“So you’re the little lady who started the war,” Abraham Lincoln said to Harriet Beecher Stowe when he met her for the first time at the White House. She moved a Nation with what became the most sensational, bestselling influential books of its day: Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In Mightier Than the Sword: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Battle for America, David S. Reynolds, a professor of English and American Studies at the City University of New York, makes a very strong argument that the novel “was central to redefining American democracy.” He believes that the book helped write social injustice by putting forth fairness and empowerment for those groups who were oppressed here in the United States as well as abroad. He credits the book for helping influence …show more content…
This book is, neither a biography of Stowe nor an exploration of her role in the struggle over slavery and abolition. It is almost a biography of the novel itself, and the transformation thinking that it drove for two centuries, from Stowe’s birth in 1811 to the present. According to Reynolds, the novel’s unprecedented popularity can be explained by the fact that it incorporated images from virtually every part of the culture, including religion, reform, temperance, antislavery writings, pulp fiction and popular performances. These contemporary props helped bring the messages all together in very inspiring characters and vivid plots. According to the author, “Stowe’s immersion in popular culture set the stage for her affecting novel.” He feels that her book, “channeled popular tropes and images into realistic human narrative with a crystal-clear social point: slavery was evil and so were the political and economic institution that supported it.” The big question is how did the novel start the war? Reynolds argues in his book …show more content…
Stowe’s book first appeared in a newspaper as a series. Finally then published in 1852, her novel was a best seller, and one month later, the presses were, “running twenty-four hours a day, three paper mills supplying paper, and a hundred booksellers selling work.” Within a year, it had sold over 300,000 copies in the United States, three times more than any other American book, including the Bible. In the book, Reynolds tells the reader that reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin aloud became a favorite family pastime, and abroad, it was widely translated. According to Reynolds, in England the British bought more than 1 million copies, more than triple the rate in the United States. He also mentions that Stowe did not get rich from the book and sales because she signed a poor contract and without international copyright laws, she received nothing for books sold overseas. Reynolds indicates that just as important as the novel were the different spinoffs, which included, engravings of the black characters, “Topsy dolls,” Uncle Tom’s Unadulterated Coffee and licorice from Paris called Uncle Tom’s Candy. The most influential, according to the author, was the play based on the novel. Some