saw slavery as evidence of national sin, created an atmosphere of tension between North and South that had been postponed since the founding of the nation. Into this atmosphere came Stowe’s novel, which depicts the cruelties of slavery in a way that had never registered on the national consciousness before.Harriet Beecher (1811-1896), born in Litchfield, Connecticut, belonged to a family of famous clergymen. Her father, Lyman Beecher, was a strict Congregationalist, and her brother, Henry Ward Beecher, became a famous preacher during an era when preachers were admired as much as film or television celebrities are admired today. Harriet Beecher was a retiring woman, however, married to Calvin Stowe, a professor at Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati, Ohio. For eighteen years, as she raised seven children, Stowe observed the effects of slavery in the slave state of Kentucky, just across the Ohio River to the free state of Ohio. Stowe supplemented her family income with freelance writing. She developed the idea of writing a novel about the horrors of slavery after the Fugitive Slave Act was passed in 1850. Many Northerners were outraged by this law, which allowed slaves owners to pursue their runaway slaves into free states in order to recover their “property.” Stowe combined her religious backgrounds with her political beliefs by writing a book about a saintly slave who forgave his tormentors, just as Christ forgave His.When Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published it became an instant success, selling so many copies that it is considered today to be the first “best seller” in American publishing history. It was banned in the South, however, and prompted dozens of answering novel, essays, and poems by proslavery writers. Southern writers believe that Stowe exaggerated the condition of slaves in the South, representing the exceptional cruel master (Simon Legree) as the norm, and representing the kin...
