Ken Burns 
1811–1896
Her popular novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, published a decade before the Civil War, helped change the way many Americans felt about slavery, and is forever linked to the abolitionist “fever.” Daughter of a strict Calvinist minister, Harriet Beecher later married a professor who encouraged her to write the book after they moved to Maine. Abraham Lincoln allegedly called her “the little lady who made this big war.”
