Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom's Cabin in serial form in the abolitionist newspaper the National Era between 1851 and 1852, and in book form in March 1852. It sold 300,000 copies in the United States and one million in Britain within the first year. The novel follows several characters whose lives are shaped by the institution of slavery: Uncle Tom, a devout enslaved man sold by his owner to pay a debt; Eliza, who escapes with her son across the frozen Ohio River rather than allow him to be separated from her; and Simon Legree, the brutal plantation owner who eventually beats Tom to death for refusing to reveal the hiding place of escaped slaves.
Stowe's strategy was to make the moral and emotional reality of slavery legible to Northern readers who had no direct experience of it, by rendering enslaved characters with enough psychological complexity and domestic feeling that readers could recognize their own humanity in the novel's victims. The technique worked, the book provoked both enormous emotional response among those it was intended to persuade and enormous hostility from defenders of slavery, who published dozens of pro-slavery novels in response. The novel's political impact is attested by the famous, probably apocryphal story of Lincoln greeting Stowe as "the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war."
Uncle Tom's Cabin is both a historical document, one of the most important pieces of political literature in American history, and a novel whose specific choices about characterization, sentimentality, and racial representation have been the subject of sustained critical analysis. The figure of Uncle Tom himself, whose patient, Christian acceptance of suffering has made his name a term of contempt in later African American culture, is the most contentious aspect of a contentious book. Reading it now requires attending to both its historical effectiveness and the limitations of Stowe's imagination, which sought to humanize enslaved people within the emotional vocabulary available to her white Northern readers rather than on terms of genuinely equal humanity.
Abraham Lincoln reportedly greeted Harriet Beecher Stowe as "the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war." Uncle Tom's Cabin sold 300,000 copies in its first year, equivalent to roughly 30 million copies today.
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