Uncle Sam and Uncle Tom

Uncle Sam is a popular name for United States of America. This name is associated with ideas of power, control and dictatorship. USA exerted this authority on the whole world and was therefore never liked by people of other countries. The situation however in the United States  was not always so rosy and pleasant. Its people who came from all over the world, considering it a land of opportunities, were not treated as equals. Those who were given the color black to their skin by God were considered slaves and lived a life of indignity and exploitation. 

Uncle Tom is an equally popular name that relates to USA and this name too does not show USA in good light. Uncle Tom is the chief character of the famous novel ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ written by Ms Harriet Beechter Stowe in 1852. It was revolutionary for its passionate evocation and indictment of the practice slavery in American society. The author presented Uncle Tom as ‘a man of humanity’. He was also the first black hero in American fiction. Uncle Tom’s Cabin had several characters that attained iconic status; Simon Legree, Little Eva and Topsy Sambo are even today American bywords. They made a heartrending and a dirty picture of America, which showed blacks as a tradable commodity and as people who ‘don’t have the same feelings as we do’. It was a society divided into only four categories slave catchers, slave traders, slave owners and those who aspired to own slaves. 

Uncle Tom’s Cabin emphasized that slavery was an unchristian practice and both cannot exist together. Ms Stowe accentuated benevolence as a feminine trait and also called outraged feminine feeling as the widest opposition to slavery. Little Eva, daughter of dissolute and weak Augustus comes across as sensitive and saintly whereas Mr Shelby sells Uncle Tom to the negro trader Haley and Simon Legree and his brutish black attendants beat him to death. At his death, Uncle Tom with his Christian meekness stands up to Legree as morally superior wholly perfect human being. 

Ms Harriet Beechter Stowe, the author was born in Connecticut in 1811 and was brought up on tales of devotions, Christian charity and brotherhood. She was exposed to slavery, race riots, runaway slaves early in her life. She moved to Maine, after her marriage and joined Bowdain College as a professor. She wrote this novel as a reaction to the passage of Fugitive Slave Act. It became one of the most-sold books of 19^th century, was translated into 37 languages and was reviewed by renowned figures like Thomas Macaulay, George Sand and Heinrich Heine. She wrote several novels however only Uncle Tom’s Cabin has survived.

Ms Stowe was always outspoken on controversial moral issues like temperance, women’s suffrage and of course slavery. Perhaps her early religious training aided her to be fearless and confident. She enjoyed friendship of several greats of English literature like Lady Byron and George Eliot. Mark Twain was her neighbor. Leo Tolstoy admired her book and called her ‘a brilliant soldier in the liberation war of Humanity . The greatest tribute to her came from Abraham Lincoln who greeted her at the White House in 1863 as “The Little woman who started this great revolution’.