page_title: Harriet Beecher Stowe
section_title: Uncle Tom's Cabin and the American Civil War
hierarchical_section_title: Harriet Beecher Stowe / Uncle Tom's Cabin and the American Civil War
caption_attribution_description: Title-page illustration by Hammatt Billings for Uncle Tom's Cabin [First Edition: Boston: John P. Jewett and Company, 1852]. Shows characters of Chloe, Mose, Pete, Baby, Tom.
context_page_description: Harriet Beecher Stowe was an American abolitionist and writer. Her novel Uncle Tom's Cabin showed the lives of African-Americans slaves. It was very popular as a novel and a play, and had a great influence in the United States and Britain, helping people who did not like slavery and making many people disagree with slavery.
context_section_description: In 1850, the Stowe family moved to a house near the campus of Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. Calvin Stowe was teaching in the college. On March 9, 1850, Stowe wrote to the  editor of the antislavery journal National Era. She told him that she was planning to write a story about slavery. In June 1851, the first installment of her book, Uncle Tom's Cabin, was published in the National Era. She originally used the subtitle "The Man That Was A Thing". It was changed to "Life Among the Lowly". Installments were published every week from June 5, 1851, to April 1, 1852.
  For the newspaper serialization (published in parts) of her novel, Stowe was paid only $400. Uncle Tom's Cabin was published in book form on March 20, 1852, by John P. Jewett with an initial print run of 5,000 copies. Each of its two volumes included three illustrations and a title-page designed by Hammatt Billings. In less than a year, the book sold an unprecedented 300,000 copies. By December 1851, sales began dropping off. A cheap edition was published to stimulate more sales.
  Americans were captivated by the book. It provoked more debate about abolition and slavery. Southerns hated the book. Within a year of the book's publication, 300 babies were named "Eva" in Boston alone.
caption: First edition title page
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