[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.During the decade between 1850 and1860, as many as 20,000 American blacks who lived in theassumed safety of the North left the country for Canada.LIFE AMONG THE LOWLYJust as the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 created a stir ofcontroversy in the abolitionist arena, so did the publicationof a novel two years later.Its author was the aforementionedHarriet Beecher Stowe, the daughter of Lyman Beecher,a minister and one of New England s most influentialabolitionists.When Harriet Beecher was a young girl, herfather had moved his family from New England to Ohio,where he took over the leadership of the Lane TheologicalSeminary.There, he and other faculty members had taughttheir ministerial students about the evils of slavery.Allsix of Harriet Beecher Stowe s brothers became Christianministers.For most of his adult life, Lyman Beecher believedand taught that evangelical Christianity erased the linebetween public and private. 99 This view led him to believethat a single person s salvation and that of the general societyas a whole were linked.He who opposes slavery, he wouldteach, must campaign for society to take the same moralview.Harriet Beecher Stowe would adopt that same position.Although she had almost no direct experience with slavery,she was enormously sympathetic to the plight of slaves in theUnited States.When one of Stowe s two young children died,she would write: It was at his dying bed and at his grave thatI learned what a poor slave mother may feel when her childis torn away from her. 100The book was Uncle Tom s Cabin, or Life Among theLowly, a novel that focused on the cruelty of those who ownslaves and, with great sympathy, on the victims of slavery.Uncle Tom was a kind, elderly slave who is killed before the 91Clash of RegionsThe daughter of Lyman Beecher, a prominent New EnglandCongregationalist minister, Harriet Beecher Stowe lived in Cincinnati,Ohio, for 18 years.It was there where she first encountered fugitiveslaves who escaped across the Ohio River to freedom.Stowe is picturedhere with her father (center) and brother Henry Ward, in 1860.novel s end, beaten to death by his owner.Stowe wrote herbook to present a sympathetic picture of American slaves.Before she penned her influential work, Stowe had onlyspent a week in the South.The visit, however, had changedher.As she later wrote to a friend, I have often felt thatmuch that is in that book had its root in the awful scenesand bitter sorrow of that summer. 101 Her sister-in-law hadbeen pressing Stowe to write something popular on behalf ofthe abolitionist cause, which she had postponed for a year ortwo because she had a baby at home who occupied a great 92The Abolitionist Movementdeal of time.She finally did put pen to paper in the early1850s, after the enactment of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.She began to write one Sunday afternoon after her returnfrom church, where, she later claimed, the tragic death ofthe noble Uncle Tom, came to her.in a vision. 102Stowe s work was first published in 40 serial issues of theabolitionist weekly newspaper the National Era, beginningin June 1851.In March 1852, it was published as a two-volume book by John Punchard Jewett.It sold 300,000 copiesin the United States within its first year of publication and1.5 million copies around the world, primarily in Europe.(Many of those copies were printed illegally, pirated byunscrupulous publishers.) Its popularity was unprecedented.No work of fiction had ever sold that many copies.It waspopular among all classes of readers.Queen Victoria cried asshe read it, as did the wife of the British novelist and politicalreformer Charles Dickens.How many American readers, onthe basis of that book, changed their minds and opposed theinstitution of slavery will never be known.The impact of thenovel, however, spread across the nation in great ripples [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]