Uncle Tom's Cabin

Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, published in 1852, did more than any other book to turn Northern public opinion against slavery. By dramatizing the suffering of enslaved people as a human and moral catastrophe, it reached readers that political argument never could.

The book was a publishing phenomenon, selling 300,000 copies in its first year in the United States and far more abroad — one of the best-selling novels of the entire 19th century. It was adapted into countless stage plays that carried its anti-slavery message to audiences who never read the book.

Stowe had been galvanized by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which required Northerners to assist in returning escaped people to bondage. Her novel made that abstraction unbearable, putting faces and families to the cruelty the law demanded ordinary citizens take part in.

Its impact was so great that, according to a popular if likely apocryphal story, Abraham Lincoln greeted Stowe as "the little lady who made this big war." Whether or not he said it, the sentiment captured a truth: Uncle Tom's Cabin helped make the moral case that hardened the North against slavery.