Things Lincoln never said

[David Lockmiller]

(02-05-2014 09:32 AM)RJNorton Wrote:  

(02-04-2014 12:12 PM)David Lockmiller Wrote:  Such is the case, for instance, with his supposed greeting of Harriet Beecher Stowe as ‘the little woman who made this great war.’” Unfortunately, this quote is in the book by Emanuel Hertz, "Lincoln Talks, a Biography in Anecdote," without qualification as to authenticity.

Other than Stowe family lore I have never been able to find a source for this. Dr. Gerald J. Prokopowicz writes, "A popular story has Lincoln greeting the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin with 'So you're the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war!' but there's no written evidence that he said this. All that Stowe wrote to her husband was that she 'had a real funny interview with the President,' promising to tell him the details later."

I am inclined to believe that Lincoln made the greeting in this manner to Harriet Beecher Stowe. I believe that it was Lincoln's humerous way of stating that he knew already who Harriet Beecher Stowe was. As Roger writes in his post: "All that Stowe wrote to her husband was that she 'had a real funny interview with the President,' promising to tell him the details later." If true, all the rest of Harriet Beecher Stowe's interview with President Abraham Lincoln that day (its humor and sagacity) has been lost to history.

The phrasing of Lincoln in this instance sounds somewhat similar to Lincoln's statement that the Brady photograph taken at the time of his Cooper Union speech and the speech itself made him President. The Lincoln-Douglas debates, Lincoln's "House Divided" speech, Lincoln's speech critical of the Taney Supreme Court majority opinion in the Dred Scott case are among several other contributing factors to his election.

It is hard to imagine that a series of magazine articles published in 1850 to 1852 and cumulatively published as the book "Uncle Tom's Cabin" in 1852 could be considered by either of these two intelligent people as the direct cause of the American Civil War almost a decade later. No doubt, it was important to the process of change in public opinion in the North on the subject of slavery.

A NY Times book review published in 2011 entitled "The Impact of ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin,’" states the following information:

[The book being reviewed is “Mightier Than the Sword,” by David S. Reynolds]

The novel began to germinate in Stowe’s mind while she was living in Cincinnati in the 1830s and ’40s, where she met fugitive slaves who had escaped through or from Kentucky, and where, as Reynolds puts it, “she loved spending time in the kitchen with servants like the African-¬American Zillah.” In the spring of 1850, having moved to Maine, where she followed the Congressional debates over a proposed new law that would deny fugitive slaves basic rights while imposing new penalties on anyone harboring them, she wrote to a magazine editor that “the time is come when even a woman or a child who can speak a word for freedom and humanity is bound to speak.” The result was a series of fictional sketches of slaves under physical or psychological assault.

When the magazine pieces were gathered and published in 1852 as “Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the first print run was 5,000. Within a year, the book had sold 300,000 copies in America, and over a million in Britain.

If ever there was a publishing event to prove the principle that timing is everything, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was it. On both sides of the sectional divide the timber was dry — and Stowe struck the igniting spark. In the North, Frederick Douglass rejoiced that she had “baptized with holy fire myriads who before cared nothing for the bleeding slave.” In the South, her indictment of slavery through the odious figure of Legree was likened to a “malignant” attack on the institution of marriage, as if she had chosen a wife-beater to represent “the normal condition of the relation” between loving spouses.

A decade after the book appeared, Abraham Lincoln is said to have received Stowe at the White House with the greeting, “Is this the little woman who made this great war?” No one knows if Lincoln really said that, and as the historian David Potter once put it, “history cannot evaluate with precision the influence of a novel upon public opinion.”