The Publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin 

By: Linnea Wikander 5th period APUS

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published in 1852. It had been previously written in installments in the anti-slavery newspaper The National Era. Stowe decided to write in the paper to express her anger about the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and her articles were so popular among abolitionists that they were published in novel form. The book soon became popular and at the end of the first year of its publication, 300,000 copies had been sold in America and 200,000 had been sold in England. Uncle Tom’s Cabin ended up making a tremendous impact on slavery in the pre-Civil War era.

The novel portrays the horrors of slavery through the life of an African American slave named Tom. He is sold by a family in Kentucky and lives a religious life with his wife and three children. He opts to not run away as had other slaves to protect his family, but he was eventually sold south. He meets Topsy, Eva, Simon Legree, and St. Clare, who are characters who display the awful lives of slaves in the south in their different ways. The ending scene where he is beaten and whipped to death by his third and final master leaves a lasting impression in ones mind the barbarity of slavery. Uncle Tom showed how the slave system treated people as property and it demanded a promise for eventual freedom and equality for the slaves. The portrayal of Tom’s master Simon Legree is meant to represent the evilness of plantation owners in America. White readers in the North often sympathized with Tom because of his strong Christian principles. The overall-effect of the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin was that it rallied thousands of people to the anti-slave cause.

The reaction from the South was of disgust and outrage. Southerners denounced the novel as being slanderous and false. Some southern authors even wrote works portraying the happy lives of slaves and miserableness of Northern workers. Most blacks, such as Frederick Douglass, greatly appreciated the publication of the book in that they saw it as a help to their cause. Some however, criticized Tom’s character and disliked the fact that he was too submissive to authority.

The fact that Uncle Tom was so popular abroad had an extremely significant effect on slavery in America. Many people, especially in Britain, bought a copy of the novel and sympathetically felt for the black slaves in the south of America after reading Tom’s story. The “Tom-mania” that rose up in Britain made it so the London government did not intervene in the Civil War on behalf of the South.

At home, many people, especially in the North, heard the rallying cry of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It influenced many to not obey the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. It also made an impression on many young kids who read the book in the 1850’s and joined the war effort later on during the Civil War. Ultimately, this book helped to start and end the Civil War. The disgusting way that the lives of slaves were portrayed in this book won over thousands of Americans and greatly helped the abolitionist cause.

Works Cited

"The History of Uncle Tom's Cabin." Uncle Tom's Cabin. Web. 09 Nov. 2011. <http://www.uncletomscabin.org/history.htm>.

Kennedy, David M., Lizabeth Cohen, and Thomas A. Bailey. The American Pageant. 13th ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. Print.

"Slave Narratives." PBS: Public Broadcasting Service. Web. 09 Nov. 2011. <http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4p2958.html>.

"Uncle Tom's Cabin." Welcome to the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center. Web. 09 Nov. 2011. <http://www.harrietbeecherstowecenter.org/utc/>.