Uncle Tom's Cabin
Resentment of the Fugitive Slave Act continued to simmer among many Yankees. Even the heart of an occasional law-and-order man could be melted by the vision of a runaway manacled for return to bondage. Among evangelical Protestants who had been swept into the antislavery movement by the Second Great Awakening, such a vision generated outrage and activism. This is what gave Uncle Tom's Cabin such outstanding success. As the daughter, sister, and wife of Congregational clergymen, Harriet Beecher Stowe had breathed that doctrinal air of sin, guilt, atonement, and salvation since childhood. She could clothe these themes in prose that throbbed with pathos as well as bathos. Uncle Tom's Cabin came out in the spring of 1852. Within a year it sold 300,000 copies in the United States alone- comparable to at least 3 million today. The novel enjoyed equal popularity in Britain and was translated into several foreign languages. Within a decade it had sold more than 2 million copies in the United States, making it the best seller of all time in proportion to population.
Although Stowe said that God inspired the book, the Fugitive Slave Act served as His mundane instrument. "Hattie, if I could use a pen as you can, I would write something that will make this whole nation feel what an accursed thing slavery is," said her sister-in-law after Congress passed the law. "I will if I live," vowed Harriet. And she did, writing by candlelight in the kitchen after putting her 6 children to bed and finishing the household chores. Unforgettable characters came alive in these pages despite a contrived plot and episodic structure that threatened to run away with the author. "That triumphant work," wrote Henry James, who had been moved by it in his youth, was "much less a book than a state of vision." Drawing on her observances of bondage in Kentucky and her experiences with runaway slaves during a residence of 18 years in Cincinnati, this New England woman made the image of Eliza running across the Ohio River on ice floes or Tom enduring the beatings of Simon Legree in Lousiana more real than life for millions of readers. Nor was the book simply an indictment of the South. Some of its more winsome characters were southerners, and its most loathsome villain, Simon Legree, was a transplanted Yankee. Mrs. Stowe (or perhaps God) rebuked the whole nation for the sin of slavery. She aimed the novel at the evangelical conscience of the North. And she hit her mark.
It is not possible to measure precisely the political influence of Uncle Tom's Cabin. One can quantify its sales but cannot point to votes that it changed or laws that it inspired. Yet few contemporaries doubted its power. :Never was there such a literary coup-de-mainas this," said Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. In England, Lord Palmerston, who as prime minister a decade later would face a decision whether to intervene on behalf of the South in the Civil War, read Uncle Tom's Cabin and admired it not so much for the story as "for the statesmanship of it." As Abraham Lincoln was grappling with the problems of slavery in the summer of 1862, he borrowed from the Library of Congress A Key To Uncle Tom's Cabin. a subsequent volume by Stowe containing documentation on which she had based the novel. WHen Lincoln met the author later that year, he reportedly greeted her with the words, "So you're the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war."
Uncle Tom's Cabin struck a raw nerve in the South. Despite efforts to ban it, copies sold so fast in Charleston and elsewhere that booksellers could not keep up with the demand. The vehemence of southern denunciations of Mrs. Stowe's "falsehoods" and "distortions" was perhaps the best gauge of how close they hit home. "There never before was anything so detestable or so monstrous among women as this," declared the New Orleans Crescent. The editor of the Southern Literary Messenger instructed his book reviewer: "I would have the review as hot as hellfire, blasting and searing the reputation of the vile wretch in petticoats who could write such a volume." WIthin 2 years proslavery writers had answered Uncle Tom's Cabin with at least 15 novels whose thesis that slaves were better off than free workers in the North was capsulized by the title of one of them: Uncle Robin in His Cabin in Virginia and Tom Without One in Boston.
In a later age "Uncle Tom" became a epithet for a black person who behaved with fawning servility toward white oppressors. This was partly a product of the ubiquitous Tom shows that paraded across the stage for generations and transmuted the novel into comic or grotesque melodrama. But an obsequious Tom was not the Uncle Tom of Stowe's pages. That Tom was one of the few true Christians in a novel intended to stir the emotions of a Christian public. Indeed, Tom was a Christ figure. Like Jesus he suffered agony inflicted by evil secular power. Like Jesus he died for the sins of humankind in order to save the oppressors as well as his own people. Stowe's readers lived in an age that understood this message better than ours.