Harriet Beecher Stowe

Harriet Elisabeth Beecher Stowe (/stoÊŠ/; June 14, 1811 â€" July 1, 1896) was an American abolitionist and author. Her novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) was a depiction of life for African Americans under slavery; it reached millions as a novel and play, and became influential in the United States and United Kingdom. It energized anti-slavery forces in the American North, while provoking widespread anger in the South. She wrote more than 20 books, including novels, three travel memoirs, and collections of articles and letters. She was influential for both her writings and her public stands on social issues of the day.

Life and work

Harriet Elisabeth Beecher was born in Litchfield, Connecticut, on June 14, 1811. She was the seventh of 13 children born to outspoken religious leader Lyman Beecher and Roxana (Foote), a deeply religious woman who died when Stowe was only five years old. Roxana's maternal grandfather was General Andrew Ward of the Revolutionary War. Her notable siblings included a sister, Catharine Beecher, who became an educator and author, as well as brothers who became ministers: including Henry Ward Beecher, who became a famous preacher and abolitionist, Charles Beecher, and Edward Beecher.

Harriet enrolled in the seminary (girls' school) run by her older sister Catharine, where she received a traditionally "male" or academic education in the classics, including study of languages and mathematics. Among her classmates was Sarah P. Willis, who later wrote under the pseudonym Fanny Fern.

At the age of 21, Harriet Beecher moved to Cincinnati, Ohio in 1832 to join her father, who had become the president of Lane Theological Seminary. There, she also joined the Semi-Colon Club, a literary salon and social club whose members included the Beecher sisters, Caroline Lee Hentz, Salmon P. Chase (future governor of the state and Secretary of Treasury under President Lincoln), Emily Blackwell, and others. Cincinnati's trade and shipping business on the Ohio River was booming, drawing numerous migrants from different parts of the country, including many free blacks, as well as Irish immigrants who worked on the state's canals and railroads. Areas of the city had been wracked in the Cincinnati riots of 1829, when ethnic Irish attacked blacks, trying to push competitors out of the city. Beecher met a number of African Americans who had suffered in those attacks, and their experience contributed to her later writing about slavery. Riots took place again in 1836 and 1841, driven also by native-born anti-abolitionists.

It was in the literary club that she met Calvin Ellis Stowe, a widower who was a professor at the seminary. The two married on January 6, 1836. He was an ardent critic of slavery, and the Stowes supported the Underground Railroad, temporarily housing several fugitive slaves in their home. Most slaves continued north to secure freedom in Canada. The Stowes had seven children together, including twin daughters.

Uncle Tom's Cabin and Civil War

In 1850, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Law, prohibiting assistance to fugitives and strengthening sanctions even in free states. At the time, Stowe had moved with her family to Brunswick, Maine, where her husband was now teaching at Bowdoin College. Their home near the campus is protected as a national historic resource in her honor.

During a communion service at the college chapel, Stowe had a vision of a dying slave, which inspired her to write his story. On March 9, 1850, Stowe wrote to Gamaliel Bailey, editor of the weekly antislavery journal National Era, that she planned to write a story about the problem of slavery: "I feel now that the time is come when even a woman or a child who can speak a word for freedom and humanity is bound to speak... I hope every woman who can write will not be silent."

Shortly after, in June 1851, when she was 40, the first installment of her Uncle Tom's Cabin was published in serial form in the newspaper National Era. She originally used the subtitle "The Man That Was A Thing", but it was soon changed to "Life Among the Lowly". Installments were published weekly from June 5, 1851, to April 1, 1852. For the newspaper serialization of her novel, Stowe was paid $400. Uncle Tom's Cabin was published in book form on March 20, 1852, by John P. Jewett with an initial print run of 5,000 copies. Each of its two volumes included three illustrations and a title-page designed by Hammatt Billings. In less than a year, the book sold an unprecedented 300,000 copies. By December, as sales began to wane, Jewett issued an inexpensive edition at 37 1/2 cents each to stimulate sales.

According to Daniel R. Lincoln, the goal of the book was to educate northerners on the realistic horrors of the things that were happening in the south. The other purpose was to try to make people in the south feel more empathetic towards the people they were forcing into slavery.

The book's emotional portrayal of the effects of slavery on individuals captured the nation's attention. Stowe showed that slavery touched all of society, beyond the people directly involved as masters, traders and slaves. Her novel added to the debate about abolition and slavery, and aroused opposition in the South. Within a year, 300 babies were named "Eva" in Boston alone, and a play based on the book opened in New York in November of that year. Southerners quickly responded with numerous works of what are now called anti-Tom novels, seeking to portray southern society and slavery in more positive terms. Many of these were bestsellers, although none matched the popularity of Stowe's work, which set publishing records.

After the start of the Civil War, Stowe traveled to the capital Washington, D.C., where she met President Abraham Lincoln on November 25, 1862. Stowe's daughter Hattie reported, "It was a very droll time that we had at the White house I assure you... I will only say now that it was all very funnyâ€"and we were ready to explode with laughter all the while." What Lincoln said is a minor mystery. Her son later reported that Lincoln greeted her by saying, "so you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war." Her own accounts are vague, including the letter reporting the meeting to her husband: "I had a real funny interview with the President."

Later years

In the years following the Civil War, Stowe campaigned for the expansion of married women's rights, arguing in 1869 that:

[T]he position of a married woman ... is, in many respects, precisely similar to that of the negro slave. She can make no contract and hold no property; whatever she inherits or earns becomes at that moment the property of her husband.... Though he acquired a fortune through her, or though she earned a fortune through her talents, he is the sole master of it, and she cannot draw a penny....[I]n the English common law a married woman is nothing at all. She passes out of legal existence.

In 1868, Stowe became one of the first editors of Hearth and Home magazine, one of several new publications appealing to women; she departed after a year.

In the 1870s, Stowe's brother Henry Ward Beecher was accused of adultery, and became the subject of a national scandal. Unable to bear the public attacks on her brother, Stowe fled to Florida but asked family members to send her newspaper reports. Through the affair, she remained loyal to her brother and believed he was innocent.

After her return to Connecticut, Mrs. Stowe was among the founders of the Hartford Art School, which later became part of the University of Hartford.

Following her husband Calvin Stowe's death in 1886, Harriet started rapidly to decline in health. By 1888 the Washington Post reported that as a result of dementia the 77-year-old Stowe started

"writing Uncle Tom's Cabin over again. She imagined that she was engaged in the original composition, and for several hours every day she industriously used pen and paper, inscribing passages of the book almost exactly word for word. This was done unconsciously from memory, the authoress imagining that she composed the matter as she went along. To her diseased mind the story was brand new and she frequently exhausted herself with labor which she regarded as freshly created."

Mark Twain, a neighbor of Stowe's in Hartford, recalled her last years in the following passage of his autobiography:

"Her mind had decayed, and she was a pathetic figure. She wandered about all the day long in the care of a muscular Irish woman. Among the colonists of our neighborhood the doors always stood open in pleasant weather. Mrs. Stowe entered them at her own free will, and as she was always softly slippered and generally full of animal spirits, she was able to deal in surprises, and she liked to do it. She would slip up behind a person who was deep in dreams and musings and fetch a war whoop that would jump that person out of his clothes. And she had other moods. Sometimes we would hear gentle music in the drawing-room and would find her there at the piano singing ancient and melancholy songs with infinitely touching effect."

Modern researchers now speculate that at the end of her life Harriet was suffering from Alzheimer's disease.

Harriet Beecher Stowe died on July 1, 1896, at age eighty-five in Hartford, Connecticut. She is buried in the historic cemetery at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts.

Legacy

Landmarks

Multiple landmarks are dedicated to the memory of Harriet Beecher Stowe, and are located in several states including Ohio, Florida, Maine and Connecticut. The locations of these landmarks represent various periods of her life such as her father's house where she grew up, and where she wrote her most famous work.

The Harriet Beecher Stowe House in Cincinnati, Ohio is the former home of her father Lyman Beecher on the former campus of the Lane Seminary. Her father was a preacher who was greatly affected by the pro-slavery Cincinnati Riots of 1836. Harriet Beecher Stowe lived here until her marriage. It is open to the public and operated as a historical and cultural site, focusing on Harriet Beecher Stowe, the Lane Seminary and the Underground Railroad. The site also presents African-American history.

In the 1870s and 1880s, Stowe and her family wintered in Mandarin, Florida, now a neighborhood of modern consolidated Jacksonville, on the St. Johns River. Stowe wrote Palmetto Leaves while living in Mandarin, arguably an eloquent piece of promotional literature directed at Florida's potential Northern investors at the time. The book was published in 1873 and describes Northeast Florida and its residents. In 1870, Stowe created an integrated school in Mandarin for children and adults. This predated the national movement toward integration by more than a half century. The marker commemorating the Stowe family is located across the street from the former site of their cottage. It is on the property of the Community Club, at the site of a church where Stowe's husband once served as a minister. The Church of our Saviour is an Episcopal Church founded in 1880 by a group of people who had gathered for Bible readings with Professor Calvin E. Stowe and his famous wife. The house was constructed in 1883 which contained the Stowe Memorial stained glass window, created by Louis Comfort Tiffany.

The Harriet Beecher Stowe House in Brunswick, Maine is where Stowe lived when she wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin. Her husband was teaching theology at nearby Bowdoin College, and she regularly invited students from the college and friends to read and discuss the chapters before publication. Future Civil War general, and later Governor, Joshua Chamberlain was then a student at the college and later described the setting. “On these occasions,” Chamberlain noted, “a chosen circle of friends, mostly young, were favored with the freedom of her house, the rallying point being, however, the reading before publication, of the successive chapters of her Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and the frank discussion of them.” In 2001 Bowdoin College purchased the house, together with a newer attached building, and was able to raise the substantial funds necessary to restore the house. It is not open to the public.

The Harriet Beecher Stowe House in Hartford, Connecticut is the house where Stowe lived for the last 23 years of her life. It was next door to the house of fellow author Mark Twain. In this 5,000 sq ft (460 m²) cottage-style house, there are many of Beecher Stowe's original items and items from the time period. In the research library, which is open to the public, there are numerous letters and documents from the Beecher family. The house is open to the public and offers house tours on the half hour.

In 1833, during Stowe's time in Cincinnati, the city was afflicted with a serious cholera epidemic. To avoid illness, Stowe made a visit to Washington, Kentucky, a major community of the era just south of Maysville. She stayed with the Marshall Key family, one of whose daughters was a student at Lane Seminary. It is recorded that Mr. Key took her to see a slave auction, as they were frequently held in Maysville. Scholars believe she was strongly moved by the experience. The Marshall Key home still stands in Washington. Key was a prominent Kentuckian; his visitors also included Henry Clay and Daniel Webster.

The Uncle Tom's Cabin Historic Site is part of the restored Dawn Settlement at Dresden, Ontario, which is 20 miles east of Algonac, Michigan. The community for freed slaves founded by the Rev. Josiah Henson and other abolitionists in the 1830s has been restored. There's also a museum. Henson and the Dawn Settlement provided Stowe with the inspiration for Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Honors

• Stowe is honored with a feast day on the liturgical calendar of the Episcopal Church (USA) on July 1.

• On June 13, 2007, the United States Postal Service issued a 75¢ Distinguished Americans series postage stamp in her honor.

• In early 2010, Stowe was proposed by the Ohio Historical Society as a finalist in a statewide vote for inclusion in Statuary Hall at the United States Capitol.

In popular culture

In the North American Confederacy Series by L. Neil Smith, in which the United States becomes a Libertarian state in 1794 after a successful Whiskey Rebellion and the overthrowing and execution of George Washington by firing squad for treason, Harriet Beecher Stowe served as the thirteenth President of the North American Confederacy from 1859 from when Arthur Downing died to 1860 from when Lysander Spooner succeeded her. She was the first woman to hold the office of the presidency and was called her own First Lady.

Partial list of works

• The Mayflower; or, Sketches of Scenes and Characters Among the Descendants of the Pilgrims (1834)
• Mark Meriden (1841)
• Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852)
• A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1853)
• Dred, A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856)
• The Minister's Wooing (1859)
• Agnes of Sorrento (1862) (reading online)
• The Pearl of Orr's Island (1862)
• The Chimney Corner (1866) (chapters published in Atlantic Monthly Volume 18)
• The American Woman's Home (1869) (with Catherine Beecher) (see summary and links to the book here)
• Old Town Folks (1869)
• Little Pussy Willow (1870)
• Lady Byron Vindicated (1870)
• My Wife and I (1871)
• Pink and White Tyranny (1871)
• Six of One by Half a Dozen of the Other (one of several contributors, 1872)
• Woman in Sacred History (1873)
• Palmetto Leaves (1873)
• We and Our Neighbors (1875)
• Poganuc People (1878)
• The Poor Life (1890)
• He's Coming Tomorrow (unknown)

As Christopher Crowfield

• House and Home Papers (1865)
• Little Foxes (1866)

See also

• Harriet Beecher Stowe House (Cincinnati, Ohio)
• Origins of the American Civil War

Notes

External links

• Works by Harriet Beecher Stowe at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Harriet Beecher Stowe at Internet Archive
• Works by Harriet Beecher Stowe at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin: an Electronic Edition of the National Era Version â€" Edited by textual scholar Wesley Raabe, this is the first edition of the novel to be based on the original text published in the National Era
• Uncle Tom's Cabin and American Culture â€" A multimedia archive edited by Stephen Railton about the Stowe's novel's place in American history and society
• Harriet Beecher Stowe House & Center â€" Stowe's adulthood home in Hartford, Connecticut
• Harriet Beecher Stowe Society â€" Scholarly organization dedicated to the study of the life and works of Harriet Beecher Stowe
• The Online Books Page (University of Pennsylvania)
• Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe Compiled From Her Letters and Journals by Her Son Charles Edward Stowe at Project Gutenberg
• Harriet Beecher Stowe's brief biography and works
• Uncle Tom's Cabin, online text with audio. (PDF)
• "Uncle Tom's Cabin: the book that ignited a nation"
• "How To Live on Christ" a pamphlet by Harriet Beecher Stowe, taken from her Introduction to Chistopher Dean's "Religion As It Should Be or The Remarkable Experience and Triumphant Death of Ann Thane Peck" published in 1847 Hudson Taylor sent a pamphlet using the words of this preface out to all the missionaries of the China Inland Mission in 1869.
• Barron's BookNotes for Uncle Tom's Cabin - The Author and Her Times
• Harriet Beecher Stowe at C-SPAN's American Writers: A Journey Through History
• Letter from Harriet Beecher Stowe to Horace Mann, 2 March 1852 from the Horace Mann Papers III at the Massachusetts Historical Society, retrieved June 4, 2012
• Beecher-Stowe family Papers. Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.