During 1850 and early 1851, Harriet Beecher Stowe read
every slave account she could get her hands on. She interviewed
dozens of ex-slaves and even began a correspondence with perhaps
the most famous ex-slave in the country–Frederick Douglass. For
her first novel, Harriet Beecher Stowe did a great deal of journalistic
work. Uncle
Tom's Cabin painted an authentic portrait
of slave life on Southern plantations.
In May 1851, the first chapter of Uncle Tom's
Cabin appeared in National Era as "Uncle
Tom's Cabin: or, the Man That Was a Thing." Each week, Harriet
sent a newly finished chapter off to her editor, who promptly published
it in the next issue of National Era. This process
was fairly standard for novels of the day–Charles Dickens, for
example, published almost all of his novels serially. The book
grew and grew and, in March 1852, the last installment of Uncle
Tom's Cabin appeared in National Era. That same month, the
book was published in whole and, like the each issue of National
Era that contained an installment of Uncle Tom's Cabin, it
sold out almost immediately. Uncle Tom's Cabin had captured the
attention of an already tense nation.
The immediate success of Uncle Tom's Cabin was
overwhelming. The book sold three thousand copies in its first
day and went through 120 editions in its first year. Before the
end of the year, 350,000 copies of the book had been sold and it
had been translated into forty languages. Four months after Uncle
Tom's Cabin was published, Harriet Beecher Stowe–who had,
for so many years worked to make ends meet–received her first royalty
check. It was for ten thousand dollars. In 1852, this was an almost
incomprehensible amount of money.
In 1852, everyone in America seemed to have a copy of Uncle Tom's
Cabin in his or her hand. The story of slave plantation
life, the pathos with which she infused the lives of both slave
and slave owner, and the impassioned argument she made against
slavery evoked intense emotions in anyone who read it. The hero
of the book, an old slave named Uncle Tom, is a gentle, affable,
religious man who has been a lifelong victim of the institution
of slavery. Later, in the mid Twentieth Century, the character
of Uncle Tom would come be seen as a cliché of the obsequious,
submissive black man oppressed by whites or white dominated society.
But in Stowe's book, he was meant to be a living symbol of the
effect of slavery on the human spirit. Uncle Tom finds his counterpart
in the fiery George Harris, a younger slave who would rather die
than remain in chains for the rest of his life. Stowe also created
very real, complex characters out of the slave traders, the plantation
owners, the apologists in Northern churches and the "conductors"
on the Underground Railroad, mostly Quakers. The book made Harriet Beecher
Stowe one of the most hated people in the South. The hostility
was violent and unyielding despite the fact that Stowe had gone
to great pains to show that Southern plantation owners were, in
a sense, also victims of the institution to which their economy
was wedded.
Harriet Beecher Stowe's social document was also regarded
as great literature by some of the best authors of the time. Dickens
was impressed by Stowe's book, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow considered
it a triumph, Tolstoy called it "pure, moral art" and Henry James
greatly respected it. In later years, when realism had trumped the
maudlin romanticism of much of nineteenth-century American novels,
Harriet Beecher Stowe's works would be seen as sentimental and
clichéd.
By the end of 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe was a full-fledged celebrity,
both at home and abroad. Her financial worries were over, and she
had acquired the fame she had long sought. However, her domestic
duties were still of great importance to her and when, that same
year, her husband Calvin Ellis Stowe was offered the prestigious
chair of Sacred Literature at the Theological Seminary in Andover,
Massachusetts, she welcomed the opportunity to cease being the chief
breadwinner in the family.
