Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a smashing success. The gripping exposé of slavery sold 3,000 copies on its first day in print, and Frederick Douglass reported that 5,000 copies—the entire first print run—were purchased within four days.
A Within six weeks, The Boston Morning Post declared that “everybody has read it, is reading, or is about to read it.” According to reports at the time, it took 17 printing presses running around the clock to keep up with demand. By the end of its first year in print, the book had sold over 300,000 copies in the United States alone, going on to become the best-selling book of the 19th century aside from the Bible. The plot of Stowe’s bestseller centers around an indebted farmer and his favorite slave, a kind and humble middle-aged Christian man named Uncle Tom.
The farmer is eventually forced to sell Tom south, where he is eventually killed when he refuses to disclose the whereabouts of two escapees. The backlash against the novel was immediate and fierce. Critics insisted that slavery was sanctioned in the Bible and that Stowe had fabricated an unrealistic, one-dimensional picture of slavery in the South. She was slammed as a socialist, anti-Christian, and ugly.In response to the allegations, Stowe released The Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. A giant annotated bibliography of her sources, the book pointed to hundreds of documented cases of real-life incidents that were similar or identical to those portrayed in her story.
“The character of Uncle Tom has been objected to as improbable; and yet the writer has received more confirmations of that character, and from a great variety of sources, than of any other in the book,” wrote Stowe.Who was the man who inspired Stowe’s Uncle Tom? “The venerable Josiah Henson,” wrote Stowe. “Now pastor of the missionary settlement at Dawn, in Canada.” Within days, Henson, a former enslaved laborer, now aging Methodist minister, catapulted to international fame.
Born a Slave
Josiah Henson was born near Port Tobacco, Maryland, around 1789. His first memories were witnessing his father’s punishment; he was whipped, his ear cut off, and he was sold south—all as punishment for striking a white man who had attempted to rape his wife. Henson never saw his father again.
Henson was soon separated from his mother and sold to a child trafficker but quickly fell deathly ill. The slave trader offered the boy to Henson’s mother’s owner, an alcoholic gambler named Isaac Riley, for a bargain: free of charge if the young Henson died, a barter of some horseshoeing work if he survived.
