Introduction

Legend holds that upon meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe, President Abraham Lincoln greeted her as "the little lady who started the big war." Although the story remains unsubstantiated—and the American Civil War was the result of many complex factors—Stowe's novel brought the slavery question to the forefront in an already divided nation. When first published in 1851 as part of a magazine series, Stowe had little idea of the international phenomenon that would result. In writing the fictional account of slavery in various circumstances in the South, Stowe focuses on the inhumane and un-Christian spirit of considering human beings property under the law. When the novel was published as a full book in 1852, it set all-time sales records: ten thousand copies in the first week and three-hundred thousand in the first...