HARRIET BEECHER STOWE.
Such incidents, together with the aggravation caused by the removal of fugitives successfully seized, made it plain that the compromise was not the "finality" that the politicians declared it to be; and that the Whig and Democratic parties chose to decree it in their national platforms in the summer of 1852. The principles of political opposition determined by the conditions of the time were uttered by the convention of the Free Soil party, with which many of the underground operators were now allied, in the words: "No more slave states, no more slave territories, no nationalized slavery, and no national legislation for the extradition of slaves." The issue of the presidential campaign in the election of Pierce, a compromise Democrat, marks only a temporary disturbance in the progress of sentiment, due to the desire of the country to have rest, the disinclination of many Whigs to support their own candidate, General Winfield Scott, and the policy of acquiescence he represented; and the solidarity of action among the Democrats, who were generally satisfied both with their principles and their candidate.
As it was the Fugitive Slave Law that brought the North face to face with slavery nationalized, so it was the Fugitive Slave Law that occasioned, in the spring of 1852, the production of Uncle Tom's Cabin, a novel the great political significance of which has been generally acknowledged. The observations and experience that made possible for Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe the writing of this remarkable book were gained by her while living at Cincinnati, where she was enabled to study the effects of slavery. While thus a resident on the borders of Kentucky, she numbered among her friends slaveholders on the one side of the Ohio River and abolitionists on the other. At the time of her first trip across the Ohio in 1833, she visited an estate, which is described as that of Colonel Shelby in Uncle Tom's Cabin.[930] Her associations and sympathies brought home to her the personal aspects of slavery, and her house on Walnut Hills early become a station on the Underground Railroad, remaining so doubtless till 1850, when she removed with her husband, Professor Calvin Stowe, to Brunswick, Maine.
During the intervening years she was unconsciously gleaning incidents and scenes and discovering characters for her future book. The woful experiences of her midnight visitors, whose hunger for freedom rose superior to every other need, awoke her deepest compassion, and the neighborhood in which she lived, nay, even her own household, supplied the circumstances and adventures depicted in the lives of some of her most admirable characters. Mrs. Stowe herself declared Uncle Tom's Cabin to be "a collection and arrangement of real incidents,—of actions really performed, of words and expressions really uttered,—grouped together with reference to a general result, in the same manner that the mosaic artist groups his fragments of various stones into one general picture."[931] For example she points out that the service of Senator Bird in the incident of the novel in which Eliza escapes from her pursuers Tom Locker and Marks had its counterpart in the service rendered a negro girl in her own employ by Professor Stowe and his brother-in-law, Henry Ward Beecher, in 1839. This girl was secretly conveyed northward by her escorts a distance of twelve miles to the house of John Van Zandt, another station-keeper of the Underground Road; and Van Zandt it was who "performed the good deed which the author in her story ascribes to Van Tromp."[932] Concerning the leading Quaker character in her book Mrs. Stowe says: "The character of Rachel Halliday was a real one, but she has passed away to her reward. Simeon Halliday, calmly risking fine and imprisonment for his love to God and man, has had in this country many counterparts among the sect. The writer had in mind, at the time of writing, the scenes in the trial of Thomas Garet, of Wilmington, Delaware, for the crime of hiring a hack to convey a mother and four children from Newcastle jail to Wilmington, a distance of five miles."[933] The thrilling adventures of Eliza in escaping across the Ohio River with her child in her arms as the ice was breaking up was an actual occurrence that took place fifty miles above Cincinnati, at Ripley, an initial station of an important underground route.[934]
By the combination of such elements under the crystallizing influence of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, Mrs. Stowe made her story. Intent on having the people of the North understand what the "system" was, about which so many seemed apathetic, she set to work in response to appeals to her to take up her pen. The result, wholly unexpected, was the production of a book that did for the whole population of the free states what the Underground Railroad had been doing for a part only: the author made real the sin of slavery to the consciences of freemen, by an object-lesson in the possible evils of slavery and the desire of the slave to be free. In Harriet Beecher Stowe the thousands of fugitive slaves that had been unwittingly acting as missionaries in the cause of freedom through the earlier years found at last a champion whose words carried their touching story to the multitudes. The disheartening circumstances under which her novel had been composed and the exhausted condition in which the author found herself at its conclusion did not permit her to look for anything but the failure of her undertaking. As she finished the last proof-sheets "it seemed to her that there was no hope; that nobody would hear, nobody would read, nobody would pity; that this frightful system, which had already pursued its victims into the free States, might at last even threaten them in Canada."[935] But the success of the book was immediate. Three thousand copies were sold on the first day of publication, and more than three hundred thousand in this country within the year.[936]
The political effect of the novel has been disparaged by a few writers, because it did not cause anti-slavery gains in the national election occurring in the fall of 1852. Thus George Ticknor wrote in December of that year, "It deepens the horror of servitude, but it does not affect a single vote."[937] This was certainly true, for the mass of Northerners were resting in the belief that a substantial political settlement had been reached in the great compromise. It was not to be expected that this belief, which was the outcome of weeks of strenuous discussion, was to be easily tossed aside under the emotional stimulus of a novel. The immediate effect of Uncle Tom's Cabin as a political agency lay in the renewal on a vast scale of the consideration of the question of slavery, which the compromise had been thought by so many to have settled. Its remote effect, which did not show itself until the latter part of the decade 1850-1860 has been best explained by the historian, James Ford Rhodes. This writer says, "The mother's opinion was a potent factor in politics between 1852 and 1860, and boys in their teens in the one year were voters in the other. It is often remarked that previous to the war the Republican party attracted the great majority of school-boys, and that the first voters were an important factor in its final success; ... the youth of America whose first ideas on slavery were formed by reading Uncle Tom's Cabin were ready to vote with the party whose existence was based on opposition to an extension of the great evil."[938] They were also ready to fight for the cause of union and of freedom in 1861.
Soon after the publication of Mrs. Stowe's book, Sumner began his movement in the Senate to secure the repeal of the Fugitive Slave Law. In May, 1852, he presented a memorial from the Society of Friends in New England, asking for its repeal;[939] in July he offered a resolution instructing the Committee on Judiciary to report a bill for this purpose;[940] and in August he sought to secure his end by proposing an amendment to the civil and diplomatic appropriations bill.[941] In the speech made at the time he presented this amendment, a speech said to rank with that of Webster on the Compromise in 1850 in the popular interest it aroused, Sumner pointed to the example of Washington, who let one of his slaves remain unmolested in New Hampshire rather than "excite a mob or riot, or even uneasy sensations in the minds of well-disposed citizens." The execution of the Fugitive Slave Law, he asked Congress to note, involved mobs, cruelty and violence everywhere its enforcement was tried. The wonderful reception given Uncle Tom's Cabin was, he thought, an expression of the true public sentiment. "A woman, inspired by Christian genius, enters the lists, like another Joan of Arc, and with marvellous powers sweeps the chords of the popular heart. Now melting to tears, and now inspiring to rage, her work everywhere touches the conscience, and makes the slave-hunter more hateful."[942] He saw the import of the appeal of fugitive slaves to Northern communities for protection and liberty. "For them every sentiment of humanity is aroused. Rude and ignorant they may be, but in their very efforts for freedom they claim kindred with all that is noble in the past. Romance has no stories of more thrilling interest; classical antiquity has preserved no examples of adventure and trial more worthy of renown. They are among the heroes of our age. Among them are those whose names will be treasured in the annals of their race. By eloquent voice they have done much to make their wrongs known, and to secure the respect of the world. History will soon lend her avenging pen. Proscribed by you during life, they will proscribe you through all time. Sir, already judgment is beginning; a righteous public sentiment palsies your enactment."[943]