In 1851, after the enactment by the United States Congress of a Fugitive Slave Act (the effect of which was to return Africans and African Americans who had escaped from slavery in the Southern states and were living in the North, back into captivity), the editor of an antislavery periodical asked Harriet Beecher Stowe if she could supply him with a timely story or article. Stowe agreed to write a fictional piece about the lives of several slaves on a Kentucky plantation. It was a subject she knew a little about, having visited such a plantation briefly and having talked and corresponded with people who had a more detailed knowledge; moreover, it was a subject that moved her deeply. She expected that her story, printed in serial form, would run for three or four installments. In fact, it would turn out to be much longer and would require some hurried research, as Stowe's characters took her into places and situations of which she had little or no knowledge.
The story, as it ran, was immensely popular, and when it was published in book form in 1852, it immediately became a runaway bestseller in both the U.S. and Great Britain. The effect of this emotionally powerful book was to galvanize public opinion against slavery in a way that no strictly moral or intellectual argument had as yet been able to accomplish. President Lincoln supposedly said, upon meeting Stowe in 1862, "So you're the little woman who wrote the book that caused this great war." In a very real sense, he was right.
Uncle Tom's Cabin was first of all a popular book, effective because people identified with its sympathetic characters and thrilled to its incidents. Readers of all ages and levels of education, male and female, American and British, black and white (although the book was certainly intended chiefly for a white audience), made Uncle Tom's Cabin one of the most successful bestsellers to be published in the United States. And whether or not the average nineteenth-century reader agreed with the book, he or she had no trouble recognizing and understanding its language, assumptions, and fictional conventions. However, that is not the case with the average reader today. Stowe's novel presents modern readers with several problems that bear examination.
