The Fugitive Slave Act’s enforcement outrages directly prompted Stowe to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Evidence

Harriet Beecher Stowe no doubt heard about Sojourner Truth’s speech in Garrison’s The Liberator, or through correspondence with Ohio suffragists and abolitionists. But the attention of this gifted writer was not on the awakening suffrage movement. It was on the outrages of the Fugitive Slave Act, which was sending fugitives and free Blacks to the cotton fields. And Stowe learned about these outrages from letters that her younger sister, Isabella, was sending her from Connecticut. The letters were often read aloud in the parlor for Harriet’s seven children to hear. “Now Hattie,” Isabella wrote her big sister in one such letter, “if I could use a pen as you can, I would write something that would make this whole nation feel what an accursed thing slavery is.” Harriet Beecher Stowe rose from her chair. “I will write something,” she declared. “I will write if I live.” — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 511

Categorization

• XREF: Supports Kendi’s core causal inversion: policy (the Fugitive Slave Act, a concrete enforcement mechanism) precedes and motivates the influential idea-work (the novel).