The Art of Democracy. Jim Cullen

the twentieth century, “Uncle Tom” had taken on thoroughly pejorative connotations for blacks, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin was more generally seen as typifying the worst sentimental excesses of nineteenth-century women’s fiction. In its own day, however, it was a powerful polemic of moral rigor and political significance. One African-American critic, comparing Stowe favorably to Alice Walker, recently noted that “Stowe pleads just as strenuously and far more effectively for the humanity and protection of women and children and for the assertion of the values of home against the values of the marketplace that have dehumanized and debased all human relationships.” Far from being a dreamy idealist, “Stowe knows that conversions like the one experienced by St. Clare are rare; most people who participate in a comfortable social order will not change until they are forced to.” Abraham Lincoln was joking—but only half joking—when, on meeting Stowe at the height of the Civil War, he greeted her by saying, “So you’re the little woman who made this great war.”⁸⁰

      It would be hard to overstate the effect that Uncle Tom’s Cabin had on U.S. culture. The book sold 3,000 copies on the first day it was published, over 300,000 within a year, and half a million by the time of the panic of 1857—not counting pirated editions. By 1861, it had become the most popular novel ever written by an American, and a tremendous international success as well. Yet such numbers can only begin to suggest its reach. Perhaps more revealing is the fury it provoked in the South, where it was widely banned. By the standards of what followed, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a moderate document, at least as harsh on the North as it was on the South and notable in that the evil Simon Legree was a Northerner while the slave-owning St. Clare was portrayed somewhat sympathetically. Nevertheless, the power of Stowe’s moral indictment was unmistakable, as was her point of view. The novel was rebutted in a flurry of “Anti-Tom” novels, such as Aunt Phyllis’s Cabin; or Southern Life as It Is (1852) and The Planter’s Northern Bride (1854). Stowe’s rejoinder, The Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1853), attempted to prove that the scenes she had depicted were, if anything, too mild. “Tom” literature, pro and con, became a kind of subgenre of its own in the years preceding the Civil War, although no work came close to Stowe’s in articulating a political critique that both drew on and reconfigured the conventions of domestic fiction.

      “Tom” also became a staple of the stage for the rest of the nineteenth century. The first dramatic version, which opened in 1853, retained the antislavery spirit of the novel, but it was soon challenged, and then supplanted, by a pro-Southern version that ended happily and turned Tom into a comic caricature of Stowe’s character. Satiric minstrel versions, with titles like “Happy Uncle Tom,” also flourished. One comic song, first performed after the novelist made a trip to England, revealed the class tensions that divided Democrats from abolitionists: “When us happy darkies you pity in your prayer/Oh don’t forget de WHITE SLAVES dat’s starvin’ over dar!”⁸¹ It may be, however, that the minstrels and other critics paid Stowe the ultimate compliment through their preoccupation with her work. Indeed, the only works of twentieth-century popular culture that have rivaled the impact of Uncle Tom’s Cabin are Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind—and both represent active attempts to refute the imagery, rhetoric, and message of Stowe’s novel. Long before the Civil War and long after it, the issues and perceptions at the heart of the conflict have continued to be fought out in U.S. popular culture.⁸²

      It is always a question for historians whether wars cause or simply reflect the underlying transformations that often accompany them. The Civil War was clearly the culmination of a long process of sectional friction that involved industrial development, commercial competition, racial ideology, and regional identity, all of which were amply documented in the popular culture of the time. But the war also dramatically accelerated these trends, and its immediate effects were so great that one can reasonably say that certain events—from the creation of the modern banking system to the Emancipation Proclamation—were directly attributable to the war. In any case, the last third of the nineteenth century had a distinctly different tenor in popular cultural terms than the first two-thirds. If the antebellum period witnessed the emergence of many popular cultural forms, the postbellum decades were a period when culture became an industry in the modern sense of the word. Some of this was becoming apparent even before the war. In the 1840s, men of humble backgrounds like P.T. Barnum and Horace Greeley were able to found their enterprises with a little bit of credit and a lot of pluck; a decade later, the New York Times was capitalized for $100,000, half of which went for technology that had not even existed a few years before.⁸³ At the same time, however, the Civil War would not mark the end of the poor boy (or, occasionally, girl) who could make good. In fact, for African Americans, this period was about to begin. More important still, the late nineteenth century would not mark the end of the cultural innovation that had characterized the antebellum period. Now, that innovation would take place in a world that was becoming increasingly recognizably modern.