Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin was published in book form on March 20, 1852, after running as a serial the previous year. It sold 10,000 copies in its first week and 300,000 within a year in the United States alone, galvanizing Northern opposition to slavery and enraging the South, and is often credited with helping set the stage for the Civil War.
Stowe, a Connecticut-born writer and abolitionist, wrote the novel after being horrified by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which compelled Northerners to assist in capturing escaped slaves. She said the idea came to her in a vision during a church service. The book followed the enslaved Tom through cruelty and sacrifice, and introduced characters like the cruel overseer Simon Legree and the innocent child Eva who became fixtures of American popular culture, for better and worse, for generations.
Publisher John P. Jewett took a risk on the book, agreeing to split printing costs with Stowe because he doubted an anti-slavery novel could sell. He was wrong: it became the best-selling novel of the 19th century worldwide, translated into dozens of languages, and it was reportedly the second-best selling book of that century after the Bible.
Legend holds that when Stowe met Abraham Lincoln in 1862, he greeted her by saying, "So this is the little lady who started this great war." Whether or not he said it, the novel's emotional portrait of slavery's brutality reached readers a political pamphlet never could, turning abstract debate into visceral outrage and fueling the abolitionist movement in the run-up to the Civil War.