March 20 · This Day in America
A minister's daughter from Connecticut, grieving a son she lost to cholera, sits down to make readers feel slavery as a mother feels it. On March 20, John P. Jewett publishes Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel in two volumes. Three thousand copies sell the first day. Three hundred thousand sell within the year — an unimaginable number for the time. Northerners who had been comfortably ambivalent finished the book and could not be again; the South denounced it as slander. A novel did what speeches and statistics had not: it put faces and grief on a system, and it would not let America pretend not to know. The book did not start the war that came nine years later. But it changed what the country was willing to argue about, and how loudly.
Source: www.history.com
Also on this day · 1854
In Ripon, Wisconsin, anti-slavery Whigs and Free-Soilers crowd into a one-room schoolhouse, furious over the Kansas-Nebraska Bill that would let slavery spread west. They resolve to build a new party to stop it. Organizer Alvan Bovay urges the name 'Republican.' Six years later, that party's first president would be a railroad lawyer from Illinois named Abraham Lincoln. It started here, on a March night, in a building you can still visit.
Source: riponhistory.org