According to many, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin did not just reflect the author's era. They contend that the novel actually affected the history of that era. When President Abraham Lincoln met Stowe during the Civil War, he reportedly exclaimed, "So this is the little lady who made this big war" (Lincoln in Gerson, p. 163).
Conflict over slavery mounts: 1830-1850. In 1830 the United States, a land of different subcultures, had been united for barely fifty years. During this time its two settled regions, the North and the South, headed in increasingly different directions. The North, consisting mainly of family farms and reliant on an economic system of free labor, began to industrialize and urbanize. Meanwhile, the South, made up of great plantations as well as family farms, became committed to largescale agriculture and the use of black slave labor.
Until the 1830s the two regions shared some common ground concerning slavery. Southern liberals, who hoped the practice would die out naturally, had begun to push for emancipation. In 1831-32, the Virginia legislature openly debated such a proposal, and it was defeated by only fifteen votes.
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