Harriet Beecher Stowe

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Stowe, Harriet Beecher (1811–1896), novelist and abolitionist. Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote the widely popular antislavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, which was published in 1852 and went on to sell three hundred thousand copies the first year. Credited with mobilizing antislavery sentiment in the North, Stowe was praised, honored, and respected among African Americans both during her lifetime and in the years following.

Uncle Tom's Cabin was based on various slave narratives, including those of Lewis Clarke, Frederick Douglass, and Josiah Henson. Legend has it that Henson was the model for Uncle Tom, and Henson capitalized on this legend by writing two more narratives after Uncle Tom's Cabin was published.

The years following the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin saw African American authors publish a number of narratives, novels, plays, and poems inspired by Stowe's work, including William Wells Brown's Clotel (1853), Martin R. Delany's Blake (1859), and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's Iola Leroy (1892). In addition, Harper published three known poems inspired by Stowe. “Eva's Farewell” and “Eliza Harris” are based on incidents in Uncle Tom's Cabin, and “Harriet Beecher Stowe” extols Stowe as a savior to African Americans. Other poets who paid tribute to Stowe in verse include Henrietta Cordelia Ray and Paul Laurence Dunbar, whose 1898 sonnet praises Stowe as a “prophet and priestess” whose voice “spoke to consciences that long had slept.”

With a new century came a more critical look at Stowe. Sterling A.Brown in his literary history The Negro in American Fiction (1937) suggested that Stowe's sentimentalized representations of African Americans paved the way for the more pernicious stereotypes that characterized the works of racist writers such as Thomas Dixon. Richard Wright indirectly referred to Stowe's most famous work in the names of both his short story collection, Uncle Tom's Children (1940), and the main character of Native Son (1940), Bigger Thomas. For Wright, Stowe's novel signified the racist past that continued to influence the present aspirations of young African Americans. Similarly, in “Everybody's Protest Novel” (1955), James Baldwin called Uncle Tom's Cabin a “bad novel” characterized by a “self-righteous, virtuous sentimentality” motivated less by sincere empathy for African Americans oppressed by slavery and more by Stowe's desire for moral salvation and the assimilation of African Americans into her own moral and cultural purview.

Stowe's moral and theological views and domestic discourse were accepted as progressive, indeed radical, in the nineteenth century. It is ironic that in the twentieth century, she has come to exemplify both impotent white liberalism and the source of racist preconceptions about African Americans.

Bibliography

• Jean Ashton, Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Reference Guide, 1977.
• Joan D. Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, 1994

—Wendy Wagner

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200th Birth Anniversary

June 14, 1811. American writer Harriet Beecher Stowe, daughter of the Reverend Lyman Beecher and sister of Henry Ward Beecher. Author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1850), an antislavery novel that provoked a storm of protest and notoriety. It sold 300,000 copies in its first year alone. The reaction to Uncle Tom’s Cabin and its profound political impact are without parallel in American literature. It is said that during the Civil War, when Harriet Beecher Stowe was introduced to President Abraham Lincoln, his words to her were, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war.” Stowe was born at Litchfield, CT, and died at Hartford, CT, July 1, 1896.

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For more information on Harriet Beecher Stowe, visit Britannica.com.

The impact created in 1852 by the novel "Uncle Tom's Cabin" of Harriet Elizabeth Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) made her the most widely known American woman writer of the 19th century.

Harriet Beecher Stowe's personality and her work are mint products of her culture. They represent a special combination of rigid Calvinist discipline (fight against it though she tried), sentimental weakness for the romanticism of Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron, and a crusading sense of social and political responsibility.

"Hattie" Beecher was born in Litchfield, Conn., on June 14, 1811, into a family of powerful and very demanding individuals. Her father, Lyman Beecher, was a fiery, evangelical Calvinist who drove his six sons and two daughters along the straight and narrow path of devotion to God, to duty, and to himself. Her mother, Roxana Foote Beecher, died when she was 4, leaving a legacy of quiet gentleness and a brother - the Beecher children's uncle Samuel Foote. Uncle Sam, retired sea captain, brought a sense of romance and adventure into the household, as well as a measure of warm tolerance which might otherwise have been absent.

In October 1832 the family moved to Cincinnati, where the elder Beecher became director of the Lane Theological Seminary and where his older daughter, Catherine, opened her Western Female Institute, a school in which Harriet taught.

In 1834 she began writing for the Western Monthly Magazine and was awarded a $50 prize for her tale "A New England Sketch." Her writing during the next 16 years was to be sketchy indeed, for on Jan. 6, 1836, she married Calvin Ellis Stowe, a professor in the Lane Seminary, and they had seven children during a period of financial hardship. At the same time she did, however, have the opportunity to visit the South, and she observed with particular attention the operation of the slave system there. The atmosphere at the Lane Seminary was abolitionist in the extreme, but Harriet herself did not at that time espouse this position. In 1849 she published her first volume, The Mayflower, a slender book but one which convinced her husband that she should aspire seriously to a literary career.

Uncle Tom's Cabin

In 1850 Calvin Stowe was called to a chair at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, where they had their last child. She then set about writing Uncle Tom's Cabin, which first appeared in serial form in 1851-1852 in the National Era, a Washington, D.C., antislavery newspaper. The book was published in 1852 in a two-volume edition by the house of John P. Jewett and sold 300,000 copies in its first year - 10,000 in the first week. During the first 5 years of its publication, the book sold half a million copies in America alone.

Though Uncle Tom's Cabin was received with wild attention, its reception was (except for the abolitionist press) almost uniformly hostile. Not only in the South, where each newspaper was a sea of fury, but also in the North there were universal charges that the world of the slave had been melodramatically misrepresented. The action of the book traces the passage of the slave Uncle Tom through the hands of three owners, each meant to represent a type of Southern figure. The first is a benevolent planter, the second a highbred gentleman, and the last the infamous Simon Legree, who causes the death of Uncle Tom. The fortunes of the slaves in the book curve downward, and the finally successful dash for freedom taken by George and Eliza constitutes the high drama of the book. But the overall treatment of slave and master reveals something far more complex than an abolitionist tract: the high, eloquent style contains much that is warmly, even fiercely sympathetic to the world of the old South.

Stowe answered her critics in 1853 with A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, a book designed to document the facts of the novel, but she also responded to her success by traveling widely, receiving in England and on the Continent a perfect wave of acclamation. In 1856 she published her novel Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp. This, too, was a slave novel, and its reception was hardly less enthusiastic than that of Uncle Tom's Cabin. In England alone, during the first month, over 100,000 copies were sold. Although Stowe then turned to a less didactic dimension, producing a series of novels based on New England and drawing heavily on local color, her reputation for years to come was connected with the didactic power of her first two novels. Indeed, when she was introduced to Abraham Lincoln in 1862, he is said to have exclaimed, "So this is the little lady who started our big war!"

Later Years

In 1869 Stowe again toured Europe, renewing an earlier friendship with Lord Byron's widow. As a result, the novelist published Lady Byron Vindicated (1870), charging the dead poet with having so violated his marriage vows as to have had an incestuous relationship with his sister. Byron was a legend by this time, and the charges resulted in alienating much of Stowe's hitherto loyal British audience. Undisturbed, however, she continued her series of novels, poems, and sketches, as well as her autobiography, never wanting for a devoted and enthusiastic American audience.

The later years of her life were spent, in large part, in Florida, where she and her husband tried, with only moderate success, to manage the income from her literary activities. Stowe died in Hartford, Conn., on July 1, 1896.

Further Reading

Forrest Wilson, Crusader in Crinoline: The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe (1941), consolidates earlier work. Lyman Beecher Stowe, Saints, Sinners and Beechers (1934), supplies the crucial family context. See also John R. Adams, Harriet Beecher Stowe (1963). For critical works consult Harry Birdoff, The World's Greatest Hit: Uncle Tom's Cabin (1947); Charles H. Foster, The Rungless Ladder: Harriet Beecher Stowe and New England Puritanism (1954); Joseph Chamberlin Furnas, Goodbye to Uncle Tom (1956); and Edmund Wilson; Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (1962). A complete list of Mrs. Stowe's work can be found in Robert E. Spiller and others, eds., Literary History of the United States, vol. 3 (1948; 3d ed. 1963).

(1811-1896), author. Born in Litchfield, Connecticut, Harriet Beecher was the seventh child of the Reverend Lyman Beecher, a Congregational minister and moral reformer, and Roxanna Foote Beecher. She was schooled at the Pierce Academy and at her sister Catharine Beecher's Hartford Female Seminary, where she also taught. She moved with the family to Cincinnati in 1832, when her father was appointed president of Lane Theological Seminary. The spectacle of chattel slavery across the Ohio River in Kentucky and its effects on the acquiescent commercial interests of white Cincinnati moved her deeply.

In 1836, she married Calvin Ellis Stowe, professor of biblical literature at Lane. The death of a son in 1849 led her away from her father's Calvinism and gave supremacy in her views to the redemptive spirit of Christian love. By 1850, the family had moved to Maine, where, in response to the Fugitive Slave Act of that year, Stowe wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), her most celebrated work. Sentimental and realistic by turns, the novel explored the cruelties of chattel slavery in the Upper and Lower South and exposed the moral ironies in the legal, religious, and social arguments of white apologists.

The immense impact of the novel (it sold 300,000 copies in its first year) was unexpected. Antislavery fiction had never sold well; Stowe was not an established writer, and few would have expected a woman to gain a popular hearing on the great political question of the day. Some female abolitionists had shocked decorum in the 1840s by speaking at public gatherings, but they were widely resented. The success of Uncle Tom's Cabin went far toward legitimizing, if not indeed creating, a role for women in public affairs.

To the dismay of many northern radicals, Uncle Tom's Cabin casually endorsed colonization rather than abolition. In fact, Stowe was unconcerned about the tactics that made slavery a political issue: for her, the problem was religious and emotional, and one that women were best equipped to confront. Her stated purpose, "to awaken sympathy and feeling for the African race" and to urge that readers "feel right" about the issue, belongs to a feminist and utopian agenda that contemporary readers were slow to recognize. In the South, the book was read as sectional propaganda; in the North, it was read as a compelling moral romance. Although Stowe blamed the slave system itself as "the essence of all abuse" rather than the slaveholders and deliberately made its chief villain, Simon Legree, a displaced New Englander, the novel's effect was to exacerbate regional antagonisms. Indeed, Uncle Tom's Cabin, which called forth anti-Tom novels from southern writers, so raised the temperature of the dialogue that Lincoln would later, half-seriously, apportion to Stowe some responsibility for starting the Civil War.

Notable among Stowe's subsequent works are A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1853), documenting her case against slavery; Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856), also on slavery; and The Minister's Wooing (1859), a historical novel that attacks Calvinism. Stowe also wrote realistic regional fiction, including The Pearl of Orr's Island (1861), which influenced Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman. Her miscellaneous writings include Lady Byron Vindicated (1870), which created an international sensation by charging Lord Byron with incest, and Palmetto Leaves (1873), written at her winter home in Florida, which encouraged a Florida land boom.

Bibliography:

Thomas F. Gossett, Uncle Tom's Cabin and American Culture (1985); Eric J. Sundquist, ed., New Essays on Uncle Tom's Cabin (1986); Forrest Wilson, Crusader in Crinoline: The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe (1941).

Author:

Albert J. von Frank

See also Abolitionist Movement; Literature; Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Nineteenth-century American author Harriet Beecher Stowe was born on this date in 1811. With her novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Stowe helped to change the world by changing the way people looked at slavery. The book, published in 1852, was the first to break down the stereotypes and portray slaves as individuals. It is said that President Lincoln met Stowe during the Civil War and said to her, "So you are the little woman who wrote the book that made this big war."

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From our Archives: Today's Highlights, June 14, 2005

Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 1811-96, American novelist and humanitarian, b. Litchfield, Conn. With her novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, she stirred the conscience of Americans concerning slavery and thereby influenced the course of American history. The daughter of Lyman Beecher, pastor of the Congregational Church in Litchfield, and the sister of Henry Ward Beecher, Harriet grew up in an atmosphere of New England Congregational piety and, like all the Beechers, early developed an interest in theology and in schemes for improving humanity. In 1824 she went to Hartford, at first to study, later to teach in her sister Catherine's school. When her father became head of Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati, she moved to that city with him and there began teaching again and writing. In 1836 she married Professor Calvin Ellis Stowe.

Cincinnati, a border city, was at the time torn with abolitionist conflicts. Harriet's brothers were violently opposed to slavery, and she had seen its effects in Kentucky and had aided a runaway slave. However, it was not until the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act (1850) that she was moved to write on the subject. Uncle Tom's Cabin, first published serially (1851-52) in the abolitionist paper National Era, was not intended as abolitionist propaganda nor was it directed against the South, but slaveholders condemned the book as unfair, and it also crystallized the sentiments of the North. In one year more than 300,000 copies were sold in the United States and over a million in Britain. In addition, its dramatization by G. L. Aiken had a long run. The book was translated into many foreign languages, and when Stowe visited Europe in 1853 numerous honors were bestowed on her.

Her second novel of slavery, Dred (1856), while better constructed and more accurate, failed to recapture the warm characterization of the first. During the 1850s she worked vigorously for the antislavery effort, although she never allied herself with the abolitionists, whom she considered extremists. The mother of six children, she was constantly harassed by financial worries, for despite the great popularity of her books her earnings were never large, and she and her husband were unbusinesslike and overly generous. Interested in other reform movements, such as temperance and woman suffrage, she also wrote religious poems and articles for religious magazines and housekeeping manuals. Her works are generally given to sermonizing, but in The Minister's Wooing (1859) and Old Town Folks (1869) she captures the New England of her childhood.

At her best, Stowe combined literary realism with evangelical fervor. A prolific writer whose works fill 16 volumes, she was chiefly popular because she so aptly expressed the sentiments of the 19th-century middle class. Her works reflect the great 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.

Bibliography

See her life and letters, ed. by A. Fields (1897, repr. 1970); biographies by C. E. Stowe, her son (1889, repr. 1967), R. F. Wilson (1941, repr. 1970), and J. D. Hedrick (1994); studies by J. R. Adams (1963, rev. ed. 1989), M. Reynolds (1985), and D. S. Reynolds (2011).

(1811-1896)

1834	"Isabelle and Her Sister Kate" and "A New England Sketch." The former is Stowe's first published work, appearing in the February installment of the Western Monthly Magazine. The second, appearing in its April issue, wins first prize in its fiction contest and is published in the pamphlet Prize Tale: A New England Sketch.
1843	The Mayflower; or, Sketches of Scenes and Characters Among the Descendants of the Pilgrims. Stowe's first collection of stories and sketches features New England characters and a pioneering use of dialect. Many of the stories had been originally written for gatherings of the Semi-Colon Club and published in Western Monthly Magazine.
1852	Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly. Perhaps the most important American novel of the nineteenth century, Stowe's masterpiece is published serially in the National Era in 1851-1852 and as a book in 1852. The primary plot recounts the travails of the faithful slave Uncle Tom as he passes among several owners, eventually dying a martyr under the cruel Simon Legree. It is considered the first novel to portray blacks as individuals rather than stereotypes.
1853	Uncle Sam's Emancipation. Stowe collects stories, sketches, and moral essays. The most substantial story is "The Yankee Girl" in which a New England woman rejects a Canadian aristocrat to preserve her independence. In "The Two Altars" Stowe contrasts the ideals of the American Revolution with the realities of contemporary America under the Fugitive Slave Law.
1853	A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin. Written to refute attacks on the validity of Stowe's portrayal of slavery in Uncle Tom's Cabin, the volume gathers letters, newspaper articles, court records, and legal information that support her claims.
1854	Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands. An epistolary travelogue based on Stowe's first voyage to England and the European continent, written in the fashion of the growing field of female travel books popular in the nineteenth century. Americans would use it extensively as a guidebook.
1856	Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp. Stowe's second popular antislavery novel. Not as successful as Uncle Tom's Cabin, it focuses on the negative economic and moral effect of slavery on whites.
1858	Our Charley, and What to Do with Him. Stowe publishes a collection of children's stories for mothers to share with their children. Included are "Take Care of the Hook," about a fish who fails to obey his mother, and "A Tale About Birds," about the kindness of God's creatures.
1859	The Minister's Wooing. Stowe's first and most complex novel of New England is the story of a Calvinist minister and his courtship of a younger girl who is in love with her cousin but will not marry him because he has not been saved. The novel attacks Calvinism and accurately depicts Puritan life in colonial New England.
1862	Agnes of Sorrento. Stowe's historical romance, begun in 1859 to entertain her daughters while traveling in Italy, is set during the time of Savonarola in the fifteenth century. Stowe also publishes The Pearl of Orr's Island: A Story of the Coast of Maine, the story of the virtuous Mara Lincoln (the pearl of the title), an orphan raised by her grandparents in a Maine village, and her love for her adopted brother Moses, a Spanish boy her grandparents had found in the stormy sea. Mara's love, care, and eventual death elevate Moses and save him from his imprudent lifestyle. Stowe's second New England novel is called by John Greenleaf Whittier "the most charming New England idyll ever written."
1867	The Daisy's First Winter, and Other Stories and Queer Little People. These collections of children's stories contain animal fables and realistic moral tales.
1869	Oldtown Folks. Although it receives negative reviews, this novel is noteworthy for its accurate local-color portraits of New England characters just after the Revolutionary War. The work is based on Stowe's own experiences and those of her husband, Calvin Stowe. J. R. Dennet's review in the Nation says that Stowe "has succeeded decidedly in depicting typical Massachusetts men and women."
1869	The American Woman's Home; or, Principles of Domestic Science: Being a Guide to the Formation and Maintenance of Economical, Healthful, Beautiful, and Christian Homes. Stowe collaborates with her sister on a revision of the latter's Treatise on Domestic Economy (1841), which as a subscription book had sold nearly fifty thousand copies.
1870	Little Pussy Willow. Stowe's children's story is a fable contrasting the wholesome life of a country child with the pampered vanity of the daughter of a wealthy city man.
1870	Lady Byron Vindicated. Having met Byron's widow abroad, Stowe takes up her cause against her husband, detailing Byron's sexual infidelities and the claim of his incestuous relationship with his sister. The stridently polemical work damages Stowe's reputation.
1871	My Wife and I. The first of three works that Stowe would call her "society novels" makes a case for a woman's right to a career. A sequel, We and Our Neighbors, would appear in 1875. The social satire Pink and White Tyranny is also published in 1871.
1872	Oldtown Fireside Stories. Material left out of Oldtown Folks (1869) had become stories mainly published in the Atlantic Monthly and collected here. Narrated in dialect by Yankee Sam Lawson, the collection would be expanded in 1881 as Sam Lawson's Oldtown Fireside Stories. Many consider the stories among Stowe's best work.
1873	Palmetto-Leaves. In what has been called by Stowe's biographer Forest Wilson "probably the first promotion-writing for Florida ever done," the author describes the state and recommends it for other writers, stating that "Hawthorne ought to have lived in an orange grove in Florida."
1878	Poganuc People. In this novel Stowe treats aspects of her own childhood, drawing on family anecdotes. It is Stowe's contribution to the local-color genre of fiction.

Quotes:

"In all ranks of life the human heart yearns for the beautiful; and the beautiful things that God makes are his gift to all alike."

"These words dropped into my childish mind as if you should accidentally drop a ring into a deep well. I did not think of them much at the time, but there came a day in my life when the ring was fished up out of the well, good as new."

"Now, if the principle of toleration were once admitted into classical education --if it were admitted that the great object is to read and enjoy a language, and the stress of the teaching were placed on the few things absolutely essential to this result, if the tortoise were allowed time to creep, and the bird permitted to fly, and the fish to swim, towards the enchanted and divine sources of Helicon --all might in their own way arrive there, and rejoice in its flowers, its beauty, and its coolness."

"Everyone confesses in the abstract that exertion which brings out all the powers of body and mind is the best thing for us all; but practically most people do all they can to get rid of it, and as a general rule nobody does much more than circumstances drive them to do."

"To be really great in little things, to be truly noble and heroic in the insipid details of everyday life, is a virtue so rare as to be worthy of canonization."

"I am speaking now of the highest duty we owe our friends, the noblest, the most sacred --that of keeping their own nobleness, goodness, pure and incorrupt. If we let our friend become cold and selfish and exacting without a remonstrance, we are no true lover, no true friend."

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