1852 Ten years after it came out, on meeting the book’s author, Harriet Beecher Stowe, President Abraham Lincoln is supposed to have said: ‘So this is the little lady who made this big war.’ Historians now doubt the literal truth of that anecdote, but its larger truth is undeniable. In its first year alone the book sold 300,000 copies, and after a dip in sales, went on to become the best-selling novel of the 19th century, clocking up figures second only to the Bible. And if it didn’t cause the Civil War, it did more to convert people of the northern states to the abolitionist cause than a million speeches by single-issue campaigners.
Tom is a loyal slave with high Christian principles. Sold down the river by gentle but financially distressed owners, he saves the life of little Eva, whose father, the wealthy plantation-owner Augustine St Clare, buys Tom in gratitude as his own household slave. When Eva dies and her father is accidentally killed, Tom is auctioned to the wicked Simon Legree, a brutal, drunken planter who eventually has Tom flogged to death.
The book’s power lies in its Dickensian blend of a strong moral message wrapped in situations stirring the readers’ sentiments. Chapter V, in which Tom’s original owners discuss the conflict between their loyalty to their slaves and their need for money, is worthy of Dickens at his best. Mrs Shelby objects more to the boorish manners of the slave trader than to what he’s come to do, and next morning, after a guiltily sleepless night, still complains when her personal servant doesn’t answer her call.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin has been blamed for introducing or perpetrating a number of black stereotypes, like the genial matriarch Mammy the cook and the pickaninny child Topsy, who just ‘growed’. And throughout the civil rights movements of the second half of the 20th century, ‘Uncle Tom’ was a byword for the compliant negro. Yet without him and the novel bearing his name, black progress might have started from much further behind.