SOURCE: "Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Portent of Millennium," in The Veracious Imagination: Essays on American History, Literature, and Biography, Wesleyan University Press, 1981, pp. 59-69.

In the following excerpt, Strout examines the nineteenth-century theological traditions that informed the writing of Uncle Tom's Cabin, defending Stowe against modernist critics who accuse her of racism.

"Everybody's Protest Novel," James Baldwin called it in 1949, in order to condemn it and its descendants. Looking at it through the eyes of a modern Negro, he found it a hysterically moralistic melodrama of stereotypes with a cast of genteel mulattoes and quadroons whose lightness of color betrayed Harriet Beecher Stowe's revulsion against blackness. "Tom, therefore, her only black man," he asserts, "has been robbed of his humanity and divested of his sex. It is the price for that darkness with which he has been branded." Her fear of the dark, Baldwin charges, is "a...