How Harriet Beecher Stowe Turned Public Opinion Against Slavery
Learn how Harriet Beecher Stowe’s book Uncle Tom’s Cabin sparked national debate and changed how many Americans understood slavery.
Stirring the National Conscience
New York artist Alanson Fisher (1811–1896) painted this portrait of Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1853, when the writer was already celebrated far and wide for Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the abolitionist novel that jolted many Americans into a condemnation of slavery. The painting had been commissioned by theater impresario Alexander Purdy for a stage adaptation at the National Theater in New York. “According to the picture the distinguished writer is quite a good-looking woman, apparently about forty-five years of age,” the New York Evening Post reported. Stowe described herself around the same time as “a little bit of a woman—somewhat more than forty, about as thin and dry as a pinch of snuff; never very much to look at in my best days, and looking like a used up article now.” We see her as a thoughtful person of middle age, with an inscrutable, quiet demeanor despite her fame and influence as a writer.
A year earlier, at the age of forty-one, Stowe (1811–1896) achieved instant celebrity. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was an over-night sensation, selling three hundred thousand copies in its first year of publication. It would become the most read book, next to the Bible, in mid-nineteenth-century America. But it also drew violent criticism from the pro-slavery South and from some Northerners who questioned the novel’s portrayals as unrealistically brutal.
But for many of the book’s readers, Stowe’s depiction of slavery was revelatory. The inhuman treatment of African Americans is made plain in a saga of danger, cruelty, and redemption, set in motion when a Kentucky family decides to sell two of its enslaved men. One of them, the kind and selfless Uncle Tom, shows forbearance in the face of every outrage. “My object will be to hold up in the most lifelike and graphic manner possible slavery, its reverses, changes.” Stowe wrote in 1851.
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Stowe was brought up in a family of New England intellectuals and Calvinist ministers. From an early age, her writing drew praise, and she began a literary career in her twenties. In 1832, she married Calvin Ellis Stowe, a seminary professor. While bearing seven children and managing the household, she continued to write essays for Godey’s Lady’s Book and other journals, often to make ends meet for her family.
Raised with antislavery views, Stowe was deeply affected by the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850, which mandated the capture and return of runaway slaves to their owners. As a consequence, the North was no longer a safe haven, as all states and all Americans were required to follow this federal law. Abolitionists feared that slavery could conceivably spread throughout the country—a concern that may have contributed to Stowe’s decision to write her book. And she was no doubt encouraged by a letter from her sister-in-law urging her to depict “what an accursed thing slavery is.”
Ultimately her novel was profoundly changed in subsequent theatrical renditions, which often added minstrel acts and songs, subverting its original radical message of social reform and distorting the characters, especially Uncle Tom, who became an overdrawn caricature of servility. But the book and its tenacious author indisputably changed hearts and minds at a time of great danger and fury in a divided country.
This article was originally published in Smithsonian American Women: Remarkable Objects and Stories of Strength, Ingenuity, and Vision from the National Collection.