomenal. Lord Palmerston read it three times and called it statesmanlike. Abraham Lincoln, when he met Harriet Beecher Stowe, remarked famously, “So this is the little lady who made this big war.” After the war, however, sales declined rapidly, and by the 1890s, the book was out of print, where it remained for 50 years.

But “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was destined for the kind of mythic fame that would have made its author drop her jaw and shade her eyes. The characters were kept alive by successive stage dramatizations that exploited them for their comic and melodramatic elements, each one moving ever further from the original until, finally, the famous novel was transformed into a vaudeville that, by the 1920s, compelled the writers of the Harlem Renaissance to blast it to kingdom come with their hot scorn of “Tom-ism.” Thus, as Edmund Wilson observed 40 years ago in “Patriotic Gore,” his great study of Civil War literature, “To expose oneself in maturity to Uncle Tom may prove a startling experience.” Indeed.

I read the book last month for the first time, not only to discover that there are no dogs snapping at Eliza’s heels as she crosses the ice, that Simon Legree is not an overseer, that Topsy bears a strong resemblance to the sinister love child in “The Scarlet Letter” and that Tom is a Christ figure, but also to discover the real shocker: the unexpectedness of Stowe’s intelligence, the depth and the breadth of it. A masterpiece of American literature had lived inside me since childhood as the sum of those distortions that popular culture and civil rights rhetoric had imposed on it for most of its lifetime. If ever a book proved that politics and literature are inextricably bound, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” is it.

What Lord Palmerston meant when he called the book statesmanlike is that Stowe creates a slowly unfolding, steadily encompassing picture of how slavery was actually lived out in the United States among slaves, slave owners and traders, bounty hunters and Christian do-gooders (both genuine and hypocritical). It is a picture drawn with sufficient analytic and descriptive power to make every creature on the landscape a felt reality.

The structure of the book is simple. Tom, a slave on a Kentucky estate, is bought and sold twice, and Eliza, a slave on the same estate, becomes a runaway. These twin events provide the two major strands of storytelling that the book develops. Eliza’s fate is resolved successfully when she falls into the hands of Quakers on the Underground Railway who transport her (along with her child and recovered husband) to Canada. Tom’s journey is of an altogether different nature. Each of Tom’s successive owners forces him farther south -- deeper into hell -- on a Pilgrim’s Progress that is meant to account for much of the world of slave masters. To begin with, there is the weak, kindly philistine, Arthur Shelby of Kentucky, then the poetic, spiritually inert Augustine St. Clare of New Orleans and, at last, the pathologically self-hating Simon Legree hidden away in rural Louisiana. Holding the drama together is Tom’s steady progress toward his own Christ-like death, a death, that is, of course, a foregone conclusion.

Metaphysical schemes aside, the characters in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” are remarkably absorbing. In the first household we meet Tom; Eliza; Tom’s wife, Chloe; and the Shelbys liberal son, George; in the second, St. Clare and his daughter, Little Eva; the wild-child slave, Topsy; and St. Clare’s self-consciously Christian cousin from the north, Ophelia; in Simon Legree’s house of horror, it is Eliza’s long-lost mother, the magnificent Cassy (another character Hawthorne could have written) who compels attention. These people all take their places in the allegory, and the force and clarity with which each one comes alive on the page, emerging from prose that is essentially without art, is amazing.

Stowe was a writer with a mission. Her mission was to make mid-19th century America see that it had betrayed itself with slavery, and her excellent mind told her to work hard to create characters who would move, as well as instruct, readers. So we see the vanity of Arthur Shelby’s weakness, feel the anxiety behind Simon Legree’s murderousness and are shocked by the mad integrity of Topsy’s wildness as well as the terrible limitation of Ophelia’s knee-jerk Christianity.

Tom is the figure in whom reposes Stowe’s idea of genuine Christianity -- the man who cannot close his heart or raise his hand against another, even at the risk of losing his life -- and Tom is also the repository of typically radical fantasies about the Other. On arriving at St. Clare’s beautiful house in New Orleans, “Tom got down from the carriage, and looked about with an air of calm, still enjoyment. The negro, it must be remembered, is an exotic of one of the most gorgeous and superb countries in the world, and he has, deep in his heart, a passion for all that is splendid, rich, and fanciful.... If ever Africa shall show an elevated and cultivated race -- and come it must, some time, her turn to figure in the great drama of human improvement -- life will awake there a gorgeousness and splendor of which our cold western tribes faintly have conceived. In that far-off mystic land ... will awake new forms of art, new styles of splendor; and the negro race, no longer despised and trodden down, will, perhaps, show forth some of the latest and most magnificent revelations of human life....”

Little Eva is Tom’s saintly counterpart. When everyone is terrorized by Topsy’s suicidal unruliness, Eva alone tames the wretched black girl by smoothing her face with a kindly hand. It is often Eva who is the catalyst for plain thinking in the central section of the book. In one crucial scene, St. Clare and Ophelia sit on a veranda watching the little girl climb onto Tom’s lap. Ophelia, the complicated do-gooder, finds herself viscerally disgusted at the sight of the white child hugging the black man, and St. Clare observes, “You would think no harm in a child’s caressing a large dog, even if he was black; but a creature that can think, and reason, and feel, and is immortal, you shudder at ... I know the feeling among some of you northerners.... You loathe them as you would a snake or a toad, yet you are indignant at their wrongs. You would not have them abused; but you don’t want to have anything to do with them yourselves. You would send them to Africa, out of your sight and smell, and then send a missionary ... to elevate them....” Gazing at Eva and Tom, St. Clare murmurs, “What would the poor and lowly do, without children?... Your little child is your only true democrat

Ophelia is amazed and chastened by these thoughts and thinks him on the verge of becoming an abolitionist; whereupon he instantly punctures his own balloon. “Nothing,” he assures her, “is easier than talking,” and recalls, appropriately enough, that “Shakespeare makes somebody say, ‘I could sooner show twenty what were good to be done, than be one of the twenty to follow my own showing.’ ”

At the unforgettable heart of the novel stands St. Clare. It is through him that Stowe makes the largest sense of things. In the middle of the novel he delivers a 15-page disquisition worthy of George Eliot on the existential meaning of slavery. The speech is both profound and shocking. He is the Ashley Wilkes of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”: a developed sensibility rendered useless by an immobilized will. His words, his destiny, his very being come to haunt the reader. In his person, the hope of civilization is both aroused and deflated. Through him we feel acutely the limited use of an educated intelligence as opposed to that of a clarified spirit moved to urgency.

St. Clare is the good German under the Nazis or the nerveless Tolstoyan shrugging off serfdom or the liberal white South African living with apartheid. St. Clare is any one of us at any time in history. In 1858, in a collection of articles, letters and slave auction notices called “A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” Stowe published a letter written in 1773 by Patrick Henry in which Henry says of slavery, “[T]hat this abominable practice has been introduced ... at a time when the rights of humanity are defined and understood with precision, in a country above all others fond of liberty ... is as repugnant to humanity as it is inconsistent.... Would anyone believe that I am master of slaves of my own purchase? I am drawn along by the general inconvenience of living here without them. I will not, I cannot, justify it.”

We see why it took Moses 40 years to lead the Jews out of the desert. How dominating is appetite, how enveloping immediate experience! Even the philosophically minded among us capitulate, ultimately, to the narrowest sense of personal need. Political time moves at a snail’s pace because it is only with nearly insurmountable difficulty that moral discomfort takes root in the best of people, forcing an imperative out of a complaint; so viscerally repugnant is it for a critical mass to find the prevailing system unbearable, much less prepare to take up arms against it. Impossible, then, for one and all, victims and victimizers alike, to do more than rage or regret, suffer or run, pursue or die. Harriet Stowe was a fervent Christian, but she might just as easily have been a theoretical revolutionary, such is the cast of her mind.

“Uncle Tom’s Cabin” has the power to make any reader remember that if arms are not taken up during a time in which some human beings are perceived and treated as less than human, then everyone alive will have much to answer for. It is impossible to read the book and not find yourself thinking, “If the time was now, and the place was here, where would I be standing on this landscape of human insufficiency?”