Essays Contents
Harriet Beecher Stowe
August 6, 2023
Harriet Beecher Stowe
author of Uncle Tom's Cabin
Resources:
wikipedia:
Harriet Beecher Stowe
wikipedia:
Calvin Ellis Stowe
wikipedia:
Beecher Family tree
wikipedia:
Lyman Beecher (Harriet's father)
wikipedia:
Uncle Tom's Cabin
audio book:
Uncle Tom's Cabin, Volume 1 of 2
audio book:
Uncle Tom's Cabin, Volume 2 of 2
wikipedia:
Palmetto_Leaves
audio book:
Palmetto Leaves
"Harriet was probably never fully aware of how great had been
her influence in advertising Florida to the country, turning it from an
obscure down under tip on the map into a beckoning, lush, tropical paradise,
to which tens of thousands would flock to help build a state over the following
decades. She herself would doubtless have viewed it as a fitting Christian
act to help restore a prostrate, defeated brotherland to its feet; Florida's first
promoter was merely a Good Samaritan."
YouTube channel: LibriVox Audiobooks, ad-free
Remember to enable Closed Captioning on the audiobooks.
Harriet Beecher Stowe's family history goes back to the beginning of
the settling of America. John Beecher emigrated in 1637
from Kent, England but died later that year while scouting for
a site to make a settlement in Conneticut with seven other men.
The site is now New Haven, Conneticut.
and
Nathaniel Foote emigrated in 1633. He was part of the settlement
party that founded Wethersfield, Connecticut, the oldest town in that state.
Foote's wife, Elizabeth, was the sister of John Deming, considered one of
the "fathers of Connecticut." In 1635, he surveyed the boundaries between
his hometown of Wethersfield and Hartford.
In the 19th century this Beecher family was a political family notable for
issues of religion, civil rights, and social reform. Such notable members
of the family include clergy (Presbyterians and Congregationalists),
educators, authors and artists. Many of the family were Yale-educated
and advocated for abolitionism, temperance, and women's rights.
Some of the family provided material or ideological support to the
Union in the American Civil War.
John Beecher had one son, Isaac. From him all the New Haven families
of the name are said to have descended, and from whence the name has
spread throughout the surrounding country, numbering, among the direct descendants, the West Haven branch of the Beecher family and the
Lyman Beecher family, which would become an American
religious and educational force throughout the 19th century.
Harriet (Hattie) Elizabeth Beecher Stowe (1811–1896) was an
American abolitionist and author, best known for her novel
Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), which depicts the harsh conditions
for enslaved African Americans through fictionalized stories.
The book reached millions as a novel
and play, and became influential in the United States and Great Britain,
energizing anti-slavery forces in the American North, while provoking
widespread anger in the South. Stowe wrote 30 books, including novels,
three travel memoirs, and collections of articles and letters. She was influential
for both her writings and her public stances on social issues of the day.
Uncle Tom's Cabin
In the United States, Uncle Tom's Cabin was the best-selling novel and the
second best-selling book of the 19th century, following the Bible.
It is credited with helping fuel the abolitionist cause in the 1850s.
The influence attributed to the book was so great that a likely
apocryphal story arose of Abraham Lincoln meeting Stowe at the start
of the Civil War and declaring,
"So this is the little lady who started this great war."
The book and the plays it inspired helped popularize a number of negative
stereotypes about black people, including that of the namesake character
"Uncle Tom." The term came to be associated with an excessively subservient
person. These later associations with Uncle Tom's Cabin have, to an extent,
overshadowed the historical effects of the book as a "vital antislavery tool".
Nonetheless, the novel remains a "landmark" in protest literature.
Harriet's father was Lyman Beecher, a minister who published several
notable and well-circulated sermons on intemperance and
dueling. In 1832 he became president at Lane University in
Cincinnati. His mission there was to train ministers to win the West for Protestantism. Lyman preached against the popery of the
Catholic church. An abolitionist, he advocated for the colonization of
freed blacks in Liberia, Africa.
In February 1834, students at Lane, with national publicity, for
18 consecutive nights debated the colonization issue: whether
the American Colonization Society, which sought to settle freed
slaves in Africa, was worthy of support. The students did not have
permission for the debate, but they were not stopped ahead of time.
Most of them abandoned colonization as a hoax, replacing it with
abolitionism.
Many of the students were from the South, and an effort was made to stop
the discussions and the meetings. Slaveholders from Kentucky came in
and incited mob violence, and for several weeks Beecher lived in a turmoil,
not knowing whether rioters might destroy the seminary and the houses
of the professors.
The Board of Trustees interfered during the absence of
Beecher, and allayed the excitement of the mob by forbidding all further
discussion of slavery in the seminary, even at meals, whereupon the students
withdrew en masse. The group of about 50 students (who became known
as the Lane Rebels) who left the seminary went to the new Oberlin Collegiate
Institute, leaving Lane almost without students. Beecher believed himself blameless.
The well-reported events contributed significantly to the growth and spread
of abolitionism in the northern United States. Beecher was neither aware
of nor interested in Lane's key role in publicizing abolitionism.
Beecher stoked controversy by advocating "new measures" of evangelism
(including revivals and camp meetings) that ran counter to traditional
Calvinist understanding. These new measures at the time of the Second
Great Awakening brought turmoil to churches all across America.
Joshua Lacy Wilson, pastor of First Presbyterian (later merged with
Second Presbyterian into modern-day Covenant First Presbyterian)
charged Beecher with heresy in 1835.
The trial took place in his own church, and Beecher defended himself,
while burdened with the cares of his seminary, his church, and his wife
at home on her deathbed. The trial resulted in acquittal, and, on an
appeal to the general synod, he was again acquitted, but the controversy
engendered by the action went on until the Presbyterian church was
divided in two. Beecher took an active part in the theological controversies
that led to the excision of a portion of the general assembly of the Presbyterian
church in 1837-38, Beecher adhering to the New School Presbyterian
branch of the schism.
After the slavery controversy, Beecher and his co-worker Calvin Ellis Stowe
remained and tried to revive the prosperity of the seminary, but at last
abandoned it. The great project of their lives was defeated, and they
returned to the East, where Beecher went to live with his son Henry in
Brooklyn, New York, in 1852.
Harriet's husband, Calvin Ellis Stowe, was an American Biblical scholar
who helped spread public education in the United States. Over his career,
he was a professor of languages and Biblical and sacred literature at
Andover Theological Seminary, Dartmouth College, Lane Theological
Seminary, and Bowdoin College. He was the husband and literary
agent of Harriet Beecher Stowe.
Calvin Stowe's father, a village baker, died due to an accident in 1808.
He left an impoverished widow with two sons. Stowe was sent to his
maternal grandparents to live. At the age of twelve, Stowe was apprenticed
to a paper maker. Stowe had an insatiable craving for books, and acquired
the rudiments of Latin by studying at odd moments during his
apprenticeship in the paper mill. He saved enough money to pay for
a year at Bradford Academy in 1818.
His earnest desire and determined efforts to gain an education attracted
the attention of benefactors who sent him to an academy in Gorham,
Maine in 1819 or 1820. He entered Bowdoin College and in 1821 Stowe
became a member of the Peucinian literary society which had a collection
of 600 to 700 titles. He became secretary of the society in 1822.
After donations of several hundred books, Stowe became a paid librarian
for the school in 1824. He graduated with honors in 1824.
President Franklin Pierce was a classmate, who said that he benefited
by sitting next to Stowe when taking tests. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
and Nathaniel Hawthorne's class was one year behind Stowe's.
After his graduation from Bowdoin, he remained there for a year as an
instructor and librarian. In September 1825, he entered Andover Theological
Seminary. For his continued scholastic studies, he received his master's degree
from Bowdoin in 1827. At the instigation of Moses Stuart, a professor at
Andover, he completed a scholarly translation of Jahn's Hebrew Commonwealth.
He graduated in 1828. He was proficient in the Greek, Latin, Hebrew and
Arabic languages.
In 1829, he became editor of the Boston Recorder, the oldest religious newspaper in the United States. He published a translation from the Latin, with notes, of Lowth's Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews.
In 1830, he was appointed professor of Greek at Dartmouth College. He was
a popular professor and Dartmouth awarded him an honorary master's
degree for his continued scholarship. Two years later, he was appointed
professor of Biblical Literature at the Lane Theological Seminary in
Cincinnati. He was also the librarian, responsible for building what grew
to a collection of 10,000 volumes by 1837, some of which were acquired
during a book-buying trip to Europe in May 1836. Based upon a study of
American academic libraries published in 1840, the Lane had the largest
academic library west of the Alleghenies at that time.
Lyman Beecher was the president of the seminary; Stowe was mocked in
the press for being Beecher's "satellite". He taught religion at Bowdoin
from 1850 to 1852 and at Andover Theological Seminary from 1852 to 1864.
While in Cincinnati, Stowe became an important advocate for the development
of public schools. In May 1836, he sailed for England, primarily to purchase a
library for Lane seminary, but he received at the same time an official
appointment from the Ohio State Legislature to visit as agent the public
schools of Europe, particularly those of Prussia. On his return he published
his Report on Elementary Education in Europe, which urged Ohio
to adopt a state-backed educational system like that of German states.
The Legislature ordered a copy of the book for each of the state's school districts.
Stowe contributed to religious periodicals over his career. His first book,
published while he was Professor of Biblical Literature at the Lane Seminary,
was Introduction to the criticism and interpretation of the Bible:
designed for the use of theological students, Bible classes, and high schools.
After Harriet's novel became famous, Stowe wrote his own best-selling book,
Origin and History of the Books of the Bible, both Canonical and
Apocryphal (Hartford, 1867). He also published The Religious Element
in Education, a lecture (1844); and The Right Interpretation of the
Sacred Scriptures, inaugural address (Andover, 1853).
In 1832, he married Eliza Tyler of Portland Maine. Her father was
Rev. Bennet Tyler, who was a president of Dartmouth. They moved to
Walnut Hills, Cincinnati, Ohio. Eliza died on August 26, 1834.
Eliza was a good friend of Harriet Elizabeth Beecher. In January 1836,
he married Harriet. Her father was Dr. Lyman Beecher, president of Lane Theological Seminary. They lived in Cincinnati after their marriage
and moved to Brunswick, Maine in 1850, during a period of unrest
due to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. The family moved to Andover, Massachusetts in 1852, the final move for Stowe's career.
Harriet wrote her acclaimed novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1852.
In 1853 and 1856, he visited Europe with Harriet. His childhood stories
served as the basis for Harriet's books Oldtown Folks (1869)
and Sam Lawson's Old Fireside Stories (1872).
They had a winter house in Florida along the St. Johns River.
It sat on a 90-acre property orange grove. Following months of ill health,
Stowe died on August 22, 1886, in Hartford, Connecticut.
He is buried in the cemetery of Phillips Academy in Andover,
Massachusetts.
While in Cincinnati, the Stowes provided shelter for northward-bound
freedom seekers on the Underground Railroad and Harriet's brothers and
Stowe helped them on their journey to Canada. Cincinnati riots of 1836
sent angry mobs, led by the agents of exasperated and desperate
slave-holders, to hunt down free blacks in the streets of Cincinnati.
As references in William Lloyd Garrison's radical abolitionist paper,
The Liberator, document... although Stowe privately decried slavery,
he was no abolitionist. He believed slavery was sanctioned by the Bible
and that, through Christian education, slavery would gradually fade away.
He was, instead, an advocate of colonization of free Blacks in Liberia as a
"solution" to slavery. It was only after his wife Harriet Beecher Stowe's
Uncle Tom's Cabin was published in 1852 that Stowe began, haltingly,
to change his stance regarding slavery, first as a signatory to a petition
of New England clergy in opposition to the Kansas–Nebraska Act,
issued in 1854.
author of Uncle Tom's Cabin