To: Bread Upon The Water who wrote (166051 ) 7/15/2011 12:29:49 AM From: Win Smith Read Replies (2) | Respond to Being a somewhat irrepressible googler these days, I looked it up. Concisely, from the traditional google top hit:After the outbreak of the Civil War, Stowe traveled to Washington, D.C. and there met President Abraham Lincoln on November 25, 1862.[13] Legend has it that, upon meeting her, he greeted her by saying, "so you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war."[14] In reality, little is known about the meeting. Stowe's daughter Hattie reported, "It was a very droll time that we had at the White house [sic] I assure you... I will only say now that it was all very funny—and we were ready to explode with laughter all the while."[15] Stowe's own letter to her husband is equally ambiguous: "I had a real funny interview with the President."[15] en.wikipedia.org historycooperative.org In her introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Harriet Beecher Stowe, Cindy Weinstein begins, as so many others have, with one of the most popular anecdotes in American literary history: "Harriet Beecher Stowe's most famous introduction took place on or around Thanksgiving Day, 1862, when she was introduced to President Abraham Lincoln, who allegedly greeted her with these memorable words, 'So you're the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war!'"1 Weinstein's evocation of Lincoln is not surprising; of all the biographical details currently in circulation about Stowe, this anecdote certainly ranks among the most well known, and one finds some version of Lincoln's greeting employed in hundreds of articles, books, reviews, and Web summaries. Despite its popularity, however, the quotation is entirely apocryphal, emerging from within Stowe family tradition without any textual support or verification from the author herself. Most of Stowe's biographers have included some version of the quote, almost always scrupulously attributing it to its apocryphal origins.2 Many twentieth-century literary scholars, critics, and historians who reference the incident were not as careful as Weinstein to qualify the quotation with phrases like "allegedly said" or "is reported to have said."3 The quote is a rarity in Lincoln biographies, however, and many of the Lincoln biographers and historians who have used it have been sloppy about noting its apocryphal origins. On the Internet, where historical summaries are often disconnected from their sources entirely, Lincoln's alleged words are rapidly hardening into unqualified historical fact.
