Harriet Beecher Stowe's Mightier Than The Sword

“So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this Great War! Sit down please,” President Abraham Lincoln said to Harriet Beecher Stowe when they first met in the White House. Harriet was invited there for moving the whole nation of America with her magnificent, bestselling masterpiece in the day – Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Years later, as a tribute to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s two hundred birthday, historian David S. Reynolds, also a professor of English and American Studies at the University of New York, wrote Mightier than the Sword: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Battle for America. The book, later became the New Yorker Favorite Book of the Year, explains how Stowe’s novel had an enormous impact on the American Civil War as well as the abolitionist. He also illustrates in detail the background of the story and reasons Stowe’s book were loved by so many people. Not only America, Reynolds claims the novel also has effects on events around the world, such as the end of serfdom in Russia. He makes it clear that Uncle Tom’s Cabin “was a central to redefining American democracy on a more egalitarian basis” (Reynolds 12). Reynolds believes, in the United States, as well as other countries, the book has put its power for fairness and empowerment, showing injustice in society at the current time.

Reynolds introduces some background about Harriet Beecher Stowe’s life, from the time she was born to the time she wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in order to show the influences she gained to write the novel. He tells the readers that one of Stowe’s first inspiration appeared in her mind while she was living in Cincinnati between the 1830s and 1840s. Here, she saw a lot of slaves who escaped from Kentucky. According to Reynolds, this was also the place where she “loved spending time in the kitchen with servants like the African-American Zillah” (Reynolds 114). Harriet Beecher Stowe was different than other people, she did not care about the