Uncle Tom’s Cabin

While scholars today criticize the stereotypical rendering of characters in Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in its time this novel was a hugely popular and influential work embraced by anti-slavery advocates around the world. So influential was Uncle Tom’s Cabin, when President Abraham Lincoln first greeted author Harriet Beecher Stowe, he referred to her as the “little woman” who “caused all the trouble.” Uncle Tom’s Cabin centers around the trials of the religiously devout black slave Tom who is sold away from his family; a second plot line involves the mulatto woman Eliza, who flees slavery with her child when she learns she is to be sold.