When she was born on June 14, 1811 to Lyman Beecher and
his wife Roxana, no one could have guessed that Harriet Beecher
Stowe would, in many ways, affect the course of U.S. history during
its most troubled period. Born in the parsonage of her father's
Litchfield, Connecticut church, Harriet was the sixth child born
to Lyman Beecher and his first wife. Reverend Beecher was a strict
teetotaler and a conscientious Presbyterian, unwavering in his
social and religious beliefs. He instilled into his children a
sense of social justice for everyone, including women and blacks.
Opportunity, he told his children, should be afforded to everyone,
regardless of race or sex. On religious matters, however, Lyman
Beecher was not as open-minded: he was a well-known foe of Roman
Catholics.
When Harriet was five years old, and just two years after
having given birth to Harriet's favorite brother Henry Ward Beecher,
Roxana Beecher died. At fifteen, Catharine, the eldest Beecher
child, became a mother figure to her younger siblings: Mary, Edward, Thomas,
Henry Ward, Harriet and Charles. After her mother's death, young
Harriet fell into a depression and her father sent her to visit
her grandmother–and namesake–Harriet Foote. While visiting her
grandmother's farm, Harriet met black people, including two household
servants named Dinah and Harry. The two young people were indentured
servants- meaning, they were working towards their freedom. Harriet
encountered her first social dilemma–she could not understand why
Dinah and Harry were treated as her inferiors. This perplexed her,
and was a question she could not forget.
In the early summer of 1816, Harriet returned to her father's home
in Connecticut and was enrolled in Ma'am Kilbourne's school, where
she proved to be a voracious reader and a precocious student. By
the time Harriet was six, she had devoured every book in the house
and her father allowed her free use of his library. Around this
time, Lyman Beecher remarried. His new bride was an exquisitely
pretty, yet cold woman named Harriet Porter. The next year, a new
baby arrived named Frederick, but he died the next year from Scarlet
fever.
When Harriet was ten, she was enrolled in John Brace's
Litchfield Academy, where she received the highest grades in the
class and astounded her teachers with her intellect. When Harriet
was eleven, she took first prize in the school's essay contest
for her essay "Can the Immortality of the Soul be Proved by the
Light of Nature?" That same year, 1822, the second Mrs. Beecher
gave birth to Harriet's half-sister, Isabella.
Catharine, in the meantime, had lost her fiancé in a shipwreck and
had decided to go a different direction with her life. Like her father,
she believed women ought to be afforded educational opportunities,
and so decided to found her own school for young women in Hartford
in 1824. Her younger sister Harriet was her first, and most promising,
pupil. There Harriet met another intelligent young woman named
Georgiana May, and the two became fast friends. Harriet discovered
the poetry of Lord Byron and fell in love with it, dreaming of
becoming a poet herself. Because Catharine so disdained poetry,
Harriet chose to scribble her poems late at night. Two years later,
Catharine was able to construct her own building, and she named
the school Hartford Female Seminary.
That same year, 1826, Lyman Beecher was asked to join
Hanover Street Church in Boston as clergyman, and he accepted.
Harriet, by now an extremely bright, and extremely moody, teenager,
followed the Beechers to Boston, while Catharine chose to stay
behind to run her school. After a difficult year in Boston, the
Beechers sent Harriet back to Hartford to be schooled by her sister.
Except for a brief visit to see her new baby brother James, Harriet
spent the rest of the year in Hartford, where in addition to her
duties as pupil, she was also teaching. She continued to read voraciously,
and was having increasing trouble getting a handle on her adolescent
emotions. She began writing long letters to friends and family,
detailing the religious questions she struggled with-such as God's
love for man, and her attempt to improve herself morally and spiritually-
as well as the emotional challenges she couldn't seem to overcome.
The teachers she roomed with found her mood swings difficult to
deal with.
At the age of twenty-one, Harriet had grown into an attractive, ambitious
young woman. Except for Catharine, her siblings had not yet begun
to show any of the signs of their future greatness. Henry Ward,
who would later become one of the most famous clergymen in U.S.
History, was at this time a mediocre student, and seemed not to
know what he wanted out of life. Harriet, on the other hand, was
itching for a change of scenery.
