Tom Putnam is a retired history museum director. He lives in Cape Porpoise.

It is easy to forget that one of our nation’s most influential novels was written in Maine.

Its author, Harriet Beecher Stowe, is more often associated with Connecticut, where she was born and raised; and with Ohio, where she lived for 18 years, married, and bore six of her seven children. It was also from her home in Cincinnati that she traveled to neighboring Kentucky and famously witnessed a slave auction.

A life-altering experience, for years she attempted to burnish the memory of the woeful cries she heard that day as an enslaved mother was separated from her child. But in 1849, when Mrs. Stowe lost her own 18-month-old son to cholera, those memories returned. Her own tragic loss connected her to the pain of others.

A year later her husband, Calvin Stowe, accepted a professorship at his alma mater, Bowdoin College, prompting the family’s move to Maine. Six months pregnant with their seventh child, Mrs. Stowe arrived first and rented a home adjacent to campus.

That same year, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act requiring northerners to assist in the return of runaway slaves, suspending habeas corpus and denying fugitives the right to jury trials. The law’s enactment fueled the fire of abolitionists like Mrs. Stowe, who, while worshipping in Brunswick’s First Parish Church in the spring of 1851, had a dramatic vision of an enslaved man being whipped to death by his master.

After sharing that experience with friends and family, they urged her to begin writing the novel we know as “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” in which that vision became an integral scene.

Originally published in weekly episodes in a national anti-slavery newspaper, the first installment was issued 175 years ago today on June 5, 1851. For the next 40 weeks, Mrs. Stowe faced tremendous pressure to meet weekly publishing deadlines while also raising her family and running a school for neighborhood children.

The completed novel, published in March of 1852, was a national sensation though it was, of course, received more openly by northerners than southerners.

By portraying African Americans as individuals with lives and families of their own, it galvanized public sentiment against slavery and is considered the most important piece of popular abolitionist writing ever written. In 19th-century America, only the Bible outsold it.

The home in which the novel was written still stands. Visitors can sit in the parlor where Mrs. Stowe would write and greet guests during her two years in Brunswick. Perhaps her most significant guest was John Andrew Jackson, a fugitive from slavery escaping to Canada in November of 1850. By allowing him to stay the night, the Stowes openly defied the Fugitive Slave Act.

Scholars continue to debate the literary merits of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” But few dispute that Stowe’s fiction is imbued with her belief in the inherent dignity of every individual and in the importance of guaranteeing certain economic and judicial protections for all people based on our shared humanity.

Those ideals are woven throughout our nation’s founding documents, though how to best achieve them posed a challenge in Stowe’s time as it does in our own.

Mrs. Stowe recognized the limits of her fiction, suggesting in the novel’s afterword that she had “given only a faint shadow, a dim picture of the anguish and despair that are, at this very moment, riving thousands of lives, shattering thousands of families … Nothing of tragedy can be written that equals the frightful realities of scenes daily and hourly acting on our shores, beneath the shadow of American law….”

Like readers in her day, each of us may take different lessons from the concerns Harriet Beecher Stowe articulated in her groundbreaking novel and how to apply them to the humanitarian crises of our time. But on this historic anniversary, we can, perhaps, pause collectively to appreciate her example as one who advocated, in word and deed, for the principles she held sacred.