It is true that with these congratulatory and commendatory letters came hosts of others, threatening and insulting, from the Haleys and Legrees of the country.
Of them Mrs. Stowe said:
They were so curiously compounded of blasphemy, cruelty, and obscenity, that their like could only be expressed by John Bunyan's account of the speech of Apollyon: “He spake as a dragon.”
A correspondent of the National era wrote: “Uncle Tom's Cabin is denounced by time-serving preachers as a meretricious work. Will you not come out in defense of it and roll back the tide of vituperation?”
To this the editor answered:
We should as soon think of coming out in defense of Shakespeare.
Several attempts were made in the South to write books controverting Uncle Tom's Cabin, and showing a much brighter side of the slavery question, but they all fell flat and were left unread. Of one of them, a clergyman of Charleston, S. C., wrote in a private letter:--
I have read two columns in the Southern press of Mrs. Eastman's “ Aunt Phillis' Cabin, or Southern Life as it is,” with the remarks of the editor. I have no comment to make on it, as that is done by itself. The editor might have saved himself being writ down an ass by the public if he had withheld his nonsense. If the two columns are a fair specimen of Mrs. Eastman's book, I pity her attempt and her name as an author.
In due time Mrs. Stowe began to receive answers to the letters she had forwarded with copies of her book
