CHAPTER XI

HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

1811-1896

The Beechers came to America in 1638 and were leaders in the New Haven colony. Almost two centuries later the most celebrated member of this family was born in the old parsonage in the beautiful Connecticut hilltown of Litchfield. The father of this little girl, Lyman Beecher, was preaching earnest sermons, on the munificent salary of five hundred a year. To add to their income the mother, a beautiful and gifted woman, opened a school, though she had eight children of her own to care for. All of them grew up to be distinguished, especially the two youngest, Harriet and Henry Ward, who were inseparable companions.

Harriet had a remarkable memory and read all the books she could find. But most of her father’s library was sermons and church pamphlets, appeals and replies and theological discussions; so you can imagine her delight when at the bottom of a garret barrel of musty sermons and essays she discovered _The Arabian Nights_, and delicious fragments of _The Tempest_ and _Don Quixote_. Her father had said his children were not to read novels, but made an exception of _Ivanhoe_. The delighted Harriet and her brother George read it through seven times in six months, until indeed they could recite many scenes by heart.

The Beecher children were wide-awake, bright, happy youngsters, a big family of them, partly educated by running wild on the long breezy hills. Until she was eleven Harriet went to a “dame school” and to the Litchfield Academy, showing her future bent by thoroughly enjoying, instead of dreading, the task of composition writing. Sir Walter Scott helped form her style. She read and re-read her few books until words and sentences were fixed in her mind.

At one of the school exhibitions when compositions were read, Doctor Beecher, listening idly, suddenly brightened and looked up.

“Who wrote that?” he asked.

“Your daughter, sir,” replied the teacher.

“That,” said Harriet years later, when she knew something of fame, “was the proudest moment of my life.”

The older sister Catherine had opened a school for girls at Hartford, and twelve-year-old Harriet went there, first as a pupil, then as teacher. Indeed she was for a time both, and crowded days she had. In this double race for development her brain wearied out her body. The memory of those overworked days lingered with her all her life. Healthy and hearty as a little child, she was allowed to think and feel and study too much. Consequently as a woman she was far from vigorous, finding her lack of strength a continual drawback to her work.

Her father had been preaching for six years in Boston and was now offered the presidency of Lane Seminary, to be opened in Cincinnati. Catherine was to start a school for girls, with Harriet as her assistant. The whole family made the toilsome adventurous journey across the mountains by stage-coach, to what was then considered the Far West.

In addition to her work in the school Harriet wrote short essays and sketches for publication, giving them away at first. But when the _Western Magazine_ offered a prize of fifty dollars for a story and she won it, she began to think of writing as a possible means of livelihood.

In 1836 she married Calvin Stowe, a professor in the seminary. They were far from wealthy, at times even poor, for Professor Stowe, rich in Greek and Latin and Hebrew and Arabic, was rich in nothing else. Though she had a household of little children, and often a few boarders, Harriet continued writing from time to time. Her first check was used to buy a feather bed. When a new mattress or carpet was needed, or the year’s accounts wouldn’t balance, she would send off a story, literally to keep the pot boiling.

Outwardly their life in Ohio was orderly and quiet, but every month occurred something stirring, even spectacular. There were fierce debates on the slavery question among the seminary students. Doctor Bailey, a Cincinnati editor who started a discussion of the subject in his paper, twice had his presses broken and thrown into the river. Mrs. Stowe’s brother went about his newspaper work armed. Houses of colored people were burned and attacked; the shop of an abolitionist was riddled; free negroes were kidnapped. The Beecher family slept with weapons at hand, ready to defend the seminary. Many slaves escaping from Kentucky sought refuge in the town, where the Underground Railroad helped them to reach Canada and safety.

It was impossible to live in Cincinnati and not be personally affected. Servants were hard to secure, especially for a household with slender means, though colored maids were available. The Stowes had a young negress from Kentucky who had been brought to Cincinnati by her mistress and left there. When a man came across the river hunting for her, meaning to take her back to slavery again, Mr. Stowe and Henry Ward Beecher drove the poor girl at night, in a severe storm, twelve miles into the country, where they left her with a friend until search for her was given over.

Colored boys and girls came to the classes Mrs. Stowe had for her own children. One little fellow was claimed by his former master, arrested and put up at auction. The distracted mother begged and pleaded for help. Harriet Beecher Stowe went out and raised the money to buy the child and give him back to his mother.

Pathetic incidents such as these were continually coming to the attention of the professor’s family. In Cincinnati this New England woman had a real acquaintance with negroes, and was quick to note their peculiar characteristics. Unconsciously she was absorbing and assimilating pictures of slavery which later served a great purpose.

“What is there here to satisfy one whose mind is awakened on the subject?” she asked. “No one can have it brought before him without an irrepressible desire to do something, but what is there to be done?”

To find this something-to-do gradually became one of her chief thoughts, even though her domestic cares were almost overwhelming and her health suffered from the strain. The resources of the family did not increase. One year she was ill six months out of the twelve, yet she put up the stiffest kind of fight against the most disheartening odds. Whenever the household was in a comparative calm she would seize her pen and write some story or sketch. A delicate, highly strung, little woman, with seven children on her hands, she wrote in the tumult of the living-room, with babies tumbling about her, with tables being set and cleared away, with children being washed and dressed, and everything imaginable in a household going on.

Doctor Stowe received a call to Bowdoin College, in Brunswick, Maine. Perhaps the family was glad to leave the excited atmosphere of Cincinnati where feeling on the slavery question was so inflamed, and live once more in the calm of New England. Yet for Mrs. Stowe it was not to remain for long a calm background.

On the journey north she stopped in Boston at the home of her brother Edward. The fugitive slave bill was being debated in Congress just at this time and everywhere the hearts of thinking men were stirred. Her visit came at the height of the fierce and fiery discussion of the proposed law which not only gave southern owners the right to pursue their slaves into free states, but forced the North to assist in the business. Her brother had received and forwarded fugitives many a time. She heard heartrending accounts of slaves recaptured and dragged back in irons, of children torn from their mothers and sold south--this breaking up of families offended her most of all.

Soon after the Stowes were settled in their Maine home a letter came from her sister-in-law in Boston.

“Hattie, if I could use a pen as you can, I would write something to make this whole nation feel what an accursed thing slavery is.”

Reading this letter aloud to the family, when she came to that sentence Harriet Beecher Stowe rose, crushed the paper in her hand, and with a look on her face that her children never forgot, she exclaimed, “I will write something--if I live, I will!”

She was forty years old, in delicate health, overladen with responsibilities; a devoted mother, with small children, one still a baby; with untrained servants requiring supervision; with her pupils to be taught daily; and boarders to eke out the limited salary--her hands were full to overflowing. It seemed unlikely that she would ever do anything but this ceaseless labor. But her heart burned within her for those in bondage. The law passed and the fugitives were hunted out and sent back into servitude and death. The people of the North looked on indifferently. Could she, a woman with no reputation, waken them by anything she might write?

While at a communion service in the little church at Brunswick, like a vision the death of Uncle Tom on Legree’s plantation came before her. Scarcely able to control her sobbing, she hurried home, locked herself in her room, and wrote it out, exactly as it stands now, in a white heat of passionate enthusiasm. She read it to her two little boys, ten and twelve years old. Through his sobs one of them said, “Oh, mamma, slavery is the most cursed thing in the world!”

Then she wrote the opening chapters and offered the manuscript to Doctor Bailey who had moved his paper from Cincinnati to Washington. He accepted it and arranged that it should be printed in weekly instalments--a dangerous method unless the story is completed before publication begins. With only fragments of her time to write, she sent off the necessary chapters each week, composed sometimes in pain and weariness, under almost insurmountable difficulties, seldom revised, sometimes not even punctuated. But the story was to her so much more intense a reality than any other earthly thing that the required pages never failed.

The subject possessed her. Her whole being was saturated with her theme. Her hot indignation was welling up, her deep pity was a part of her inmost soul. Day and night it was there in her mind, waiting to be written, needing but a few hours to bring it into sentences and paragraphs. She had been a guest at the Shelby plantation soon after her arrival in Cincinnati. Now, nearly twenty years later, she described the details of that visit with minutest fidelity--the humble cot of the negro, the planter’s mansion, the funny pranks and songs of the slaves. Eliza’s escape was suggested by the story of one of her own servants. Uncle Tom’s simple honor and loyalty were characteristics impressed on her by the husband of a former slave woman for whom she wrote letters, a man who remained in bondage rather than break his promise to his master and so win his freedom. Topsy was a child in Mrs. Stowe’s mission Sunday-school class, who only grinned in bewilderment when asked, “Have you ever heard anything about God?” When the teacher asked again, “Do you know who made you?” the answer was, “Nobody as I knows on,” the eyes twinkling as she added, “I ’spect I growed.” And Legree’s plantation was pictured to her in a letter from her brother Charles, who went on a business trip up the Red River to an estate where the slaves were treated with a brutality almost indescribable. Her own experiences thus gave the personal touch that fires knowledge into passion.

“My heart was bursting with the anguish excited by the cruelty and injustice our nation was showing to the slave, and praying God to let me do a little, and to cause my cry for them to be heard. Weeping many a time as I thought of the slave mothers whose babes were torn from them, I put my lifeblood, my prayers, my tears, into the book,” was her own graphic description of its making.

The story was not so much composed by her as imposed upon her. Scenes and conversations and incidents rushed on her with a vividness and importunity admitting of no denial. She had no choice in the matter, the book insisted on getting itself into shape and could not be withstood.

Years afterward an old sea captain asked to shake hands with the author of _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_.

“I did not write it,” said the white-haired lady gently.

“You didn’t?” he ejaculated in great surprise. “Why, who did, then?”

“God wrote it,” she replied simply, “I merely did His dictation.”

“Amen,” said the captain reverently, and walked thoughtfully away.

The serial ran in the _New Era_ from June of 1851 to the following April. When it was nearing completion a firm in Boston offered to print it in book form, but feared failure if it was much longer.

“I can not stop,” was her answer, “until it is done.”

Henry Ward Beecher told his sister his plans to work against slavery in Plymouth church.

“I too have begun to do something,” was her reply; “I have begun a story trying to set forth the sufferings and wrongs of the slaves.”

“That’s right, Hattie. Finish it and I’ll scatter it thick as the leaves of Vallombrosa.”

But there was small need for his endorsement. It was soon published as a book. Would anybody read it, she asked herself doubtfully; the subject was so unpopular. She would help it make its way, if possible, and sent a copy to Queen Victoria, knowing how deeply she was interested in the abolition of slavery. Then this busy woman waited in the quiet Maine home to see what the world would say.

The first day three thousand copies were sold, ten thousand in ten days, over three hundred thousand the first year. The magazine had paid her three hundred dollars for the manuscript; the check for her first month’s royalty was ten thousand dollars, when Professor Stowe had hoped the proceeds would buy her a new silk dress. There were translations into twenty different languages, forty editions in England, while the publishers lost count of the number in America. How restful for the tired overworked woman to have more than enough for her daily needs, to be free from the anxieties of poverty!

“Having been poor all my life,” she said, “and expecting to be poor for the rest of it, the idea of making money by a book which I wrote just because I couldn’t help it, never occurred to me.”

Written with a purpose, a great underlying principle, _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_ is distinctly the work of a woman’s heart, not of her head. And this explains the book’s merits as well as its literary defects.

“But if critics find unskilful treatment,” wrote George Sand, “look well at them and see if their eyes are dry when they are reading this or that chapter. The life and death of a little child and of a negro slave--that is the whole book. The affection that unites them is the only love story.”

Yet this book met with a success that reads like a fairy tale. It was dramatized immediately, six London theaters playing it at the same time. Learned reviews printed long notices of it, leading writers in America and England added their critical appreciation. Even those rating it low as a work of art called it a true picture of slavery. The common people accepted it eagerly, making it the most widely read book of modern times. It was one of the greatest triumphs in literary history, to say nothing of the higher moral triumph.

Its effect on the public was electric. The air, already charged with feeling, was ready to become impassioned. After its reading the Missouri Compromise was felt to be monstrous and impossible, enforcing the fugitive slave law absolutely out of the question. Throughout the North the book was received with acclamations. All classes, rich and poor, young and old, religious and irreligious, read it. No one who began it could remain unchanged. Echoes of sympathy came to the author from all parts of the land; the indignation, pity and distress which had long weighed on her soul seemed to pass from her to the readers of the book.

Some of the slaveholders Mrs. Stowe pictured as amiable, generous, just, with beautiful traits of character. She admitted fully their temptations, their perplexities, their difficulties. She thought the abolitionists would say, “Too mild altogether!” But the entire South rose against the book, in a hurricane of denial and abuse. The daily papers featured column after column of minute criticism which seemed to leave the book in tatters--its facts were false, its art contemptible, its moral tone slanderous and anti-Christian. Thousands of angry and abusive letters poured in on the author.

“_Uncle Tom’s Cabin_ met with such a universal praising,” she said to one of her brothers, “that I began to think, ‘Woe unto you when all men speak well of you!’ But I have been relieved of my fears on that score. If there is any blessing in all manner of evil said falsely against one, I am likely to have it.”

In the North a large element condemned the book no less severely--those who thought slavery just, who feared civil strife, who opposed abolition. But it was encouraging at least in this respect: The subject of slavery was now fairly up for inquiry before the public mind. The systematic efforts which had been made for years to prevent its being discussed were proving ineffectual. And on the whole the North accepted the story as a fair indictment of the national sin and as a sermon to them on their part in it.

For the moral sense of the people was awakened. The men who had viewed the subject with indifference became haters of the system. The sleepy church which had lagged behind in the rear of progress was stirred as if by a blast from the last trumpet. Politicians in Congress trembled, statesmen scented danger near. The unpopular reformers who had taken their lives in their hands, found their ranks reinforced by sturdy enthusiastic recruits. The story told the same appalling facts they had been stating in their meetings and printing in their papers, but the people would neither listen nor read. But Uncle Tom spoke with authority, and not as the scribes.

The marvel of its time, the wonder of succeeding generations of readers, this book was the beginning of the end of slavery. No other individual contributed so much to its downfall--Whittier’s fiery lyrics, Sumner’s speeches, Phillips’ eloquence, the sermons of Parker and the Beechers, all fell short of the accomplishment of Harriet Beecher Stowe. She now found herself the most famous woman in the world. When she went to Washington, after the Civil War had begun, Abraham Lincoln on being introduced to her asked, “What! are you the little woman that caused this great war?” and then took her off to a deep window-seat for an hour’s talk.

Invited to England, Mrs. Stowe found her journey there almost a royal progress. People stood at their doors to see her pass by. Children ran ahead of the carriage and offered her flowers. “That’s her,” cried out the newsboys on the street, “d’ye see the courls?” A national penny offering, coming from all classes of society, was turned into a thousand golden sovereigns and presented to her, to be used for the cause of the slave. There were many addresses and public meetings and demonstrations of sympathy, and from the people a perfect ovation. The great of the court, of literary England, anti-slavery leaders, united to pay her homage.

One of her gifts she brought back to America, in order to complete its record. The Duchess of Sutherland gave her a gold bracelet in the form of a slave’s shackles, inscribed “We trust it is a memorial of a chain that is soon to be broken.” Its links bore the dates for the abolition of the slave trade and of slavery itself in England and her possessions. Later Mrs. Stowe had other links marked for the ending of slavery in the District of Columbia, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the constitutional amendment abolishing slavery in this country--changes due largely to her work, two of these events coming within a decade after _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_ was published.

After her return to America, Mrs. Stowe kept on writing--sketches of her experiences abroad, essays and stories of New England life, and a second slavery novel called _Dred_, which the critics announced a greater book than _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_, but its popular success was less.

Her whole soul was bound up in the affairs of the nation as the crisis of 1861 drew nearer. She dreaded war, yet believed that it was the red-hot iron that must burn away the nation’s disease.

“It was God’s will,” she said, “that this land, north as well as south, should deeply and terribly suffer for the sin of consenting to and encouraging the great oppressions of the south; that the ill-gotten wealth which had arisen from striking hands with oppression and robbery should be paid back in the taxes of war; that the blood of the poor slave, that had cried so many years from the ground in vain, should be answered by the blood of the sons from the best hearthstones through all the free states; that the slave mothers whose tears nobody regarded should have with them a great company of weepers, north and south, Rachels weeping for their children and refusing to be comforted; that the free states who refused to listen when they were told of lingering starvation, cold, privation, and barbarous cruelty as perpetrated on the slave, should have lingering starvation, cold, hunger, and cruelty doing its work among their own sons, at the hands of these slave masters with whose sins our nation had connived.”

Her own son was among the first to enlist when Lincoln called for volunteers. “Would you have men say that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s son is a coward?” he replied to a question about his going. And she received him back from Gettysburg with a wound in his head from which he never recovered.

From morning till night, all the days of the week, throughout the war Mrs. Stowe worked steadily. Years before she had written an appeal to the women of America, setting forth the injustice and misery of slavery, begging them to work together to have the system abolished. And when a strong party arose in England favoring the South, she wrote another appeal to her sisters there, which helped to crystallize public sentiment in favor of abolition and the North, to stop the English talk of recognizing the independence of the confederacy and of mediation. Its effect on the press and on Parliament was at once evident, and all over the kingdom resolutions were passed for the Union.

During the trying days of reconstruction she worked to secure full rights for the freedmen. Living in Florida for the winters, and in Connecticut in the summers, both north and south she helped to educate the negroes whom she had helped to free.

She still wrote well for many years, though she never achieved another exceptional success. Thirty books in all she published, some of them admirable, and then claimed a release from active service, saying she had written all her thoughts. But had Uncle Tom been her only hero, still would she live in the history of our country as foremost in the movement against slavery.