1850-1859---"Uncle Tom's Cabin"

JUNE 5, 1851:  

The National Era, an abolitionist magazine, publishes the first of 40 installments of Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Or, Life Among The Lowly by Harriet Beecher Stowe, sister of Brooklyn, New York’s leading abolitionist, Henry Ward Beecher. Uncle Tom’s Cabin proves so popular as a serial that it is released in 1853 as a complete novel. The book sells more than 300,000 copies between 1853 and 1854, but is then taken out of publication. For its time it is a blockbuster bestseller.

 

There is no question that Uncle Tom’s Cabin was written as abolitionist propaganda. The Christlike slave, Tom, is beaten and abused mercilessly by his master, Simon Legree (who is portrayed as a relocated Northerner). The lurid cruelty of Uncle Tom’s Cabin did much to spur the Abolition Movement, and hardened feelings between North and South. Abraham Lincoln called it, “The little book that started this great war.”

Southerners excoriated Stowe, and insisted that slavery was not as she had presented it. In fact, Stowe’s depiction of the black race is rife with its own racism and stereotypes, many of which have persisted in certain quarters to this day. However, no Southerner penned a pro-slavery story that caught at the public imagination as much. Indeed, slaveowners were not generally as wasteful of slaves as was the fictional Legree, if for no other reason than that slaves represented a huge capital investment.

That is not to say that slavery was a benign institution. Just as there are wife-beaters, child-beaters, and animal-beaters there were slave-beaters (often the same men). And slaves, as property, could be done with and to as a Master saw fit. Slaves were sold off for cash, with slave families being broken up in the process. Slave women were frequently and carelessly used for sexual release by Planters and their sons. The resultant mixed-race children (stereotyped as “tragic mulattoes”) were often sold off at the insistence of Planters’ wives. Black men could not defend their wives or their children from such misadventures. Slavery did provide Southern blacks and whites with a built-in social structure governing race relations, but the structure, and the relations, were often perverse; for though blacks were considered as property and usually deemed inherently inferior to whites, whites used their slave property not only as field labor but as household help, cooks, playmates and wet-nurses for their children. Many were the young Masters who were suckled at the breasts of their own slaves.

Just as Uncle Tom’s Cabin hardened stereotypes about Southerners and slaves in the North, it hardened Southern conceptions about Northern whites. There were far fewer abolitionists in the North than the South believed. Northern racism was, if anything, far more pernicious than Southern racism in the years leading up to and including the war. Blacks in the North were seen as competition for free labor, and they were banned from some cities entirely and severely segregated in others (such as New York). Only in a few areas (like Boston) did blacks have civic rights and was the Fugitive Slave Law actively contravened. Pockets of abolitionists throughout the rest of the North maintained the Underground Railroad to New England and Canada at the risk of their own incarceration or death by mob.     

Underground Railroad Stations:  The historic Solomon Fowler House in Bristol, Indiana has a cupola and a secret "hide" beneath the floor. The house itself was built in 1868, when slavery was already abolished, so the purpose of the cupola and the "hide" are unknown. Possibly, the "hide" was used prior to the house's construction. The house is extremely similar architecturally to the Levi Coffin House in nearby Fremont, Indiana, which was built before the Civil War. The Levi Coffin House too has a cupola (used as a lookout post) and a "hide." The two men were business partners, close friends, and fellow prewar abolitionists, so it is possible Fowler simply decided to add the features that graced his friend's home.