"So you're the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war." According to history, this is what President Lincoln said as he was introduced to Harriet Beech Stowe when she toured the White House. Lincoln's succinct statement may have been done tongue-in-cheek, but it did reflect a question that America had been asking for nearly a decade. Did a fictional novel help fan the flames of conflict and actually lead to the opening shots of the Civil War?
In 1851, Harriet Beecher Stowe started writing a series of articles about the lives of slaves and slave owners. These articles were published in serial form titled "Life Among the Lowly." Due to the success of the serialization, Stowe then published "Uncle Tom's Cabin" as a novel in 1852, and within two weeks it sold 10,000 copies. After a year 300,000 copies were sold, it was translated into twenty languages, and forty different British publishers had issued it.
Our speaker will discuss the events that lead Stowe to write this novel, a reassessment of the characters and the story, the true significance of the novel at the time it was published, and how the novel is part of our historical and literary heritage.
Our speaker is David Wilkerson, who last spoke at our October, 2003 meeting about Reconstruction. He was a founding member of the Inland Empire Civil War Round Table. He received his B.A. and M.A. in History from the University California, Riverside and is currently the Senior Archivist with Johnson Controls, Inc. David is also an adjunct faculty instructor at Chapman University's Moreno Valley campus, lecturing about various elements of American history and Western Civilization.
Please join us as we learn more about the history of this landmark novel.
Janet Whaley
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