Harriet Beecher Stowe – 1811-1896

New Englander Stowe saw slavery close-up when she lived for a time on the Ohio-Kentucky border with her Bible-scholar husband, Calvin Stowe. Passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850 prompted her to begin a book she called Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly, which was published serially during 1852 and appeared as a book in 1853. An international bestseller, its vividly sentimental scenes dramatized the cruelty of slavery, shaking the apathy out of many Northerners and enraging slave-holding Southerners. When President Abraham Lincoln met Stowe during the Civil War, he greeted her as “the little lady who wrote the book that made this big war.”