Reading Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1853, Charles Briggs found a rejoinder to the question that once preoccupied John Neal: “Who reads an American book, did you inquire, Mr. Smith? Who does not?” Continued Briggs, “Apart from all considerations of the subject, or motive, of Uncle Tom's Cabin, the great success of the book shows what may be accomplished by American authors who exercise their genius upon American subjects.” Uncle Tom obviously mustered forceful emotional responses; in so doing, it performed the task that literary nationalism had demanded. In part by recalling the way Uncle Tom's Cabin seemed to fulfill the demand of literary nationalism, in this chapter I challenge both the view that Stowe's work is merely a contraption of stereotype and convention, and the view that it is a conduit of physically immanent emotion, all but unmediated by language. But of course Stowe herself suggested the latter notion, that Uncle Tom's Cabin facilitates a transparent exchange of authentic, subjective experience. In its final chapter Stowe wrote, “The separate incidents that compose the narrative are, to a very great extent, authentic, occurring, many of them, either under her own observation, or that of her personal friends.” This claim was underscored by the appearance of The Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin shortly after the novel, in which Stowe reasserts that Uncle Tom's Cabin was not her own artistic invention but “a collection and arrangement of real incidents, – of actions really performed, of words and expressions really uttered.”