Harriet Beecher Stowe

Living across the Slaveholding State of Kentucky, the young Harriet Beecher Stowe met both abolitionists and fugitive slaves, both whom informed her of the cruelty of life in bondage. By the time she left Ohio with her husband and five children, she was convinced that slavery had to be abolished immediately. She stated, “I will write something.I will if I live†(Douglas 8). Her goal was set, so she settled down in Brunswick, Maine and there composed Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In this novel she hoped to demonstrate slavery’s wrongs to the nation (Douglas 8). She also hoped to do her small share for the cause, but it proved to be much more. With the help of her sister, Catharine Esther Beecher, and other feminist women who edited Stowe’s so called, “idiomatic jargon”, the book was on its way to be a world-renowned novel. She wrote the most powerful antislavery novel ever and it perhaps made her the most influential woman of her time. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin opened up America’s eyes to the injustice of slavery and changed the course of women’s history.
American women have played a large part in building our country. Harriet Beecher Stowe was the most prominent

The books pathos, sensationalism, and timeliness made it enormously popular (McMichael 1561). Millions of copies were sold and it was distributed and translated throughout the world. It inspired other authors such as Frederick Douglas’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas and Harriet Ann Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl to write about their experiences as slaves. This movement brought the abolitionist’s message to the White House and beyond. Like all the abolitionists, Stowe was aware of the painful discrepancies between America’s Declaration of Independence and its legislation of slavery (Douglas 20). She claims that she longed “to do something, I knew not what: to fight for my country, or to make some declaration on my account. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was that declaration” (Douglas 21).

The war on slavery was just beginning. A power hungry man named William Lloyd Garrison began to put his opinion on slavery. He stated, “Northern business backed the Southern slave-dependant economy” (Douglas 23). Stowe knew that he was just trying to protect white labor and white supremacy. She replied this, “Slavery was a sin, one that needed a more dramatic response- people could do something about it” (23). She knew that slavery was going to be the last religious political debate in America.

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin changed the course of history in many ways. Today Uncle Tom’s Cabin is valued because it raises still p