Barrel Cactus Press
Review by Brian Tanguay
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published in forty-one installments by the National Era, a prominent abolitionist newspaper. The story of a Black man, Uncle Tom, and a Black woman, Eliza Harris, brought humanity to human bondage and became a national sensation. Running from June 1851 to April 1852 — a time of intense public and political debate about slavery in America — Stowe’s story drove the National Era’s circulation from a modest 17,000 in 1851 to nearly 30,000 by 1853. As historian Lisa Waller Rogers notes, copies of the Era were passed from house to house until the paper was worn out; the literate read it to the illiterate.
The period covered in When People Were Things was one of the most consequential in American history. Harriet Beecher Stowe was an abolitionist before passage of the Fugitive Slave Act became law in 1850, but it was daily news reports of slave abductions and return to bondage that galvanized her to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin. She wanted to change public opinion and make people experience the brutality and suffering of slavery in a way that was more immediate than anti-slavery sermons, pamphlets, and editorials. Her aim was to write a gripping narrative filled with “humor and pathos” that would influence readers to think long and hard about slavery. Her timing was impeccable. The Fugitive Slave Act had quickly become a unifying issue for abolitionists of all persuasions. Those that sought gradual emancipation now found common cause with those demanding immediate emancipation; questions about women’s rights and Black suffrage were temporarily tabled in order to oppose the Act with a united front.
Along with Harriet Beecher Stowe, Waller’s sprawling and well-paced narrative serves to introduce or reintroduce readers to some of the key figures and issues that led the Civil War: Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Sojourner Truth, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Charles Sumner, John Brown, Stephen A. Douglas and Abraham Lincoln. Along with the Fugitive Slave Act, Waller shows how the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 and the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision of 1857 contributed to national tension and divisions over slavery. For his part, Abraham Lincoln neither approved of slavery nor believed that Blacks could ever be equal to whites, and was prepared to leave the practice in place where it already existed. Lincoln’s path to the Emancipation Proclamation wasn’t linear. Waller writes with clarity about the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates, recreating their drama and consequence.
When People Were Things is a well-written and organized general history of the cataclysmic events of the mid-nineteenth century. One can certainly find more granular accounts of the Fugitive Slave Act or the Dred Scott decision, but what I found admirable was the way Waller employed Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Lincoln, and the Emancipation Proclamation as a narrative triangle. She captures the mood of the time, the ambivalence of many northerners and the hubris of the south’s Slave Power, along with the moral outrage of religious leaders, publishers, and women. Without the fortitude of women, the abolitionist movement wouldn’t have been nearly as influential as it was. It took moral and often physical courage to stand against slavery and for the humanity of Black people. That sort of courage is necessary in every time and place.
