Aunt Phillis, Uncle Tom and the Journalism of Fiction

 

Robert Dardenne

Abstract

 

Harriett Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin in part for the expected compensation from National Era magazine, but also with the intent to present a truthful, albeit emotional, portrayal of slave life. Mary Eastman and the 30 or so authors responding to Stowe seemed mostly to have wrote to, from their perspectives, set the record straight, to undo the great wrongs resulting from Stowe's incredibly, and to many, surprisingly, popular book. While Uncle Tom's cabin was a literary approach to the slavery issue, the authors responding to it seemed far more interested in defending slavery against what they considered an attack from a woman who used artifice to malign their most peculiar institution. Stowe's book was not only a literary success, but a journalistic one as well. It accomplished what reams of traditional journalism could not -- to get people up in arms about slavery. The publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin and its multitude of detractors fueled the slavery debate around issues of care of slaves, Biblical sanctioning of slavery itself, treatment of laborers in England and Europe, southern and U.S. economics, property rights, women's liberation, human intelligence, and other areas in ways that supplemented and broadened the debates resulting from more traditional journalism.