Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery novel, published in two volumes in 1852, follows Tom, a devout enslaved man who is sold to a slave trader and sent down the Mississippi, where he endures brutal treatment. Stowe, an abolitionist from the religious Beecher family, wrote it to show the horrors of slavery and to argue that Christian love could overcome it. It had a profound effect on American attitudes to slavery and is said to have helped lay the groundwork for the Civil War.