Explain the importance of Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin was important because it helped to bring on the Civil War.  President Lincoln is supposed to have said (though this is probably apocryphal) to Harriet Beecher Stowe “So you're the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.”  Even if this is not true, it shows how people believed that Stowe’s book helped to cause the Civil War.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin increased opposition to slavery in the North.  Most Northerners were not all that concerned about the plight of slaves before the book.  It is true that most Northerners wanted to keep slavery confined to the South, but most of them were not interested in abolishing slavery.  They looked at slavery more in terms of its effect on whites in the North.

With Stowe’s book, however, this changed.  Her book encouraged white people to think of slaves as real human beings and to look at the impact that the system of slavery had on them.  It encouraged them to think about whether slavery was really moral.  As people in the North came to question the morality of slavery more strongly, they became more inclined to fight to end the practice.

At the same time, the book helped make the South angrier at the North.  They felt that the book was a distortion of the truth. They felt that people who believed in the book could not possibly treat them (the Southerners) fairly.  This helped increase sectional discord and helped to cause the Civil War.