Today in History—March 20: Uncle Tom’s Cabin Published As a Novel

Uncle Tom’s Cabin played a crucial role in shifting white American sentiment against slavery, even as it propagated a narrative that was deeply problematic in its own right. Written by abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe, the story first appeared as a serialized work in 1851 and was published as a novel the following year.

Born in Litchfield, Connecticut, Stowe was the daughter of a Congregationalist minister and had access to significantly more educational opportunities than most women at the time. After moving to Cincinnati, Ohio, she was separated from slave-owning country by just the Ohio River.

A turning point came in 1849 when Stowe’s sixth child, Samuel Charles Stowe, passed away in the cholera epidemic that swept through Cincinnati. In the midst of her grief, Stowe compared the feeling of losing her son to that of an enslaved mother losing her child on the auction block. The following year, she saw the Fugitive Slave Law enacted, requiring ordinary civilians to assist in capturing runaway enslaved people.

Both events had lasting effects on Stowe, who began working on Uncle Tom’s Cabin shortly afterward. When Stowe eventually published Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a novel, the response was overwhelming—especially among abolitionists, who championed the book as evidence of slavery’s evil. In the latter half of the 19th century, Uncle Tom’s popularity was rivaled only by the Bible.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin follows Tom, a deeply pious enslaved man. After Tom saves a young girl named Eva, her grateful father purchases Tom. Eva’s angelic nature prompts her to urge her father to free the enslaved people on his plantation—but he is killed before he can do so. The evil (and some would say, one-dimensional) Simon Legree has Tom whipped to death when Tom refuses to disclose the whereabouts of some escaped slaves. Throughout the book, Tom is portrayed as a saintly Christian figure; moments before he dies, he forgives the enslaved men who whipped him.

In the North the novel turned many previously ambivalent people into abolitionists. Stowe’s “sentimental” style (a genre mostly read by women at the time) struck an emotional chord with readers that may have helped shift their perspectives. In the South, however, Stowe was relentlessly mocked, called an “obscure Yankee school mistress” and repeatedly accused of lying.

While Uncle Tom’s Cabin played an important role in shaping antislavery sentiment ahead of the Civil War—which eventually led to a formal, if unevenly realized, end to chattel slavery—the novel has since faced significant criticism. Black writers such as Richard Wright and James Baldwin have denounced its racist portrayals, and “Uncle Tom” eventually became synonymous with subservience, and in some cases, complicity.