Among the Lowly began to appear in serial form in the Washington National Era, an abolitionist weekly Harriet Beecher Stowe's anti-slavery story was published in forty installments over the next ten months. For her story Mrs. Stowe was paid $300. Although the weekly had a limited circulation, its audience increased as reader after reader passed their copy along to another. In March 1852, a Boston publisher decided to issue Uncle Tom's Cabin as a book and it became an instant best seller. Three hundred thousand copies were sold the first year, and about 2,000,000 copies were sold worldwide by 1857. For one three month period Stowe reportedly received $10,000 in royalties. Across the nation people discussed the novel and hotly debated the most pressing socio-political issue dramatized in its narrative, slavery.
Because Uncle Tom's Cabin so polarized the abolitionist and anti-abolitionist debate, some claim it to be one of the causes of the Civil War. Indeed, when President Lincoln received its author, Harriet Beecher Stowe, at the White House in 1862, legend has it he exclaimed, "So this is the little lady who made this big war?"
For some sixty-five years after its debut, Uncle Tom's Cabin was frequently presented on stage. According to the article "Negro on the American Stage," as late as 1913 there were "about four Uncle Tom's Cabin Companies en tour, and at least two of them . . . doing a good business." By the late 1800s, however, productions often caricatured Stowe's more carefully depicted literary figures. Although at first white actors usually played all the parts (rendering characters like the slaves Uncle Tom, Eliza, and Little Eva in blackface), some productions did star African-American actors and singers.
A black actor, Sam Lucas (for whom the song "Uncle Tom's Gwine to Stay" was written) first played the title role on film in 1914. By 1927, at least seven silent film versions of Uncle Tom's Cabin had been made. More recently, The King and I -- a Broadway play, movie, and animated feature film -- contains a stylized version of Uncle Tom's Cabin within its own story. Over time Uncle Tom's Cabin has been translated into at least twenty-three languages.
- Read Documentary History of Slavery in the United States from the collection African American Perspectives, 1818-1907 for a concise review of slavery in the U.S. between 1774 and 1850, when the Fugitive Slave Act was passed.
- Search American Memory on the term Uncle Tom's Cabin to find a wide variety of material concerning the book, subsequent theatrical adaptations, and related music. See, for example, the musical pieces "Eliza's Flight," published in 1852 and "Eva to Her Papa."
- Search on the term Harriet Beecher Stowe in The 19th Century in Print: Books to find material written by and concerning Mrs. Stowe. Among these items is a review of Uncle Tom's Cabin, entitled "Uncle Tom in England" from the London Times of Friday, September 3, 1852.
- Between 1852 and the Civil War, Uncle Tom's Cabin evoked at least twenty-five proslavery (“anti-Tom”) novels. Although these fictional accounts are not currently digitized in American Memory, a search on the term slavery in Narratives of the American South, 1860-1920 will reveal many non-fiction accounts of slavery. Tupelo, by John Hill Aughey, describes the plight of abolitionists living in the South at the time of secession while quoting a Southern perspective on slavery.
- Born in Slavery, 1936-1938 contains more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs of former slaves. Read the Introduction to the WPA Slave Narratives to learn the background of this ambitious effort of the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration. Also choose images, photographed to accompany many of the narratives, from the Subject Index.
- Search on the names Jenny Lind and Mark Twain in the Today in History Archive to learn more about two contemporaries and admirers of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Search the archive on the term Walden to learn about another American literary classic which addressed a social conundrum.
- From Slavery to Freedom: The African-American Pamphlet Collection, 1824-1909 presents 397 pamphlets published from 1824 through 1909 by African-American authors and others who wrote about slavery, African colonization, Emancipation, Reconstruction, and related topics. Search the Subject Index to find a wide variety of materials including personal accounts, orations, reports, and speeches.
