Sharp Flashes of Lightning Come from Black Clouds: The Life of Josiah Henson by Jamie Ferguson Kuhns (review)

It is shocking that historians have not written more about Josiah Henson given his renown in the nineteenth century. Identified as the story of the “real” Uncle Tom, whom Harriet Beecher Stowe made famous in her wildly popular 1852 novel, Henson’s autobiography sold thousands of copies after its first release in 1849. But curiously, like Henson’s contemporary Harriet Tubman, it has taken decades for scholars to publish full academic accounts of these black icons’ life stories. Tubman has received recent attention from historians like Kate Clifford Larson and Catherine Clinton, and Henson is just now getting noticed by scholars, with comparative literature professor Edna M. Troiano publishing a 2019 biography, a filmmaker documenting his life (Redeeming Uncle Tom: The Josiah Henson Story [2019]), and this gorgeous and meticulously researched book by Jamie Ferguson Kuhns.

Kuhns’s work begins with an acknowledgment that her motivation for writing a biography of Henson is rooted in the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission’s purchase of Henson’s historic home in Montgomery County, Maryland. The homestead, which is now surrounded by the most coveted Washington, D.C., suburbs like Chevy Chase, serves as the starting point for both Henson’s life and Kuhns’s retelling of it, which she does by integrating scholarly sources, images of historical manuscripts, and beautifully reproduced maps and photographs. While the result is more like a coffee-table book than a historical monograph, the scholarship is sound, and the story is compelling and accessible to the general public.

Kuhns contextualizes Henson’s remarkable life within the history of slavery and abolition, his autobiography within the genre of the slave narrative, and his rise to fame alongside the fictional Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The result is a sweeping chronology of Henson’s enslaved childhood in Maryland, his trials as a smart, strong, and disabled (due to injuries from being whipped) overseer and preacher in Maryland and Kentucky, and his eventual escape to Canada in 1830 at the age of approximately forty. After arriving in Canada, Henson claimed that he would “use my freedom well; I’ll give my soul to God” (p. 91).

Like fellow Marylander Tubman, Henson was deeply spiritual and felt motivated by God to continue his work for black freedom after securing it for his wife and four children. Henson returned several times to the South and rescued dozens of enslaved people, ferrying them from Kentucky to Ohio and on to Canada; indeed, it was Henson’s crossing the Ohio River into Cincinnati that informed Stowe’s climactic scene in the novel. Ultimately settling in Dresden, Ontario, Henson was instrumental in establishing the British-American Institute (BAI), a school for black people that taught industrial skills like milling, a trade that Henson had mastered. In addition to proceeds from the sales of his autobiography and his work as a preacher, Henson hoped that his labors at the BAI would help the free black community in Canada become “independent of the white man for [their own] intellectual progress” (p. 104).

Henson’s family and fame grew after the Civil War; he married Nancy Ridgely Gambril in 1858 after his first wife, Charlotte, died, and together they raised ten children, whom they provided for, in part, with the increasing sales of Henson’s autobiography. Henson published seven editions of the book between 1877 and 1890, capitalizing on the fame of Stowe’s novel by renaming the 1879 version “Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction”: An Autobiography of Rev. Josiah Henson (Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom”) from 1789–1879. Historians know that truth is often not stranger than fiction, but certainly Kuhns has done readers a great service by resurrecting Henson’s important life story.