NOTWITHSTANDING THE APOCRYPHAL story, it seems that Abraham Lincoln never actually characterized Harriet Beecher Stowe as “the little woman who made this big war;” and it's equally doubtful that her 1852 novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin: or Life Among the Lowly, had a similar effect. But that is not to cast doubt on the book's importance. It was the first entirely successful American blockbuster-by-design, and it changed the nature of the book world forever. Unbeknownst to Stowe— or to John Jewett, the small-time Boston publisher who engineered its remarkable commercial and cultural coup—the book helped light a slow fuse that, in time, detonated an explosion that lit the way for the modern copyright system.

We know copyright today as an intrusive and ubiquitous regulatory scheme, global in both the literal and the physical senses, spanningboth time and space. The qualified monopoly it confers on a wide range of more or less imaginative creations generally lasts longer than the value of those objects. Copyright embraces a wider variety of works than could ever have been imagined at its birth, and it extends to the most geographically remote corners of the world. Its ubiquity gives rise both to triumphalist celebrations of copyright's contributions to global trade in cultural commodities, and to anguished and anxious expressions of its chilling effects.

When Uncle Tom's Cabin first appeared, however, copyright was still struggling to establish its contemporary form. A few years before the book's publication, the English historian and politician, T.B. Macaulay, would warn against the dangers of copyright's monopoly. He wrote in support of remunerating authors, but warned of the evil of monopolistic control: “For the sake of the good we must submit to the evil; but the evil ought not to last a day longer than is necessary for the purpose of securing the good.” The history of Uncle Tom's Cabin shows the windingpath that copyright trod in the 19th and the 20th centuries, as legislators sought to meet these conflicting demands.

Stowe hadn't expected much from the book publication of her serialized magazine story. Calvin, her hapless, washed-up, academic husband, served as her de facto literary agent, and struck a bargain that he hoped would pay for a good new silk dress.