| Abstrakt: |
There is an old story, now widely considered apocryphal, that when Harriet Beecher Stowe met Abraham Lincoln in 1862, the president declared, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war.” Of course, the trouble between the North and the South had begun long before Stowe reached for her pen, but her novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin did indeed spark a firestorm across the nation. While some (mainly in the North) hailed it as a book expounding the utter truth of American slavery, others (mainly in the South) felt it was an abominable novel, filled with grotesque exaggeration and sectional prejudice. The excerpted chapters below are a small sample of this crucial piece of nineteenth-century literature, highlighting the growing tension in the United States and illuminating a possible resolution for those removed from bondage. |
