Throughout the south, the idea of slavery was accepted, and slaves were used by rich farm owners for manual labor.  On the other hand, the northern states had banned slavery almost completely.  The argument of slavery came to a head when the case of Dred Scott was decided and it was ruled that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional and that slaves were allowed to be anywhere throughout the north and south.  Adding to the problem, the now heavily populated California enters as a free state, and the Fugitive Slave Act comes into play.  The act declared that northern people must capture runaway slaves that escape from the hands of the south.  This infuriated the north, and lead to extremely high tensions between them and the south.

                Tying in with the beliefs on slavery, another very influential reason that pushed for war was the dispute on whether slavery should spread west to states such as California.  The United States acquired a very large amount of land from the Mexican-American war, and whether or not the states formed from this territory should be free was a big idea.  A temporary solution to this was the Missouri Compromise, which prohibited slavery north of a certain line in the United States.  This was repealed in what is known as the Kansas-Nebraska act in 1854 and brought the start of what is now known as ‘Bleeding Kansas,’  and was a preview of what was to come in the war ahead. 

                The last push that probably made the start of the Civil War most inevitable was the propaganda against slavery and the attacks on it.  Pieces of work such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin helped the northerners that did not have a strong feel on either side of the dispute move towards the side of abolition. The book depicted the life of a black slave who is in the end beaten to death by his cruel owner.  The southern people also started to feel that their way of life was in danger when the abolitionist John Brown attempted to raid a weapon arsenal at Harper’s Ferry in Virginia.  His plan was to lead an armed rebellion with slaves after he had seized the weapons from the store.  Southern people felt that this was an attack on their way of life and were furthermore pushed to secede and start the war.

                Many things contributed to the start of the Civil War.  The most apparent reasons include the beliefs on slavery, the westward movement of slaves, as well as propaganda against slavery.  These things made the war inevitable.  The United States was in so much of a downward spiral that not even a great compromiser, such as Henry Clay, could fix its problems. 

All of  us have, in one way or another, lost someone special in our lives — be it friends, parents, grandparents, and partners.  Some of them are taken from us so suddenly, we often fail to tell them how much they mean to us.  Sometimes there are messages we need to convey to them, but we no longer can.

It would have been easier to accept if they left us naturally.  At least, we have time to prepare ourselves and make them feel that they made a mark in our lives.  Unfortunately, there are times when people encounter unexpected events.  Accidents happen and there are some people who are just born with bad blood in their veins, they cause mischief and grief to others.  Some are just plain evil.

Tough to accept, but that is part of life.  Death is inevitable; some perish ahead of others.

Therefore, we should at least let the people we love know how valuable they are to us before it’s too late.  Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, said that “the bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and for deeds left undone,” so tell someone you love him or her.  Make someone feel special today.

                With all of these examples you need to keep in mind that it wasn’t all in one side and zero in the other. An example would be that there was slavery in both North and South states, but the North had a lot less slave states and slaves. The Industrial Revolution was when a whole lot of time saving inventions were put into use. Some of these inventions were not rightfully ours, but we “borrowed” them despite other nations protecting their inventions. This lead to a lot of cotton refining, spinning, weaving, and sewing factories popping up in the North. The South started to grow a lot more cotton, which the invention of the cotton gin helped with. The South also had factories and the North also had farms, but the North became more city-like with factories while the South kept being primarily agricultural.

                Now you can look at the issue of slavery, which was not the sole reason for the Civil War. There were a lot less slaves North and a lot less abolitionists in the South, but not everybody was for or against slavery. In the South only 16% of the population had some slaves, and very few had more than 10. Most white Southerners were without slaves. Slavery was going to die out from profit issues, but the cotton gin helped to delay the inevitable end of slavery. Then slavery grew from the North wanting more cotton.

                There were also tariffs that helped to keep Northern businesses in business, but hurt the Southern farmers. There were also many other differences, and this growing list lead to a mass secession of states, which went and formed the Confederate States of America.

Following the Louisiana Purchase, people moved out to these areas from behind the Applachians, and when 60,000 of them occupied an area, they could apply for “ratification”. That meant that they could become “states”.

States were divvied out between north and south until 1830 when Missouri would be the subject of debate. Missouri was above the Mason Dixon line but still wanted to be a slave state. And so…a special law put in called the 30′30 compromise would make this possible.

For a few people in the north, this would be maddening. Slavery was supposed to die with this seemingly failproof Mason-Dixon line, simply because, with the U.S. not owning Texas yet, the north would have had a much bigger stretch of western territory then the south did. Expansion was supposed to eventually lead to the North dominating any issues in Congress for this very reason. For it to now be protocol to compromise this boundary and share westward Northern territories with the South…meant that slavery seemed destined to continue forever.

Meet William Lloyd Garrison, newspaper editor from Boston. 

He begins a newspaper called “The Liberator” which calls for the end of slavery. He said “I will not retreat one single inch…and I WILL BE HEARD!!!”

Unlike the other Thomas Jefferson/James Madison-inspired fairweather speakers, William Lloyd Garrison would be the first public figure in America to call for 100 percent total outlawing of slavery.

The north unfortunately was no angels. With how little greater America actually knew about the degredation and human rights violations going on in the south, it really seemed to alot of people that the slaves had it better then the people in the north! Industrialists in the north were some PRICKS. They worked people to death, paid them pennies, and were not only a huge benefactor of products made from cotton…but due to New York City being in the North, it was Northern banks that funded these plantations! 

Add to that, racism in the north was commonplace.

Of course, this would only make the words of William Lloyd Garrison seem more truthful in the eyes of even people who knew nothing about the south.

He would inspire a growing group of intellectuals called the transcendalists.

Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and the lady who first shed light on the plight of the handicapped who previously were being locked up for nothing — Dorthea Dix.

Expansion throughout both the north and south portions of the West Coast were slowed down a bit when a depression hit in 1837. Like we’ll see with Hitler in the next century, depressions cause scapegoating, and less sympathy when it comes to neighbors. Invasions of neighboring territories…something we would learn by Hitler’s time was wrong…was the order of the day in America during this time period.

We would send people into Texas until 60,000 of them had made it in. They would fight to take Texas from Mexico, and this would lead to a war in which America would claim all of Mexico’s North American possessions except for where it was too hot for white people to go. It was a god damn shame, because Mexicans are the coolest people IN North America.

In 1848, a few miners would discover what Spain had been onto in the 1500s — there was lots of gold to be found in their North American colonies. San Francisco had a whole bunch that had yet to be claimed. Word spread here in the days when television hadn’t replaced one-on-one, face-to-face communication with friends. The finders of this gold were not very good at “curbing their enthusiasm”. And so by 1849, people from all over the Eastern part of the Mississippi River flooded into San Francisco to mine for gold.

California thus becomes a state before the entire Oregon territory was even completely settled. Before there were even enough people in Kansas, Nebraska and Colorado to ratify.

This is a big big deal…because now in the early 1850s, it has become clear to all involved in the slavery issue…that a limit has been established as far as land out west to compromise and stall with. They’re going to have to deal with this very very soon. 

Harriet Tubman, a runaway slave from Maryland would grow to become the number one most wanted felon in the U.S., would lead what was referred to as the Underground Railroad, a series of pit stops along several routes leading up to Canada. Many of the places that took the form of these pit stops would be places that millions of African-Americans call home today — such as Detroit, sitting right on the Canadian border, Chicago, St. Louis, Milwaukee, Indianapolis, Philadelphia, and the city where Frederick Douglass would escape to…Boston. The catch was that Tubman knew there were alot of slaves who were following her only to chicken out, and would threaten to shoot anyone who did. You were not allowed to chicken out once you agreed to take a ticket on the Underground Railroad because you compromised the whole secrecy of the operation. You were a possible narc. Harriet Tubman would not be responsible thus for liberating hundreds of slaves…but at keeping the operation afloat. 

Tubman was never caught, living deep into her 80s until dying of natural causes.

1852.

Up until now, there was even the belief that slaves LIKED their situation. A Harvard doctor would even coin the idea of “Draptomania”, labelling the desire of slaves to want to run away to be a “medical condition”!

That will all change when Harriet Beecher Stowe writes “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” as a way to appeal to other mothers and sisters of Americans, and it turns out to be an international bestseller. As it was her first and only literary effort, Stowe’s book itself was not the best written one there’s been, but it contains three very important elements of the institution of slavery that people outside the South weren’t aware of — such as 1) slave families being separated in “auctions”, 2) slaves attempting suicide, and even killing their own babies to spare them a life as a slave, 3) owners telling recently purchased slaves that they’re doomed should they ever get sick, for they can just buy new ones.

Yet even then, there were still SOME people in America who didn’t plan on touching this conflict with a ten foot pole.

Until the Fugitive Slave Law.

That did it.

Suddenly, slaveowners from the South were showing up on their doorsteps in Connecticut with the completely legal right to search the premises for their missing slaves.

Northerners and Southerners alike who had nothing to do with Congress were now fighting to the death in town halls in still undecided territories such as Kansas and Nebraska. Kansas became a slave state, Nebraska was free.

1858

A new political party is established that is designed to eliminate slavery by keeping it from spreading. The “Republican Party”. These are what we call today Democrats, and there would be a reason later on for the great shift, but for now, they’re called Republicans. The face of this party would be a man who had grown old trying to break into politics. He had been at it for almost thirty-five years. A former lawyer from Illinois, and one who would use his lifetime of experience at appeasing people as a no-name to express a moderate position that nobody concerned will buy…for he still wasn’t a sleezy enough of a politician to con anybody. But he would make up for it by becoming the greatest military strategist of all time as well as our greatest American leader.  His name was Abraham Lincoln…

End of part 4 of 25

Nothing could quench her thirst for knowledge. One instance her father read to her The Declaration of Independence. Hatty later wrote, “I was ready as any of them to pledge my life, fortune, and sacred honor for such a cause.” I always thought that was hypocritical of them to put, “… that all men are created equal,” and then have slaves working on plantations. I can only imagine what affect it had on little Harriet. In 1833 Stowe crossed the Ohio River and saw her first plantation, many think that this provided her with her setting for Uncle Tom’s Cabin. By 1840, she was writing romantic stories for Godey’s Lady’s Book. Her fifteen stories and sketches were published into a collection called The Mayflower, about the descendants of the pilgrims. Stowe was now becoming the author she was always destined to be. While in church one day she had a very descriptive vision of a black man being beaten until he was on the edge of death, he forgave his tormentors and passed away. She went home and wrote down what she saw and drew a sketch. When she read it to her children they exclaimed, “Oh mama! Slavery is the most cruel thing in the world.” Her husband also commented, “Hatty this is the climax of that story… begin at the beginning and work up to this and you’ll have your book. From her she started to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It first appeared in weekly installments in the National Era between June 5, 1851 and April 1, 1852. Within two days the entire first edition had sold out, and after one year sales of the novel were estimated at more than 325,000 copies in America alone. World wide there are 3 million copies sold during Stowe’s life. Popular all over the world it was translated into many different languages. Stowe wanted to make her story very believable, to do this she had interviews with former slaves, she witnessed the selling of husbands and wives, and she even wrote to Fredrik Douglas. Abraham Lincoln said during a meeting with her, “So this is the woman who started the book war.” In the history of literature there has never been a more earth shattering story. Northerners and Southerners alike became aware of the wrongs done to so many people. For that reason this book is still read today, and still will be read for centuries to come; Harriet Beecher Stowe’s life, work, and Legacy will live on too.

Works Cited

“Harriet Beecher Stowe.” World Biographies 2003. Biography resource center. EBSCO Hos.

Noblesville Media Center, Noblesville, IN. 20 Nov. 2008. <http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/BioRC>

“Harriet Beecher Stowe.” World Biographies 2003. Biography resource center. EBSCO Hos.

Noblesville Media Center, Noblesville, IN. 21 Nov. 2008. <http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/BioRC>

Coil, Suzanne M. Harriet Beecher Stowe. Connecticut: Franklin Watts, 1995

“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”.