It’s the birthday of Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896, #nicelonglife), whose anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851-52) had such a powerful and polarizing effect on society as to be considered one of the causes of the Civil War.

Stowe was born in Litchfield, Connecticut, to the sort of family who were always learning or teaching or founding schools. Her father was Lyman Beecher, a Congregationalist minister who became president of Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati, Ohio, and one of her siblings, Catharine, started a couple of schools.

Stowe went with her father to Cincinnati and in 1836 met and married a professor at Lane, biblical scholar Calvin Ellis Stowe, who encouraged her writing. Stowe, who had already published her first book, Primary Geography, in 1833, would go on to have seven children and write 30 books, which seems like plenty of both. In 1849, the Stowes lost a son to a cholera epidemic, deepening Stowe’s empathy for slaves who had children sold away from them, and in 1850 the Fugitive Slave Act was passed, requiring Northerners to return runaways. Stowe was galvanized to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a “call to arms for Northerners to defy the Fugitive Slave Act” (see the article here).

Uncle Tom’s Cabin appeared first in serial form in the National Era, an anti-slavery paper out of D.C., and then in book form in 1852, selling 10,000 copies in the U.S. in its first week, 300,000 copies in its first year, and 1.5 million copies in Great Britain that same year, making it the bestselling novel of the 19th century and the second bestselling book (behind the bible). The novel tells the story of the slave Uncle Tom, whose master plans to set him free but dies before he can do so; Tom is sold to a vicious new master, Simon Legree, who hates Tom because of his strong Christian faith and finally orders him beaten to death. Tom is forgiving and Christ-like to the bitter end, and those who have beaten him convert to Christianity.

As popular as the novel was in the North, it was less enthusiastically received in the South. (Okay, they were pissed.) Mary Henderson Eastman responded with the pro-slavery novel Aunt Phillis’s Cabin; Or, Southern Life as It Is (1852), which involved a lot of talk about how happy slaves were compared to free blacks in the North and how natural, benevolent, and essential slavery was as an institution, thus proving that people can talk themselves into all sorts of nonsense when they want to. It sold between 20,000 and 30,000 copies. In 1853, Stowe published A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a compilation of documents supporting her portrayal of slavery.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin became controversial in the 20th century when many black authors, including James Baldwin and Richard Wright, attacked it for perpetrating racist stereotypes.

Have a thoughtful Friday, taking to heart Bulwer-Lytton’s assertion that the pen is mightier than the sword, and stay scrupulously honest to the data.