Harriet Beecher Stowe

Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896) wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), which sent a shockwave through the nation. It depicted the brutality of slavery and caused intense controversy between those who would preserve slavery and those who would abolish it. It was the best-selling novel of the nineteenth- century. President Lincoln read it along with her nonfiction rebuttal to critics’ response to the book.