“So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war.”
Imagine it. Abraham Lincoln, the President of the United States during the Civil War, meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Though the accuracy of this quote is speculative, Stowe’s famous book surely had a large impact on people of both the North and South in 1852. A story that reveals the injustice toward slaves of that time and portrays them as human beings with reasonable thoughts and feelings, it enraged slave owners and galvanized abolitionists to war. Tension had been mounting as new states joined the country, and people everywhere argued about whether they should be free or slave states. The argument had already advanced to the point of bloodshed, but now the floodgates were open.
Born in 1811 to a family of preachers, teachers, and abolitionists, Harriet Beecher Stowe grew up listening to her father’s sermons in his church in Litchfield, Connecticut. At the dinner table, she and her ten brothers and sisters would often engage with their parents in animated discussions, learning how to be persuasive and present a good argument. From an early age, the girl showed signs of literary interest, and at seven, she won an essay contest at her school, earning the pride of her parents. At thirteen years old, Stowe began schooling at Hartford Female Seminary, which had been founded by her older sister Catharine. Only five years later, she was already teaching there as well.
When Harriet Beecher was twenty, her family moved to Cincinnati, where her father accepted a job as the president of Lane Seminary. They lived on the banks of the Ohio River, a boundary between free and slave states. She continued to teach, but news of the trouble between the North and South was unavoidable, and the trouble would soon come to her own town.
About a year after the young schoolteacher married Professor Calvin Ellis Stowe, a riot of Kentucky slave owners stormed across the river into Cincinnati. A student at her father’s seminary had published an anti-slavery newspaper there, which had angered the slave owners. They rampaged the newspaper office and tossed the papers into the river, causing great turmoil in the city. Seeing the destruction they had caused, Stowe was determined to do something to help abolish slavery, writing, “No one can have the system of slavery brought before him without an irrepressible desire to do something; and what is there to be done?”
In 1850, someone did do something—for, not against, slavery. Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Law, saying that slaves were no longer free in the North. Slave owners were permitted to search for slaves in free states, capture them, and bring them back to the South. Harriet Beecher Stowe, now living in Maine, felt angered that no one seemed to understand the true picture of slavery. Then she received a letter from her sister-in-law, who wrote, “If I could use my pen as you can I would write something to make the whole world see what an accursed thing slavery is!”
Harriet Beecher Stowe would write something. And she did.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin began as a short serial story in a newspaper but progressed on to become a novel that would continue to be appreciated by readers for decades. When it was published in 1852, to Stowe’s surprise, it became popular instantly, and she gained money and respect from readers and writers around the world. In England, Dickens read it, and in Russia, Tolstoy read it. Northerners read it, and Southerners read it. Many people challenged the accuracy of the novel’s depictions of slavery, and one woman even countered Stowe with a book of her own: Aunt Phillis’s Cabin; Or, Southern Life as It Is. But this did not stop the overwhelming realization that thousands of people were coming to. It did not stop the impending war that would begin only nine years later.
This was not Harriet Beecher Stowe’s first novel. As a prolific author, she wrote for over fifty years. There had been books before this, and there would be books after it. However, of all her works, Uncle Tom’s Cabin affected the world and the people around her the most. In its time, this book was the second-most bestselling book, right after the Bible. Because Stowe lifted up her pen and decided to change the world, readers and writers then and now learn much from her example of determination to stop what she knew was wrong.
Picture Credit:
https://storage.googleapis.com/clio-images/13049.22604.jpg
Sources:
https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/harriet-beecher-stowe
https://www.harrietbeecherstowecenter.org/harriet-beecher-stowe/harriet-beecher-stowe-life/
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/80760/10-things-you-may-not-know-about-harriet-beecher-stowe
https://manoflabook.com/wp/fun-facts-friday-harriet-beecher-stowe-2/
Foster, Genevieve. Abraham Lincoln’s World. Expanded by Joanna Foster, expanded ed., Beautiful Feet Books, July 2001, pp. 77-251.