Uncle Tom's Cabin Controversy

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin caused controversy between Northern abolitionists and Southern slaveholders when it was published in 1852. Stowe had a bit of life experience with slavery when writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin. At age 21, she moved with her family to Cincinnati. Cincinnati, being across the Ohio River from Kentucky which is a slave state, Stowe was exposed to slavery. The connection only runs deeper. Though she only went to Kentucky once for a brief period of time, she knew slaves, both free and fugitive. Some of her friends and acquaintances were conductors in the famous Underground Railroad, and she talked about slavery with former slaves and read abolitionist papers. When she learned of the Fugitive Slave Act, it

The North, for the most part, found Stowe’s novel to be a great resource to aid in the goal of the abolitionist movement. Although some “Northerners felt Stowe portrayed the slaveholding South too kindly, ...most Southerners believed Stowe condemned their way of life”(Uncle 298). Stowe meant for the book to aid in abolition, writing it after the passing of the Fugitive Slave Act. Her intention was not to sugar coat slavery. The way Stowe’s son put it in her biography was “...the novel was slowly evolved, thought over as a long-planned contribution to the abolition movement”(Uncle 298). Nevertheless, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Evil, Affliction, and Redemptive Love, Josephine Donovan says “Uncle Tom’s Cabin is probably the most influential novel ever written, and certainly the most effective political novel…”(Donovan 11). It is influential in the general sense because it got people talking. It was influential politically because it is said to have kickstarted the civil war. When President Abraham Lincoln met Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1862, he is reported to have remarked “‘So this is the little lady who brought on this big war’”(“Uncle” 298). By “big war” he means the United States Civil War. President Lincoln was saying he believed that Uncle Tom’s Cabin helped to start the Civil War. And Southerners said things that the Northerners would dispute with things they said. Southern whites called it an exaggeration of the conditions slaves were kept in and the abuse they were put through. They were also in an uproar because Stowe made the typical slave owner Legree. Legree is the exceptionally cruel slave owner. Then, Mr. Shelby is the nice owner, although they say he was too weak, caring too much for his slaves. They also say this about him because at the end of the novel, Mr. Shelby freed all of his slaves in the name of Uncle Tom(Cumberland