Dates: (June 14, 1811 - July 1, 1896)
Also: Harriet Beecher Stowe - profile with outline of basic facts about Harriet Beecher Stowe
Harriet Beecher Stowe was born in Connecticut in 1811, the seventh child of her father, the noted Congregationalist preacher, Lyman Beecher, and his first wife, Roxana Foote. Her mother died when she was four, and Harriet's oldest sister, Catherine, took over care of the children. Even after Lyman Beecher remarried, and Harriet had a good relationship with her stepmother, Harriet's relationship with Catherine remained strong.
After five years at Ma'am Kilbourn's school, Harriet enrolled in Litchfield Academy, winning an award (and her father's praise) when she was twelve for an essay titled, "Can the immortality of the Soul be Proved by the Light of Nature?"
Harriet's sister Catherine founded a school for girls in Hartford, Hartford Female Seminary, and Harriet enrolled there. Soon, Catherine had her young sister teaching at the school.
In 1832, Lyman Beecher was appointed president of Lane Theological Seminary, and he moved his family -- including both Harriet and Catherine -- to Cincinnati. There, Harriet associated in literary circles with the likes of Salmon P. Chase (later governor, senator, member of Lincoln's cabinet, and Supreme Court chief justice) and Calvin Ellis Stowe, a Lane professor of biblical theology, whose wife, Eliza, became a close friend of Harriet.
Catherine Beecher started a school in Cincinnati, the Western Female Institute, and Harriet became a teacher there. Harriet began writing professionally: first she co-wrote a geography textbook with her sister, Catherine, and then sold several stories.
Cincinnati was across the Ohio from Kentucky, a slave state, and Harriet also visited a plantation there and saw slavery for the first time. She also talked with escaped slaves. Her association with anti-slavery activists like Salmon Chase meant that she began questioning the "peculiar institution."
After her friend Eliza died, Harriet's friendship with Calvin Stowe deepenened, and they were married in 1836. Calvin Stowe was, in addition to his work in biblical theology, an active proponent of public education. AFtr their marriage, Harriet Beecher Stowe continued to write, selling short stories and articles to popular magazines. She gave birth to twin daughters in 1837, and to six more children in fifteen years, using her earnings to pay for household help.
In 1850, Calvin Stowe obtained a professorship at Bowdoin College in Maine, and the family moved, Harriet giving birth to her last child after the move. In 1852, Calvin Stowe would move to Andover Theological Seminary, from which he'd graduated in 1829, and the family would to Massachusetts.
1850 was also the year of the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, and in 1851, Harriet's son 18-month-old died of cholera. Harriet had a vision during a communion service at the college, a vision of a dying slave, and she determined to bring that vision to life.
Harriet began writing a story about slavery, and used her own experience of visiting a plantation and of talking with ex-slaves. She also did much more research, even contacting Frederick Douglass to ask to be put in touch with ex-slaves who could ensure the accuracy of her story.
On June 5, 1851, the National Era began publishing installments of her story, appearing in most weekly issues through April 1 of the next year. The positive response led to publication of the stories in two volumes. Uncle Tom's Cabin sold quickly, and some sources estimate as many as 325,000 copies sold in the first year.
Though the book was popular not only in the United States but around the world, Harriet Beecher Stowe saw little personal profit from the book, due to the pricing structure of the publishing industry of her time, and due to the unauthorized copies that were produced outside the U.S. without the protection of copyright laws.
By using the form of a novel to communicate the pain and suffering under slavery, Harriet Beecher Stowe tried to make the religious point that slavery was a sin. She succeeded. Her story was denounced in the South as a distortion, so she produced a new book, A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, documenting the actual cases on which her book's incidents were based.
Reaction and support was not only in America. A petition signed by half a million English, Scottish, and Irish women, addressed to the women of the United States, led to a trip to Europe in 1853 for Harriet Beecher Stowe, Calvin Stowe, and Harriet's brother Charles Beecher. She turned her experiences on this trip into a book, Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands. Harriet Beecher Stowe returned to Europe in 1856, meeting Queen Victoria and befriending the widow of the poet Lord Byron. Among others she met were Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and George Eliot.
When Harriet Beecher Stowe returned to America, she wrote another antislavery novel, Dred. Her 1859 novel, The Minister's Wooing, was set in the New England of her youth, and drew on her sadness in losing a second son, Henry, who drowned in an accident while a student at Dartmouth College. Harriet's later writing focused mainly on New England settings.
