CHAPTER XVI
“UNCLE TOM’S CABIN” AND ITS INFLUENCE
“Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was dispatched chapter by chapter, almost before the ink was dry, to the editor of The National Era, an anti-slavery paper published in Washington, in which the story ran from June, 1851, to April, 1852. The modest author who was accustomed to think of herself as a mere household drudge with very few ideas beyond babies and housekeeping, did not dream what was in store for her. In fact, she had at first a profound feeling of discouragement; she feared the book would fall to the ground unnoticed and do no good for the cause. That this might not happen, she sent copies to significant persons in England and in her own country to call their attention to the work and to win their interest if possible. Charles Dickens, Prince Albert, Macaulay, Charles Kingsley, Lord Carlisle and the Earl of Shaftsbury received copies and acknowledged them in courteous and feeling letters.
But Mrs. Stowe found that far from needing help from the great to make it find its way, her book of love and pity had struck a chord in the universal heart. It can almost be said of her as it was of Byron that she awoke one morning and found herself famous. No book in American literature ever achieved so immediate and so wide a popularity. There was an unprecedented call for it. Three thousand copies went off the first day, and soon eight power presses were kept busy night and day to supply the demand. It swept over the country, and people everywhere were reading it into the small hours of the night, weeping and sobbing over the death of little Eva and over the heroism of Uncle Tom. Before the year was over, more than three hundred thousand copies had been sold. As Emerson said, it “found readers in the parlor, the nursery and the kitchen of every household.”
The daughter of William Lloyd Garrison, Mrs. Henry Villard, in a passage recently written, said: “I read it as a little child with tears and sobs, as did many an older person, thrilled by its recital of the horrors of slavery, and touched by the kindness of those who were slaveholders, contrary to their wishes and the dictates of conscience. A moral whirlwind followed in its path, the anti-slavery agitation which preceded it having prepared the way for its wonderful reception in the north.”
Mrs. Stowe was now called the greatest of American women; her book was declared “a work of undoubted genius”; it was “epoch-making”; Julia Ward Howe called it an “offering on the altar of a heavenly intuition, destined to go down to posterity as of supreme desert and of undying memory.” The poet Whittier wrote: “What a glorious work Harriet Beecher Stowe has wrought! Thanks for the Fugitive Slave Law! Better for slavery that law had never been enacted, for it gave occasion for ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin.’”
Yet not all the breezes that blew were balmy. There were many astonished outcries, some execrations. But these things influenced the mind of the author very little. She knew that they would not change the heart of her friends toward her, and they could not change the truth. So what had she to fear?
Very soon editions began to appear in England, and within a year a million and a half copies had been sold in that country. Through France and Germany, Italy and Sweden, too, the book went like wildfire. That good, friendly soul, Frederika Bremer, wrote to Mrs. Stowe that “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” had been translated and read and praised in Sweden as no book ever was before, adding that she had an unwavering faith in the “strong humanity of the American mind.” She said: “It will ever throw out whatever is at war with that humanity; and to make it fully alive, nothing is needed but a truly strong appeal of heart to heart, and that has been done in ‘Uncle Tom.’” In France George Sand wrote a notable review of the book in which she said that it was no longer permissible to those that could read not to have read it. The people devour it, she said; they cover it with tears. In a short time there were few places in Italy also where “Il Zio Tom” could not be found.
Soon the pebble that had been thrown into the water began to make wider circles. Florence Nightingale wrote to Mrs. Stowe that the British soldiers amid the hardships of far eastern campaigns read the story of heroism. The book was printed at Venice by a fraternity of Catholic Armenian monks so that in the Armenian language it now was carried in all the wanderings of that intelligent people, in the towns and villages along the banks of the Euphrates, through southern Russia, and in the farthest confines of Persia. At last it reached Bengal, and, in their own language, became a household book among the Bengalese. Flying across the straits into Siam, it reached the royal group, where a member of the family liberated her own slaves to the number of one hundred and thirty as a result of its influence, and always signed her own name “Harriet Beecher Stowe,” because of her admiration for the author of the book. Professors Lin Shu and Wei-I of Peking together made a translation into Chinese, and Professor Takenobu of the Waseda University, Tokio, translated it into Japanese.
A poem by Dr. Holmes sums up, in his characteristic merry vein, the tale of the nations that learned to recognize the author of “Uncle Tom.” If we should call the roll,
Briton and Frenchman, Swede and Dane,