Ink Strong Enough to Break a Yoke

On March 20, 1852, the Boston firm of John P. Jewett published a two-volume novel by a minister's daughter from Connecticut. Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin sold ten thousand copies in its first week and three hundred thousand within the year.

Stowe wrote from experience and from grief. Living in Cincinnati during the 1840s, she had witnessed the reality of slavery just across the Ohio River in Kentucky. When her eighteen-month-old son, Samuel Charles, died of cholera in 1849, the devastation opened her eyes to the anguish of enslaved mothers whose children were torn from their arms and sold. That grief became fuel. She began writing what would become the most influential novel in American history.

Her book did what decades of political argument had not — it made millions of readers feel the weight of chains they had chosen to ignore.

Isaiah 58:6 calls God's people to "loose the chains of injustice" and "set the oppressed free." Notice that the prophet does not say merely to disapprove of injustice. He says to loose it, to break it, to act. Stowe understood this. She took the compassion burning in her heart and gave it a form that could travel into parlors and pulpits across a nation.

Compassion that stays a private sentiment changes nothing. The kind of fasting the Almighty desires moves from feeling to action — from a broken heart to hands that break yokes.