A History of the American People

American pleiade, Whitman's Leaves of Grass made its first appearance in 1855, as did
Longfellow's Hiawatha.
Among these remarkable books, however, one stands out not so much for its literary quality as
for its political influence. There has never been another book quite like Uncle Tom's Cabin.
Originally published serially in the National Era, it appeared in book form on March 20, 1852,
selling 10,000 copies in its first week and 300,000 by the end of the year. The sales in Britain
were even higher; 1,200,000 within twelve months. Its author, Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-96),
came from a sprawling Connecticut family of teachers and clerics, married a clerical professor
herself, and produced a sprawling family of her own. She took to magazine- and book writing,
like hundreds of other American and British matrons of her class-Mrs Trollope was a typical
example-to make ends meet and give her children a few treats. She had already built up a
substantial popular reputation before she exploded the bomb which was Uncle Tom. The force of
the blast surprised no one more than herself. Curiously enough, she was not really an abolitionist,
at least when she wrote the book, and knew little about the South. Her only direct experience of
slavery was a short visit to Kentucky, itself a border state. She seems to have got most of her
information about slavery from black women servants, especially her cook, Eliza Buck, and from
the abolitionist literature. It was not until the factual basis of her novel was challenged by angry
Southerners that Mrs Stowe, helped by her brother, combed through newspaper reports of actual
legal cases from the South. The result was a 259-page, densely printed compilation, A Key to
Uncle Tom's Cabin, which Stowe published in 1853, showing that the cruelties and injustices of
which the novel complained were, in reality, far more severe than she had imagined.
By then the book was not merely a bestseller; it was also a phenomenon. The sales in Britain
were particularly significant. An immense Sunday School edition, at the equivalent of 25 cents,
meant that British schoolchildren had their ideas of America shaped by Eliza, Tom, Eva, Topsy,
Dinah, Miss Ophelia, Augustine St Clair, and Simon Legree. When Stowe came to Britain in
1853 she was lionized by all classes. She received delegations and thank-offerings from the poor,
the leading novelist Charles Kingsley hailed her as the founder of American literature' and her book asthe greatest novel ever written,' and the Duchess of Sutherland presented her with a
solid gold bracelet in the form of a slave's shackle." The truth is the British leaped at this
opportunity to treat Americans, from whom they had received much preaching about democracy
and equality, from visitors such as Senator Webster and Emerson, as morally suspect. So did the
rest of the world, the novel being rapidly translated into more than forty languages. In Britain the
success of the novel helped to ensure that, seven years later, the British, whose economic interest
lay with the South, remained strictly neutral. But in the world as a whole it was the foundation
stone of what, in the 20th century, became the mighty edifice of anti-Americanism. In the United
States itself, the impact of the book was multiplied many times by the new American science of
boosting and multimedia sales-pitching (a modern expression for what was, by the 1850s, a well-
established process). The book was turned into statues, toys, games, handkerchiefs, wallpapers,
cutlery, and plates. Its real. popularity began when it appeared on the stage, in the form of songs
and dramatized versions. `Tom Shows' toured all the Northern and Western states. One of the
highlights of the book, Eliza's escape, carrying her child across the Ohio into free territory, with
the slave-catchers in close pursuit, became a key moment in early American drama. When the
episode was staged at the National Theater in New York, an immense hush descended on the
packed audience and an observer who looked around was astonished to see everyone, including
society gentlemen and roughshirted men in the galleries, in tears. Uncle Tom was the greatest