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Lauren Richmond History 201 April 1, 1999 A Reaction to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin “So this is the little lady who made this big war.” Abraham Lincoln’s legendary comment upon meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe demonstrates the significant place her novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, holds in American history. Published in book form in 1852, the novel quickly became a national bestseller and stirred up strong emotions in both the North and South. The context …

…bore heavy consequences on both the creation and reaction to the novel, and I now can appreciate the value of such a “document” in the scheme of American history. The “little lady who made the big war,” then, surely did not realize that her novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, would heavily reverberate into the dawn of the 21st century. Bibliography Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom’s Cabin. 1852. Introduction by Darryl Pinckney. New York: Penguin Group, 1998.