r expectations were strikingly different from the facts.
"She had painted slaveholders as amiable, generous, and just. She had
shown examples among them of the noblest and most beautiful traits of
character; had admitted fully their temptations, their perplexities, and
their difficulties, so that a friend of hers who had many relatives in
the South wrote to her: 'Your book is going to be the great pacificator;
it will unite both North and South.' Her expectation was that the
professed abolitionists would denounce it as altogether too mild in
its dealings with slaveholders. To her astonishment, it was the extreme
abolitionists who received, and the entire South who rose up against
it."

There is something almost amusing in Mrs. Stowe's honest expectation
that the deadliest blow the system ever suffered should have been
received thankfully by those whose traditions, education, and interests
were all bound up in it. And yet from her point of view it was not
altogether unreasonable. Her blackest villain and most loathsome agent
of the system, Legree, was a native of Vermont. All her wrath falls
upon the slave-traders, the auctioneers, the public whippers, and
the overseers, and all these persons and classes were detested by the
Southerners to the point of loathing, and were social outcasts. The
slave-traders and the overseers were tolerated as perhaps necessary in
the system, but they were never admitted into respectable society. This
feeling Mrs. Stowe regarded as a condemnation of the system.

Pecuniary reward was the last thing that Mrs. Stowe expected for her
disinterested labor, but it suits the world's notion of the fitness of
things that this was not altogether wanting. For the millions of copies
of Uncle Tom scattered over the world the author could expect nothing,
but in her own country her copyright yielded her a moderate return that
lifted her out of poverty and enabled her to pursue her philanthropic
and literary career. Four months after the publication of the book
Professor Stowe was in the publisher's office, and Mr. Jewett asked him
how much he expected to receive. "I hope," said Professor Stowe, with a
whimsical smile, "that it will be enough to buy my wife a silk dress."
The publisher handed him a check for ten thousand dollars.

Before Mrs. Stowe had a response to the letters accompanying the books
privately sent to England, the novel was getting known there. Its career
in Great Britain paralleled its s