The novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe, born 200 years ago, was a poor housewife with six children, who suffered from various illnesses. And yet, driven by a passionate hatred of slavery, she found time to write "Uncle Tom's Cabin" which became the most influential novel in American history and aroused radical change both at home and abroad. Today, however, the book has a different reputation, owing to the popular image of its character, Uncle Tom-whose name has become a saying for a cowardly black man who betrays his race. But this view is wrong: The original Uncle Tom was physically and morally strong, an inspiration for blacks and other oppressed people worldwide. Indeed, that's why in the mid-19th century Southerners attacked "Uncle Tom's Cabin" as a dangerously destructive book, while Northern reformers-especially blacks-often praised it. The book was influential overseas, too.In Russia it inspired Vladimir Lenin, who recalled it as his favorite book in childhood. It was the first American novel to be translated and published in China, and it fueled antislavery causes in Cuba and Brazil. The book's progressive appeal was the character of Uncle Tom himself: a strong man who is notable because he does not betray his race; one reason he gave up escaping from his plantation is that he doesn't want to put his fellow slaves in danger. And he is finally killed because he refuses to tell his master where two runaway slaves are hiding. Unfortunately, these themes were lost in many of the stage versions of "Uncle Tom's Cabin". The play, seen by more people than those who read the book, remained popular up to the`1950s and still appears occasionally. But in the play Stowe's revolutionary themes were drowned. But it doesn't have to be that way; indeed, during the civil rights era it was those who most closely resembled Uncle Tom-Stowe's Tom, not the sheepish one of popular myth-who proved most effective in promoting progress. Both Stowe and Tom deserve our reconsideration and our respect. What is true of the character Uncle Tom in the book?
He is a black man who betrays his race. He manages to escape from the plantation. He doesn't put his fellow slaves in danger. He kills himself instead of giving away the slaves.