The most famous man in America : the biography of Henry Ward Beecher by Applegate Debby

Author:Applegate, Debby
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Beecher, Henry Ward, 1813-1887, Congregational churches, Clergy
Publisher: New York : Three Leaves Press
Published: 2006-03-13T16:00:00+00:00

262 ^^ The Most Famous Man in America

soon began to cry," said Henry. "Then I went and shut all the doors, for I did not want anyone to see me. Then I sat down to it and finished it that night, for I knew that only in that way should I be able to preach on Sunday." Eunice waited up for him. Finally, as the clock struck three, he came upstairs and threw the book down in front of her, exclaiming, "If Hattie Stowe ever writes another book like that, I'll—well she has half killed me." 50

Within a year the book, now subtitled Life Among the Lowly, had sold 305,000 copies in the United States and a million in England, and was translated into Italian, Swedish, Danish, Dutch, Flemish, German, Polish, and Magyar. It quickly became the first American novel to see more than a million copies in the United States, at a time when the population was less than 24 million. The country was gripped by "Tom Mania," producing hundreds of "Uncle Tom" spin-offs: sheet music, plays, minstrel shows, parodies, knickknacks, handkerchiefs, toys, and lithographs illustrating scenes from the book. A play adapted from the book ran for two hundred consecutive performances at New York's Chatham Theater.

Suddenly Harriet was rich, earning ten thousand dollars in the first three months of sales. Every postal delivery brought fan letters and admiring articles hailing her as a genius. Uncle Tom's Cabin would go on to become the single best-selling book in the world, translated into fifty-eight languages. This quiet parson's wife had accomplished the impossible: She took the most unpopular subject in the country and turned it into the most popular book in American history.

Backlash followed quickly. The novel was unofficially banned throughout the South, hate mail streamed in (one envelope brought a bloody brown human ear), and the hostile press excoriated her as a foulmouthed liar, a polluted woman, and "an obscure Yankee school mistress, eaten up with fanaticism." 51 "Mrs. Stowe betrays a malignity so remarkable that the petticoat lifts of itself, and we see the hoof of the beast under the table," wrote the Southern author William Gilmore Simms. 52

Their animosity had good cause. With her powerful "pictures" Harriet may have done more to undermine slavery in the North than any other single effort to date. "I estimate the value of antislavery writing by the abuse it brings," William Lloyd Garrison congratulated Harriet. "Now all the defenders of slavery have let me alone and are abusing you." 53

Harriet returned to New York for the May Anniversaries in 1852 as

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