geeky
This is what Abraham Lincoln is reported to have told Harriet Beecher Stowe, best known for being the author of the classic book Uncle Tom's Cabin, a work of fiction. The book was intended to open the eyes of Americans to the reality of the life of an enslaved person. It might be an overstatement to say that the book "started this great war," but it certainly caused a lot of commotion and had the nation talking about it.
The author was born Harriet Elisabeth Beecher in Litchfield, Connecticut on June 14, 1811, the sixth of 11 children born to the prominent Calvinist preacher Lyman Beecher. Her mother was his Beecher's wife, Roxana Foote, who died when Stowe was only five years old. The Beecher family had a Roxana's maternal grandfather was General Andrew Ward of the Revolutionary War. Her siblings were a talented group. Her sister, Catharine Beecher was educator and also an author. Three of her brothers became ministers: Henry Ward Beecher, who also achieved fame as an abolitionist, and also Charles Beecher and Edward Beecher.
Harriet enrolled in the Hartford Female Seminary which was run by her older sister Catharine. She received something a traditional academic education at a time when this was something very rare for young women to acquire. She was taught the Classics, languages, and mathematics. In 1832, at the age of 21, Harriet Beecher moved to Cincinnati, Ohio to join her father, who was now the president of Lane Theological Seminary. She also joined something known as the Semi-Colon Club, a literary and social club, In that group she met the Beecher sisters, as well as Salmon P. Chase (who would go on to become Governor of Ohio and Secretary of the Treasury under President Lincoln, and Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court.)
Cincinnati was a busy city for trade and shipping due to its location on the Ohio River. Ohio was a free state, while Kentucky, on the other side of the river, was a slave state. Many escaped slaves as well as slave hunters, passed through the city. The city also had a large population of Irish immigrants who worked on the state's canals and railroads. There was tension between the Irish and the escaped slaves because the former worried that the latter were after their jobs. In 1829 a group of Irish workers attacked some of the African-American population, causing havoc in parts of the city. Beecher met with a number of African Americans who had been victims of those attacks. She learned much from talking with them and this contributed to what she would subsequently write about slavery.
In February of 1834 a series of debates on the subject of slavery were held at the Lane Theological Seminary. Harriet Beecher Stowe attended most of these debates and was impressed by the arguments made by Theodore Weld and other abolitionists. Her father and the school's trustees were afraid of violence from anti-abolitionists and they decided to ban further discussions of the topic. The result was that many of the Lane students as well a one of the trustees and one professor left the school and moved as a group to the new Oberlin Collegiate Institute. The trustees of that school had agreed to accept students regardless of race, and to allow discussions of the topic of slavery.
While she was a student at Lane, Harriet met Rev. Calvin Ellis Stowe, a widower who was a professor of Biblical Literature. They were married at the Lane Seminary on January 6, 1836 and had seven children together.
In 1850, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Law, which prohibited the provision of assistance to fugitive slaves and which required law enforcement in free states to assist in their return. By this time the Stowes had moved to Brunswick, Maine, where Rev. Calvin Stoew was now teaching at Bowdoin College. The Stowes supported the Underground Railroad, and would temporarily house fugitive slaves in their home. The death of her eighteen-month-old son, Samuel Charles Stowe is believed to have contributed to her inspiration to write her famous novel. She said, "Having experienced losing someone so close to me, I can sympathize with all the poor, powerless slaves at the unjust auctions. You will always be in my heart Samuel Charles Stowe." On March 9, 1850, Stowe wrote to Gamaliel Bailey, editor of the weekly anti-slavery journal The National Era, and told him that she planned to write a story about slavery. In June of 1851, at the age of 40, she published the first installment of Uncle Tom's Cabin. It was published in serial form in the National Era. Her working title was "The Man That Was a Thing", but she later changed it to "Life Among the Lowly".
Installments were published weekly from June 5, 1851, to April 1, 1852. She was paid $400 for the newspaper serialization of her novel, equivalent to about $14,750 today. Uncle Tom's Cabin was published in book form on March 20, 1852, by John P. Jewett with an initial print run of 5,000 copies. Each of its two volumes included three illustrations and a title-page designed by Hammatt Billings. It was a commercial success. In less than a year, the book sold over 300,000 copies. In December of 1852, as sales began to slow down, Jewett issued an inexpensive edition at 37½ cents each. In Britain and other foreign countries, the book was a great success, though Stowe was not paid for these sales because there was no international copyright agreement in place at the time. In late 1853 Stowe embarked on a lecture tour of Britain and the Glasgow New Association for the Abolition of Slavery set up Uncle Tom's Offering for people to make donations.
The book is about an enslaved man named Tom, a middle-aged man with a wife and children. Tom and Harry, another enslaved man, are sold by their Kentucky slaveholder to Mr. Haley, a coarse slave trader. Harry's mother, Eliza, decided to run away with her son. Eliza departs that night, later making a dangerous crossing over the ice of the Ohio River to escape her pursuers. Tom is sold, an on route, he dives into the river to save the life of a young white girl named Eva. Being grateful to Tom, the child's father buys him from Haley and takes him with the family to their home in New Orleans.
During Eliza's escape, she meets up with her husband George Harris, who had run away previously. They decide to attempt to reach Canada, but are tracked by Tom Loker, a slave hunter hired by Mr. Haley. Eventually Loker and his men trap Eliza and her family, causing George to shoot him in the side. Worried that Loker may die, Eliza convinces George to bring the slave hunter to a nearby Quaker settlement for medical treatment.
After Tom has lived with the St. Clares for two years, Eva grows very ill. Before she dies she experiences a vision of heaven, which she shares with the people around her. St. Clare pledging to free Tom, but before he can follow through on his promise, he dies after being stabbed outside a tavern. His wife reneges on her late husband's pledge and she sells Tom at auction to a vicious plantation owner named Simon Legree. Legree takes an instant dislike to Tom, who refuses Legree's order to whip his fellow slave. Despite Legree's cruelty, Tom refuses to stop reading his Bible and comforting the other slaves as best he can. While at the plantation, Tom meets Cassy, another slave whom Legree used as a sex slave.
Meanwhile, after being healed by the Quakers, Tom Loker helps George, Eliza, and Harry enter Canada from Lake Erie and become free. In Louisiana, Uncle Tom almost succumbs to hopelessness as his faith in God is severely tested by the hard life on the plantation. He encourages Cassy to escape, which she does. When Tom refuses to tell Legree where Cassy has gone, Legree orders his overseers to kill Tom. As Tom is dying, he forgives the overseers who savagely beat him. George Shelby, Arthur Shelby's son, arrives to buy Tom's freedom, but Tom dies shortly after they meet. George Shelby returns to the Kentucky farm, where after his father's death, he frees all his slaves. George Shelby urges them to remember Tom's sacrifice every time they look at his cabin. He decides to lead a pious Christian life just as Uncle Tom did.
Stowe hoped that by writing the book, she would educate Northerners on the realistic nature of slavery and open their eyes to what was happening in the slaveholding states. She also hoped to make people in the South feel more empathetic towards enslaved people. Stowe showed that slavery touched many aspects of society, not just those directly involved. Her novel fired up debate about abolition and slavery, and aroused intense opposition in the South. Within a year, 300 babies in Boston alone were named Eva (one of the book's characters), and a play based on the book opened in New York in November. Southerners countered with a genre of novels known as "anti-Tom novels", which tried to portray Southern society and slavery in more positive terms. None of these matched the popularity of Stowe's book.
After the start of the Civil War, Stowe traveled to Washington, D.C., where she met President Abraham Lincoln on November 25, 1862. Stowe's son later reported that Lincoln greeted her by saying, "so you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war." Her own accounts of their meeting are vague, but she did comment on Lincoln's sense of humor, stating in a letter to her husband that "I had a real funny interview with the President."
Stowe's husband, Calvin Stowe died in 1886, and Harriet's own health began to decline rapidly. She began to show signs of dementia and in 1888, The Washington Post reported she had started writing Uncle Tom's Cabin over again, imagining she was engaged in the book's original composition. Mark Twain was a neighbor of Stowe's in Hartford, and in his autobiography, he gave this account of her final years:
Her mind had decayed, and she was a pathetic figure. She wandered about all the day long in the care of a muscular Irish woman. Among the colonists of our neighborhood the doors always stood open in pleasant weather. Mrs. Stowe entered them at her own free will, and as she was always softly slippered and generally full of animal spirits, she was able to deal in surprises, and she liked to do it. She would slip up behind a person who was deep in dreams and musings and fetch a war whoop that would jump that person out of his clothes. And she had other moods. Sometimes we would hear gentle music in the drawing-room and would find her there at the piano singing ancient and melancholy songs with infinitely touching effect.
Harriet Beecher Stowe died on July 1, 1896, in Hartford, Connecticut, 17 days after her 85th birthday. She is buried in the cemetery at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, along with her husband and their son Henry Ellis.