THE WORLD OF HARRIET BEECHER STOWE AND UNCLE TOM’S CABIN

1619	The first Africans are brought to Jamestown, Virginia, and other English colonies in America.
1638	The New England slave trade begins in Boston.
1661	The Black Codes legalize slavery in Virginia.
1688	Members of the Society of Friends protest slavery in German- town, Pennsylvania.
1706	In his tract The Negro Christianized, Puritan clergyman Cotton Mather argues for the equality of blacks.
1775	A group of Quakers founds the first Abolition Society in Philadel phia.
1777	Slavery is abolished in Vermont, and the external slave trade is prohibited in Virginia.
1780	The Pennsylvania legislature passes a law providing for the gradual abolition of slavery.
1783	Slavery is abolished in Massachusetts.
1800	Virginia passes a law prohibiting African-Americans from gathering for religious worship between sunset and sunrise.
1811	Harriet Beecher Stowe is born on June 14 in Litchfield, Connecti cut, one of eleven children. Her father, Lyman Beecher, is a Calvin ist preacher, the founder of the American Bible Society, and an activist in the antislavery movement. Her mother, Roxana Foote Beecher, is devoted to prayer.
1815	Stowe’s mother dies.
1823	Stowe enrolls at the Hartford Female Seminary in Connecticut, founded by her eldest sister, Catharine. She receives a solid edu cation in foreign languages, natural and mechanical sciences, mathematics, and writing, and eventually becomes an assistant teacher at the school.
1832	Stowe’s father remarries and the family moves to Cincinnati, Ohio, where Lyman assumes presidency of the Lane Theological Seminary. Stowe cofounds the Western Female Institute in Cincin
	nati with Catharine. She has her first contact with fugitive slaves and meets Calvin Ellis Stowe, a professor at the seminary who ar dently opposes slavery.
1834	Stowe’s literary career begins when she wins a contest sponsored by the Western Monthly Magazine; she becomes a regular contributor of stories and essays.
1836	On January 5 Harriet marries Calvin Stowe. Sympathetic to the Underground Railroad movement, the couple begins to house fugitive slaves in their home. Stowe begins to interview fugitive slaves and travels to Kentucky to witness the brutality of slavery.
1843	Stowe’s first book, The Mayflower; or, Sketches of the Descendents of the Pil grims, is published. The antislavery movement continues to grow.
1845	While still a fugitive slave, Frederick Douglass publishes Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.
1850	The Stowes move to Brunswick, Maine, where Calvin becomes a professor at Bowdoin College. Harriet freelances for local maga zines and papers. After the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, which granted Southerners the right to pursue escaped slaves into free states and prohibited assistance for them, Stowe begins writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a novel about the realities of slavery in the South based on the research she had done in Cincinnati; much of the background information derives from a tract by abolitionist Theodore Weld, American Slavery As It Is (1839).
1851	Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (or, Life Among the Lowly) is published in in stallments in the antislavery journal National Era.
1852	The book version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin appears in 1852 and becomes an instant bestseller. In the preface, Stowe explains her intention to awaken “sympathy and feeling for the African race . . . under a system so necessarily cruel and unjust.” More than a half million copies are sold in the United States, and the book is translated into at least twenty languages. Copies are smuggled into Russia (in Yid dish in order to avoid the czarist censors) . At least thirty books ap pear in retaliation, including Jossiah Priest’s Bible Defence of Slavery (1852).
1853	Stowe responds to criticism of Uncle Tom with A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Presenting the Original Facts and Documents Upon Which It Is Based, a compilation of extensive documents and testimony to strengthen the arguments she presented in her novel. Stowe travels to Europe,
	where she becomes friendly with British writers George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Lady Byron, the half-sister of Lord Byron.
1854	Stowe recounts her trip to Europe in her book Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands. The Republican Party, a coalition that includes antislav ery factions, is formed.
1856	Stowe’s second antislavery novel, Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp, about an attempted slave rebellion, is published.
1857	The Supreme Court’s ruling in Dred Scott v. Sandford prevents the fed eral government from interfering with the states’ rights to slavery. The decision also denies citizenship to African-Americans. The Atlantic Monthly is established and joins the magazines and news papers that publish Stowe’s work.
1858	On June 16, at the close of the State Republican Convention in Springfield, Illinois, at which he had just been named their can didate for U.S. Senate, Abraham Lincoln delivers his speech on slavery, “A House Divided.”
1859	Stowe publishes The Minister’s Wooing, a novel that focuses on a slave rebellion.
1860	Abraham Lincoln is elected the sixteenth President of the United States.
1861	The American Civil War begins when South Carolina batteries fire on Fort Sumter. Southern states secede from the Union and estab lish the Confederate States of America. Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, an autobiographical novel that exposes the sex ual exploitation of enslaved African-American women, is published.
1862	Stowe is introduced to Lincoln, who is said to greet her with the words “So, you are the little woman who made the great war.” Slavery is abolished in the District of Columbia.
1863	The Emancipation Proclamation, legally freeing slaves in the South, takes effect on the first of the year. Lincoln delivers the Gettysburg Address.
1865	On January 31 Congress approves the Thirteenth Amendment, outlawing slavery in the United States. The Civil War ends, fol lowed by the implementation of Jim Crow laws in the South. These discriminatory regulations severely limit the liberties of African-Americans in public and private arenas. Lincoln is assassi nated.
1869	Stowe loses much favor in England when she publishes The True Story of Lady Byron’s Life, in which she accuses the poet Lord Byron of having an incestuous love affair with his half-sister, Lady Byron.
1886	Stowe’s husband, Calvin, dies.
1896	Stowe dies on July 1 in Hartford, Connecticut. In the landmark case Plessey v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court upholds the Louisiana Court’s ruling in favor of segregation of blacks and whites, rein forcing the Jim Crow laws. 1955- Martin Luther King, Jr., and Rosa Parks lead the Mont
1956	gomery Bus Boycott.
1961	With transport segregation still in place in the Deep South, the civil rights group Congress of Racial Equality organizes “freedom rides” to desegregate transportation.
1964	Congress passes the Civil Rights Act.