Harriet Beecher Stowe When President

Harriet Beecher Stowe When President Abraham Lincoln met her in 1862, he gazed upon the petite woman who stood less than five feet in height, remarking, "So you're the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war." He was, of course, greeting Harriet Beecher Stowe, and was referring to her 1852 book, Uncle Tom's Cabin, which had catapulted her to international fame as it flamed the fires of anti-slavery sentiments.

Stowe was one of America's best-paid and most-sought-after writers, and during her life that spanned all but fifteen years of the nineteenth century, she spoke to a nation deeply divided by race, sex, region, and class. During her life, Harriet corresponded with such noted individuals as Lady Byron and Oliver Wendell Holmes, and wrote numerous publications including poems, travel books, children's books, biographical sketches, in addition to several adult novels. The seventh child of Lyman and Roxana Beecher, Stowe was born on June 14, 1811 in Litchfield, Connecticut.

Lyman was a prominent Congregational minister who preached anti-slavery sermons and encouraged intellectual debates. Roxana, who also was an educational enthusiast, died shortly after giving birth to her eleventh child, when Harriet was 5 years old. Due to this dynamic family life, the Beecher children were committed to changing the world for the better by serving God through civic action.

Stowe's brother, Henry Ward Beecher, became a noted minister, who like his father, preached against slavery and took an active part in the abolitionist movement, while sister, Isabella, was a suffragette in the woman's movement. In 1823, Stowe's sister, Catherine, opened the Hartford Female Seminary with a total of seven students, including thirteen-year-old Harriet, in s single room above the White Horse harness shop in Hartford, Connecticut.

During its prime, the school, which was run by and for women, boarded more than 160 students, eight teachers, two principals, and a governess, and was destined to take a significant place in the history of women's education. Harriet spent eight years at the Hartford school, and when she emerged at twenty-one years of age, her career took a different path than that of Catherine's, however it had been profoundly shaped by her older sister, who often turned her own experience into practical experiments for the benefit of others.

Catherine's school was one of only a handful of female institutions where young females could get an education that was equivalent to a young man's, for in addition to offering the same curriculum as other female academies, such as the Young Ladies Academy in Philadelphia and the Litchfield Female Academy, it also offered the traditional male curriculum, which included the English branches of study, ethics, logic, history, and the natural and mechanical sciences.

Moreover, Hartford offered the young ladies instruction in Latin, French, Italian, Greek, drawing, and music, as well as college preparatory subjects that could be classified as either ornamental or useful, depending on their application. The girls at Hartford were also involved with national events, and under Catherine's leadership organized on behalf of the Cherokee Indians, who in 1827 were ordered to vacate their lands in the state of Georgia, and throughout 1829, circulated petitions and circulars protesting the federal action.

Harriet assumed the role of pastoral guide, which complimented her temperament and prepared her for a prophetic career in which she would "preach on paper" to the nation. However, she only taught two terms at Hartford, and in 1832 followed her father to Cincinnati, Ohio, where she developed as a writer and entered society with determination.

She conceived the design of writing a set of letters, the first of which described "a house in the country, a gentleman and lady, as being pious, literary, and agreeable," and threw in "a number of little particular and incidental allusions to give it the air of having been really a letter." Harriet sent the letter to Samuel Foote's wife, Elizabeth, who showed it to Samuel, who in turn showed it to Mr.

Green, the reader for the Semi-Colon Club, and eventually her letter turned into a series that found its way into print through the agency of James Hall's Western Literary Magazine. Her most memorable character sketch, Uncle Lot, written in November 1833, so impressed Hall that he encouraged her to submit it to the prize competition sponsored by his magazine, which earned her a $50 prize and the publication of her story.

In 1836, Harriet married Calvin Ellis Stowe, the widowed husband of Eliza Tyler Stowe, who had been one of the Semi-Colon's most beloved members. This same year, Angelina and Sarah Grimke embarked on their abolitionists careers with stunning analyses of the relationship between two patriarchal institutions, slavery and the subordination of women, and from this point on, the issues of women's rights and abolition were closely intertwined.

While Elizabeth Cady Stanton and others established the first women's rights convention at Seneca Falls, at which their Declaration of Sentiments was read, Harriet had no desire to speak in public and used Henry Ward Beecher's Christian Union to publish editorials on subjects she did not want to won by name, thus early on she learned ways to speak both from women's sphere and from men's. Between 1833 and 1834, Harriet published five stories and sketches for Hall's magazine, and also wrote for Sarah Hale's Godey's Lady's Book.

Beginning in 1839 with Trials of a Housekeeper, she published at least eight stories in Godey's Lady's Book during the three following years, and during the same period began publishing short homilies on Christian themes in the New York Evangelist, a weekly devoted to news about revivals, Sunday schools and temperance societies. As Joan D.

Hedrick writes in Harriet Beecher Stowe, a Life: All the elements she would later meld into a powerful mixture in Uncle Tom's Cabin are present in her periodical publications of the 1830s and 40s: the impulse to instruct, to use fiction as a vehicle for moral and cultural reformation, to write of domestic doings and saying." In 1843, Harper Brothers bought out Harriet's collection of stories and entitled them the Mayflower, or Sketches of Scenes and Characters among the Descendants of the Pilgrims.

Harriet was now on her way to becoming one of the most noted authors in the United States. Uncle Tom's Cabin is the culmination of Stowe's evangelistic teachings and her staunch position of anti-slavery. Harriet did not start out to write a novel. Uncle Tom began as a series of articles for the National Era, partly in response to the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, which effectively punished ($1,000 and six months in prison) any person who gave shelter, food or assistance to an escaping slave.

The Law abrogated individual rights such as habeas corpus and the right of trial by jury and provided what abolitionists called bribes to commissioners by awarding them $10 for every alleged fugitive they remanded to slavery, but only $5 for every one they determined to be free. In Chicago no one could be found to serve as commissioner under the new law, and in Philadelphia the commissioner resigned rather than serve under the Fugitive Slave Law.

Hendrick writes that freedmen everywhere "took up arms and entered into a solemn covenant to defend each other's liberty, emptying ammunition stores of their revolvers and prompting editorials on 'The Mob Spirit.'" Dr.

Leonard Bacon declared that the fugitive slave was a "prisoner of war" and "that the escape of the slave was on his part nothing more than a legal act of hostility against a government to which he owes no allegiance." In March 1851, Harriet wrote to Gamaliel Bailey of the National Era, that she had embarked on a story that she thought would run "through three or four numbers," and projected "a series of sketches which give the lights and shadows of the patriarchal institution." Although she confessed that the story would be much longer than any she had ever written, she had no intent of writing a sprawling novel that would run in weekly installments from June 5, 1851 to April 1, 1852, however she was keenly aware that she was entering the national debate with women's weapons.

Hendrick writes: The 'graphic sketches' that made women's letters come alive with distant people and events were to be employed in the highly political arena of sectional strife; the intimate narrative voice that melded region to region in domestic letters would now speak to a nation deeply divided; the pleasures that this national narrative voice afforded to a nation eager to see pictures of itself would lure the reader into a dark tale of freedom and bondage.

Stowe told Bailey, "I shall show the best side of the thing and something faintly approaching the worst." Her intention to study "the negro character" embroiled her in racial politics that continue today, for her generalizations about African-Americans repeatedly assume their childlike dependence, "a posture or mask that could be accounted for by the economic and psychological exigencies of the mistress-servant relationship," writes Hendrick.

The complicated relation in which she stood to the domestic servants is reflected in her contradictory consciousness, and while she over-identified with them as women, she distanced herself from their race and class, and actually used them to carry her own burden of loss and anger.

Yet, as Hendrick writes, Harriet also transformed those feelings into an engine of social change; "pursuing the Calvinist injunction to 'improve the affliction' and reap 'the peaceable fruits of righteousness' in the wake of" her son Charley's death, and "stirred up the nation to an awareness of its sin." Harriet wrote to her brother Henry, "You see...how this subject has laid hold of me...The poor slave on whom the burden of domestic bereavement falls heaviest is precisely the creature of all Gods creatures that feels it deepest." While there is no doubt that Harriet Beecher Stowe achieved political status by making a national audience see the subjectivity of African-Americans, however what she personally saw was filtered through a white woman's consciousness.

After the series ran in the abolitionist newspaper, the National Era, Uncle Tom's Cabin was published in book form in March 1852, and by mid-June 10,000 copies were being sold each week, and within six months, more than 150,000 had been sold. Between 1852 and the beginning of the Civil War in 1861, three million copies had been sold in the United States alone. Uncle Tom's Cabin is as controversial today as it was during the mid-nineteenth century.

To call someone 'Uncle Tom' today is one of the most inflammatory racial insults that an African-American person can offer, yet during the nineteenth century it was a compliment of the highest order.

According to Patricia Turner, a professor of African-American studies at the University of California-Davis, "People don't realize that when they call someone like an 'Uncle Tom,' that really is an insult to Uncle Tom," for he was actually a heroic figure who chose to die than to reveal the "the whereabouts of two escaped slaves who have been sexually abused." Turner points out that while everyone knows about the novel, few have actually read it, therefore most of the African-American community do not understand the significance of the character or the true meaning behind the name, Uncle Tom.

Ironically, historical record indicates that the novel was widely vilified even as the public was buying copies faster than any book in previous publishing history. Southerners viewed it as a vicious libel on their culture, and in one memorable account, a freedman in the slave state of Maryland was sentenced to ten years in jail for owning a copy of Uncle Tom's Cabin and a map of Canada.

However, the book was just as controversial within the abolitionist community because "Stowe appears to advocate African colonization rather than emancipation as the solution to the moral blot of slavery." Because there was no international copyright law in 1852, Stowe owned only the novel, and thus had no rights to the characters and could not control their transmission to other media, such as magic lantern shows, ceramic figurines and plates, and to the stage.

The first stage production came in 1852, and with George Aiken's adaptation in 1852, the play Uncle Tom's Cabin became so popular throughout the country that it is estimated that 50 people saw the stage show for every one person who bought or read a copy of the book.

Richard Yarborough recently made an assessment of the novel noting that "although Stowe unquestionably sympathized with the salves, her commitment to challenging the claim of black inferiority was frequently undermined by her own endorsement of racial stereotypes," and because these stereotyped notions appear not only in this novel but in other works by Stowe, it seems that her attitude toward chattel slavery, or rather how she pandered to the conflicting attitudes of slavery, was ambivalent.

Harriet believed that the novel depicted the favorable side of slavery and this fact should have appeased the South, however the typical Southern regarded Stowe's novel as an abomination and an utterly false representation of the institution of slavery. When Stowe wrote Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp, she became the first major American author to write what is essentially a campaign novel.

David Grant writes in the September 2000 issue of Studies in American Fiction: Composed as the events that shaped the canvass unfolded and as the Republican party completed its national organization, excerpted in many Republican newspapers before its release, prefaced so as to steer its reception toward the great decision facing the nation, published in the late summer as election excitement was reaching its peak, heralded in the Republican press as a contribution to the cause, advertised by its publisher alongside other works of campaign propaganda - the novel in both its writing and its dissemination assumed the role of an instrument to promote a Republican victory in the election of 1856.

According to Grant, Stowe's novel looks to the North to redeem the South from without as well as within, and only on the larger stage can the logic of slavery's extension that is dramatized in the story be balanced. Rachel Naomi Klein writes in the June 2001 issue of Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, that Stowe's career, which extended well into the 1870's, displayed a remarkable consistency concerning the issue of labor contract.

Klein notes that rather than challenging capitalist relationships, Stowe's post-War essays advocated the extension of market principles into the household. This persistent faith in the efficacy of free labor explains the conventionality of her later "society novels," especially since they did not include any reference to the explosive labor questions that dominated the post-War era. Klein points out that before the War, "Stowe's faith in free labor served as the fulcrum for her powerful systemic critique of slavery.

With the abolition of slavery, she assumed that the nation's fundamental structural and moral problem had been resolved." Stowe did not use her writing as a way to avoid her domestic obligations but rather as a means to demonstrate her higher domestic duties.

Through funds earned as a writer, she was able to hire additional servants, and throughout her career, she maintained that waged workers would actually enhance rather than replace the primary work of wives and mothers, for servants would allow for her loftier managerial and educational responsibilities, however she criticized households that maintained large numbers of servants. She believed that morality, democracy, and labor scarcity would lead the U.S. To become a nation of smaller households whose servants who enjoyed equality and whose mistresses benefited from physical labor.

Stowe believed that married women would pay for help, and at the same time would teach, supervise and even work along side their employees. Harriet once wrote, "A woman is a moral being - an immortal soul - before she is a woman; and as such she is.