Harriet Beecher Stowe had been perplexed and troubled
by the South's violent reaction to her book. She had hoped that
those on the fence about the slavery issue would warm to her point
of view, and that she'd light a fire under moderates, but she was
blind sighted by the hatred coming out of the South. She received
a great deal of hate mail. In reaction, she decided to write A
Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, which was a mixture of journalism
and abolitionist tract, peppered with case histories of slave lives.
In the book she argued that people living in the South were so
numbed to the routine human brutalities involved in maintaining
a slave plantation that they no longer regarded acts of cruelty
as anything out of the ordinary. In addition, she censured clergymen
who refused to take a position on the slavery question, saying
that in keeping quiet, they were actively supporting the institution.
The book, published in May 1853, sold 150,000 copies in the U.S.
in its first year.
The wake of Uncle Tom's Cabin was wide,
and in it everyone wanted to see and hear from the woman who wrote
the tome. In March of 1853, Harriet Beecher Stowe traveled to England
and Europe on what purported to be a speaking tour. However, because her
fear of public speaking was almost crippling, her eloquent husband
Calvin Ellis Stowe took over most of her speaking engagements while
abroad. No one seemed to mind, as seeing the pale, slender woman
sitting next to the podium seemed to be enough for the people in
the audience.
The storm surrounding Uncle Tom's Cabin found
a twin in Europe, and Harriet was thrilled by the international
solidarity that she saw wherever she went. The whole of Europe,
it seemed, stood firmly behind the American anti- slavery cause.
In England, crowds followed her in the street. She was relieved
when she crossed over to the continent and found a somewhat more
relaxed atmosphere in Paris. She was, again, the toast of the town,
and her French hosts made sure to introduce her to all the appropriate
literary luminaries. French novelist Amatine Lucile Aurore Dupin,
known by her pseudonym George Sand, was a great fan of Harriet's,
and had written her fan letters. When Harriet arrived in Paris,
she asked to be introduced to Sand, but her French hosts balked
at the idea. People of respectable society, they told her, do not
speak with Sand, who openly kept lovers. Harriet, still a devout
Presbyterian at that time, agreed with this reasoning, and so never
met one of her greatest French fans.
After three months in Europe and England, Harriet and
her husband steamed home across the Atlantic. Upon her return she
found that her popularity in the North, and her notoriety in the
South, had not diminished. She received so much mail that her mailman
had taken to delivering her mail in a large sack each day. Her
social circle widened and her regular royalty checks kept the family
in comfortable, albeit still modest, surroundings.
In May 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed in Congress. The
new law enraged abolitionists because it left the decision whether
or not to allow slavery to exist in the newly admitted states up
to the territorial settlers. Soon after, the Dred Scott Case (or,
Sanford v. Scott), caused an even bigger uproar. Dred Scott, a
slave from Missouri, had accompanied his master to Illinois and
then to the Wisconsin territories, where slavery was illegal. When
his master died, Scott sued his master's widow for his and his
family's freedom, stating that because he was in a free state,
he was no longer a slave. The case was argued before the United
States Supreme Court in 1856–1857.The Supreme Court ruled against
Scott, deciding, in the process, that Congress had no power to
prohibit slavery in new states and territories.
Inspired and enraged by the outcome of the Dred Scott
case, Harriet Beecher Stowe began writing a new novel she based
on the 1831 slave insurrection popularly called the Nat Turner
Rebellion. Turner, a Virginia slave who believed himself meant
by God to lead the rebellion, planned a revolt along with about
sixty other slaves. The group killed Turner's owner's family and
then went on to kill fifty-five other whites. It led to a tightening
of the existing slave laws in the South and ended any hope of success
for the burgeoning abolitionist movement there. Harriet's book,
titled Dred: the tale of the great dismal swamp, was
published in 1856 and was a resounding success. Stowe was now the
most popular American author in the world.
In June 1856, Harriet left for Europe again, this time
bringing along her family. While in England she dined with Queen
Victoria and members of the British aristocracy. She seemed oblivious
to where the great wealth of the aristocracy came from, and some newspaper
editorialists in England took care to make sure she saw the parallels
between the Southern slave owners she so abhorred and the rich
aristocratic Brits with whom she was dining, who relied upon factory
laborers who were paid pennies and who were forced to work in abominable
conditions.
