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Essay on Provoking Change: Harriet Beecher Stowe's Reform Efforts as Seen in Uncle Tom's Cabin
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s best-selling novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin was published in 1851–52. The novel is a sentimental but powerful portrayal of the cruelties of slave life on Southern plantations and it promoted the call for abolition. The heroically loyal slave Uncle Tom has in the 20th century become a byword for black subservience. Even Abraham Lincoln acknowledged that it had stirred Northern sentiments and helped precipitate the American Civil War.
This novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe did much to galvanize northern public opinion against slavery. Uncle Tom's Cabin, or, Life Among the Lowly began as a ten-month serial in the National Era, an abolitionist newspaper, on June 5, 1851. Published in book form in March 1852, it quickly sold 300,000 copies and eventually about 7 million throughout the world. It was also dramatized in 1852 by George Aiken (without Stowe's consent) and had a successful stage run.
The book tells the story of a Christian slave, Uncle Tom, who is sold by a Kentucky family burdened by debt. Finally, sold again, he dies under the lash of the henchman of a cruel overseer, Simon Legree, who wants Uncle Tom to accept him instead of God as his master. Stowe, a member of a family of abolitionists and ministers, also recounts the flight of a family of runaways on the Underground Railroad.
Many northerners were shocked into a hatred for the institution so melodramatically described. When introduced to Stowe during the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln is said to have called her the "little lady who made this big war." The novel also affected the American language: "Uncle Tom" became an epithet for passive, usually older blacks (paradoxically, considering that Tom will answer to no white man, only to God), and "Simon Legree" became a synonym for cruelty. "Uncle Tomitude" soon came to mean sympathy with blacks....
