The appearance of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin did much to galvanize opinion on both sides of the racial divide. Indeed, following its publication in 1852, Stowe was bombarded with hate mail (including a package containing the ear of a slave).

A decade later, in 1862, Stowe visited president Abraham Lincoln at the White House. "So," Lincoln said by way of introduction, "this is the little lady who wrote the big book that made this great war."

[The poet Langston Hughes later called Uncle Tom's Cabin America's "first protest novel." It was also the first to sell more than one million copies.]