1852

1852 - Third (Unraveling) - Uncle Tom's Cabin is published by Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Slavery had been an issue of concern to the United States of America since before it began. Discussions by delegates to the Constitutional Convention in 1787 had to navigate concerns between those who considered the use of slave labor a legitimate part of the economy, and those who thought a country based on liberty should not have human beings bought and sold. For most of the next 60 years, the process of determining the role of slavery in the country consisted of compromises between free states and those supporting slavery. 

And then, Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote a fictional story about the life of a slave. Initially a weekly serial, the complete story was published in book form in 1852.  Uncle Tom’s Cabin changed the discussion of slavery from an abstract view of economics and morality to one involving characters that people could care about. 

The following year Twelve Years a Slave would be published, the memoirs of a black man from the North who was kidnapped and sold into slavery. This described as fact not only the wretched lives of slaves - and acted as additional factual confirmation of Stowe's work - but the possibility that free men could also be trapped only because of the color of their skin. Over the rest of the decade the slavery question expanded until the entire country went to war over it.  According to Stowe's son, Abraham Lincoln said, upon meeting Stowe in 1862,  "So this is the little lady who started this great war."