page_title: Abolitionism in the United States
section_title: Uncle Tom's Cabin
hierarchical_section_title: Abolitionism in the United States / History / Uncle Tom's Cabin
caption_attribution_description: Title-page illustration by Hammatt Billings for Uncle Tom's Cabin [First Edition: Boston: John P. Jewett and Company, 1852]. Shows characters of Chloe, Mose, Pete, Baby, Tom.
context_page_description: Abolitionism in the United States was the movement that sought to end slavery in the United States immediately and was active both before and during the American Civil War. In the Americas and Western Europe, abolitionism was a movement that sought to end the Atlantic slave trade and to free the slaves. In the 18th century, Enlightenment thinkers condemned slavery on humanistic grounds and English Quakers and some Evangelical denominations condemned slavery as un-Christian. At that time, most slaves were Africans, but thousands of Native Americans were also enslaved. In the 18th century, as many as six million Africans were transported to the Americas as slaves, at least a third of them on British ships to North America. The Colony of Georgia originally prohibited slavery.
  Between 1780 and 1804, all Northern states, beginning with An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery from Pennsylvania in 1780, passed legislation abolishing slavery, sometimes by gradual emancipation. Massachusetts ratified a constitution that declared all men equal; freedom suits challenging slavery based on the principle brought an end to slavery in the state.
context_section_description: The most influential abolitionist publication was Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), the best-selling novel and play by Harriet Beecher Stowe, who had attended the anti-slavery debates at Lane, of which her father, Lyman Beecher, was the president. Outraged by the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 (which made the escape narrative part of everyday news), Stowe emphasized the horrors that abolitionists had long claimed about slavery. Her depiction of the evil slave owner Simon Legree, a transplanted Yankee who kills the Christ-like Uncle Tom, outraged the North, helped sway British public opinion against the South, and inflamed Southern slave owners who tried to refute it by showing some slave owners were humanitarian. It inspired numerous anti-Tom, pro-slavery novels, several written and published by women.
caption: Uncle Tom's Cabin inflamed public opinion in the North and in Britain against the personified evils of slavery.
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