Published as a book on March 10, 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin catapulted her almost overnight from a writer of New England folkways to a national and international celebrity. Selling an unprecedented 300,000 copies within a year in the United States, the novel was even more popular in Great Britain, and it was immediately translated into French, Spanish, German, Dutch, and some dozen other languages. Further, more people probably had the novel read to them aloud, or saw it performed as a stage show than actually purchased a copy, and the lack of international copyright agreements ensured that an untold number of copies were simply pirated, printed, sold, and circulated without Stowe receiving a penny. Such was the cultural and political influence of Uncle Tom’s Cabin before the Civil War that Abraham Lincoln, upon meeting Stowe at the White House in 1864, supposedly remarked: “So, you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war!” (Hedrick iv).
Whether or not Lincoln actually pronounced these words, they register the profound impact that Uncle Tom’s Cabin had on debates about slavery and American democracy, as even pro-slavery advocates indirectly acknowledged its power by writing mirror image “Anti-Tom” novels that supposedly corrected its overly harsh portrait of slavery. If Uncle Tom’s Cabin was read and debated vigorously in the United States, though, it was also potent political allegory for repressed peoples abroad, whether they endured indentured servitude (as in Russia where the novel was banned) or outright slavery (as in Brazil, where slavery existed until 1888). As Stowe herself warns in the last chapter of Uncle Tom’s Cabin where she directly addresses her readers in apocalyptic tones,
This is an age of the world when nations are trembling and convulsed. A mighty influence is abroad, surging and heaving the world, as with an earthquake. And is America safe? Every nation that carries in its bosom great and unredressed injustice has in it the elements of this last convulsion. (484)
Uncle Tom’s Cabin was thus both a popular hit and a transformative moral force in debates about slavery and race, but both the novel and Stowe’s own literary reputation began to decline by the 1880s after emancipation and as American writers turned to more realistic and naturalistic forms of fiction. Indeed, Uncle Tom’s Cabin the novel was slowly eclipsed in the public’s imagination by Uncle Tom’s Cabin the “Tom Show”—staged productions that were so popular between 1852-1930 that one commentator suggested in 1931 that over 10 million people had seen one (Rose). Unfortunately, these shows were usually racist travesties of Stowe’s anti-slavery text, and they took substantial liberties with its plot, characters, and message. By the 1940s and 1950s, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was seemingly passé: African Americans associated the novel with nostalgic and racist images of white paternalism, and they often (erroneously) took the name of its titular hero, Uncle Tom, as a euphemism for a weak and servile black man. The novel no longer resonated with literary critics either, who now valorized formal complexity, irony, and rhetorical understatement rather than the sentimental language and political exhortation that had once given the novel its extraordinary cultural power. Only in the 1970s and 1980s did feminist and other literary critics begin to recover Stowe’s watershed novel and explore its surprising complexities and contradictions. After thirty years of scholarly debate, today Uncle Tom’s Cabin is known as a canonical novel and one of a handful of nineteenth-century texts—like The Scarlet Letter, Moby-Dick, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—whose textual, aesthetic, historical, and political implications are subject to frequent debate and reappraisal.
Despite the waxing and waning of its reputation, then, Uncle Tom’s Cabin has been a touchstone in debates about race and national identity since its publication some 160 years ago. Why? A central reason is that Stowe did something that no other writer had done to that point: she tapped the creative resources and omnivorous nature of the novel —a literary form that incorporates and refracts an almost unlimited variety of cultural voices and discourses—to create a national kaleidoscope of slavery and the relations between blacks and whites that have always been at the heart of the nation’s history. Outraged by the passage of the Fugitive Slave Bill of 1850, which required Northerners to give up runaway slaves and criminalized any aid or comfort, Stowe vowed to her family to write something for the antislavery cause, and she told her editor Gamaliel Bailey at The National Era, when she began to publish the novel as a serialized text in 1851, that she would proceed by holding up
in the most lifelike and graphic manner possible slavery, its reverses, changes, and the negro character, which I have had ample opportunities for studying. There is no arguing with pictures, and everybody is impressed by them, whether they mean to be or not. (Stowe, 541; her emphasis)
Although she was influenced by the “nonfiction” of abolitionist tracts and slave narratives, Stowe created fictional characters and scenes that induced not only immediate readerly engagement but also lent themselves to future cultural re-presentation in a host of other media (on stage and later in film, of course, but also in antebellum jig saw puzzles, ceramic dishware, posters, and other commodities).
Uncle Tom’s Cabin was thus a kind of Harry Potter of its day, but its staying power as a reading experience stems from Stowe’s witty and satirical narrator, its pungent dialogue, its host of memorable characters (both major or minor), and the contrapuntal force of two mirror-image plots. The novel begins in the border state of northern Kentucky at the Shelby plantation, where the young slave mother Eliza Harris flees from the threat of the sale of herself and her young son Harry. She goes northward, across the Ohio River and, eventually, finds freedom in Canada and Liberia after being reunited with her husband George in Indiana. Throughout the novel, Stowe dramatizes the dangers of slavery to domestic harmony, and especially the threat of sudden separation that black families endure due to the caprices of their masters or the market. In the case of Eliza, Stowe uses the archetypal sentimental pair of the mother/child to make this point, and she often does so quite pointedly such as when her narrator asks the implied white (and female) reader:
If it were your Harry, mother, or your Willie, that were going to be torn from you by a brutal trader, to-morrow morning, –if you had seen the man, and heard that the papers were signed and delivered, and you had only from twelve o’clock till morning to make good your escape, –how fast could you walk? (95; Stowe’s emphases).
As Stowe repeatedly makes clear through Biblical allusions or direct references, though, the ultimate source of such sentimental power is spiritual; when Harry pleads with his mother not to let the slave trader Haley catch them, “the mother” says “‘Yes, sure’,” and “in a voice that startled herself; for it seemed to her to come from a spirit within, that was no part of her” (95).
A central strategy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin is therefore to dramatize the contradiction that “living property” has natural “feelings” (terms Stowe uses in the title of Chapter V), but she also tries to create moments of possible identification between (black) characters and (white) readers. In the novel’s most famous scene (and one repeated without fail in the Tom Shows), Eliza crosses the ice-choked Ohio River with Harry in a desperate attempt to escape from the slave trader Haley:
The huge green fragment of ice on which she alighted pitched and creaked as her weight came on it, but she staid there not a moment. With wild cries and desperate energy she leaped to another and still another cake;--stumbling—leaping—slipping—springing upwards again! Here shoes are gone—her stockings cut from her feet—while blood marked every step; but she saw nothing, felt nothing, till dimly, as in a dream, she saw the Ohio side, and a man helping her up the bank.
In the present-tense immediacy of the scene, racial difference is temporarily suspended, sympathy creates an implied moral duty, and moral duty becomes a form of implied social action. As Stowe famously states in the last chapter of Uncle Tom’s Cabin,
There is one thing that every individual can do, –they can see to it that they feel right. An atmosphere of sympathetic influence encircles every human being; and the man or woman who feels strongly, healthily and justly, on the great interests of humanity, is a constant benefactor to the human race. (480; Stowe’s emphases)
This “freedom narrative” of Eliza (and George Harris) is counterbalanced by the fate of the titular character Tom, who is suddenly torn from his family at the Shelby plantation and quite literally “sold down the river” (i.e. moved to the deep South) to pay for his master’s gambling debts. At first fortunate enough to find another benevolent master in the New Orleans slave owner Augustine St. Clare, Tom is unexpectedly sold yet again and purchased by the evil Simon Legree (who, in a neat stroke, is both a Yankee and a Southern plantation owner). The clash of wills between the simple, pious, and yet spiritually resolute Tom and Legree comprises the moral centerpiece of the novel, and Tom is clearly depicted as a Christ-like figure that would resonate with Stowe’s antebellum audience. His confrontation with Legree, however, also juxtaposes two antithetical conceptions of legal authority at stake in debates about slavery in the 1850s: the right to property; and the notion that jurisprudence must be founded upon the “higher law” of moral justice. Ironically invoking the Biblical injunction that servants must obey their masters (after Tom refuses to whip a fellow slave), for example, Legree asks:
‘An’t I yer master? Did n’t I pay down twelve hundred dollars, cash, for all there is inside yer old cussed black shell? An’t yer mine, now, body and soul?’”
In the very depth of physical suffering, bowed by brutal oppression, this question shot a gleam of joy and triumph through Tom’s soul. He suddenly stretched himself up, and, looking earnestly to heaven, while the tears and blood that flowed down his face mingled, he exclaimed, “‘No! no! no! my soul an’t yours, Mas’r! You have n’t bought it, –ye can’t buy it! It’s been bought and paid for, by one that is able to keep it; – no matter, no matter, you can’t harm me!’ (396-97).
Like Tom’s moral declaration of independence from Legree, Stowe’s unique accomplishment in Uncle Tom’s Cabin was that she exposed the national scope of slavery and the impossibility of escaping complicity in the system whether one was a reluctant and ruthless slave owner, a slave trader, a minister whose religious doctrines conveniently rationalize slavery, a senator whose votes perpetuate moral injustice or, of course, slaves themselves whether like Tom (whose religious beliefs make him more trustworthy and thus more valuable) or a beautiful young slave girl (whose beauty make her more desirable and thereby much more vulnerable to sexual predation). In essence, Stowe shows that slavery is capitalism run amok or, perhaps, capitalism perfected: everything has its price.
If she opposes sentimental, moral, and religious arguments to the power of commerce and the law, however, the multiple and divergent conclusions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin suggest that Stowe didn’t quite know how to end her story precisely because she, like every other American at the time, didn’t know the endgame of slavery itself. One ending has George Harris explaining why he and his family have decided to emigrate to Liberia the better to serve his “mother’s race” (an act of emigration known as “colonization” and one advocated by many Americans including, initially, Lincoln, as a solution to the gradual or immediate emancipation of slaves); another ending has the young George Shelby, who has inherited his father’s plantation and slaves in Kentucky, pledge to free and hire them at wages “such as we will agree on;” and the third ending, the last chapter of the novel, finds Stowe preaching to and pleading with her readers for sectional reconciliation based upon common Christian belief and the good of the union.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin thus articulated a rhetoric of sectional brotherhood and political compromise that offered something for almost everyone and thereby ended up pleasing no one entirely. Abolitionists and African Americans generally hailed the novel as a Godsend in the fight against slavery, but even they questioned Stowe’s apparent endorsement of colonization and the racial logic of her characterizations. In a remark that anticipates current debates about the novel’s racial politics, the radical abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison asked: “We are curious to know whether Mrs. Stowe is a believer in the duty of non-resistance for the white man, under all possible outrage and peril, as well as for the black man; whether she is for self-defense on her own part, or that of her husband or friends or country, in case of malignant assault, or whether he impartially disarms all mankind in the name of Christ, be the danger or the suffering what it may” (qtd. in Stowe 564). Questions of colonization and Tom’s non-resistance are further complicated by the fact that Eliza and George Harris (and other characters who openly resist slavery) are of mixed white and black ancestry such that the aggressive (and agnostic) George must seemingly be exiled from America because black militantism would constitute a danger to the (white) body politic.
For their part, pro-slavery advocates viewed Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a naïve and presumptuous portrait of slavery, and they relentlessly attacked Stowe’s novel as a fiction that only purported to be founded upon fact. (Stowe subsequently wrote The Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1853) to refute such charges and to give the actual historical cases and character archetypes upon which she built her novel.) As Louisa McCord wrote sarcastically in a review published in the Southern Quarterly Review, “In the ordinary relations of master and slave, such [sentimental] feelings are not only impossible, but the mere supposition of them becomes ludicrous, to any one who has looked into the institution as it exists in the United States, between the white man and the African. . . . The master gives protections; the slave looks for it” (qtd. in Stowe 579). Furthermore, opponents attacked Stowe personally by asking how a woman who purported to know as much she did about slavery, sexual marketing, and the like could possibly be a respectable woman at all. (At one point, Stowe even received the severed ear of a slave in the mail after the novel’s publication.)
Despite its tour de force performance and unprecedented popularity, then, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, like Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855) some three years later, dramatizes that while literature may galvanize both individuals and the imagined community of the nation, it nevertheless is not a substitute for social, political, and legal justice. Indeed, like The Declaration of Independence (the signed draft of which excised an entire paragraph condemning slavery), The Constitution (and its notorious three fifths clause), and the Compromises of 1820 and 1850, Uncle Tom’s Cabin illustrates that self-serving compromise only papers over fundamental differences—such as that between the nation’s stated democratic ideals and its exploitation of its black citizens—and postpones a real accounting to a future date. Stowe’s novel certainly did help to bring about the “great war” that Lincoln mentioned; however, the war still had to be fought and won.
Works Cited
Hedrick, Joan. Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1995. Print.
Rose, R. Burton. “The Death of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Overland Monthly
and Out West Magazine. Dec., 1931. Uncle Tom’s Cabin and
American Culture. Web. 24 July, 2011.
Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Ed. Christopher
G. Diller. Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2009. Print.
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Citation: Diller, Christopher. "Uncle Tom's Cabin". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 25 July 2011 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=8533, accessed 08 July 2025.]
