Yet, as Hendrick writes, Harriet also transformed those feelings into an engine of social change; "pursuing the Calvinist injunction to 'improve the affliction' and reap 'the peaceable fruits of righteousness' in the wake of" her son Charley's death, and "stirred up the nation to an awareness of its sin." Harriet wrote to her brother Henry, "You see...how this subject has laid hold of me...The poor slave on whom the burden of domestic bereavement falls heaviest is precisely the creature of all Gods creatures that feels it deepest." While there is no doubt that Harriet Beecher Stowe achieved political status by making a national audience see the subjectivity of African-Americans, however what she personally saw was filtered through a white woman's consciousness.
After the series ran in the abolitionist newspaper, the National Era, Uncle Tom's Cabin was published in book form in March 1852, and by mid-June 10,000 copies were being sold each week, and within six months, more than 150,000 had been sold. Between 1852 and the beginning of the Civil War in 1861, three million copies had been sold in the United States alone.
Uncle Tom's Cabin is as controversial today as it was during the mid-nineteenth century. To call someone 'Uncle Tom' today is one of the most inflammatory racial insults that an African-American person can offer, yet during the nineteenth century it was a compliment of the highest order. According to Patricia Turner, a professor of African-American studies at the University of California-Davis, "People don't realize that when they call someone like an 'Uncle Tom,' that really is an insult to Uncle Tom," for he was actually a heroic figure who chose to die than to reveal the "the whereabouts of two escaped slaves who have been sexually abused." Turner points out that while everyone knows about the novel, few have actually read it, therefore most of the African-American community do not understand the significance of the character or the true meaning behind the name, Uncle Tom.
Ironically, historical record indicates that the novel was widely vilified even as the public was buying copies faster than any book in previous publishing history. Southerners viewed it as a vicious libel on their culture, and in one memorable account, a freedman in the slave state of Maryland was sentenced to ten years in jail for owning a copy of Uncle Tom's Cabin and a map of Canada. However, the book was just as controversial within the abolitionist community because "Stowe appears to advocate African colonization rather than emancipation as the solution to the moral blot of slavery."
Because there was no international copyright law in 1852, Stowe owned only the novel, and thus had no rights to the characters and could not control their transmission to other media, such as magic lantern shows, ceramic figurines and plates, and to the stage. The first stage production came in 1852, and with George Aiken's adaptation in 1852, the play Uncle Tom's Cabin became so popular throughout the country that it is estimated that 50 people saw the stage show for every one person who bought or read a copy of the book.
Richard Yarborough recently made an assessment of the novel noting that "although Stowe unquestionably sympathized with the salves, her commitment to challenging the claim of black inferiority was frequently undermined by her own endorsement of racial stereotypes," and because these stereotyped notions appear not only in this novel but in other works by Stowe, it seems that her attitude toward chattel slavery, or rather how she pandered to the conflicting attitudes of slavery, was ambivalent. Harriet believed that the novel depicted the favorable side of slavery and this fact should have appeased the South, however the typical Southern regarded Stowe's novel as an abomination and an utterly false representation of the institution of slavery.
When Stowe wrote Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp, she became the first major American author to write what is essentially a campaign novel. David Grant writes in the September 2000 issue of Studies in American Fiction:
Composed as the events that shaped the canvass unfolded and as the Republican party completed its national organization, excerpted in many Republican newspapers before its release, prefaced so as to steer its reception toward the great decision facing the nation, published in the late summer as election excitement was reaching its peak, heralded...
Uncle Tom Although President Lincoln might have overstated the importance of Uncle Tom's Cabin as being a singular cause for the war, the statement does capture the fact that literature serves as a reflection for social values and norms. Abolitionism did become a major political force in the antebellum years, which is why Lincoln and the Union were willing to wage war for so many years and sacrifice so many lives.
Uncle Tom's Cabin - Fiction as a Catalyst for Fact The Origins of a Living Document Stage Night North and South Polarized: Critics Respond The Abolitionist Debates The Tom Caricature The Greatest Impact The Origins of a Living Document In her own words, Harriet Beecher Stowe was compelled to pen Uncle Tom's Cabin "....because as a woman, as a mother, I was oppressed and broken-hearted with the sorrows and injustice I saw, because as a Christian I felt
Underground Railroad was the single most important nonviolent political protest movement in nineteenth century America. Slave rebellions did help to rally the cause for self-empowerment and abolition, but the Underground Railroad led to meaningful, tangible results. The descendants of former slaves who made it to Canada have shaped the fabric of that nation, while the descendants of the former slaves to achieved liberty in their lifetime and lived to tell
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Women and the Home Front in Western North Carolina and Eastern Tennessee during the Civil War This paper examines the living conditions and attitudes that shaped the lives of the women in western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee during and after the American Civil War. The thesis statement should deal with the breakdown of long standing ties between the people of the mountains as they chose to fight for the
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