William Cullen Bryant

REFORM AND LIBERATION: ABOLITIONISTS 
New England intellectuals had, in fact, a tradition of involvement in liberal 
reform. In the 1850s, this took the form of a movement to end the institution of slavery, 
which by that time was practiced chiefly in the southern states. In 1852, a New England 
woman named 
Harriet Beecher Stowe
(1811-1896) wrote “
Uncle Tom’s Cabin”,
an 
antislavery novel that galvanized political opinion across the nation. Sentimental and 
melodramatic as it was, “
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
”
 
portrayed black slaves as sympathetic, 
suffering figures, and created an image of the cruel slave-owner in the character of 
Simon Legree. Largely as a result of this best-selling novel, the slavery question became 
a passionately debated political issue. Eventually the Southern states determined to 
secede from the Union and to establish themselves as an independent country in order to 
preserve their way of life, which included an agrarian economy based in great part on 

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slave labor. The result of Northern reaction to this secession was the Civil War (1861-
1865), fought to preserve the Union. One consequence of the South’s defeat in that war 
was the abolition of slavery in the United States. In many ways, this bloody, divisive 
war dimmed American optimism, and for a time writers retreated from national themes.