A History of the American People

tearjerker of the 19th century, beating even the death of Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop
(1841) and Black Beauty (1877).
Stowe was lucky, in a way, to live at the time when American literature was only just
maturing and most of it was still crude or grossly imitative of English fashions. She was no
stylist, she loved melodrama (her mentor was Scott), and some of her effects would, and indeed
did, make even Dickens blush. But she stuck out because she wrote in the American language
and her theme was the great issue which was already beginning to dominate American politics to
the exclusion of almost everything else. There was also the additional frisson of a woman writing
about atrocities hitherto regarded as unspeakable. Readers, especially men, were not sure
whether it was proper for a woman novelist to acknowledge that slaves were stripped naked and
beaten, that slave women were the sexual property of their masters, and that slave-owners
habitually fathered children of all colors. In the South this was precisely the line of attack critics
took. One wrote: Granted that every accusation brought by Mrs Stowe is perfectly true ... the pollution of such literature to the heart and mind of women is not less.' The Southern Quarterly dismissed her work asthe loathesome rakings of a foul fancy.' Another review read: The Petticoat lifts of itself and we see the hoof of the beast under the table.’ Fortunately for Stowe, Northern readers did not think she had gone too far. They found her descriptions more credible, perhaps, just because she was a woman-more so than the highly colored atrocity stories of the emancipationist press, written almost entirely by men, usually clerics. This conviction turned Uncle Tom into the most successful propaganda tract of all time. It was widely believed that Mrs Stowe was responsible for Lincoln's election, and so for the chain of events which led to the bombardment of Fort Sumter. When the towering President received Stowe, who was under five feet, at the Whit House in 1862-would that we had a photograph of that encounter-Lincoln said to her:So you're the little woman who wrote the boo
that started this great war. But of course it was more complicated than that.