Uncle Tom's Cabin Thesis

932 Words4 Pages

On March 20, 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe, with the help of her husband and children, published the book Uncle Tom’s Cabin. This book would play a major role in igniting the fire that started the Civil War. When she was 21, Stowe moved to Cincinnati with her family, and while there she saw many things that drove her to detest slavery. She saw slaves being thrown onto a small boat in the Ohio River to be sold into slavery, and potentially be separated from their families. She also met many abolitionists who owned stops on the Underground Railroad who told her about the horrors of slavery. These events drove Stowe to feel the way she did about slavery. Born June 14, 1811, Beecher Stowe was the seventh of thirteen children in a very famous religious family. Her mother, Roxana Foote died when she was five, and her father was a Calvinist preacher named Lyman Beecher. From an early age, Stowe thought her purpose in life was to write. This passion …show more content…

Since it went into a lot of detail regarding the gruesome incidents of slavery, it angered many Southern plantation-owning men who owned slaves. The argument they made for the anger towards the book was that it unfairly dramatized the reality of slavery, and they also accused her of trying to put a tainted persona on slavery. This anger towards the book spilled over into the banning of the books sales in the South. To counter these accusations, Stowe published the book A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which presented the facts and documents that made the story hyper-realistic. The book angered so many people before the Civil War that when she was introduced to President Abraham Lincoln, he said to her, “So you’re the little woman who started this Great War”. In conclusion, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin played a vital role in igniting the fire among the people to start the Civil