though that may seem, which has a relevance today. So, in our own time, a moral decision, complicated by social and economic factors, faces every individual of the Negro group who comes in contact, as indeed he must, with the dominant white majority. Whether or not a Negro will be called an Uncle Tom by his own people depends on the manner in which he conducts himself in his dealings with whites.
The term, Uncle Tom, has become a cant phrase among American Negroes, along with half a hundred other synonyms in current slang, but the type of person to whom it refers is known in other minority groups as well. The Japanese-Americans or the Jews might well adopt the term for those of their leaders who counsel compromise rather than struggle. There are, of course, both Negroes and whites who will defend the manner in which an Uncle Tom conducts his relations with the rest of the world. They assure themselves that there is no other way in which the things that are vitally necessary at the moment can be obtained, and are inclined to find justification for their point of view by claiming that they are “practical” and by pointing to the achievements of a man like Booker T. Washington. What may have been true at one time—and perhaps even then to a much more limited extent than they are willing to admit—is no longer true today. To continue to conform consciously to a pattern of segregation is to assure the fact that segregation with all its attendant evils will continue to exist. If, therefore, an attempt is made in this book to represent Henson as a three-dimensional character, it does not imply in any way that today it is possible to condone actions similar to his.
One can no longer believe that either Uncle Tom’s Cabin or the John Brown raid at Harper’s Ferry caused the Civil War in the United States. Rather, both Uncle Tom and John Brown were created and shaped by the same deep forces in society which brought about the irrepressible conflict. At the time, of course, both John Brown and Uncle Tom were identified with the war in the popular imagination, which always seeks an easy, obvious, and often humanized symbol in order to create a hero through whose actions a world event can be interpreted according to the customs which rule each private life.
The popular attitude was conveniently shaped into capsule form by Oliver Wendell Holmes:
All through the conflict up and down
Marched Uncle Tom and Old John Brown;
One ghost, one form ideal:
And which was false and which was true
And which was mightier of the two
The wisest Sibyl never knew
For both alike were real.
In the image of the poet, Brown was the form ideal, though his body lay a-mouldering in the grave, while from that grave had sprung a song to claim that his soul went marching on. The old hymn tune to which they had set the words rolled and thundered through the ranks of the Union, or began, muffled and indistinct as the boots of tired men, to rise, gather, and swell into a mighty monotonous chorus of voices which carried the soldiers another mile and another mile.
The face of the nation was about to change.
The South hanged Brown at Charlestown in Virginia; Lee, not yet a general, had led the last charge against the engine house at Harper’s Ferry on October 16, 1859; Stonewall Jackson was among those who saw Brown die one bright morning in December of the same year.
Death had delivered him: “This is a beautiful country; I never had the pleasure of seeing it before,” he said to those who led him out to the gallows, and it was true that he had seen no country before except the country of his vision. Now he was done with camp and countermarch. The Kansas War, the secret journeys, the convention in Canada, the shepherding of slaves to safety, and the expedition undertaken had led him here inevitably. In the letters which he was allowed to write from prison—they proved stronger weapons against the “peculiar institution” than the pikes with which he had proposed to arm the slaves—we hear the voice of a happy man sure of his destiny. Old John Brown, Osawatomie Brown, the angry prophet and antique hero, knew that the principal condition of his new-found happiness was the limit of time in which he could enjoy it; he was already free. “I am worth now infinitely more to die than to live.”
To those who have written of the last days before the attack on Harper’s Ferry it has seemed probable that he planned it to be a glorious failure. If that was indeed so, what faith he had in himself and in his followers that he should tell them nothing of his plans! He was always a secret man, and he knew where he went. With no insurrection of slaves behind him and the knowledge that even some of the abolitionists would forswear him, he stormed to “an almost certain immortality, dragging with him certain unwilling gentlemen who will be embarrassed to find themselves there as his murderers.” The manner of his failure was to be the very measure of his success. A strong man and his sons were gone to their death achieving a great goal—in fact, and in agreement with the poet’s syntax, Brown was the “form ideal.” But what of Uncle Tom? What was he?
Uncle Tom, then, was a “ghost” because he was a character from fiction and because Harriet Beecher Stowe had killed him off in such impressive literary fashion that no one could doubt that he was really in heaven with Little Eva. Yet was he only a character from the book? The poet would seem to imply, and the Sibyl must surely have known, that both he and John Brown were real.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or, Life among the Lowly poured out from the presses like an avalanche and swept away the greater part of its readers in a torrent of tears, though here and there it was answered by a countertorrent of abuse. In a few years people were to say that it was “the book that had started the war.” Everyone read it; almost everyone saw it acted as well. Uncle Tom, Little Eva, Topsy, Simon Legree, Eliza, all became giant-size as they played out their drama in theaters and in tents behind the kerosene flares and the pine-pitch torches. Even Mrs. Stowe, for the one time in an otherwise virtuous life, was known to have stolen into a theater—heavily veiled, of course—to see her creatures on the stage.
It was Harriet Beecher Stowe who without a doubt was the best-hated woman south of Mason and Dixon’s line, and the ranks of the Northern army were filled with young men who had, when the war broke out, scarcely left her book behind them in the nursery. Yet it was not the shade of a poke bonnet and bustle that Mr. Holmes saw in the smoke of battle. No, it was that “old darky” with his aureole of cotton-wool hair and beard that the poet thought he saw there: Uncle Tom, bobbing and bowing, loving as he suffered. Yes, Massa; no, Massa. It was this picture of a subservient Negro, his master’s friend, the conciliator and turn-the-other-cheek brother, which Mrs. Stowe presented for the admiration of the nineteenth century.
“Uncle Tom” meant one thing to the nineteenth century, but today the term means something quite different. For while John Brown has passed into history and legend, it is Uncle Tom who goes marching on. He is the ghost of a certain relationship between the races in America, and as he marches toward the second half of the twentieth century his is a ghost which must be laid.
It is in the hope of laying his ghost that this book is written. To the problem with which we are presented in this country and elsewhere by the color bar—segregation, the job ceiling, and every other evidence of prejudice—there is no solution which does not involve struggle. The use of force is not an abstract or academic question, for force is used every day in one form or another by those who wish to ensure that the lines continue to be drawn according to race or religion.
The enforcement of discrimination by legal means, or by extralegal means which are condoned by public opinion, is an application of force against a minority group which is bewildering to anyone who has read the American Constitution. If such acts are acceptable to the majority of Americans, it can be only because of a lack of understanding of the age-old technique of divide and conquer. New evidences of the common interest of the majority of the people are continually coming to light, yet the old methods of subjugation will continue to work if they are not understood.
In order to divide people it is necessary to do so in a manner that seems logical, or at least obvious, and which plays upon their own sense of insecurity. This division may be accomplished according to the skin pigmentation, though the line of demarcation might just as well, in the absence of a pigmented group, be pushed to its absurd conclusion and, after a suitable