Harriet Beecher Stowe

Born: Litchfield; June 14, 1811
Died: Hartford; July 1, 1896

Entry by James P. Walsh

So long as the world reads Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe will rest in immortality. Her novel, a classic epic of sin and redemption, is one of the greatest ever written by an American.

She was the seventh child of Lyman Beecher (1775-1863), a noted Congregational minister, and grew up in a warm, loving household where everyone was expected to be dedicated to God's work on earth. For the boys, that meant the ministry; for the girls, a kind of sanctified motherhood. She moved with her family to Cincinnati in 1832 and there, in 1836, she married Calvin Stowe (1802-1886), a professor at Lane Theological Seminary, and assumed her duties as a wife and mother.

Like all the Beechers, Harriet had come scribbling from the womb, and she turned her literary skills to good use by selling her stories in order to supplement her husband's income. Her sister Catherine (1800-1878) once described how she nagged Harriet into finishing a story. "Two dollar a page, my dear," Catherine pointed out, "and you can write a page in fifteen minutes!"

In 1850 the family moved back to New England when Calvin began teaching at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. It was here that Harriet wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin. She saw, in a kind of vision, the scene in which Tom suffered a martyr's death and began to write a series of installments in which to set that scene. Early in 1851 she sold the story, not yet fully written, to an abolitionist newspaper for $300. As she wrote, the story "just growed," as one of her most famous characters, Topsy, would have put it, and there were eventually forty installments. In March 1852 the work finally appeared in book form. It was an enormous success. It sold 300,000 copies in its first year and gave Harriet an international literary reputation.

Even today, Uncle Tom's Cabin maintains tremendous vitality and force. From its first scene, where a slave trader describes the "humane" tricks be used to separate slave children from their mothers, to Tom's death, Stowe used irony, humor, sarcasm, bathos, melodrama, and sentimentality to attack not just individuals like Simon Legree, but an entire social system that made the decent weak and the powerful vicious. It is a shame that so few Americans today read the book, and even sadder that the term "Uncle Tom" has come to mean a coward. Tom was, in fact, a man of great courage and honor. He could easily have escaped slavery but did not because he had given his word not to flee. He died, willingly, in order to protect the freedom of another black.

The royalties from Uncle Tom's Cabin allowed the Stowes to live in comfort. In 1864 they moved to Hartford where Harriet remained incredibly busy, publishing more than a book a year until she was in her eighties. Unhappily, she also began to suffer spells of senility and became completely childish before her death. She attributed her mental weakness to the fact that she had a woman's frail brain, but she had also, in abundance, a woman's faith that love and kindness could transform the world.

For Further Reading

The best biography of Harriet Beecher Stowe is the one on which she collaborated with her son in 1889. The original edition is hard to find but Houghton, Mifflin published a new edition in 1911, written by Edward Stowe and Lyman Beecher Stowe: Harriet Beecher Stowe: The Story of Her Life. The best easily available biography is by Barbara M. Cross in Notable American Women (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1971), III, 393-402.

* Entry under revision.