These negative associations have to some extent obscured the historical impact of Uncle Tom's Cabin as a "vital antislavery tool".[1] James Baldwin, in a 1949 essay "Everybody's Protest Novel", called Uncle Tom's Cabin a "very bad novel" ... "ruined by its "self-righteous, virtuous sentimentality", and stated that Stowe was less a novelist than an "impassioned pamphleteer", i.e., a propagandist for the antislavery cause.[86] Edward Rothstein has claimed that Baldwin missed the point and that the purpose of the novel was "to treat slavery not as a political issue but as an individually human one – and ultimately a challenge to Christianity itself";[86] as a propaganda work it need not necessarily be great literature in order to succeed in its goals.