Harriet Beecher Stowe

Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896) was an American writer and abolitionist, born into a famous family of New England preachers and the mother of seven children. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which made it a crime for a northerner to help someone escaping slavery, is what made her write: Uncle Tom's Cabin ran as a serial the following year and sold three hundred thousand copies in its first American year, more than any novel had. The story that Lincoln greeted her as the little woman who made this great war is almost certainly apocryphal, but it records accurately what the book was taken to have done.