Harriet Beecher Stowe
“It’s a matter of taking the side of the weak against the strong, something the best people have always done. “
As an author and an abolitionist, I am famous for my book “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” The book changed many people’s views on slavery. It had even changed the mind of Abraham Lincoln. Good Morning, My name is Harriet Beecher Stowe.
I was born on June 14, 1811 in Litchfield, Connecticut, to Lyman Beecher and Roxanna Foote Beecher. I had ten siblings. My mother died when I was five years old.
In 1824, I started my formal education at age 13. In 1832, my family moved to Cincinnati, Ohio. There, my father was appointed as the president of the Lane Theological Seminary. While we were living in Cincinnati, with only a river that kept my family separated from Kentucky, I learned about the reality of slavery.
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Together, we had seven children. While we were in Brunswick, Maine, I learned about the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which was a law that made it a crime to give assistance anyone escaping slavery.
In 1851, during a sermon about anti-slavery, I envisioned the story of a novel showing the cruelty of slavery. With the support of my husband I started to write a story about slavery to help people from the north to better understand the reality of it. It was circulated for forty-six weeks in the abolitionist newspaper, National Era. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published as a book on March 20, 1852.
My book had a huge impact on society. It taught people in the north what slavery was about. The people of the Confederacy thought the book was all fiction and wasn’t based on any true facts. Because of this, I wrote “A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin” which was a compilation of references and places where I had gotten my facts for the