In the year 1852, one of the best-selling books of the 19th century was published by a 40-year-old Connecticut woman. The book was Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and the woman was Harriet Beecher Stowe, who was born this day on June 14, 1811.
Today, Harriet is remembered as a towering figure in the anti-slavery movement in America during the Civil War era. We honor her today on the 214th anniversary of her birth.
Harriet’s early life heavily influenced her later views on the issue of slavery. Harriet was the daughter of a Calvinist preacher, who may or may not have been an abolitionist. Her mother died when she was 5 years old, and she was raised by her father. Harriet attended a religious school in Hartford before moving to Ohio with the family in 1832, after her father was named president of a seminary in Cincinnati. At the seminary she met her future husband, Reverend Calvin Stowe, and they married in 1836 when she was 25. They later moved to Maine, where Calvin took a teaching job at Bowdoin College. During her years in Ohio and Maine, Harriet was exposed to the intense debates taking place in the North over the issue of slavery in the western territories. While Harriet had never traveled to the South, she had witnessed examples of the impact of slavery in Ohio, where many escaped slaves lived and worked, and where she saw the persecution of blacks taking place in the streets of Cincinnati (and the city itself witnessed several race riots while she lived there). By the 1850’s, Harriet and her husband had become vocal critics of slavery, and were direct participants in the Underground Railroad.
Harriet made her first attempt at writing about slavery in June 1851, just months after Congress passed the infamous Compromise of 1850, which effectively supported the institution of slavery in the South by including the Fugitive Slave Act. Her work first appeared as a series of newspaper articles, which ultimately were compiled into book form and published in 1852 under the title “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” The book was an over-night success, selling hundreds of thousands of copies, and Harriet became a celebrity; she traveled throughout America and England on a lecture tour the following year. She also became a target for Southern pro-slavery advocates, who attacked her, and published their own works purporting to defend the institution of slavery. When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Harriet travelled to Washington D.C. to meet with President Abraham Lincoln. The details of that meeting are vague, and Harriet herself described it in cryptic terms: “I had a really funny interview with the President,” she wrote to her husband.
Harriet’s post-Civil War years were spent in various pursuits, including as a magazine editor, a founder of an art school, and an advocate for women’s rights. She was a friend of Mark Twain, who spent time with her towards the end of her life. Twain later wrote that “her mind was decayed, and she was a pathetic figure.” Harriet’s husband died in 1886, and a few years later there were newspaper reports that she was suffering from dementia. She lived another ten years, however, dying on July 1, 1896 in Hartford at the age of 85. Today, the house in Maine where she wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a historical site, as is the house in Hartford where she lived the last two decades of her life (Mark Twain lived next door!). In 1986, Harriet was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame.
So today, we honor the memory of Harriet Beecher Stowe, one of the leading anti-slavery voices in America in the 19th century, whose writings had a major impact on our national consciousness about the evils of slavery.
