Caroline Lee Whiting Hentz (June 1, 1800, Lancaster, Massachusetts – February 11, 1856, Marianna, Florida) was an American novelist, most noted for her defenses of slavery and opposition to the abolitionist movement.

As the youngest of eight children, Hentz watched as “three of her brothers became officers and served in the War of 1812.”[2] Their letters home and “tales of patriotic adventure”[2] were great inspiration to her.

As a young girl, she was “popular with her companions, playing games, taking woodland walks, and studying nature.”[2] On September 30, 1824, she married Nicholas Marcellus Hentz, “a political refugee from Metz [and] son of a member of the French National Convention.”[2] The couple originally lived near Round Hill School in Northampton, Massachusetts, where Nicholas was an instructor.

[2] During this period, Hentz helped George Moses Horton, an enslaved illiterate poet, by writing down his poems and sending them to local newspapers to gain publication.

[2] From their new home in Covington, Caroline Hentz wrote the prize-winning tragedy De Lara; or, The Moorish Bride for actor William Pelby of Boston.

She wrote less formally during this period, but she did write some poetry and kept a diary that inspired the “letters, deathbed confession, and other lamentations that are hallmarks of her novels.”[4] While living in Florence for nine years, the family leased two slaves, one of them a woman who helped Hentz with her domestic chores.

[7] During her husband's illness, Hentz wrote at his bedside, dividing her attention among his care, the demands of the literary public, and the occasional visitors who would disturb her routine.

[7] After nearly five years of supporting her family financially and nursing her husband, Caroline Lee Whiting Hentz died of pneumonia on February 11, 1856.

In March 1832, she published her first work, a short story, "The Sacrifice," in Godey's Lady's Book, a popular magazine for women.

While living in Covington, Kentucky, Hentz wrote Constance of Werdenberg, a play performed at the Park Theatre in New York in 1832.

[10] It has been described as a "polemical and distinctively Southern response to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin," which was published in 1852[1] and became a best seller.

"[citation needed] While at Covington, Kentucky, Hentz competed for a prize of $500 that had been offered for a play by the directors of the Arch Street Theatre in Philadelphia.

She portrays the people wanting to abolish the institution of slavery as being motivated for personal gain, not by a desire to improve mankind.

She expanded on this motive to attribute abolition sentiment to the industrial revolution that was taking place in the North, which she said would require the massive amounts of cheap labor that only the South could provide by way of slavery.