One Woman Against Acts of Slavery: Effects on Uncle Tom’s Cabin
by Famous literature and how it affected slavery and the Civil War.
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”.
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