The novel drew considerable attention even while serialized in an abolitionist newspaper, The National Era. Faced with a looming publisher’s deadline, the author used her three daughters to help transcribe and finish her work.
The immediate impetus for the book was the Fugitive Slave Act, which Stowe despised for making Northerners complicit in the recovery and return of captured slaves. For a key element of the novel—a slave mother’s grief when her child is sold—Stowe channeled her own emotions after losing her 18-month-old boy Charlie in 1849 to cholera.
Explaining why she felt compelled to write her most famous book, Stowe explained: "I wrote what I did because as a woman, as a mother, I was oppressed and broken-hearted with the sorrows and injustice I saw, because as a Christian I felt the dishonor to Christianity -because as a lover of my country, I trembled at the coming day of wrath."
It took less than a decade, but eventually she did get to experience that “coming day of wrath.” In 1862, when she finally had the chance to meet an anti-slavery President, Abraham Lincoln, towering over his diminutive guest, joked: “So you’re the little lady who wrote the book that started this great war.”
That “great war” soon took its toll on her own family. Already drinking heavily when he enlisted in the Union army, son Frederick became a full-fledged alcoholic after being badly wounded at Gettysburg. Rehabilitation—including stints in a sanitarium and moving to Florida, where he tried to manage a coffee plantation—ended badly. In 1871, after shipping out for the West Coast in a last-ditch attempt to save his life, Frederick disappeared, never to be seen again.
Stowe’s novel has experienced swings of opinion as extreme as any other work in American literature. In her own time, when it was not bringing down upon her head howls of execration from Southerners, her work was read over and over—selling more than 300,000 copies in the U.S. and over a million in Britain in its first year of publication. The fame of her narrative spread when it toured the country in countless stage adaptations (from which she gained not a nickel in royalties) as well as wallpapers and even songs about her character Little Eva.
By the middle of the 20th century, however, the phrase “Uncle Tom” had become shorthand for African-American too subservient to whites. Lending crucial support to this change was novelist and critic James Baldwin, whose Notes of a Native Son (1955) lashed out against Uncle Tom’s Cabin—what Baldwin acidly labeled “Everybody’s Protest Novel”—as “a very bad novel, having in its self-righteous, virtuous sentimentality, much in common with Little Women.”
A trenchant essayist, Baldwin was also far more subtle at characterization than Stowe. But sentimentality is not disabling in literature in and of itself—otherwise, how would Dickens have survived the modern turn from his unmistakable sentimental mode? It might also be argued that, if Stowe were not sentimental, she could not have otherwise have thrust Americans face to face with the reality of slavery.
With the rise of the women’s movement, greater respect has been given to Stowe and her artistic aspirations, in and out of literature. A year and a half ago, The Annotated “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” edited by Henry Louis Gates and Hollis Robbins, appeared to considerable acclaim.
Stowe wrote 30 books—about one a year—throughout her career, and they helped immensely in supplementing the income of her husband Calvin, a preacher who wrote one book over the course of his long lifetime, a scholarly tome on books of the Bible. She was also an enthusiastic painter. Her abiding sense of toleration, not just toward blacks but also groups such as Roman Catholics, has also won her deserved esteem, especially when placed in a time of virulent prejudice.
Twenty-one years after the publication of her most famous book, Stowe, Calvin and three of their daughters moved into a 17-room Victorian cottage in the Nook Farm community of Hartford, Connecticut. Her next-door neighbor was Mark Twain, author of the other 19th-century novel that most bitterly attacked slavery: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
On two occasions over the last few years I’ve taken guided tours of the Stowe house, now preserved as the Harrier Beecher Stowe Center. I came away with a greater appreciation for the multifaceted character and achievement of this pioneering novelist. The house not only contains furniture from the period (40% original to the home) but also first editions of her books and several paintings Stowe created.
I was also surprised to learn that she had collaborated with her sister Catharine on The American Woman’s Home, a precursor to Martha Stewart-style living advice, and that she practiced what she preached, including narrow, open shelves in the kitchen to allow her to use what she saw.
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