Uncle Tom's Cabin Thesis

On Thanksgiving Day of 1862, president Abraham Lincoln was introduced to an unforgettable woman and he exclaimed, “Is this the little woman who made this great war?” (qtd in McNamara 1). The little woman that Lincoln was referring to was author Harriet Beecher Stowe. She was born in Connecticut and has published over 25 books in her career. One of these books includes Uncle Tom’s Cabin which was a wildly popular book that displayed and spread the harsh realities of slavery. Uncle Tom’s Cabin contributed to the start of the Civil War because it’s popularity had a large influence on society and the reaction it caused in the South as well as the North. Uncle Tom's Cabin is a fiction novel based on realistic topics that takes place in Kentucky and Mississippi. Through her effective writing techniques, Stowe is able to take the readers through an emotional experience of a slave's life. Harriet's original intention for the book was to question the idea of slavery but it ended up proving to people how wrong slavery was. She ultimately ends up …show more content…
And even though the book was extremely popular in the North, thousands were still sold in the South. One difference between the South and the rest of majority was that their views were completely opposite from Beecher and the book. They believed that the entire book was full of lies that were intended to make everyone else turn against them. They also denied all of the book’s content. “In the South, as might be expected, it was bitterly denounced, and in some states it was actually illegal to possess a copy of the book. In southern newspapers Harriet Beecher Stowe was regularly portrayed as a liar and a villain, and feeling about her book no doubt helped to harden the feelings against the North”(McNamara 2). So not only did Stowe's novel help turn the North against the South, it forced the South to become more defensive