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162 Lincoln and the Refounding of America and the monumental nature of the issue it addressed, Uncle Tom’s Cabin still stands as the most politically influential novel in American history.1 If this point is lost on most contemporary audiences, it is because the book now rarely makes it onto any teacher’s required reading list, thanks among other things to its sometimes honey-sweet sentimentality and the racially demeaning images that have come to be associated with the moniker of the novel’s beloved hero, ‘‘Uncle Tom.’’ But the novel is a better, more sophisticated piece of literature than is often assumed, and the prevailing image of ‘‘Uncle Tom’’ as a black sycophant seeking white approval has more to do with the wildly popular minstrel shows that were inspired by the novel than by the novel itself. For those few still willing to read the book, Stowe’s original Uncle Tom emerges as a powerful Christ figure whose understanding and dignified practice of agape was a critical component of the book’s immediate appeal and its broad success in making the injustice of slavery all the more ugly and unacceptable to the Bible-drenched culture of antebellum America.2 Charity, it turns out, is central to the entirety of Stowe’s story, not just Tom’s character, a point recognized by Leo Tolstoy, whose own admiration for the book rested significantly on his sense that it was one of the highest examples of a work of art ‘‘flowing from the love of God and man’’3 As early as the Preface, Stowe signals that her aim is to ‘‘awaken sympathy and feeling for the African race, as they exist among us,’’ hoping that her work is part of ‘‘another and better day’’ dawning wherein the ‘‘great master chord of Christianity, ‘good-will to man’’’ will eliminate the utterly cruel institution of southern slavery.4 Said another way, Stowe’s controlling aim is to reform white America’s sense of Christian love to include an entire race of people previously subhuman and nearly invisible.5 One of Stowe’s several strategies to achieve this is to provide the reader with a string of compelling characters who model great human sympathy regardless of race. This sense of color-blind compassion is practiced best by those most genuinely religious, and it challenges, in a rich difference of degrees and ways, the worst prejudices and practices of southern slavery.6 Stowe’s most effective strategy, though, is to bring the novel to a close by juxtaposing the wretched, soul-destroying malice of Simon Legree, white plantation owner, with the Christic, awe-inspiring love of Uncle Tom, black slave. Simon Legree remains one of the most malevolent figures in all of American fiction.7 His depravity is so foul and pronounced as to poison From Tom to Abe 163 even his slaves. At Legree’s plantation—unlike other plantations in the novel where a vibrant sense of human community prevails among slave populations—the slaves live together in but a barbaric semblance of society almost entirely devoid of love, trust, or mutual aid. When Tom arrives, he looked in vain among the gang . . . for companionable faces. He saw only sullen, scowling, imbruted men, and feeble, discouraged women, or women that were not women,—the strong pushing away the weak,—the gross, unrestricted animal selfishness of human beings, of whom nothing good was expected and desired; and who, treated in every way like brutes, had sunk as nearly to their level as it was possible for human beings to do.8 Symbolically situated as the southernmost plantation in the novel, Legree’s is truly a living Hell, something the reader recognizes Tom has been steadily descending toward since the opening of the story, when his more humane master, Mr. Shelby, was forced to sell Tom. The full poignancy of this final destination for Tom is not just that conditions are so despicably mean as to warrant outrage, it is the double offense that someone as selfless and kind as Tom is forced to suffer such cruelty and ignominy. As the novel opens, Tom is revealed as a character who not only refuses several prime opportunities to escape his enslaved condition but who allows himself to be sold ‘‘down river’’ to preserve his master’s estate.9 As Lionel Trilling first pointed out years ago, such actions and the dispositions that produced them got grossly distorted in the ‘‘Uncle Tom’’ character—a stooped figure of...

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