Racism in "uncle Tom's Cabin"

Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin was the defining piece of the time in which it was written. The book opened eyes in both the North and South to the cruelties that occurred in all forms of slavery, and held back nothing in exposing the complicity of non-slaveholders in the upholding of America's peculiar institution. Then-president Abraham Lincoln himself attributed Stowe's narrative to being a cause of the American Civil War. In such an influential tale that so powerfully points out the necessity of emancipation, one would hardly expect to find racialism that would indicate a discomfort with the people in bondage. However, Stowe shows no apprehension in typifying her characters according to their various races. While this at times serves a distinctly polemical purpose, the author often employs racialism in places where it appears to be wholly unnecessary. On the whole, Stowe seems to be all too comfortable with promoting stereotypes unfitting of a polemic piece crying out for the liberation of the Africans and African-Americans in bondage.

George Harris is a slave embodying qualities few people in the South of the nineteenth century would believe to exist in a black man. He displays an adroit ingenuity, inventing a machine that improves the efficiency of cleaning hemp at the factory to which his master rents him out. Unlike many of his fellow slaves, he yearns for something more. When he is belittled and cheated by his master for nothing more than his hard-earned success, he has to restrain every nerve and impulse inside his body to prevent striking back. He shows boldness and audacity in running away from his owner when the sanctity of his marriage to Eliza is threatened, and even more so in his journey to Canada. George equips himself with pistols and bowie knives, ready to go down fighting for his right to freedom. His eloquence and abundance of knowledge are displayed fully in his brief exchange with Mr. Wilson. As mentioned before, these qualities would not be expected from the supposedly jolly, docile and lighthearted blacks. The problem is that George is indeed not black; his father carried on the unfortunate tradition of white masters raping black slaves, making him a mulatto. George Harris is the one slave in the novel who is able to act with audacity, intelligence and a hunger for freedom... the one slave who appears to have fully broken away from the stereotypes that classify his race. Stowe would appear to attribute this to the fact that he had some of that Anglo-Saxon blood--containing the ingredients for daring, conquest and intelligence--running through his veins.

Eliza is George's loving wife, and Stowe essentially portrays her as a feminine reflection of the latter. She is a strong, beautifully formed mulatto woman who like her husband is courageous and gifted. Rather than delivering her child into the Lord's hands when she finds out Haley has purchased him, as the black Uncle Tom would most likely do, she grabs her child and takes flight as soon as she can. In one of the novel's most famous scenes, she shows supernatural prowess in crossing a river by hopping across ice floes in a blizzard in a desperate attempt to elude a group of slave catchers. Like George, she exhibits qualities and talents that would hardly be expected of blacks; also like George, this would seem to imply that her more positive traits come from the loins of her white father.

Uncle Tom is presented as the ideal black man--that is, he would fetch top dollar in the auction house. Stowe describes him as "a large, broad-chested, powerfully-made man, of a full glossy black, and a face whose truly African features were characterized by an expression of grave and steady good sense, united with much kindliness and benevolence. There was something about his whole air self-respecting and dignified, yet united with a confiding and humble simplicity" (18). What Tom's kindliness, benevolence and humble simplicity amounts to is going with his fate in the name of the Lord, even when that fate would lead to his pain and misery. The poor slave abides by every stereotypical trait attributed to his race; he is submissive, jocular and religious, because he is "of a full glossy black," and lacks the white man's genes that have turned George down a completely opposite path. Even worse, Stowe seems to encourage this behavior amongst slaves. Uncle Tom is without a doubt made out to be an African Jesus--the symbols and parallels become increasingly blatant as the novel progresses. In placing him as the pinnacle of his race's character, the author encourages Tom's modest complacency. He accepts his condemnation to bondage in this world with barely a word of protest, and seeks his reward in an afterlife with the Lord. In promoting this kind of behavior, Stowe sets herself alongside the content Northerners who preached, "Slaves obey your master."

In Topsy, the reader is presented with a character that is the bane of every master or Miss Ophelia-esque teacher. She is a troublesome young slave child who lies, cheats, steals and pranks her way through her futile life with no apparent will to learn or improve upon her sinful life. The girl responds to neither stern lessons nor harsh whippings, and appears to be resigned to wreaking havoc and chaos wherever she goes. There is no doubt that this mischievous slave serves a polemical purpose; Evangeline later converts her to a better way of life through showing her love, indicating that even the most hopeless of blacks only need genuine affection to lead them back to the correct path. However, in her description of Topsy's