Uncle Tom's Cabin Unit of Study

Personal Biography

In the turbulent spring of 1851, the United States' anti-slavery movement found one of its most forceful voices in a diminutive, first-time author, Harriet Beecher Stowe. The great abolitionist author and lecturer Frederick Douglass noted, "In the midst of these fugitive slave troubles came the book known as Uncle Tom's Cabin, a work of marvelous depth and power. Nothing could have better suited the moral and humane requirements of the hours. Its effect was amazing, instantaneous and universal."

Harriet Elisabeth Beecher was born June 14, 1811, in Litchfield, Connecticut, the seventh child of the famous Congregationalist minister, Reverend Lyman Beecher (one of the founders of the American Bible Society). She received a typical Calvinist upbringing, but her mother, Roxanna Foote Beecher, also began a careful educational course for her daughter. This ceased upon Roxanna's death when the child was five years old.

Without a mother, Harriet Beecher grew close to her older sister Catharine. At the age of eleven, she attended the school her sister founded, Hartford Female Seminary. While Catharine Beecher based her educational philosophy on traditional academics, with an emphasis on writing, the curriculum included many innovations, such as physical education and home economics. After graduation four years later, Harriet Beecher became an assistant teacher at the seminary.

In 1832, Lane Theological Seminary appointed Lyman Beecher its president. His daughter accompanied him to Cincinnati, Ohio. There, she met the widowed husband of her friend, Eliza Tyler. Nine years her senior, professor Calvin E. Stowe married Harriet Beecher. Six of their seven children (Eliza and Harriet, the unmarried twins; Henry Ellis, who drowned during his freshman year at Dartmouth; Frederick; Georgianna May, who became addicted to the morphine she used as a painkiller after the birth of her son; and Samuel Charles, who died of cholera when only 18 months old) were born in Cincinnati.

Cincinnati lay across the Ohio River from slaveholding Kentucky. The nearness to the Peculiar Institution had a profound effect on the professor's wife that influenced her later writing. To her surprise, their servant, Zillah, informed the family that she was a runaway slave. Calvin Stowe immediately drove Zillah to the next Underground Railroad station. Later, a neighbor, Mr. Rankin, reported seeing a young woman run across the ice-strewn river carrying a baby in her arms.

Calvin Stowe received an appointment to the faculty of his alma mater Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, in 1850. That same year, the Stowe's final child, Charles Edward, who would become the minister of the Simsbury, Connecticut Congregational Church, was born. The family lived in Brunswick until 1853.

Development as an Writer

Calvin Stowe always encouraged his wife as an author. In 1840, he wrote, "My dear, you must be a literary woman. It is so written in the book of fate," and he continued, "Make all your calculations accordingly." Fate now opened the door. The passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850 disturbed Harriet Stowe deeply and inspired her to take action. She immediately established the boundaries of her calling, "My object will be to hold up in the most lifelike and graphic manner possible Slavery...."

While sitting at communion in the First Parish Church of Brunswick, the initial scene of her new work appeared in a vision to the fledgling author. She rushed home and wrote down what would eventually become the conclusion of her story, the violent whipping death of Uncle Tom. After reading the completed episode to her young sons, they responded through tears, "O mamma, slavery is the most cursed thing in the world." The determined author decided almost immediately to title her book Uncle Tom's Cabin, and originally planned to use, "The Man Who Was a Thing" as the subtitle. Later she changed this to "Life Among the Lowly" as being more descriptive of the total work.

On March 9, 1851, Harriet Stowe contacted Dr. Gamaliel Bailey, the editor of Washington, D.C.'s antislavery paper National Era. She wrote, "Up to this year I have always felt that I had no particular care to meddle with this subject (slavery)" and continued, "But I feel now that the time is come when even a woman or a child ... is bound to speak." Without a definite storyline or a planned length, Bailey agreed to publish Uncle Tom's Cabin as a weekly serial for $300.

Unused to writing, Stowe introduced multiple characters and plotlines in her initial installments. Thus, the serialize novel eventually ran over 40 installments intermittently from June 5, 1851, through April 1, 1852. Harriet Stowe sealed her audience's attention on July 10, 1851, when the National Era published the episode of Eliza's dramatic escape across the river.

Uncle Tom's Cabin told the story of slavery through its effects on individuals and families. Stowe not only described slavery's physical abuse, but she also stressed the psychological and sexual trauma it caused. She carefully attacked slavery as an institution rather than individuals or the South as a region, and attempted to show the corrupting influence of that institution on the slave, slaveholder, and nation equally. With only minimal knowledge of the South, the author drew on her experiences in Ohio and the popular slave narratives for her storyline.

Beginning in the 1840s, slave narratives provided northern audiences with their first and most accurate accounts of the southern institution. Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, and Solomon Northup authored personal accounts of their life in slavery. Douglass, Brown, Henry Bibb, Sojourner Truth, and Ellen and William Craft toured the lecture circuit with their tales. Harriet Stowe's novel, however, reached a wider and often more receptive audience. Historian Milton Rugoff explained, "At her best, Harriet Beecher Stowe was the first American realist of any consequence and the first to use fiction for a profound criticism of American society, especially its failure to live up to (the) promises of democracy."

As the story progressed, Stowe realized that she lacked the personal knowledge needed to complete the serial. On July 9, 1851, she wrote Frederick Douglass for help: "You may perhaps have noticed in your editorial readings a series of articles that I am furnishing for the Era under the title of "Uncle Tom's Cabin, or Life among the Lowly." In the course of my story, the scene will fall upon a cotton plantation--I am very desirous to gain information from one who has been an actual laborer on one...." This letter opened a lifelong friendship between the two.

Harriet Beecher Stowe often disparaged her own writing style, although she published 30 books and countless shorter works. She said, "I no more thought of style or literary excellence than the mother who rushes into the street and cries for help to save her children from a burning house, thinks of the teachings of the rhetorician or the elocutionist." However, Frederick Douglass assessed her work differently: "One flash from the heart-supplied intellect of Harriet Beecher Stowe could light a million camp fires in front of the embattled host of slavery which not all the water of the Mississippi, mingled as they are with blood, could extinguish."

John Jewett, a small Boston publisher whose wife loved the New Era's serial, approached Calvin Stowe about printing Uncle Tom's Cabin in book form. Jewett requested that the Stowes pay half the initial printing costs and then receive half of the profits. Because the family possessed limited resources, Calvin Stowe asked their friend Congressman Philip Greeley for advice. Greeley replied that the risk of publishing such a controversial book would be enormous and advised that the family ask for ten percent of the profits, which they did. In return for this advice, Calvin Stowe purchased the first two-volume set for $0.56 for Philip Greeley. The congressman read the clothbound edition on a train to Washington, D.C., and found the novel so moving that he left the train in tears.

On the first day of publication, Uncle Tom's Cabin sold out the initial run of 3,000. A second edition went immediately to publication. To keep up with the extreme demand for it, eight printing presses ran night and day. Within the first week, Jewett distributed 10,000 copies. The first royalty check arrived at the Stowes' home in July for $1,000. In August, sales hit 100,000. Tales abounded about the book's popularity, with California gold miners supposedly charging $0.25 to share copies. By the end of 1852, Uncle Tom's Cabin sold ten times its initial printing. Putnam's Magazine called Uncle Tom's Cabin, "the first real success in bookmaking."

Uncle Tom's Cabin drew an immediate response. The novel received praise and criticism, being seen both as a telling portrayal of the Peculiar Institution and condemned as a slanted, inaccurate account. Unhappy readers forced a bookseller to leave Mobile, Alabama, after selling copies of the book. Threatening letters arrived at the Stowe home, along with a package containing the severed black ear from a disobedient slave. Children in Richmond Virginia, chanted, "Go, go, go, Ol' Harriet Beecher Stowe! We don't want you her in Virginny--go, go, go." But, Booker T. Washington appraised the book's true impact when he said that Harriet Beecher Stowe "was inspired to recite the story of the Negro in America. This she did with a mastery and a fascination that commanded the widest reading ever yet given to an American book. She so stirred the hearts." He went on to say that, "The value of Uncle Tom's Cabin to the cause of Abolition can never be justly estimated."

In 1852 "Tom-mania" hit. Extraneous items using the novel as a source proliferated: children's versions, plays, games, and even ceramic statues. "Tom-mania" also attacked Europe. A publisher at a rival New York publishing house, Putnam's, sent a copy of Uncle Tom's Cabin to an English publisher for ₤5. Without international copyright laws, this cost Harriet most worldwide royalties. The book was translated eventually into 60 languages, including Yiddish in order to get it into repressive czarist Russia.

Following the successful publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin, the Stowes' lives changed forever. Calvin Stowe became a professor of theology at Andover Theological Seminary in 1853. But by now, his wife took on the aura of celebrity with its many consequences. She was invited to the British Isles in 1853, to which she returned in 1856 and 1859. Her initial visit, however, showed that the complicated politics of slavery involved not only the United States.

The struggle between the North and the South caused British politicians a great deal of consternation, not wishing to side with either of their trading partners. While many members of the British aristocracy hosted the Stowes, Queen Victoria prudently refused to meet with her. However, on her second visit to England, Harriet Stowe met Queen Victoria "accidentally." The Stowe family happened to be at King's Cross Station at the same time that the royal family was on its way to their castle in Scotland, Balmoral. The two most famous women in the world chatted briefly before their respective trains departed.

While Harriet Stowe wrote a second antislavery work, Dred (in response to the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision) and many colloquial New England novels, her fame rested almost solely on Uncle Tom's Cabin. In November 1862, she traveled to Washington to attend the Thanksgiving Dinner for the Freedmen of the District of Columbia. During her visit, Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts arranged a meeting with President Lincoln. Harriet Stowe took 12-year old Charles Edward, also known as Charley, with her to the White House. As she entered the President's private office (study), he rose and supposedly greeted her, "Why, Mrs. Stowe, right glad to see you. So you're the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war!"

After Calvin Stowe's retirement, the family moved to Hartford, Connecticut. There, they built their dream house, Oakholm. However, due to unforeseen expenses, they sold it in 1870 and moved into a brick cottage-style house on Forest Street. A year later, Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) moved his family into the neighboring house. Clemens was a contemporary and friend of the Stowe twins, who managed the house for their mother.

In 1890, Harriet Stowe wrote, "My mind wanders like a running brook. I have written all my words and thought all my thoughts...." She became childlike, wandering over to the Clemens' home to "pick" (actually pull up) their flowers. Occasionally she entered their home and played the piano in their white and gold drawing room until one of the twins retrieved her. One day, an unknown man approached her, complimenting her on Uncle Tom's Cabin. She replied, "Ah yes! That was a great book. God wrote it."

Harriet Beecher Stowe died on July 1, 1896, in Hartford. At her funeral, the black community of Boston placed a wreath on her casket with a card reading, "The Children of Uncle Tom." Two years later, Paul Laurence Dunbar wrote this in Century Magazine:

"She told the story, and the whole world wept
At wrongs and cruel ties and it had not known
But for this fearless woman's voice alone.
She spoke to consciences that long had slept:
Her message, Freedom's clear reveille, swept
From heedless hovel to complacent throne.
Command and prophecy were in the tone,
And from its sheath the sword of justice leapt.
Around two peoples swelled a fiery wave,
But both came forth transfigured from the flame.
Blest be the hand that dread be strong to save,
And blest be she who in our weakness came -
Prophet and priestess! At one stroke she gave
A race to freedom, and herself to fame."

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