Pitiably poor, and distracted by
household cares which she had to face single-handed--for the
Professor was a "feckless body"--Mrs. Stowe nevertheless could
not be indifferent to the national crisis over the Fugitive Slave
Law. She had seen its working. When her sister-in-law wrote to
her: "If I could use a pen as you can, I would write something
that would make this whole nation feel what an accursed thing
slavery is," Mrs. Stowe exclaimed: "God helping me, I will write
something; I will if I live."
"Uncle Tom's Cabin," begun in the spring of 1850, was a woman's
answer to Webster's seventh of March speech. Its object was
plainly stated to be "to awaken sympathy and feeling for the
African race; to show, their wrongs and sorrows, under a system
so necessarily cruel and unjust as to defeat and do away the good
effects of all that can be attempted for them, by their best
friends under it." The book was permeated with what we now call
the 1848 anti-aristocratic sentiment, the direct heritage of the
French Revolution. "There is a dies irae coming on, sooner or
later," admits St.
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