...Stowe is often credited with influencing the country to think differently about slavery. But what do we know about how Stowe influenced Lincoln? A decade
earlier, Uncle Tom's
Cabin (1852) had been a publishing and propaganda phenomenon. Using stories to illustrate the human impact of slavery, Stowe's blistering
pen lit the world on fire. The statistics remain record-
breaking
:
10,000 copies sold in the first week; a million and a half British copies in a year. The book was so
successful it was immediately
dramatized for the stage, where it became a theatrical icon. Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner, leader of the radical
Republicans, said, "Had there been no Uncle
Tom's Cabin, there would have been no Lincoln in the White House."... But pro-slavery critics charged that Stowe
had made it all up and that slavery was a humane system. So Stowe
wrote a nonfiction retort, The Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1853), compiling the real-life
evidence that had informed her fictional stories....
Source: Katherine Kane, "Lincoln and The Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin," Connecticut Explored, Winter 2012/2013
According to the document, what was a major effect of the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin?
Abraham Lincoln was elected president of the United States
More Americans learned how to read in order to read the book
The Abolitionist movement began across the United States
Harriet Beecher Stowe became a figure in the women's suffrage movement