Uncle Tom's Cabin
was published this day in 1852. Written by Harriet Beecher Stowe, herself an ardent abolitionist one can legitimately argue that the book was an influential as any novel ever written. Consider only this:
1. The population of the US in the Census of 1850 waas just over 23 million.
2. The book sold more than 300,000 copies in its first year.
Proportional to the 2010 population of just under 309 million, an equivalent sales rate nowadays would project to more than 4 million copies.
Stowe did not create her tale out of whole cloth. She relied in part upon the 1849 publication of The Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave, Now an Inhabitant of Canada, as Narrated by Himself , who lived in North Bethesda, Md, and a history of slavery written jointly by the Grimke sisters and Theodore Dwight Weld.
The book first appeared as a serialized publication in 1851 in National Era. Stowe was convinced to put it out as a book.
There is the tale, perhaps apocryphal, that when President Lincoln met Mrs. Stowe in 1862 he greeted her as "the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war" - except that the book was published in 1852,
1. The population of the US in the Census of 1850 waas just over 23 million.
2. The book sold more than 300,000 copies in its first year.
Proportional to the 2010 population of just under 309 million, an equivalent sales rate nowadays would project to more than 4 million copies.
Stowe did not create her tale out of whole cloth. She relied in part upon the 1849 publication of The Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave, Now an Inhabitant of Canada, as Narrated by Himself , who lived in North Bethesda, Md, and a history of slavery written jointly by the Grimke sisters and Theodore Dwight Weld.
The book first appeared as a serialized publication in 1851 in National Era. Stowe was convinced to put it out as a book.
There is the tale, perhaps apocryphal, that when President Lincoln met Mrs. Stowe in 1862 he greeted her as "the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war" - except that the book was published in 1852,