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as a money-making business, and in regard to this new contract she writes:
I did not know until a week afterward precisely what terms Mr. Stowe had made, and I did not care.
I had the most perfect indifference to the bargain.
The agreement was signed March 13, 1852, and, as by arrangement with the
National era the book publication of the story was authorized before its completion as a serial, the first edition of five thousand copies was issued on the twentieth of the same month.
In looking over the first semi-annual statement presented by her publishers we find
Mrs. Stowe charged, a few days before the date of publication of her book, with “one copy U. T. C. cloth $.56,” and this was the first copy of
Uncle Tom's Cabin ever sold in book form.
Five days earlier we find her charged with one copy of
Horace Mann's speeches.
In writing of this critical period of her life
Mrs. Stowe says:--
After sending the last proof-sheet to the office I sat alone reading Horace Mann's eloquent plea for these young men and women, then about to be consigned to the slave warehouse of Bruin & Hill in Alexandria, Va., -a plea impassioned, eloquent, but vain, as all other pleas on that side had ever proved in all courts hitherto.
It seemed that there was no hope, that nobody would hear, nobody would read, nobody pity; that this frightful system, that .had already pursued its victims into the free States, might at last even threaten them in Canada.
Introduction to Illustrated Edition of Uncle Tom, p. XIII.
（Houghton, Osgood & Co., 1879.)
Filled with this fear, she determined to do all that
