A former schoolteacher in Connecticut opened a package in the 1850s and found a severed human ear inside, sent in response to a novel she had written. This episode traces Harriet Beecher Stowe from her quiet life in Brunswick, Maine, to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 that compelled northern citizens to assist in capturing escaped people, and the moral breaking point that drove her to build Uncle Tom's Cabin from real testimony, including the life of Josiah Henson.

We examine why she chose sentimental domestic fiction over political pamphlets, how the 1851 serial grew into a two-volume book that kept eight steam presses running day and night, and how it became the second best-selling book of the 19th century behind the Bible. The conversation then covers the southern literary counterattack, Stowe's 1853 nonfiction rebuttal A Key to Uncle Tom ...