Introduction

  Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe was the daughter of a famous American divine, Dr. Lyman Beecher, and born of good New England stock, at Litchfield, Conn., on June 14, 1812.
  James Russell Lowell, speaking of another of her stories, The Minister's Wooing, said that no writer of her time had "by birth, breeding, and natural capacity," the opportunity to know New England so well as she did. This is important, because it was distinctly the moral impulse generated in New England that set going the slave's liberation movement, of which the most powerful tract was a novel, and that novel Uncle Tom's Cabin.
  Her father's preaching, and his prayers for the slaves, had a determining influence over Mrs. Stowe as a girl; and then, in 1832, the family moved south to Cincinnati, Ohio, where she was within easy reach of the slave states, and gained her intimate knowledge of the life she was to describe. She married there Professor Stowe, of Lane College, in 1836—an eventful year, when his house was often in danger from its association with the "underground railway" that helped the slaves to escape north. A few years later her husband had become professor at Andover, Mass., and the slave movement had reached a further crisis, when she began the story that was to move every country in Europe and give her international and world-wide fame.The following summary by Nassau W. Senior sketches its contemporary effect:— "Uncle Tom's Cabin came out as a sort of feuilleton in the National Era, a Washington paper. The death of Uncle Tom was the first portion published, indeed the first that was written.