"Uncle Tom's Cabin" was wildly successful, selling over a million copies within its first year; yet, despite its success in engendering raucous debate amongst Americans over the issue of slavery, it was—and is still—not without its critics. Criticism of the book has often focused on Stowe’s personal opinions regarding racial equality, and whether they possibly weaken the message and legacy of her book.

1. Colonization and Expatriation in Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin
by Jeremy Borgia
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin is among the most important—and popular
—books of the nineteenth century. Stowe’s depiction and critique of slavery was a catalyst in the
abolitionist movement, and is even thought to have accelerated the United States’ slide into civil
war. The impetus for the book was the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act; passed as a compromise
between Northern Free-soilers and Southern slave holders, the law mandated that all fugitive
slaves should be returned to their masters, and made it a crime for Northerners to harbor them.
The law emboldened many Northerners who had quietly opposed slavery but had failed to take
any significant or meaningful action in support of their stance. It essentially required Northerners
to enforce pro-slavery laws, leaving a sour taste in the mouths of many and ultimately pushing
many abolitionists out of inaction. The book was wildly successful, selling over a million copies
within its first year; yet, despite its success in engendering raucous debate amongst Americans
over the issue of slavery, it was—and is still—not without its critics. Criticism of the book has
often focused on Stowe’s personal opinions regarding racial equality, and whether they possibly
weaken the message and legacy of her book.
Before delving into Stowe’s critics, it is important to first contextualize the criticism
within the politics of Stowe’r era. The American Colonization Society (ACS), founded in 1817,
was the primary proponent of so-called “colonization,” the belief that expatriating freed slaves to
Africa would be preferable to emancipation and eventual racial integration. Its stated purpose
was to establish independent colonies in Western Africa to be peopled by both freed slaves and

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free-born African Americans who would bring "civilization" and Christianity to Africa. “The
American Colonization Society seemed to promise all things to all people…It claimed to be a
missionary enterprise, a remedy for the Upper South's expanding free black population, a
conservative step toward gradual abolition, a solution to pauperism in Northern cities, and the
dawn of expanded commerce with Africa” (Dorsey). However, the movement was based on the
premise that white prejudice against blacks was so ingrained that African Americans could never
be completely equal unless they were wholly removed from white society. "There appears to
exist in the breasts of white men in this country," Frederick Freeman declared, "a prejudice
against the colour of the African, which nothing short of divine power can remove."
Colonizationists voiced little hope for resolving the conditions of both institutional and social
racism, finding mass ethnic expatriation a reasonable and more realistic alternative to the
prospect of racial integration. Black and white liberal abolitionists insisted that
colonizationalists’ claims merely concealed their racism. Colonization was "the offspring of
Prejudice," black abolitionist Sarah Forten contended; she was convinced "that it originated more
immediately from prejudice than from philanthropy.” (Dorsey, 79). There were, however, some
blacks who articulated their belief that white Americans were “so racist that the white American
populace would be unable to survive let alone succeed in the United States once slavery was
outlawed” (Boots, 3). Baptist missionary Lott Cary, a former slave from Virginia and one of the
earliest colonists in Liberia, reportedly said, "I am an African, and in this country, however
meritorious my conduct and respectable my character, I cannot receive the credit due to either. I
wish to go to a country where I shall be estimated by my merits, not by my
complexion” (Dorsey, 91). It was not unreasonable for some blacks to be in favor of

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colonization, which allowed them to defy the claim of the pro slavery faction that slaves are
naturally dependent on their white masters and could never obtain economic security on their
own. Additionally, a move to Liberia allowed them to distance themselves geographically from
ties of gratitude and obligation towards whites, particularly Northern abolitionist whites who,
though anti-slavery, still held many deep-seated racist beliefs (Ryan, 762).
White colonizationalists shaped the underpinnings of both white supremacy and white
male dominance for the rest of the century by drawing upon what they perceived to be the
lessons of history, nature, and even scripture in order to construct a rationale for colonization.
“The only black man who could be considered by colonizationalists as intelligent, enterprising,
courageous—in other words, a true man—was one who recognized that he could not live among
white people and chose to go to Africa. All others were mired in ignorance, prejudice, or under
the influence of evil forces” (Dorsey, 85). It was into this heated and complex discussion that
Stowe entered when her book’s Harris family moved to Liberia. At the end of Uncle Tom’s
Cabin, Eliza's husband George Harris moves the now-free family to Liberia, which the ACS
established as a place to repatriate freed slaves. By sending the Harris family to Liberia, Stowe
stepped into this messy debate between her contemporaries, putting at risk her reputation. Her
conclusion removed her surviving black characters from the United States, fundamentally
altering the construction of the nation whose racial cohesion—even integration—she had
carefully advocated earlier in the book. The success of the book’s overarching argument depends
on the creation of interracial responsibility between characters; yet, the novel ends with
resegregation and a return to allegiance based on race (Ryan). By including voluntary
colonization in her book, she acknowledges the vigorous debate about the merits of black

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migration and colonization outside of the United States. Ultimately, though, her colonization
narrative “appealed more to the head than to the heart of the novel’s audience” (Boots, 3). Her
plan reinforced racial separation, with black and white acting as benevolent agents only to their
own race. That is, “while black emigrants serve Africans, in a post emigration United States
Anglo-Americans are left to serve the needy whites who remain within its borders” (Ryan, 762).
The question, then, is why Stowe’s views regarding colonization matter in the bigger
picture of post-slavery America. The colonizationalist ending of Uncle Tom’s Cabin has fueled
Stowe’s critics who argue that her representations are more damaging than liberating. Karen
Sánchez-Eppler articulates many critics’ dismay at the book’s segregationist resolution when she
decries ‘‘Stowe’s failure to imagine an America in which blacks could be recognized as
persons.’’ The question of Stowe’s politics is much more nuanced than her being pitted against
her critics in a simple binary of good or bad; indeed, much of the scholarship surrounding
Stowe’s politics has argued that her politics are more ambivalent than they are conclusive. It is
possible to be critical of Stowe’s politics, then, while acknowledging the good of some of her
views. The point, then, is that it continues to matter how ‘‘good’’ Stowe’s politics were, and not
only because Uncle Tom’s Cabin, her most famous novel, is so explicitly and passionately
activist. It matters because Stowe’s book has come to embody both the antislavery and racial
equality movements of the nineteenth century. “Stowe has come to represent—perhaps most
pointedly for Euro-American women in the academy—earnest, middle-class, white activism. In
the process, she has proven to be a vexing icon—both an honored foremother and a specter of
good intentions gone awry” (Ryan, 751). With this—the “so what,” if you will—we now go

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forward to discuss whether or not Harriet Beecher Stowe was, in fact, a proponent of
colonialization.
There are many critics who argue that Stowe was not a proponent of colonialization. One
such critic, Christopher Diller, based his views on his readings of Stowe’s various prefaces to the
different editions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin that were published throughout the United States and
Europe. Diller states that the preface “has been responsible as the novel itself for the enduring
but misguided assumption that Stowe was an apologist for black expatriation and colonialism. As
Robert S. Levine notes in correcting that view, Uncle Tom’s Cabin argues for colonialism only
halfheartedly” (Diller, 621). The American preface, Diller argues, is more accurately read as a
strained attempt to mediate between the disparate views of white America mid nineteenth
century, who could not agree on the existence of slavery itself, let along what to do after its
dissolution. White abolitionists themselves were split on the issue of colonialization. Essentially,
Diller posits that Stowe’s inclusion of colonization in her story was, rather than an endorsement,
an acknowledgement of the debate. Another critic, Cheryl Boots, points to the scene of the book
where blacks are gathering on the Shelby farm to sing hymns with the young George Shelby.
This display of community and culture, Boots argues, demonstrates Stowe’s belief that there is
potential for a successful American multi-racial society. Critic Liz Sonneborn recognizes that
Stowe’s characters’ decision to move to Africa “seems like an endorsement of the colonization
policy.” But, she argues, Stowe likely did not mean it as such. “After all,” she says, “it is Harris’s
decision, not one the narrator prescribes for all freed slaves.” All of these critics argue that Stowe
was not likely to be well versed in the argument of the day surrounding colonization, so had not
fully fleshed out her views. They point to Stowe’s later denials that she endorsed

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colonizationalism—then out of style—as evidence that she had finally had the time and means to
formulate an informed opinion. However, these critics undermine their own argument, revealing
that Lyman Beecher, Stowe’s father, was himself a proponent of colonization. Thomas Graham,
on the topic, said that:
“Her favorable treatment of colonization has been cited to indicate Mrs.
Stowe’s latent racism or at least her truckling to Negrophobia in the North.
Possibly the latter charge contains some truth, since her father, Lyman
Beecher, supported colonization because it went along with white
prejudices and thus might hasten emancipation…Although she was not in
sympathy with [colonization], she does suggest that after a number of
years of ‘uplifting’ in the North, emancipated slaves should be encouraged
to return to Africa. A major element in her thinking was her romantic hope
that in Africa the Negro would be free to build a splendid Christian
civilization” (Graham, 620).
Indeed, Graham seems to indicate Stowe’s sympathies—at the very least—for colonization in his
very argument against that fact. Stowe’s father’s pro-colonization beliefs predispose many critics
to assert that Stowe held similar beliefs; the conclusion of her novel, to them, seems to confirm
it. Her hope that blacks “would be free to build a splendid Christian civilization” in Africa, a
romantic hope shared by many colonizationalist advocates, indicates Stowe’s view of blacks as a
tool to spread European Christianity within their own separate sphere, rather than as equal
citizens worthy of integration and assimilation into American society.
Many critics believe that Stowe was a proponent of colonization as suggested by her
family history and the content of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Elizabeth Ammons points to Stowe’s
characterization of George Harris, who was likely a frightening character for white Americans,
whatever their stance on slavery. Harris is an articulate, opinionated, and armed black man who
is willing to harm white people who threaten the well-being of his family. Ammons says:

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“Stowe places her support for Liberian emigration in the mouth of George
Harris, her smartest, angriest, most militant black—which, of course, goes
a long way toward explaining her support for an idea that abolitionists
from Douglass to Garrison roundly condemned. Deportation conveniently
solves the problem of dealing with demands for racial equality in America.
If at the end of Uncle Tom’s Cabin George Harris remained in the United
States, or even just across the border in Canada, how would Stowe contain
his militant voice, not just for emancipation for also for black equality?
Imagine Tom living rather than dying, and the point becomes obvious.
Tom would never pose a problem because he has learned well the obedient
behaviors of a servant and, even more important, subscribes to a
philosophy of Christian nonviolence and forgiveness. George Harris,
however, does present difficulties. Educated, enraged, determined not to
acquiesce in American racism, he represents a character potentially out of
the author’s control: an articulate advocate for racial equality in the United
States. Similarly, Topsy, ‘civilized’ and educated, represents a threat, as do
an independent Eliza, the Harris children, Cassy, and quickly mentioned at
the end, Cassy’s son, an educated ‘young man of energy.’ Consequently,
Stowe, in the tested tradition of the ACS, packs them all off to Africa, the
place for dangerous, ambitious, free American blacks.” (Ammons, 237-8)
Ammons argues here that Stowe, like many abolitionists, is, although antislavery, racist. Indeed,
many abolitionists fought against slavery because they recognized its inconsistency with their
Christian values, not because of a progressive belief that racial inequality itself was wrong.
Fighting to end slavery did not necessarily mean fighting to end white supremacy, which is why
Stowe and others endorse colonization. Removing educated, assertive, free blacks from the
United States meant removing the problem of whites having to participate in a social change
even more profound than the abolition of slavery: the change of white society relinquishing their
unearned white privilege, power, and dominance on which the U.S. system was structured in the
nineteenth century (Ammons).
Ultimately, it is clear that Harriet Beecher Stowe held some pro-colonization views.
Based on her family history, her book prefaces, and her other works, it is clear that the

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expatriation conclusion to Uncle Tom’s Cabin is indeed demonstrative of some of Stowe’s
beliefs. In the American edition of her novel, published out of Boston in 1852, it says:
“The scenes of this story, as its title indicates, lie among a race hitherto
ignored by the associations of polite and refined society; and exotic race,
whose ancestors, born beneath a tropic sun, brought with them, and
perpetuated to their descendants, a character so essentially unlike the hard
and dominant Anglo-Saxon save, as for many years to have won from it
only misunderstanding and contempt.”
This passage illustrates Stowe’s attitude toward blacks. Namely, it shows that, despite her
antislavery activism, she did not view blacks as equal to whites. This context is very important; it
is for this same reason that many of Stowe’s contemporary abolitionists advocated for
colonialization. The preface later says:
“When an enlightened and Christianized community shall have, on the
shores of Africa, laws, language and literature, drawn from among us, may
then, the scenes from the house of bondage be to them like the
remembrance of Egypt to the Israelite,—a motive of thankfulness to Him
who hath redeemed them!”
This passage more clearly reveals Stowe’s colonializationalist views. She is clearly speaking of a
time when freed slaves will return to the shores of Africa. Drawing upon Biblical imagery, she
superimposes her own romantic notions of an exodus upon the freed slaves. This same rationale
was used by many colonializationalist advocates who dreamt that freed slaves could act as
messengers for Christianity to the African continent. This thinking allowed white Americans not
only to exonerate themselves and their nation from the great crimes of slavery, but went so far as
to assign a divine purpose to that crime. Rather than acknowledging the pure evil of the slave
trade, they tried to find God’s hand and work in it. In addition to her preface, Stowe reveals her

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thinking on colonialization in some of her earlier work, namely the geography books that she
published roughly twenty years before Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Throughout the geography books,
titled Primary Geography for Children and First Geography for Children, the development of
Stowe’s faith in expansionism and in abolition lead her to embrace antiracist reform while
simultaneously rejecting the full enfranchisement of blacks. “Stowe’s geopolitical view rests on
the ideas that a natural geographic order separates distinct racial groups and that whites are the
only appropriate subjects of US space, history, and destiny. In these two books, the white child
embodies national geopolitics, and this exclusive embodiment makes African American bodies
incompatible with the nation” (Ben-Zvi, 10). In these books, Stowe advocates the Monroe
Doctrine, the expansion of Anglo-Saxon civilization throughout the American continent,
presenting slavery as a foil to that expansion. In both books, only “Europeans” are described as
settlers, while the noun is conspicuously omitted when discussing those of other races. This
distinction is crucial in determining Stowe’s view of slavery in relation to expansion: slavery is
the antithesis to the expansion of white, European Christianity throughout the American
continent. It is for this reason that slavery is immoral, not because it excludes slaves from U.S.
freedom. With this in mind, it becomes clear why Stowe would—indeed, must—advocate for
colonialization if she advocates for the end of slavery. Free or enslaved, blacks are an obstacle to
the spread of European-style Christianity throughout America. Blacks can fit into her world
view, as described in her geography textbooks, as long as each race it kept on its own separate
continent. Ultimately, Stowe argues that racism must be eradicated, but the world in which she
would have such reform take place must be ordered into racially distinct spheres. Stowe’s
resistance to the integration of American society recalls Jefferson’s fantasy of colonization,

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which imagined a future U.S. declaration of blacks as “a free and independent people” away
from its borders. Like Jefferson, Stowe suggests that foreign rather than domestic policy should
purge the nation of slavery and that slavery has been a historical accident whose solution lies in
separating America and white US citizens from Africa and blacks. Within this worldview, free
blacks are an unintelligible population belonging nowhere, and the binary geographies that
control the geopolitical relations between Africa and America threaten to frustrate Stowe’s hope
for a reorganized Africa where the descendants of slaves will be able to rebuild their political
lives (Ben-Zvi, 31-2).
Regardless of Stowe’s personal views on the issue of colonialization, one cannot argue
that the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin did not have a profound effect on the slavery debate in
the United States. The millions of copies sold, as well as the litany of “anti-Tom” literature after
it, demonstrate that it struck along a fault line of American identity and politics. However, her
legacy and that of her novel require us to place it in the context of the culture from which it
emerged. The reality of the nineteenth century is that abolition on its own was radical and
progressive; still, many, if not most abolitionists, were people of their time, and held the common
and deep-seated racist views of their time. Because of her novel, we are tempted to transform
Stowe herself into a beacon of the twenty-first century notion of racial equality. However, Stowe,
as evidenced by the novel itself, was susceptible to the prejudices of her time. That fact does not
need to subtract from Stowe’s legacy. Rather, it humanizes it.
Works Cited

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Ammons, Elizabeth. "Freeing the Slaves and Banishing the Blacks: Racism, Empire, and Africa
in Uncle Tom's Cabin." Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin: A Casebook.
Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. 227-48. Print.
Ben-Zvi, Yael. "The Racial Geopolitics of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Geography Textbooks."
Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 29.1 (2012): 9-36. Print.
Boots, Cheryl C. "Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Abolition Soundtrack in Uncle Tom’s Cabin." Forum
on Public Policy Online 2010.2 (2010). Web.
Diller, Christopher G. "The Prefaces to Uncle Tom’s Cabin" The New England Quarterly 77.4
(2004): 619-45. JSTOR. Web.
Diller, Christopher G. "Sentimental Types and Social Reform in Uncle Tom's Cabin." Studies in
American Fiction 32.1 (2004): 21+. Literature Resource Center. Web.
Dorsey, Bruce Allen. "A Gendered History of African Colonization in the Antebellum United
States." Journal of Social History 34.1 (2000): 77-103. Religion and Philosophy
Collection. Web.
Graham, Thomas. "Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Question of Race." The New England
Quarterly 46.4 (1973): 614-22. JSTOR. Web.
Ryan, S. M. "Charity Begins at Home: Stowe's Antislavery Novels and the Forms of Benevolent
Citizenship." American Literature 72.4 (2000): 751-82. Academic Search Premier. Web.
Sonneborn, Liz. Harriet Beecher Stowe. New York: Chelsea House, 2009. Print.
Stowe, Harriet Beecher. "Author's Preface to the English Edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin" Preface.
Uncle Tom's Cabin. London: Thomas Bosworth, 1852. Print.
Stowe, Harriet Beecher. "Preface to Uncle Tom’s Cabin" Preface. Uncle Tom's Cain. Boston:
John P. Jewett, 1852. Print.
Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom's Cabin. New York: Modern Library, 2001. Print.