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When Harriet Beecher Stowe, abolitionist and author of "Uncle Tom's Cabin", first met Abraham Lincoln, the president is said to have said to her, “So this is the lady who made this big war.”

A Moment in Time is a brief, exciting and compelling journey into the past. Created to excite and enlighten the public about the past, its relevance to the present and its impact on the future, A Moment In Time is a captivating historical narrative that is currently broadcast worldwide.

Transcript

Lead: When Harriet Beecher Stowe first met Abraham Lincoln, the president is said to have said to her, “So this is the lady who made this big war.”

Intro: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts.

Content: In 1850 a series of laws were passed by the Congress of the United States that came to be known as the Compromise of 1850. They secured relative peace between North and South and delayed by a decade the coming Civil War. One of the parts of the compromise was a strengthened Fugitive Slave Law. It was passed to block the growing campaign by abolitionists and others opposed to slavery who were trying to help slaves escape captivity.

One of those offended by the new Fugitive Slave Law was Harriet Beecher Stowe: a housewife, mother of seven children, and daughter of the famous Protestant preacher Lyman Beecher. She lived in Brunswick, Maine where her husband was a professor at Bowdoin College. As a confirmed abolitionist she felt it was her moral duty to help runaway slaves. She complained to a relative that the new law made her feel helpless and then set out to write a novel dramatizing the evils of slavery.

The vehicle she chose was a story serialized in the weekly abolitionist newspaper "National Era." Despite her lack of firsthand experience with slavery, her rich narrative and vivid descriptions were convincing. Periodically, a new chapter would describe the lives, challenges, sufferings, and pleasures of a cast of characters whose names were soon world famous: Little Eva, Sambo, Quimbo, the tragic Lucy, cruel master Simon Legree, and, of course, Uncle Tom.

As a powerful piece of moral and political propaganda, "Uncle Tom's Cabin" sold three million copies before 1860. Though inaccurate in places, it confirmed the worst fears of the abolitionists, offended many white southerners who thought its descriptions of slavery to be extreme, spurred the forces that brought together the Republican Party, and enflamed and hardened opinion on all sides of the questions of slavery and states' rights.

At the University of Richmond, this is Dan Roberts.

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