Uncle Tom's Cabin Published, Sells 300,000 Copies in First Year

Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel sold 300,000 copies in its first year in the US and one million in Britain within a year. Abraham Lincoln allegedly greeted Stowe in 1862 as "the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war." While the novel humanized enslaved people for white readers, its portrayal of the submissive Uncle Tom and its sentimentalism drew criticism from Black abolitionists including Frederick Douglass.