The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War

by Erik Larson

Immediately after the book version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin emerged, Simms and others responded with a barrage of proslavery, anti-abolitionist novels, well over a dozen, that took the themes of Stowe’s story, notably the separation of enslaved families, and contorted them in ways that verged on the comical. One author, Charles Jacobs Peterson, paradoxically a Philadelphia-bred writer and editor, in that same year published The Cabin and the Parlor, which laid the blame for separation at the feet of financiers in New York, specifically a firm named “Mssrs. Skin and Flint” whose predatory behavior forced a planter to sell his slaves. Another novel, with the cudgel-like title Uncle Robin, in his Cabin in Virginia, and Tom Without One in Boston, blamed slave separations on Northern abolitionists who cajoled slaves into escaping their plantations, thereby leaving them vulnerable to capture and resale by unscrupulous slave traders. The traders were Yankees. Another book, Aunt Phillis’s Cabin, carved an especially contorted path, likewise blaming abolitionists for causing slaves to flee, but with the twist that once the fugitives were captured and returned to their plantations, their presence proved so disruptive that the loyal stay-behinds forced their masters to sell them in order to restore harmony.