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Uncle Tom's Cabin or Life Among the Lowly was first published in The National Era newspaper in Washington, D.C. It appeared in forty weekly installments between June 5, 1851 and April 1, 1852. The book version came out on March 20, 1852 and was an immediate success.
To a great extent, the story is dated and the specific issues of slavery and its abolition are no longer relevant. The tremendous popularity once enjoyed by the book has diminished over the years and today, the appellation, “Uncle Tom,” is one of considerable opprobrium and contempt. Moreover, those who read Harriet Beecher Stowe's solution to the problems of the Blacks, today, regard it as highly simplistic and naive, if not offensive.
This paper is not concerned with the timeliness of the story. My aim here is to explore some of the underlying psychological themes in Uncle Tom's Cabin and their relationship to what is known about Harriet Beecher Stowe. Almost everyone is familiar with the general story, but there are a number of details which are important for my particular emphasis. I will first briefly summarize the plot and some of these pertinent incidents.
Overwhelmed by his serious financial problems, Mr. Shelby, a plantation owner in Kentucky, was reluctantly forced to sell two of his slaves to a slave trader: Uncle Tom, an older, reliable Negro† and Harry, the four- or five-year-old son of Eliza, his wife's slave. Eliza, carrying her son, fled