Understanding “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”: How Novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe Influenced the Northern Mind

"All I can say is that there's a sweetness here, a Southern sweetness, that makes sweet music...If I had to tell somebody who had never been to the South, who had never heard of soul music, what it was, I'd just have to tell him that it's music from the heart, from the pulse, from the innermost feeling. That's my soul; that's how I sing. And that's the South."

--Singer Al Green

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The most influential literary contribution to the politics of the northern States during the mid-to-late 1850’s — helping incite State Secession and a horrific four-year war that killed 360,000 Federals — was Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, published in 1851-52, just before the onset of “Bleeding Kansas.”

Likewise, that war’s most influential music/poetry contribution — morally justifying, in the minds of many northern States people, the military conquest of the Confederacy and the huge death toll suffered — was Julia Ward Howe’s poem, The Battle Hymn of the Republic (1861), a variation upon the then-recent Federal army camp folk song, John Brown’s Body, which was an intentional mockery of a very popular, traditional South Carolina church revival song, Say, Brothers, its music and lyrics written by William Steffe a few years earlier. The Battle Hymn is handed down to us today as “lyrics by Julia Ward Howe and music by William Steffe.”

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