Harriet Beecher Stowe

(1811-1896)

Harriet Beecher Stowe and John Brown were two of the most important anti-slavery activists of the 1850’s, one as an author, the other as an armed enemy of the slave owners. Stowe’s father and several of her brothers were New England Protestant preachers. Their anti-slavery sentiments came directly from their deep religious convictions. The same can be said of John Brown. Harriet married the theology professor Calvin Stowe in 1836 and remained a house wife and mother as well as an author for the remainder of her long life.

Harriet personified in many ways the emerging ideal of American womanhood: self-sacrificing, child bearing, intensely domestic, and highly repressed. America was a male dominated society in the mid-1800’s, and would remain so to an even greater extent than in the older European societies. There was no American equivalent of the sophisticated salons of Paris and London, where educated women could mix as equals with intellectuals and politicians. After marriage, American women were treated like children, they were to be seen (but only under closely supervised circumstances) but not heard.

The revolt of educated American women against these restrictions started at the same time as the northern abolitionist movement got underway in the 1830’s. In many ways the two movements were related: both aiming at the liberation of a subject people, one subjected due to their gender, the other due to their race.

As the daughter of a preacher and educator and the wife of a professor of religion, Harriet was exposed to a highly refined intellectual climate in which women were expected to be the bearers of moral teaching to their children. She gradually became aware of the wider social issues of her times, however, and looked beyond the moral training of her own children to the morality of society at large. As a teacher at her older sister’s school for girls, the Hartford Female Seminary, in the late 1820’s, she helped organize, along with her students, a letter writing campaign to Congress to protest the treatment of the Cherokee Indians by the State of Georgia. Thus, even before the anti-slavery agitation came into full motion, Harriet and other well-educated young women were making their voices heard on social issues of the day.

Like many women of that time, she was also very concerned by the impact of heavy alcohol consumption on American domestic life. Drunken, if not alcoholic, husbands and fathers who abused or neglected their wives and children were a major concern of the mid-1830’s. The temperance movement, aiming to bring men home from the saloon and to remind them of their domestic duties was a major theme in Harriet’s life.

Harriet was caught up in the abolitionist fervor of the mid-1830’s when students at the Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati, which her father, Lyman Beecher headed, protested the institution’s failure to rally to the anti-slavery cause. Situated on the Ohio River, Cincinnati was intimately acquainted with the plight of runaway slaves who swam the Ohio River in the hope of finding freedom on its northern shore. Many abolitionists, black and white, working in the southern Ohio area, helped these so-called “fugitive slaves” escape via the Underground Railroad to Canada.

The abolitionists had a major impact on the Lane Seminary, and made an important impression on Harriet. Many of them – both students and faculty -- left Lane, which they considered unfriendly to the abolitionist cause, and went to Oberlin College in northern Ohio, a hotbed of abolitionist sentiment. Thus, even before her marriage to Calvin Stowe in 1836, Harriet had been drawn into the anti-slavery agitation. During the period from 1832 to 1850, she would live in Cincinnati, begin to write, get married and have six of her seven children. Only after this would she have her greatest literary and moral triumph in the anti-slavery cause.

Harriet had been a writer from a very early age, but her first successful publication was a geography text book for children, published in 1833. She was invited to join the Semi-Colons, a Cincinnati literary club, made up of both men and women. This was a relatively recent creation and gave women intellectuals like Harriet and her sister Catherine an outlet for their literary talents. They wrote short stories and poems, which they read or recited at the Club’s meetings.

From these beginnings, Harriet would grow into an author of worldwide fame. Shortly after she left Cincinnati with her husband for Maine and then Massachusetts, she began work on her novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. When published in March 1852, it sold more copies than any book published up to that time in the United States, some 300,000 copies within the first year of publication and it would eventually be translated into over 20 foreign languages. Stowe became a rich woman, since she received a royalty of 10 per cent of the net profits on the book; an income of $10,000 in the first three months after publication.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin was first published in the magazine National Era in a series of 40 installments. Each episode left its readers hungry for more. The characters: Uncle Tom, the saint-like slave patriarch of a large slave family who is send “down the river” by his heartless master; his wife Eliza, who makes a harrowing escape to freedom with their little son, across the breaking ice of the Ohio River, pursued by slave catchers; Simon Legree, the diabolical slave master, whose flogging to death of Tom made readers’ blood boil and made Legree the epitome of evil villainy; Little Eva, the perfectly innocent little white girl, dying of tuberculosis, who provides a white counterpart to Tom’s black holiness. Finally, Topsy, the little slave girl, who will serve as the model for numerous Hollywood comical blacks of the 1930s and 40s. All of these characters, and the melodramatic plot of the novel, drawn out over many episodes during weekly installments from June 5, 1851 to April 1, 1852, electrified the northern half of America and terrified much of the southern half of the country. Nothing like it had ever been seen in American history.

The novel was in large part inspired by the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 and the frightful stories of ex-slaves and even some free blacks being dragged back to the South in chains after they had made unsuccessful attempts to escape. Although these incidents were not numerous, they were frequent and terrible enough to arouse the passions of all of the northern abolitionists and to spread anti-slavery feeling into a much wider public. Stowe said later that she deserved no particular credit for writing this blockbuster of a novel:

“It is no merit in the sorrowful that they weep, or to the oppressed & smothering that they gasp and struggle, nor to me, that I must speak for the oppressed – who cannot speak for themselves.”

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s knowledge of African-Americans was limited to her contacts with her own domestic help. She became a master at duplicating their dialect speech and in capturing many of their mannerisms. The result, of course, is a white woman’s depiction of the life of black people living under slavery. Inevitably, it strikes us today as a condescending view of black life and personality. The characters, both black and white, are caricatures, with Uncle Tom being unbelievably good and Simon Legree and the slave catchers being unbelievably bad. Uncle Tom, in particular, has been criticized by black activists as a terrible example of a black man who bows and scrapes, never offending his master and always turning the other cheek: a combination of Christian saint and contemptible coward. Stowe, like John Brown later, wanted to fight the black man’s fight for him. Some one hundred years later, when the civil rights movement under Martin Luther King’s leadership takes place, there will be the same problem of the role of white liberals in the Negro struggle for liberation. Particularly for younger black men, the presence of whites in the movement posed difficult problems of differentiating between whites as allies and whites as the enemy. The black leader Frederick Douglass, who lived at the same time as Harriet Beecher Stowe, would have to deal with the same set of problems. On balance, Douglass found the contribution of the white activists to be a positive one, but in our own day, when black political power has become so much greater, the role of the white allies is less important.

One indication of Stowe’s somewhat quaint understanding of the racial problem of the United States was her suggestion at the end of Uncle Tom’s Cabin that the solution for the ex-slaves was to be sent back to Africa, where they could live happily. Frederick Douglass, while expressing appreciation for Stowe’s contribution to the anti-slavery movement, wrote to Stowe: “The truth is, dear Madam, we are here, & here we are likely to remain.” Douglass never saw colonization in Africa as a likely future for the ex-slaves. They were Americans and Americans they would remain.

Stowe’s book had the effect of greatly increasing moral support for the anti-slavery cause. Episodes from the book were also dramatized, with stage productions of Eliza crossing the Ohio on ice floes becoming hits throughout the North and Europe. Stowe managed to put the issues facing the nation on a human scale and to give them a human face. As a result, people who had been in doubt about their own views on the immorality of slavery were motivated to see it as an unmitigated wrong that had to be ended in some way.

At the same time, Stowe broke the taboo on “respectable women” becoming involved in politics. She became in the months following publication of her novel the foremost female advocate of the anti-slavery cause and probably the most influential woman in American history up to that time. She was too timid to go on the lecture circuit, but she did go to Great Britain on tour. Her novel sold 1.5 million copies there in the year after its publication, five times more than in the U.S. during the same period. Her book inspired more than half a million women in Great Britain to sign a petition demanding an end to slavery in the U.S.

Stowe would publish a number of other novels in the years to come, but nothing would ever compare with her amazing success with Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The book’s impact was so great, that when in 1862 Abraham Lincoln met Stowe at the White House for the first time, he shook her hand and said, half jokingly, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war!” Stowe measured less than five feet in height, so she probably appeared short to Lincoln, who was well over six feet. The point, of course, was that her small stature only further magnified the size of her accomplishment.