“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.

One of these runaways, by the name of Eliza Harris, from a plantation in Kentucky located several miles just South of the Ohio River, learned that her and her only child were to be sold to another owner due to the fact that her present owners had fallen into debt. In order to protect her and her only surviving child, in March, she chose to run, hoping that the river waters would still be frozen over and an escape would be relatively effortless. Unexpectedly, to Eliza’s dismay, the river waters had thawed and the ice on the river had been broken into moving chunks of ice downstream. With her baby in one hand, a man standing on the opposite side of the river watched the mother leap from block to block across the river. Deeply moved by her heroism, the man aided her in making it to shore. Half paralyzed by the cold, Eliza and her baby were taken to the home of Reverend John Rankin, who generously nursed the two back to heath and sent them to the next “station” along their journey to safety. Stowe became aroused by Eliza’s story of survival, and thus, her interest in slavery began, and grew.

“Slavery was a crime against God and Christians has a duty to take action against it. But how does a woman in a provincial town, burdened with the responsibility of a household and caring for small children, become involved in such a struggle?… “No one can have the system of slavery brought before him without an irrepressible desire to do something, and what is there to be done?”” (Scott 73). From the experience, Stowe came to be introduced to Levi Coffin, later bestowed the title of “president” of the Underground Railroad. Coffin and his wife were later immortalized in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, renamed Rachel and Simeon Halliday.

Runaway slaves “shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due.”

          – U.S. Constitution, Article IV

The Fugitive Slave Act was one of the most important and most hated measures ever passed by the United States Congress. Not only did this act allow intolerable abuses, but it also provided a profitable business out of the kidnapping of free blacks that lived in northern states, of which had never run at all. The North was outraged. It was not uncommon for protesters to go into the fields and streets with guns to stop the federal government from capturing and returning runaway slaves to their owners. Stowe’s immediate purpose when she first began to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin, was to directly speak out against the Fugitive Slave Act and to teach American’s that it was to be recognized as a symbol for the system of tyranny that existed in the States. It was both the Fugitive Slave Act and the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin that is recognized as the two main events in history that truly sparked the conclusion among Northerners that slavery was worth dying for if necessary. On March 20, 1852, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published and released in book form to the world, and later, was translated into forty foreign languages. Few books in the history of modern literature have ever won such immediate and widespread popularity.

Uncle Tom, as created by Stowe, taught that black people should avoid aggression and turn from their oppressors. According to Tom’s character in the novel, slaves should not defy their masters, but rather demonstrate charity towards those which owned them and to pray for their souls. Nonetheless, Tom remains a freedom fighter who will resist evil until his death, and is willing to die before ever raising a hand against fellow people. In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Tom and his wife learn of their master’s plan to sell Tom. Instead of fighting his master’s decision, Tom does as he believes that him, as a black slave, should, and does not object to the decision of his master. In transit to his new plantation, Augustine St. Claire, a New Orleans slave owner, on a trip returning from a visit to his cousin, Ophelia, loses his daughter, Eva, over the boat. Tom saves the child, who returns the favor by convincing her father to purchase Tom. Ophelia develops as an integral character; she is the character who most reacts to the scenes of slavery that surround her.

In one particular instance, Ophelia questions Augustine as to why he does not protect a slave woman from being beaten to death by her owners. Here, Stowe assures the true views of slave owners become evident to her readers through dialogue. Ophelia inquires as to why the killing of slaves is not to be reported to the police. Augustine responds by telling her that, in theory, slave owners are never brutal to their slaves because no one would want to damage such valuable property, but that in reality, slave owners often abuse their power and commit cruel acts against slaves regardless. “’I don’t know what’s to be done… Slaveholders have absolute power… There would be no use in interfering; there is no such law that amounts to anything practically, for such a case. The best we can do is to shut our eyes and ears, and let it alone’” (Scott 115). Stowe did not wish to create some characters to be seen in a positive light because she felt that that there were equally as many kind-hearted slave owners as non-kind-hearted, but rather Stowe sought to expose the vices of slavery, even in its best possible scenario.

As the book comes to an end, the character of George Shelby, frees his slaves. This is where the title of Stowe’s novel becomes most apparent and is most brilliantly explained. Shelby tells his slaves as they leave for freedom to remember the freedom that was granted to them and to dedicate it to and themselves to Tom and his Christian-way of life. The cabin is meant to represent the suffering that Tom endured during his life as a slave, as well as a metaphor for Tom’s readiness to be beaten or even killed in order to protect fellow slaves. This outlines Tom’s compliance to do what is desired of him in order to in no way betray his Christian love and loyalty. Therefore, the cabin is symbolic of the destructive power of slavery and shows that Christians have the capability to overcome anything.

In essence, Stowe’s novel attempts to express that American’s must begin to stop denying the occurrence of slavery, treating slavery with indifference, or even apologizing for the fact that slavery exists. Instead, American’s needed to be taught to use their hearts, convey pity and compassion for victims, and think of the wrong doings done as wrongs done unto themselves. Her message: “You must feel in your hearts the horror and evil of slavery, and you must abolish it; if not, you will face a day of reckoning compared with which a thousand cholera epidemics will be as nothing” (Scott 119). And this message came a crucial time in United States history. The war with Mexico and the Fugitive Act of 1850 had just begun to awaken the fact that abolitionists were right, that slavery had taken the place of the United State’s major enemy in place of Britain, of their democratic institutions, and the free-labor economy constructed. Not only was Uncle Tom’s Cabin an adequate response to the new changes in public opinion, but also a major contribution to the antislavery cause. The American mood had been reflected in the words of one woman, creating a change at lightening speed, the change in which slaveholders had seen coming and feared.

“The Cabin was a call to all American’s to place themselves in harmony with their own Declaration of Independence, and to face the fact that the holding of human being in bondage was wrong. The Cabin was a trumpet blast announcing the day of judgment and the end of the world – the world of slavery. In writing this book Harriet saw herself as a messenger of God, bearing tiding both of doom and joy. She announced, and she demanded, a revolution in American public opinion” (Scott 123).

Uncle Tom’s Cabin also served another major role in society in the United States. Although written before women’s rights movements in the late 1800’s, it is still regarded as an early example of feminism. Women as portrayed as more morally conscientious than men and as having a strong bearing on the persuasion of the decisions men make. The oppression of blacks and the oppression, thus, are paralleled. Stowe shows obvious hope that the strength one oppressed group, women, might aid in alleviating the oppression of another group. She hoped that women would rise to sway their husbands, the people in which are responsible for voting, to see that slavery was un-Christian and immoral, thus mounting above to effect decisions made against acts of slavery. Stowe reflects women as not necessarily having insight far beyond that of others as to what is good and what is malevolent, but rather an inherent sense of moral wisdom, eager to persuade the use of this quality to induce a social change in their time. Women who read Uncle Tom’s Cabinwere given optimism and great expectation. Although women were not able to fight a war for what they believed as right for society, Stowe attempted to convince women that they could get their voices, as a whole, heard.

As Daniel Webster and others had seen coming a quarter of a century earlier, the deep and miserable pain of a nation plunged it into war to fight on its own soil. As Stowe said, “It was God’s will that this nation – The North as well as the South – should deeply and terribly suffer for the sin of consenting to and encouraging the great oppressions of the South; that the ill-gotten wealth, which has arisen from striking hands with oppression and robbery, should be paid back in the taxes of war; that the blood of the poor slave, that had cried so many years from the ground in vain, should be answered by the blood of the sons from the best hearthstones through all the free States; that the slave mothers whose tears nobody regarded should have with them a great company of weepers, North and South” (Fields 259).

“In a life that spanned all but fifteen years of the nineteenth century, Stowe spoke to a nation divided by race, sex, region, and class. Speaking to the masses meant negotiating diverse and even contradictory cultures. How successfully she accomplished this, and with what cost to various subcultures, continues to be a subject of fierce debate. In her time southern readers objected to her portrayal of slavery in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In our time, African Americans have objected to Stowe’s racial stereotypes. To engage her life is to engage the plurality and contradiction of American culture” (Hedrick).

It is fair to say that one person, even a woman, is capable of changing a nation. Although Uncle Tom’s Cabin was not the reason for the Civil War, it was one of the main contributors to what the nation saw as inevitable. So, in response to Lincoln’s statement to Stowe, yes, she was the “little woman who started this big war”.