Uncle Tom's Cabin

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Uncle Tom's Cabin

Uncle Tom's Cabin was a novel written by Harriet Beecher Stowe, that was very passionate about anti-slavery. The book expressed the moral issues of slavery in an extreme way. The writing fueled abolitionists toward the abolitionist movement of the North. In 1852, the first year the book was published in book form, 300,000 copies were sold. Now these numbers were astonishing for the time. The majority of the readers were Northerners, and it changed the Northern perspectives of the African Americans and the slavery that is often involved. The novel displays Stowe's deception of the enslaved hero, Tom, and the antagonist, Simon Lee; Stowe depicted African Americans as real people that are imprisoned in their horrific situations. Stowe pictured herself as a "painter of the slavery's horrors rather than abstract debater," because she had this outlook, she evoked pathos in many of the readers, causing previous unmoved readers to feel pity and outrage. Because the novel fired up the northern abolitionists, Uncle Tom's Cabin contributed to the start of the Civil War. On the other hand, the Southerners tried to have the novel banned because of its portrayal of slavery, claiming that the writing falsely depicted slavery. Although the Southern rebuttal, the book eventually sold millions of copies and had a huge impact on the public opinion and  also greatly effected the causes of the civil war.