UNCLE TOM’S CABIN first appeared in 1851 as a serial in the abolitionist newspaper The National Era; when it came out in book form the next year, it quickly sold three hundred thousand copies. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s immensely powerful tract (without it, Charles Sumner claimed, Lincoln would never have been elected President) long outlived the war it helped bring about and has left in our national consciousness at least one indelible image: the slave Eliza, child in arms, fleeing across the ice to freedom.

In 1892 an ex-slave named Lewis George Clark wrote of the people he knew whom Mrs. Stowe had incorporated into her story and of his own role in it. His account, never before published, appears here through the courtesy of a New York autograph collector:

”… You must not think that you are reading a letter from a school-taught man for I never went to any school in my life. My teachers was two little nieces of Mrs. H. B. Stowe in Cambridgeport Mass, in the years of ’44 and ’45 at odd times. Their names was Francis Louisa and Mary Lina Safford at that time. Mr. Saffords was my home while I was traveling over the country trying to expose the slave system.

“I ran away from the auction in August in the year of 18 and 41 in Lancaster, Garrod Co., Ky. and was not able to read a good book at that time, any more than our horses or mules, and was sold for the same selfish purposes.

“As to the truth of Uncle Tom’s Cabin it is fixed up and some connections made that is fictitious. But as to the characters that it is based on, they are true and you must not mind the places that things took place nor the names of persons. They are almost all fictitious while facts are clearly true. Eliza did cross the ice and I did tell Mrs. Stowe of it, and she had her little boy with her, and in writing she called me George Harris while my name is Lewis G. Clark.

”… It was not uncommon for men to cross the Ohio River on the ice though not when it was in that fix. Although there was a young girl a little while before the war that crossed on the ice while it was floated and she got on it above Cincinnati and floated and jumped from flake to flake until she got away below Cincinnati. At last she got off and went in a barn and the owner in the morning found her and took her to the house and dried and fed her. Then [he] took her to the care of Nathan Haliday and he put her on the cars and sent her to Chicago to the old tried and true Mr. Carpenter and she told them that Mrs. Henry Harug [?] in Windsor,