Uncle Tom's Cabin

Solution Preview

1. Please discuss the influence of the fugitive slave narratives and of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Thanks.

EXCERPT

David W. Blight (1004), a Professor of History and Black Studies at Amherst College discusses this question. Increasingly in the 1840s, the black abolitionists of prominence are fugitive slaves, are people born in slavery in the South, like Frederick Douglass, like Henry Highland Garnett and many others, whose anti-slavery training, if you will, was on Southern plantations. They have a very different perspective. They have a very different experience. They're less patient with doctrine, and they are now about the business of the emergencies of black life in the North and of attacking slavery in meaningful ways in the South.

This transition now is also driven by the writing of these slave narratives. Frederick Douglass' narrative in 1845 is perhaps the most famous, but there were many others. There's Josiah Henson's narrative, there's Solomon Northrop's narrative, ...