Uncle Tom's Cabin
Harriet Beecher Stowe was born in Connecticut. She was an abolitionist. Stowe wrote her novel because of the 1850 passage of the second Fugitive Slave Act. This law punished people who helped slaves run away. It also made the North stop and return the South's black runaways. Mrs. Edward Beecher wrote to Harriet ("Hattie"), "If I could use a pen as you can, I would write something that will make this whole nation feel what an accursed thing slavery is." At that time, Stowe was a wife with six children who sometimes wrote for magazines. Her son, Charles Stowe, said that his mother read this letter out loud to her children. When she finished the letter, she stood up, and with "an expression on her face that stamped itself on the mind of her child", she said, "I will write something...I will if I live." That is how Uncle Tom's Cabin began.