When, amid the burning ruins of a besieged city, a
mother's voice is heard uttering a cry of anguish over a child killed
in her arms by a bursting shell, the attention is arrested, the heart
is touched. So "Uncle Tom's Cabin" was a cry of anguish from a
mother's heart, and uttered in sad sincerity. It was the bursting
forth of deep feeling, with all the intense anguish of wounded love.
It will be the purpose of this chapter to show this, and to cause to
pass before the reader's mind the time, the household, and the heart
from which this cry was heard.
After struggling for seventeen years with ill health and every
possible vexation and hindrance in his work, Professor Stowe became
convinced that it was his duty to himself and his family to seek some
other field of labor.
February 6, 1850, he writes to his mother, in Natick, Mass.: "My
health has not been good this winter, and I do not suppose that I
should live long were I to stay here. I have done a great deal of hard
work here, and practiced no little self-denial. I have seen the
seminary carried through a most vexatious series of lawsuits,
ecclesiastical and civil, and raised from the depths of poverty to
comparative affluence, and I feel at liberty now to leave. During the
three months of June, July, and August last, more than nine thousand
persons died of cholera within three miles of my house, and this
winter, in the same territory, there have been more than ten thousand
cases of small-pox, many of them of the very worst kind.
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