Why Uncle Tom's Cabin is an important novel

Abraham Lincoln is said to have remarked that it started the Civil War. I've read it and it's powerful.

Thread
1-After listening to @tylercowen recent podcast with Hollis Robbins I was motivated to read Uncle Tom's Cabin, a book I was probably supposed to read at some point but never did. subtext...too much of what I read is suggested by Cowen...but that's another thread.

— Sean Patrick Hughes (@seanphughes99) September 11, 2019

The rest of the tweet stream:

2-At the risk of sounding dramatic, my take away is that it's probably the most important work of American literature ever written. And I would not have said that 10 years ago. That something a 175 years old gains relevance over time is part of the point.

3-What makes it so relevant, beyond the obvious racial tensions of 21s century American politics, is that Stowe writes about more than slavery. It's a tale of immigration too.And federal legislation. And the personal nature of politics and the role agency & power structures play.

4-There's a part in which a senator discusses with his wife that it's his duty to comply with the Fugitive Slave Law. And the emotional beating he takes from his wife on that position that convinces him he's wrong is one of the most powerful exchanges I've ever read.

5-The direct line parallel to today is with the enforcement of zero tolerance to illegal immigration. I don't pretend to draw too strong a comparison between the enforcement of borders and the evils of slavery. But there's something telling in the pattern that is between them.

6-In order to enforce the absolute property rights of slavery, the Fugitive Slave Act forced those morally uncomfortable, even principally opposed to slavery but not active in their opposition, to support slavery in broad daylight under penalty of law.

7-Publicity of mass detainment facilities of immigrants forced the moral hazard of harsh immigration enforcement into daylight. There's an unavoidable cruelness to 0 tolerance immigration policy one can only be comfortable with if one views immigrants, as a group, negatively.

8- There's a cruelty to keeping another human being in bondage that one can only tolerate if one views those in bondage, as a group, negatively. Stowe shows this cruelty over & over in heart wrenching, emotionally exhausting accounts of children being taken from their mothers.

9-And we saw this with today's family separations. Children, on their first day of school, crying for their parents in MS when an ICE raid took them. It was hard to watch. As the accounts of Cassy's son being hauled off to be "broken" by the man who bought him was hard to read.

10-These children were not their mother's. It's the ultimate destruction of agency; to not possess that which is the basis for human existence. Family.

11-It was an unjustifiable, unimaginable cruelness. A certain kind of evil. And it was justified by the same themes we justify things today. That we have no choice. That this was the way it had to be. That we are collectively better off for it.

12-None of those reasons stand up through the cold light of history. Though we haven't really learned the lesson. I highly recommend the read again, with an eye towards the themes I mention.

H/t Tyler Cowen.