In 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote "Uncle Tom’s Cabin" to show slavery as a thing so cruel and unjust. In the first year over 300,000 copies of her book were sold. In 1856, over two million copies were sold. Her book was made in 13 different languages. When President Lincoln went to meet her he said, "So you’re the little girl that started this big war."
When Harriet Beecher Stowe’s antislavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published, it was an immediate best-seller, and became the most sensational and best-selling book of the 19th century. French writer George Sand described the international phenomenon: "This book is in all hands and in all journals. It has, and will have, editions in every form; people devour it, they cover it with tears." Today, the novel has been criticized for its stereotypical depictions of black characters, as well as its sentimentalism and moralism. But as problematic as some of the book’s language and descriptions are, in the 1850s, Uncle Tom’s Cabin evoked international sympathy for African American slaves.
Harriet Beecher Stowe was born in Connecticut in 1811, the daughter of Lyman Beecher, a prominent Congregational minister. The Beechers, who were white, had never owned slaves, but in 1832 they moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, just across the Ohio River from slaveholding Kentucky. There, Stowe taught at a school for former slave children, and was able to see at firsthand race riots, terrified runaway slaves, bounty hunters, and suffering freedpeople.
Upon returning to New England in 1850, she decided to write a book about her insights, one of the only forms of protest available to her: "My heart was bursting with the anguish excited by the cruelty and injustice our nation was showing to the slave, and praying God to let me do a little and cause my cry for them to be heard."
Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s strong religious overtones appealed to its largely Christian, white, 19th-century audience. Its plot follows the story of Uncle Tom, a pious and faithful slave, as he is sold to several owners. His last owner beats him to death, but even as the Christlike Uncle Tom is dying, he prays that his master will repent and be saved.
A favorite character among readers was Little Eva, a white child who treats her slaves with angelic love and kindness, and dies surrounded by weeping servants. Stowe complements these melodramatic deathbed scenes with equally dramatic descriptions of beatings, s*xual abuse, and family separations, all of which added to the novel’s powerful effect on its readers.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin has had its critics. The first were Southern slaveholders, who argued that the book was horribly exaggerated fiction; ownership of the book was made illegal in the South. In response, Stowe published in 1853 A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a collection of slave narratives, newspaper clippings, and other facts that verified the details in her novel. In more recent years, many readers have criticized the condescending racist descriptions of the appearance, speech, and behavior of many of the book’s black characters, and the excessive pietism of Uncle Tom.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin was so widely read that its characters helped spread common stereotypes of African Americans. These included lazy, carefree Sam, an example of the "happy darky"; Eliza, Cassy, and Emmeline, beautiful light-skinned women who are the products and victims of s*xual abuse, and stereotypes of the tragic mulatto; and several affectionate, dark-skinned women house servants who are examples of the mammy (including a character named Mammy, the cook at the St. Clare plantation).
The name Uncle Tom has itself become a stereotype for an African American who is too eager to please whites. Soon after the book was published, traveling "Tom shows" became popular throughout the United States. These were essentially minstrel shows loosely based on Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and their grossly exaggerated caricatures further perpetuated some of the stereotypes that Stowe used.
These negative associations now sometimes overshadow Stowe’s original intentions, as well as the historical impact of Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a vital antislavery tool. At the time of its publication, though, its impact was without question. Some have claimed that it so affected British readers that it kept Britain from joining the American Civil
War (1861-1865) on the side of the Confederacy, and when President Abraham Lincoln met Stowe in 1862, he reportedly called her "the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war!" The cry that Stowe had hoped to sound about African Americans was indeed heard, and while Uncle Tom’s Cabin did perpetuate cultural stereotypes of African Americans, it also turned the tide of public opinion against slavery in the United States.
Posted By: DAVID JOHNSON
Tuesday, September 14th 2010 at 7:48PM
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