This was what gave Uncle Tom’s Cabin such astounding success. As the daughter, sister, and wife of Congregational clergymen, Harriet Beecher Stowe had breathed the doctrinal air of sin, guilt, atonement, and salvation since childhood. She could clothe these themes in prose that throbbed with pathos as well as bathos. After running serially in an antislavery newspaper for nine months, Uncle Tom’s Cabin came out as a book in the spring of 1852. Within a year it sold 300,000 copies in the United States alone—comparable to at least three million today.
