Slavery’s Destruction Of Domestic Life In Uncle Tom's Cabin

8 Pages 1981 Words

Harriet Beecher Stowe is considered by many to have written the most influential American novel in history. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the first successful social protest novel published in the United States and is thought to be a catalyst of the Civil War. When Stowe met President Lincoln in 1862, he reportedly said, “So you are the little lady that started this Great War!” Stowe’s book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, began as a series of stories in the National Era, a Washington abolitionist paper, in 1851. Jewett, a Boston publishing company, reluctantly published the book in 1852. By the end of the first year, 300,000 copies had been sold in America alone. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was translated into numerous languages and also performed, as a play, on stages throughout the world. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was so successful that it sold more copies than any other book written with exception to the Bible. Stowe’s writing of Uncle Tom’s Cabin was in response to the Fugitive Slave Law, which was included in the Compromise of 1850. The Fugitive Slave Law forced non-slave owners in the free North, to return escaped slaves to their Southern masters. According to The Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, Stowe intended on humanizing slavery by telling the story of individuals and families. Stowe states that “The object of these sketches is to awaken sympathy and feeling for the African race, as they exist among us; to show their wrongs and sorrows, under a system so necessarily cruel and unjust as to defeat and do away the good effects of all that can be attempted for them, by their best friends, under it”.
Stowe knew that her audience would primarily be white women, especially Northern white women. With this knowledge, she introduces her readers to seemingly real characters suffering from the injustice of slavery to produce feelings of uneasiness and guilt over the treatment of slaves. This can be easily seen in the writing style Stowe us...