erican who perceives that in spite of the triumph of emancipation,
in which Garrison had his fair share of glory, many aspects of our
race-problem remain unsolved. Horace Greeley, the founder and editor of
the "New York Tribune" was a farmer's boy who learned early to speak
and write the vocabulary of the plain people. Always interested in new
ideas, even in Transcendentalism and Fourierism, his courage and energy
and journalistic vigor gave him leadership in the later phases of the
movement for enfranchisement. He did not hesitate to offer unasked
advice to Lincoln on many occasions, and Lincoln enriched our literature
by his replies. Greeley had his share of faults and fatuities, but in
his best days he had an impressively loyal following among both rural
and city-bred readers of his paper, and he remains one of the best
examples of that obsolescent personal journalism which is destined
to disappear under modern conditions of newspaper production. Readers
really used to care for "what Greeley said" and "Dana said" and "Sam
Bowles said," and all of these men, with scores of others, have left
their stamp upon the phrases and the tone of our political writing.

In the concrete issue of Slavery, however, it must be admitted that
the most remarkable literary victory was scored, not by any orator or
journalist, but by an almost unknown little woman, the author of "Uncle
Tom's Cabin." No American novel has had so curious a history and so
great or so immediate an influence in this country and in Europe. In
spite of all that has been written about it, its author's purpose
is still widely misunderstood, particularly in the South, and the
controversy over this one epoch-making novel has tended to obscure the
literary reputation which Mrs. Stowe won by her other books.

Harriet Beecher, the daughter and the sister of famous clergymen, was
born in Litchfield, Connecticut, in 1811. For seventeen years, from 1832
to 1849, she lived in the border city of Cincinnati, within sight of
slave territory, and in daily contact with victims of the slave system.
While her sympathies, like those of her father Lyman Beecher, were
anti-slavery, she was not an Abolitionist in the Garrisonian sense of
that word. At twenty five she had married a widowed professor, Calvin
Stowe, to whom she bore many children. She had written a few sketches of
New England life, and her family thought her a woman of genius. Such was
the situation in the winter of 1849