The city was a refuge for escaping slaves along the underground railroad. Some of the refugees were often sheltered in Stowe's own home. That's when she would hear first hand runaway slave stories of broken families, cruelties of overseers, the horrors of the auction block and the terrors of being hunted like animals. She even got a chance once to witness the slave system for herself, once. Visiting some friends she found her model for the fictional Shelby plantation in Uncle Tom's Cabin. Her brother, a traveling businessman, would bring back ugly tales of slavery in the Deep South, with which she was able to make the prototype of Simon Legree, basing him off a rough overseer whom Charles, her brother, had met on a Mississippi riverboat.
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.
Supposedly every reasonably literate person in the country read this controversial novel. Its record of publication has only been beat by the Bible itself. It was extremely popular in England, as well.