“Uncle Tom’s Cabin” sold 1 million copies, inspired stage adaptations, songs and merchandise, and became wildly popular across the U.S. and the United Kingdom, where it sparked anti-slavery petitions and rallies. Southern writers were so incensed by its contents that they hurried to publish “Anti-Tom” novels defending slavery in response. Estimation of Uncle Tom’s influence hasn’t waned; writing in The New Yorker in 2011, the historian Annette Gordon-Reed called it “one of the most successful feats of persuasion in American history.”