The Blog of Awesome Women / Harriet Beecher Stowe: Civil Warrior

Most schoolchildren are taught that Harriet Beecher Stowe was an extremely creative young woman who, almost accidentally, wrote a book that tore America apart. In this insidiously watered down and sugarcoated version of history we were spoon-fed as children, the most important aspects of Stowe’s story are completely omitted. The truth is, and let us please let it be known far and wide, Harriet’s opus, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, was written with precisely the intent to publicize the cruelty of slavery and give it a human name and face so people could relate, sympathize, and, most importantly, ACT!

Extremely bright, Harriet was keenly interested in improving humanity even as a child. She lived in a large family of nine children; her father was a Calvinist minister and her mother died when she was five. She was very attached to her older sister, Catherine, who founded the Hartford Female Seminary. The year 1832 found the Beecher family leaving their longtime home of Litchfield, Connecticut, and moving to Cincinnati, right across the Ohio River from Kentucky. From this vantage point so much closer to the south, Harriet had much greater exposure to slavery. A young, idealistic student of theology, Harriet did not like what she was seeing at all. Her father, Lyman Beecher, was the president of Lane Theological Seminary. Her brothers became involved in the antislavery movement and were extremely vocal about their feelings. Harriet, for her part, aided a runaway slave.

In 1836, Harriet met one of the professors of religion at her father’s seminary, Calvin Stowe, married him, and bore six children. Around this time, she discovered her love of writing, contributing articles to numerous religious magazines and papers. She also began working on her first novel, The Mayflower: Sketches and Scenes and Characters Among the Descendants of the Puritans. After too many years across the river from the slave state of Kentucky, Harriet Beecher Stowe finally returned to the Northeast with her husband and children.

In 1850, the Fugitive Slave Acts passed Congress. It was this event that moved Harriet to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin. She couldn’t abide the inhumanity of slaves being hunted down and forcibly returned to their former owners after struggling so hard for the freedom that was their birthright. Horror stories of the torture of runaway slaves galvanized the sensitive Harriet to action, and she wrote the book with the full intention of sending out a cry against the whipping, maiming, and hanging of slaves.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Life Among the Lonely was first run as a series of installments in the national Era, an abolitionist newspaper. Upon publication in book form in 1852, Stowe’s work was very well received. Harriet had expected her novel to be a nonevent outside the circle of abolitionists, but she was very surprised. The entire printing of 5,000 sold out in two days, and the book sold three million copies around the world before the Civil War! Harriet had outstripped her wildest dreams and had truly fired the shot that started what was to become the War Between the States. She also received critical acclaim from such literary luminaries as MacCauley, Longfellow, and Leo Tolstoy, who declared Uncle Tom’s Cabin the “highest moral art.” Abraham Lincoln himself called Harriet “the little lady who made this big war.”

Harriet’s strategy was to show the extremes of slavery, culminating in the savage beating of the gentle old slave, Tom. The world was captivated by Stowe’s dramatic story. Reviled in the south, Stowe met all her pro-slavery detractors with dignity, even going so far as to publish a critical Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and wrote a second novel about the plight of slaves in Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp. Harriet Beecher Stowe is a shining example of courage and conviction; her life is proof of how passion and purpose can change the world.

“I won’t be any properer than I have a mind to be.”—Harriet Beecher Stowe.

This bio of Harriet Beecher Stowe was taken from “The Book of Awesome Women” by Becca Anderson, which is available now.