Stowe, Harriet Beecher (1811-1896)

Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896)

Sources

Writer

Impact. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s first novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), not only was the best-selling novel before the Civil War but also became a highly effective instrument in the movement to abolish slavery in the 1850s. Abraham Lincoln is reported to have commented upon meeting Stowe, “So this is the little lady who made this big war!” The remark is certainly an overstatement, but it indicates Stowe’s fame and the extent to which her writing was seen as influencing the moral attitudes of the nation.

Early Years. Stowe was born in Litchfield, Connecticut, the daughter of the respected Congregational minister Lyman Beecher and Roxana Foote. She was raised in an environment that emphasized strict moral principles and intellectual energy, elements that shaped her future writing. She attended the Hartford Female Seminary, which was run by her sister Catharine, and later taught there. In 1832 Lyman Beecher was appointed president of the Lane Theological Seminary, and the family moved to Cincinnati, Ohio. Stowe continued schoolteaching until 1836, when she married Calvin Stowe, a professor at the seminary. She began writing stories both as an escape from the drudgery of raising her seven children and as a way to earn extra income for the family. In 1843 The Mayflower y her first collection of sketches and stories, was published by Harper.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The Stowes moved to Brunswick, Maine, in 1850, and the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act the same year caused her to begin writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The novel was printed in forty installments by The National Era between June 1851 and April 1852, then published in book form by John P. Jewett of Boston in March 1852. It was an immediate success. By May, 50,000 copies had been sold. Within a year the total had reached 300,000. The book was widely pirated in Europe, and 1.5 million copies were printed in London alone. The story and its characters were written into plays, featured in songs, and incorporated into souvenir and keepsake items, making it the most popular book of its time.

A National Lesson . Much of the appeal of Uncle Tom’s Cabin was due less to its moralistic message than to the emotional force behind the story. Stowe argued that Christian feeling and human compassion, not cold reason, should be the guide for moral behavior and society’s laws. Accordingly, she tells her story in compelling episodes with strongly defined characters and sharp melodramatic and sentimental language. The novel’s two main plots—the flight of Eliza, George, and Harry Harris northward to freedom and the descent of pious Uncle Tom southward to suffering and death—move swiftly and are skillfully charged with suspense. In the process, Stowe explores the complicity of both North and South in the evils of slavery and calls for a renewed moral effort to abolish the institution.

Other Books . Though Uncle Tom’s Cabin remains her best-known work, Stowe wrote prolifically for the rest of her career. In 1853, as an attempt to rebut criticism of her portrayal of slavery, Stowe published A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which contained the court records, handbills, eyewitness reports, and other documents that she had used as sources while writing the novel. She treated the antislavery theme again in Dred (1856), then began a series of novels dealing first with colonial New England life and, later, post-Civil War society. In 1870 she again caused a literary sensation when she published Lady Byron Vindicated, which revealed Lord Byron’s incestuous relationship with his half-sister and defended Byron’s wife, Anne, who had been Stowe’s friend. At her death in 1896, Stowe’s collected works filled sixteen volumes.

Sources

Noel B. Gerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Biography (New York: Praeger, 1976);

Forrest Wilson, Crusader in Crinoline: The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1941).