Uncle Tom's Cabin

Uncle Tom's Cabin is a novel written by Harriet Beecher Stowe and published in 1852.  This is an anti-slavery novel that Stowe wrote in response to her experiences with fugitive slaves, the punitive fugitive slave laws, and her experiences with the Underground Railroad. The novel tells of a poor white farmer and wife with a good relationship with their slaves. The farmer plans to sell two slaves (Uncle Tom and his wife) to avoid losing everything he owns.  The wife warns the slaves who flee north.  The story relates the experiences of the slaves on their flight to freedom. The African Americans depicted are relatable and real.  The impact on the U.S. was extremely wide. By the first year, 300,000 copies were sold. To the Northerers it illustrated the horrors of slavery and unleased pity and outrage at the treatment of slaves in the Lower and Upper south.  

When Southerners read this book they called it blasphemous, outraged at the conditions of enslaved peoples.  Uncle Tom's Cabin contributed to the tension between the North-South because it was so widely read that it influenced  Americans' views of slavery, and increased in the north the immoral view of the southern way of life.