Introduction


Harriet Beecher Stowe
In 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Her abolitionist novel is often credited with promoting so much empathy for slaves from readers in the North and so much anger from readers in the South that it was an instigator of the Civil War. Stowe’s family was instrumental in her own development as an antislavery advocate. Her father, Lyman Beecher, was a prominent abolitionist preacher, and her brother was the very famous minister Henry Ward Beecher. Although she had concentrated on being a wife and mother for a number of years, in 1850 the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law (which allowed escaped slaves to be returned to their “masters”) so incensed Stowe that she felt it was her duty to write the novel. She died in 1896 at the age of 85

Essential Facts

  1. Upon meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe, Abraham Lincoln reportedly said, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this Great War!”
  2. Uncle Tom’s Cabin is the first American novel to have an African-American protagonist.
  3. Reflecting years later on her purposes in writing the novel, Stowe said in her journal, “I wrote what I did because as a woman, as a mother I was oppressed and brokenhearted with the sorrows and injustice I saw, because as a Christian I felt the dishonor to Christianity, because as a lover of my country I trembled at the coming day of wrath.”
  4. Although Stowe’s intentions in creating her novel may have been altruistically motivated, many African Americans feel that being called an “Uncle Tom” is a slur of the worst order. Many find the title character to be the epitome of submissiveness.
  5. In 1870, Stowe created an integrated school for both children and adults in Mandarin, Florida, a move toward integration that would not truly be realized in American for another fifty years or more.