Uncle Tom's Cabin

Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe, first published as a serial in 1851 and as a book in 1852. It follows the lives of several enslaved people — most centrally the dignified, deeply faithful Tom — as they are separated from their families and sold to different owners across the American South.

Through Tom’s journey from a relatively kind master in Kentucky to the brutal plantation of Simon Legree in Louisiana, Stowe exposed the daily cruelties and moral horrors of slavery to a mass audience. The novel also follows Eliza, a young mother who makes a desperate escape across the frozen Ohio River with her child rather than see him sold away.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin became the best-selling novel of the nineteenth century and the second best-selling book in America after the Bible. It galvanized the abolitionist movement and deepened the sectional divide that led to the Civil War. Abraham Lincoln reportedly greeted Stowe with the words, “So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.”