Harriet Beecher Stowe, who has been described as "a 'genius' in a family of eccentrics," is best known for her 1852 antislavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin: or, Life Among the Lowly. Few American books have as spectacular a publishing history. The novel launched tumultuous discussion that, according to Ralph Waldo Emerson, "encircled the globe." Three thousand of the initial printing of five thousand copies were sold the first day, and within a year of publication there had been 120 editions and sales of more than 350,000. The succeeding year George L. Aiken's dramatic version of the book was produced in New York. The play was exceptionally successful. Later in the decade as many as sixteen companies were presenting the play throughout the United States, and it was popular well into the twentieth century.

When Stowe visited the White House in 1862, President Abraham Lincoln is said to have greeted her with the...