Henry James called it “less a book than a state of vision, of feeling, and of consciousness.” Frederick Douglass compared it to “fire through a ‘dry stubble’ sweeping all before it.” Harriet Beecher Stowe herself believed that God, and not she, had written Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The book appeared in 1852, soon after a new Fugitive Slave Act made it markedly more difficult for Northerners to deny their complicity in slavery. 

The daughter of an influential Congregationalist minister, Stowe invoked cherished precepts of Christianity and domesticity to assail the institution that was tearing the nation apart. She grounded her tale in circumstantial depictions of slavery and its horrors in the variety of forms in which it appeared across the South, demonstrating how bondage represented cruelty that could not be refined. Many literary critics—then and now—have dismissed her novel as cloyingly sentimental. And Stowe’s support for African colonization of freed Blacks has been decried. But her book won audiences—and converts—with emotional truths that no abolitionist tract could convey. 

In her novel and in essays she published in The Atlantic, Stowe fought her war against slavery with weapons available to a woman of her class and era: with the “moral oxygen” of her faith in God and in the power of right feeling.