1852

Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin is published in book form on March 20, 1852, after serialization in an abolitionist paper. It sells 300,000 copies in its first year. The novel makes the humanity of enslaved people vivid to millions of Northern readers who had been indifferent. Southern states ban it. Black readers criticize Stowe's paternalism but recognize its political impact.

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.

Frederick Douglass delivers the most searing abolitionist speech of the era, exposing the hypocrisy of celebrating liberty in a slaveholding nation.

Philadelphia reorganizes its Vigilance Committee under William Still, who begins the record-keeping that becomes the UGRR's defining archive.

Nineteenth-century medical schools relied on bodies stolen from Black cemeteries for dissection — at the Medical College of Georgia, the work was done by an enslaved man, Grandison Harris.

Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel galvanizes Northern antislavery opinion.