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How did slave narratives influence Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin?

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Phillis Wheatley's first book of poetry — African American literature Frontispiece and title page of *Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral* (1773) by Phillis Wheatley, the first Black woman to become a poet of note in the United States. The portrait on which the frontispiece's engraving is based is often attributed to Scipio Moorhead, an Black artist and writer who, like Wheatley, was enslaved and living in Boston.

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) was profoundly influenced by her reading of slave narratives, a genre of firsthand autobiographical accounts written or dictated by formerly enslaved people to expose the harsh realities of the institution of slavery.1

Stowe drew extensively from these narratives to construct her novel, utilizing them as a source for many of the graphic incidents depicted in her work. Furthermore, the slave narrative tradition provided Stowe with models for several of her most memorable characters. By incorporating these authentic, often harrowing experiences into her fiction, Stowe was able to vividly dramatize the brutality of slavery for a largely Northern white readership, contributing significantly to the antislavery sentiment that preceded the American Civil War.12

Stowe’s commitment to the veracity of her portrayal was further evidenced in 1853, when she published A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a compilation of documents and testimonies intended to support the accuracy of the details she had presented in her novel.3