We're still learning from 'Uncle Tom's Cabin,' just not in high school

Yahoo

03-03-2025

Mar. 3—In December 1850, John Andrew Jackson — who had escaped a plantation in South Carolina and was living in Massachusetts — showed up at the Brunswick home that Harriet Beecher Stowe and her family were renting while her husband taught at Bowdoin College.
Sent there by a friend of Stowe's, Jackson was looking for a place to stay for the night as he made his way north to Canada. The Fugitive Slave Act had passed a few months earlier, requiring even Northerners to return people who escaped slavery to their enslavers, and he was no longer safe living in the United States, where he openly had been raising money to buy the freedom of his wife and young daughter.
Stowe welcomed Jackson into their home, where he talked and sang with her young children. He showed Stowe the scars of slavery on his back, and she listened with sympathy to his story of being separated from his family. She gave him food, clothes and $5 and made up a place in her closet-sized "waste room" for him to sleep that night, according to Susanna Ashton, a Clemson University professor who last year published "A Plausible Man," a biography about Jackson and his role in inspiring Stowe to start writing "Uncle Tom's Cabin" weeks later in that same house on Federal Street.
Now, the room where Jackson slept is slated to become the office of Cathi Belcher, who was recently rehired as educator and guide at the Bowdoin-owned Harriet Beecher Stowe House, where the writer lived for two years. It reopened to the public last week for the first time since the pandemic.
Between that and the publication of Ashton's book, "it's a high point for 'Uncle Tom's Cabin,'" said Tess Chakkalakal, a Bowdoin professor who has added to the recent activity around the novel with a podcast that she and a colleague co-host called "Dead Writers." Each episode, which also aired on Maine Public, focuses on the Maine home of a late literary giant and started in July with Stowe's house.
At the same time, the novel — that Abraham Lincoln is said to have credited with starting the Civil War by stoking the antislavery movement — seems to be disappearing from secondary school classrooms. Once considered required reading at the middle or high school level, it's not even taught in Brunswick schools, up the road from where it was written.
Suellyn Santiago, chief academic officer for the Brunswick School Department, said she wasn't able to find out whether it used to be part of the curriculum and, if so, why it wasn't anymore, though it's not hard to figure.
"Uncle Tom's Cabin" has been criticized from all angles since it was published — by Southerners who said it misrepresented slavery, literary scholars who call it overly sentimental and racial justice advocates roiled by its perpetuation of stereotypes. There are also the racial slurs that have similarly knocked "Huckleberry Finn" off the standard high school English syllabus, said Adam Schmitt, an assistant professor of teacher education at the University of Southern Maine.
Schmitt, who specializes in elementary and secondary social studies, said there are a lot of reasons the book might not be taught as much in schools today. There's been an effort in recent decades to bring more underrepresented voices into the classroom, he said, and at the same time, students have more access than ever to primary source documents. So, rather than spending the time reading Stowe's lengthy, fictionalized story about slavery, students are more likely to learn about the book's role in history and read accounts of what slavery was like from people who experienced it.
"It's still referenced because it's a major part of the story of the Civil War, but I'm not sure how much it's actually read," Schmitt said.
As the subject of an entire college course, there's more room for all the context that reading the book requires — its reception, its cultural impact and, at Bowdoin, its origin story.
Almost every year, Chakkalakal teaches "Reading 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' in the Twenty-First Century," which includes visiting Stowe's house, the First Baptist Church where she had a vision of Tom's death, and the college's special collections, which has issues of the National Era abolitionist newspaper where Stowe's story was originally published.
Chakkalakal said it's become something of "a signature class at Bowdoin," and senior Kaitlin Weiss, who took it this fall, agreed.
Despite its 8:30 a.m. start time, Weiss said she and her friends would leave the class "juiced." Now, she tells all the underclassmen she knows, "this is one of the classes you have to take."
But you don't have to be a Bowdoin student to get a look inside Stowe's world as she was writing the bestselling novel of the 19th century. The Harriet Beecher Stowe House is now open noon to 3 p.m. Thursdays and Fridays, and visitors can sit and read or write in a parlor where Stowe would have held her salons, inviting Bowdoin professors and students (including eventual Civil War hero Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain) for discussions and, sometimes, readings of her work.
Belcher, who also recently restarted a social justice book club at the house (that filled up immediately), has a lot more programming in the works, including the return of Teas with Harriet, monthly events during which she gives talks about some aspect of Stowe's life over refreshments.
When she held them before the pandemic, so many people showed up that she had to institute a ticketing system, and she expects, with all the time that's passed, demand will be high again. In the warmer weather, she plans to bring back her Historical Walk with Harriet around town, and she'd love to host regular salon-style discussions at the house too.
"I think the sky's the limit," said Belcher, who believes the community can match her enthusiasm for Stowe, the house and its role in history.
Where does her interest stem from? An English paper she wrote on "Uncle Tom's Cabin" in the '70s, when she was in high school.
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