The James Logan Courier

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
Harriet Elizabeth Beecher Stowe (June 14, 1811 – July 1, 1896) was a white American abolitionist and novelist, whose Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) attacked the cruelty of slavery; it reached millions as a novel and play, and became influential, even in Britain. It made the political issues of the 1850s regarding slavery tangible to millions, energizing anti-slavery forces in the North. It angered and embittered the South. The impact is summed up in a commonly quoted statement apocryphally attributed to Abraham Lincoln when he met Stowe, "So you're the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war!"

Life
Born in Litchfield, Connecticut, she was the daughter of Lyman Beecher, an abolitionist Congregationalist preacher from Boston, and Roxana Foote Beecher. She was the sister of the renowned minister Henry Ward Beecher. Roxana died when Harriet was four. She had two other prominent and activist siblings, a brother, Charles Beecher, and a sister, Isabella Beecher Hooker. In 1832, her family moved to Cincinnati, another hotbed of the abolitionist movement, where her father became the first president of Lane Theological Seminary. There she gained second-hand knowledge of slavery and the Underground Railroad and was moved to write Uncle Tom's Cabin, the first major American novel with an African-American hero. She never visited a plantation, but did talk with former slaves.

Read American Woman's Home by Catharine Esther Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, free from Project Gutenberg.