Selling more than 300,000 copies in its first year of publication, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s antislavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin immediately garnered both praise and condemnation. The novel’s portrayal of the cruelties of slavery and its memorable characters proved effective tools in mobilizing support for abolitionism and helped to inflame the tensions that led to the U.S. Civil War.
The Fugitive Slave Law
Uncle Tom’s Cabin began as a series of short stories published in the National Era in 1851 and 1852. The National Era, published weekly in Washington, D.C., and affiliated with the antislavery Free-Soil Party, proved receptive to Stowe’s proposed series. Its abolitionist editor Gamaliel Bailey
Uncle Tom’s Cabin represented something of a departure for Stowe, the daughter of a Connecticut minister who had been raised with antislavery but not activist principles. Her previous fiction and essays published in magazines and gift books concentrated on romantic tales or idyllic portraits of New England life. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was also something of a departure for antebellum publishing, for few prior antislavery novels had met with much success.
Poster for a late 1890’s dramatic production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which was frequently adapted to the stage during the nineteenth century.
Despite the positive response that the serial received in the National Era, the novel form of Uncle Tom’s Cabin was rejected by at least one publisher before John Punchard Jewett
Uncle Tom’s Cabin features parallel plots involving the fates of two slaves living on the Kentucky plantation of Mr. Shelby. Stowe follows Uncle Tom after he is sold by Shelby through two subsequent masters. The first is Augustine St. Clare, a genteel master in New Orleans. Tom forms a special bond with St. Clare’s daughter Eva, and her death scene is one of the most emotional in the novel. Tom is later sold to a rural Louisiana plantation owned by Simon Legree. Legree, a cruel master who eventually beats Tom to death, is made an even more powerful character because he originally hails from Vermont. Stowe thus uses her novel to show her readers both the variety of conditions slaves endure and the moral damage the slave system inflicts even on northerners who become involved. The novel also details the successful escape of Eliza Harris, a mulatto slave, from Shelby’s plantation after Shelby agrees to sell her four-year-old son, Harry. In one famous scene, Eliza and Harry cross the frozen Ohio River from Kentucky to the free state of Ohio. They eventually reunite with Harry’s father, George Harris, and the family emigrates to Liberia.
Stowe’s evocative tale prompted almost immediate praise from Northern and abolitionist circles. Encomiums came from Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and William Lloyd Garrison. Southern reviews of Uncle Tom’s Cabin were largely negative. Critics charged that Stowe had presented an inaccurate portrait of slavery in the South and rebutted that most masters treated their slaves well and that most slaves were content.
Critics also noted that Stowe had never lived in the South; indeed, her only visit to the South occurred in 1834, when she spent a few days in Kentucky. Although Stowe and her husband lived in the border city of Cincinnati, Ohio, for almost two decades, there is little historical evidence that she had much contact with either free or enslaved African Americans. These criticisms prompted Stowe to publish A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1853, which attempted to establish the verity of the depiction of slavery presented in the novel. Nonetheless, southern society threatened reprisal for advocates of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and its message. Southern newspapers urged their readers not to buy the novel, and those who tried to sell it were subject to vigilante harassment. In Maryland, for example, a free African American named Samuel Green
Northerners were not without their own reservations about Stowe’s novel. Some were doubtful that Uncle Tom’s Cabin, given its sentimental style, would do much more than evoke emotional responses, leaving the political mobilization of antislavery sentiment unfulfilled. Abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison were also unnerved by Stowe’s endorsement of relocating freed African Americans to Africa, as the fate of George and Eliza Harris suggested.
Some northern critics of the novel, like their southern counterparts, argued that Stowe’s objections to slavery were unjustified because slavery was the appropriate and biblically determined condition of the African American. African American abolitionists bristled at the colonization issue and at Stowe’s depiction of Uncle Tom as unswervingly pious and obedient, although much of this criticism was muted. Frederick Douglass praised the novel, and the term “Uncle Tom”
Contrary to popular assumptions, Uncle Tom’s Cabin exerted only limited direct impact on antebellum politics. Many of the responses to the work were literary; a rash of novels appeared in the 1850’s that claimed to show the truth of slavery by refuting Stowe’s description of its cruelty. Few politicians made public mention of the work.
The novel, however, proved most effective in winning converts to the antislavery cause through its adaptation for the stage. Theatrical
Perhaps because Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a play could mediate the novel’s antislavery emphasis according to the tastes of the communities in which it was performed, most observers then and now consider the play responsible for promoting popular abolitionism in the North. Versions of the play toured throughout the North through the end of the nineteenth century. “Anti-Uncle Tom” plays were popular in the pre-Civil War South.
President Abraham Lincoln
In 1893, James Ford Rhodes
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Gossett, Thomas F. Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American Culture. Dallas, Tex.: Southern Methodist University Press, 1985. Thorough account of the composition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, northern and southern responses to the novel, and the novel’s ongoing cultural and political legacy. -
Hedrick, Joan D. Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Definitive biography, using updated materials such as letters and diaries, to offer a fresh perspective on Stowe’s life and work. Winner of a 1995 Pulitzer Prize. -
Levine, Robert S. Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. Compares and contrasts the responses of two leading African American abolitionists to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, particularly its advocacy of African emigration. -
Pierson, Michael D. Free Hearts and Free Home: Gender and American Antislavery Politics. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. Considers the influence of Uncle Tom’s Cabin on men and women within the Free-Soil Party.
Southerners Advance Proslavery Arguments
Garrison Begins Publishing The Liberator
American Anti-Slavery Society Is Founded
Douglass Launches The North Star
Underground Railroad Flourishes
Compromise of 1850
Second Fugitive Slave Law
National Council of Colored People Is Founded
Last Slave Ship Docks at Mobile
U.S. Civil War
Lincoln Issues the Emancipation Proclamation
Susan B. Anthony; Henry Ward Beecher; John Brown; Frederick Douglass; Paul Laurence Dunbar; William Lloyd Garrison; Sarah and Angelina Grimké; Sarah Orne Jewett; Abraham Lincoln; Wendell Phillips; Dred Scott; Elizabeth Cady Stanton; Harriet Beecher Stowe; Bertha von Suttner; Harriet Tubman; Nat Turner; John Greenleaf Whittier.