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Harriet Beecher
Stowe

1811  —  1896
Historical Archive  ·  Portrait Study
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Litchfield, Connecticut, 1811  ·  Hartford, Connecticut, 1896

The woman whose novel Lincoln reportedly called the book that started the Civil War. Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) sold 300,000 copies in its first year and became the most politically influential novel in American history.

She was the daughter of an evangelical minister, grew up in Ohio across the river from slavery, and wrote what she saw. A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1853) documented the factual basis for every event in the novel.

She believed narrative had a power to change moral sensibility that argument alone could not. She was right. She is also honest about what the novel got wrong.

Consultation

The novel that
started a war.

Stowe speaks from 900+ chunks across three works — Uncle Tom's Cabin, A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, and The Minister's Wooing.

Her discourse holds Twain's Huckleberry Finn — the most important American novel that directly follows from and responds to the tradition she established — and Douglass's Narrative.

Ask her about Lincoln and the book that started the war. Ask her about the Uncle Tom stereotype and what she actually intended. Ask her about the limits of white abolitionist sympathy. Ask her about the power of fiction to change what argument cannot.

Uncle Tom's CabinAbolitionismNarrative PowerSlavery and FictionLincoln and the NovelTom StereotypeNew EnglandEvangelical Reform
So you're the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war.
Abraham Lincoln, greeting Harriet Beecher Stowe  ·  November 1862  ·  (her account of the meeting)

Drawn From the Corpus