Harriet Beecher Stowe’s antislavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life among the Lowly, published nine years before the outbreak of the Civil War, set sales records for its time and inflamed the sectional tensions that led to the war. Written in protest against the infamous Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, the novel gained many readers when it first appeared in forty-one weekly installments in the Washington, D. C. newspaper the National Era from June 1851 to April 1852. It created a sensation when the Boston publisher John P. Jewett published it as a book in 1852. It “has excited more attention than any book since the invention of printing,”[1] remarked the minister Theodore Parker. Within a year, over 300,000 copies had been sold in American and some 1.5 million in Great Britain, and the novel had been translated into fifteen European languages.[2] And because reading the novel aloud was a favorite pastime of families and literary groups, it likely reached many more people. “Uncle Tom has probably ten readers to every purchaser,”[3] The Literary World declared in 1852. William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator hailed the “victorious Uncle Tom, with his millions of copies, and ten millions of readers.”[4]
What explains the novel’s success? Stowe skillfully used images from virtually every realm of culture—including religion, sensational pulp fiction, and popular entertainment—and brought them together in memorable characters and two compelling antislavery plot lines: the Northern one, involving the escape of the fugitive slaves Eliza and George Harris with their son, Harry; and the Southern one, tracing the painful separation of Uncle Tom from his family in Kentucky when he is sold into the Deep South.
