“So you are the little woman who wrote a book and started this great war.” Harriet Beecher Stowe wasn’t a warrior, nor an African American who fought for freedom, but an author who influenced many. Stowes’ works featured her own beliefs, thoughts, and experiences to write a story that describes both the physical, mental, and sexual abuse that enslaved people were forced to tolerate. Her most famous and influential novel, “Uncle Tom’s cabin,” basically humanizes slavery by portraying the lives of individuals and families. I picked this individual because she used peaceful protest, through writing to influence the lives of enslaved African Americans throughout the world. Harriet Beecher Stowe was born, one of thirteen children on June 14, 1811 …show more content…
She knew that more bloodshed would not be included in her individual fight for freedom. She soon came to the conclusion that she could achieve this peaceful protest through literature. She expressed her strong belief in abolition in her writing including books like “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and “Dread: A tale of the Great Dismal Swamp” She had enlisted friends and family to send her information and she scoured freedom narratives and anti-slavery newspapers for first hand accounts as she composed her story. Once “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was published on June 5,1851, it became an immediate best-seller in the United states, England, Europe, and Asia and was translated in over 60 different languages. According to Stowe, she used her own experiences to write her novels. Her 18 month old son died of cholera and later stated, “The crushing pain i felt was one of the inspirations for “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” because it helped me understand the pain enslaved mothers felt when their children were taken away from them and sold.” Slavery would be unjust in the eyes of a good kind-hearted person, but as a christian, she found slavery even harder to accept. "I wrote what I did because as a woman, as a mother, I was oppressed and broken-hearted with the sorrows and injustice I saw, because as a Christian I felt the dishonor to Christianity - because as a lover of my county, I trembled at the coming day of