One Woman Against Acts of Slavery: Effects on Uncle Tom’s Cabin

“So long as the law considers all these human beings, with beating hearts and living affections, only as so many things belonging to the master — so long as the failure, or misfortune, or imprudence, or death of the kindest owner, may cause them any day to exchange a life of kind protection and indulgence for one of hopeless misery and toil — so long it is impossible to make anything beautiful or desirable in the best-regulated administration of slavery.”

          – Harriet Beecher Stowe

Uncle Tom’s Cabin catalyzed debates on the issue of slavery throughout the United States throughout the twenty-first century. Today, it still remains as one of the most historically recognized books in our nation’s history. Harriet Beecher Stowe, arguably became one of the most influential women writer’s of all time, through writing the book. Once a poor and unknown writer, Stowe became rich and famous after the release of her book, selling 300,000 copies in its first year and another million by 1860. She became so well known and controversial, in fact, that Abraham Lincoln, in 1862, himself once referred to Stowe as “the little woman who started this big war”. The war in which Lincoln referred was not any “big war”, but none other than one of the most significant war in United States history, the American Civil War. Of the three million soldiers that fought for the abolition or continuation of slavery in the States, over 600,000 died for what they believed in, whether they agreed or disagreed with the views of Stowe.

Although many events in the life of Harriet Beecher Stowe inspired her to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin, one key event in Stowe’s life truly marks her initial interest in the issue of slavery in the States. In 1793, the Fugitive Slave Acts were passed, recognizing the right of slaveholders to seize their slaves wherever they might find them and drag them back into bondage. There, thus, was no place in the States that slaves were safe, even if they were to cross into territory initially marked anti-slavery territory, even if they crossed over the Ohio River. Therefore, many people that were against the acts of slavery in the States created the Underground Railroad, a system of protecting runaways in direct defiance of the federal law. Anyone convicted of such an act could be punished with a weighty fine. Despite the risks, many people chose to do what they felt was right to do, and aided runaway slaves.