Uncle Tom's Cabin

So you're the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war.

This was Abraham Lincoln's reported greeting to HARRIET BEECHER Stowe when he met her ten years after her book UNCLE TOM'S CABIN was published. Although the President may have been exaggerating a bit, few novels in American history have grabbed the public spotlight and caused as great an uproar as Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Across the north, readers became acutely aware of the horrors of slavery on a far more personal level than ever before. In the south, the book was met with outrage and branded an irresponsible book of distortions and overstatements. In such an explosive environment, her story greatly furthered the Abolitionist cause north of the Mason-Dixon Line and promoted sheer indignation in plantation America.

The book sold even more copies in Great Britain than in the United States. This had an immeasurable appeal in swaying British public opinion. Many members of the British Parliament relished the idea of a divided United States. Ten years after the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin, the British people made it difficult for its government to support the Confederacy, even though there were strong economic ties to the South. In the end, Mr. Lincoln may not have been stretching the truth after all.