Stowe: what sort of woman I am!

"So you want to know what sort of woman I am!" wrote Harriet Beecher Stowe with obvious surprise. The letter, dated from Andover, Massachusetts, on February 16, 1853, was written in response to that request and Stowe happily complied. She described herself as, "To begin with... I am a little bit of a woman, — somewhat more than forty, about as thin and dry as a pinch of snuff; never very much to look at in my best days, and looking like a used-up article now."

Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin had been published in book form slightly less than a year earlier. Considering the recipient of Stowe's letter was a stranger to her, she was quite open, describing that Uncle Tom's Cabin was inspired in part by her own poor state and "awful scenes and bitter sorrows" of her own life, including the "peculiar bitterness" and "almost cruel suffering" of the death of one of her children. She was equally forthcoming about her poverty, even noting she did not own enough teacups for a family visit to her home. "But then I was abundantly enriched with wealth of another sort," she wrote. Her first payments from publishing stories, she said, was used to purchase a feather-bed, "the most profitable investment" she could think of at the time — she compared it to the philosopher's stone.

Now, Stowe noted, she was working on a follow-up to her novel: "It will contain all the facts and documents on which that story was founded, and an immense body of facts, reports of trials, legal documents, and testimony of people now living South, which will more than confirm every statement in 'Uncle Tom's Cabin'..." The book, which would be published later that year as A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, was causing her difficulty because of the subject matter. "This horror, this nightmare abomination!" she wrote of slavery, "can it be in my country? It lies like lead on my heart, it shadows my life with sorrow."

Stowe's letter was addressed to Eliza Lee Follen, herself a published author, which may explain why Stowe was so forthcoming about personal details. She admitted to having felt already acquainted since her girlhood, having made "daily use of your poems for children." In fact, years ago, Stowe had considered writing to Follen to introduce herself and thank her for her work. In her first book, published 1839, Follen included an anti-slavery poem, "Remember the Slave," which Stowe almost certainly admired:

Mother, whene'er around your child
      You clasp your arms in love;
And when, with grateful joy, you raise
      Your eyes to God above, —

Think of the negro mother, when
      Her child is torn away,
Sold for a little slave — O, then,
      For that poor mother pray...

Ye Christians! ministers of Him
      Who came to make men free,

When, at the Almighty Maker’s throne
      You bend the suppliant knee,—

From the deep fountains of your soul
      Then let your prayers ascend

For the poor slave, who hardly knows
      That God is still his friend.

Let all who know that God is just,
      That Jesus came to save,

Unite in the most holy cause
      Of the forsaken slave.

The noblest work by woman done

Former Massachusetts governor and member of the House of Representatives William Claflin invited people to a garden party at his home in Newtonville, Massachusetts to celebrate the 70th birthday of Harriet Beecher Stowe. For that special occasion, held June 14, 1882 (actually her 71st), fellow anti-slavery writer John Greenleaf Whittier wrote a poem, "A Greeting":

Thrice welcome from the Land of Flowers
And golden-fruited orange bowers
To this sweet, green-turfed June of ours!
To her who, in our evil time,
Dragged into light the nation's crime
With strength beyond the strength of men,
And, mightier than their swords, her pen!
To her who world-wide entrance gave
To the log-cabin of the slave;
Made all his wrongs and sorrows known,
And all earth's languages his own, —
North, South, and East and West, made all
The common air electrical,
Until the o'ercharged bolts of heaven
Blazed down, and every chain was riven!

Like Stowe, Whittier had also used his pen in the war against slavery, composing several poems for the cause and also editing an abolitionist newspaper. Stowe's 1852 novel Uncle Tom's Cabin had become the highest selling novel of the generation and was cited as a major factor in unifying northerners against slavery. But Whittier's poem also praises her other works; he mentioned several of her "fireside stories, grave or gay," including Oldtown Folks. He continues:

To her at threescore years and ten
Be tributes of the tongue and pen;
Be honor, praise, and heart-thanks given,
The loves of earth, the hopes of heaven!

Ah, dearer than the praise that stirs
The air to-day, our love is hers!
She needs no guaranty of fame
Whose own is linked with Freedom's name.
Long ages after ours shall keep
Her memory living while we sleep;
The waves that wash our gray coast lines,
The winds that rock the Southern pines,
Shall sing of her; the unending years
Shall tell her tale in unborn ears.
And when, with sins and follies past,
Are numbered color-hate and caste,
White, black, and red shall own as one
The noblest work by woman done.

Stowe and Lady Byron: like mist before the sun

Perhaps the strangest of literary friendships was that of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Anne Isabella Noel Byron, the wife of the British poet Lord Byron. The two had met during Stowe's European visit in 1853 (the year after the publication of her book Uncle Tom's Cabin). Stowe, in fact, was quickly enamored with the widow, nearly twenty years her elder. After continuing her travels, she wrote a letter to her new friend, dated June 5, 1853:

Dear Friend, — I left you with a strange sort of yearning, throbbing feeling; you make me feel quite as I did years ago, a sort of girlishness quite odd for me...

I often think how strange it is that I should know you — you who were a sort of legend of my early days; that I should love you is only a natural result. You seem to me to stand on the confines of that land where the poor formalities which separate hearts here pass like mist before the sun, and therefore it is that I feel the language of love must not startle you as strange or unfamiliar. You are so nearly there in spirit that I fear with every adieu that it may be the last; yet did you pass within the veil I should not feel you lost.

I have got past the time when I feel that my heavenly friends are lost by going there. I feel them nearer, rather than farther off. So good-by, dear, dear friend, and if you see morning in our Father's house before I do, carry my love to those that wait for me, and if I pass first, you will find me there, and we shall love each other forever. 

The two women maintained a friendship until Lady Byron's death. In those years, she had revealed the truth about her relationship with Lord Byron and his affairs. After Lady Byron's death, rumors spread about her sins and Stowe rose to her defense in a book, appropriately titled Lady Byron Vindicated: A History of the Byron Controversy (1869). In it, Stowe painted Lord Byron as a licentious, immoral man who had an affair with his half-sister. Lady Byron, Stowe wrote, was innocent of wrongdoing. The book was not well-received and Stowe was soon piled into her own controversy.

A word for freedom and humanity

Calvin Stowe was preparing to move to Andover, Massachusetts, where he would teach at the Phillips Academy. Meanwhile, his wife was making the greatest decision of her life: Harriet Beecher Stowe was preparing to write something to signify her stance against slavery. In a letter dated March 9, 1851, she wrote to Gamaliel Bailey, editor of the abolitionist newspaper The National Era:

Up to this year I have always felt that I had no particular call to meddle with this subject, and I dreaded to expose even my own mind to the full force of its exciting power. But I feel now that the time is come when even a woman or a child who can speak a word for freedom and humanity is bound to speak. The Carthagenian women in the last peril of their state cut off their hair for bowstrings to give to the defenders of their country; and such peril and shame as now hangs over this country is worse than Roman slavery, and I hope every woman who can write will not be silent.

The Stowe family was living in Brunswick, Maine at the time. Though she had never cared for slavery (much like her other family members, including father Lyman Beecher and brother Henry Ward Beecher), her inspiration to speak out came in the form of a divine intervention: while at church, she suddenly had a vision of a dying slave. The first serialized installment of the book which became Uncle Tom's Cabin was published in May; originally planned as a four-part sketch, that number rose to 40.

The title character, Uncle Tom, has become a negative stereotype - though not because of the book but because of an unauthorized stage adaptation in the 19th century. Stowe's character is a suffering though patient character, strengthened by his religion. In fact, like Stowe himself, he has a divine vision which urges him onward. After being sold to the villainous and cruel Simon Legree, who tries to break Tom's spirit and his faith. Tom's vision elevates him to a Messiah-like state:

When a heavy weight presses the soul to the lowest level at which endurance is possible, there is an instant and desperate effort of every physical and moral nerve to throw off the weight; and hence the heaviest anguish often precedes a return tide of joy and courage. So was it now with Tom. The atheistic taunts of his cruel master sunk his before dejected soul to the lowest ebb; and, though the hand of faith still held to the eternal rock, it was with a numb, despairing grasp. Tom sat, like one stunned, at the fire. Suddenly everything around him seemed to fade, and a vision rose before him of one crowned with thorns, buffeted and bleeding. Tom gazed, in awe and wonder, at the majestic patience of the face; the deep, pathetic eyes thrilled him to his inmost heart; his soul woke, as, with floods of emotion, he stretched out his hands and fell upon his knees, — when, gradually, the vision changed: the sharp thorns became rays of glory; and, in splendor inconceivable, he saw that same face bending compassionately towards him, and a voice said, "He that overcometh shall sit down with me on my throne, even as I also overcame, and am set down with my Father on his throne."

*For some of the information in this post, I am indebted to Joan D. Hedrick's biography Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life (1995).

Stowe: we get into regular gales

On November 2, 1872, Harriet Beecher Stowe continued her public reading tour, this time in Bangor, Maine. Her first reading ever took place less than two months earlier. It was a far cry from her tour of England in 1853, during which Stowe merely stood up for her audiences, accepted their applause, and sat down; the actual reading was done by her brothers. Her motivation for the tour was simple: she needed the money. Each audience member (150 to 1,500, depending on the venue) paid between 50 and 75 cents to hear the "most noted woman in America" according to one billing.

The reading was encouraged in part by her publisher James T. Fields, though Stowe admitted, "I am appalled by finding myself booked to read." Billed as "the world-famous author of Uncle Tom's Cabin," she naturally chose to read sections from her best-selling novel. But Stowe also presented selections from some of her New England-themed short stories and The Pearl of Orr's Island.

Despite her reticence at the beginning of the tour, she eventually admitted she enjoyed her audience's reaction: "how they do laugh! We get into regular gales." And, of course, her most important motivation: "it is as easy a way of making money as I have ever tried, though no way of making money is perfectly easy." Despite the success of her writing, Stowe was a bit to willingly parted with her earnings, often donating to various causes or to those in need.

Still, the tour proved rewarding for Stowe. In Bangor, a woman who was deaf traveled 50 miles just to see Stowe and admitted, "I'd rather see you than the Queen." Stowe might also have felt at home: two decades earlier, while writing Uncle Tom's Cabin, she lived in Brunswick, Maine, only slightly southwest of Bangor.

Bicentennial of Harriet Beecher Stowe

200 years ago, on June 14, 1811, Harriet Beecher was born in Litchfield, Connecticut. Later Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, she would earn fame as the author of the highest-selling novel of the century, Uncle Tom's Cabin.

On her 70th birthday, a celebration was held in her honor in the form of a garden party. She gave a short speech and concluded: "Let us never doubt. Everything that ought to happen is going to happen."

In her centennial year, 1911, her son and grandson published what they termed a memoir; they would not use the term "biography." As they wrote in their preface: " It is rather the story of a real character; telling, not so much what she did as what she was, and how she became what she was." They also claimed the town of her birth inspired her lifelong love of nature. As Stowe wrote:

My earliest recollections of Litchfield are those of its beautiful scenery, which impressed and formed my mind long before I had words to give names to my emotions, or could analyze my mental processes. To the west of us rose a smoothbosomed hill, called Prospect Hill; and many a pensive, wondering hour have I sat at our playroom window, watching the glory of the wonderful sunsets that used to burn themselves out amid voluminous wreathings or castellated turrets of clouds proper to a mountainous region.

On the east of us lay another upland, called Chestnut Hills, whose sides were wooded with a rich growth of forest trees, whose change of tint and verdure, from the first misty tints of spring green through the deepening hues of summer into the rainbow glories of autumn, was a subject of constant remark and of pensive contemplation to us children. We heard them spoken of by older people and pointed out to visitors, and came to take pride in them as a sort of birthright.

She died close to home in Hartford, Connecticut about two weeks after her 85th birthday.

A new story by Mrs. H. B. Stowe

Harriet Beecher Stowe alerted the editor of the National Era, Gamaliel Bailey, that her new story would "extend three or four numbers" but it would "be ready in two to three weeks." In fact, Stowe's project turned to be a much bigger undertaking and she missed her own deadline. The headline on May 8, 1851, seemed simple enough: "A New Story by Mrs. Stowe." The body of the article promised "the publication of a new story by Mrs. H. B. Stowe, the title of which will be, 'UNCLE TOM'S CABIN, OR THE MAN THAT WAS A THING'." Bailey warned his readers not to "neglect to renew their subscriptions."

In the process of writing the serialized novel, Stowe knew she would be writing something far longer than her previous work. The idea first came to her in a vision: one Sunday morning at church in Brunswick, Maine, she saw the image of an enslaved man being beaten by two others at the orders of a white master. As she wrote:

My vocation is simply that of a painter, and my object will be to hold up in the most lifelike and graphic manner possible Slavery, its reverses, changes, and the negro character, which I have had ample opportunities for studying.

Throughout a cold winter, she wrote (sometimes skipping meals) in her home at Bowdoin College. She told her husband she would show "the capabilities of liberated blacks to take care of themselves" — a topic over which she soon obsessed. Even when she traveled, she continued working on her novel, sometimes moved to tears by her own scenes. The project grew and grew and the author ultimately changed its subtitle to "Life Among the Lowly." What was originally a four-part sketch became a 40-part novel. Its first section was not published the first week after Bailey's announcement but about a month later, on June 5. It continued weekly until April 1 of the next year. In book form, it became the highest-selling novel of the 19th century.

Stowe: I should certainly fall in love with you

"Well, my dear," wrote Harriet Beecher to a friend on January 6, 1836, "about half an hour more and your old friend, companion, schoolmate, sister, etc., will cease to be Hatty Beecher." That day, she married Calvin Ellis Stowe, a teacher at the seminary school where her father was president. "I have been dreading and dreading the time... and lo! it has come," her letter continued, "and I feel nothing at all." Nothing, in this case, referring to the absence of fear or dread.

Though they were frequently separated for one reason or another, the couple managed to have seven children (some of whom died tragically; their first-born were twins, born almost exactly nine months after their marriage). On one of those occasions when they were apart, Mrs. Stowe wrote to her husband that she was "dependent" on him: "There are a thousand favorite subjects on which I could talk with you better than with any one else. If you were not already my dearly loved husband I should certainly fall in love with you." In 1842, Mr. Stowe wrote to his wife, "I want you to come home as quick as you can. The fact is I cannot live without you... There is no woman like you in this wide world."

Though today known mostly for her 1852 novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe was a prolific writer of novels and short stories. Her book Oldtown Folks hearkened back to an earlier United States, before the Civil War, and was inspired heavily by her husband's New England years; the narrator, Horace Holyoke, was born in Natick, Massachusetts, just like Mr. Stowe. One section in particular seems to hearken to Mrs. Stowe's own personal struggles in becoming a domestic housewife:

My mother's gayety of animal spirits, her sparkle and vivacity, all went with the first year of marriage. The cares of housekeeping, the sicknesses of maternity and nursing, drained her dry of all that was bright and attractive; and my only recollections of her are of a little quiet, faded, mournful woman, who looked on my birth and that of my brother Bill as the greatest of possible misfortunes, and took care of us with a discouraged patience, more as if she pitied us for being born than as if she loved us.

The soon to be Mrs. Stowe wrote her letter in an effort to comfort her friend, who was recently engaged and apparently nervous about her own impending marriage. For the information in this post, I am indebted to Philip McFarland's Loves of Harriet Beecher Stowe (2007).

Whittier, Child, Sumner, Beecher: Abolitionists after slavery

From his home in Amesbury, Massachusetts, John Greenleaf Whittier wrote to Lydia Maria Child on September 20, 1874. "I make many new friends," he began, "but my heart, as I grow older, turns longingly to the surviving friends of my early years, who had shared in the struggles and triumphs of a great cause." Whittier was referring to the anti-slavery cause, for which both he and Child were strong advocates.

By 1874, both were getting old (Whittier, though only 66, noted in the letter, "We are all growing old and nearing the unknown shore") and the movement against slavery was won. In fact, Child had sent Whittier an image of one of abolitionism's greatest champion, Senator Charles Sumner, who had died only recently. Without their cause, however, both writers continued writing. Whittier mentioned that his "little book," Hazel-Blossoms, would be published soon and promised to send a copy to Child. The two were dear friends after all: "We have so much in common," Whittier noted. "We so nearly agree on so many points."

But all was not well in the world. Whittier referenced a growing scandal in New York involving another anti-slavery man, one who used his voice more often than his pen: Henry Ward Beecher, brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe (whose own anti-slavery writing allegedly caused a whole war). "I have loved Beecher so much!" Whittier wrote, never actually mentioning the details of the sex scandal in Brooklyn. "I cannot believe him guilty as is charged, and yet it looks very dark." He called it "a most mournful tragedy."

Stowe's "most amazing adventure"

After two decades of successful writings, including Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1852, prompted Harriet Beecher Stowe's lecture tour. Her first public reading was held on Springfield, Massachusetts on September 13, 1872. She spent most of September through December in front of various audiences in an experience she referred to it as "the most amazing adventure" of her later years.

Stowe's decision to go on a reading tour despite a slight aversion to public speaking was purely practical: she needed money. Two years earlier, she had to sell (at a loss) her home, Oakholm, in Hartford, Connecticut, after living there only five years. At the same time, she was investing in property in Florida at the suggestion of family, losing some $40,000 in the process. She wrote incessantly as a means of income: books like Old Town Folks, Little Pussy Willow, My Wife and I, and Pink and White Tyranny were published within only three years.

The reality is that Stowe's financial woes were not due to a lack of income. Uncle Tom's Cabin, after all, earned over $10,000 in its first three months (compared to The Scarlet Letter earning about $1,500 for Nathaniel Hawthorne over 14 years). Stowe's problems came from her expenses: she was a philanthropist and often gave her money away.

These lectures by Stowe, over 60 years old, billed her as "a distinguished lady whose works have been read wherever the English language is spoken." Tickets were fifty or seventy-five cents each and anywhere from 150 to 1,500 people attended. She began a second tour the next fall, traveling much farther than she did in 1872.

*Thanks to Philip McFarland for much of the information from this post, included in his biography Loves of Harriet Beecher Stowe (2007).

Death of Harriet Beecher Stowe

Though primarily remembered for one novel, one which was the highest-selling of the century, Harriet Beecher Stowe (pictured at left, 1886) wrote much more than Uncle Tom's Cabin. In 1889, however, she suffered a crippling stroke. It took a major toll on her and she realized she was nearing her death. As she wrote to Oliver Wendell Holmes four years later:

I am passing the last days of my life in the city where I passed my school-girl life [Hartford, Connecticut]. My physical health, since I recovered from my alarming illness, I had four years ago has been excellent... [but] my mental condition might be called nomadic.

By 1894, her children noted their mother's change. "She herself is changed very very much. Should you meet her without knowing who she was, I don't think you would recognize her at all. Her hair is snowywhite, her face very thin... and has the vague wondering expression of infancy."

By the end of June, Stowe was confined to her bed with brain congestion and apparent paralysis. Stowe died on July 1, 1896, surrounded by family at her home at Nook Farm. It was about two weeks after her 85th birthday.

"I love everybody," Stowe once wrote in a letter. Years later, her son and biographer wrote, "She was impelled by love and did what she did, and wrote what she did, under the impulse of love."

*Much of the information from this post comes from Philip McFarland's The Loves of Harriet Beecher Stowe, which closes (quite poetically) with the emphasis on Stowe's love.

Uncle Tom's Cabin published

After serializing it in 40 parts for the National Era, Harriet Beecher Stowe agreed to turn her story into a book. Uncle Tom's Cabin was published in that format on March 20, 1852. It was a major success, named a best-seller second only to the Bible. It sold 300,000 copies in its first year alone.

The book tells a fictional story based partly on the autobiography of Josiah Henson, a black man who escaped from slavery in Maryland and helped others settle down and become self-sufficient in Canada. Presented as a sentimental novel, the story tried to draw emotional reactions from its readers. Stowe did this intentionally. In particular, the death of the character Eva drew solid fan support, such that it is claimed that, the year of its publication, 300 girls were named Eva in Boston alone.

Stowe's book also is a bit heavy-handed as a Christian tale, with her narrative voice often interjecting to comment on Christian values. Ultimately, she condemns slavery as immoral and inherently evil. Though it has occasionally been criticized in modern times for perpetuating or even creating stereotypes of black characters (though, in reality, those criticisms are better aimed at the stage version of the book, created without Stowe's approval), there is no denying its purpose: to call upon Americans to end slavery.

The book swiftly drew condemnation from Southerners, including the writer William Gilmore Simms, who said the book's sentiments were completely untrue. In fact, the book spurned a whole genre of literature known as "Anti-Tom" novels. In the northern part of the country, readers were strongly turned against slavery, particularly aiming at the Fugitive Slave Law. The polarizing effect of the book (and, of course, slavery in general) later led to the Civil War — which, in turn, led to the legendary (perhaps apocryphal) meeting between Harriet Beecher Stowe and Abraham Lincoln. Legend has it that the President referred to her as "the little lady who started this great war."