By Mike Zonta, BB editor (and ChatGPT)

Me: Uncle Tom was really (in the book) a very heroic, if not Christ-like figure, wouldn’t you say?

ChatGPT: Yes—I’d say that’s a very defensible reading, especially if you mean Uncle Tom as he actually appears in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel, rather than the later stereotype that “Uncle Tom” came to mean.

Tom is extraordinarily heroic. His defining quality is refusal to return evil for evil, even when he is brutally abused. He repeatedly puts his Christian conscience above his own safety. In the final section, when Simon Legree demands that he reveal where Cassy and Emmeline have gone, Tom refuses even though he knows it may cost him his life.

And there is something distinctly Christ-like about Stowe’s presentation of him:

• He forgives people who mistreat him.
• He refuses to hate Legree.
• He suffers rather than betray another person.
• His faith becomes strongest under persecution.
• His death is explicitly framed in Christian, almost martyr-like terms.
• Most importantly, his moral authority is greater than that of the people who legally own him.

Stowe was deliberately constructing Tom as a Christian martyr. His final words and the reactions of those around him make the parallel with Christ quite unmistakable.

The irony is that the cultural meaning of “Uncle Tom” eventually became almost the opposite of Stowe’s character. The phrase came to mean a servile Black person who accommodates white authority. But Stowe’s Tom isn’t servile in the morally important sense: he obeys God rather than men. His refusal to cooperate with Legree is actually an act of profound resistance.

In fact, I think one could argue that Tom’s Christianity is the most radical political element of the novel: Legree possesses Tom’s body legally, but he cannot possess Tom’s conscience.