A new biography, My Name is Not Tom: The Life of Reverend Josiah Henson, by local historian Susan Cooke Soderberg, offers a fresh perspective on the life of Josiah Henson, an enslaved man from Montgomery County who escaped to Canada and became a respected leader.
Based on over a decade of research, the book uncovers new details about Henson’s life, his role in aiding freedom seekers, and his complex connection to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, challenging long-held narratives about his legacy. The book will be published by Georgetown University Press and is set for release on April 2, 2025. Additional information below, courtesy Susan Cooke Soderberg:
“I was working as a public historian for Montgomery Parks in 2005 when a property came up for sale that was called “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” The County was considering purchasing the property because of its association with a local person by the name of Josiah Henson. I was asked to authenticate that this was indeed the house of Isaac Riley, the enslaver of Josiah Henson. As I investigated resources I discovered that the only biographies of Josiah Henson were based on, and sometimes almost entirely copies of, Henson’s four autobiographies, with little or no outside research. As I was under a time constraint I went ahead and applied for authentication of the site by the National Network to Freedom using the information at hand. The County subsequently purchased the house and one acre for a million dollars in January 2006 and it is now the Josiah Henson Museum and Park.
I was intrigued by the man and, encouraged by my friend Tony Cohen, I proceeded to continue my research after I retired in order to write a definitive biography of this man who grew up enslaved here in Montgomery County, escaped to Canada with his wife and children and became an important and respected figure there. And why was he called “Uncle Tom”?
I spent more than a dozen years traveling from southern Maryland to Kentucky to Canada — walking in his footsteps, visiting the places where he lived and worked, taping into the local historical societies and museums. At home I conducted my research on-line with more and more valuable documents being scanned and digitized.
The result is a biography that uncovers a vast amount of additional material than was previously published in earlier biographies or even in his four autobiographies, and reveals a very different Josiah Henson than previously portrayed.
Josiah Henson was an ordinary man who was able to rise out of enslavement by using his intelligence and insight to adapt to different situations and difficult predicaments. Fortified by his religious convictions and personal courage, he escaped enslavement in Kentucky with his wife and four children in 1830, returning several times later to lead others to freedom. In Canada he dedicated his life to helping his fellow refugees attain a better quality of life through spiritual guidance and education. His constant search for funding to support a school for the formerly enslaved near Dresden, Ontario led him to lecture circuits in New England and in England where he met many well-known and influential people, including Frederick Douglass.
One result of his fund-raising efforts was an autobiography that he dictated to a friend who then published it. This small volume was read by the author Harriet Beecher Stowe who was trying to find a real enslaved man who had enough Christian religious conviction to martyr himself to save others so she could finish her serialized novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. She used an incident from Henson’s life for this purpose and described it in The Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Even though Henson was only one of several individuals upon which Stowe based her title character, two publishers of his subsequent autobiographies used this connected to unabashedly hype publicity for these books, calling Henson “the real Uncle Tom.” After escaping to Scotland from a 100-stop book tour in England orchestrated by an unscrupulous publisher who had tricked him into signing over the copyright of the book, Henson began his speech there with the words — “Now allow me to say that my name is not Tom, and never was Tom, 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.”
This is the source of the title of my book: My Name is Not Tom: The Life of Reverend Josiah Henson, published by Georgetown University Press, to be released April 2, 2025.”