During the first seven years of marriage she had seven children one of whom died at infancy and she wrote pieces for magazines to help out with her husbands meager salary. She won a short story prize from Western Monthly Magazine, and her literary production and skill increased steadily. In 1834, her short-story collection The Mayflower was published. Cincinnati was across the river from the slave trade, and she observed

firsthand several incidents that motivated her to write her famous anti-slavery novel. The scenes she observed on the Ohio River, including seeing a husband and wife being sold apart, as well as newspaper and magazine accounts and interviews contributed material to the emerging plot. She also met a family that shared her abolitionist opinion and was active in hiding runaway slaves. In 1939 a black girl in her family’s employment confessed to being a runaway. Mrs. Stowe’s husband and brother helped her escape.

In 1850 Calvin Stowe was appointed at Bowdoin College in Maine, and the entire family returned to the Northeast. They reached Boston at the height of the public chaos over the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, which made legal the return of runaway slaves already in the North to their owners. Many former slaves fled to Canada from their homes in New England. Under the law people who gave food, shelter, or assistance to a runaway slave could be subject to a find of $1,000 or six months in prison. Harriet chose to write Uncle Tom's Cabin because her sister-in-law urged her to use her skills to aid the cause of abolition, “If I could use a pen as you can, I would make this whole nation what an accursed thing slavery is.” Harriet set about writing an argumentative novel illustrating the moral responsibility of the entire nation for the cruel system.

However, they could do little to prevent the book's success and appeal to the nation. The success of Uncle Tom's Cabin stemmed largely from its status as a symbol of the abolitionist movement. The book sold more copies than any other book in history to date besides the Bible. The issue of slavery had divided beliefs well before 1852, but it took an “emotional, human novel to project it to the national spotlight.” Upon meeting Mrs. Stowe at a White House reception, Abraham Lincoln said, "So this is the little lady who started this big war!"

In Uncle Tom’s Cabin Harriet Beecher Stowe wri

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