Harriet Beecher Stowe’s book, "Uncle Tom’s Cabin" and its effect on the Civil War.
At 40 years old, Harriet Beecher Stowe agreed to write a weekly series in an anti-slavery newspaper called the National Era. She first planned to write no more then 3 or 4 episodes, but because of popular demand she kept writing the serial that eventually became one of the greatest novels of all time, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. All the episodes were published together in book form for the first time in 1852. It was an instant best seller. In its first two months on sale it sold more then 300,000 copies. Three printing presses were running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, to supply the demand for the popular novel. In its first year 1,000,000 copies were sold in the U.S. and England, and the book was translated into 17 different languages. Uncle Tom’s Cabin moved readers to tears in the North; while in the South, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was hated. It was called "a dirty Negro book" and "poison and dirty." Some people even insulted Harriet Beecher Stowe saying, "she was as ugly as original sin." Southerners were outraged that Harriet Beecher Stowe would criticize their lifestyle when she had never lived in the south herself. They had a counter-attack of books such as, Uncle Robin in his Cabin in Virginia and Tom without one in Boston. Which was saying that they (the slave owners) were doing the slaves a favor by owning slaves because if the slaves were free then they would have no place to go or live. Many Southerners thought that Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin to purposely paint a false picture of the South. The real reason she wrote it was to criticize slavery and to try and bring it to a peaceful end. Her book was an accurate view of what slavery was like and that horrified Northerners. The country had already heated up over this issue but her book was like a match to straw. It made the Northerners angry to see human beings being treated like animals and it made the Southerners angry to be criticized by people that had never even seen how they lived.