Uncle Tom's Cabin was a novel published in 1852 by Harriet Beecher Stowe. This novel is known for strengthening the divide between the North and the South, which later started the Civil War. Uncle Tom's Cabin showed how awful and inhumane slavery was, making many people want to abolish it.
The effect that Uncle Tom's Cabin had in the South was outrage. They believed that they were being portrayed terribly and thought it was all lies. They also argued that the way slavery was being depicted was not accurate and exaggerated. The South ended up banning Uncle Tom's Cabin, as it was thought to have been "abolitionist propaganda."
The North had no problem with Uncle Tom's Cabin, it even moved many people and sparked abolitionists to rise. Some people who had agreed with slavery or had not cared for it before were now against it and thought it was horrible. While most people in the North weren't going out of their way to try to get rid of slavery, after Uncle Tom's Cabin many Northerners did not agree with it.
Harriet Beecher Stowe used many historical documents to write Uncle Tom's Cabin, even publishing them after people were saying her depiction of slavery was inaccurate. She used narratives of former slaves like Frederick Douglass to help her write her novel, trying to make it realistic and outline the horrors of slavery.
Uncle Tom's Cabin caused further division between the North and the South because it strengthened how much the South wanted to defend slavery and strengthened how much the North did not like slavery.
