d master (Mr. Shelby) as too weak not to sell slaves in times of economic necessity. For nine years, between the time Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published in 1852 and the start of the Civil War in 1861, a writer and Southern pro-slavery writer was waged. Though many anti-slavery works had been written before Uncle Tom’s Cabin, most notable the fugitive slave narratives of Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown and others, it was the combination of sentimentality and religious feelings in Stowe’s novel that triggered the controversy that ended in Civil War. Abraham Lincoln’s famous comment when he met Mrs. Stowe (“So you are the little lady who made this big war”) implies that Uncle Tom’s Cabin caused the war, but Stowe only articulated in a new way the deep-seated problem that had been present in America since the foundation of the colonies in the seventeenth century. Uncle Tom’s Cabin is not a work, which can stand alone as a self-contained entertainment. It requires an understanding on the part of the reader of the conditions that made the author write it and which made the nation respond to it so passionately. It is difficult, today, to imagine a work of literature so powerful that it can truly be said to have hastened the onset of a war and the resolution of a problem so intractable that neither the Founding Fathers nor nearly a hundred years of congresses could find a solution. The fact that Abraham Lincoln decided to emancipate the slaves in 1863 without addressing the related problems of South would be bankrupt, is a testament to the fact that intense public feeling, rather than logic and negotiation, had made it possible for Lincoln to act unilaterally. Uncle Tom’s Cabin contributed greatly -even primarily-to that change of feeling in the nation. The first approach to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, therefore, must be the historical and biographical.In the century and a half sinc...
