Never was a book so perfectly psychologically timed. The issue of slavery in the US had grown tenser due to the Fugitive Slave Law. Abolitionists had been pushing antislavery for twenty years, now, and congress was split by increasing controversy. The Northern and Southern clergy made Biblical arguments for and against the “peculiar institution.” The whole situation was a bomb waiting to explode; and Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the match that lit the wick.

Daughter of one of the most noted divines of the nineteenth century, Lyman Beecher, sister of an even more controversial minister, Henry Ward Beecher, married to a minister, sister and mother o

For the rest of her eighty-five years of life, she continued to write novels, stories, biographies, articles and religious essays. She averaged a book per year for almost thirty years, but almost immediately dropped the subject of slavery. During the Civil War she wrote a letter to the women of England, reminding them of how much they took a liking to Uncle Tom’s Cabin almost a decade earlier, and chided them for their pro-Southern sentiment after the outbreak of the war. This letter played an important role in possible preventing English interference when it could have endangered the Northern side.

In a letter, her sister-in-law implored Stowe to “write something that would make a whole nation feel what an accursed thing slavery [was].” She said that the whole scene unrolled in her mind while attending church one day. What she originally intended on completing in a month, lasted a year. Scenes, incidents, characters, and conversations from her memory and from past experiences interminably continued to inspire her imagination. She later insisted that , “the Lord Himself wrote it. I was but an instrument in his hand.” While she was beginning the composition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin her two brothers were preaching against slavery in their sermons and holding slave auctions to in order to give them their freedom. By the time it had been in circulation for a year, eight power presses were running night and day to meet the demand for the book, and three paper mills were attempting to supply the necessary paper; and they were still thousands of copies behind orders.

f other ministers, Harriet

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