Uncle Tom's Cabin

Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), antislavery novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896).Though Stowe famously said that “God wrote it,” she is nonetheless credited with the authorship of this best‐selling work that galvanized opposition to slavery in the 1850s. Written in the aftermath of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, Uncle Tom's Cabin: or, Life among the Lowly was first serialized in the National Era (June 1851–April 1852) and then published in book form. It sold more than 10,000 copies in the first few weeks after publication and some 300,000 in the first year.

Based on various slave narratives, including those of Henry Bibb and Josiah Henson, the novel primarily focuses on the title character, a slave who is sold by his owner and torn from his home and family. Tom is first purchased at the New Orleans slave market by Augustine St. Clare as a companion for his daughter Eva, who shares Tom's devotion to Christianity. After Eva and St. Clare tragically die, Tom is sold to a plantation owner who turns him over to a vicious and cruel overseer, Simon Legree. Repelled by Tom's innate goodness and enraged when Tom refuses to reveal the hiding place of two slaves seeking to escape, Legree beats Tom savagely. Tom dies just as his former owner, George Shelby, arrives to purchase him.

Stowe's novelistic blend of history, personal experience, politics, law, and religion captured the public imagination and moved many northerners to a more vocal opposition to slavery. Even President Abraham Lincoln acknowledged Stowe's role in escalating tensions that led to the Civil War, calling her “the little lady who started the big war.” Southern whites' response was predictably negative. In the face of southern criticism that she had misrepresented the reality of slavery, Stowe in A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1853) collected historical and legal records documenting events similar to those in her novel.

The power and interest of Uncle Tom's Cabin endured long after the Civil War ended and the slavery issue was resolved. Uncle Tom, Simon Legree, Little Eva, and Eliza Harris, the courageous slave mother who escapes the slave catchers by jumping across ice floes on the Ohio River, became familiar archetypes. Dramatizations of Uncle Tom's Cabin were frequently staged and immensely popular with nineteenth‐ and early twentieth‐century audiences. Always recognized for its political and cultural importance, the novel by the late twentieth century had also come to be recognized as a major literary classic.
See also Civil War: Causes; Literature: Early National and Antebellum Eras.

Bibliography

Jane Tompkins , Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1850, 1985.
Joan D. Hedrick , Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life, 1994.

Wendy Wagner