Art Imitates Testimony: On the Real-Life Inspiration For Uncle Tom’s Cabin

When Jackson escaped from the English family plantation on Christmas Day back in 1846, he had put the ones near and dear to him at terrible risk. If we have learned anything about the English family, it is that they likely tortured his family members to see if they could get information out of them about his plans. Doctor, Betty, Ephraim, and others remaining in bondage in Lynchburg likely suffered because of his decision to flee. He was not willing to put others at risk again. We shouldn’t be surprised that he is a bit cautious in his accounts about the illegal help others gave him.

Information about those first weeks of travel out of Massachusetts in late 1850 is a bit elusive. We must piece together conjectures with context and hints. But the story unfolds when we look at the broader context of his travels and examine who he would have encountered. As always, Jackson made an impression.

Jackson seems to have traveled chiefly by land, likely moving from town to town, partly on his own and possibly with an occasional escort, knowing only in general terms which house to stop in, which communities to head toward, and which person to ask for along the way. Frightening, for sure, but unlike his previous solitary journey across South Carolina and aboard the Smyrna.

His discretion in narrating this second stage of freedom journeying had one clear exception. In an act of irresistible and strategic celebrity name-dropping in his 1862 narrative, he wrote:

I may mention that during my flight from Salem to Canada, I met with a very sincere friend and helper, who gave me a refuge during the night and set me on my way. Her name was Mrs. Beecher Stowe.

With these words, Jackson referenced the most well-known American writer in the world, Harriet Beecher Stowe, who began to publish her blockbuster serialized novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in 1851. He knew what he was doing. His encounter with Stowe, a meeting that only gets a few scant sentences in his memoir, was nonetheless an encounter that, quite possibly, changed the world.

Jackson affected Stowe. He was, she attested, “a genuine article.” When she sat down only a few weeks later with her experience with Jackson fresh in her mind, she started writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a novel that was to help instigate the most consequential social revolution of the modern world: the overthrow of modern slavery.

To understand what brought Jackson to this place and this moment, we have to view Jackson’s movement up to Brunswick, Portland, and elsewhere in Maine as a story of self-liberation. The danger was always his. The mistakes were his. The courage was his. The success was his. During this stage of his escape, he was assisted by courageous people, both Black and white. But that assistance was never assured and never secure. It was inconstant and always contingent on someone else’s moods, funds, or even the weather.

Each step would have been tense. With hindsight, we might be tempted to think of his move through Maine toward Canada as triumphant; it was doubtless filled with some terror. Even with the optimism and tenacity that characterized his way of functioning in the world, he could not have known that he would succeed. After all, every step toward a supposedly more assured freedom also took him further and further from everyone he knew and loved.

Jackson took whatever money he had saved and got out of town as fast as he could. Hitching rides on a wagon or simply hiking on the road would be wiser than a stage or train, even if he had the money for any tickets. Trains, although there were many leading north out of Massachusetts, could and often were inspected by conductors and government agents who could ask uncomfortable questions. There were plenty of rural roads wending their way north out of Salem, and it would have been quieter to endure the frozen and bumpy roads on a wagon when possible and by foot when not than to draw attention with other choices.

As Jackson probably saw it, another escape by ship would have been too risky. Everyone was now on alert for Black people scrambling to get north. Even a sympathetic captain or crew on a vessel heading north might encounter another ship, be boarded by officials, or be inspected upon arrival. He would be foolish to test his luck with another sea voyage. And so he went along the coast, probably directed and occasionally escorted to sympathetic households. While archival traces of his journey hint at or provide small details about his encounters with white people along the way, such meetings weren’t enough. He needed free Black people, people who looked like him. They were far better positioned to hide him. He could pass as one of them. Town by town, then, Jackson headed north. He would have crossed out of Massachusetts and gone briefly through New Hampshire, probably passing a night or two there. Then, he would have entered the state of Maine with its long stretch north to the Canadian border.

Arriving in Maine was an achievement; every mile north was a bit further from Anderson, the overseer sent to track him. Thanks to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, though, crossing state borders was now essentially meaningless: there was no formal protection from the reach of federal law. And it was still a long way to Canada, with no standardized route or system for a fugitive to get there. Traveling from Salem just to the border of New Hampshire was over thirty miles. Moving along the New Hampshire coast toward Maine would have been at least another twenty miles. Getting from the Maine border there up to Canada (and the roads would become fewer and rougher the more north he got) would have been close to an additional three hundred miles. Walking the entire way in winter was almost unthinkable.

Trusting fate, he would have to move along as best as he could, altering plans when necessary, all the while soliciting whatever food, money, or lifts he could scrounge. He was ready to listen if he ran into people with more knowledge or better strategies for crossing that border and finding sanctuary. One foot in front of the other. Just accumulate the miles.

Maine was home to some of the most ardent antislavery movements and activists. But most people in Maine were not extremists. Jackson needed to be careful about whom he asked for help.

The truth was that Maine was a state dependent upon maritime trade, which meant that loyalties, for white citizens at least, were usually to one’s livelihood at the expense of acknowledging the inconvenience of a moral stand against slavery. The state’s primary economic engine was deeply invested in not alienating its Southern trading partners. As one antislavery editorial in a Portland, Maine, paper lamented: “It is quite respectable and popular, even in the city of Portland, to be identified with the slave owners—slave pirates and man stealers. It subjects no man to loss of caste or character in Portland, to be found on the side of the oppressor and man thief.”

And so, even in 1850, when the Fugitive Slave Act had begun to mobilize activists, it was only a tiny network that operated, sometimes effectively and sometimes not so effectively, to support and otherwise assist people seeking their own emancipation. Some coastal Maine hubs for activists could be found in southern and midstate locales, such as Hallowell, Bath, Topsham, Brunswick, and Portland. Such hubs were usually where a free Black community or at least a few Black residents lived alongside a couple of white families with antislavery sympathies.

When people imagine the Underground Railroad’s workings, they often think of a highly covert and organized system. There is some truth to that. Organizers and central conductors did exist in some places. As they became increasingly experienced, many of these Black and white activists developed hiding places and ways to collect and organize the considerable finances necessary to operate these endeavors (supplies, bribes, tickets, and so on). On the other hand, people fleeing on the UGRR rarely experienced it in a predictable or organized manner, particularly in the flurry of months right after the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act passed and the number of people seeking to escape from the Northern states, as well as the Southern states, grew. Plans could be haphazard and unclear.

Uncertainty abounded. Fugitives might be directed from place to place by people who were generally sympathetic but not necessarily clear on what might happen at the next stop: Could they be sure that a person was home and would welcome a strange fugitive showing up at the door? What happened to Jackson was probably fairly typical for this region and at this point. He probably had a list of names in his head that he had been told to ask for when reaching a certain town. One of those people might shelter him for a night or two and help him with transport or directions to the next town. The cold weather of winter in New England wouldn’t make travel easy. Jackson would have needed to stay put in some places for days or weeks at a time, ideally with other Black families or communities where he would be less conspicuous. While there, he had to make himself useful and at least try to earn his keep and possibly earn funds to help move forward. He wouldn’t want to lose touch with the white activists, though, and would probably need to keep checking in with them until they could coordinate his next steps.

Brunswick, Maine, was and is still a small college town on the coast. By the mid-nineteenth century, it was known as the home of Bowdoin College, a small but prestigious institution that catered to New England’s elite and prosperous families. Also at that time, lumber was a significant industry there, mainly for shipbuilding, and Brunswick boasted a small but active port and, notably, a cotton mill—dependent upon bales from the Southern states.

Somehow or another, Jackson had been directed to the home of one of the most well-known antislavery activists in the state, William Smyth. Smyth was a Bowdoin College professor of mathematics and natural philosophy and founder of Maine’s first antislavery newspaper, the Advocate of Freedom.

Most important for Jackson, Smyth had spent decades agitating against human bondage and was an experienced strategist. His connections and knowledge of the literal and figurative terrain fugitives would need to cross were unmatched. He had helped fugitives before, and his experience and commitment now meant he was a central organizer for the latest desperate influx of freedom seekers.

Despite Smyth’s prominence in the movement, antislavery activists were always in the minority, even in small college towns. As his son put it, the Bowdoin College trustees did not feel the abolitionist cause necessarily advanced the interests of the institution; thus, Smyth and others still had to tread carefully in their balance between private activism and scholarly professionalism.

As Smyth’s son later recollected:

Brunswick, like so many other towns in Maine, had many citizens whose interests were involved in the cotton trade. I remember my father’s being mobbed in Brunswick with some antislavery speakers. His house was one of the stations of the underground railway. Slaves secreted themselves in vessels coming to Portland, or in other ways reached that city, and friends would send them on to Brunswick. There was a black settlement about four miles further on, and they were helped on to Canada. I remember the wales and scars on the backs of the poor creatures.

By 1850, Smyth was no longer a young firebrand. Now he was a weary middle-aged academic, but he was still ready to help. In addition to several older and grown children, he had five children under the age of thirteen, presumably all living at home with him and his wife, Harriet Porter Coffin Smyth. The Smyth family shared a two-story structure, with an attic, that was divided down the middle; another faculty family occupied the other half. Not surprisingly, he wasn’t in a good position to shelter people on his premises for long. But he could help direct and transport fugitives to temporary resting places or otherwise onward in their journeys. As the longtime editor of his antislavery newspaper, he knew the local and even the national antislavery networks. Most important, he was familiar with the Black families in the area. Those families would have been in a far better place to discreetly shelter a Black man in their homes than he, a white professor living in a shared house adjacent to campus, could ever have been. He knew how to both address immediate needs and set fugitives up for some longer-term strategic planning.

After welcoming Jackson and probably sitting with him to scheme a bit, Smyth likely directed Jackson to walk down the street and knock on the door of his neighbors, the Uphams. Perhaps these neighbors might have food, comfort, money, prayer, or ideas to share. Smyth must have assured Jackson that he would be in no danger by crossing the Upham family threshold. Smyth knew he needed to keep his antislavery activities discreet from the Bowdoin authorities, so sending Jackson to one of his colleagues who lived a tad further away from campus and who didn’t share a wall with another family, was probably a wise move. Jackson couldn’t have known it then, but the door he was about to knock on was to become immortalized in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

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This excerpt originally appeared in A Plausible Man: The True Story of the Escaped Slave Who Inspired Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Susanna Ashton. Copyright © 2024 by Susanna Ashton. Published by The New Press. Reprinted here with permission.