and South. Its direct aim was to make slavery so odious as to cause any rendition of slaves under the fugitive slave law to be impossible. Its political use was to destroy both the Whig and Democratic parties, so as to erect from their ruins a powerful ant i- slavery association, which then meant an anti-Southern party. For all these purposes the story told by Mrs. Stowe was ingeniously constructed, and opportunely given to the Northern public in conditions that secured for it immediate, wide and even astounding success. The story has been justly called by anti-slavery critics "a monstrous caricature," and it will not escape the condemnation of the future historian as a libel on the Southern people. The intelligence and Christian character of the author, together with the remarkable influence of the book upon the masses in New England and Great Britain, will be fully acknowledged, but the book itself, as to its political and incendiary purpose, its suggestions of infidelity to legal obligations, its unjust and untrue descriptions of South ern society, its inspirations of sectional discord, will in all fairness be consigned to the purgatory of pernicious literature.
The Free Soil leaders made extensive use of "Uncle Tom’s Cabin" as a campaign document. Its sale in a few months reached to many thousands, and its readers were perhaps more than double the editions published. "The storm of anti-slavery demonstration, the tempest of invective, denunciation and menace which swept the North," says an English historian, "the counter-blast of indignation and resentment provoked in the South, terrified politicians who had inherited from Clay, Calhoun and Webster the traditions of a mightier generation and the task of saving the Union. Now for the first time their object was called in question. That the Union was worth saving was openly denied by thousands ; that it could be saved was inwardly doubted by millions." All the advantages gained by the Northern section
