Chapter 60: The novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin builds Northern empathy for those enslaved.  

Daughter of Presbyterian icon Lyman Beecher, abolitionist Harriet B. Stowe authors the dual stories of the house slave Eliza’s frantic escape with her child across the frozen Ohio River, and the heartless abuse of the saint-like Uncle Tom by the sinister villain Simon Legree.

The novel is published in forty installments, each eagerly awaited by the public. Some 300,000 copies are sold in the first year in American with another on million in Britain.

The emotional impact in the North later prompts Lincoln to greet Stowe as “the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.”