Uncle Tom's Cabin burst on the American scene, first as a series of installments in the antislavery journal the National Era in 1851 and 1852 and then in 1852 as a two-volume edition published in Boston by John P. Jewett, many readers were overwhelmed by Harriet Beecher Stowe's powerful portrayal of the sufferings of slaves. Within the first eight weeks alone, sales of Uncle Tom's Cabin reached a whopping fifty thousand copies, and six months after that it had sold a quarter of a million volumes. On a scale hitherto unknown in America's publishing history, readers responded to Stowe's novel of sentiment, family, separation, and reunion.

The novel presents a somewhat romanticized and melodramatic picture of slavery in the South. Today the book is regarded as important, not for its literary merit, but for the effect it had in shaping public opinion against slavery. The novel was also influential in Europe, and eventually it was translated into every modern language, including Chinese. It has been credited with starting the American Civil War which led to the emancipation of all the Southern slaves.

There are many different summaries of Uncle Tom's Cabin in the eNotes Study Guide for this famous novel, many of them reprinted from other reference books such as Masterpieces of World Literature. Individual characters are also described and discussed. 

Historians typically say that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin had a tremendous impact on the North.  Abraham Lincoln supposedly greeted her by saying, “So you're the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war!”  This probably did not happen, but it reflects the impact that historians tend to ascribe to Stowe and her book.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin is said to have caused people in the North to become much more opposed to slavery. It is said to have helped make slavery less popular by putting faces on the slaves and on their owners. People came to picture slaves as being similar to Uncle Tom and they came to identify all people who owned slaves with Simon Legree.  In other words, instead of thinking of slavery in impersonal terms that could be somewhat easily ignored, people started to think of slavery as involving “real” people like those in the book.  Because of this, more people came to think that slavery was an evil institution that should be opposed.