“Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was dispatched chapter by chapter, almost before the ink was dry, to the editor of _The National Era_, an anti-slavery paper published in Washington, in which the story ran from June, 1851, to April, 1852. The modest author who was accustomed to think of herself as a mere household drudge with very few ideas beyond babies and housekeeping, did not dream what was in store for her. In fact, she had at first a profound feeling of discouragement; she feared the book would fall to the ground unnoticed and do no good for the cause. That this might not happen, she sent copies to significant persons in England and in her own country to call their attention to the work and to win their interest if possible. Charles Dickens, Prince Albert, Macaulay, Charles Kingsley, Lord Carlisle and the Earl of Shaftsbury received copies and acknowledged them in courteous and feeling letters. But Mrs. Stowe found that far from needing help from the great to make it find its way, her book of love and pity had struck a chord in the universal heart. It can almost be said of her as it was of Byron that she awoke one morning and found herself famous. No book in American literature ever achieved so immediate and so wide a popularity. There was an unprecedented call for it. Three thousand copies went off the first day, and soon eight power presses were kept busy night and day to supply the demand. It swept over the country, and people everywhere were reading it into the small hours of the night, weeping and sobbing over the death of little _Eva_ and over the heroism of _Uncle Tom_. Before the year was over, more than three hundred thousand copies had been sold. As Emerson said, it “found readers in the parlor, the nursery and the kitchen of every household.” The daughter of William Lloyd Garrison, Mrs. Henry Villard, in a passage recently written, said: “I read it as a little child with tears and sobs, as did many an older person, thrilled by its recital of the horrors of slavery, and touched by the kindness of those who were slaveholders, contrary to their wishes and the dictates of conscience. A moral whirlwind followed in its path, the anti-slavery agitation which preceded it having prepared the way for its wonderful reception in the north.” Mrs. Stowe was now called the greatest of American women; her book was declared “a work of undoubted genius”; it was “epoch-making”; Julia Ward Howe called it an “offering on the altar of a heavenly intuition, destined to go down to posterity as of supreme desert and of undying memory.” The poet Whittier wrote: “What a glorious work Harriet Beecher Stowe has wrought! Thanks for the Fugitive Slave Law! Better for slavery that law had never been enacted, for it gave occasion for ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin.’”