March 20, 1852: Uncle Tom's Cabin is published
On this day 156 years ago Harriet Beecher Stowe's anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, is published. No one dreamt a tale of life on a plantation written by a tiny woman from New England could have such a profound effect on national affairs.
The novel sold an unprecedented 300,000 copies within three months and was so widely read that when President Abraham Lincoln met Stowe in 1862, he reportedly said, "So this is the little lady who made this big war."
Harriet Beecher Stowe photographed at the time of her novel's highest popularity
Stowe was born in 1811, the seventh child of the famous Congregationalist minister Lyman Beecher. She studied at private schools in Connecticut, then taught school in Hartford from 1827 until her father moved to Cincinnati in 1832.
Young Harriet and her father Lyman Beecher
She accompanied him and continued to teach while writing stories and essays. In 1836, she married Calvin Ellis Stowe, with whom she had seven children. She published her first book, Mayflower, in 1843.
Mr and Mrs Calvin Ellis Stowe
While living in Cincinnati, Stowe encountered fugitive slaves who had escaped from Kentucky and listened to their stories of the horrors of life on the plantation. Thus inspired, she wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin in reaction to the recently tightened federal fugitive slave laws which required folks in "free states" to assist in the return of runaway slaves. The book had a major influence on the way the American public viewed slavery.
The Stowe home in Cincinnati where the novel was written
It also added a new popular term to the American lexicon for a black person who acquiesced to the superiority of the white master based on "Uncle Tom" himself. Uncle Tom was a character in the novel who was a loyal old enslaved man who loved his master and discouraged his fellow slaves from revolt or disloyalty.
Principal routes to freedom taken by fugitive slaves
Uncle Tom's Cabin established Stowe's reputation as a woman of letters. She traveled to England in 1853, where she was welcomed as a literary hero. Along with Ralph Waldo Emerson, she became one of the original contributors to The Atlantic, which launched in November 1857. That magazine still exists as The Atlantic Monthly.
In 1863, when Lincoln announced his executive order known to history as the Emancipation Proclamation -- which freed slaves who resided in states then in rebellion but did not eliminate slavery in the loyal "slave states" which had not seceded (MO, MD, KY, DE - and therefore actually "freed" no one,) the normally stuffy Mrs. Stowe danced in the streets.
Nevertheless, the Proclamation put the world on notice the Civil War was now about ending slavery as well as maintaining the federal union. Thus, it ensured no European government would recognize and ally with the Confederacy. That lack of a strong European ally effectively sealed the Slaveocracy's doom.
Slavery was not finally ended in the U.S. until the ratification of the XIII amendment after the Civil War had ended in the spring of 1865. The amendment which formally changed the Constitution and ended slavery in the US was proposed for ratification to the legislatures of the states by the 38th Congress on January 31, 1865.
It was declared ratified at the end of that year on December 18, 1865, after three-fourths of the state legislatures (27 of 36 states) had approved it. No word on how Stowe reacted, but she probably caught the train to Drunkytown.
Harriet Beecher Stowe continued to write throughout her life and died 31 years after the end of slavery in the US in 1896 at age 85.
Stowe photographed near the end of her life ca. 1895.
