Whittier wrote to Garrison:—
"What a glorious work Harriet Beecher Stowe has wrought. Thanks for the Fugitive Slave Law! Better would it be for slavery if that law had never been enacted; for it gave occasion for 'Uncle Tom's Cabin.'"
Garrison wrote to Mrs. Stowe:—
"I estimate the value of anti-slavery writing by the abuse it brings. Now all the defenders of slavery have let me alone and are abusing you."
To Mrs. Stowe, Whittier wrote:—
Ten thousand thanks for thy immortal book. My young friend Mary Irving (of the "Era") writes me that she has been reading it to some twenty young ladies, daughters of Louisiana slaveholders, near New Orleans, and amid the scenes described in it, and that they, with one accord, pronounce it true.
Truly thy friend,
John G. Whittier.
From Thomas Wentworth Higginson came the following:—
To have written at once the most powerful of contemporary fictions and the most efficient of anti-slavery tracts is a double triumph in literature and philanthropy, to which this country has heretofore seen no parallel.
Yours respectfully and gratefully,
T. W. Higginson.
A few days after the publication of the book, Mrs. Stowe, writing from Boston to her husband in Brunswick, says: "I have been in such a whirl ever since I have been here. I found business prosperous. Jewett animated. He has been to Washington and conversed with all the leading senators, Northern and Southern. Seward told him it was the greatest book of the times, or something of that sort, and he and Sumner went around with him to recommend it to Southern men and get them to read it."