Profile of the Day: Harriet Beecher Stowe

Image: Harriet Beecher Stowe / U.S. National Archives and Records Administration

“So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.” According to legend, these are the words President Abraham Lincoln said upon meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of the popular anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, shortly after the start of the American Civil War. The novel’s vivid depiction of the realities of slavery is often credited with helping to change the public’s opinion of slavery and fuel the abolitionist cause leading into the start of the Civil War.

The author and abolitionist was born on June 14, 1811 to a prominent religious family. She was the seventh of thirteen children born to Lyman Beecher, a prominent Presbyterian minster, and Roxana Foote. Growing up, she received an education that was typically reserved for males at the time and followed her father’s strong abolitionist beliefs. In 1936, she married Calvin Ellis Stowe, a prominent critic of slavery.

In 1851, Stowe first published Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a 40-week serial in the abolitionist periodical, The National Era. The serial had become so popular that the next year it was released as a book. Demand for the book as strong and it would become the best selling novel of the 19th century.

Have you read Uncle Tom’s Cabin?

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