There is some controversy over whether President Lincoln really greeted Harriet Beecher Stowe with the remark, “So, you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.” But, what is without a doubt, he could have.
Inspired by the death of her child and a vision at a communion service, Stowe feverishly wrote the book that would become a best seller and then a play that would be seen around the world, and which, did indeed, fire the hearts of people everywhere.
It pointed to the cancer at the heart of the republic.
It called people to end the horror.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin was first published in serial form in the Abolitionist journal National Era, starting on this day in 1851.
The great reckoning would be a decade away, but the clock had started ticking…
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