The possibility of making money by the publication of this book was quite remote from Mrs. Stowe's disinterested mind. As she wrote in a letter to a friend: "Having been poor all my life, and expecting to be poor for the rest of it, the idea of making money by a book which I wrote just because I could not help it, never occurred to me." But from this time forth she was to be free from the anxieties of poverty. As the first payment of three months' sale, Mrs. Stowe received ten thousand dollars.
The following year Professor and Mrs. Stowe went to Great Britain, having been urgently invited to visit in many Scotch and English houses. Even in foreign lands, Mrs. Stowe found herself known and loved. Crowds greeted her in Liverpool, Glasgow, Edinburgh and London. Children ran ahead of her carriage, throwing flowers to her, and officials of the Anti-Slavery Societies met her and offered hospitality.
A national penny offering, turned into a thousand golden sovereigns, was presented to her on a magnificent silver salver for the advancement of the cause for which she had written. This offering came from all classes of people.
A personal gift which Mrs. Stowe valued highly was a superb gold bracelet presented by the beautiful Duchess of Sutherland who entertained her at Stafford House. It was made in the form of a slave's shackle and bore the inscription, "We trust it is a memorial of a chain that is soon to be broken." On two of the links were already inscribed the dates of the abolition of slave trade and of slavery in the English territories. Years afterward, on the clasp of the bracelet, Mrs. Stowe had engraved the date of the Constitutional Amendment abolishing slavery in the United States.
Upon Mrs. Stowe's return from her visit to Europe in the autumn of 1853, she became very active in public affairs. She supported anti-slavery lectures, established schools for the colored people, assisted in buying ill-treated slaves and setting them free, and arranged public meetings for the advancement of anti-slavery opinions, using the money which had been given to her in England to support the work. In addition, she kept up a correspondence with influential men and women on the subject of the abolition of slavery.
The books she wrote after this were Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands; Dred, a great anti-slavery story; The Minister's Wooing; Agnes of Sorrento; The Pearl of Orr's Island; and Old Town Folks. All have been widely read, but Uncle Tom's Cabin, though lacking in literary form and finish, written as it was at white heat and with no thought of anything but its object, remains her greatest work. It made the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law impossible, by making people see slavery in all its inhumanity.
In addition to her books, Mrs. Stowe wrote an appeal to the women of America, in which she set forth the injustice and misery of slavery, begging all thoughtful women to use their influence to have the wicked system abolished. Here are a few paragraphs:
What can the women of a country do? Oh! women of the free states, what did your brave mothers do in the days of the Revolution? Did not liberty in those days feel the strong impulse of woman's heart?
For the sake, then, of our dear children, for the sake of our common country, for the sake of outraged and struggling liberty throughout the world, let every woman of America now do her duty!