Uncle Tom's Cabin

"Uncle Tom’s Cabin is an anti-slavery activist novel, written in the run-up to the Civil War . Stowe tried to mediate the widening schism between North and South, but the book had the opposite effect – prodding North and South to greater extremes of rage. With some justice, Uncle Tom’s Cabin has been called a cause of the Civil War. When President Abraham Lincoln met the author at the White House, he greeted her as “the little lady that started the big war.” Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the prime candidate bandied around at the time that the concept of the Great American Novel was first in wide circulation. So, there’s a historical reason to include it as a GAN. But there are intrinsic reasons as well. The novel has two plot strands that cut in opposite directions. The main plot involves the selling of the nominal hero, Uncle Tom, from a plantation in the upper south into harsher forms of slavery. The other sub-plot involves the opposite movement of a Frederick Douglass -like slave who escapes North with his wife, who is from the same plantation as Uncle Tom. Stowe presses harder and wider on the anti-slavery theme than just to say that it’s bad to subject Blacks to chattel status. To hit the middle-class reader square in the gut, she shows how slavery destroys families. It was wildly successful. It always has been a marketing ploy, used to telegraph a big achievement. In this case, the advertisement avoids branding it as fiction because when Uncle Tom’s Cabin first appeared novels, as a genre, still lay under a cloud of suspicion. But you can find slogans like ‘one of the greatest American novels of our time’ from the late nineteenth century forward."