No Uncle Tom's Cabin

Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote the book Uncle Tom's Cabin.
It was published in 1852.
Suppose there is no Uncle Tom's Cabin. What happens then?
 

TFSmith121

Banned
Aunt Tansy's Hut...

Aunt Tansy's Hut...

Stowe was a gifted writer, and Cabin had an impact that is almost incomprehensible to us today, but there were similar books - one of them would have gained the attention Stowe's work received.

David Reynolds' Mightier than the Sword is a great read.

Best,
 
As tremendous a seller as *Uncle Tom's Cabin* was, one can argue that. at least at first, it hardly galvanized antislavery sentiment. After all, in the 1852 presidential election, the first one after the book was published, the Free Soil Party got only five percent of the vote (half of what it got in 1848), while Franklin Pierce swept the North as well as the South. It seemed that the northern public was willing to acquiesce in the Compromise of 1850--even including the Fugitive Slave Act. It was only *after* the South and its allies re-started sectional conflict with the Kansas-Nebraska Act that the majority of state "personal liberty laws" seeking to nullify the Fugitive Slae Act were passed.
 
One consequence might be surprising:

"His [Vladimir Ulyanov]'s favourite book, before he moved on to the Russian literary classics, was none other than Harriet Beecher Stowe's *Uncle Tom's Cabin.* This tale of a Negro slave's attempt to flee the cruelties of a cotton plantation in the South was given pride of place in his room...it is striking that Vladimir's most cherished book described not Russia but the USA. This was in keeping with the desire of his parents to keep themselves and their children away from dangerous discussions of Russian public life. If so, they were a little naive. *Uncle Tom's Cabin* contained ideas of universal significance; its sentimental style communicated universal ideals of human dignity. When we try to trace the origins of Vladimir's political outlook, we often look to what he read in his late adolescence and early manhood. We focus on Chernyshevski, Marx, Plekhanov and Kautsky. But we need to remember that, before these Russian and German male authors imprinted themselves upon his consciousness, an American woman--Harriet Beecher Stowe--had already influenced his young mind." Robert Service, *Lenin: A Biography* (Harvard UP 2000), p. 43. https://books.google.com/books?id=N9mbl_xbWpkC&pg=PA43

"So this is the little lady who started the Great October Socialist Revolution?"
 
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