Harris described Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel, "Uncle Tom's Cabin", as a major influence on the characters of Uncle Remus and the Little Boy. When he read Stowe's novel in 1862, he said that it "made a more vivid impression upon my mind than anything I have ever read since." Interpreting "Uncle Tom's Cabin" as a "wonderful defense of slavery," Harris argued that Stowe's "genius took possession of her and compelled her, in spite of her avowed purpose, to give a very fair picture of the institution she had intended to condemn". In Harris's view, the "real moral that Mrs. Stowe's book teaches is that the ... realities slavery, under the best and happiest conditions, possess a romantic beauty and tenderness all their own."