Harriet Beecher Stowe

A Personal Portrait and Origins of a Magnum Opus

            In 1852, a literary explosion in novel form rocked the United States striking to the core of regional conscience.  Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a national indictment of the hotly contested slavery issue.  Previously a poor and unknown housewife, Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of this phenomenon, became a household name overnight.  Responding to her own compulsions in the novel’s composition, she was astonished at the furor surrounding her offering.  Biographers and scholars have since delved into Stowe’s pre-best-seller days in an effort to isolate motives.  Perhaps the clearest evidence for the birth of Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a strongly developed moral sense inculcated at an early age and forged in the childhood fires of one the more remarkable early nineteenth century families.  

            On June 14, 1811, Litchfield, Connecticut was unaware of its newest citizen’s future fame.  People only knew that the Lyman Beecher family had another little girl christened Harriet Elizabeth Beecher.  Nurture played a vital role in shaping young Harriet’s destiny.  Her father, Lyman Beecher, has received scholarly evaluations spanning the spectrum from severely censorial to open admiration.  It is certain that he was a unique individual whose overwhelming energy and vocal stance on issues translated itself to his children.

            As a Calvinistic reverend, Lyman Beecher operated in sermon mode much of the time.  E. Bruce Kirkham observes this in his The Making of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, writing that Beecher had “…fun arguing points of theology at the dinner table.”[1]  Raised on such a steady diet of rhetoric, it is not surprising that the Beecher family should have produced an astounding display of talent in the oratorical and literary fields.  Noel B. Gerson records a quote to this effect in the excellent biography Harriet Beecher Stowe saying, “Lyman Beecher was called ‘the father of more brains than any other man in America.’ “[2] The moral debate was ever a favorite to him and his offspring.  This method of expression became a standard presence in Harriet’s prolific literary career.  It appears multiple times in Uncle Tom’s Cabin where Harriet interrupts the narrative to address the “dear reader” directly for a long discourse in best lecture style.[3] 

            It was soon obvious to the Beecher family that Harriet had a nearly insatiable propensity for the printed word.  Literacy instruction began at the age of four, and she ingested large portions of the King James Bible and Book of Common Prayer at the feet of her grandmother and aunt.  Gerson tells us, “Before she was eight, she proved to Lyman Beecher’s satisfaction that she could master the content of adult books.”[4] She was given the run of his library.  This prodigious intake coupled with the Beecher disposition for eloquence inevitably produced an equally vast output.  The first hint was a prize-winning essay written at the age of eleven entitled, “Can the Immortality of the Soul Be Proved by the Light of Nature?”[5]

            Harriet obtained her formal education at the Hartford Female Seminary, a girls’ school begun by her innovative sister Catharine Beecher Stowe who had acted on a desire for broader educational opportunities for women.  Harriet was an apt student who found time for writing poems and numerous letters despite being set to teaching classes of her peers by her sister. 

            In 1832, Harriet moved with her family to Cincinnati, Ohio where she later met and married Calvin Stowe, a learned and distinguished Bible scholar.  It was here that Harriet made her most significant debut as a writer prior to Uncle Tom’s Cabin fame.  She became a regular contributor to the area magazines with her first piece being “Modern Uses of Language” published in the Western Monthly Magazine.[6]  With the discovery that she could earn an income through relieving her compulsory urge for writing, Harriet thereafter regarded her work as a supplement to her husband’s meager salary as a professor.  It was often that her pieces barely averted bankruptcy. 

            The US political climate throughout the 1830’s and 40’s was stormy.  The national debate over slavery in the Southern states steadily escalated toward a climax. Slavery advocates and abolitionists engaged in bitter disputes, the rabid William Lloyd Garrison one of the more extreme examples who in his paper, The Liberator, attacked anyone and everyone who did not support him in calling for immediate emancipation.[7]

            Cincinnati in its location near the slave-holding state of Kentucky was rife with the opposing currents.  It is significant that Harriet’s writings make almost no mention of the subject prior to her novel examining it minutely.  She was certainly not unaware of the issue having paid a visit to a slave-holding plantation across the Ohio River with a friend Mary Dutton in 1833,[8] however she felt no particular calling to add her opinion in print.  Her thoughts as expressed to friends were moderately anti-slavery advocating “gradual emancipation through purchase and colonization in Liberia.”[9]  Her opposition to slavery was always based on her deeply held beliefs in God and his love for all mankind.  Dehumanization through being regarded as mere merchandise jarred horribly on Stowe’s moral sensibility.  Yet she believed Garrison’s plan would ultimately harm both slaves and the South who depended on them.  Thus she supported gradual emancipation.  Then came the Compromise of 1850 containing the Fugitive Slave Law. 

            The Compromise of 1850 attempted to mollify both Northern and Southern states over the issue of whether slavery would be allowed in the new states being admitted to the Union.  As a bone to the South, on outlawing slavery in the new state of California, the legislature enacted the Fugitive Slave Law that in effect declared that any free Negro residing in the US could be apprehended as a fugitive if a man were to identify himself as his master corroborated with the sworn testimony of a compatriot.  Abolitionists were incensed.  “The Two Altars”, an explicitly anti-slavery article appeared in 1851 marking Harriet’s debut as an abolitionist writer.[10]

            1851 also found Harriet writing for an abolitionist newspaper called the National Era edited by one Gamaliel Bailey.  With feelings at a fever pitch, Harriet received a letter from her sister-in-law observing, “If I could use a pen as you can, I would write something that would make this whole nation feel what an accursed thing slavery is.”[11]  Immediately following this exhortation, a commission from Mr. Bailey himself in the form of an advance payment on more anti-slavery literature and Harriet’s own deeply offended moral view on God’s love for humanity demolished the last barriers.  Harriet informed Mr. Bailey that she had found inspiration for not a mere short story but a serial that could turn into novel.  Uncle Tom’s Cabin had been conceived. 

            Readers of the National Era eagerly scanned the weekly issues for the next chapter of Harriet’s gripping installments depicting places and practices easily recognizable to them.  Originally estimated to be approximately a six-month undertaking, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s creativity, drawing on her experience and imagination, stretched to nearly a year.  When it finally drew to a close with the harrowing death of Uncle Tom at the hands of the sadistic Simon Legree[12], publishers detected a profitable venture.  Some thought it too volatile for Southern audiences, but John P. Jewett, a Boston publisher, carried the day and produced the first edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.[13] Three thousand copies were sold the first week, and Harriet received a royalty check of ten thousand dollars.  Truly her morals had served her well. 

            The public reaction to Uncle Tom’s Cabin was predictable.  The South was violently hostile, and the North had found additional ammunition.  Certainly Harriet was bewildered.  Her conception of God’s love had led her in her mind to attack the system of slavery through her novel rather than individuals.  She held a somewhat naïve belief that if only humane minds on both sides could “perceive its evils”, they would be led “to turn against it.”[14]  The attacks on her veracity proved otherwise.  Uncle Tom’s Cabin, instead of being the moderate chiding intended to nudge the nation toward abolition, drove a further wedge that led inexorably to a civil war.

Works Cited

Adams, John R. Harriet Beecher Stowe. New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1963.

Gerson, Noel B. Harriet Beecher Stowe. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1976

Kirkham, E. Bruce. The Building of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Knoxville: The University of                 Tennessee Press, 1977.

Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Edited by Elizabeth Ammons. New York:               Norton, 1994.

Wagenknecht, Edward. Harriet Beecher Stowe The Known and the Unknown. New York:             Oxford University Press, 1965. 

Always be certain your character remains plausible.  If in your narrative, you wrench him/her into a direction incompatible with the portrait painted in the reader's mind, you will lose your audience. 

These thoughts remain foremost in my mind from the Creative Writing class I was blessed to attend a few years ago.  I am experiencing the cognitive dissonance created when this rule of thumb is flagrantly breached.  Indeed I am weary of the near constant contradictions presented in my current read.  A demon who did not kill a woman because he wished to maintain his integrity....um.. Hello? I thought it was a demon and incomparably evil.  I was not aware that they possessed anything resembling integrity.

The mighty monkey prince, Sugreeva, married to a beautiful woman and surrounded by other lovely women??  Wait a minute..I thought they were all monkeys. Are they somehow mixed up or they interchangeable or is it...? Sorry I'm confused.    

It really becomes a labor and somewhat of a dizzying prospect to be constantly shifting the schema to accomodate the random whims of the tale.  But then again..the 300 million plus gods in Hindu culture (as we learned in Asian Civilization class) would be enough to daunt even the hardiest soul.