Harriet Beecher Stowe and New Orleans

DURING the more than one hundred years since it was published, Uncle Tom's Cabin, the abolitionist novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe, has been considered important primarily because of its function in American history. Before 1861 the book was, to the North, an expose of the evils of the institution of slavery and, to the South, a slanderous and vicious attack on a comfortable and even moral way of life.1 It was, beyond all doubt, so potent an instrument of sectional dissension that even today the average reader's mind retains the compelling picture of Abraham Lincoln smiling down at Mrs. Stowe and exclaiming, So you're the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war!2 That picture evokes, inevitably, the bitter, long-range memories (third and fourth hand now, or more) of sectional hates and prejudices, of the War Between the States, and of the Reconstruction period, through which no clear view of Uncle Tom's Cabin as literature or of its author as artist is possible. The book has become a symbol and its characters-Uncle Tom, Topsy, Simon Legree, and even Little Eva-types which, with no regard for literary merit or the lack of it, refuse to die.3 The

Art · American and British Literature Analysis · Literature: history, themes, analysis · Race, History, and American Society