In order to show that she had neither lied about slavery nor exaggerated the plight of enslaved people, she compiled A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin.

The book was subtitled "Presenting the Original Facts and Documents upon Which the Story Is Founded, Together with Corroborative Statements Verifying the Truth of the Work".

The responses of abolitionists and Northerners in general were among the positive, lauding the documentation of the evils of slavery and the confirmation of the truth of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

A review in the Southern Literary Messenger called the Key a "distortion of the facts and mutilation of the records, for the sake of giving substance to the scandalous fancy, and reduplicating the falsehood of the representation".

Rather they claimed that the examples that Stowe provided are the most extreme instances, which she gathered to give the worst possible impression of the institution of slavery, and of the South.