The Library of Congress in 1892: Ainsworth Spofford, Houghton, Mifflin and Company, and Uncle Tom's Cabin

On Wednesday, March 23, 1892, A. S. Wheeler, a clerk employed by the Boston publishing firm Houghton, Mifflin and Company, visited the Library of Congress at its location in the dome of the U.S. Capitol. He was there on secret business. Upon completing his consultations at the Library, Wheeler retired to his hotel, the Riggs House, and penned a thirteen-page letter (see below) to his employer in which he gave "full particulars" of his investigations.¹ It provides an interesting and colorful account of the Library of Congress and its operations only a few years before it moved in 1897 to a new, dedicated library building, now known as the Jefferson Building.

An explanation is in order. At the time of Wheeler's visit, questions had arisen concerning the legal status under copyright of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, one of the greatest publishing phenomena of the nineteenth century. The work originally had been published serially from June 5, 1851, to April 1, 1852, in the National Era, a Washington-based antislavery weekly edited by Gamaliel Bailey. At the time, Stowe was resident in Brunswick, Maine, and a regular contributor of sketches and stories to the National Era, though she had never attempted anything as ambitious or clearly political as Uncle Tom's Cabin. Perhaps this explains why she took the unusual step of arranging for the registration of the work for copyright in the U.S. District Court of Maine.

If Uncle Tom's Cabin attracted considerable attention in the National Era, it only became a true best seller with its publication in two volumes by John P. Jewett and Company of Boston on March 20, 1852: an unprecedented 310,000 copies were produced during its first year of book publication. In 1860 the rights passed to another Boston firm, Ticknor and Fields, and then eventually to the Houghton firm, which in 1878 acquired the rights of the many classic works by New England authors originally published by Ticknor and Fields. When the original copyright term of twenty-eight years expired in 1879, Stowe and her new publisher were careful to file for a renewal of an additional fourteen years: Uncle Tom's Cabin would finally enter the public domain only in 1893.

If sales of Uncle Tom's Cabin as a book were initially spectacular, by mid-1853 sales had come to a near halt and continued to be slack during the 1850s and 1860s, when only about 8,000 additional copies were produced. During the 1870s sales began to pick up, and the original 1852 plates were used to produce just under 20,000 further copies. In 1879, the same year that copyright was renewed, the Houghton firm reissued the text, printed from newly manufactured plates, in an expensive "red-line" and a cheaper "library" edition. During the 1880s, as the firm continued to issue it in a variety of new forms and editions, the work became a dependable, steady seller on Houghton, Mifflin and Company's backlist, contributing to the solid financial foundation on which any established publisher relies. In the five-year period from 1886 to 1890 nearly 110,000 copies were sold.²

Thus, it is hardly surprising that Houghton, Mifflin and Company was alarmed in 1892, when the copyright status of Uncle Tom's Cabin was questioned, even if it had only just over a year of copyright protection remaining. On March 1, 1892, an obscure advertising industry periodical, the National Advertiser, announced "A Remarkable Discovery" that, according to the technicalities of copyright law, Uncle Tom's Cabin "was not, and never has been, legally copyrighted."³ As the article pointed out, the 1880s had seen the rise of an increasing number of "pirates," publishing firms that made a business of reprinting foreign and noncopyrighted works in inexpensive, shabby editions, issued in series that qualified for distribution through the mails as second-class matter. If the "discovery" were correct, any publisher would be free to issue Uncle Tom's Cabin in its own edition. Houghton...