2023/12/01 by Daniel Immerwahr · 1 voice
Social Sciences · Business, Management and Accounting · #Race, History, and American Society #American History and Culture
paper · doi:10.1093/jahist/jaad263
openalex publication_date 2023/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
Of those who escaped slavery and told the tale, few inspired such admiration as the Reverend Josiah Henson. No slave narrative was as “instructive” as his, the author Harriet Beecher Stowe believed. Indeed, Stowe used Henson's pious account of suffering slavery's torments as a basis for her wildly popular novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin (1854). Henson's life, she explained, ran “parallel with that of Uncle Tom,” her personification of enslaved virtue. The Uncle Tom connection made Henson into a celebrity, a living embodiment of “the archetypal ‘good slave,’” the scholar Jan Marsh has written.1 If Henson was the celebrated “good slave,” then Harry Smith was something else. He certainly was not celebrated; he barely registers in the historical record, and most of what we know about him is from an error-riddled and unreliable slave narrative quietly published in 1891 by an obscure Michigan press. Nor was he, by his own reckoning, good. He had been “very saucy and mischevious” as a youth, and his five decades in bondage did little to change that. Telling his story in his old age, Smith reveled in its seediness. He recounted drinking, gambling, having trysts with white women, punching a woman in a brothel, and waving a pilfered pistol in a white infant's face. Such were the “flaming truths” of slavery, his editor wrote.2