Dare to Hope!
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Harriet Beecher Stowe
Harriet Beecher Stowe
(1811-1896)
“ ‘If I must be sold, or all the people on the place, and everything go to rack, why, let me be sold. I s’pose I can b’ar it as well as any on ‘em,’ he added, while something like a sob and a sigh shook his broad, rough chest convulsively. ‘Mas’r always found me on the spot,—he always will. I never have broke trust, nor used my pass no ways contrary to my word, and I never will.
It ‘s better for me alone to go, than to break up the place and sell all.’ ”
—Fictional character Uncle Tom about his willingness to be sold as a slave to save others
From Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
More Online Resources
Uncle Tom's Cabin or Life Among the Lowly
Complete Text
A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Hope in Writing
In 1850, Harriet Beecher Stowe was a 39-year-old New England housewife when the North entered into an agreement to capture slaves escaping from the South. Provoked by the cruel captures that resulted from the Fugitive Slave Law, this daughter of the famous preacher Lyman Beecher cried out, “I will write something. I will write if I live!”
Her chapters were published first as a series of articles in the abolitionist paper National Era. When the full book was published, this work of fiction, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, became an instant best-seller. Even today it is well-known as a power-packed anti-slavery treatise—except in the Black community, where the content of the book is hardly known at all, but the name “Uncle Tom” has become deeply hated.
Who was the real Uncle Tom? Significantly, this fictional character—who was based on a composite of real-life stories—was a Christ-like figure of compassion and high integrity who, as a suffering slave, refused to lie or break trust and then laid down his life so that other slaves could live.
This book was strong medicine for pre-Civil War America. Like Stowe’s contemporaries, evangelist Charles Finney and Christian businessmen Arthur and Lewis Tappan, whose commitment to Christ drove them to seek social change, she used her writing skills to awaken the nation to see slavery as a sin. As an author and commentator within the book, she repeatedly challenges the reader to view slavery as something so terrible that the conscience of any thinking Christian—North or South—must drive them to reject it and work toward its end.
People of America and other nations were forced to pay attention when they read the gripping accounts in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and they changed their minds about slavery based solely on the impact of her words.
Author and cynic Heinrich Heine wrote, “Astonishing that after I have whirled about all my life over all the dance floors of philosophy and yielded myself to all the orgies of the intellect and paid my addresses to all possible systems without satisfaction, like Messaline after a licentious night, I now find myself on the same standpoint where poor Uncle Tom stands—on that of the Bible.”
Uncle Tom’s Cabin was originally intended to run for three months, but the newspaper serialization ran for ten. When the complete book was published in March 1852, within three months Mrs. Stowe had earned the incredible sum of $10,000, and within a year 300,000 copies had been sold.
In 1850, Harriet Beecher Stowe was a 39-year-old New England housewife when the North entered into an agreement to capture slaves escaping from the South. Provoked by the cruel captures that resulted from the Fugitive Slave Law, this daughter of the famous preacher Lyman Beecher cried out, “I will write something. I will write if I live!”
Her chapters were published first as a series of articles in the abolitionist paper National Era. When the full book was published, this work of fiction, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, became an instant best-seller. Even today it is well-known as a power-packed anti-slavery treatise—except in the Black community, where the content of the book is hardly known at all, but the name “Uncle Tom” has become deeply hated.
Who was the real Uncle Tom? Significantly, this fictional character—who was based on a composite of real-life stories—was a Christ-like figure of compassion and high integrity who, as a suffering slave, refused to lie or break trust and then laid down his life so that other slaves could live.
This book was strong medicine for pre-Civil War America. Like Stowe’s contemporaries, evangelist Charles Finney and Christian businessmen Arthur and Lewis Tappan, whose commitment to Christ drove them to seek social change, she used her writing skills to awaken the nation to see slavery as a sin. As an author and commentator within the book, she repeatedly challenges the reader to view slavery as something so terrible that the conscience of any thinking Christian—North or South—must drive them to reject it and work toward its end.
People of America and other nations were forced to pay attention when they read the gripping accounts in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and they changed their minds about slavery based solely on the impact of her words.
Author and cynic Heinrich Heine wrote, “Astonishing that after I have whirled about all my life over all the dance floors of philosophy and yielded myself to all the orgies of the intellect and paid my addresses to all possible systems without satisfaction, like Messaline after a licentious night, I now find myself on the same standpoint where poor Uncle Tom stands—on that of the Bible.”
Uncle Tom’s Cabin was originally intended to run for three months, but the newspaper serialization ran for ten. When the complete book was published in March 1852, within three months Mrs. Stowe had earned the incredible sum of $10,000, and within a year 300,000 copies had been sold.
Helping to Launch a War to End Slavery
At the time when she wrote her articles for National Era, most people in the North read newspapers voraciously. Countless thousands responded to her strong moral tone and they emotionally identified with the life-and-death struggles of her slave characters and their secret rescuers, such as the Quakers. They read the story aloud to their families.
However, because she took a strong position on such a controversial subject, many others strongly opposed her, accusing her of being untruthful, dangerous, and a poor writer. In response, she published an extensive documentation of the actual true-life events on which she based her story. It is called Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Abraham Lincoln, commenting on the impact of Uncle Tom’s Cabin on the course of history, said that Stowe was “the little woman who started this great [Civil] war.” She was a crusading woman when it was not fashionable to be one, yet her compassion and sense of family proved to be some of her best attributes. She is a model for us, whether male or female, Black or White, as someone who took time to make a difference.
At the time when she wrote her articles for National Era, most people in the North read newspapers voraciously. Countless thousands responded to her strong moral tone and they emotionally identified with the life-and-death struggles of her slave characters and their secret rescuers, such as the Quakers. They read the story aloud to their families.
However, because she took a strong position on such a controversial subject, many others strongly opposed her, accusing her of being untruthful, dangerous, and a poor writer. In response, she published an extensive documentation of the actual true-life events on which she based her story. It is called Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Abraham Lincoln, commenting on the impact of Uncle Tom’s Cabin on the course of history, said that Stowe was “the little woman who started this great [Civil] war.” She was a crusading woman when it was not fashionable to be one, yet her compassion and sense of family proved to be some of her best attributes. She is a model for us, whether male or female, Black or White, as someone who took time to make a difference.
