“[Uncle Tom’s Cabin is] perhaps the most influential novel ever published, a verbal earthquake, an ink-and-paper tidal wave.” —one of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s critics When President Lincoln met Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1863, he is reported to have said, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war!” Uncle Tom’s Cabin may not have caused the Civil War, but it shook both North and South.