Tensions arose between the North and the South on the controversial issue of slavery as it resulted in violence and the much-debated Fugitive Slave Law. In 1862, Harriet Beecher Stowe, a young novelist, had the great honor of meeting President Abraham Lincoln, as he remarked, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war.” Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin made its way throughout the North to exemplify the horrors that slavery placed into this nation which greatly impacted individuals from far and wide. The mother of twelve wrote descriptions of reality through her imagination about slavery which sparked a drastic change for the North’s perspective on this matter. Stowe's novel came to be the most influential novel in American
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Their thoughts revolve around the way Southern masters treated their slaves and how the practices in this fiction novel were used on a daily basis for so many. For instance, Legree demands Tom to strip his somewhat nice clothes and shoves some cheap clothes in Tom's face. Legree tells his slave to, "Take might good care of them clothes. It'll be long enough 'fore you get more...one suit has to do for one year, on my place" (Stowe 366 - 367). Many might believe that it is quite impossible to live off of only one article of clothing for an entire year, but shocked to find out that this was a very common practice. Although many Southerners presumed that the author was biased, they could not deny the fact that they treated slaves by identifying them as property, not human beings. As a result, the book was outlawed in the South due to much controversies but became popular around the rest of the world. Kennedy states that the South had, "...learned that hundreds of thousands of fellow Americans were reading and believing her "unfair" indictment" (Kennedy 410 - 411) which demonstrates that a majority of individuals were influenced by Stowe's words and also impacted their lives greatly. Consequently, the North had won the Civil War mainly because of the influence of Uncle Tom's Cabin as the success abroad was phenomenal because millions of copies were sold in and out of the
Their thoughts revolve around the way Southern masters treated their slaves and how the practices in this fiction novel were used on a daily basis for so many. For instance, Legree demands Tom to strip his somewhat nice clothes and shoves some cheap clothes in Tom's face. Legree tells his slave to, "Take might good care of them clothes. It'll be long enough 'fore you get more...one suit has to do for one year, on my place" (Stowe 366 - 367). Many might believe that it is quite impossible to live off of only one article of clothing for an entire year, but shocked to find out that this was a very common practice. Although many Southerners presumed that the author was biased, they could not deny the fact that they treated slaves by identifying them as property, not human beings. As a result, the book was outlawed in the South due to much controversies but became popular around the rest of the world. Kennedy states that the South had, "...learned that hundreds of thousands of fellow Americans were reading and believing her "unfair" indictment" (Kennedy 410 - 411) which demonstrates that a majority of individuals were influenced by Stowe's words and also impacted their lives greatly. Consequently, the North had won the Civil War mainly because of the influence of Uncle Tom's Cabin as the success abroad was phenomenal because millions of copies were sold in and out of the