1852: Stowe

This quarter-plate daguerreotype was probably made around the time of the publication
Uncle Tom's Cabin (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).

Best-Seller

Harriet Beecher Stowe was 41 years old when she finished the best-selling novel published in the United States before 1865. While Frederick Douglass's Narrative sold 5,000 copies within 4 months of its publication in 1845 and 30,000 by the beginning of the Civil War in 1861. Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin sold 10,000 copies in its first week and 300,000 within the first year following its publication in 1852.

Evangelical Celebrity

Born in Connecticut, Stowe was the daughter of one of the best-known evangelical ministers in the United States.

Progressive Academic Training

Stowe attended "one of the earliest schools in the nation to offer serious academic training to women" (838).

Recolonization?

When Stowe moved to Cincinnati at the age of 23, she "became acutely aware of the controversy over slavery" when students resigned from her father's seminary after denouncing his suggestion that free Blacks be sent to a colony in Africa.

Fugitive Slave Act

"Although she had little firsthand knowledge of slavery," the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, inspired her to write Uncle Tom's Cabin, which was published by installments in 1851 and 1852. When it came out in book form in 1852, it was an immediate best-seller.

A Christian Intervention

Her aim in writing the book was "to inspire voluntary emancipation by demonstrating the evil and unchristian nature of slavery" so that war could be avoided.

Documenting sources

A year after writing Uncle Tom's Cabin, she wore a Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, which sought to demonstrate that the harsh treatment of slaves described in her novel was in fact reflective of reality.

Legacy

"When the modernist movement championed a critical ethos of understatement and antisentimentality, denying that politics had any place in serious literature, Uncle Tom's Cabin became a target of critical abuse. Overtly emotional, fearlessly potlicial, and appealing to the widest possible audience, it represented literary values that modernism abhorred. More recently the novel's racial politics have come under fire, as some have objected to the extent to which it draw on stereotypes. But if it had not been so much a part of its own time, Uncle Tom's Cabin could never hav eachieved its effects, and reconsidertaion of the novel has helped revive appreciation for literature that is politically engaged and popularly effective" (Norton Anthology of American Literature: Beginnings to 1865, Shorter Ninth Edition840).