The following selections from critical commentaries about the novel are offered to provide provocative ideas and suggestions for further reading and study.

“In Uncle Tom’s Cabin Stowe notes that in the ‘meetin’ held in the Negro cabin, the hymns sung ‘made incessant mention of ‘Jordan’s banks,’ and ‘Canaan’s fields,’ and the ‘New Jerusalem,’ and that the slaves clapped and cried ‘or shook hands rejoicingly with each other, as if they had fairly gained the other side of the river” (UTC, 1:37). As the geography of the holy land was laid over the geography of slavery, the Ohio River, separating the free state of Ohio from the slave state of Kentucky, became fraught with moral significance. Certainly the parallels between the Hebrew exodus from the land of Pharoah and the desire of Africans to escape from southern slavery made hymns about crossing the River Jordan into the land of Canaan a powerful form of expression and of political organizing in slave communities. In 1800 Gabriel’s Rebellion in Richmond, Virginia, the rebellion ‘contended that ‘their cause was similar to the Israelites,’ and that in the Bible God had promised ‘five of you shall conquer a hundred and a hundred a thousand of our enemies.’ By incorporating their own historical reality into Protestant evangelical religion, black Christian slaves brought the other world back to earth and interpreted the Scriptures in a fashion perhaps more in keeping with the original Hebrew experience” (pp. 214-15).

“For an index of popular racial feeling in the United States, one could do worse than minstrelsy. The tone and format of the early minstrel show, with its knee-slapping musical numbers punctuated by comic dialogues, bad puns, and petit-bourgeois ribaldry, should seem familiar to anyone who has seen American television’s 'Hee Haw'" (p. 5).

“The moment of minstrelsy’s greatest popularity (1846-54) was marked by a variety of bitter political controversies: labor struggles in New York and other major cities, the Wilmot Proviso debates over the extension of slavery, the Seneca Falls women’s rights convention, the Astor Place theater riot, the Fugitive Slave Law and its aftermath, the Kansas-Nebraska bill, and others. In significant ways this historical moment suddenly made the misappropriations and distortions committed in minstrelsy politically dangerous. The conflictual character of minstrelsy only deepened with the approach of the gravest pre-Civil War threat to the social order of the Union, the debates over slavery that led to the Compromise of 1850. Stephen Foster’s “Plantation Melodies” unwittingly conjured up the hydra-headed conflicts; these melodies, and the vast dissemination of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in various politically divergent blackface theatrical productions--a kind of prelude to civil war on the stage--offer a lens through which to read a political crisis. . . .” (p. 9).

“It is then, to the music that I now turn, and to its sentimentalized images of plantation life, which were enlarged in this period into a mythology so enduring it barely seems to have had a distinct beginning. Surprisingly harsh and mournful when it was not cheerful and spry, this mythology was marketed in hundreds of songs full of nostalgia, heartbreak, and death as much as winsome contentment, and its usefulness to a North marked by fracture and dissent will be of interest in this discussion” (p. 173).

“The novel is packed with references to the four last things--Heaven, Hell, Death, and Judgment--references which remind the reader constantly that historical events can only be seen for what they are in the light of eternal truths. . . . These reminders come thick and fast; they are present in Stowe’s countless quotations from Scripture, introduced at every possible opportunity--in the narrative, in dialogue, in epigraphs, in quotations from other authors; they are present in the Protestant hymns that thread their way through scene after scene, in asides to the reader, in apostrophes to the characters, in quotations from religious poetry, sermons, and prayers, and in long stretches of dialogue and narrative devoted to the discussion of religious matters. Stowe’s narrative stipulates a world in which the facts of Christ’s death and resurrection and coming day of judgment are never far from our minds because it is only within this frame of reference that she can legitimately have Tom claim, as he dies, ‘I’ve got the victory’” (p. 511-512).

“Uncle Tom steadily gathered momentum. By autumn it was a firm classic, its author apotheosized upon Olympus. . . . By the end of September Americans were playing, singing, and shedding tears over eight Uncle Tom songs. Besides Whittier’s Little Eva, they were H. Swift’s Uncle Tom, J.S. Adams’s I Am Going There, F. Howard’s Uncle Tom’s Glimpse of Glory, Woodbury’s Uncle Tom’s Lament and an industrious Miss Collier’s Death of St. Clare, Eva’s Parting, and Eliza’s Flight. Sales of the book had passed 150,000” (p. 324).