Uncle Tom’s Cabin (or Life Among the Lowly) is an anti-slavery novel by American author Harriet Beecher Stowe. Published in 1852, the novel “helped lay the groundwork for the Civil War,” according to Will Kaufman.
Stowe, a Connecticut-born teacher at the Hartford Female Seminary and an active abolitionist, featured the character of Uncle Tom, a long-suffering black slave around whom the stories of other characters revolve. The sentimental novel depicts the reality of slavery while also asserting Christian love can overcome something as destructive as enslavement of fellow human beings.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the best-selling novel of the Nineteenth Century and the second best-selling book of the same century, following The Bible. It is credited with helping fuel the abolitionist cause in the 1850s. In the first year after it was published, 300,000 copies of the book were sold in the United States; 1,000,000 copies in Great Britain. In 1855 three years after it was published, it was called “the most popular novel of our day.”
