Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote the best-selling novel of the antebellum period,
Uncle Tom’s Cabin(1852), with first day sales estimated at three thousand copies, followed by ten thousand copies weekly, and totaling three hundred thousand copies in the first year. Although she came from a family of prominent reformers, Stowe’s legend is often introduced by an account of her December 2, 1862, meeting with President Abraham Lincoln, in which he purportedly stated, “So you're the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war!” While this apocryphal story may offer a shorthand for Stowe’s importance in nineteenth-century American politics, the origins are untraceable, undocumented, and likely untrue (Vollaro 18). While Lincoln probably did not assert that Stowe caused the…
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Citation: Salib, Lucy. "Harriet Beecher Stowe". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 03 February 2025 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=4255, accessed 31 March 2025.]
