A bestselling novel mobilized more abolitionists than the movement’s leading orators

Evidence

All along, mutual friends tried to stop the quarrel. Before the year expired, Harriet Beecher Stowe stepped between Douglass and Garrison. She achieved what others could not. After all, the best-selling Uncle Tom’s Cabin had catapulted Stowe to the pinnacle of the abolitionist movement overlooking both Douglass and Garrison. Her novel was drawing more northerners to the movement than the writings and speeches of Douglass and Garrison—especially, and crucially, the women who were firing the nation up for their rights. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 535

Categorization

• XREF: Relates to reader’s published article on trees/art as infrastructure? Not directly — but connects to the broader pattern of narrative/media doing more political work than argument, which echoes the communication-as-culture theme of propaganda shaping belief.