The most famous book about slavery has been rejected by black thinkers since it was published

Most of us have heard of the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin and have learned, as part of our high school history lessons, the critical role of the book in galvanizing public opinion against slavery in the 1850s. But despite the book’s prominent role in the watershed moment in African American history, African Americans have rejected it as untrue to their experience since it was first published.

Written by the abolitionist author Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the most popular book of the 19th century, outsold only by the Bible. Millions of copies of the book were printed, and the novel was a smashing success both in America and abroad. Stowe became an international superstar. Queen Victoria wanted to meet her when she travelled to England. And whether or not Lincoln actually did call Stowe “the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war,” that estimation became part of American folklore. The book remained popular through the 1930s, almost 80 years after it was first published. Even today, if one book about African Americans is mentioned in a history class, it is Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

But it was also controversial almost instantly. Frederick Douglass and Martin Delany, co-editors of the storied abolitionist paper The North Star, had an angry exchange over the book in 1853. Delany, speaking out against the novel despite the success the book was having in turning Northerners against slavery, wrote that “Mrs. Stowe knows nothing about us” (italics his). “Neither,” he adds, “does any other white person.” Stowe’s book borrowed heavily from accounts of the South written by former slaves, Delany pointed out. One of those Stowe borrowed from was Frederick Douglass, who was fine with it. Stowe wasn’t the problem, he told Delany. Actually, Delany was the problem, since he was distracting from Stowe’s powerful anti-slavery argument. “We are a disunited and scattered people,” Douglass retorted, “and very much the responsibility of this disunion must fall upon such colored men as yourself.”

One of the things Delany — who in response published his own novel featuring a strong black hero — and other detractors took issue with was Tom’s passivity. “If any man had too much piety, Uncle Tom was that man,” African American author William Allen declared in a letter to The North Star. African American abolitionist George Downing complained about the “subservient, submissive Uncle Tom spirit, which has been the cause of much of the disrespect felt for the colored man.” Another flashpoint was Stowe’s position on colonization, dramatized when her her light-skinned main character, George Harris, moved to Liberia instead of settling in the North after his daring escape from slavery. One writer fumed in a letter to an African American newspaper: “Uncle Tom must be killed, George Harris exiled! Heaven for dead Negroes! Liberia for living mulattos. Neither can live on the American continent. Death or banishment is our doom!”

As the novel’s sales figures suggest, not all readers were skeptical. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a beloved book. The novel’s roster of admirers extended into the 20th century and included Mark Twain, Leo Tolstoy, Henry James and Lenin. It was revolutionary to many and was even banned in the South as abolitionist propaganda. The most appealing aspect of the novel, though, was probably the character of Uncle Tom himself. The novel alternated between several interconnected stories, but it was Uncle Tom who endured in plays and minstrel shows spun off from the novel, showing up as late as the 1950s in the stage production of the King and I.

Uncle Tom, a gentle and pacifist Christian, was a comforting character for his white readers. He loved his master, even after he was sold to a slave trader. Instead of getting angry at the betrayal, Tom gently reminds his own family, who are heartbroken, that the Bible says to “pray for them that spitefully use you.” Though he has many chances to run away as he is transported to the Deep South for a slave auction, Tom never does. Eventually sold to the cruelest of masters, he dies on a dirt floor after a severe beating, never once questioning his devotion to God. He even manages to convert his tormentors to Christianity as he lay dying. Stowe meant Tom as a Christ figure, but his servility was also a salve for White northerners’ fears of Black people, fears that might otherwise prevent them from empathizing with slaves.

The book is largely unsparing about the brutality of slavery and it humanized slaves through the empathy it evoked, but did so in a way that was ultimately soothing to white audiences. Stowe believed deeply in the evil of slavery, but she did not see African Americans and whites as equals. Only the light-skinned characters in the book, those with a good deal of white ancestry, are intelligent and self-sufficient. While the dark-skinned Tom turns the other cheek, near-white slaves bravely and ingeniously work their way North. In Stowe’s view, slaves could be freed, but they could not assume a place in American society on equal footing with whites.

The enduring popularity of the novel meant that African American writers had to continue to grapple with its legacy well into the 20th century. Richard Wright’s first published book was a collection of stories called “Uncle Tom’s Children.” In it, Southern African American characters faced circumstances nearly as bad as those confronted in Stowe’s novel, but Wright’s characters didn’t turn the other cheek like Tom did in the face of abuse. More often than not, they armed themselves and killed their oppressors.

After Wright, James Baldwin and Ishmael Reed were among the prominent writers who shunned Uncle Tom. Baldwin famously excoriated Stowe in his 1952 essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel.” “Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a very bad novel,” Baldwin wrote, sentimental and overwrought with simplistic characters that do nothing to illuminate African American life. His case in point is Uncle Tom, who he describes as “jet black, wooly-haired and illiterate.” Tom’s mission in life is to forebear — to accept rather than challenge his circumstances. “The ‘protest’ novel,” Baldwin writes, “so far from being disturbing, is an accepted and comforting aspect of the American scene.”

Without a doubt, Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a touchstone in American history. But as the responses of Wright, Baldwin, and others demonstrate, the book that helped to free African Americans from slavery also left a whole new set of cultural stereotypes that still haven’t been dispelled today.