Did Uncle Tom’s Cabin create the conditions that started the Civil War? What does David S. Reynolds think?

Whether President Abraham Lincoln did, in fact, say to Harriet Beecher Stowe, “so, you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war,” will never be known for certain. Uncle Tom’s Cabin did not create the conditions that brought about the Civil War. The causes of that conflict transcended to a certain degree the issue of slavery, although slavery was the single greatest most important issue as it constituted the principle benefit to the American South of that vast region’s struggle for greater states’ rights and less, far less, authority for the central, or federal, government in Washington, D.C. Stowe’s novel about slavery was a pro-abolitionist tract, and established caricatures that remain a part of American popular culture today (e.g., the pejorative use of the phrase “Uncle Tom,” the dastardly character of Simon Legree, which became synonymous with cartoonish villains). The road to war, however, was firmly established much earlier than the 1852 publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. That road, as students of the American Revolution and the debates over federalism and states’ rights know, began with the struggle for independence from the British Crown. In a very real sense, the Civil War was the inevitable result of unfinished business from the Revolutionary War era. The Founding Fathers chose to kick that proverbial can down-the-road, so to speak, lest its seemingly intractable nature interfere with the higher priority of establishing a new nation. In any event, Stowe’s novel, while influential, cannot really be said to have caused the war. It may, however, have lit the fuse that resulted in the first shots being fired at Fort Sumter.

David S. Reynolds, in his study of Harriet Beecher Stowe, her novel, and the book’s impact on American culture and politics, Mightier than the Sword: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Battle for America, is meticulously researched, and well-reasoned. And, its thesis, that Stowe’s book did have tremendous influence on the debate over slavery, and that influence was instrumental in moving the nation towards civil war, is not without merit. As noted, nobody has been able to confirm whether President Lincoln said those famous words upon meeting Stowe at the White House. What we do know, and what Reynolds does quote Lincoln as saying, is that “our government rests in public opinion. Whoever can change public opinion can change the government.” Reynolds argues eloquently that the popularity of Uncle Tom’s Cabin strongly influenced public opinion, at least in the North, against the institution of slavery, while provoking the ire of the novel’s critics in the South who rightly saw it as an attack upon their prerogatives. Toward this end, Reynolds devotes copious space to his discussion of precisely how popular was the novel, noting that the “production and distribution of the novel was considered a massive achievement, facilitated by recent technological advances.” Later, Reynolds writes that “the novel demonstrably had a key role in the political reshuffling that lay behind the rise of the antislavery Republican Party. . .As the novel’s stature grew in antislavery circles, enhanced by the growing popularity of the Uncle Tom plays and other tie-ins, it gave strong impetus to antislavery politics in the North.”

In short, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was hugely popular, including in important political circles, and its depictions of the treatment of slaves sensitized more than the question of slavery as an abstract concept ever could the political leaders best positioned to act on those sentiments. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel did not cause the Civil War. It did radically increase sympathy for the abolitionist cause, which, in turn, emboldened Lincoln to press ahead in taking vitally-important steps he otherwise might have hesitated in taking.