Pro-slavery forces, at the time of its publication in 1852, accused Uncle Tom’s Cabin of gross exaggeration of situations that rarely occurred. I had read that Uncle Tom, Stowe’s devotedly Christian hero, represents Christ and that the wickedly brutal slaveowner Simon Legree represents Satan. I thus approached this reading as a search for archetypes in all the characters. I did, indeed, find many a “type” among Stowe’s characters. I was surprised, then, when I began reading Harriet Beecher Stowe’s The Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, to find that her characters were modeled after people she learned about during her research for the novel that she hoped would touch the hearts and consciences of people who weren’t paying that much attention to the issue.

The Key is more than 500 pages of letters, reports, witness accounts, first-person accounts (including slave narratives), newspaper advertisements (slaves for sale and notices of runaway slaves), legal documents, and other sorts of documentation. There are more pages of document verbatims than there are Stowe’s comments on them.

When I first realized that I was about to read 500 plus pages of dreary reporting, I thought it would be sufficient to simply mention the content and go on to other reading. But I was at once captured by the documents Stowe used to draw the character of Haley, the slave trader to whom Mr. Shelby sells two of his slaves when he finds himself hopelessly in debt. It is a negotiated trade: Haley gets Shelby’s top hand, Uncle Tom, and Harry, the handsome child of Mrs. Shelby’s chamber maid Eliza, in exchange for settling the debt. From letters of the day, written by one businessman to another, and from a courtroom transcript of a slavetrader’s testimony, Stowe drew her character of Haley.

From there, I read on--documents that inspired the characters of Mr. And Mrs. Shelby, George Harris, Eliza, Uncle Tom, Miss Ophelia, the St. Clares, Simon Legree, and the Quakers who sheltered Eliza, George, and Harry as they made their way to Canada. Stowe claims she worked just as hard at finding the “good” among the pro-slavery forces as she did in locating the bad. Her documentation upholds her claim. Time and again, her fictional world used incidents from the real world, even to the extent to put into the mouths of her characters the exact words and phrases used by the people she studied.

Though Uncle Tom’s Cabin easily stands alone as a testimony to the evils of slavery, I recommend without reservation the reading of The Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. I would even consider it essential reading if you, too, as I did, assume that Harriet Beecher Stowe used a broad pen to draw her characters larger than life in order to make her point. There actually was a slave woman who jumped from ice patch to ice patch across the Ohio River in her desperation to escape her pursuers. ( )