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Social media rants about injustice toward Black people is accomplishing the square root of fuck all. I should have put that in quotes because that is not my opinion. Alas, it is held by many a brainless fuckpuddle who would seek to silence you. Yet there is ample evidence the fuckpuddles are wrong, including the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a 40-week serial in the abolitionist publication The National Era beginning June 5, 1851.
--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: June 5, 1851--
It’s a story of a white farmer’s decision to sell two of those he enslaved to pay his debts. One enslaved is a middle-aged man named Uncle Tom, who has a wife and children. The other is Harry, the only surviving child of the farmer’s maid, Eliza. It was about families being ripped apart, humans sold like consumer goods because a farmer needed the money, and the heartache that ensued. Telling that story changed history.
Considering the glacial pace of evolution via natural selection, we homo sapiens plowed our way to top of the food chain with lightning speed, and we were able to do that because we’re fucking smart. We rule the planet. I mean, we’ve been total dicks about it and I’m not saying humanity is awesome, but there is no question our massive brainpower is what made us dominant. We used that brainpower to communicate and to organize, to share common beliefs and values and goals. Might often makes “right,” and ideas can generate a mighty following. Such was the case with Harriet Beecher Stowe’s writings.
The series was so popular the Era got complaints if the next installment hadn’t appeared in the latest issue. It was published as a novel in 1852 and sold 300,000 copies its first year in the U.S., and 200,000 in the UK. Selling that many copies of a book in 1852 qualifies as “a metric shit-ton.”
Stowe, a white woman, had a Christian savior complex and failed to present Black people as humans worthy of the same rights as their white counterparts, but she did get an important message across: Chattel slavery is wrong. Of course the pro-slavery shitnuggets blew their poop so hard their outhouses overflowed. They called the book fake news. The next year Stowe was all, “References, motherfuckers!” with the publication of A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a nonfiction book citing numerous real-life equivalents to people in the novel. It too became a bestseller.
The stories reached people. It made them rethink the plots of their own lives and the society they were a part of, supplying rocket fuel to the abolitionist movement. The readings were so influential that in 1862, a year into the American Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln met with Stowe and is believed to have said, “So this is the little lady who started this great war.”
Keep ranting. And be ready to reference a motherfucker.
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