Among all the singular and interesting records to which the institution of American slavery has given rise,
Harriet Beecher Stowe once wrote, “we know of none more striking, more characteristic and instructive, than that of JOSIAH HENSON.”
Stowe first wrote about Henson’s 1849 autobiography in her 1853 book A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, an annotated bibliography of sorts in which she cited a number of nonfiction accounts she had used as source material for her best-selling novel. Stowe later said that Henson’s narrative had served as an inspiration for Uncle Tom.
Proslavery newspaper columnists and southern planters had responded to the huge success of Uncle Tom’s Cabin by accusing Stowe of hyperbole and outright falsehood. Benevolent masters, they said, took great care of the enslaved people who worked for them; in some cases, they treated them like family. The violent, inhumane conditions Stowe described, they contended, were fictitious. By naming her sources, and outlining how they had influenced her story, Stowe hoped to prove that her novel was rooted in fact.
A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin was an immediate success; its publisher reported selling 90,000 copies by the end of 1854. Abraham Lincoln himself may have read the book, at a crucial turning point in the Civil War: Records indicate that the 16th president checked it out from the Library of Congress on June 16, 1862, and returned it on July 29. Those 43 days correspond with the period during which Lincoln drafted the Emancipation Proclamation.
Who was Josiah Henson? Born in 1789, according to his autobiography, he was enslaved in Maryland and Kentucky and served as an overseer before escaping to Canada in 1830. By 1862, when Lincoln checked out The Key, Henson had helped found a 200-acre settlement in Ontario, known as Dawn, which provided a refuge for hundreds of free Black people who had fled bondage in America. He had also made numerous return trips to the American South to help guide enslaved people to freedom. In total, Henson said, he freed 118 people; by comparison, Harriet Tubman is believed to have freed about 70.
Why weren’t American students being taught about Henson when they learned about Harriet Tubman, or assigned his autobiography alongside Frederick Douglass’s?
I first learned about Henson’s remarkable life a year or so ago, as I was doing research for a different story. I wondered why I hadn’t heard of him sooner. He was one of the first Black people to be an exhibitor at a World’s Fair. He met with President Rutherford B. Hayes and Queen Victoria. He built businesses that gave Black fugitives a livelihood after years of exploitation. Why weren’t American students being taught about Henson when they learned about Tubman, or assigned his autobiography alongside Frederick Douglass’s?
One reason might be that Henson chose, after escaping the United States at age 41, to spend the rest of his life in Canada, the country that gave him his freedom and full citizenship. And perhaps educators have been reluctant to spend too much time on a man known as “the original Uncle Tom” when that term has become a virulent insult.
But Henson was not Uncle Tom. Despite being forever linked with the fictional character after Stowe revealed him as a source of inspiration, he longed to be recognized by his own name, and for his own achievements. And he publicly wrestled with the role he had played, as an overseer, in abetting slavery’s violence and cruelty.
Henson’s biography and legacy, I came to see, defy easy categorization. His is not a linear story of triumph over hardship. Rather, it is a story that reflects the complexity and moral incongruence that animated the lives of enslavers and shaped the lives of the enslaved. It is a story of how a man who was at once a victim and a perpetuator of slavery’s evils tried, and failed, and hoped, and evolved, and regretted, and mourned, and tried again. It is a story that reveals the impossibility of being a moral person in a fundamentally immoral system.
“Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a very bad novel,” James Baldwin wrote in his 1949 essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel.” Published when Baldwin was just 24 years old, the essay helped establish the young writer as one of America’s fiercest social critics. Baldwin writes that Stowe’s book was gratuitous, overly sentimental, and two-dimensional, “not intended to do anything more than prove that slavery was wrong.” He concludes: “This makes material for a pamphlet but it is hardly enough for a novel.”
In many ways, the book did serve as a pamphlet; abolitionists saw it as a means for laying bare the horrors of slavery to white northerners. (Supporters of slavery saw it as a threat. One minister in Maryland was arrested and imprisoned for owning a copy, along with other abolitionist literature.) Uncle Tom’s Cabin is said to have been, aside from the Bible, the best-selling book of the 19th century. Originally serialized in a newspaper, The National Era, over the course of 44 weeks, the complete book was published in March 1852. It sold an estimated 300,000 copies in the U.S., and more than 2 million worldwide, in its first year.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin is indeed, as Baldwin suggests, filled with stereotypes. “In order to appreciate the sufferings of the negroes sold south, it must be remembered that all the instinctive affections of that race are peculiarly strong,” Stowe writes. “Their local attachments are very abiding. They are not naturally daring and enterprising, but home-loving and affectionate.” When describing the songs enslaved people sang together, Stowe explains that “the negro mind, impassioned and imaginative, always attaches itself to hymns and expressions of a vivid and pictorial nature.”
The scholar Jim O’Loughlin, who has written extensively about the literary and cultural implications of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, refers to Stowe’s posture as one of “romantic racialism.” Even when the writer is ostensibly celebrating or sympathizing with Black characters, O’Loughlin told me, she posits an essentialist view of them.
Worse, Stowe’s Black characters venerate whiteness and disparage themselves. “Now, Missis, do jist look at dem beautiful white hands o’ yourn, with long fingers, and all a sparkling with rings, like my white lilies when de dew’s on ’em,” Aunt Chloe, an enslaved woman, says to her white mistress. “And look at my great black stumpin hands. Now, don’t ye think dat de Lord must have meant me to make de pie-crust, and you to stay in de parlor?” As Baldwin puts it: “Here, black equates with evil and white with grace.”
Still, when I read it recently, sections of the book took me by surprise. My understanding of Uncle Tom, I came to see, had been informed less by the character in the book than by the distortions of the character that followed in the succeeding decades, when he came to be known as a lackey and a traitor. The Tom of the novel, while not as fully realized as some of Stowe’s white characters, was kind, thoughtful, and brave—a tragic hero who sacrifices his own life rather than give up information about where two enslaved Black women are hiding. This was not the Tom I thought I knew.
I was also fascinated by some of the exchanges between the white characters on the morality of slavery, as exemplified by a conversation between Miss Ophelia and her cousin Augustine St. Clare. Miss Ophelia, a white woman from the North who has come to stay with the slave-owning St. Clare and his family down South, doesn’t understand how her cousin—who she believes to be a kind, good-hearted man—can participate in such an egregious institution.
“I say it’s perfectly abominable for you to defend such a system!” said Miss Ophelia, with increasing warmth. “I defend it, my dear lady? Who ever said I did defend it?” said St. Clare. “Of course, you defend it,—you all do,—all you Southerners. What do you have slaves for, if you don’t?” “Are you such a sweet innocent as to suppose nobody in this world ever does what they don’t think is right? Don’t you, or didn’t you ever, do anything that you did not think quite right?” “If I do, I repent…”
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