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First published in the National Era, at Washington, from June, 1851, to April, 1852, and appearing in book form in Boston in 1852. Mrs. Stowe seems to have been at first disappointed as to its success, but during the next five years 500,000 copies were sold through the States. It served to stimulate abolitionists' sentiments in a remarkable degree, stirring to their profoundest depths thousands of minds in the North which could never have been reached by politicians. It played no small part in creating an anti-slavery party, though its delineations of outrages perpetrated upon the slaves were in a great measure misleading and the work of imagination.