Loves of Harriet Beecher Stowe

"So this is the little woman who wrote the book that made this big war!" Abraham Lincoln is reputed to have said when he met the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin on the eve of the Emancipation Proclamation. Harriet Beecher Stowe's groundbreaking novel forced an ambivalent North to confront the atrocities of slavery, yet it was just one of many accomplishments of the Beechers, the most eminent American family of the nineteenth century.

Historian Philip McFarland follows the Beecher clan to the bo...