Harriet
Beecher Stowe
Harriet
Beecher Stowe, née Harriet Elizabeth
Beecher (b. June 14, 1811, Litchfield,
Conn., U.S.—d. July 1, 1896, Hartford,
Conn.), American writer and
philanthropist, the author of the novel
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which contributed so
much to popular feeling against slavery
that it is cited among the causes of the
American Civil War.
Harriet
Beecher was a member of one of the 19th
century’s most remarkable families. The
daughter of the prominent
Congregationalist minister Lyman Beecher
and the sister of Catharine, Henry Ward,
and Edward, she grew up in an atmosphere
of learning and moral earnestness. She
attended her sister Catharine’s school
in Hartford, Conn., in 1824–27,
thereafter teaching at the school. In
1832 she accompanied Catharine and their
father to Cincinnati, Ohio, where he
became president of Lane Theological
Seminary and she taught at another
school founded by her sister.
In
Cincinnati she took an active part in
the literary and school life,
contributing stories and sketches to
local journals and compiling a school
geography, until the school closed in
1836. That same year she married Calvin
Ellis Stowe, a clergyman and seminary
professor, who encouraged her literary
activity and was himself an eminent
biblical scholar. She wrote continually
and in 1843 published The Mayflower; or,
Sketches of Scenes and Characters Among
the Descendants of the Pilgrims.
Stowe
lived for 18 years in Cincinnati,
separated only by the Ohio River from a
slave-holding community; she came in
contact with fugitive slaves and learned
about life in the South from friends and
from her own visits there. In 1850 her
husband became professor at Bowdoin
College and the family moved to
Brunswick, Maine.
There
Harriet Stowe began to write a long tale
of slavery, based on her reading of
abolitionist literature and on her
personal observations in Ohio and
Kentucky. Her tale was published
serially (1851–52) in the National Era,
an antislavery paper of Washington,
D.C.; in 1852 it appeared in book form
as Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the
Lowly. The book was an immediate
sensation and was taken up eagerly by
abolitionists while, along with its
author, it was vehemently denounced in
the South, where reading or possessing
the book became an extremely dangerous
enterprise. With sales of 300,000 in the
first year, the book exerted an
influence equaled by few other novels in
history, helping to solidify both pro-
and antislavery sentiment. The book was
translated widely and several times
dramatized (the first time, in 1852,
without Stowe’s permission), where it
played to capacity audiences. Stowe was
enthusiastically received on a visit to
England in 1853, and there she formed
friendships with many leading literary
figures. In that same year she published
A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a
compilation of documents and testimonies
in support of disputed details of her
indictment of slavery.
In 1856
she published Dred: A Tale of the Great
Dismal Swamp, in which she depicted the
deterioration of a society resting on a
slave basis. When The Atlantic Monthly
was established the following year, she
found a ready vehicle for her writings;
she also found outlets in the
Independent of New York City and later
the Christian Union, of which papers her
brother Henry Ward Beecher was editor.
She
thereafter led the life of a woman of
letters, writing novels, of which The
Minister’s Wooing (1859) is best known,
many studies of social life in both
fiction and essay, and a small volume of
religious poems. An article she
published in The Atlantic in 1869, in
which she alleged that Lord Byron had
had an incestuous affair with his
half-sister, created an uproar in
England and cost her much of her
popularity there, but she remained a
leading author and lyceum lecturer in
the United States. Late in her life she
assisted her son Charles E. Stowe on a
biography of her, which appeared in
1889. Stowe had moved to Hartford in
1864, and she largely remained there
until her death.
