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References for the novel

Stowe, a Connecticut-born teacher at the Hartford Female Academy and an active abolitionist, wrote the novel as a response to the 1850 passage of the second Fugitive Slave Act (which punished those who aided runaway slaves and diminished the rights of fugitives as well as freed Blacks). Much of the book was composed in Brunswick, Maine, where her husband, Calvin Ellis Stowe, taught at his alma mater Bowdoin College.^[11]

Stowe was partly inspired to create Uncle Tom's Cabin by the autobiography of Josiah Henson, a black man who lived and worked on a 3,700 acre (15 km²) tobacco plantation in North Bethesda, Maryland owned by Isaac Riley.^[12] Henson escaped slavery in 1830 by fleeing to the Province of Upper Canada (now Ontario), where he helped other fugitive slaves arrive and become self-sufficient, and where he wrote his memoirs. Stowe eventually acknowledged that Henson's writings inspired Uncle Tom's Cabin.^[13] When Stowe's work became a best-seller, Henson republished his memoirs as The Memoirs of Uncle Tom, and traveled extensively in the United States and Europe.^[12] Stowe's novel lent its name to Henson's home—Uncle Tom's Cabin Historic Site, near Dresden, Ontario—which since the 1940s has been a museum. The actual cabin Henson lived in while he was a slave, still exists in Montgomery County, Maryland.

American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses, a volume co-authored by Theodore Dwight Weld and the Grimké sisters, is also a source of some of the novel's content.^[14] Stowe also said she based the novel on a number of interviews with escaped slaves during the time when Stowe was living in Cincinnati, Ohio, across the Ohio River from Kentucky, a slave state. In Cincinnati the Underground Railroad had local abolitionist sympathizers and was active in efforts to help runaway slaves on their escape route from the South.

Stowe mentioned a number of the inspirations and sources for her novel in A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1853). This non-fiction book was intended to verify Stowe's claims about slavery.^[15] However, later research indicated that Stowe did not actually read many of the book's cited works until after the publication of her novel.^[15]