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Person1811 – 1896

Harriet Beecher Stowe

American writer whose novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), depicting the cruelty of slavery, roused anti-slavery opinion

Daughter of the famous preacher Lyman Beecher, she lived for eighteen years in Cincinnati, Ohio, across the river from slaveholding Kentucky, and heard the stories of fugitive slaves. Outraged by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, she wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin, serialised from 1851 and published as a book in 1852. The novel was a sensation in America and Europe and stirred anti-slavery opinion; answering Southern critics, she also published A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1853), a compilation of her sources. She went on to write many more novels and essays.

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    1852Publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabinauthor

    Harriet Beecher Stowe published her novel of the cruelties of slavery as a book; selling some 300,000 copies in the United States in its first year, it greatly strengthened anti-slavery feeling in the North.

Themes this person appears in

  • The American Civil War1850 – 1865

    From the Compromise of 1850 to Lincoln’s assassination — a nation divided over slavery fought four years of civil war, preserving the Union and ending slavery