[149]
convulsions of weeping, one of them saying through his sobs, “Oh, mamma slavery is the most cruel thing in the world.”
Thus Uncle Tom was ushered into the world, and it was, as we said at the beginning, a cry, an immediate, an involuntary expression of deep, impassioned feeling.
Twenty-five years afterwards Mrs. Stowe wrote in a letter to one of her children, of this period of her life: “I well remember the winter you were a baby and I was writing ‘ Uncle Tom's Cabin.’
My heart was bursting with the anguish excited by the cruelty and injustice our nation was showing to the slave, and praying God to let me do a little and to cause my cry for them to be heard.
I remember many a night weeping over you as you lay sleeping beside me, and I thought of the slave mothers whose babes were torn from them.”
It was not till the following April that the first chapter of the story was finished and sent on to the National era at Washington.
In July Mrs. Stowe wrote to Frederick Douglass the following letter, which is given entire as the best possible introduction to the history of the career of that memorable work, Uncle Tom's Cabin.
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Houghton, Mifflin and Company, The Riverside Press, Cambridge, 1889.
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