Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin as a protest against the Compromise of 1850, specifically its Fugitive Slave Law, which required Northerners to abet the South in its retrieval of runaway slaves. Serialized in The National Era beginning in 1851 and published in book form on March 20, 1852, by John P. Jewett, Stowe's response to the incursion of slave law into free states took the United States by storm. The novel sold 50,000 copies in its first two months, 300,000 in its first year, and by early 1853, Americans and Britains had bought one million copies. The novel was such a phenomenon that when Abraham Lincoln met Stowe in 1852, he is said to have greeted her with these famous words: "So you're the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war!"

Many factors explain the enormous popularity of Stowe's abolitionist novel. Uncle...