On this day in 1851, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Live Among the Lowly began appearing as a 40-part serial in The National Era, an abolitionist newspaper. The novel had a profound effect on attitudes toward African Americans and slavery in the U.S., and is said to have “helped lay the groundwork for the American Civil War”.
Stowe, a Connecticut-born teacher at the Hartford Female Seminary, was part of the religious Beecher family and an active abolitionist. She wrote the sentimental novel to depict the horrors of slavery while also asserting that Christian love could overcome slavery. The novel focuses on the character of Uncle Tom, a long-suffering black slave around whom the stories of the other characters revolve.
Stowe was partly inspired to create Uncle Tom’s Cabin by the slave narrative The Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave, Now an Inhabitant of Canada, as Narrated by Himself (1849). Henson, a formerly enslaved black man, had lived and worked on a 3,700-acre (15 km2) plantation in North Bethesda, Maryland, owned by Isaac Riley.
Eliza crossing the icy river, in an 1881 theatre poster
still leaks…
Here’s Taylor Dayne to welcome the weekend…https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ud6sU3AclT4
