Harriet Beecher Stowe, born in 1811, moved with her family from Massachusetts to Cincinnati in 1832, and Stowe encountered fugitive enslaved people and the Underground Railroad for the first time. Her anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, written in reaction to recently tightened fugitive slave laws, was published on March 20, 1852, and sold 300,000 copies within three months. Along with Ralph Waldo Emerson, she became one of the original contributors to The Atlantic magazine.
The book had a major influence on the way the American public viewed slavery. As Uncle Tom’s Cabin became the most discussed work of fiction in the United States, there’s no doubt that the novel influenced feelings about the institution of slavery. With readers connecting deeply to the characters, enslavement was transformed from an abstract concern to something very personal and emotional. Stowe’s novel helped to move anti-slavery feelings in the North beyond the relatively small circle of abolitionists to a more general audience.
So, while it would be a simplification to say that Harriet Beecher Stowe and her novel caused the Civil War, her writing definitely delivered the political impact she intended.
A major theme in Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the vulgarity of slavery and the treatment of humans as property, concepts that Stowe counterbalanced against the morality of Christianity. Stowe’s depiction of slavery in her novel drew on her personal experience during the 1830s and ’40s while living in Cincinnati, OH, which was a destination for those escaping slavery in the Southern states. In Uncle Tom’s Cabin she made her case against slavery by cataloging the suffering experienced by enslaved people and by showing that their owners were morally broken.
The role of Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a cause of the American Civil War is rooted in a statement—typically rendered as “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war!”—that was falsely attributed to U.S. Pres. Abraham Lincoln.
The novel’s reputation became problematic during the 20th century, however. In a 1952 introduction to the novel, Langston Hughes referred to Uncle Tom’s Cabin as “a moral battle cry.” This was an attempt to counteract the writings of Richard Wright and James Baldwin, among other Black writers, who attacked it during the 1930s and ’40s. The term, “Uncle Tom”, also became an insult used to describe a Black person who shows subservience to whites or is otherwise considered complicit with oppression by whites (sell-out). Today Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s depiction of its Black characters is seen as racist and patronizing.
Over the course of this novel’s life, it has proven to be galvanizing, divisive and controversial; questioning the ancient proverb, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend”. Uncle Tom’s Cabin fiercely attacked slavery, infuriating the South by exposing its brutality and challenging pro-slavery arguments, while simultaneously facing later criticism (especially from Black communities) for using racial stereotypes that, despite its abolitionist intent, perpetuated harmful Black caricatures, particularly through the submissive “Uncle Tom” figure that evolved from the novel into a derogatory term.
This is History With a Twist.