Harriet Beecher Stowe

I

Introduction

Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896), American writer and abolitionist, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), a forceful indictment of slavery and one of the most powerful novels of its kind in American literature.

II

Early Years

Born in Litchfield, Connecticut, on June 14, 1811, Harriet Elizabeth Beecher was the daughter of the liberal clergyman Lyman Beecher and the sister of five clergymen, including the popular preacher Henry Ward Beecher. In 1832 she moved to Cincinnati, where her father had been made president of Lane Theological Seminary. Here she gained her first direct knowledge of slavery. Here, also, in 1836 she married scholar and educator Calvin Ellis Stowe, who had encouraged her writing. Her first published work, a textbook called A New Geography for Children (1833), was cowritten with her sister, Catharine Esther Beecher. Her next book, The Mayflower, or Sketches of Scenes and Characters Among the Descendants of the Pilgrims, appeared in 1843.

III

Uncle Tom’s Cabin

By 1850, when her husband accepted a position at Bowdoin College in Maine, Harriet Beecher Stowe was the mother of seven children. Back in the New England atmosphere of rising religious abolitionism, she poured her own indignation over the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 into Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the novel that brought her fame. It was serialized in 1851 and 1852 in an abolitionist paper, the National Era, and issued as a book in 1852.

As a serial, the story attracted no unusual notice. The success of the book, however, was unprecedented; 500,000 copies were sold in the United States alone within five years, and it was translated into more than 20 foreign languages. It did much to crystallize militant antislavery sentiment in the North, and therefore was an important factor in precipitating the American Civil War (1861-1865). Uncle Tom’s Cabin, like most of Stowe’s novels, is rambling in structure, but rich in pathos and dramatic incident. It is one of the best examples of the so-called sentimental fiction that enjoyed popularity in the United States during the 1800s. Sentimental writers focused on domestic scenes, and their work evoked strong emotions. Like Stowe, many of these authors were social reformists, but they were criticized for creating overly idealized characters.

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The Uncle Tom of Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a devout Christian slave, owned by the kindly Shelby family. When financial difficulties make it necessary for the Shelbys to sell their slaves, Tom is purchased by a dealer and taken to New Orleans. On the way there he saves the life of Eva, the daughter of the wealthy St. Clair family, and in gratitude St. Clair purchases him. Tom now lives happily for two years with the angelic little Eva and her black companion, Topsy, but when Eva dies and St. Clair is killed in an accident, Tom is sold again. This time he is sold to the cruel and villainous Simon Legree, who, when Tom refuses to divulge the hiding place of two runaway slaves, flogs him to death. As Tom is dying, George Shelby, son of his old master, arrives and vows to devote himself to the cause of abolition.

IV

Later Writings

In 1853 Stowe issued A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, containing an impressive array of documentary evidence in support of her attack upon slavery. She returned to the attack in Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856). Stowe’s later fiction was great in volume but uneven in quality, her best work lying in her stories of the local life of her own Puritan New England. The Minister’s Wooing (1859), The Pearl of Orr’s Island (1862), and Oldtown Folks (1869) are acute psychological and spiritual studies of real people. Only occasionally are they marred by the author’s characteristic fault of using a story to preach an abstract principle. Stowe also wrote short stories and religious poetry. She died on July 1, 1896, in Hartford, Connecticut. See also American Literature: Prose.

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