UNCLE TOM’S CABIN, OR, LIFE AMONG THE LOWLY

UNCLE TOM’S CABIN, OR, LIFE AMONG THE LOWLY

Civil War Propaganda

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was oil on the fires of the anti-slavery movement. On June 5, 1851, the first installment of Uncle Tom’s Cabin appeared in the Washington anti-slavery paper, The National Era. At first there appeared to be little interest, but the story gained an ever-increasing audience as weekly installments followed. In book form it became a runaway sensation. In its first week of publication (March 20, 1852), ten thousand copies were sold. Within a year, three hundred thousand copies had been purchased. That the novel intensified the debate over the role of slavery is an understatement. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel gave the conflict an international audience. By 1860, Uncle Toms Cabin was in print in at least twenty languages. In southern states, Stowe became a hated woman. The novel has been described as exploding “like a bombshell,” its “social impact…on the United States…greater than that of any book before or since,” and “the book [that] precipitated the American Civil War.” Certainly no one expected that the long two-volume Uncle Tom’s Cabin, with the first African-American hero in American literature, and written by a woman, would become the most popular and influential novel in the United States of the nineteenth century.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah

John P. Jewett & CO.

1852

J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah

JPEG

English

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