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Sources

Stowe, a Connecticut -born teacher at the Hartford Female Seminary and an active abolitionist, wrote the novel as a response to the passage, in 1850, of the second Fugitive Slave Act. Much of the book was composed at her house in Brunswick, Maine, where her husband, Calvin Ellis Stowe, taught at his alma mater, Bowdoin College.

Stowe was partly inspired to create Uncle Tom's Cabin by the slave narrative The Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave, Now an Inhabitant of Canada, as Narrated by Himself (1849). Henson, a formerly enslaved black man, had lived and worked on a 3,700-acre (15 km) plantation in North Bethesda, Maryland, owned by Isaac Riley. Henson escaped slavery in 1830 by fleeing to the Province of Upper Canada (now Ontario), where he helped other fugitive slaves settle and become self-sufficient.

Stowe was also inspired by the posthumous biography of Phebe Ann Jacobs, a devout Congregationalist of Brunswick, Maine. Born on a slave plantation in Lake Hiawatha, New Jersey, Jacobs was enslaved for most of her life, including by the president of Bowdoin College. In her final years, Jacobs lived as a free woman, laundering clothes for Bowdoin students. She achieved respect from her community due to her devout religious beliefs, and her funeral was widely attended.

Another source Stowe used as research for Uncle Tom's Cabin was American Slavery as It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses, a volume co-authored by Theodore Dwight Weld and the Grimké sisters. Stowe also conducted interviews with people who escaped slavery. Stowe mentioned a number of these inspirations and sources in A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1853). This non-fiction book was intended to not only verify Stowe's claims about slavery but also point readers to the many "publicly available documents" detailing the horrors of slavery.