JEFFERSON DAVIS.

Address of Hon. John W. Daniel Before the Virginia House of Delegates.

By 1848 the United States had seized vast new western territories from Mexico, leading Sumner and his faction to join with the Liberty party and northern antislavery Democrats to create the new Free Soil party. In so doing Sumner never hesitated in attacking former friends, whom he said supported the slave power in an alliance between "the lords of the lash and the lords of the loom." Such attacks were fast becoming a Sumner trademark, as he spared no one who opposed his goals. The young reformer did not confine his concern for racial justice to territorial slavery.

For Sumner the Civil War presented the opportunity to free the slaves, and he became one of the first members of Congress to urge abolition. He worked for the next eighteen months to persuade President Abraham Lincoln. During that time he skillfully pushed legislation that weakened slavery in numerous small ways, as he successfully prepared public opinion to accept black freedom. Clearly he was among the most important of those who influenced Lincoln to issue his Emancipation Proclamation.

The success of Uncle Tom's Cabin made Stowe an international celebrity and a focus of antislavery sentiment. In 1853 she published A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, an antislavery polemic written to answer critics who complained that her novel had exaggerated the brutalities of slavery. At the invitation of two Scottish antislavery societies she undertook a tour of the British Isles.

Always controversial, Stowe fell into disrepute in the latter half of the nineteenth century. When literature became professionalized and more formal, aesthetic standards of art prevailed, and Stowe's passion and finely honed rhetoric were judged "melodramatic" and "sentimental." Her strongly marked characters, particularly Uncle Tom, were seen as stereotypes, an impression increased by the minstrel darkies of the "Tom shows" that continued into the twentieth century.