Читать книгу American Civil War For Dummies - Keith D. Dickson - Страница 52

In 1852, in reaction to the Fugitive Slave Law, Harriet Beecher Stowe (see the following image), a member of a prominent abolitionist family, wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a novel portraying the problems of slavery in the South. The novel, typical in many ways of the sentimental writing of this period, nevertheless tells a powerfully effective story using characters that have become stock characters in American culture: Little Eva, the pure little girl destined for heaven; Uncle Tom, the kindly, Christ-like Black servant; and Simon Legree, the brutal and degraded slave owner. It sold 100,000 copies in two months, and 300,000 in its first year. For 1852, these are impossibly large numbers. Like the bestseller Jaws, which made the idea of shark attack so real that everyone was afraid to swim in the ocean, Uncle Tom’s Cabin created frightening images of the South in the minds of its readers. Despite howls of outrage from Southerners, Stowe’s image of a benighted South and Southerners as a collection of depraved sadists became reality, convincing thousands of Northerners that slavery’s very existence was a moral blight on the soul of America. When Abraham Lincoln met Mrs. Stowe in 1862, he reportedly said, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war.”

Harriet Beecher Stowe / The Library of Congress / Public Domain