Uncle Tom's Cabin had a tremendous effect on its time, and immensely influenced in prompting of the American Civil War. It was criticized as being, "a monstrous distortion inspired by abolitionist fanaticism and designed to excite sectional discord," and accused as having "done more harm to the world than any other book ever written." Longfellow, although, praised it as being "one of the greatest triumphs recorded in literary history." Some called it "a triumph of reality," or "immortal," and some even described the author as "unquestionably a woman of genius.".
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 of other ministers, Harriet Beecher Stowe spent virtually her entire life in an intensely religious, particularly a Calvinistic, atmosphere. Her religious background is evident in Uncle Tom's Cabin and other works of hers. She loved to read and was strongly influenced by her favorites, Byron and Scott, in her later writing.
She grew up in Litchfield, CT, and then moved to Cincinnati until 1850. There, she married and had 6 of her 7 children, every now and then contributing stories for magazine publications. Stowe lived across the Ohio River from large slave plantations in Kentucky. Naturally, it was a center of slavery controversy. Anti-abolition mobs roamed the streets mistreating free Negroes. Violent speeches for and against slavery were constantly heard.
