The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue

Immediately after the war, there was a large class of Southern people who feared that the opening of the free schools to the freedmen and the poor whites—the education of the head alone—would result merely in increasing the class who sought to escape labor, and that the South would soon be overrun by the idle and vicious. But as the results of industrial combined with academic training begin to show themselves in hundreds of communities that have been lifted up through the medium of the Tuskegee system, these former prejudices against education are being removed. Many of those who a few years ago opposed general education are now among its warmest advocates.

This industrial training, emphasizing as it does the idea of economic production, is gradually bringing the South to the point where it is feeding itself. Before the war, and long after it, the South made what little profit was received from the cotton crop, and sent its earnings out of the South to purchase food supplies,—meat, bread, canned vegetables, and the like; but the improved methods of agriculture are fast changing this habit. With the newer methods of labor, which teach promptness and system, and emphasize the worth of the beautiful,—the moral value of the well-painted house, and the fence with every paling and nail in its place,—we are bringing to bear upon the South an influence that is making it a new country in industry, education, and religion.

THE STORY OF UNCLE TOM'S CABIN by Charles Dudley Warner

On the 29th of June, 1852, Henry Clay died. In that month the two great political parties, in their national conventions, had accepted as a finality all the compromise measures of 1850, and the last hours of the Kentucky statesman were brightened by the thought that his efforts had secured the perpetuity of the Union.

But on the 20th of March, 1852, there had been an event, the significance of which was not taken into account by the political conventions or by Clay, which was to test the conscience of the nation. This was the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Was this only an "event," the advent of a new force in politics; was the book merely an abolition pamphlet, or was it a novel, one of the few great masterpieces of fiction that the world has produced? After the lapse of forty-four years and the disappearance of African slavery on this continent, it is perhaps possible to consider this question dispassionately.

The compromise of 1850 satisfied neither the North nor the South. The admission of California as a free State was regarded by Calhoun as fatal to the balance between the free and the slave States, and thereafter a fierce agitation sprang up for the recovery of this loss of balance, and ultimately for Southern preponderance, which resulted in the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, the Kansas-Nebraska war, and the civil war. The fugitive slave law was hateful to the North not only because it was cruel and degrading, but because it was seen to be a move formed for nationalizing slavery. It was unsatisfactory to the South because it was deemed inadequate in its provisions, and because the South did not believe the North would execute it in good faith. So unstable did the compromise seem that in less than a year after the passage of all its measures, Henry Clay and forty-four Senators and Representatives united in a manifesto declaring that they would support no man for office who was not known to be opposed to any disturbance of the settlements of the compromise. When, in February, 1851, the recaptured fugitive slave, Burns, was rescued from the United States officers in Boston, Clay urged the investment of the President with extraordinary power to enforce the law.

Henry Clay was a patriot, a typical American. The republic and its preservation were the passions of his life. Like Lincoln, who was born in the State of his adoption, he was willing to make almost any sacrifice for the maintenance of the Union. He had no sympathy with the system of slavery. There is no doubt that he would have been happy in the belief that it was in the way of gradual and peaceful extinction. With him, it was always the Union before state rights and before slavery. Unlike Lincoln, he had not the clear vision to see that the republic could not endure half slave and half free. He believed that the South, appealing to the compromises of the Constitution, would sacrifice the Union before it would give up slavery, and in fear of this menace he begged the North to conquer its prejudices. We are not liable to overrate his influence as a compromising pacificator from 1832 to 1852. History will no doubt say that it was largely due to him that the war on the Union was postponed to a date when its success was impossible.

It was the fugitive slave law that brought the North face to face with slavery nationalized, and it was the fugitive slave law that produced Uncle Tom's Cabin. The effect of this story was immediate and electric. It went straight to the hearts of tens of thousands of people who had never before considered slavery except as a political institution for which they had no personal responsibility. What was this book, and how did it happen to produce such an effect? It is true that it struck into a time of great irritation and agitation, but in one sense there was nothing new in it. The facts had all been published. For twenty years abolition tracts, pamphlets, newspapers, and books had left little to be revealed, to those who cared to read, as to the nature of slavery or its economic aspects. The evidence was practically all in,—supplied largely by the advertisements of Southern newspapers and by the legislation of the slaveholding States,—but it did not carry conviction; that is, the sort of conviction that results in action. The subject had to be carried home to the conscience. Pamphleteering, convention-holding, sermons, had failed to do this. Even the degrading requirements of the fugitive slave law, which brought shame and humiliation, had not sufficed to fuse the public conscience, emphasize the necessity of obedience to the moral law, and compel recognition of the responsibility of the North for slavery. Evidence had not done this, passionate appeals had not done it, vituperation had not done it. What sort of presentation of the case would gain the public ear and go to the heart? If Mrs. Stowe, in all her fervor, had put forth first the facts in The Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, which so buttressed her romance, the book would have had no more effect than had followed the like compilations and arraignments. What was needed? If we can discover this, we shall have the secret of this epoch-making novel.

The story of this book has often been told. It is in the nature of a dramatic incident of which the reader never tires any more than the son of Massachusetts does of the minutest details of that famous scene in the Senate Chamber when Webster replied to Hayne.

At the age of twenty-four the author was married and went to live in Cincinnati, where her husband held a chair in the Lane Theological Seminary. There for the first time she was brought into relations with the African race and saw the effects of slavery. She visited slaveholders in Kentucky and had friends among them. In some homes she saw the "patriarchal" institution at its best. The Beecher family were anti-slavery, but they had not been identified with the abolitionists, except perhaps Edward, who was associated with the murdered Lovejoy. It was long a reproach brought by the abolitionists against Henry Ward Beecher that he held entirely aloof from their movement. At Cincinnati, however, the personal aspects of the case were brought home to Mrs. Stowe. She learned the capacities and peculiarities of the negro race. They were her servants; she taught some of them; hunted fugitives applied to her; she ransomed some by her own efforts; every day there came to her knowledge stories of the hunger for freedom, of the ruthless separation of man and wife and mother and child, and of the heroic sufferings of those who ran away from the fearful doom of those "sold down South." These things crowded upon her mind and awoke her deepest compassion. But what could she do against all the laws, the political and commercial interests, the great public apathy? Relieve a case here and there, yes. But to dwell upon the gigantic evil, with no means of making head against it, was to invite insanity.

As late as 1850, when Professor Stowe was called to Bowdoin College, and the family removed to Brunswick, Maine, Mrs. Stowe had not felt impelled to the duty she afterwards undertook. "In fact, it was a sort of general impression upon her mind, as upon that of many humane people in those days, that the subject was so dark and painful a one, so involved in difficulty and obscurity, so utterly beyond human hope or help, that it was of no use to read, or think, or distress one's self about it." But when she reached New England the excitement over the fugitive slave law was at its height. There was a panic in Boston among the colored people settled there, who were daily fleeing to Canada. Every mail brought her pitiful letters from Boston, from Illinois, and elsewhere, of the terror and despair caused by the law. Still more was the impressed by the apathy of the Christian world at the North, and surely, she said, the people did not understand what the "system" was. Appeals were made to her, who had some personal knowledge of the subject, to take up her pen. The task seemed beyond her in every way. She was not strong, she was in the midst of heavy domestic cares, with a young infant, with pupils to whom she was giving daily lessons, and the limited income of the family required the strictest economy. The dependence was upon the small salary of Professor Stowe, and the few dollars she could earn by an occasional newspaper or magazine article. But the theme burned in her mind, and finally took this shape: at least she would write some sketches and show the Christian world what slavery really was, and what the system was that they were defending. She wanted to do this with entire fairness, showing all the mitigations of the "patriarchal" system, and all that individuals concerned in it could do to alleviate its misery. While pondering this she came by chance, in a volume of an anti-slavery magazine, upon the authenticated account of the escape of a woman with her child on the ice across the Ohio River from Kentucky. She began to meditate. The faithful slave husband in Kentucky, who had refused to escape from a master who trusted him, when he was about to be sold "down river," came to her as a pattern of Uncle Tom, and the scenes of the story began to form themselves in her mind. "The first part of the book ever committed to writing [this is the statement of Mrs. Stowe] was the death of Uncle Tom. This scene presented itself almost as a tangible vision to her mind while sitting at the communion-table in the little church in Brunswick. She was perfectly overcome by it, and could scarcely restrain the convulsion of tears and sobbings that shook her frame. She hastened home and wrote it, and her husband being away, read it to her two sons of ten and twelve years of age. The little fellows broke out into convulsions of weeping, one of them saying through his sobs, 'Oh, mamma, slavery is the most cursed thing in the world!' From that time the story can less be said to have been composed by her than imposed upon her. Scenes, incidents, conversations rushed upon her with a vividness and importunity that would not be denied. The book insisted upon getting itself into being, and would take no denial."

When two or three chapters were written she wrote to her friend, Dr. Bailey, of Washington, the editor of The National Era, to which she had contributed, that she was planning a story that might run through several numbers of the Era. The story was at once applied for, and thereafter weekly installments were sent on regularly, in spite of all cares and distractions. The installments were mostly written during the morning, on a little desk in a corner of the dining-room of the cottage in Brunswick, subject to all the interruptions of house-keeping, her children bursting into the room continually with the importunity of childhood. But they did not break the spell or destroy her abstraction. With a smile and a word and a motion of the hand she would wave them off, and keep on in her magician's work. Long afterwards they recalled this, dimly understood at the time, and wondered at her power of concentration. Usually at night the chapters were read to the family, who followed the story with intense feeling. The narrative ran on for nine months, exciting great interest among the limited readers of the Era, and gaining sympathetic words from the anti-slavery people, but without making any wide impression on the public.

We may pause here in the narrative to note two things: the story was not the work of a novice, and it was written out of abundant experience and from an immense mass of accumulated thought and material. Mrs. Stowe was in her fortieth year. She had been using her pen since she was twelve years old, in extensive correspondence, in occasional essays, in short stories and sketches, some of which appeared in a volume called The Mayflower, published in 1843, and for many years her writing for newspapers and periodicals had added appreciably to the small family income. She was in the maturity of her intellectual powers, she was trained in the art of writing, and she had, as Walter Scott had when he began the Waverley Novels at the age of forty-three, abundant store of materials on which to draw. To be sure, she was on fire with a moral purpose, but she had the dramatic instinct, and she felt that her object would not be reached by writing an abolition tract.

"In shaping her material the author had but one purpose, to show the institution of slavery truly, just as it existed. She had visited in Kentucky; had formed the acquaintance of people who were just, upright, and generous, and yet slave-holders. She had heard their views, and appreciated their situation; she felt that justice required that their difficulties should be recognized and their virtues acknowledged. It was her object to show that the evils of slavery were the inherent evils of a bad system, and not always the fault of those who had become involved in it and were its actual administrators. Then she was convinced that the presentation of slavery alone, in its most dreadful forms, would be a picture of such unrelieved horror and darkness as nobody could be induced to look at. Of set purpose, she sought to light up the darkness by humorous and grotesque episodes, and the presentation of the milder and more amusing phases of slavery, for which her recollection of the never-failing wit and drollery of her former colored friends in Ohio gave her abundant material."

This is her own account of the process, years after. But it is evident that, whether consciously or unconsciously, she did but follow the inevitable law of all great dramatic creators and true story-tellers since literature began.

For this story Mrs. Stowe received from the Era the sum of three hundred dollars. Before it was finished it attracted the attention of Mr. J. P. Jewett, of Boston, a young and then unknown publisher, who offered to issue it in book form. His offer was accepted, but as the tale ran on he became alarmed at its length, and wrote to the author that she was making the story too long for a one-volume novel; that the subject was unpopular; that people would not willingly hear much about it; that one short volume might possibly sell, but that if it grew to two that might prove a fatal obstacle to its success. Mrs. Stowe replied that she did not make the story, that the story made itself, and that she could not stop it till it was done. The publisher hesitated. It is said that a competent literary critic to whom he submitted it sat up all night with the novel, and then reported, "The story has life in it; it will sell." Mr. Jewett proposed to Professor Stowe to publish it on half profits if he would share the expenses. This offer was declined, for the Stowes had no money to advance, and the common royalty of ten per cent on the sales was accepted.

Mrs. Stowe was not interested in this business transaction. She was thinking only of having the book circulated for the effect she had at heart. The intense absorption in the story held her until the virtual end in the death of Uncle Tom, and then it seemed as if the whole vital force had left her. She sank into a profound discouragement. Would this appeal, which she had written with her heart's blood, go for nothing, as all the prayers and tears and strivings had already gone? When the last proof sheets left her hands, "it seemed to her that there was no hope; that nobody would read, nobody would pity; that this frightful system, which had already pursued its victims into the free States, might at last even threaten them in Canada." Resolved to leave nothing undone to attract attention to her cause, she wrote letters and ordered copies of her novel sent to men of prominence who had been known for their anti-slavery sympathies,—to Prince Albert, Macaulay, Charles Dickens, Charles Kingsley, and Lord Carlisle. Then she waited for the result.

She had not long to wait. The success of the book was immediate. Three thousand copies were sold the first day, within a few days ten thousand copies had gone, on the 1st of April a second edition went to press, and thereafter eight presses running day and night were barely able to keep pace with the demand for it. Within a year three hundred thousand copies were sold. No work of fiction ever spread more quickly throughout the reading community or awakened a greater amount of public feeling. It was read by everybody, learned and unlearned, high and low, for it was an appeal to universal human sympathy, and the kindling of this spread the book like wildfire. At first it seemed to go by acclamation. But this was not altogether owing to sympathy with the theme. I believe that it was its power as a novel that carried it largely. The community was generally apathetic when it was not hostile to any real effort to be rid of slavery. This presently appeared. At first there were few dissenting voices from the chorus of praise. But when the effect of the book began to be evident it met with an opposition fiercer and more personal than the great wave of affectionate thankfulness which greeted it at first. The South and the defenders and apologists of slavery everywhere were up in arms. It was denounced in pulpit and in press, and some of the severest things were said of it at the North. The leading religious newspaper of the country, published in New York, declared that it was "anti-Christian."

Mrs. Stowe was twice astonished: first by its extraordinary sale, and second by the quarter from which the assault on it came. She herself says that her expectations were strikingly different from the facts. "She had painted slaveholders as amiable, generous, and just. She had shown examples among them of the noblest and most beautiful traits of character; had admitted fully their temptations, their perplexities, and their difficulties, so that a friend of hers who had many relatives in the South wrote to her: 'Your book is going to be the great pacificator; it will unite both North and South.' Her expectation was that the professed abolitionists would denounce it as altogether too mild in its dealings with slaveholders. To her astonishment, it was the extreme abolitionists who received, and the entire South who rose up against it."

There is something almost amusing in Mrs. Stowe's honest expectation that the deadliest blow the system ever suffered should have been received thankfully by those whose traditions, education, and interests were all bound up in it. And yet from her point of view it was not altogether unreasonable. Her blackest villain and most loathsome agent of the system, Legree, was a native of Vermont. All her wrath falls upon the slave-traders, the auctioneers, the public whippers, and the overseers, and all these persons and classes were detested by the Southerners to the point of loathing, and were social outcasts. The slave-traders and the overseers were tolerated as perhaps necessary in the system, but they were never admitted into respectable society. This feeling Mrs. Stowe regarded as a condemnation of the system.

Pecuniary reward was the last thing that Mrs. Stowe expected for her disinterested labor, but it suits the world's notion of the fitness of things that this was not altogether wanting. For the millions of copies of Uncle Tom scattered over the world the author could expect nothing, but in her own country her copyright yielded her a moderate return that lifted her out of poverty and enabled her to pursue her philanthropic and literary career. Four months after the publication of the book Professor Stowe was in the publisher's office, and Mr. Jewett asked him how much he expected to receive. "I hope," said Professor Stowe, with a whimsical smile, "that it will be enough to buy my wife a silk dress." The publisher handed him a check for ten thousand dollars.

Before Mrs. Stowe had a response to the letters accompanying the books privately sent to England, the novel was getting known there. Its career in Great Britain paralleled its success in America. In April a copy reached London in the hands of a gentleman who had taken it on the steamer to read. He gave it to Mr. Henry Vizetelly, who submitted it to Mr. David Bogue, a man known for his shrewdness and enterprise. He took a night to consider it, and then declined it, although it was offered to him for five pounds. A Mr. Gilpin also declined it. It was then submitted to Mr. Salisbury, a printer. This taster for the public sat up with the book till four o'clock in the morning, alternately weeping and laughing. Fearing, however, that this result was due to his own weakness, he woke up his wife, whom he describes as a rather strong-minded woman, and finding that the story kept her awake and made her also laugh and cry, he thought it might safely be printed. It seems, therefore, that Mr. Vizetelly ventured to risk five pounds, and the volume was brought out through the nominal agency of Clarke & Company. In the first week an edition of seven thousand was worked off. It made no great stir until the middle of June, but during July it sold at the rate of one thousand a week. By the 20th of August the demand for it was overwhelming. The printing firm was then employing four hundred people in getting it out, and seventeen printing-machines, besides hand-presses. Already one hundred and fifty thousand copies were sold. Mr. Vizetelly disposed of his interest, and a new printing firm began to issue monster editions. About this time the publishers awoke to the fact that any one was at liberty to reprint the book, and the era of cheap literature was initiated, founded on American reprints which cost the publisher no royalty. A shilling edition followed the one-and-sixpence, and then one complete for sixpence. As to the total sale, Mr. Sampson Low reports: "From April to December, 1852, twelve different editions (not reissues) were published, and within the twelve months of its first appearance eighteen different London publishing houses were engaged in supplying the great demand that had set in, the total number of editions being forty, varying from fine illustrated editions at 15s., 10s., and 7s. 6d. to the cheap popular editions of 1s. 9d. and 6d. After carefully analyzing these editions and weighing probabilities with ascertained facts, I am able pretty confidently to say that the aggregate number of copies circulated in Great Britain and the colonies exceeds one and a half millions." Later, abridgments were published.

Almost simultaneously with this furor in England the book made its way on the Continent. Several translations appeared in Germany and France, and for the authorized French edition Mrs. Stowe wrote a new preface, which served thereafter for most of the European editions. I find no record of the order of the translations of the book into foreign languages, but those into some of the Oriental tongues did not appear till several years after the great excitement. The ascertained translations are into twenty-three tongues, namely: Arabic, Armenian, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Flemish, French, German, Hungarian, Illyrian, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, modern Greek, Russian, Servian, Siamese, Spanish, Swedish, Wallachian, and Welsh. Into some of these languages several translations were made. In 1878 the British Museum contained thirty-five editions of the original text, and eight editions of abridgments or adaptations.