Uncle Tom's Cabin
Even though there were such criticisms, the novel was still very popular. Stowe's son says that when Abraham Lincoln met her in 1862 Lincoln said, "So this is the little lady who started this great war." Historians are not sure if Lincoln really said this or not. In a letter that Stowe wrote to her husband a few hours after meeting with Lincoln, she does not say anything about this sentence. After this, many writers have said that this novel helped make the North angry at slavery and at the Fugitive Slave Law. It greatly helped the abolitionist movement. Union general and politician James Baird Weaver said that the book made him help in the abolitionist movement.Uncle Tom's Cabin also interested many people in England. The first London edition came out in May 1852. It sold 200,000 copies. Some of this interest was because at that time the British people did not like the United States. A writer said, "The evil passions which 'Uncle Tom' gratified in England were not hatred or vengeance [of slavery], but national jealousy and national vanity. We have long been smarting (hurting) under the conceit of America – we are tired of hearing her boast that she is the freest and the most enlightened country that the world has ever seen. Our clergy hate her voluntary system – our Tories hate her democrats – our Whigs hate her ... All parties hailed Mrs. Stowe as a revolter from the enemy." Charles Francis Adams, the American minister to Britain during the war, said later that, "Uncle Tom's Cabin; or Life among the Lowly, published in 1852, influenced the world more quickly, powerfully, and dramatically than any other book ever printed."Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published in Russia at the end of 1857 and was soon recognized as a classic of world literature. Many people saw a very strong link between the world of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the serfdom that still existed in Russia in 1850s. In his letter to an abolitionist Maria Weston Chapman, Nikolay Turgenev wrote, “Many of the scenes described in the book seem like an exact depiction of equally frightful scenes in Russia.” Uncle Tom's Cabin served as an educational tool for Russian and Russo-Soviet elite in the post emancipation period, and it also became part of Soviet children literature.