First Serial Publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, June 1851

Born in Litchfield, Connecticut, in 1811, Harriet Beecher moved with her large family to Cincinnati in 1832, which positioned them—all fervent abolitionists—into the ongoing cruelties and struggles of slavery. Harriet—in particular, who married Calvin Stowe in 1836, witnessed race riots that targeted free and incarcerated African Americans, met with many of its victims, and worked with other abolitionists to provide them with aid to escape across the Ohio River from Kentucky, a slave state, and Ohio, a free one. Although the passing of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act outlawed the “exchanges,” they did not stop, and Stowe was galvanized to write what she expected to be a small—and minor—abolitionist serial novel called “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”

The first installment was published on June 5, 1851, in the abolitionist paper, The National Era. Moved by an emotional loss after the death of her infant son, and by a vision Stowe claimed to have experienced about a long-suffering slave who died after taking communion, the serial tracked the tribulations of an enslaved black man—Tom or Uncle Tom—who was intended to elicit sympathy and condescension from white abolitionists. After an enthusiastic reception, Stowe published a larger version in March of 1852, that sold hundreds of thousands of copies, revved up abolitionist fervor in the years prior to the Civil War, and—allegedly—prompted Abraham Lincoln to say, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.”

For more information about Harriet Beecher Stowe and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the Grateful American Book Prize recommends Joan D. Hedrick’s Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life (1995).

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Ed Lengel is an author, a speaker, and a storyteller.

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History Matters is a feature courtesy of the Grateful American Book Prize, an annual award for high quality, 7th to 9th grade-level books dealing with important events and personalities in American history.