Civil War
Uncle Tom's Cabin significantly contributed to the rising tensions between the North and South that led to the Civil War. It emotionally swayed Northerners to face the horrors of slavery and work together to end it. At the same time it caused Southerners to more staunchly defend their right to uphold the system of slavery.
The war started on April 12, 1861 at Fort Sumter and ended the spring of 1865. There were two million casualties on the Union side and one million on the Confederate side, but the total number of deaths ranged from 610,000 to 850,000. |
Uncle Tom’s Cabin … caused a reactionary surge of pro-slavery feeling in the South, exacerbating the tensions that led to the Civil War. By the eve of the war, as one Southerner of the day noted, the novel 'had given birth to a horror against slavery in the Northern mind which all the politicians could never have created' and 'did more than all else to array the North and South in compact masses against each other.'"
-David S. Reynolds
“Civil war … People thought that it was going to be easy ... who knew that there would be four bloody years ... about a million causalities. But this book forced this issue that you can’t compromise with slavery. Uncle Tom was devoutly Christian; he wasn't trying to burn down his master's house or poison his master's food, but he tried to do what he could in that institution ... it was cruel and you can't compromise with a tyrant.” ~Prof. Williams, Interview
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There were a lot of people in the North who because of Uncle Tom’s Cabin believed that the war really was a war to end slavery... And there were men who joined the Union Army because they read Harriet Beecher’s book and were inspired to go and fight slavery... one of the proofs I would cite for that is that every book that I have ever read about the Civil War, Harriet’s book is mentioned as one of the big events, one of the big cultural events on the way to the war in the run up to the war."
~Prof. Koester, Interview
January 1861 - The South Secedes (Source: Freeman)