In 1850, two years before Harriet Beecher Stowe published her bestselling anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, there were 3,204,313 enslaved people in the United States. Although the novel energized the abolitionist movement and stoked tensions between the North and South, the nation's enslaved population continued to grow, reaching 3,953,760 by 1860.

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Harriet Beecher Stowe was born on June 14, 1811, in Litchfield, Connecticut. Raised in a deeply religious family, Stowe's father and seven brothers were ministers and shared their abolitionist opinions with Harriet and their congregations. After studying at the Hartford Female Seminary, Stowe moved with her family to Cincinnati, Ohio. Cincinnati's location on the Ohio River made it a major stop for fugitive slaves escaping to freedom in the North along the Underground Railroad, as well as for the bounty hunters searching for them.

Inspired by her interactions with formerly enslaved and free Black people living in or passing through Cincinnati, Stowe published The Freeman's Dream: A Parable in the abolitionist newspaper The National Era on August 1, 1850. Stowe wrote the article in opposition to the pending Fugitive Slave Act (signed into law by President Millard Fillmore, September 18, 1850) and urged Northerners to assist escaping slaves. 

Following a positive response to the article, newspaper editor Gamaliel Bailey urged Stowe to continue writing for The National Era. The first installment of the serialized version of Uncle Tom's Cabin was immediately popular when it appeared in The National Era on June 5, 1851. Even as Bailey continued to publish weekly installments of Uncle Tom's Cabin, Stowe signed a contract to publish it as a two-volume novel. After its release on March 20, 1852, approximately 10,000 copies of the book were sold in the United States in one week. Within a year, 300,000 copies had been purchased. Translated into multiple languages, Uncle Tom's Cabin sold 1 million copies in Great Britain during its first year, and more than 2 million copies were sold internationally by 1857.

Stowe followed Uncle Tom's Cabin with a second popular anti-slavery novel, Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp in 1856. Stowe remained a prolific writer of books, essays, short stories, and newspaper and magazine articles. She published her last complete novel in 1878, Poganuc People: Their Loves and Lives. It was a semi-autobiographical story about the daughter of a minister growing up in a small New England town and being influenced by Calvinist values. She continued to publish prose, short religious reflections, and recollections of her life in magazines and anthologies until the mid-1880s. Following her husband's death in 1886, Stowe retreated to her Hartford home, where she visited with family and close friends, including her neighbor, author Mark Twain. She passed away quietly at her home on July 1, 1896, after a long period of declining health. Today, Stowe's work remains a powerful example of how literature can influence social change.

You can learn more about Harriet Beecher Stowe using Census Bureau data and records. For example:

• Harriet Beecher Stowe was born in Litchfield, Connecticut, on June 14, 1811. In 1810, the Litchfield County town had a population of 4,639. Stowe died on July 1, 1896. Between 1890 and 1900, Litchfield's population fell from 3,304 to 3,214. In 2024, the Census Bureau estimated that 8,333 people called Litchfield home.
• A number of notable Americans were born, studied, or resided in Harriet Beecher Stowe's hometown of Litchfield. They included Declaration of Independence signatory and 19th Connecticut Gov. Oliver Wolcott; Litchfield Law School graduates and vice presidents of the United States Aaron Burr and John C. Calhoun; Revolutionary War general and founder of Vermont Ethan Allen; commanding officer of the USS Indianapolis (CA-35) Charles B. McVay III; Continental Army officer and Culper Spy Ring leader Benjamin Tallmadge; and Litchfield Female Academy founder Sarah Pierce.
• Stowe published Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1852. Two years earlier, the 1850 Census counted 235 Bookbinding and Blank Book manufacturing establishments and 673 printers and publishers. These establishments employed 3,468 and 8,268 people, respectively. Ten years later, the 1860 Census reported that there were 1,666 printing establishments employing 20,159 people and 269 bookbinding and blank book establishments with 4,777 employees. The copyright for Uncle Tom's Cabin expired in 1893, so it can now be copied, published, and adapted by some of the 2,259 in the Book Publisher (NAICS 513130) sector counted by the Annual Business Survey in 2022. That year, the sector employed 72,512 people and had an annual payroll of nearly $6.1 billion.
• Stowe wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin in response to the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act which made it illegal to assist runaway slaves. The harsh depiction of slavery in the book sparked a national debate about slavery. For many Americans, the book introduced them to the grim emotional and physical abuse inflicted on enslaved people. Between 1790 and 1840, the enslaved population in the United States grew from 697,897 to 2,487,455. Shortly before Stowe began writing the novel, the 1850 Census reported that there were 3,204,313 enslaved people in the United States. Virginia led the nation with 472,528, followed by Georgia (381,682), and Alabama (342,844). The 1860 Census was the last census to count enslaved people, reporting 3,953,760 enslaved people, again led by Virginia (490,865), Georgia (462,198), and Alabama (435,080).
• The abolitionist newspaper The National Era initially published Uncle Tom's Cabin as a 40-week serial between 1851 and 1852. Published as a two-volume book in 1852, it became the first American novel to sell more than 1 million copies and an international bestseller translated into more than 20 languages within five years. Uncle Tom's Cabin was one of the bestselling books of the 19th century alongside books like, The Wide, Wide World (1850) by Susan Warner; The Scarlet Letter (1850) by Nathaniel Hawthorne; Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1880) by Lew Wallace; Louisa May Alcott's Little Women; Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884); and The Red Badge of Courage (1895) by Stephen Crane.
• Wealthy from the sale of Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe and her husband Calvin E. Stowe purchased a home in the Mandarin neighborhood of Jacksonville, Florida, in 1867. They spent winters at their home along the St. Johns River until 1884, after which her husband became too ill to travel. During the period that Stowe wintered in Jacksonville, the city's population grew from 6,912 in 1870 to 7,650 in 1880 and 17,201 in 1890. In 2024, the Census Bureau estimated that Jacksonville was home to 1,009,833 people.
• Harriet Beecher Stowe died at her home in Hartford on July 1, 1896, from what modern medical practitioners might diagnose today as Alzheimer's disease. Alois Alzheimer did not report the first clinical case of the disease until 1906, and it was not named for him until 1910. As a result, deaths resulting from cognitive illness were generally categorized as "Diseases of the Nervous System" when the Census Bureau published mortality statistics. In 1900—four years after Stowe's death—the Census Bureau reported that 117,579 people died of diseases of the nervous system. This category also included deaths from meningitis, tetanus, epilepsy, cerebral apoplexy ("stroke"), etc. 
• Uncle Tom's Cabin and Stowe's other published work remain popular in the 21st century thanks to the many museums dedicated to the author and her bestselling books. These include the Harriet Beecher Stowe House in Brunswick, Maine, where she wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin; the Stowe Center for Literary Activism in Hartford; the Mandarin Museum & Historical Society in Jacksonville, Florida; the Harriet Beecher Stowe House in Cincinnati; and the Harriet Beecher Stowe Museum / Marshall Key House in Maysville, Kentucky.
• On April 14, 2026, the Census Bureau released Frequently Occurring First Names and last Names in the 2020 Census. Analysis of the name data found that 30,352 people in the United States had the first name "Harriet" in 2020. Surname data showed that 5,106 people had the last name "Beecher" and 10,208 shared the last name "Stowe." These were among the 53,615 first names and 156,621 surnames contained in the datasets.

Did you know that June 1 was Census Day from 1830 to 1900?

President John Quincy Adams is credited with recommending the move of Census Day from August to June in his December 2, 1828, address to Congress. The move gave U.S. marshals conducting the censuses more time to complete the count.

The 1830 Census was also the first to use printed schedules to collect census data. Prior to 1830, marshals used whatever paper they had and designed their own forms (1790, 1800, 1810, 1820) which could complicate clerks' task of compiling the data.

June 1 (June 2 in 1890, because the 1st was a Sunday) remained Census Day until 1910, when it moved to April 15. Congress moved Census Day to January 1 in 1920. The Census Bureau has conducted the decennial census as of April 1 since 1930.