March 20: A Novel Ignites, A Woman Wins, A War Begins

March 20 has witnessed three moments when barriers were crossed—moral, athletic, and military. A novel exposed slavery's horrors with such emotional power that it helped precipitate civil war, proving that storytelling could shift public opinion on the defining moral crisis of its era. A woman won a brutal endurance race through Alaskan wilderness that had been male-dominated since its inception, demonstrating that gender barriers in extreme sports existed only until someone refused to accept them. And the United States launched an invasion based on faulty intelligence that would consume lives, treasure, and credibility for years, showing how certainty about threats can lead to catastrophic miscalculation. Together, these events reveal how change arrives—through moral persuasion, through breaking precedent, and sometimes through decisions whose consequences prove far grimmer than anticipated.

The Book That Started a War

On March 20, 1852, Uncle Tom's Cabin was published as a two-volume book after first appearing as a serial in the abolitionist newspaper The National Era. Harriet Beecher Stowe, daughter of a prominent minister and sister to famous preachers, wrote the novel in response to the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, which required Northerners to return escaped slaves to bondage. Stowe crafted a melodramatic story centered on Tom, an enslaved man of extraordinary Christian faith, and Eliza, a mother who flees across ice floes to save her child from being sold. The novel depicted slavery not through abstract arguments but through characters readers could sympathize with, showing families torn apart, children sold, and human beings treated as property.

The book became a phenomenon. It sold 300,000 copies in its first year in the U.S. and over a million in Britain. Stowe received fan mail and death threats. Southern writers produced pro-slavery response novels attempting to counter her portrayal. The book's influence was enormous—legend claims that when Abraham Lincoln met Stowe in 1862, he said, "So you're the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war." Whether apocryphal or not, the quote captures Uncle Tom's Cabin's impact. The novel made slavery personal for Northern readers who had never seen it firsthand, converting abstract moral questions into visceral emotional reactions. It demonstrated that art could be activism, that storytelling could change minds more effectively than political pamphlets, and that showing suffering mattered more than debating philosophy. Uncle Tom's Cabin helped make the Civil War inevitable by making compromise with slavery morally intolerable for millions of Northerners who had previously been indifferent or accommodating. Stowe proved that sometimes one voice, telling one story well, can shift the moral center of a nation.

Through the Blizzard

One hundred thirty-three years after Stowe's book was published, on March 20, 1985, Libby Riddles mushed her dog team into Nome, Alaska, becoming the first woman to win the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race. The Iditarod, established in 1973, covers roughly 1,000 miles of brutal Alaskan wilderness between Anchorage and Nome, commemorating the 1925 serum run that saved Nome from a diphtheria epidemic. The race tests both mushers and dogs against sub-zero temperatures, blinding snow, treacherous ice, and exhaustion. Riddles, a 28-year-old from Wisconsin who had moved to Alaska and fallen in love with dog mushing, was not favored to win. But during the race, she made a gamble that would define her victory.

A severe storm was approaching, and most mushers decided to wait it out. Riddles, trailing the leaders, saw opportunity in the blizzard. She pushed forward through whiteout conditions and brutal winds, making up significant time while competitors sheltered in place. Her decision was risky—she could have become disoriented, gotten lost, or endangered herself and her dogs—but her navigation skills and the strength of her dog team carried her through. When the storm cleared, Riddles had taken the lead, which she maintained to victory. Her win shattered the assumption that the Iditarod was too grueling for women, proving that strategic thinking and connection with one's dog team mattered as much as physical strength. Riddles opened doors for female mushers who followed; Susan Butcher would win four times in the next decade. Riddles demonstrated that barriers labeled "too difficult" often mean "no woman has done it yet," and that sometimes the boldest decision is to keep moving when everyone else stops.

Shock and Awe

On March 20, 2003, eighteen years after Riddles's Iditarod victory, the United States launched Operation Iraqi Freedom with massive airstrikes on Baghdad in a campaign called "shock and awe." President George W. Bush and his administration argued that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and posed an imminent threat to U.S. security. The invasion bypassed United Nations authorization after France, Germany, and other allies refused support. A "coalition of the willing"—primarily the U.S. and United Kingdom—invaded anyway. American forces quickly toppled Saddam's government; Bush declared "Mission Accomplished" from an aircraft carrier on May 1. The mission, it turned out, had barely begun.

No weapons of mass destruction were found. The assumptions underlying invasion—that Iraqis would welcome Americans as liberators, that a stable democracy would quickly emerge, that the war would pay for itself through oil revenues—proved catastrophically wrong. Instead, Iraq descended into sectarian violence, insurgency, and civil war. Over 4,500 American service members died, along with hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. The war cost trillions of dollars, destabilized the region, and contributed to the rise of ISIS. The faulty intelligence and flawed reasoning that led to invasion damaged American credibility internationally and domestically. The Iraq War demonstrated that military power without accurate intelligence and realistic planning produces disasters, that certainty about threats doesn't make those threats real, and that wars of choice based on faulty premises can consume lives and treasure with no corresponding benefit. While Stowe's novel helped start a war to end slavery—a cause that, however costly, achieved a moral good—the Iraq War began with noble rhetoric but produced primarily suffering, instability, and lessons learned too late. March 20, 2003, marked the beginning of America's longest continuous combat operation and one of its greatest foreign policy mistakes.