It is said that when Harriet Beecher Stowe was greeted by Abraham Lincoln at a White House reception in December 1862, the president looked down at the diminutive author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and said “Is this the little woman who made this great war?”
Whether the statement is apocryphal or not hardly matters. The influence of the anti-slavery novel, the best selling book of the 19th century after the Bible, was immense and 200 years after Stowe’s birth it remains a lightning rod for controversy, praised by white scholars for its far-reaching influence and more often than not disparaged — unfairly, in my view — by many blacks, for whom the name Uncle Tom is an epithet for the submissive black man.
That controversy will never be settled, but there is no question in the mind of American Studies professor David S. Reynolds that Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in mobilizing public opinion against slavery, helped Lincoln get elected and in doing so lit the spark that plunged the nation into civil war.
Reynolds is the author of the just-published Mightier Than The Sword: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Battle For America, which vigorously explores the world in which Stowe lived, the inevitability of the Civil War and, most interesting for me, the capacity of a white woman to understand the feelings, beliefs and desires of blacks, and in doing so redefining American democracy on a more egalitarian basis.
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