Stowe (1811-96) began writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin, her first book, in 1851, at age 40, having borne seven children. She would later say the book was dictated by God, but the precipitating earthly cause was certainly the passage, in 1850, of the Fugitive Slave Law, which legally obliged the people of the North to return escaped slaves to their southern owners. Before that law, it was possible for northerners to overlook the Peculiar Institution down South; now northerners became accomplices in maintaining slavery. And what did they know of slavery? Not much. Southerners gave glowing accounts of it or argued that it was necessary to subdue an inferior race. Few northern writers—Frederick Olmsted was the exception—journeyed south and reported what they found.
Stowe, who had lived 18 years in Cincinnati, just across the Ohio River from the slave state of Kentucky, knew slavery from people who had endured it and dared to try and escape. She determined, as she says in the book’s autobiographical “Concluding Remarks,” to “exhibit [slavery] in a living dramatic reality.” The picture she painted caused shock waves throughout the English-speaking world and beyond. 562,000 British women signed a proclamation expressing their admiration and gratitude to her. Queen Victoria wrote a fan letter. The book was banned in the South; young southern whites pledged never to read it. But Stowe continued to get vilifying letters from southerners, including an anonymous package that contained a black human ear.
Many historians would agree with the southern writer Thomas Nelson Page (1853-1922) that Uncle Tom’s Cabin “contributed more than any one thing to slavery’s abolition in [Stowe’s] generation.” When President Lincoln met Stowe at the White House during the Civil War, he greeted her by saying, not entirely in jest, “So this is the little lady who made this great war.”
Literary critics have pooh-poohed the book for sentimentality and structural clumsiness. Stowe herself admitted she wrote with “no more thought of style or literary excellence than the mother who rushes into the street and cries for help to save her children from a burning house thinks of the teachings of the rhetorician or the elocutionist.” Nonetheless, the book has an amazing vitality and variety of character. The English writer George Orwell believed that it will outlive the collected works of Virginia Woolf; the American writer Kurt Vonnegut suggested that literary excellence should be measured in units called “stowes,” in honor of the only fiction writer whose work made a real difference in the world.
That was precisely what Stowe wanted to do. She ends the book by directly addressing her readers, northern and southern, admitting that her story has “given only a faint shadow, a dim picture, of the anguish and despair that are, at this very moment, riving thousands of hearts, shattering thousands of families, and driving a helpless and sensitive race to frenzy and despair. . . . Nothing of tragedy can be written, can be spoken, can be conceived, that equals the frightful reality of scenes daily and hourly acting on our shores, beneath the shadow of American law, and the shadow of the cross of Christ.”
Constantly throughout the book Stowe tears her fiction apart to say, in effect, “It’s true! Something like this is going on right now. Only it’s worse!” Her unremitting insistence that readers read through her story into the reality behind it is what moves me most in the book. Nearly all current editions cut the few short footnotes Stowe put in the book, but the cultural historian Russel B. Nye left them in his Washington Square Press edition (1962; out of print), which I read and from whose introduction I have gratefully borrowed here.
In Chapter 12, Haley, a slave-trader, purchases the slave Lucy and sells off her 10-month-old son behind her back. Discovering this, Lucy crumples in tears on the deck of the boat taking her south (a short while later she will commit suicide by throwing herself overboard). Stowe continues:
Tom had watched the whole transaction from first to last, and had perfect understanding of its results. To him, it looked like something unutterably horrible and cruel, because, poor, ignorant black soul! he had not learned to generalize, and to take enlarged views. If he had only been instructed by certain ministers of Christianity, he might have thought better of it, and seen in it an every-day incident of a lawful trade; a trade which is a vital support of an institution which an American divine tells us has “no evils but such as are inseparable from any other relations in social and domestic life.”* But Tom, as we see, being a poor ignorant fellow, whose reading had been confined entirely to the New Testament, could not comfort and solace himself with views like these.
That footnote is Stowe’s. It shows how deep her fury was. She wanted the reverend son-of-a-bitch who said that awful, stupid thing to be known, held accountable, and reviled.
*Dr. Joel Parker, of Philadelphia.
