“So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war.”
Whether Abraham Lincoln greeted Harriet Beecher Stowe with those words during her 1862 visit to the White House is uncertain, but if so, they were accurate. Stowe was little—she stood less than five feet tall—and the novel she had written 10 years earlier had dumped gasoline on the smoldering issue of slavery.
A bronze memorial commemorating the 1862 meeting of Lincoln and Stowe located on Columbus Boulevard and State Street in Hartford, Conn. (Jay Gao/Shutterstock)
Serialized first in a magazine and then published as a book in 1852, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” did more than any other novel in American history to influence public events. This story of slavery caught fire, selling over 300,000 copies in the United States and more than a million in Great Britain. In the North, the abolitionist cause gained tens of thousands of fervent supporters. In the South, slave owners and newspapers raged against what they perceived as the injustices and inaccuracies of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” and in certain places the book was banned outright….