Antebellum Responses to Harriet Beecher Stowe

In his Uncle Tom's Cabin and American Culture, Thomas F. Gossett lists 27 pro-slavery works written in response to Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, between 1852 and 1861. These novels were written by men and women, Northerners and Southerners. They adopt a variety of polemical strategies, from defending the plantation as a good place to attacking the North for its treatment of "white slaves" (the working class) to depicting Blacks as either happy in slavery or racially unfit for freedom. None of these novels attained anything like the popular success of Stowe's book, but some went through a number of printings and were widely read in the North. More...

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