Harriet Beecher Stowe

(1811–1896)

It may truly be said that I write with my heart’s blood.

(letter to Eliza Cabot Follen, December 1852)

Harriet Beecher Stowe was born in Litchfield, Connecticut, on June 14, 1811, the seventh of nine children in the family of the prominent Congregationalist minister Lyman Beecher and his first wife, Roxana Foote Beecher. Harriet was especially close to her brother Henry Ward, the best-known pulpit orator of the day; her sister Catherine, who pioneered the movement for women’s education; and her half sister Isabella, who became an outspoken advocate for women’s suffrage. Her father was an energetic man who carried out his religious teachings with determination and strict discipline. Entering the ministry at the beginning of the religious revival known as the Second Great Awakening, he made it his mission to convert to Christianity those souls he viewed as threatened by an appetite for materialism fostered by an increasingly secular society. As a husband and a father, however, he could be difficult to live with: His intensity and earnest religious calling seemed at times to blind him to the more immediate personal concerns of his family members. In fact, his frequently messy and disorganized personal habits could combine with a bossy, exacting nature to make life in the Beecher household very difficult—when he was home. To complicate matters even further, the already large family was rarely without the additional company of frequent and numerous visitors, who added to the confusion and made the work of maintaining the home even more difficult.

Harriet’s mother, Roxana Foote, played the role of 19th-century wife and mother that has since become known as the “angel of the house.” Roxana was the central fi gure managing an incredibly busy domestic sphere while Lyman traveled and lectured extensively in the public realm. Although reared in a highly educated and cultured family herself, as wife to Lyman Beecher and mother to nine children, Roxana had almost no time to read nor even to think about the issues of the day, much less relax or rest. The drudgery of endless domestic duties—she had no electricity, no hired help, no modern appliances, and little income—in addition to the household’s administrative duties all fell on her shoulders. This proved an impossible burden that eventually wore her out. Roxana Foote died in 1816 of tuberculosis at the young age of 41, when Harriet was only fi ve. On her deathbed Roxana described to her mourners, including her husband and children, “a vision of heaven and its blessedness.” Her mother’s deathbed scene became so deeply impressed upon Harriet’s imagination that she made it the basis of one of the most famous scenes, the death of little Eva in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

After the death of her mother, Harriet was sent to the home of her widowed grandmother, the elder Roxana Foote, as well as her unmarried and very capable aunt, Harriet Foote in Nutplains, Connecticut. There young Harriet was embraced happily and given much loving attention. She was also taught the traditional feminine domestic skills of knitting and sewing. The time Harriet spent with these two loving, strong, and independent women provided not only the vivid image of a home warmed by maternal love, but also an alternative model of womanhood. The experience would infl uence Harriet’s development of women characters, especially her depiction of forceful, independent women whose strength and wisdom enabled them to manage the large, complicated households so common at this time. Harriet lived with her aunt and her grandmother for little more than a year, at which time her father married Harriet Porter and young Harriet returned to her father’s home. Harriet found her new stepmother to be rather distant and cold, as she had little to do with the upbringing of the children from her husband’s previous marriage. Once she began having children of her own, the distance between the two Harriets grew even greater.

Harriet did, however, benefi t from a good education; first, in Litchfield, at Sarah Pierce’s girls’ academy (1819–25), and later, at the age of 13, at the female seminary in Hartford, Connecticut, that her sister Catherine founded. She entered the Sarah Pierce school at the age of eight and fl ourished through the exercise of her remarkable memory and a growing interest in writing. In particular, the innovative teaching of John Brace, whose composition assignments were a regular part of his program, departed from the conventional topics of “female” virtues such as “cheerfulness” and “forgiveness” and inspired Harriet to write. She proved herself to be a thoughtful and imaginative writer from a very young age and was even selected as one of the writers for the school’s annual exhibition. Later, at the seminary her sister founded, she spent eight years studying French, Latin, and Italian, as well as history and moral theology. But the stated goals of Catherine Beecher’s seminary—“the building of character, the cultivation of the intellect, and the proper preparation of young ladies to enter society”—would develop Harriet’s sense of purpose and self-confidence in even more meaningful ways than her knowledge of academic subjects themselves. In addition, Catherine’s philosophy that women held an important place in society as the dispensers of moral sentiment became an important theme in the school, in Stowe’s mission in life, and in her writings. As Catherine’s sister, she was often called upon to help with the work in the school; as a consequence, Harriet began to experience a sense of her own strengths in oratory. Throughout her life, Stowe advocated education as the key to social change.

When the family moved in 1832 to Cincinnati, Ohio, where her father became president of the Lane Theological Seminary, Harriet met and eventually married the widower Calvin Ellis Stowe, a professor at the seminary, in 1836. It was also there that she and her siblings became part of the Semi-Colon Club, a parlor literary group that offered Stowe an opportunity to meet other writers and to discuss the books she and others were reading, but more importantly, a reason to write. Being part of the group put Harriet into contact with others who shared her literary bent so that it can be said that through this group Stowe was granted an opportunity to discuss her writings and to begin her real literary career. Her participation in the parlor group also influenced her writing style (literary realism) because it helped her develop the habit of directly addressing a specifi c audience, whether reading a letter or telling a story. It was during this time and in this setting, situated as it was close to Kentucky, a slaveholding state, and therefore separated from legalized slavery only by a river over which many runaway slaves escaped, that Harriet observed many dramatic scenes associated with slavery that would ignite her passion for the antislavery movement and inspire her to write on behalf of slaves. The fugitive slaves’ flight to the North and to Canada was facilitated by a vast network of people, mostly black but also many whites, who provided “stations” and “depots” where slaves could rest or eat, terms arising from the system known as the Underground Railroad. The society of Quakers was particularly involved in helping runaway slaves make their way to freedom; in Uncle Tom’s Cabin Stowe has her leading characters, Eliza, George, and Harry, find refuge at the Quaker home of Rachel and Simeon Halliday.

Like her mother, Harriet was burdened with the harsh realities of domestic responsibilities, but her marriage was fulfi lling in many ways. Living in what was called a “companionate” marriage, in which the husband acts as an intellectual companion and tutor, Calvin and Harriet were quite happy despite the daily challenges posed by the tedious and grueling tasks of maintaining a household on a modest income. Together they had seven children, including twin girls, Hattie and Eliza, born in 1836; a son, Frederick William, in 1840; and Samuel Charles, who died of cholera in infancy. Ill health, several miscarriages, Calvin’s frequent absences, as well as a tendency toward depression must have made life very difficult for Harriet as she looked after her six young children. In a letter to Calvin, she writes, “I am sick of the smell of sour milk, and sour meat, and sour everything, and then the clothes will not dry, and no wet thing does, and everything smells mouldy; and altogether I feel as if I never wanted to eat again”. She writes about her marriage and the conditions in which she lived to the abolitionist Eliza Cabbot Fulten: “Despite these long years of struggling with poverty and sickness and a hot debilitating climate my children grew up around me. The nursery and the kitchen were my principal fields of labor” (Stowe, “Letter” 413).

When a friend tried to help her by finding a publisher who paid Stowe for her sketches, Stowe realized that she could supplement her husband’s income and relieve the family’s economic hardship. Having “married into poverty and without a dowry, ” her husband possessing “only a large library of books and a great deal of learning”, she was motivated by her small writing income to find more time to write. It was at this time that Stowe began to publish several sketches in magazines such as Godey’s Lady’s Book and the New York Evangelist. Her tendency to preach and to instruct, a practice known as didacticism, is an obvious characteristic of her writing—but it became even more pronounced when she moved to Brunswick Brunswick, Maine, where Calvin was appointed in 1850 to the faculty of Bowdoin College. In that same year, the Fugitive Slave Act was passed, prohibiting any citizen from assisting a runaway slave, a law that enraged Stowe. She realized then that she and all citizens, whether they were for slavery or against it, were implicated in what she described as “this horror, this nightmare abomination! ” that “lies like lead on my heart, it shadows my life with sorrow the more so that I feel, as for my own brothers, for the South, and am pained by every horror I am obliged to write, as one who is forced to disclose in court some family disgrace”. She then became committed to the antislavery movement at the urging of her sister-in-law, Isabella P. Beecher, an activist in the cause. After witnessing a slave’s being beaten to death, Stowe was so distraught and so deeply moved that she decided to take action. Her sympathy for slave women whose babies were taken from them was fueled by her own loss of a child in infancy: “It was at his dying bed and at his grave that I learned what a poor slave mother may feel when her child is torn away from her” (Preface, Ammons viii). Her profound empathy for slave mothers, who, at the mercy of their masters, were forced to part with their children to be sold at slave auctions, became a central part of the plot in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Published in serialized form in 1851 and 1852, her most famous work paints a composite picture of all of these events through her careful presentation of plot and character. Inspired by the vision of a bleeding slave being whipped that appeared to her while she was in church celebrating the Eucharist, a service that commemorates the suffering of Christ, she wrote with evangelical intensity. The book was so successful that it sold more copies than the Bible and was translated into several languages. Stowe was much in demand in Europe, where she was asked to speak on behalf of the antislavery movement; when she traveled there in 1853, she received many honors.

The subtitle of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Life among the Lowly, clearly reflects the characteristics of the genre of literary realism to which the book belongs, with its concern for and validation of “the coarse, common world”. Later Stowe wrote A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1853) to accompany the novel and to counteract attacks on the accuracy of her portrayal of slavery, mapping out in great detail all of the factual material associated with her narrative.

In all Stowe wrote more than two dozen books of fiction and nonfiction, including Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856), Pearl of Orr’s Island (1862), Oldtown Folks (1869), and Pink and White Tyranny (1871). In all of her works, Stowe drew on the values and experience of women to pose a radically democratic alternative to the separation between public and private, reason and feeling, that characterized the dominant patriarchal social and political structures, which were based on separate spheres of male and female authority. She was instrumental in launching the literary periodical the Atlantic Monthly and offered a serial novel, The Minister’s Wooing (1859), in the first year of the journal. She continued to advocate women’s rights in Hearth and Home, a magazine that she coedited with Ik Marvell (Donald G. Mitchell, author of Reveries of a Bachelor). In 1863 Calvin retired at age 61 while Stowe, at 52, continued her career as a determined professional writer. With the comfortable income provided by her work, they built a home in Hartford, Connecticut, where Harriet spent her final years. Harriet Beecher Stowe died on July 1, 1896, at the age of 85, surrounded by her family.

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s writing is characterized by the highly romanticized Christian sensibilities that were familiar to her 19th-century audience but have less appeal for the modern reader. Her ability to use local dialects and to describe settings and characters in clear and accurate detail makes her an effective realist. However, she is best remembered today for the historical significance of her writing. Her work expresses the concerns of the 19th-century middle class and addresses the central issues and events of her century: slavery, women’s position in society, the decline of Calvinism, the rise of industry and consumerism, and the birth of a great national literature. Despite the highly sentimental quality and Christian didacticism of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Stowe influenced the course of American history so much that during the Civil War Abraham Lincoln met Mrs. Stowe and is said to have stated, “So you are the little woman who wrote the book that made this big war.”

The Harriet Beecher Stowe Center in Hartford, Connecticut, promotes the life and work of this important American writer and attracts thousands of Stowe enthusiasts each year.