Stowe seemed destined to write a powerful protest novel like Uncle Tom's Cabin: Her father was Lyman Beecher, a prominent evangelical preacher, and her siblings were preachers and social reformers. Born in 1811 in Litchfield, Connecticut, Stowe moved with her family at the age of twenty-one to Cincinnati, where she lived for eighteen years. In Cincinnati, across the Ohio River from slaveholding Kentucky, Stowe was exposed to the institution of slavery. Although she made just one brief trip to Kentucky—her only personal contact with the South—she knew freed and fugitive slaves in Cincinnati. She also had friends who participated in the underground railroad, the secret system for aiding runaway slaves in their flight to freedom.

Stowe learned about slave life by talking to these people and by reading various materials, including slave narratives and antislavery tracts. She also saw Northern racial prejudice. Stowe...