Harriet Beecher Stowe was born on June 14, 1811, into
a family of extraordinarily gifted and promising siblings. The
Beechers, later in their lives, would become a kind of intellectual
Camelot, with Harriet Beecher Stowe and her famous brother, Henry
Ward Beecher, at the head of the table.
Harriet, a precocious and fiercely intelligent child,
grew up in Connecticut, a decidedly anti-slavery state. The America
in which Harriet was born was an America already beginning to show
the strains of economic and social division. The North, built on
industry and invention-steel mills and banking, for example- could
not differ more from the laid-back, pastoral South, where slave
labor brought prosperity to those who exploited it. But while antislavery sentiments
grew more and more impassioned in border states like Ohio, the
Northern states of New England were far enough away from the reality
of slavery to provide a kind of buffer. Slavery was something to
theorize about, not to confront.
When Harriet and her family moved to Ohio when she was
in her early twenties, however, she saw the horrors of slavery
firsthand, and was exposed to people who held strong opinions on
the institution. She joined a literary club in Cincinnati called
the Semi-Colon club where she met her future husband, the brilliant
Biblical scholar Calvin Ellis Stowe. Harriet's interest in the
anti-slavery cause increased, and in 1833, when she was twenty-two,
Harriet visited a slave plantation across the Ohio River in Kentucky.
She was horrified by what she witnessed, and the events and scenes
were burned into her brain, simmering there for nearly twenty years.
Harriet, by this time, was turning out short stories and essays
for a Cincinnati magazine called Western Monthly Review. She found,
increasingly, her topic was slavery. In 1836, Harriet married Calvin
Stowe, and they began their long life together, scraping by and
struggling to make ends meet.
Using the visit to that Kentucky plantation as a template
for Colonel Shelby's plantation in Uncle Tom's Cabin, along
with numerous slave accounts and interviews she conducted with
ex-slaves, in 1851 and 1852 Harriet finally penned one of the most famous
American books of the nineteenth century, published serially in
an abolitionist magazine called New Era, and certainly one of the
most popular. While basically a morality play, Uncle Tom's Cabin was
an attack against an institution that most Southerners had, for
over a hundred years, accepted as necessary without question. However,
Harriet believed that the Southerners who enslaved blacks were
also victims of the institution, as it made them completely dependent
upon slave labor, and as a result they felt it impossible to extricate
themselves.
The publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin in
1852 was an event that changed an already changing nation. The
novel was an instant bestseller, going through 120 editions in
a year. Harriet became, in the same year, the most beloved American
author in the country, and the most hated. Northerners considered
the very symbol of all that the anti-slavery movement stood for-never
mind that she, in fact, advocated gradual emancipation of slaves
rather than instant and irrevocable-and the South considered her
a great threat to their way of life.
Although best known for Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet
Beecher Stowe wrote hundreds of novels, short stories, articles,
children's books and religious inquiries. Each book she published
was a bestseller; each issue of a magazine in which she published
an article sold out overnight. People wanted to hear what she had
to say, and even the best authors of the time respected her work–including Dickens,
George Sand, Henry James and Anthony Trollope. However, despite
her success as an author, she never saw her writing as anything
other than a job. Her husband was the most important person in her
life, and the care of her many children always came first in her
life.
Harriet Beecher Stowe was a full-fledged celebrity, both
in America and abroad, and Lincoln famously called her "the little
lady that made this big war", in reference to the Civil War. Her
many trips to Europe and England enlarged her mind, and her books
sold as well abroad as they did in America.
When she died in 1896, Harriet Beecher Stowe's books had
fallen out of favor, as the social issues had become less relevant
and the art of the books had been thrown into question. However, Uncle
Tom's Cabin remains in print today and is considered an
extraordinarily important social document of a fractured America.
