Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a novel that changed a lot of American’s views on slavery. When Harriet Beecher Stowe first published the novel the year was 1852.and there was unrest among the northern and southern states. A law had been passed called the Fugitive Slave Law, which ordered citizens of non-slave owning states in the north to return run away slaves, when caught, to their owners in the south. To someone who was against slavery it must have been a heart wrenching moment to abide by this law and return a human being to there “rightful owner”. So there was obvious tension between the north and the south. After the law was passed Stowe’s sister-in-law said to her “if I could use a pen as you can, I would write something that will make this whole nation feel what an accursed thing slavery is” to which Harriet replied “I will if I live”. This was when she began writing her novel and within a year of being published Uncle Tom’s Cabin had sold over 300,000 copies and opened many people’s eyes to the wrongs of slavery. She did this by showing families being broken up during slave trades, and Tom being mistreated even after being shown as a kind

Though a minstrel show was not what Stowe had in mind, nor was it what Aiken had in mind when adapting the novel, this became the future of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The play had been done so many times by so many playhouses that for a while nearly all of the actors in America had played a part in it at one point in their careers. At one point an American theatre company was touring Australia and locals asked them to do Uncle Tom’s Cabin; they realized that so many of the actors had been in it before that they could do it without a script. At this point Aiken’s version had hit a point of no return, it became a “true folk-play” one that even the audience knew well enough to have the lines memorized (Furnas 276). Of course over periods of productions, lines in the play became altered, added, and often left out all together but it didn’t matter, the story had lost its meaning and the entertainment value was all that was important.

The most obvious of these stereotypes has to be Uncle Tom himself. I had heard the term “Uncle Tom” long before I had any idea what Uncle Tom’s Cabin was about. What this term reminds me of is a scene in the film Chasing Amy written and directed by Kevin Smith. In this particular scene a black man, touting camouflage and a handgun professes that blacks in comics and action movies never get to be the good guys. When the character Lando Calrissian from Star Wars gets brought to his attention he declares that Lando was an “Uncle Tom” only doing the biddings of his white allies without complaining. This was my first recollection of this term and after reading the play I can see how this term’s connotations evolved into what they are now. In this play Uncle Tom is an obeying servant, saying, “yes mas’r” often and fearing that “mas’r isn’t good to himself”, not once caring that he is owned and traded at will. Tom’s first owner, Shelby, praises his work ethic, declaring that he is a “good, steady, sensible, pious fellow” and that he “let him go to Cincinnati alone, to do business for (him) and… Tom comes back sure enough; (he) knew he would” (Aiken, pars. 20-24). He may be trusted but as with the stereotype, all “Tom’s are chased, harassed, hounded, flogged, enslaved, and insulted, (yet) they keep the faith, n’er turn against their white massas, and remain hearty, submissive, stoic, generous, selfless, and oh-so-very kind” (Bogle 6). Stowe used Tom's character to show the perfect gentleness and forgiving nature which, she believed, lay dormant in all blacks, this may have been effective to get her message across but, since this period, Uncle Tom has become an image that is pointed to over and over. Despite being loyal and kind to his white owner, Uncle Tom gets whipped, beaten, bought and sold, and blatantly mistreated over and over. African Americans use the term Uncle Tom as an insult now, there are two different types of Uncle Tom’s now, the docile, loyal, religious, contented servant who accommodates himself to a lowly status, thus letting others walk over him without objecting, and the African American who is ambitious but is willing to take a secondary position to a white man if it means being better off than they were before. Basically “’Uncle Tom’ (has become) an epithet for a black person who (behaves) with fawning servility toward white oppressors” (McPherson 90). While doing research I discovered that the great African American actor Sidney Piotier has often been described as an

Some topics in this essay:
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