Uncle Tom's Cabin

Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly, is an anti-slavery  novel by American author Harriet Beecher Stowe. Published in 1852, the  novel "helped lay the groundwork for the Civil War", according to Will  Kaufman. Stowe, a Connecticut-born teacher at the Hartford Female  Seminary and an active abolitionist, featured the character of Uncle  Tom, a long-suffering black slave around whom the stories of other  characters revolve. The sentimental novel depicts the reality of slavery  while also asserting that Christian love can overcome something as  destructive as enslavement of fellow human beings. Uncle Tom's Cabin was  the best-selling novel of the 19th century and the second best-selling  book of that century, following the Bible. It is credited with helping  fuel the abolitionist cause in the 1850s. In the first year after it was  published, 300,000 copies of the book were sold in the United States;  one million copies in Great Britain. In 1855, three years after it was  published, it was called "the most popular novel of our day." The impact  attributed to the book is great, reinforced by a story that when  Abraham Lincoln met Stowe at the start of the Civil War, Lincoln  declared, "So this is the little lady who started this great war." The  quote is apocryphal; it did not appear in print until 1896, and it has  been argued that "The long-term durability of Lincoln's greeting as an  anecdote in literary studies and Stowe scholarship can perhaps be  explained in part by the desire among many contemporary intellectuals  ... to affirm the role of literature as an agent of social change."