Uncle Tom's Cabin

Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin as a protest against the Compromise of 1850, specifically its Fugitive Slave Law, which required Northerners to abet the South in its retrieval of runaway slaves. Serialized in The National Era beginning in 1851 and published in book form on March 20, 1852, by John P. Jewett, Stowe's response to the incursion of slave law into free states took the United States by storm. The novel sold 50,000 copies in its first two months, 300,000 in its first year, and by early 1853, Americans and Britains had bought one million copies. The novel was such a phenomenon that when Abraham Lincoln met Stowe in 1852, he is said to have greeted her with these famous words: "So you're the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war!"

Many factors explain the enormous popularity of Stowe's abolitionist novel. Uncle Tom's Cabin combines a lively and accessible writing style with a portrait of antebellum American society that Northern readers, in particular, found convincing, thoughtful, and sympathetic. For example, Stowe's scenes of domestic life illustrated her culture's belief in the sanctity of family. Her representations of various regions in America evoked the nation's diverse geography, language, and thought. Perhaps most important, in linking the story of Uncle Tom's suffering with the life and death of Jesus Christ, Stowe had woven together slavery, the most controversial issue of the time, with Christianity, the culture's most profound belief system. Her political point was that Christianity and slavery were mutually exclusive. And, in choosing the vehicle of sentimental fiction, which appealed to readers' emotions through a series of unforgettable characters—Uncle Tom, Topsy, Eva, Legree—she succeeded beyond her wildest expectations.

Most Southerners would have none of this. Reviews of the novel indicate that Southern readers were outraged by Stowe's contention that slavery ravaged families, denigrated labor, and encouraged sexual indiscretion. They argued that she had misrepresented slavery and the South, insisting that Stowe's characterization was based on little, if not concocted, evidence. Censorship of the novel was unusual, although incidents of book burning in Virginia and Georgia did occur. A more typical response can be found in a set of more than twenty novels, known as "anti-Uncle Tom" novels, which represented happy slaves and their sensitive masters, who, unlike factory owners, fed, clothed, and cared for slaves in sickness and old age.

Nine years after Uncle Tom's Cabin was published, the Civil War began. War was not Stowe's solution to the problem of slavery. Sympathy was. At the novel's conclusion, she asked readers to "feel right" (p. 624). Once they did, Stowe believed that slavery would end. History, however, wrote a different ending. Stowe's son, Fred, fought, was wounded at Gettysburg in 1863, struggled with alcoholism, and disappeared sometime in 1871, never again to be heard of by his family. Stowe viewed the nation's conflict through a Christian framework: war became the necessary and final confrontation with the evils of slavery. In its indictment of those evils, Uncle Tom's Cabin laid the psychological groundwork for that struggle, and inaugurated a tradition of American reform literature that flourishes today.

Abolitionists; Slavery; Tubman, Harriet.

Gossett, Thomas F. Uncle Tom's Cabin and American Culture. Dallas, TX: Southern Methodist University Press, 1985.

Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom's Cabin or, Life Among the Lowly (1852). New York: Penguin, 1981, edited and with an introduction by Ann Douglas.

Weinstein Cindy, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Harriet Beecher Stowe. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

"Uncle Tom's Cabin and American Culture." Archive directed by Stephen Railton. University of Virginia, Department of English. Available from <http://www.iath.virginia.edu/ut c>