“Among all the singular and interesting records to which the institution of American slavery has given rise,” Harriet Beecher Stowe once wrote, “we know of none more striking, more characteristic and instructive, than that of JOSIAH HENSON.”

Stowe first wrote about Henson’s 1849 autobiography in her 1853 book A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, an annotated bibliography of sorts in which she cited a number of nonfiction accounts she had used as source material for her best-selling novel. Stowe later said that Henson’s narrative had served as an inspiration for Uncle Tom.

Proslavery newspaper columnists and southern planters had responded to the huge success of Uncle Tom’s Cabin by accusing Stowe of hyperbole and outright falsehood. Benevolent masters, they said, took great care of the enslaved people who worked for them; in some cases, they treated them like family. The violent, inhumane conditions Stowe described, they contended, were fictitious. By naming her sources, and outlining how they had influenced her story, Stowe hoped to prove that her novel was rooted in fact.

A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin was an immediate success; its publisher reported selling 90,000 copies by the end of 1854. Abraham Lincoln himself may have read the book, at a crucial turning point in the Civil War: Records indicate that the 16th president checked it out from the Library of Congress on June 16, 1862, and returned it on July 29. Those 43 days correspond with the period during which Lincoln drafted the Emancipation Proclamation.

Who was Josiah Henson? Born in 1789, according to his autobiography, he was enslaved in Maryland and Kentucky and served as an overseer before escaping to Canada in 1830. By 1862, when Lincoln checked out the Key, Henson had helped found a 200-acre settlement in Ontario, known as Dawn, which provided a refuge for hundreds of free Black people who had fled bondage in America. He had also made numerous return trips to the American South to help guide enslaved people to freedom. In total, Henson said, he freed 118 people; by comparison, Harriet Tubman is believed to have freed about 70.

I first learned about Henson’s remarkable life a year or so ago, as I was doing research for a different story. I wondered why I hadn’t heard of him sooner. He was one of the first Black people to be an exhibitor at a World’s Fair. He met with President Rutherford B. Hayes and Queen Victoria. He built businesses that gave Black fugitives a livelihood after years of exploitation. Why weren’t American students being taught about Henson when they learned about Tubman, or assigned his autobiography alongside Frederick Douglass’s?

One reason might be that Henson chose, after escaping the United States at age 41, to spend the rest of his life in Canada, the country that gave him his freedom and full citizenship. And perhaps educators have been reluctant to spend too much time on a man known as “the original Uncle Tom” when that term has become a virulent insult.

But Henson was not Uncle Tom. Despite being forever linked with the fictional character after Stowe revealed him as a source of inspiration, he longed to be recognized by his own name, and for his own achievements. And he publicly wrestled with the role he had played, as an overseer, in abetting slavery’s violence and cruelty.

Henson’s biography and legacy, I came to see, defy easy categorization. His is not a linear story of triumph over hardship. Rather, it is a story that reflects the complexity and moral incongruence that animated the lives of enslavers and shaped the lives of the enslaved. It is a story of how a man who was at once a victim and a perpetuator of slavery’s evils tried, and failed, and hoped, and evolved, and regretted, and mourned, and tried again. It is a story that reveals the impossibility of being a moral person in a fundamentally immoral system.

“Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a very bad novel,” James Baldwin wrote in his 1949 essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel.” Published when Baldwin was just 24 years old, the essay helped establish the young writer as one of America’s fiercest social critics. Baldwin writes that Stowe’s book was gratuitous, overly sentimental, and two-dimensional, “not intended to do anything more than prove that slavery was wrong.” He concludes: “This makes material for a pamphlet but it is hardly enough for a novel.”

In many ways, the book did serve as a pamphlet; abolitionists saw it as a means for laying bare the horrors of slavery to white northerners. (Supporters of slavery saw it as a threat. One minister in Maryland was arrested and imprisoned for owning a copy, along with other abolitionist literature.) Uncle Tom’s Cabin is said to have been, aside from the Bible, the best-selling book of the 19th century. Originally serialized in a newspaper, The National Era, over the course of 44 weeks, the complete book was published in March 1852. It sold an estimated 300,000 copies in the U.S., and more than 2 million worldwide, in its first year.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin is indeed, as Baldwin suggests, filled with stereotypes. “In order to appreciate the sufferings of the negroes sold south, it must be remembered that all the instinctive affections of that race are peculiarly strong,” Stowe writes. “Their local attachments are very abiding. They are not naturally daring and enterprising, but home-loving and affectionate.” When describing the songs enslaved people sang together, Stowe explains that “the negro mind, impassioned and imaginative, always attaches itself to hymns and expressions of a vivid and pictorial nature.”

The scholar Jim O’Loughlin, who has written extensively about the literary and cultural implications of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, refers to Stowe’s posture as one of “romantic racialism.” Even when the writer is ostensibly celebrating or sympathizing with Black characters, O’Loughlin told me, she posits an essentialist view of them.

Worse, Stowe’s Black characters venerate whiteness and disparage themselves. “Now, Missis, do jist look at dem beautiful white hands o’ yourn, with long fingers, and all a sparkling with rings, like my white lilies when de dew’s on ’em,” Aunt Chloe, an enslaved woman, says to her white mistress. “And look at my great black stumpin hands. Now, don’t ye think dat de Lord must have meant me to make de pie-crust, and you to stay in de parlor?” As Baldwin puts it: “Here, black equates with evil and white with grace.”

Still, when I read it recently, sections of the book took me by surprise. My understanding of Uncle Tom, I came to see, had been informed less by the character in the book than by the distortions of the character that followed in the succeeding decades, when he came to be known as a lackey and a traitor. The Tom of the novel, while not as fully realized as some of Stowe’s white characters, was kind, thoughtful, and brave—a tragic hero who sacrifices his own life rather than give up information about where two enslaved Black women are hiding. This was not the Tom I thought I knew.

[Harriet Beecher Stowe: Women, unite against slavery]

I was also fascinated by some of the exchanges between the white characters on the morality of slavery, as exemplified by a conversation between Miss Ophelia and her cousin Augustine St. Clare. Miss Ophelia, a white woman from the North who has come to stay with the slave-owning St. Clare and his family down South, doesn’t understand how her cousin—who she believes to be a kind, good-hearted man—can participate in such an egregious institution.

“I say it’s perfectly abominable for you to defend such a system!” said Miss Ophelia, with increasing warmth.

“I defend it, my dear lady? Who ever said I did defend it?” said St. Clare.

“Of course, you defend it,—you all do,—all you Southerners. What do you have slaves for, if you don’t?”

“Are you such a sweet innocent as to suppose nobody in this world ever does what they don’t think is right? Don’t you, or didn’t you ever, do anything that you did not think quite right?”

“If I do, I repent of it, I hope,” said Miss Ophelia, rattling her needles with energy.

“So do I,” said St. Clare, peeling his orange; “I’m repenting of it all the time.”

The exchange is perhaps the most human and morally complex in the novel. It serves as a reminder to contemporary readers that slavery was not perpetuated simply by malevolent caricatures of evil, but also by ordinary people who suspected that slavery was wrong yet were unwilling to surrender the social and economic benefits it brought to their life.

In his 1849 autobiography and in subsequent editions of the book, Josiah Henson similarly contended with the fact that he’d been both a victim and an instrument of the institution’s brutality. As a teenager, he’d craved his master’s approval. “One word of commendation from the petty despot who ruled over us would set me up for a month,” Henson reflected. “My pride and ambition had made me master of every kind of farmwork.” (All of the quotes I am using are drawn from the 1881 edition of the book, generally considered the most complete version.) He soon became an overseer, attempting to cultivate both the trust of his enslaver and the respect of his fellow enslaved workers.

In 1825, when Henson was 35 and married with two children, his enslaver, Isaac Riley, came into his cabin with a request. Riley was in serious financial trouble; he told Henson that a court was threatening to liquidate his assets, including his enslaved workers. “They’ve got judgment against me,” Riley said, “and in less than two weeks every nigger I’ve got will be put up and sold.”

Rather than sell his property, Riley decided to hide it from the authorities, and enlisted Henson to help him. He told Henson he needed him to take 21 enslaved people from his plantation in Maryland to his brother’s plantation in Kentucky: a 700-mile journey.

Henson had never been outside the Washington, D.C., area, and the notion of the trip was daunting. But the alternative was devastating in its own right. He remembered watching his mother being separated from five of her six children at an auction when he was a boy. He could still recall the indelible image of his father being tortured for a transgression against a white overseer. His father’s ear had been severed from his head before he was ultimately sold down South. For Henson, the prospect of being separated from his own wife and children, or being even partly responsible for other family separations, was too painful to consider. He told Riley that he would go to Kentucky.

Henson’s mother stayed behind. This was perhaps a way of discouraging Henson from trying to escape after leaving the plantation—even if he was not caught, his mother could be punished in his stead, a common tactic among enslavers.

On a cold night in February, Henson led the group away from the plantation, with a travel pass provided by Riley in hand. Children rode in a horse-drawn wagon. Adults walked. When they reached the Ohio River, Henson sold the horse and wagon for a boat, and he and his charges began making their way down the river.

In Cincinnati, they encountered a group of free Black people who told them they should stay in Ohio instead of continuing on to Kentucky. Ohio was a free state; Henson and his traveling companions could make a new life—a free life. “They told us we were fools to think of going on and surrendering ourselves up to a new owner,” Henson recounted in his autobiography, “that now we could be our own masters, and put ourselves out of all reach of pursuit.” The possibility was tantalizing. But as much as he desired freedom, he had never imagined that escape would be the means by which he gained it.

Henson was a preacher on the Riley plantation, and his hesitancy stemmed in part from his religious conviction. “The duties of the slave to his master as appointed over him in the Lord, I had ever heard urged by ministers and religious men,” Henson said. Believing that God wanted him to be a man of his word, Henson told the other enslaved people in his party to get back on the boat—he had made a promise to bring them to Kentucky.

In A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Stowe, a devout Christian herself, wrote about how this decision was part of what had inspired her to draw on Henson’s story for her novel:

Those casuists among us who lately seem to think and teach that it is right for us to violate the plain commands of God, whenever some great national good can be secured by it, would do well to contemplate the inflexible principle of this poor slave, who, without being able to read a letter of the Bible, was yet enabled to perform this most sublime act of self-renunciation in obedience to its commands.

Henson was so committed to what he understood as the will of the lord that he sacrificed his own freedom—in a sense, his own life—to follow it. How many people, Stowe contemplates, would have done the same in his position?

I take issue with Stowe’s assertion; I find it impossible to disentangle what motivated Henson’s decision from its outcome. I cannot admire his devotion to God without confronting how his understanding of God’s will had been manipulated by enslavers. I cannot admire the fidelity behind his choice without confronting its insidious implications.

As I read the scene in Henson’s autobiography, I thought about the way in which Black people were routinely conscripted to enact the violence of slavery upon one another even as they experienced it themselves. To be enslaved, Henson understood, was to be constantly presented with a series of impossible choices, never knowing whether you’d made the right one. (Had he remained in Ohio, would his mother, still living on Riley’s Maryland plantation, have suffered the consequences?) Henson later described his regret over this fateful decision:

Often since that day has my soul been pierced with bitter anguish, at the thought of having been thus instrumental in consigning to the infernal bondage of slavery, so many of my fellow-beings. I have wrestled in prayer with God for forgiveness.

Isaac Riley kept falling further into debt, and eventually sent an agent to Kentucky to sell all of his enslaved property on his brother Amos’s plantation—except for Henson and his family. Henson watched as the people he had led from Maryland to Kentucky were sold. He watched them cry. He watched them beg. He watched them get hauled away. He knew that this would not have happened but for his decision to leave Ohio. This was the price of the piety that Stowe so admired.

Two years later, accompanying Amos Riley’s 21-year-old son on a trip to New Orleans, Henson stopped in Vicksburg, Mississippi. He saw many of the people from Maryland whom Riley had sold. “It was the saddest visit I ever made,” he later said.

Four years in an unhealthy climate and under a hard master had done the ordinary work of twenty. Their cheeks were literally caved in with starvation and disease. They described their daily life, which was to toil half-naked in malarious marshes, under a burning, maddening sun, exposed to poison of mosquitoes and black gnats, and they said they looked forward to death as their only deliverance. Some of them fairly cried at seeing me there, and at the thought of the fate which they felt awaited me. Their worst fears of being sold down South had been more than realised. I went away sick at heart, and to this day the remembrance of that wretched group haunts me.

I met Lauren Bokor, an archaeologist and museum educator, in her office at the top of the house where Isaac Riley once lived. The house is now part of the Josiah Henson Museum and Park, which opened in North Bethesda, Maryland, in 2021—one of several signs of renewed public attention for Henson. In recent years, his story has been told in books and in a documentary directed by Jared Brock, who wrote The Road to Dawn: Josiah Henson and the Story That Sparked the Civil War (2018).

Bokor showed me a map of the land that had once belonged to Riley. I looked out the window at the homes lining Old Georgetown Road and asked Bokor if their inhabitants knew that they were living on a former plantation.

“No, I really don’t think so,” she said. Bokor, who is white, grew up and attended high school nearby in Montgomery County in the 2000s. She read Uncle Tom’s Cabin in class but, like many of her colleagues, had never heard of Henson before she applied to work here. (Bokor has since left the museum.)

Joyce Greene, a Black woman who became a docent at the museum after she retired, told me she lives up the street. Greene considers herself a deeply engaged student of Black history, but she told me that before her first visit to the museum, she also had never heard of Henson. “I had friends of mine that didn’t even believe that Maryland was a slave state,” Greene told me.

In Riley’s former living room, I told Mark Thorne, the site manager for the museum, that I was having trouble overcoming the emotional hurdle of Henson’s choice to bring his group to Kentucky from Ohio. Thorne, who is Black, said some Black visitors have a hard time forgiving Henson, even if they know that he never forgave himself.

But Thorne believes that Henson’s experience watching his friends get sold, separated, and sent to plantations farther south served as the motivation for his later work helping enslaved people escape to Canada.

“I think that is what gave him the drive. That’s what made him be like, ‘I’ve got to make this right,’ ” Thorne told me. “If he hadn’t done that, would he have been so determined to do good?”

Henson had been unsure, before he set out on that trip to New Orleans, about its purpose, but he soon realized that he was going to be sold. He was furious, and decided to kill the young Riley in his sleep. But just as he was about to bring down the axe, the same Christian conviction that had prevented him from staying in free Ohio prevented him from striking the deadly blow. (This was another moment that Stowe describes as being deeply moving to her.) Instead, in an unexpected turn of events, Henson saved Riley’s son’s life.

Some days after Henson had nearly killed him, Riley’s son became gravely ill with malaria. Henson nursed him back to health. “If I had sold him I should have died,” the young Riley said. To thank Henson, he decided not to sell him.

When Henson returned to Kentucky and was reunited with his family, he vowed not to leave the question of whether he’d be separated from them again to the health or economic circumstances of the Rileys. He was going to escape, and he was going to bring his family with him.

On a moonless Saturday night in September 1830, Henson and his family left the Riley plantation. Sundays were rest days, and on that Monday and Tuesday, he was supposed to work on a farm many miles away; he hoped that they might gain a head start before anyone noticed his absence. For an enslaved person, running away carried enormous risk—most fugitives were caught and returned or died in the process. Running away with a child made a successful journey to freedom all the more improbable. Running away with four children would have seemed like a suicide mission. But Henson was determined. His wife, Charlotte, made him a knapsack that he could use to carry their two youngest children on his back.

For two weeks, the family traveled through insufferable cold, with meager rations, always by night to avoid detection. They were aided by people who were sympathetic to the cause of abolition. After more than a month of travel, Henson came upon a schooner at the edge of Lake Erie. He told a worker on the schooner who he was and what he was doing, and asked for help getting his family across the water to Canada. The ship’s captain, a Scottish man, agreed to bring them to Buffalo, New York, where they could take a ferry across the border.

In Buffalo, the captain arranged and paid for the ferry. Henson was overcome with emotion and thanked the man for his kindness. Before the ferry pushed off from the shore, Henson promised the captain, “I’ll use my freedom well.”

Upon arriving in Canada, Henson fell to the ground, grabbed handfuls of sand, and kissed them as the grains dribbled through his fingers. The 600-plus-mile journey had taken a month and a half. Henson was 41 years old. His family was with him. He was finally free.

Matt Williams

He soon found work on a farm and made a home for his family in a shanty that had previously been occupied by pigs. He used a shovel to get rid of the thick membrane of manure that lined the floors. Over time, as he saved money, he was able to purchase some pigs of his own, a horse, and a cow.

He took seriously the vow he had made to the captain before he crossed into Canada. “After I had tasted the blessings of freedom,” Henson recounted in his autobiography, “my mind reverted to those whom I knew were groaning in captivity, and I at once proceeded to take measures to free as many as I could.” After establishing himself in Canada, Henson traveled back to the American South to help others make their way to freedom.

On one trip to Kentucky, in order to prevent white people from thinking that he was a fugitive, he pretended to be mentally ill:

To this end I procured some dried leaves, put them into a cloth and bound it all round my face, reaching nearly to my eyes, and pretended to be so seriously affected in my head and teeth as not to be able to speak … To all their numerous inquiries I merely shook my head, mumbled out indistinct answers, and acted so that they could not get anything out of me; and, by this artifice, I succeeded in avoiding any unpleasant consequences.

The return trip was even more treacherous. At one point, a young boy in the caravan became violently ill. The other members of the group began to take turns carrying him on their back, but his condition worsened. The boy asked to be left in a secluded place to die alone; he didn’t want to hold back the group. It was another impossible choice: care for the boy and risk the entire group being caught, or abandon him? Reluctantly, they left him behind, only for the boy’s brother to soon lament the decision and run back to his sibling. A stroke of luck spared the travelers from further deliberation: They met a Quaker man whose family offered to care for the boy until he recovered, while the rest went on.

The group eventually reached the Canadian shoreline. Henson watched as they crossed the border and experienced a deep sense of pride. “They danced and wept for joy, and kissed the earth on which they first stepped, no longer the SLAVE—but the FREE.”

I wondered whether Henson felt that he had paid his moral debt. Could he ever? Did the 118 people he said he saved from slavery justify the 18 who were sold after his failure to let them stay in Ohio?

At the museum in Maryland, Mark Thorne told me that he believes spending too much time considering what Henson should or shouldn’t have done misses the point. By asking whether his decisions were right or wrong, we focus more on individual actions than on the larger system of barbarity in which those decisions had to be made. As one of Thorne’s colleagues at the museum puts it, “He was trying to be an honorable man in a dishonorable system.”

Or as Henson put it: “Before God I tried to do my best, and the error of judgment lies at the door of the degrading system under which I had been nurtured.”

When Henson was about 50 years old, his son, who had begun a bit of schooling, started teaching his father how to read. The confidence that this skill gave Henson inspired him to imagine a new set of possibilities, both for himself and for those around him. Starting around 1833, Henson worked with a group of other Black refugees to search for land they could call their own. He was chosen to select the location for the group, and soon he came across an area east of Lake St. Clair and the Detroit River—a township named Dawn. Here, a group of people who had once been tasked with sustaining the land for others might be able to sustain some for themselves.

Henson worked hard to raise money for Dawn. “I have made many journeys into New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Maine,” he later reflected, “in all of which States I have found or made many friends to the cause.” On a trip to Boston in the 1840s, he met and befriended a politician named Samuel Atkins Eliot. Eliot was moved by Henson’s life story, which he soon decided to write down and read back to Henson for his approval. The Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave, Now an Inhabitant of Canada, as Narrated by Himself was published in 1849.

The slave narrative was by then an established genre in American literature. These books played an essential role in bringing the experiences and interior lives of formerly enslaved people—almost all of whom had escaped to freedom—to the attention of a wide audience. Because most enslaved people were legally or socially prevented from learning how to read and write, some authors dictated their stories to white abolitionists. Others, like Frederick Douglass, wrote their own stories. The first edition of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave: Written by Himself was published in 1845 and became the most famous of the American slave narratives.

[From the March 2021 issue: Stories of slavery, from those who survived it]

In her book, Sharp Flashes of Lightning Come From Black Clouds: The Life of Josiah Henson, Jamie Ferguson Kuhns, a historian who has worked closely with the Josiah Henson Museum in Maryland, writes that Henson’s autobiography sold decently in its first few years. But after the 1853 publication of Stowe’s A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Henson’s name became widely known, and sales of his own book exploded. It became one of the three most popular slave narratives in the world, alongside Douglass’s and Olaudah Equiano’s, which was first published in England in 1789.

Scholars have debated when, exactly, Stowe first encountered Henson’s story, when she met Henson, and whether she may have distorted these facts to support the veracity of her book. (Scholars have also noted other figures and slave narratives she likely drew upon for inspiration when creating the character of Uncle Tom. In his book Mightier Than the Sword: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Battle for America, David S. Reynolds cites “Stowe’s insistence that no individual source yielded any character.” Reynolds names several other possible sources for Tom, including a freedman named Thomas Magruder, who lived in a cabin in Indianapolis known as Uncle Tom’s Cabin.) According to Henson, Stowe invited him to meet her at her home in Andover, Massachusetts, in 1849. Stowe, he said, was “deeply interested in the story of my life and misfortunes, and had me narrate its details to her.” But the scholar Marion Starling, in her 1981 book, The Slave Narrative: Its Place in American History, suggests that Stowe’s explicit linking of Henson to Uncle Tom was “an afterthought and a publicity stunt.” In this version of events, Stowe did not meet Henson until 1853, a year after Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published. Only by 1858, Starling argues, did Stowe begin emphasizing the importance of Henson’s story as a way of providing further legitimacy to her own. That year, Stowe wrote a preface to a new edition of Henson’s autobiography.

[Read: Atlantic articles by Harriet Beecher Stowe]

Stowe’s novel was so popular that it spawned a cottage industry: There were Uncle Tom toys, games, handkerchiefs, even coffee mugs. As Jim O’Loughlin has written, “It was perhaps the most influential cultural text in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America not despite its varied incarnations, but because of them.” But it also sparked a backlash. Before the Civil War, at least 29 “anti-Tom” novels were published, according to Reynolds, many portraying life for enslaved people in the South as better than it was for free Black people in the North.

Anti-Tom minstrel shows also became popular; these performances riffed on the novel’s characters and plot in order to defend slavery. (Stowe could do nothing to stop these performances; federal copyright law did not give authors the right to control adaptations of their work until 1870.) In Stowe’s novel, Tom is a strong, Christian martyr. By contrast, some of the anti-Tom novels and plays present him as weak and docile, in need of, and grateful for, the protection of a white master. Many more people saw Uncle Tom plays than ever read the book. The proliferation of anti-Tom works meant that, over time, the idea of “Uncle Tom” shifted in the public consciousness.

Henson himself was, understandably, ambivalent about the association. “I have been called ‘Uncle Tom,’ and I feel proud of that title,” he reflected in his autobiography. “If my humble words in any way inspired that gifted lady to write such a plaintive story that the whole community has been touched with pity for the sufferings of the poor slave, I have not lived in vain.” In 1876, Henson went on a speaking tour of Great Britain. To draw in audiences, his talks—arranged by John Lobb, a white Englishman who edited the edition of his book published that year—were marketed as an opportunity to see the “original” Uncle Tom. According to Lobb, Henson, then in his late 80s, spoke to more than half a million people during his time in Britain. He even met Queen Victoria, at Windsor Castle in early 1877.

But Henson, it seems, may have also grown weary of being tied to the character of Uncle Tom, and perhaps of being overshadowed by him. In a speech in Glasgow, Scotland, Henson made a point of proclaiming that he was his own man—not the character from Stowe’s books or any of that character’s countless popular depictions and distortions. “Now allow me to say that my name is not Tom, and never was Tom,” he said, “and that I do not want to have any other name inserted in the newspapers for me than my own. My name is Josiah Henson, always was, and always will be.”

In the early 20th century, “Uncle Tom” became an epithet used to describe Black people who supported white efforts at segregation. During the civil-rights movement, it was employed as a term of derision among activists—Malcolm X used it frequently in his speeches. As Kuhns notes, he directed it with particular venom toward Martin Luther King Jr. “Just as Uncle Tom, back during slavery, used to keep the Negroes from resisting the bloodhound, or resisting the Ku Klux Klan, by teaching them to love their enemy, or pray for those who use them spitefully, today Martin Luther King is just a 20th-century or modern Uncle Tom,” Malcolm said—not a hero, but a traitor.

Dresden, Ontario, in early spring was layered with intermittent patches of snow that had fallen in the days before, and the sky was covered in a blanket of silver clouds signaling that another snowstorm was imminent. I had come to visit the site of Henson’s Dawn settlement, a community that covered 200 acres and became a refuge for hundreds of free Black people. Henson’s home still stands here, as does a museum dedicated to his life. Until recently, it was known as Uncle Tom’s Historic Site.

Local members of the Black community had tried to change the museum’s name since the 1990s, but their efforts always fell short. “There were members of the community that were concerned that we’re going to lose that name recognition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. So the decision was made to keep it as it was,” Steven Cook, the curator of the museum, told me. Cook is a fifth-generation descendant  of refugees who escaped to Canada from Kentucky.

Finally, in 2022, the museum decided to rename the site the Josiah Henson Museum of African-Canadian History. Some community members complained that the change amounted to rewriting history. “It soon became apparent to us that they believed that Uncle Tom was an actual person that lived on this road,” Cook said, shaking his head. “So we had that battle against us, to educate the public as to why the fictitious character had taken over Josiah Henson’s real story.”

[From the September 1896 issue: The story of Uncle Tom’s Cabin]

Cook brought me into a room called the Underground Railroad Freedom Gallery. To our right were two glass cases holding some of the tools of torture and control used on Amos Riley’s plantation in Kentucky.

There was a bullwhip with tight, tan coils, its leather tip tied in a knot at the end to intensify the violence of the lash when it struck the backs of the enslaved. There was a speculum oris, whose long black prongs were used to hold open the mouths of enslaved people who refused to eat. There was a thumbscrew, used to crush the fingers of someone who, for example, failed to provide information about the whereabouts of a runaway. There was a billy club, shackles connected to a ball and chain, and a pair of handcuffs so small that they could only have been used on children.

In an adjacent case was an item that I had read about but had never seen in person—an iron collar that would be placed around the neck of an enslaved person to either prevent them from running away or punish them for having already done so. It looked so heavy, so menacing, gleaming under the museum lights.

I was beginning to feel overwhelmed by the presence of these tools, imagining how they had been used to punish and torture. But Cook has a different way of thinking about them. “When I’m in this section,” he said, “I always talk about This is why our people resisted. ” Enslavers “had to create these devices and keep adapting them, because we kept escaping. We kept trying and resisting.”

I looked at the iron collar and imagined it wrapped around the neck of an enslaved woman. Maybe she had been trying to escape with her child and was caught in the woods by dogs and men on horses. I thought of how unwieldy the collar would be, how she wouldn’t have been able to bend down and hug her child. I thought about Josiah Henson, and how a collar like this might have been worn by some of the people around him on the Riley plantation. As an overseer, Henson himself had been responsible for ensuring that the other enslaved workers did all that they were supposed to do.

“I often wonder, in that position, did he have to dole out punishment?” Cook said.

Had Henson ever placed someone’s finger in a thumbscrew? Had he ever whipped someone? Had he ever shackled someone to a ball and chain? Had he ever been the one to turn the key that locked an iron collar around a neck? Henson never mentioned an instance like this in his autobiography, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. Some historians have estimated that as many as two-thirds of overseers were Black. Even Uncle Tom, at the end of Stowe’s novel, is beaten to death by two Black slave drivers.

The job of every overseer, Black or white, was the same: Control. Production. Punishment. Perhaps this is a reason Henson is excluded from the pantheon of well-known fugitives from slavery; it is difficult to tell a wholly inspiring story about someone who might have, even reluctantly, inflicted the torture themselves.

Cook and I made our way outside, where the temperature had begun to drop as the sun started its slow descent behind the trees. I examined the remnants of the community that Henson had built, and thought about what a loss it is that he has not been part of our collective understanding of the history of slavery. Not every enslaved person was Frederick Douglass. Not every enslaved person was Harriet Tubman. And even those two individuals, as celebrated as they are, were not the morally unadulterated characters that we sometimes make them out to be. Which is to say, they were human. So was Josiah Henson. There is value in reading a slave narrative in which the central protagonist makes morally dubious decisions, regrets them, struggles with them. For the 250 years that the institution existed, generations of people were forced to make a series of impossible decisions within it.

We walked to the far end of the site, where a wooden cabin stood: Josiah Henson’s home. It was here that, on August 1, 1854, he sat with Douglass, who had come to visit the settlement for Canada’s Emancipation Day, commemorating the end of slavery in the country 20 years prior.

[From the January 1867 issue: Frederick Douglass’s “Appeal to Congress for Impartial Suffrage”]

I looked around and imagined the moment. These two men had, each in his own way, become giants of the antislavery movement. Henson, then in his 60s, was almost 30 years older than Douglass. By this time he had seven children and at least 10 grandchildren. I wondered if they spoke about how unlikely such a meeting would have felt to them all those decades ago, when they were both boys born into bondage in Maryland. I wondered if they traded stories of meeting the sorts of people—presidents, queens, archbishops—who once seemed to exist in a different world. I wondered if they spoke about their books, having both written memoirs that shaped the consciousness of a nation. I wondered if they commiserated over those they had lost. I wondered if they laughed together, remembering something their children or grandchildren had done that had filled their bellies with delight. I wondered if they felt a sense of peace. I hoped so.

This article appears in the October 2023 print edition with the headline “The Man Who Became Uncle Tom.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.