Cause and Effect of Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Civil War

In 1852, an abolitionist woman named Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote a book called Uncle Tom's Cabin.  Now this wasn't just an ordinary book, some may say that it actually stated the Civil War. 

Harriet Beecher Stowe was born in Connecticut and had 10 brothers and sisters. Her parents had taught them from a young age to make their voice known in the world and stand up for what they believed in and that's exactly what they did. Her brother Henry was an outspoken abolitionist and helped aid the free soil cause in Bleeding Kansas. It was time for Harriet to do something. At the time, she had already written about thirty books, however none of them ever became great sellers. While she was living in Cincinnati, she had noticed and been exposed to real runaway slaves, and hearing their stories broke her heart. She began to write down the tales she had heard from the slaves and put them together into short stories.  

After visiting one afternoon and reading Harriet's stories about the runaway slaves, her sister-in-law encouraged her to make a novel out of it and publish it. In 1852 it was finally published and nearly 300, 000 copies were sold in the north alone. It was a huge hit, and even people from Great Britain were buying it. It was the first thing that really opened people's eyes up to slavery and what it really was about, not just the stereotypes. Her book portrayed slave families that were forced to cope with separation by masters through sale. Uncle Tom mourned for the family he was forced to leave. In one heroic scene, Eliza made a daring dash across the frozen Ohio River to prevent the sale of her son by slave traders. The novel shows the perspective that slavery brings out the worst in the white masters, leading them to perpetrate moral atrocities they would otherwise never commit.

Her book really changed people's minds about slavery and caused an outbreak. Stowe had the chance to meet with President Abraham Lincoln a few years later and he was quite pleased and said, "So you're the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war." This may seem like a big exaggeration but to some degree it is the reason. Her book changed so many perspectives about slavery that people began to fight for what they believed in, and without her book, they might of had no idea what was really going on with slavery. Who would of thought that one small book about slavey could actually creat a huge impact with a country and start a war?!