Uncle Tom's Cabin

Rarely does a one work of literature change a society or start it down the road to cataclysmic controversy. One such work is Harriet Beecher Stowe's, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Considered by many, one the most influential American works of fiction ever published. Uncle Tom’s Cabin contracts many different attitudes that Southerners as well as Northerners shared towards slavery. It shows the evils and cruelties of slavery and the cruelty, in particular how masters treat their slaves and how families are torn apart because of slavery. Before the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, information regarding the evils of slavery and the treatment of slaves was not readily available. Uncle Tom’s Cabin succeeded where other anti-slavery publications had failed. Uncle Tom’s Cabin made a deep emotional impact and humanized the slave, moving the slave to a level where their thoughts and feeling were comparable to any other member of the human race.

The impact of Uncle Tom’s Cabin did more to provoke angry rebuttals in the South and arouse anti-slavery sentiment in the North than any other event in the slavery era. The publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, together with the Fugitive Slave Act, changed the Northerners disconnected view of slavery forever. Slavery was no longer a Southern issue that had no impact on the life of those above the Ohio River. Differing views about the ritual of slavery contributed to the growing division between the North and South, and this separation came to be known as the American Civil War.

The response to Uncle Tom’s Cabin during the nineteenth-century greatly conflict between American groups. In this paper, I will be analyzing the response and reactions of African Americans, White Northerners, and White Southerners to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s famous novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Among the three groups of Americans that are being investigated; no other group had greater objection and dissatisfaction for Uncle Tom’s Cabin then