Uncle Tom

From Martyr to Traitor

Adena Spingarn

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781503606098
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Nordamerikanische Literaturkritik

Uncle Tom charts the dramatic cultural transformation of perhaps the most controversial literary character in American history. From his origins as the heroic, Christ-like protagonist of Harriet Beecher Stowe's anti-slavery novel, the best-selling book of the nineteenth century after the Bible, Uncle Tom has become a widely recognized epithet for a black person deemed so subservient to whites that he betrays his race. Readers have long noted that Stowe's character is not the traitorous sycophant that his name connotes today. Adena Spingarn traces his evolution in the American imagination, offering the first comprehensive account of a figure central to American conversations about race and racial representation from 1852 to the present. We learn of the radical political potential of the novel's many theatrical spinoffs even in the Jim Crow era, Uncle Tom's breezy disavowal by prominent voices of the Harlem Renaissance, and a developing critique of "Uncle Tom roles" in Hollywood. Within the stubborn American binary of black and white, citizens have used this rhetorical figure to debate the boundaries of racial difference and the legacy of slavery. Through Uncle Tom, black Americans have disputed various strategies for racial progress and defined the most desirable and harmful images of black personhood in literature and popular culture.

CHAPTER 1

A MANLY HERO

SINCE HIS BIRTH in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom has appeared on thousands of stages and in a dozen or more movies; he has been painted, drawn, and sculpted; he has been re-imagined by pro-slavery Southerners and by black protest writers; he has crisscrossed the country and circuited the globe. After such a long and active life outside of Stowe’s novel, it’s no wonder that the original Uncle Tom tends to get lost in the crowd. Despite a wide critical acknowledgment that the hero of Uncle Tom’s Cabin is not, in fact, an Uncle Tom, at least not in the way that we understand the term today, the large body of Stowe criticism has allowed contemporary ideas about race, gender, religion, politics, and even death to mask the consistently radical values of Uncle Tom’s Cabin itself. It is worth noting that, during the decade and a half after the Civil War, when the lawyer and novelist Albion Tourgée had Stowe’s novel read to a large number of “the most intelligent colored people in the former slave states . . . almost every one of them noted the freedom of speech between master and servant.”¹ One insisted that “Uncle Tom must have been raised up north!” To those formerly enslaved, Uncle Tom was not a figure of submission, but rather a man unrealistically assertive with his master.

Uncle Tom has had almost as many identities within the literary critical literature as he has had in American culture, but the resurgence of Stowe criticism since the 1970s has produced two prevalent agreements about Uncle Tom: first, that he is feminine—a “heroine instead of a hero,” as Elizabeth Ammons describes him—and second, that Uncle Tom’s heroism is racially differentiated from white or even mulatto heroism.² If Uncle Tom is submissive and self-sacrificing, the argument goes, then he is feminine, a central part of the nineteenth-century domestic novel’s feminine reorganization of culture.³ And if Stowe’s full-blooded black protagonist is the novel’s most submissive Christian, then his Christ-like heroism must come from the color of his skin and confirm what George Fredrickson describes as the novel’s romantic racialism.⁴ Both of these perspectives on Uncle Tom strongly differentiate him from the novel’s white men, positing a segregated system of values within the text.⁵ Critics have read this differentiation in many different ways: as Stowe’s critique of the masculine world, as her misguided effort to argue against slavery even while upholding racial difference, as a racist devaluation of black masculinity.⁶ This chapter, however, reads Uncle Tom as Stowe’s universal masculine ideal and, ultimately, the novel’s most radical assertion of both the possibility of racial equality and the natural human right to freedom. Through the character of Uncle Tom, Stowe dramatizes a tension central to abolitionist debates of the time: between natural rights and religious obligations. I begin by discussing the novel’s representations of racial difference, arguing that alongside the romantic racialist language noted by George Fredrickson, Uncle Tom’s Cabin often couches its racial generalizations in contingency, just as often attributing racial characteristics to environment and experience as to biology. Moreover, Uncle Tom’s perfect moral character comes not from his race, I show, but from his conversion to a Christianity that was widely praised by critics of the 1850s. Next I address the character’s position in discussions about the role of religion in racial protest. Finally, I situate Tom among the novel’s other characters, both black and white, arguing that the novel embraces a shared notion of masculine Christian values for both races. This ideal, encapsulated in what Stowe calls the “manly heart,” combines deep emotional sensitivity with a willingness to act selflessly. Although Tom refuses to make his own escape from slavery, he recognizes the desire for freedom as both natural and right.

Race in Uncle Tom’s Cabin

In 1971, George Fredrickson coined the term “romantic racialism” to describe a racial attitude, virtually standard among mid-nineteenth-century antislavery activists, that accepted racial differences but not a racial hierarchy.⁷ According to romantic racialists, biology made black people permanently childlike and submissive. While some concluded from this merely that whites should not exploit blacks, others, most notably Alexander Kinmont and William Ellery Channing, went a step further, arguing that these qualities made black people natural Christians and therefore perhaps even inherently morally superior to whites.⁸ After all, in the New Testament, Christ counsels his followers to model their faith after little children.⁹

In an argument embraced by many Stowe critics, Fredrickson presents Uncle Tom’s Cabin as “the classic expression of romantic racialism,” arguing that the novel offers the fullest and most influential representation of blacks as natural Christians.¹⁰ Counterposing Uncle Tom’s submissive Christianity to George Harris’ aggressive spirit, Fredrickson further argues that Stowe’s black characters are easily distinguished in their docility from the novel’s mulattoes, who are “restive and rebellious” as a result of their Anglo-Saxon blood.¹¹ As “a naturally Christian black man,” Uncle Tom can resist only passively, by refusing to commit an unchristian act.¹² This sense of a romantic racialist divide in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, with the naturally Christian black characters in one category and the more aggressive mulattoes in another, has become a mainstay of critical discourse surrounding the novel.

There is no question that Uncle Tom’s Cabin makes racial generalizations, both explicit and implicit.¹³ Even so, Stowe departs from the romantic racialist attitude in a subtle but meaningful way: while the novel embraces the notion of racial difference and inherited racial traits, it often ascribes these to environment and experience.¹⁴ In fact, Stowe’s account of racial inheritance anticipates the biological framework of epigenetics, a growing field that suggests that people’s inheritable DNA can be changed by their behavior and environment. By couching racial generalizations in the contingencies of behavior and environment, Stowe calls attention to the instability of racial categories, suggesting the potential for racial equality. Moreover, Stowe’s novel cannily recognizes the performative aspects of race, especially the way that enslaved people can play into racial expectations and use them to their own advantage.

In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, racial generalizations that might at first glance seem to support biological racial difference are frequently moderated by language of variation and change. Tom, for example, has “to the full, the gentle, domestic heart, which, woe for them! has been a peculiar characteristic of his unhappy race” (my emphasis).¹⁵ The language here is tellingly contingent: not only can the extent of this “peculiar characteristic” differ (Tom has it “to the full,” but the implication is that others may not), but the use of the present perfect tense (“has been”) rather than the present (is) suggests the temporal instability of the characterization. In other words, this has been a racial characteristic, but it may not always be. The novel also asserts that experience can produce behavior at odds with general racial characteristics. Fear of being sold down South, for example, “nerves the African, naturally patient, timid and unenterprising, with heroic courage” (83) to attempt escape. Even the slave-trader Marks knows how physically assertive slaves can become when threatened with recapture: when Loker sneers that George Harris and his party would be “too plaguey scared” to shoot, Marks insists that “niggers do fight like the devil, sometimes” (170). Critics make much of the fact that George and several in his party are mulattoes, rather than full-blooded blacks, but this distinction never enters into Marks’ reasoning.

Consider, furthermore, the language of causality and contingency in Stowe’s sweeping statement about black sensuality: “The negro, it must be remembered, is an exotic of the most gorgeous and superb countries of the world, and he has, deep in his heart, a passion for all that is splendid, rich, and fanciful; a passion which, rudely indulged by untrained taste, draws on them the ridicule of the colder and more correct white race” (141). Here Stowe offers an experience-based explanation for the racial characteristics she perceives, crediting black sensuality to what she imagines as the richly beautiful nations of Africa. (This experience could in fact be very recent, since the United States did not ban the importation of slaves until 1808.) Compared to the Darwinian theory of evolution that would emerge only a few years after the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Stowe’s account of the development of racial characteristics is markedly more immediate and less functional. According to Stowe, the Negro loves beauty not for any useful purpose or because he is inferior, but because he, or his parents or grandparents or more distant ancestors, comes from a place full of it. This passion is, as Stowe describes, “deep in his heart.” But in her acknowledgment that this passion, if “rudely indulged by untrained taste,” can provoke “the ridicule of the colder and more correct white race”—an attitude for which she offers no endorsement—Stowe suggests that it can be changed with training.

Perhaps the novel’s most insightfully developed manifestation of an environmental and experiential explanation for racial attributes is the character of Topsy, who has not only internalized the values and expectations of her cruel masters but also bears the weight of generations of servitude. In Stowe’s comparison of Eva and Topsy, the girls are at once “representatives of the two extremes of society” and “representatives of their races” (213), a mirroring of the language that suggests an equivalence between race and social position. Stowe then offers a more detailed account of the generations of experience that have produced these racial differences, contrasting “[t]he Saxon, born of ages of cultivation, command, education, physical and moral eminence” with “the Afric, born of ages of oppression, submission, ignorance, toil, and vice!” (213). Eva, a privileged member of a fortunate race, and Topsy, an ill-treated member of an oppressed race, are characterized not so much by the color of their skin as by their positions in long social histories.

And yet Topsy, who I’d suggest is one of the novel’s most psychologically nuanced characters, is not wholly a product of her ancestry; wise to Miss Ophelia’s expectations of a little black girl in filthy clothes, she takes a gleeful pleasure in performing the role of a foolish ragamuffin. Stowe describes Topsy’s facial expression as “an odd mixture of shrewdness and cunning, over which was oddly drawn, like a kind of veil, an expression of the most doleful gravity and solemnity” (207). This veil is not, however, the inborn kind that W. E. B. Du Bois would later describe in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Rather, it is one that the girl consciously dons as she plays tricks on the unsuspecting Ophelia. Although Topsy is very bright, “learning everything that was taught her with surprising quickness” (216), she resists becoming the prim and proper young lady that Ophelia wants her to be. As soon as it seems that she’s learned how to do something flawlessly, she makes a mess of it: she can make a perfect bed but sometimes decides to pull off all the covers instead. Topsy is an excellent reader but occasionally amuses herself by willfully misreading her catechism, blaming her misbehavior on a wickedness that is clearly contrived rather than inborn. As Stowe writes, “Topsy always made great capital of her own sins and enormities, evidently considering them as something peculiarly distinguishing” (217). If her enslaved position prevents her from using her brightness in the traditional manner, then she’ll distinguish herself and exert her agency with wickedness.¹⁶

Meanwhile, St. Clare has his own explanation for Topsy’s misbehavior. Describing how social forces shape racial identity, he argues that the experience of slavery can produce racial characteristics that initially seem to be biologically determined. “You see,” he tells his cousin Ophelia, “from the mother’s breast the colored child feels and sees that there are none but underhanded ways open to it” (185). Arguing against racial determinism, St. Clare explains that a slave is born into a society with racial divisions so deep and clear that, even before acquiring language, the child understands the limits placed on her by her blackness and behaves accordingly. According to St. Clare, the institution of slavery, not biology, produces racial difference. As such, Uncle Tom is “a moral miracle!” (185) and what is remarkable about him is not that he is a moral black man but that he has remained one despite the crushing circumstances of slavery.

Uncle Tom’s Religion

There’s a factual error in St. Clare’s assessment of Uncle Tom’s moral character, and it’s one that many critics have repeated. Having known Uncle Tom for just a short time, St. Clare assumes that his new slave has always been like this, that he is one of the few who “Nature makes so impracticably simple, truthful, and faithful, that the worst possible influence can’t destroy” his good character (185). But Tom was not, in fact, born this way. St. Clare’s description contradicts a small but crucial detail in Stowe’s characterization: Tom’s Christian goodness is the result of a relatively recent religious conversion. As Tom’s longtime master, Shelby, relates in the first pages of the novel, Uncle Tom “got religion at a camp-meeting, four years ago; and I believe he really did get it. I’ve trusted him, since then, with everything I have,—money, house, horses,—and let him come and go round the country; and I always found him true and square in everything” (2; second emphasis mine). “Since then”—as a result of his conversion rather than an inborn characteristic—Uncle Tom has become, as Shelby describes him, “an uncommon fellow . . . steady, honest, capable, manages my whole farm like a clock” (1–2). When the slave-trader Haley tries to qualify this praise, saying that Uncle Tom must be “honest, as niggers go,” Shelby rejects this racial limitation. “No; I mean, really, Tom is a good, steady, sensible, pious fellow” (2), he insists, reiterating that Uncle Tom is an uncommon “fellow,” not just a remarkable slave.

Moreover, Tom himself also believes that he has fundamentally changed as a result of his religious conversion. We see this later in the novel, when Cassy asks him to join her and Emmeline in their escape from Legree’s plantation. For the second time, Tom refuses to run away, explaining that religious obligation must keep him on the plantation because there are souls that need to be saved. Yet he recalls a time when he would have been willing to escape, telling Cassy, “[T]ime was when I would; but the Lord’s given me a work among these yer poor souls, and I’ll stay with ’em and bear my cross with ’em till the end” (345). Although he once would have been willing to attempt escape, now that Uncle Tom has “got religion,” as Shelby calls it, he believes that the spiritual needs of others must take priority over his own freedom. For Tom, religious obligation supersedes everything.

Of course, from a contemporary perspective, Uncle Tom’s religious explanation for his refusal—twice!—to escape slavery is puzzling, to say the least. How can any reasonable interpretation of Christianity demand that a person remain enslaved? Why doesn’t Tom’s faith encourage him to lead an insurrection? Does he have to submit to cruel treatment just because he’s black? Tom’s self-sacrificing interpretation of Christianity probably doesn’t appeal to a modern reader, and it rubbed a few radical abolitionists the wrong way, too, as I will discuss shortly. But for the most part, whether they were for or against slavery, readers of Uncle Tom’s Cabin saw Uncle Tom as a universal Christian ideal, not one whose goodness was racially determined. The prominent abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, for example, praised Uncle Tom’s “Christian gentleness, forbearance, and love,” going on to argue that if a slave was capable of such Christian virtue, slavery was wrong.¹⁷ Another critic glorified Tom as the highest Christian ideal, making no qualification for his race: “[A] character of richer spiritual beauty, of loftier moral grandeur, than his cannot be painted. Wherever he moves a celestial halo seems to encircle his brow.” At the moment of Uncle Tom’s death, the critic observed, “we can almost see angel hands placing upon his bleeding temples the crown of martyrdom.”¹⁸ In this view, death was simply the moment when the martyr, already so close to God, joined his creator in heaven.

Even as pro-slavery critics questioned whether a black man could be so virtuous, they agreed that Stowe’s Uncle Tom was an ideal Christian. Some argued that Tom was too perfect a Christian to be credible as a black man, that he was just another ...