t the agitation
went on all over the North. Toombs, the Southern senator, tried sheer
bombast, and said he would call the roll of his slaves at the foot of
Bunker Hill monument. Timid men in the North began to cry: "Conciliate,
conciliate!" But there can be warfare, and only warfare between darkness
and light, between sickness and health, between wrong and right. At
length Phillips and Greeley took up the cry: "Let the South go!" But the
answer was: "Shall a strong man who has hold of a mad dog let the beast
go into a crowd of little children?" Compromise did something for a
time, as a safety valve, relieving men's pent-up feelings. But God had
His own counsels. Plainly, "every drop of blood shed by the lash was to
be paid for by blood shed by the sword," for "the judgments of God are
true and righteous altogether."

During those heated days of 1850, when the men of light and leading
began to see their way clearly, the masses were still timid, hesitant
and vacillating in their judgments on slavery. Scholars and thinking men
had already been reached by poets, authors and editors, while the
preachers and lecturers had driven their message home to the conviction
of the ruling classes. Later on was to come the revival of 1857 that
should stir the conscience, but preparatory to that movement it was
necessary to inform the intellect and rouse the affections of the
millions. Then it was that God raised up an author to touch the heart of
the people.

Wonderful the power of the novel in social reform! The novels of "Oliver
Twist," and "Dombey and Son," were what roused the English people to a
realization of the woes and wrongs of chimney sweeps, of children in the
factories and mines of Great Britain. It was a novel, "All Sorts and
Conditions of Men," that later built People's Palace in the Whitechapel
district of London. And it was a novel, named "Uncle Tom's Cabin," that
created the atmosphere of sympathy in which the flowers of
self-sacrifice and heroism unfolded.

The authoress was the daughter of Lyman Beecher, who had seven sons and
four daughters, each one of whom was either a preacher or reformer in
some field. His daughter, Harriet, married Prof. Calvin E. Stowe, of
Lane Seminary in Cincinnati, where, on the border between the free soil
of Ohio and the slave soil of Kentucky, people were in a state of
constant excitement and upheaval. The old Blue Grass State exhibited
slavery in its very best condition and also in i