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

UNCLE TOM'S CABIN

UNCLE TOM'S CABIN, an antislavery novel written by Harriet Beecher Stowe and published in book form in 1852. In 1862, Abraham Lincoln apocryphally referred to Harriet Beecher Stowe as "the little woman who started this big war," underscoring the enormous influence of Uncle Tom's Cabin; Or, Life Among the Lowly to antebellum audiences. Stowe claimed to have been inspired by grief over her baby's death in 1849 and resistance to the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. Published serially in the National Era from 5 June 1851 to 1 April 1852 and in book form in March 1852, the novel sold 300,000 copies in the first year and more than a million by 1860. By 1900 it had spawned a theatrical tradition, inspired a market tie-in, and been translated into forty-two languages. Abolitionists thrilled to what Jane Tompkins has called the novel's "sentimental power," its emotional appeal, especially to middle-class women readers, to identify with black families separated by slavery (Sensational Designs, pp. 122–146). But the novel was viciously attacked by proslavery readers, even after Stowe defended the research on which she based the novel in A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1853).

A later generation also attacked the novel, arguing that Stowe's stereotyped characters revealed her own historically conditioned racism. Indeed, for the African American author James Baldwin and others the term "Uncle Tom" came to imply a black person who pandered to a racist white power structure. More recently, Stowe's novel sparked an interest in uncovering other nineteenth-century women writers. Readers also noted the novel's geographical sweep from New Orleans to Canada, Paris, and Liberia; its Christian radicalism; and its relationship to slave narratives. The novel's popularity and its controversy have endured. For example, the 1956 film The King and I contains a Siamese version of the "Uncle Tom" plays that flooded American stages, and in the 1991 San Francisco Mime Troupe's acclaimed I Ain't Yo' Uncle, Stowe's characters confront their creator. Uncle Tom's Cabin continued to catalyze discussions about race in the United States in the twenty-first century.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hedrick, Joan. Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Lowance, Mason I., Jr., Ellen E. Westbrook, and R. C. De Prospo, eds. The Stowe Debate: Rhetorical Strategies in "Uncle Tom's Cabin." Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994.

Tompkins, Jane. Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

LisaMacFarlane

See alsoAntislavery ; Literature: Popular Literature .

Uncle Tom's Cabin, a novel by Mrs H. E. B. Stowe.