No other book had so dramatic an effect on the American consciousness, and consciences on the American psyche nor on American History as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s epoch-making novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Abraham Lincoln’s famous welcome to Stowe upon her visit to the White House, “So this is the lady who wrote that book that made this great war” attributes to her the major impact upon the nation’s guilt that eventually led to that great conflagration, the Civil War. Throughout her life she repeatedly asserted that God had written this famous novel, and that she was merely his amanuensis. She declared that Uncle Tom’s martyrdom came to her one day in church. Instead of all the world nodding knowingly, where were the Christian scholars who should have been shouting “Blasphemy”! God would have most assuredly disavowed any connection with such a preposterous secular production masquerading as a Christian epistle, a work that, however well-intentioned, galvanized the nation into hostile warring camps killing each other in the name of God. Had she not read the Ten Commandments? As a daughter of a minister, a sister of two, and the wife of yet another, she shows an abysmal lack of knowledge of the Bible, or was it a deliberate effort to ignore the Bible in order to achieve this propaganda coup?

Her book purports to give readers an honest glimpse of plantation life as she herself observed in Kentucky as if it were typical of the whole South. It is “about” characters we can identify with and who inhabited a world the reader considers to be socially, politically, and economically true to life. In truth her scenes are overdrawn exaggerations—maudlin sentimentality masquerading as truth. We see the unspeakable cruelty, oppressions, and sufferings inflicted upon nature’s children by all the Southerners depicted as vicious and evil slave traders, overseers, and owners. Time and again she would return to her major theme—slavery was an abomination and sin against God—a fact that cannot be supported by the Bible.

In my opinion it was not an honest presentation of the reality of human experience. It was moreover a distortion by the overdrawn scenes deliberately designed to portray Southern whites in the worst possible light, as irredeemably corrupt and evil and the saintly slaves enduring the lash from their masters. Her scenes full of moral passion appeal to the soft compassionate nature of man’s character and are the most powerful emotional portrayals against slavery. Tearful scenes, maudlin sentimentality trump dispassionate arguments to the contrary. Uncle Tom’s Cabin is the most powerful and most enduring work of art ever written with its images seared into the brain; it is a work that psychologically manipulates human emotions to cry out against this foul assault on humanity—slavery.

It is in a class by itself, and because it moved the nation to a fever pitch eventuating in the slaughter of over 1,000,000 Americans, qualifying it as the greatest case of fratricide ever, elevates the book as the most successful piece of propaganda ever devised by man. It must have been the envy of the second most successful propagandist, Joseph Goebbels.

In the philosophical debate of good and evil, the question arises what is more evil, the existence of slavery, or the deliberate slaughter of Americans to end slavery?