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Harriet Beecher Stowe
She Wrote for Freedom, She Wrote for Hope
She sat in a sturdy wooden chair pulled close to the bed, and as one languid hour passed into the next, she gazed at her young son’s face, flushed and sweaty with fever. As he tossed and moaned, slipping in and out of consciousness, she draped cool cloths over his forehead, praying fervently that he would recover. He did not. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s young son died of cholera while she watched helplessly at his bedside. “It was at his dying bed, and at his grave,” Harriet later wrote about Charley, “that I learnt what a poor slave mother may feel when her child is torn away from her.”1
Educated as a Man, Restless as a Woman
Harriet Beecher was born the seventh of thirteen children in Litchfield, Connecticut. After her mother died when Harriet was just five years old, her father, Lyman Beecher, remarried and sent Harriet to live at the Hartford Female Seminary under the direction of her older sister Catharine, who had founded the elite school in 1823 with another sister, Mary.
As the daughter of a prominent Calvinist preacher, Harriet was expected to give her life to Christ, and she did so at the age of thirteen. Her father’s greatest worry was the state of his children’s unconverted souls, and he frequently bemoaned the fact that he was able to lead successful revivals for hundreds yet struggled to bring his own children to Christ. Under this heavy weight, several of the Beecher children were spiritually paralyzed well into adulthood, which only intensified Lyman’s anxiety. Harriet, on the other hand, quietly acknowledged to her father one morning after listening to one of his Sunday sermons that she had officially converted. She was a Christian, and she was at peace.
Harriet was a precocious student, and by the time she left the seminary in 1827 at age sixteen, she was proficient in Latin, Greek, French, Italian, mathematics, geography, history, rhetoric and oratory, the natural and mechanical sciences, and music. In other words, Harriet was one of the few women in nineteenth-century New England to benefit from an education equivalent to that of a young man.
She left Hartford with her stellar education to join her father and stepmother in Boston. But Harriet’s options were limited. She could marry and raise children. She could pursue missionary work. Or, like her sister Catharine, Harriet could become a teacher. Frustrated and unable to make a decision about the next step in her life, Harriet succumbed to depression. “I don’t know as I am fit for anything, and I have thought that I could wish to die young and let the remembrance of me and my faults perish in the grave, rather than live, as I fear I do, a trouble to everyone,” she wrote to Catharine.2 She complained of feeling “so useless, so weak, so destitute of all energy,”3 yet unable to sleep at night, weeping and worrying until midnight. Catharine recognized her sister’s turmoil and immediately wrote to their father, insisting that Harriet return to help her run the Hartford Female Seminary in place of Mary, who was suffering from anxiety and consumption.
The job distracted Harriet and soothed her troubled spirit, and along the way she discovered a passion for teaching composition and rhetoric. She stayed at the seminary until 1832, when Lyman accepted a position at Lane Seminary in Cincinnati and the Beechers moved west. Although she initially resisted the move, Ohio eventually proved to be fertile ground for Harriet.
“You Must Be a Literary Woman”
During her first two years in Cincinnati, Harriet once again succumbed to restlessness and indecision. She was torn between what she assumed was her expected role—a schoolteacher at Catharine’s newly launched Western Female Institute—and her passion: writing. Harriet had already experienced some literary success with the publication of her first book, Primary Geography for Children, a textbook that earned her 187 dollars, about 15 percent of her father’s annual salary and almost as much as Catharine earned in a year of running her school. But writing was still very much a radical career choice for women at the time, and Harriet wasn’t convinced she should take the risk.
Parlor literature allowed Harriet to segue into the literary life. Like parlor music, parlor literature was a centuries-old pastime. Typical activities included singing, piano playing, and dramatic readings of essays and poems. The advent of literary clubs provided a more formal audience for this domestic literature, with men and women gathering in home parlors to read verses, ballads, and sketches they had written, which often contained humorous references to local people and events and were frequently satirical in nature. Harriet Beecher’s literary career was formally launched in the Semi-Colon Club, a Cincinnati literary society that attracted transplanted New Englanders. Harriet, with her background in composition and her love of letter writing, was skilled at creating the light, humorous, accessible tone that made parlor literature so appealing. One of her most memorable character sketches, “Uncle Lot,” was based on her grandfather, a cantankerous New England farmer. When Harriet submitted the popular sketch to a competition sponsored by Western Monthly magazine, she won fifty dollars and a boost in her confidence.
“Parlor literature afforded Harriet Beecher an advantage she never lost: an intimate relationship to her audience,” observes biographer Joan Hedrick. “When Uncle Tom’s Cabin burst on the national scene in 1851, the intimate narrative voice of that book, its appeal to domestic institutions and reader emotions, had had a long foreground in Harriet Beecher’s apprenticeship in parlor literature.”4
Not only did Harriet find her literary voice in the parlor, she found her husband there as well. Harriet had met both Calvin Stowe and his wife, Eliza, in the Semi-Colon Club. Two years after Eliza died of cholera, Harriet and Calvin, who worked with her father as a theology professor at Lane Seminary, were married. Although Harriet seemed to abhor the idea of marriage (just a half hour before the ceremony, she wrote to her sister Georgiana that she had been “dreading and dreading the time” when she would “cease to be Hatty Beecher and change to nobody knows who”5), Calvin proved to be one of her most enthusiastic advocates and an unwavering supporter of her writing career.
When Harriet doubted her role as a writer, Calvin buoyed her confidence. “Our children are just coming to the age when everything depends on my efforts,” Harriet wrote to Calvin from Boston in 1842, where she was meeting with a publisher. “They need a mother’s whole attention. Can I lawfully divide my attention by literary efforts?”6
“You must be a literary woman. It is so written in the book of fate,” Calvin answered. “Make all your calculations accordingly, get a good stock of health, brush up your mind, drop the E out of your name, which only encumbers it and stops the flow and euphony, and write yourself only and always, Harriet Beecher Stowe, which is a name euphonous [sic], flowing, and full of meaning; and my word for it, your husband will lift up his head in the gate, and your children will rise up and call you blessed.”7 The matter was settled. Harriet would write. Her husband had baptized the former Mrs. H. E. Beecher Stowe into the name that would go down in literary, abolitionist, and American history: Harriet Beecher Stowe.
“Must We Forever Keep Calm and Smile?”
Gayle Kimball observes that one of the greatest challenges in Harriet’s life was her desire and struggle to believe that she was saved as a Christian. Although she accepted Jesus and claimed her faith as a young child, the feeling of peace she’d initially experienced didn’t last long. By the time she was a young adult, Harriet consistently grappled with her perception of the punishing God of her childhood and the gentler God she wanted to trust and love. Her brother George’s suicide in 1843 further shook her “like an earthquake,” and she prayed fervently “that Christ would ‘make his abode’ within her soul.”8 Her spiritual struggles are reflected in much of her writing, including Uncle Tom’s Cabin. While the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850 enraged Harriet and was certainly a catalyst behind Uncle Tom’s Cabin, several biographers have suggested that Harriet also had personal reasons to write such a response to slavery. When her beloved son Charley died of cholera in 1847, Stowe admitted that “much that is in that book . . . had its root in the awful scenes and bitter sorrows of that summer.”9
As the number of kidnappings and forced reenslavements increased daily as a result of the Fugitive Slave Law, Harriet, now living in Brunswick, Maine, became increasingly frustrated with the negligence of the press and the public. “Must we forever keep calm and smile and smile when every sentiment of manliness and humanity is kicked and rolled in the dust and lies trampled and bleeding and make it a merit to be exceedingly cool?” she wrote to her brother, the minister Henry Ward Beecher.10
Finally, she took the matter into her own hands. In March 1851 she wrote to her editor, “Up to this year I have always felt that I had no particular call to meddle with this subject, and I dreaded to expose even my own mind to the full force of its exciting power. But I feel now that the time is come when even a woman or a child who can speak a word for freedom and humanity is bound to speak.”11 She proposed a serial that would run in three or four segments. Harriet had no idea that the story would sprawl into a novel that would run in weekly installments in the abolitionist journal the National Era from June 5, 1851, to April 1, 1852. It was published in book form in March 1852, and less than a year later, Uncle Tom’s Cabin had sold an unprecedented three hundred thousand copies.
God “Knows All about Mothers’ Hearts”
One can’t argue that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s greatest contribution was that of an abolitionist writer. It’s said that President Lincoln himself, upon meeting the diminutive Harriet, exclaimed, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war!” Yet her novels are appealing and powerful not only for their political impact but for their ability to reach the reader on a personal, intimate level as well. Underlying her statements and questions about human rights and freedom are deeper, more personal questions about truth, faith, hope, love, suffering, and salvation.
In 1857 Harriet’s son Henry, a student at Dartmouth, drowned while swimming with friends in the Connecticut River. In her grief, Harriet not only revisited her younger son Charley’s death, she also returned to the questions of salvation that had plagued her earlier in life. Harriet fretted that Henry had died unsaved, and her letters to Catharine reveal a desperate search for evidence that would prove her son did not plummet to hell because he hadn’t formally given himself to Christ. Her novel The Minister’s Wooing, written in the year following Henry’s death, was Harriet’s answer to her theological wrestling.
In the book the character of Mrs. Marvyn is unable to reconcile herself to her son’s death at sea and his everlasting damnation, and it is only the consoling words of Candace, the Marvyns’ former slave, that finally offer her comfort. God “knows all about mothers’ hearts; He wont break yours,” Candace assures the bereft mother.12 Thus Harriet was finally able to transform her own image of God from that of a distant and punishing Creator to a kind, forgiving, loving God based on her own understanding of a mother’s love. “He who made me capable of such an absorbing unselfish devotion as I feel for my children so that I could willingly sacrifice my eternal salvation for theirs,” she later wrote to her sister, “he certainly did not make me capable of more disinterestedness than he has himself—He invented mother’s hearts—& he certainly has the pattern in his own.”13
The questions Harriet wrestled with so courageously and transparently in her fiction undoubtedly offered countless grieving parents and troubled Christians an alternative to the stern, impersonal God they were accustomed to. Her solution to the question of salvation wasn’t complicated theology; it was simply love, as demonstrated by Christ himself and his own self-sacrifice. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s prolific writing is a powerful statement about basic human rights, justice, and freedom that made an indelible impact on American history. But on a more personal level, her novels are also an intimate walk through suffering and grief—a walk each one of us, in one way or another, recognizes and understands. Her search for answers is a familiar one, and her quest—one that ultimately ends in love—gives us hope and courage as we walk similar paths.