Southern spokesmen greatly exaggerated the power of abolitionists, looking especially at the great popularity of Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), the novel and play by Harriet Beecher Stowe (whom Abraham Lincoln reputedly called "the little woman that started this great war"). They saw a vast growing abolitionist movement after the success of The Liberator in 1831 by William Lloyd Garrison. The fear was a race war by blacks that would massacre whites, especially in counties where whites were a small minority.