-1850, when the Stowes migrated to
Brunswick, Maine, where the husband had been appointed to a chair at
Bowdoin. Pitiably poor, and distracted by household cares which she had
to face single-handed--for the Professor was a "feckless body"--Mrs.
Stowe nevertheless could not be indifferent to the national crisis over
the Fugitive Slave Law. She had seen its working. When her sister-in-law
wrote to her: "If I could use a pen as you can, I would write something
that would make this whole nation feel what an accursed thing slavery
is," Mrs. Stowe exclaimed: "God helping me, I will write something; I
will if I live."

"Uncle Tom's Cabin," begun in the spring of 1850, was a woman's answer
to Webster's seventh of March speech. Its object was plainly stated to
be "to awaken sympathy and feeling for the African race; to show, their
wrongs and sorrows, under a system so necessarily cruel and unjust as
to defeat and do away the good effects of all that can be attempted for
them, by their best friends under it." The book was permeated with what
we now call the 1848 anti-aristocratic sentiment, the direct heritage
of the French Revolution. "There is a dies irae coming on, sooner or
later," admits St. Clare in the story. "The same thing is working,
in Europe, in England, and in this country." There was no sectional
hostility in Mrs. Stowe's heart. "The people of the free states have
defended, encouraged, and participated [in slavery]; and are more guilty
for it, before God, than the South, in that they have NOT the apology of
education or custom. If the mothers of the free states had all felt as
they should in times past, the sons of the free states would not have
been the holders, and proverbially the hardest masters, of slaves; the
sons of the free states would not have connived at the extension of
slavery in our national body." "Your book is going to be the great
pacificator," wrote a friend of Mrs. Stowe; "it will unite North and
South." But the distinctly Christian and fraternal intention of the
book was swiftly forgotten in the storm of controversy that followed its
appearance. It had been written hastily, fervidly, in the intervals
of domestic toil at Brunswick, had been printed as a serial in "The
National Era" without attracting much attention, and was issued in book
form in March, 1852. Its sudden and amazing success was not confined
to this country. The story ran in three Paris newspapers at once, was
promptly dramatized, a