Uncle Tom's Cabin was written by an anti-slavery activist by the name of Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1852. The death of her youngest child motivated her, as she began to fully sympathize with plight of slave mothers whose children were sold away from them. Harriet was determined to awaken the North to the wickedness of slavery but could not have foreseen the phenomenal impact and undying controversy that was to come. The South condemned the book when they learned hundreds of thousands of fellow Americans were reading and believing Stowe's indictment. The novel set off a firestorm of heated debates about the moral consequences of owning slaves.
On the other hand, the Dred Scott decision was in the southerners favor. Dred Scott was a black slave who was taken by his owner from Missouri, a slave state, to Illinois, a free state, and later to Wisconsin Territory where slavery had been forbidden by the Missouri Compromise of 1820. Backed by abolitionists, he sued for freedom on the basis of his long residence on free soil. The majority of the court decreed that because a slave was private property, he or she could be taken into any territory and be legally held there in slavery. Southerners were delighted with this victory. However, Senator Douglas and a host of northern democrats were aghast and the Republicans were infuriated by the setback. The Republican defiance of the exalted tribunal was intensified by the awareness that a majority of its members were southerners. They insisted that the ruling of the Court was merely an opinion, not a decision. The Southerners in turn were inflamed by all this defiance. They began to wonder anew how much longer they could remain joined to a section that refused to honor the Supreme Court.