In Our Time - Uncle Tom's Cabin

Episode Date: June 8, 2006

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the anti slavery novel, 'Uncle Tom's Cabin'. When Abraham Lincoln met the writer Harriet Beecher Stowe after the start of the American Civil War, he reportedly said to her: 'So you're the little lady whose book started this big war'. Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, published in 1852, is credited as fuelling the cause to abolish slavery in the northern half of the United States in direct response to its continuation in the South. The book deals with the harsh reality of slavery and the enduring power of Christian faith. It proved to be the bestselling novel of the 19th century, outselling the Bible in its first year of publication. Its fame spread internationally, No other book had portrayed an African-American slave as a central figure who was heroic and Christ-like. Lord Palmerston praised it highly and Tolstoy reportedly said it was his favourite novel. What impact did Uncle Tom's Cabin have on the on the Civil War and the abolition of slavery in 19th century America? How did the book create stereotypes about African Americans, many of which endure to this day? And what was its literary legacy? With Dr Celeste-Marie Bernier, Lecturer in American Studies at the University of Nottingham; Dr Sarah Meer, Lecturer and Director of Studies in English at Selwyn College, University of Cambridge; Dr Clive Webb, Reader in American History at the University of Sussex.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, when Abraham Lincoln met the writer Harriet Beecher Stowe after the start of the American Civil War, he's reported to have said to her,

so you're the little lady whose book started this big war. Stowe's novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, published in 1852, is credited with fueling the cause to abolish slavery in the northern half of the United States in direct response to its continuation in the south. The book deals with the reality of slavery and the enduring power of Christian faith. It proved to be the best-selling novel of the 19th century,

outselling the Bible in its first year of publication. Its fame spread internationally. Lord Palmerston praised it highly, and Tolstoy said it was his favourite novel. What impact did Uncle Tom's cabin have on the abolitionist cause in America? Did the book create stereotypes about African-Americans, many of which endure to this day, and what was his literary legacy?

With me to discuss Uncle Tom's Cabins are Celeste Marie Bernier, lecturer in American studies at the University of Nottingham, Dr. Clyde Webb, reader in American history at the University of Sussex, and Dr. Sarah Amir, lecturer in English at Selwyn College, University of Cambridge. Celeste Mary Bernier, can you give us some background to the American slave trade, say the 50 or so years before this book was published? Right, okay. American slave trade emerges really out of the Atlantic or the transatlantic trade,

which occupies approximately 400 years, say from 16th century onwards up until, as you rightly mentioned, Lincoln's emancipation proclamation in 1863. Now, the 50 years prior to Uncle Tom's Cabin, published and emerging in 1852, is really that at this point, American slavery becomes, the internal trade becomes much more palpable. So in the history of the transatlantic trade, you have the Middle Passage, the Transatlantic Trade, I mean the sort of trade between Europe, Africa and the Americas. So the involvement of three nations, continents as well. And what happens during this period is you have European traders going to Africa, getting slaves and packing them onto slave ships, which are then exported out into the Americas.

Now, this galvanises the abolitionist movement in both Britain and France as well as America. and Stowe's novel emerges out of the American context specifically. It emerges as well very much as it relates to white female abolitionist activity, which is obviously to be distinguished from black abolitionist activity. So there are two distinct strands here, and I think the novel encapsulates some of those debates. An interesting point to bear in mind is her discussion of the internal trade, which she describes in the book as the Middle Passage,

the internal trade being the movement of slaves, within the United States, and that's something that she deplores in the book. Can you just remind our listeners, many of whom will know this, but it's worth just freshening up their knowledge for the purposes of this conversation. In the first half of the 19th, what was the condition of slavery? How many were involved? What was the state of it? Good question, and statistics were always my weak point. 300,000, I think, 300,000, I think Frederick Douglas, a fugitive slave orator,

describes the numbers in bonds, and Sarah might be able to correct me on this, but 300,000. It's a massive number involved in slavery. I mean, to give you more accurate statistics, a conservative estimate of the numbers of Africans exported from Africa to the Americas throughout this period is 12 million. Afrocentric historians will take this figure much higher. So the numbers involved are huge,

especially, particularly in the Caribbean, I would argue that some argue that the numbers of slaves outweigh masters 4 to 1. I just want to nail this a little bit more specifically, the Earth's last minute. We're talking about the early, so the south of the 19th century, we're talking about the plantations in the south, we're talking about slave owners,

we're talking about slaves, we're talking about them as property, and so on. What conditions were they living in? Horrific conditions. You can nail that quite simply. The Middle Passage replicates and reproduces exactly what happens in plantations.

They're packed into tiny, tiny areas, and in plantations, they work under horrific conditions, sun up to sundown, on cotton plantations, rice plantations, tobacco, all areas of production. How does this squaring in the American conscience in the intellectual discourse of America without magnificent declaration of independence in 1776 that declared all men are created equal? What's the argument going on inside the heads of thinking and caring Americans, of whom there were many? Absolutely. The Declaration of Independence, obviously drafted by Thomas Jefferson,

included a section reprobating and deploring the slave trade, castigating the British for starting the trade in the Americas, and very much campaigning for its end. Which is not quite true, but never mind. Exactly. But it was removed on the bequest of the North and the South in terms of the North's trading interests and the South slavery interests, which obviously Uncle Tom's Cabin's genius, I think, if there is one,

is that it very much makes the North complicit in the trade. So the Declaration of Independence, to answer your question more fully, as regards life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all, exclude slaves precisely because American white male liberty is predicated on African enslavement. If you follow Locke or Burke's definition of an individual, it's the right to own property. And slaves are properties.

Sarah Amir, in the early 19th century, we see the rise of the abolitionist movement in America. Can you tell me how? How strong was it? Who were the key players? Again, approaching the publication of Harriet Beaches' first novel in 1852. So let's move into the 19th century and move towards the middle of the century. Right. Well, there have always been various kinds of resistance to slavery or unease about slavery right from the 17th century. What really happens is that by the early 19th century you get a movement called,

the colonization movement, which thinks that the way to ameliorate slavery is to emancipate people gradually and then move them to colonies in West Africa. Not everyone agrees with this. Many black abolitionists don't agree with it, but it's a fairly respectable position, at least in the 1820s. but by around the 1830s you start to get a different position and much more organisation of small local and different kinds of abolitionist groups and in 1831 someone who does become the absolutely key figure

although not necessarily always the most respected figure is William Lloyd Garrison who founds an anti-slavery newspaper in 1830. And then in 1833, many anti-slavery societies come together into something called the American anti-slavery society. But the problem is that during the 1840s, they start to quarrel. They quarrel over the involvement of women, they quarrel over what political tactics they should take, and they quarrel over what role the churches are going to have. So although it is a strong movement, there are many people involved in anti-slavery world.

They aren't all necessarily working together by the time Stowe writes her novel. Because it was one way women could move into the political forum, wasn't it, through this? And many of them did, as we'll see with Harriet Beecher Stowe herself. Let's come to that colonisation, because it pertains now a specific subject, because Harry Beecher's father, who has been described as one of the great preachers in America of the 19th century, was a colonizationist himself. Yes. And how did this do you think affect her?

Well, it was her family position as she was growing up. And her sister Catherine Beecher remained, Catherine Beecher, who half brought Harriet up herself, remained a colonisationist really into the 1850s. But the family gradually divided some members becoming more and more abolitionist in the way they were thinking. And there's a letter in the 1830s where Catherine writes to Harriet saying,

you're sounding quite abolition-y. But Harriet respected her father hugely. And her father's position, he actually took a public position that was pro-colonisation and not sympathetic to abolition at his seminary

in Cincinnati, which turned into a public crisis when a lot of students left because they support. abolition and they went to Oberlin. So for Harriet, it was actually a difficult thing to move into believing in abolition. But the use of the word belief takes us just to reinforce that this was a deeply religious family where all ideas were filtered through a religious conscience and came through the book as well as came through the politics.

Clive Webb, can you tell us more about Stowe's relationship with Christianity and and then with the abolitionist movement. Well, as you said, the entire Beecher family is an extremely religious one. Her father, Lyman Beecher, is one of the preeminent clergymen of the 19th century. And Stowe's attitude towards slavery is deeply rooted in a strong moral conviction that slavery is a sin. As for her relationship with the abolitionist movement more broadly, her family is deeply rooted in the abolitionist cause. one of her brothers, Edward Beecher, has defended Elijah Lovejoy,

who is the abolitionist editor of a newspaper called The Observer, who in November 1837, is shot dead by a mob that surrounds the office where he publishes his newspaper, sets it on fire, and as Lovejoy leaves the building, he's shot. And Edward Beecher is a supporter of Lovejoy in a very politically contentious situation, but also two of her other brothers, Henry Ward Beecher and Thomas. Beecher are both outspoken opponents of the fugitive slave law of 1850, which makes it legally compulsory for people to assist slave-catchers who are attempting to return slave property to their masters in the South. Both of them say that there is a higher law that people should observe

above that, which has been passed by Congress. And so they're really early proponents of civil disobedience, very much in the kind of spirit of Henry David Thoreau. And Harry Beechester, from my reading, it gets more involved in this than when people generally accept, generally know about. And Cincinnati is a particularly fault-lined town. Can you tell us about Cincinnati and then about her personal involvement in what was going on there? Yes, Cincinnati is a border city just on the Mason-Dixon line, which separates north from south. And as a result, it's a focal point for many.

fugitive slaves who were seeking escape from the plantations of the south. Many of them arrive in Cincinnati, sometimes on route to Canada. On what's called the Underground Railroad? Along the Underground Railroad, that's right. Safe camps and safe hostages, they hoped they're on the way up, yeah. Yes, it's a covert operation assisting slaves to escape from the United States to Canada where they can claim their legal freedom. But there's also quite a large and growing free black population in Cincinnati at the time that Stowe's writing Uncle Tom's cabin. So she's exposed to a great deal of immediate public controversy about the issue, in particular,

often violent attempts to reclaim fugitive slave. She's witnessed, not directly, but she's certainly reading in a newspaper on a regular basis accounts of what's happening in the city itself, where you do have white mobs, assisting slave-catchers in securing the return of fugitive slaves. And she herself has a direct relationship with a number of African-Americans, including a cook, who's a former slave, and who tells her a great deal about the hardships that she suffered in her early life. So Stowe has some considerable contact with slavery in Cincinnati

because of its meeting of these two cultures and the very volatile. environment therein. And as she's bringing up what becomes a large family and making a living and being broke a lot of the time, she's also quite strong in her

views that when the mobs are attacking the free presses and so and she wishes she was a man and could have a gun because she would certainly take care of one window at least. And so we're not talking, I'm trying to build up a character of somebody who's not the little lady in the back room writing between time.

She has a serious intellectual and geographical social involvement as well, doesn't she? Yes, she does. She's profoundly committed to the abolitionist cause. I mean, the sentiments that she expresses in the novel don't, I think, accurately reflect just how strident her opposition to slavery was.

Well, let's turn to the novel now, then. Saramia, she published Uncle Tom's cabin in 1852. Originally, it was a 40-week serial in the magazine, the National Era, which is an abolitionist periodical. Have you only, can you succinctly tell us what prompted her to write this long novel and then perhaps give us a very brief outline? Well, the first thing is she didn't realize she was going to write a long novel. She thought she was going to write three or four sketches in three or four issues. But she seems to have been worked up over the spectacular response to the recapture of fugitive.

slaves in Boston that Clive was referring to, as well as the mobs in Cincinnati, there were these celebrated cases where slave catchers came from the South and claimed to people in Boston as former slaves who must be returned under the fugitive slave law. Some were rescued by black abolitionists and whisked away to Canada and some were returned to the mortification and horror of Bostonians. And this was a serious public concern that many people who weren't actively involved in anti-slavery organisations

started to worry about. So Stowe's one of those people, I think. She's reading letters from family members and friends in New England and getting very upset. And one of her sisters says to her, Harriet, if I could use my pen the way you can, I would do something.

about this. And she's supposed to have stood up, crumpled the letter in her hands and said, I will. If I live, I will. She's also supposed to have had a dream in which she sees the final scene of Uncle Tom's cabin. So it does seem to have taken over her imagination. Can you, have we any idea what the sources for these characters were? Well, some of them may indeed have been people that she met in Cincinnati. There was a servant in in the Beecher household called Matilda, who was spirited away on the Underground Railroad when slave catchers came for her.

She may have been the origin of Eliza. Certainly there was a case in a town called Ripley just down the Ohio from Cincinnati, very similar to Elizas. But the story, if I can be brief, and if you correct me if I get wrong, He's based on Uncle Tom who's sold into slavery by someone who, by good masters, who don't really want to sell him, but he is sold into slavery, forced to leave his family,

and his adventures from then on ending in his death after a brutal beating and his many adventures, and other characters whom he meets and brings on, whether they're mulattoes or children, and horrible slave masters and slave catches and so on. It goes right through that, but it's seen from his, basically his and there, that is the people he knows point of view, which was a radical thing at the time. Do you think it was radical at that? Was it seem very radical at the time, Celeste, Marie? Yes, absolutely.

I mean, there is a sort of famous story of a slaveholder sending Harriet Beach O'S Stowe by recorded delivery a slave's ear that he cut off in response to reading the novel, which was quite a phenomenon. I mean, in terms of the use of language in the text, I think this is sort of drawing on what Sarah is. expressing here with regards to the source material and what Clive was mentioned as well. In a sense, the novel intersects very much with popular debates raging within abolition and divisions within abolition. Always knew about it. Let's go from the beginning, because you're going to give a critique of it rather than starting further back, which I'm ploddingly going to do, I'm afraid.

So it comes out, what takes people by surprise about it? We're talking about a phenomenon, the first great American international seller, greatest seller of novels in the 19th century, something was new and people wanted it. Can you just go through one, two, three of that? Sure. Humanising the slave, if we go back to other points that were made about property status, about object status, how do you distinguish objects or beasts of the field from humanity by the fact of their religion, their religious identity? The piety of Uncle Tom, his devout docility, was in very much a kind of a sort of catalyst for black redemption.

The idea that Tom himself could be a black Christ martyred to the cause was the sort of catalyst for all the weeping and wailing and all the misery and all the sadness that the book generated. And what about the other characters? Did they bring to the notice of people that these people were people? Yeah. It brings the notice of white readers that these people were people.

Particularly as I take it, but you're going to correct me for it. I hope you do. Particularly women white readers. Sure. I mean, what's interesting in the book is the use of the skin tone of her characters. The light-skinned characters like Eliza, like Sarah has mentioned, is very much cast within the traditional vein of a genteel, true woman, as is Cassie, another slave. She's got French, she's highly educated. And what Stowe does is she suggests that there's no differences regarding race.

We are all the same. We are all one. And what she uses there is very much a universal cult of womanhood. All women who feel, all mothers who feel, will feel for the atrocities of slavery and the breaking of slavery. of families. So what came on was that these people, I mean very bluntly, I'm sorry, but these are people like you. I am a man and your brother. I am a woman and your sister, which had happened in England with Josiah Wedgwood's medallion struck after his association

of Wilberforce. That came through then. That was what was, as it were, the book was carrying one of the forces. We'll talk a bit more detail of one of the forces carrying her. And yet, she's been accused of being racist, anti-slavery, but racist. Well, that's the, the and it's not, I'm not going to be able to give you an easy answer here. The debates and the issues that are raised by... I don't want an easy answer. I mean, I resent the fact that you think I want an easy answer. So I will give you a quotation which proves my point.

We can get on with the next point. Ian, she's talking about these two children, Little Ever, and the slave girl, Toppe, Little Ever is a golden her, you don't know. They stood the representatives of their races. The Saxon, born of ages of cultivation, command, education, physical and moral eminence, and the African, born of ages of oppression, submission, ignorance, toil and vice.

Now, would you describe that as racist? Is positing essentialised differences, but not necessarily a hierarchy? What Stowe is interested in is using racist language, perhaps, or racist ideas of racial difference, to convert Southerners. The book isn't intending to be a short circuit of galvanising opinion against slavery. What she's trying to do is to get Southerners and sort of incorporate their attitudes to change them. would you take that on? Because she's talking very much

in the domestic sphere in this novel, isn't she? Yes. And that is a particular appeal to other readers. But we're talking as if she made huge calculations. I don't feel she did.

I feel exactly what Sarah said. She started to write a few things and it just went on and on and like Topsie, it growed and away it went. Can you talk more about what the dichotomy might be inside it

from her own position, from the background she came out of with her necessary prejudice and yet her deep beliefs and ideals. Because there is a contradiction, though. There is a contradiction. I mean, it's always difficult to be able to determine exactly what an author was intending

without them providing, you know, elaborate notation for us. I do think that it is, that the novel reflects the fact that its author is a white woman and that she understands that her principal audience is likely to be white women too, because they do, after all, represent a substantial majority of the... American reading public at this time.

And I think the novel is directed towards white women in particular. And we see that in the construction of female characters in the book. For instance. For instance, I think that the most important aspect of this book is its advocacy of what we might call domestic feminism. Not feminism, as we would understand it, from a contemporary perspective. But if we go back to the notion in the 19th century that there's a separate sphere for men and for women and that a woman's place is essentially in the home.

Stowe is at once subverting and celebrating the notion of woman's sphere in the book. She does so essentially by attempting to argue that through characters such as Mrs. Shelby, through Rachel Halliday, through Mrs. Bird, that a woman has the capacity, not only to educate and bestow moral virtue upon the members of our immediate family, but also to impart that wisdom and that sense of morality to the broader society. We see that in the sense of order and calm and harmony in the households of the three women I've mentioned, in contrast to a household like Lagrees, Simon Legrees, where there is no matriarch. And he's the brutal one.

And he's the brutal master who's responsible for Tom's demise. or in Marie Sinclair. She is a slave-holding mistress who totally supports the institution, believes that it's morally right. And her household, and particularly the kitchen of her cook, diner, is a mess. You get the sense really of an absence of maternal authority

where slavery has been allowed to corrupt households. Sarah, can you tell us how, Sarah Mia, what Harry Bichester was drawing on, which novel she was drawing on particularly, or which inspiration she was, what inspired her. Because it wasn't just novels, was it? Yes, no. She's partly drawing on southern fiction,

which depicts the plantation as happy. She's partly drawing on British condition of England novels, which look at terrible conditions for industrial workers, and she's sort of transferred that to the slave situation. And she's partly drawing on other kinds of popular culture, including black-faced minstrel shows, which are white performers blacked up, supposedly representing African-Americans,

but doing it in a kind of very knowing, ironic way that their audiences may or may not have recognised. Stere has been accused now, but what she then of making Africans into African-Americans into stereotypes too easy, too one-dimensional, just simply caricatures of real people. No, I don't think that was something that her contemporaries complained about. A few African-Americans, someone called Martin Delaney,

complained about stow-making Tom too weak and passive. But in some ways, our seeing her pictures of black people as caricatures comes from the fact that lots of people borrowed from her. They became stereotypes because other people did it many times. She was innovating in her character creation. That's one of the ways in which she's a striking novelist. Because it's easy to look back now, I mean, Celeste, say, well, Uncle Tom is the Uncle Tom. He's the willing, woolly hair, that's her phrase, chap who goes along with everything.

And Sam is the sort of happy, darky, I'm using phrases. These are all in inverted commas, and so on. and topsy just groch, she's the Picanini and so and so forth. But at the time, I wonder if it was thought of as at the time, or at the time did they have such new force that they had a reality, after all, Dickens caricatured without getting called. Absolutely, yeah, I would argue that very strongly. And I think what she does, especially in this with regard to innovative characterization

that Sarah's talking about, she includes characters who embody different qualities and different attitudes to slavery and exhibit different strengths. So you've got Topsy who shows what the benefits of a good environment can produce for a slave. You've got Uncle Tom who shows strengths in adversity. We've got George Harris, who's the radical. Eliza, who's the true and benevolent woman. And you have, I think my surprise listeners to remember,

that you have so very ferocious and high intellectual arguments in that book, don't you? Absolutely. She comes out of the, what was she, what was she, in the semicolon club, in Cincinnati, where they used to meet and have discussions. And she knew her Bible, she knew her Bible studies. She's read deeply, although not necessarily widely. So the arguments there are high-powered, wouldn't you say? I'd totally agree with that.

Yeah, I mean, it's fascinating in terms of debates of the rights of man, how you define the rights of man, how you set up societies, as Clive was saying about the role of women in the private sphere becomes very much how they can transform the public sphere, the little lady who made this great war. you know, it's a kind of a cliche almost now, but at least it does suggest how a womanist sensibility can somehow transform public domain.

I was just going to add something to what Celeste Anne and Sarah said, really, which is that even stereotypical characters like Sam and Andy, who we, you know, ostensibly appear to be rather foolish characters who were there for light relief, Stowe is actually very skillful in being able to manipulate those stereotypes. So, for example, Sam and Andy, when the slave trader is attempting to leave the Shelby plantation, they're responsible for causing a commotion which upsets his horse and delays his departure. They also send him on a detour down a false pathway.

And they take delight in this, and we're told about how they actually sit and listen to whites and mimic whites and their speech-making, much to the delight of other slaves on the plantation. So there's a sense really here of long before historians, I mean, Robin Kelly, the historian has recently talked about the hidden transcript amongst African Americans, which is a notion that they are skilled dissembling, that on the one hand what whites might see as being a kind of naivety and a lack of intellect on the part of African Americans,

is an actual fact a public face what's put on by African Americans as a way of manipulating whites and that construction is very much in this novel so she at once reinforces but I think transcends stereotypes So it's an extension of having two languages really

isn't it? Having a public face as a language and a private face as your own private language let's come back to making it a little bit more complicated though because we still have Harry Beecher's Sto's off a time of a class and so and so forth and she's accused at the time or one can see it at the time of being very patronising and paternalistic.

And there's this woman Sojourner Truth, who is ex-slave and a great preacher and a powerful force around that time, for that time, a black abolitionist.

And when Harry Bitch to write about it, she sort of sends her up and makes her rather lighter and more comical than we now discover from her speeches that she was. Is this something to worry about, where are you on that?

Worried, short answer. The debate that Sarah refers to when she talks about Delaney and his views to the novel, Martin Delaney and Frederick Douglass had a public exchange of letters on the novel when Douglas serialized it in his Frederick Douglas paper.

Frederick Douglas was the fugitive slave turned orator, who was potentially the source of George Harris in the novel, so had a close relationship with Stowe at various points. At one stage, they were both thinking of organizing an industrial college for colored youth, their words.

Now, the relationship of Stowe to these abolitionists and to these debates. I mean, Delaney describes the novel. He says, Mrs. Stowe knows nothing of us. And Douglas says, well, Delaney knows nothing of Mrs. Stowe and says it's the master book of the century. I mean, one of the debates that you're...

But Douglas did say the book, as I remember, hold on, just saying, the book showed the finger of God. Yeah, absolutely. Well, that isn't bad, is it? No, he loved it. I mean, his view was pragmatic. Why, Stowe gets an audience... Douglas, just to reiterate for listeners, Douglas was an ex-slave, and supposed to be, from all reports,

an extraordinary orator, very powerful black abolitionists who came in and out of the white abolitionist cause and lived to an enormous age and died at the last decade of the 19th century and was a force in the land, right, sorry. Yeah, that's quite right. I mean, one interesting aspects, I guess,

of her relationship to abolitionists would be that with Harriet Jacobs. Harriet Jacobs... Just going on a bit too far from me now. I just want to sort of talk about, Before we get to Harry Jacobs, it was very interesting. We've got time. I'd like to ask you, Sarah, about the impact at the time.

The book came out. We know it sold a lot of copies. We know we have this apocryphal, is it, story that it helped to start this great little woman side, this small woman side of the big one. Whether it did or it didn't, it entered into the mythology, which became part of an understandable part, given that the impact it had. What else was it doing in the United States? Was it really change opinions?

Did it change habits? Did it change views of slavery? I think it did. Can you just give us some colour? Oh gosh, colour there. Well, there you go. Well, Stowe took the book to one publisher, whom she'd worked with before,

and he said, I can't publish it because books about slavery don't sell. And so she took it to Dewitt, who published it. And then, of course, it became the bestseller of the century. And I think that tells you something about the shift of culture that it involved, that for the first publisher, it was too contentious. Southerners wouldn't buy it, and northerners would be nervous

that it would upset the balance between the north and the south to talk about slavery. Stowe made it impossible not to talk about slavery. And so she provided a voice for that kind of discomfort about slavery that didn't belong to an anti-slavery organisation

that had been stoked up by the fugitive slave law. Did it become, as it were, though, Disney-fied? We instantly had Uncle Tom wallpaper, Uncle Tom this, that and the others, and pincushions and dresses and badges and so on. Wasn't that a sort of let's take the sting out of it? Let's make it cuddly and let's kind of therefore sort of ignore it.

That's certainly one of the things that happened. And it's the beginning of mass culture coincidentally. But that's one of the things that happens when you proliferate things and that you take the amusing and endearing bits out, and you, you know, it's sometimes hard to put politics into a bit of Staffordshireware. Can I just return to that remark about starting this war? What credence do you give to that? What influence you think it had on starting that great big board,

this small woman's book? I think the Abraham Lincoln quotation is apocryphal. The novel, as Sarah's intimated, the real impact of the novel is that it stirs a great deal of public, debate and in certain quarters it intensifies moral opposition to slavery. But I think we can exaggerate the impact of this novel. I mean, what's important to emphasize is that when many white northerners took up arms in 1861 at the start of the American Civil War, they did not do so to liberate the slaves on southern plantations. Abraham Lincoln himself in an off-quoted

remark stated that if he could save the union without freeing a single slave, then he would do so. So if we understand that it's not a moral opposition to slavery, that is the driving force behind the northern

war effort between 1861 and 1865, then we get a clear sense, I think, that this novel's impact is relatively limited. I mean, certainly it doesn't reach out to many of the white working class, who will become members of the Union Army who won't have read the novel.

It might be aware of it in a broader sense because of the kind of commodification and commercialization that Sarah has talked about. Well, I'm just wondering if it might actually have had an impact in the South that's significant to, that Southerners feel northerners and people abroad are talking about us because of this novel in ways that are hateful. and that doesn't help the tense relationship between the north and south. It helps to kind of crystallize that polarisation. There were a lot of what were called slave narratives at the time, Celeste. And I think Harriet Beech Stowe's novel might have given them more license and more hours it were. And one of the most celebrated was Harry Jacobs, whom you brought up a few minutes ago.

Can you – she approached Harriet. She approached Harriet Beecher Stowe sort of for help, and Harriet Beecher Stowe is very patronising and off-putting to her, and then she went and published her own story about her own background. Can you tell us the significance of that and why that's important? Well, briefly, Jacob's sort of the history of the publication history of Jacob's novel is fascinating for many of the reasons that you say there.

It was published in 1861 finally, and at one point Stowe was going to write a preface, at one point Stowe was going to write her story for her, at one point Stowe was going to use her story in the key to Uncle Tom's cabin. Very much what you have in the exchange or in the letters that Jacobs writes to another abolitionist is very much of anger at Stowe wishing to ventriloquise her story. So there's this issue very much related on what both Clive and Sarah have suggested of how she uses a slave narrative in Uncle Tom's cabin,

how she popularizes it, how she dramatizes it, and what impact that has in relation to black resistance, black autonomy. But she brings in the question of sex, doesn't she? Because she brings in this deep question of the white planters, this is general, but it seems to be generally true from whatever, treating their white wives and white daughters with incredible decorum, respect, and so on,

and having, what was it called, the Southam, Open Brothel, and Jefferson, 16 children we now discover, from one of his slaves. and Harriet had been herself had been the mistress of, I suppose that's a polite way of putting it, being a born of the slave owner. So that was a bomb,

a grenade thrown into the argument, wasn't it? Absolutely. I mean, that's a sort of taboo area of slavery studies and in a sense, what's quite interesting is how the Uncle Tom's cabin legacy, I mean, Kara Walker's a contemporary artist who puts the sex back in. So that sort of issue is very much related.

No, I wasn't nod in my head to ask you to her. I was just wondering where to go next. I think it is, and was that in the argument at the time, even when Harry Jacobs brought it forward, did it enter into the discussion, the notion of this festering underneath it or this sexual festering? Did that become part of any sort of open discussion? I think the anxiety expressed there is the genre

that Uncle Tom's Cabin is written in, which is a sentimental novel, To be a true woman in that period, you had to be pious, domestic, religious and dutiful, not seen in any sense as a sexual person of any kind. And so what Harriet Jacobs is trying to do is situate herself within a discourse of white womanhood. What is it to be a true woman? And so those kinds of debates are sidelined in favour of trying to recover black women as white sort of women, with white qualities, if you like.

And as we know, the North One, the South Lost, there's an attempt at what was called Reconstruction, slaves were given the vote, and so on. And then soon the Ku Klux Klan kicked in, and the Jim Crow laws kicked in, and a sort of slavery kept on until Martin Luther King mutated into that. And so as it, and the North seemed to lose interest or make deals because it needed the South, economic deals, which allowed it to go on. What happened after that, sorry, that's very big, what happened after that, sir, to Harriet's, to Uncle Tom's cabin? let's say from the end of the 19th century. What's happening to the book? Is it of any importance then, is it? Well, after the Civil War, it's still important as a play, not a play dramatized by Harriet Beecher Stowe,

but it becomes the American play that's in circuses and little traveling Uncle Tom shows that go to the smallest towns in the backwards. And people think it's a moral play, ironically, because it's about this moral issue. And so that's all right, even if you're religious, This is the one play you can go to, and so it's the one play the actors can put on. Because I think we must emphasise before we close the programme,

that to say that a black man could be a Christ figure was a very big thing to say then. It's now looked back on, oh, he's too meek and mild and so on and so. But Jesus was sort of as meek and mild by people then. It's very, very important that she made that alliance, I think. What do you think? Yes, absolutely. That's the crucial thing. But as you said, some of those commercialized versions changed the force of the novel.

And one of the things they did was they made Tom meek rather than Christ-like. And that's why I think in the 20th century you get this term Uncle Tom, meaning a sellout or a race traitor. It's not a reading of the novel. It's a reading of something like the plays that went round in the Tom shows. So let's want to be true to say that the slave narratives of people like Harriet Jacobs, have become more important to studies of that period than Uncle Tom's cabin? I'd like to think so.

I'd like to think so. Why would you like to think so? Because, I mean, one critic has said that Uncle Tom is a slave sold more time than any other slave in history. One comment you could sort of get from that is how the unmediated voice of the slave, this is something that Henry Louis Gates talks a lot about in particular,

is an issue of how you tell your story. How do you own your story and how does your experience become your experience? So you're almost denying fiction. Not denying fiction. Slave narratives were highly fictionalised. So why should we trust them more than we trust Uncle Tom Skirman? I'm not saying it's an issue of trust.

I'm saying it's an issue of diversity of perspective. It shows the tensions within abolition. It shows the different perspectives on abolition and shows the different ways of expressing that, which gives us more fuller picture. Finally, Clive. A few of you on that. I agree with Celeste's perspective.

I mean, in teaching slavery to a contemporary student audience, certainly, they are concerned to get what they believe is a representative voice from slaves. You know, the best example that would probably be Frederick Douglass's, which is less mediated by a white interpretative voice. He's been the great admission in this programme, for which I'm very sorry listeners. He wrote a book called The American Slave, which was an amazing juxtaposition of words when you come to think about it. Thank you very much to Sarah Meier, Clive Webb and Celeste Mary Bonnier.

Next week we'll be talking about carbon, the element that forms the basis of all living things. Thanks for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.