author

A. Woodward

Known chiefly for a mid-19th-century response to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, this author is remembered through a rare, controversial work tied to the slavery debate of the 1850s. Very little biographical information appears to survive, which gives the book an unusual historical mystery as well as a polemical voice.

1 Audiobook

A Review of Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, An Essay on Slavery

A Review of Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, An Essay on Slavery

by A. Woodward

About the author

A. Woodward is an obscure author whose surviving record is quite thin. The clearest documented work is A Review of Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, An Essay on Slavery, published in Cincinnati in 1853; library and digitized-book records also identify the author as A. Woodward, M.D.

That book places Woodward in the fierce public arguments that followed Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Modern catalog and digitized-text listings describe it as a direct critique of Stowe’s novel and a defense of slavery, making it a revealing example of pro-slavery writing from its period.

Some retail catalogs also list Lessons in Loveliness: Learning to Live a Lovely Life under “A. Woodward,” but the available records suggest that book was coauthored much later with N. Schultz and do not clearly confirm that it was written by the same person. Because reliable biographical details are scarce, most of what can be said with confidence comes from the publication history of the 1853 book rather than from a fuller personal profile.