What factors helped unravel the balance between slave and free states?

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Figure false: Uncle Tom’s Cabin Poster
Figure false: After Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s outraged sister-in-law told her, “Now Hattie, if I could use a pen as you can, I would write something that will make this whole nation feel what an accursed thing slavery is.” This poster advertising the novel Stowe wrote calls it “The Greatest Book of the Age.” The novel fueled the growing antislavery crusade. The Granger Collection, NY.

THE COMPROMISE OF 1850 began to come apart almost immediately. The implementation of the Fugitive Slave Act brought the horrors of slavery into the North. Moreover, millions of Northerners who never saw a runaway slave confronted slavery through Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom's Cabin, a novel that vividly depicts the brutality of the South’s “peculiar institution.” Congress did its part to undo the Compromise as well. Four years after Congress stitched the sectional compromise together, it ripped the threads out. With the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, it again posed the question of slavery in the territories, the deadliest of all sectional issues.

CHRONOLOGY

1852

  • – Uncle Tom’s Cabin is published.
  • – Franklin Pierce is elected president.

1853

  • – Gadsden Purchase.

1854

  • – Kansas-Nebraska Act.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin

image Enormously popular antislavery novel written by Harriet Beecher Stowe and published in 1852. It helped to solidify northern sentiment against slavery and to confirm white Southerners’ sense that no sympathy remained for them in the free states.