"So this is the little lady who made this big war."
Abraham Lincoln's legendary comment upon meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe demonstrates the significant place Uncle Tom's Cabin holds in American history—and literature. Stowe's timeless and moving novel inflamed the passions and prejudices of countless numbers, and fanned the embers of the struggle between free states and slave states into the flame of the Civil War.
Uncle Tom's Cabin is the story of the slave Tom. Devout and loyal, he is sold and sent down south, where he must endure brutal treatment at the hands of the degenerate plantation owner Simon Legree. By exposing the extreme cruelties of slavery, Stowe explores society's failures and asks a profound question: "What is it to be a moral human being?" Relevant today as the novel that helped to move a nation to battle, Uncle Tom's Cabin is a powerful, triumphant work that is an essential part of the collective experience of the American people.
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