Uncle Tom's Cabin is not an adaptation, the novel was inspired by Josiah Henson's autobiography.

Uncle Tom's Cabin, also translated as The Negro Appeal for Heaven and Uncle Tom's Cabin, is a long anti-slavery novel by American author Harriet Beecher Stowe (Mrs. Stowe) published in 1852. The novel's views on African Americans and slavery in the United States had a far-reaching impact and in some ways inflamed the regional local conflicts that led to the American Civil War.

The novel Uncle Tom's Cabin was the best-selling novel of the 19th century and is credited with being a major stimulus for the rise of abolitionism in the 1850s. Within the first year of its publication, 300,000 copies were sold stateside. The impact of Uncle Tom's Cabin on American society was so great that when Abraham Lincoln received Mrs. Stowe in the early days of the Civil War, he remarked, "You're the little woman who started a great war." It has since been quoted competitively by numerous writers.

Background

Connecticut-born Mrs. Stowe was a teacher at the Hartford Female Academy and an active abolitionist, and in 1850 the U.S. passed the second Fugitive Slave Law, which outlawed assisting slaves to run away and limited the rights of fugitives and free blacks. rights of fugitives and free blacks; in response to this law, Mrs. Stowe wrote this novel. The vast majority of the novel was set in the town of Brunswick, Maine.

Uncle Tom's Cabin was inspired in part by the autobiography of Josiah Henson. Henson was a black male who had been a slave owned by slave owner Isaac Reilly and lived and labored on a 3,700-acre tobacco plantation in the North Bethesda area of Maryland.In 1830, Henson escaped to Upper Canada and freed himself from slavery; thereafter he assisted a number of escaped slaves in arriving in the area, lived a self-sustaining life himself, and wrote his memoirs.

Mrs. Stowe herself has explicitly acknowledged that it was Henson's work that inspired her to write Uncle Tom's Cabin. When Mrs. Stowe's book became famous, Henson republished his autobiography under the title "Uncle Tom's Memoirs," which was widely distributed in the United States and Europe. Mrs. Stowe borrowed the name of the Henson home in her novel. The Henson home became a museum in the 1940s, the Uncle Tom's Cabin Historic Site near present-day Dresden, Ontario.