The most influential literary contribution to the politics of the northern States during the mid-to-late 1850's - helping incite State Secession and a horrific four-year war that killed 360,000 Federals - was Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel, "Uncle Tom's Cabin," published in 1851-52, just before the onset of "Bleeding Kansas." Likewise, that war's most influential music/poetry contribution - morally justifying, in the minds of many northern States people, the military conquest of the Confederacy and the huge death toll suffered - was Julia Ward Howe's poem "The Battle Hymn of the Republic"...
The most influential literary contribution to the politics of the northern States during the mid-to-late 1850's - helping incite State Secession and a...