- [Voiceover] Hey, Becca.
- [Voiceover] Hi, Kim.
- [Voiceover] Alright, so we're here to talk about
Uncle Tom's Cabin, and I think this is
such an interesting book because when Abraham Lincoln
met Harriet Beecher Stowe, he said to her,
"So you're the little lady that started this great war."
He said Uncle Tom's Cabin actually started the Civil War.
So how does a book start a war?
- [Voiceover] I think that's a really good question, Kim,
and these next two videos are gonna help us
understand a little bit more why Lincoln said that.
How does a little book start a war?
So this book was written by Harriet Beecher Stowe,
here she is, Stowe,
and Harriet Beecher Stowe was born
in Litchfield, Connecticut to this kind of
great abolitionist family.
So what's abolitionism, Kim?
- [Voiceover] Well abolitionism was the belief
in mostly in the early 19th century
that slavery should be ended immediately.
So there were varieties of beliefs
about the institution of slavery in early America.
Some people obviously were very pro-slavery
believe that it was a natural institution
sanctioned by the Bible.
Some people, like Abraham Lincoln,
at least early in his political career,
just wanted slavery to stay where it was,
and those were what we would call free-soilers,
or anti-slavery advocates.
They said, "Alright, we can't get rid of slavery
"in the South.
"It's too entrenched there as an institution,
"but we can make sure that it does not spread
"to any of the Western territories
"that we might settle in the future."
But abolitionists were these strongest opponents of slavery.
They said that slavery should be ended today
everywhere in the United States and the world,
and that it is an immoral, un-Christian institution.
So these Western territories were a really big part
of the increasing tension over the institution
of slavery in the 1850s.
So in 1848, the United States won
the Mexican-American War and they got a whole bunch
of new territory that had once been Mexico,
and these will become the states of Texas,
and Oklahoma, and many of the sort of
Midwestern states we have today,
but this now threatened the balance of power
between those slave-holding states in US Congress
and those that were free states,
so now everyone is wondering is slavery
going to spread to the West?
Should slavery spread to the West?
- [Voiceover] And this kind of anxiety about
the Western expansion of slavery was more tense
and became more sectionally divided
after the Compromise of 1850.
So the Compromise of 1850 happened right here in 1850,
(laughter)
and the Compromise of 1850, I like to think of it
kind of like a band-aid over this sectional tension,
so I'll draw you guys a little band-aid.
- [Voiceover] This is like a gaping wound, right,
and the Compromise of 1850 is just like
this tiny, little band-aid that's kind of
holding this dam together to mix my metaphors.
- [Voiceover] The Compromise of 1850
actually admitted California as a free state,
which was a really big win for the North, obviously.
- [Voiceover] Right, lots of gold.
- [Voiceover] But it also had a really strong
Fugitive Slave Act, so this was a really
kind of critical part of the Compromise of 1850,
and this was a big win for the South.
So why was it a big win?
- [Voiceover] Well the Fugitive Slave Act
said that if a marshal was in your town
requesting your help in rounding up an escaped slave,
you had to help that marshal or face charges yourself.
So this meant that any time that someone
who was enslaved in the South made a run for the North,
a run for Canada as many of the enslaved people did,
anyone in the North might be drafted
to help return that person to the South.
- [Voiceover] And if they didn't,
they were oftentimes fined, and this really made
all Northerners participatory in slavery,
even if they weren't slaveholders themselves
or living on a plantation in the South,
Northerners were participating in the way
that slavery was held together by disallowing
runaway slaves from continuing their lives
in free territories.
- [Voiceover] So you could imagine how
this might really galvanize a Northern audience
into action about slavery because before,
you might think, "Well, I don't like slavery,
"but what does it have to do with me, right?
"I'm just a grain miller living in Pennsylvania.
"None of my business.
"I don't like it, but I can't do anything about it,
"and it's not my fault."
Now all of a sudden, if an escaped slave
comes past your house and a marshal follows him or her,
now you've got to be a person to round that person up,
and so that means you have to participate
in slavery directly, and so you might find
yourself thinking, "You know what, I refuse to do that,
"and that means that I really do hate slavery."
- [Voiceover] And this was definitely the sentiment
that Stowe and her family had on the Underground Railroad.
So Stowe lived on a stop in the Underground Railroad,
and that was this passageway for Southern slaves
to get to the North, and Stowe and her husband
actually helped a lot of runaway slaves.
- [Voiceover] So the Underground Railroad
wasn't like a literal railroad, right?
I mean that would be pretty sweet
if there were a railroad that went under the ground
all the way up to Canada, but it was more like
a sort of an informal network of people
who might help escaped slaves, direct them
to food and shelter, and just kind of send them
along to the next waypost on their trip,
either to the North or to Canada.
- [Voiceover] And so when the Fugitive Slave Act
was passed with the Compromise of 1850,
the band-aid, this really upset Harriet Beecher Stowe
and really was one of the main catalysts
for her writing this book.
She also witnessed a slave auction,
and this Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote about
as just this terrible kind of scene
of a family being just torn apart,
and this was a really common practice within slavery,
that the unit of the family was not respected
as slaveholders wanted to sell their slaves
to different plantations throughout the South,
and the slave auction really became the basis
for the plot of Uncle Tom's Cabin.
- [Voiceover] Slave auctions were absolutely terrible.
In fact, not long before the Civil War,
the main slave auction site in Washington, D.C.
was just around the corner from the White House,
so imagine walking down the thoroughfare
of this great democracy, seeing the president's house,
the seat of government, and then turning a corner
and seeing people being sold off the block.
You know Abraham Lincoln saw a slave auction
in New Orleans and he said it was one of the things
that most influenced him to hate slavery,
just witnessing these families being torn apart.
And imagine either watching a mother being sold
away from her infant children, or being that mother
wondering what it would be like
if you're ever going to see them again.
- [Voiceover] I think that's a really important point
just to show that this was something
that was happening all around the United States
and this was just abolitionist fervor was bubbling up,
and then in 1852, when this book was published,
it really set into motion this new wave
of political rhetoric, and other novels,
and just a lot of talk about these fundamental
contradictions between Christianity and human bondage.
- [Voiceover] And we'll get to that in the next video.