25 for 25. Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852)

Snapshots from a quarter-millennium

“A good bad book," George Orwell called it. "It is an unintentionally ludicrous book, full of preposterous melodramatic incidents. It is also deeply moving and essentially true." Possibly Orwell was envious. He was confident he was a better writer than Harriet Beecher Stowe, and he was sure his works had greater depth than Uncle Tom's Cabin. Yet so far—Orwell was writing in 1945—he’d had nothing like the commercial success of Stowe or the political impact of her antislavery novel.

Stowe's southern contemporaries thought it was simply a bad book, uninformed and tendentious. They noted that she never spent time on a southern plantation or otherwise witnessed most of what she wrote about. She had drawn caricatures rather than real characters. At a moment when relations between North and South were already troubled, she deliberately inflamed them.

Stowe’s own testimony on the writing of the book unsettled even some of its fans. Harriet Beecher grew up in a family of religious–minded reformers. Her brother Henry Beecher was the most famous preacher in America and an outspoken abolitionist. Harriet married Calvin Stowe, another minister, and experienced visions that conveyed what she interpreted as truth more penetrating than reality.

One such vision inspired a key passage in Uncle Tom's Cabin. She was conversing with a friend about the book's origin. “Did you know that Uncle Tom would die?" the friend asked.

"Oh yes, I knew that he must die from the first,” Harriet Stowe responded. “But I did not know how. When I got to that part of the story, I saw no more for some time. I was physically exhausted, too. Mr. Stowe had then accepted a call to Andover”—for a minister’s job—”and had to go there to find a house for the family.” Harriet remained at home planning the move. She thought she had put the book out of her mind. “But suddenly arose before me the death scene of Uncle Tom, with what led to it," she told the friend. I sat down at the table and wrote nine pages of foolscap paper without pausing, except long enough to dip my pen into the ink stand."

Stowe's account of the sacrifice of the Christ-like Tom, of the brutality of the demonic Simon Legree, and of the trials of the intrepid Eva riveted the attention of readers of the newspapers in which it was originally serialized. Gathered into book form and published in 1852, it became an instant best seller, trailing only the Bible in many parts of America and Britain.

Abolitionist literature was then in vogue in America and Britain. In editorials and essays, opponents of slavery decried its barbarity and its corrosive effect on American democracy. In narratives of their lives, former slaves recounted what they had experienced firsthand. But nothing had the impact of Stowe's novel.

Abraham Lincoln might not have said the precise words attributed to him when he met Stowe during the Civil War: “So this is the little lady who made the big war.” Yet Lincoln’s reported observation conveyed an essential truth. An editorial or an essay aims at the head. A memoir tells of a single life. But a novel like Uncle Tom's Cabin aims at the heart and is populated by characters meant to represent many people. Readers of the book learned nothing that would stand up in a court of law, but the emotions they felt made all the difference in the court of politics.

Abolitionism was a fringe movement until northern readers came to know Uncle Tom. Suddenly it became a driving force in northern politics. It helped propel the new Republican party into contention for the presidency. Most Republicans were not abolitionists, in the sense of prioritizing the immediate end of slavery. Most were willing to limit slavery's spread and count on time to produce its demise. But Stowe's book put these moderates on the defensive.

And it gave heart to abolitionist militants like John Brown, who directed the slaughter of proslavery settlers in Kansas Territory before raiding a federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, with the aim of arming slaves for an uprising against the master class.

Southerners perceived Brown as the inevitable product of Harriet Stowe's propagandizing. They were appalled when northerners, upon Brown's arrest and execution, treated him as a martyr to a holy cause. Many of the southerners concluded that their lives and property weren’t safe in a country that tolerated abolitionism and lionized terrorists like Brown. Eleven states tried to bolt the Union. When Lincoln refused to let them go, the Civil War ensued.

Harriet Stowe hadn't intended the war. But she welcomed the war's consequence: the end of American slavery. And she didn't deny her role in bringing it about.