Yet Henry Beecher, for all his fame, wasn’t even the most powerful abolitionist in the Beecher family. That honor went to his sister Harriet, who married a man named Stowe. And as Harriet Beecher Stowe she wrote the best-selling American novel of the nineteenth century, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which won more converts to the antislavery cause than all her brother’s sermons—and all the words written and spoken by any other abolitionist.
