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Harriet
Beecher Stowe
(1814 - 1896)
When President Abraham
Lincoln met Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1862, he
exclaimed "So you are the little woman who wrote
the book that started this great war!" He was
referring to her book, "Uncle Tom’s Cabin" where
Harriet expressed her moral outrage at the
institution of slavery in the United States and
exposed its harmful effects on both whites and
blacks.
Harriet Beecher Stowe was
born in Litchfield, Connecticut on June 14, 1811
in into one of America's most notable religious
families. The Beecher family was at the
forefront of numerous reform movements of the
19th century. Born the seventh child of the well
known Congregational minister Lyman Beecher and
Roxana Foote Beecher, she was their fourth
daughter. Her father was a persuasive preacher,
theologian, and founder of the American Bible
Society, who also was active in the anti-slavery
movement. Her mother was a woman of prayer, who
asked the Lord to put the call of service on her
children's hearts. This prayer was eventually
answered in a mighty way. All the Beecher
children spent their lives living out their
Christian faith.
While Harriet's life was
not without trials, she appears to have had a
relatively good family life. When she was only
four years old, her mother died, leaving her
father to become the dominant adult influence
upon the home. While it must have been difficult
to both support the family financially as well
emotionally, it appears he did a fine job
raising his family. According to Harriet, he
made the home a kind of "moral heaven",
discussing theology over family apple peelings
and always keeping before them the haloed memory
of their dear mother. Her father did remarry a
few years after her mothers death, but Roxana
children never quite took to their stepmother
and continued to cling to their father for love
and spiritual guidance. While Lyman struggled
with mood swings and often felt like he couldn't
go on, the sincere way he lived his life
inspired in all his children a quiet ambition
for some large service. And Harriet was no
exception.
Harriet was given a good
education. At eight she began to attend the
famed school of Miss Sarah Peirce in Litchfield,
where she studied until she was thirteen when
she left home to attend the female seminary
recently opened by her sister Catharine in
Hartford. Harriet was quite shy and kept to
herself, but she loved to read and write. Among
her favorite books were Scott's "Ballads" and
"Arabian Nights", which no doubt had much to do
with cultivating her imagination.
While home during the
summer leave when she was thirteen years old,
Harriet gave her life to Christ during one of
her father's sermons and felt the assurance of
Christ's saving love. Within the Beecher family,
private conversion was intertwined with a public
calling, and this decision to follow Christ
would shape the rest of Harriet's life.
At the age of fifteen she
became an assistant to her sister Catharine in
the female seminary and continued teaching there
until 1832 when the family moved to Cincinnati,
Ohio where Lyman felt called to "win the West
for God". Lyman became President of Lane
Theological Seminary and Pastor of the Second
Presbyterian Church and Catharine founded the
Western Female Institute. Harriet taught in
Catherine's school and wrote a children's
geography text, which was her first publication,
though the first edition was issued under her
sisters name.
It was here that, Harriet
met Calvin Stowe, a professor and clergyman
fervently opposed to slavery. In 1836, at the
age of 25, Harriet married Professor Stowe, a
widower, who was nine years her senior. They
were to have seven children together and Harriet
proved to be a fine homemaker as she lovingly
cared for her children, which was her main
priority. She saw motherhood as sacredly
sacrificial and set out to follow her calling of
raising children that loved and served God. But
Calvin's teaching position did not provide a
sufficient wage, so in order to supplement
Calvin's meager teaching salary, Harriet wrote
short stories dealing with domestic life for
local and religious magazines and papers. Her
royalties helped her hire household staff to
assist with running the household and raising
her children.
Calvin and Harriet were
blessed with a loving marriage. Both encouraged
and comforted each other during the trials and
tribulations that came their way. During their
lifetime they lost four of their seven children
and had many financial setbacks. While they did
not have a perfect marriage, their loving
commitment grew solidly over the years. At one
point Harriet wrote to her husband of many
years, "If you were not already my dearly
beloved husband, I should certainly fall in love
with you." Calvin encouraged Harriet to
establish a writing career, and he served as her
literary agent in both America and England. She
in turn encouraged him to write himself and he,
too, met with some success.
While they lived in Ohio,
the work of the Underground Railroad deeply
touched both Calvin and Harriet. Their house was
one of the many "stations" for the fugitive
slaves on their way to freedom in Canada. They
sheltered runaway slaves in their home until
they move to Maine when Calvin accepted a
position at Bowdoin College in 1850.
Throughout Americas
history, the slavery issue has been hotly
debated. By the late 1840’s the abolitionist
movement had expanded, roused by newspaper
editors, lecturers, authors, and clergymen. For
abolitionists, nothing justified slavery. It was
in this environment that Mrs. Stowe wrote her
famous novel "Uncle Tom’s Cabin". In this book,
Harriet dispelled the myth that benevolent
masters treated their slaves adequately. She
showed that even kind-hearted slave owners would
separate slave families and sell them "down the
river" when they were desperate for cash.
Harriet drew on her own personal experience with
slavery in writing her book. She was familiar
slavery, the anti-slavery movement, and the
underground railroad because she spent many
years living in Ohio, and Kentucky, a
neighboring state across the Ohio River from
Cincinnati, Ohio, was a slave state.
It was soon after the
passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 that
Harriet wrote "Uncle Tom’s Cabin". The Fugitive
Slave Act granted Southerners the right to
pursue fugitive slaves into free states and
bring them back. This law aroused may
abolitionists to action. When the South
threatened to secede, Harriet determined that
she would write a serial condemning the evils of
slavery. First printed as a serial in an
abolitionist paper, The National Era, it focused
public interest on the issue of slavery, and was
deeply controversial. In 1852 "Uncle Tom’s
Cabin" was printed in book form. It sold 3,000
copies on its first day, 300,000 its first year,
and eventually sold more than 3,000,000 copies
world wide.
"Uncle Tom’s Cabin" was the
first major American novel to feature a Black
hero. Harriet created memorable characters who
portrayed the inhumanity of slavery making her
readers understand that slaves were people who
were being mistreated and made to suffer at the
hands of their masters. Through her novel,
Harriet insisted that slavery eroded the moral
sensibility of whites who tolerated or profited
from it. She wrote passionately to prick the
consciences of fellow Americans to end their
blind allegiance to slavery.
Many people of her day
argued that her novel was merely fiction and not
at all based on fact. To disprove these
accusations and prove that her depiction of
slavery was factual, in 1853, Harriet wrote "A
Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin", which presented the
original facts and documents upon which she
based her novel.
The historical significance
of Harriet's abolitionists writing has veiled
from view her other work and literary
significance. Her writings were varied and in
many different genre. She wrote both fiction and
biography along with children's books. Some feel
that her best works are about New England life
such as "The Ministers Wooing" and "Old Town
Folks", where her settings were accurately
described in detail. Her portraits of local
social life, particularly of minor characters,
reflect and ability to communicate to others the
culture in which she lived.
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