Uncle Tom's Cabin: Stowe Galvanizes Abolition

Harriet Beecher Stowe had never visited a Southern plantation when she began writing the most politically explosive novel in American history. Uncle Tom’s Cabin started appearing in serial form in the National Era, an abolitionist newspaper in Washington, D.C., on June 5, 1851. Stowe had promised the editor a story that would run for three or four installments. She wrote for forty-one weeks. Stowe was the daughter, sister, and wife of prominent Protestant clergymen, and she wrote from a religious conviction that slavery was a sin against God that stained every American who tolerated it. Her immediate catalyst was the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which required citizens in free states to assist in the capture and return of escaped slaves. The law forced Northerners who had previously ignored slavery to become complicit in it, and Stowe’s fury at that complicity drove her prose. Published as a book in March 1852, Uncle Tom’s Cabin sold 300,000 copies in its first year in the United States and over a million in Britain. The novel’s depiction of slavery’s brutality, particularly the death of Uncle Tom at the hands of the sadistic Simon Legree and the desperate river crossing of the enslaved mother Eliza, reached readers who had never engaged with abolitionist arguments. Stage adaptations played to packed theaters across the North. Southern critics attacked the book as propaganda and several states banned its sale. The novel did not cause the Civil War, but it radicalized millions of readers who might otherwise have remained indifferent to slavery’s expansion. When Abraham Lincoln allegedly met Stowe in 1862 and said, "So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war," he was exaggerating for effect. But only slightly. No other work of American fiction has altered public opinion on a political question with comparable force or speed.