Over 41 issues, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel
Uncle Tom s Cabin was published as a serial in the abolitionist newspaper
The National Era, beginning on June 5, 1851. At first, few readers followed the story, but its audience steadily grew as the drama unfolded.
“Wherever I went among the friends of the
Era, I found
Uncle Tom’s Cabin a theme for admiring remark,” journalist and social critic Grace Greenwood wrote in a travelogue published in the
Era. “[E]verywhere I went, I saw it read with pleasant smiles and irrepressible tears.’” The story was discussed in other abolitionist publications, such as Frederick Douglass’s newspaper