Harriet Beecher Stowe

A Beecher of Litchfield

She was born Harriet Elisabeth Beecher on 14 June 1811 in Litchfield, Connecticut, into the most publicly argumentative family in nineteenth-century America. Her father, Lyman Beecher, was a famous Calvinist preacher; all seven of her brothers became ministers, one of them the celebrity orator Henry Ward Beecher; her eldest sister Catharine pioneered serious education for girls, and her youngest half-sister Isabella helped found the National Woman Suffrage Association. Their mother died when Harriet was five. The children argued current affairs at the dinner table as training, and Harriet decided early that her own way of shaping the world would be writing.

In 1832 the family moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, where Lyman took over a theological seminary and where Harriet — across the river from slave-holding Kentucky — met fugitives from slavery for the first time. There she married Calvin Ellis Stowe, a professor of theology, and had six of her seven children. In the summer of 1849 her eighteen-month-old son Samuel Charles died of cholera, and she later said that this was one of the things that made Uncle Tom's Cabin possible: it taught her what an enslaved mother felt when her child was sold.

Uncle Tom's Cabin, and what it argued

In 1850 the United States passed the Fugitive Slave Act, which compelled citizens of free states to help capture escaped slaves. In 1851 Gamaliel Bailey, publisher of the Washington abolitionist weekly The National Era, commissioned Stowe to write, in her own phrase, a word-picture of slavery. She expected three or four chapters and wrote more than forty, a chapter a week; the book came out complete in 1852.

The novel follows two enslaved people sold away from the same Kentucky farm. Eliza runs north with her small son, crossing the Ohio River on breaking ice, and reaches Canada. Tom, a devout middle-aged man, goes the other way — sold down the river, sold again, and finally beaten to death by the planter Simon Legree for refusing to say where two women have escaped to. The argument the book makes is deliberately narrow and impossible to sidestep: slavery is not a political question but a domestic one; it takes children from mothers and kills good men; and every reader who tolerates it is answerable. It worked. The effect, Frederick Douglass wrote, was amazing, instantaneous and universal — no book on the subject had so generally touched the American heart. It also enraged the South, and Stowe was accused of inventing her atrocities, so in 1853 she published A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, a whole volume of the court records, advertisements and testimony behind the fiction.

The serious modern criticism is not that the book is untrue but that its picture of Black character is a white author's, and a damaging one. Tom's saintly endurance — he forgives Legree while dying under his whip — became a template for Black passivity, and 'Uncle Tom' is now a racial insult, as the museum in Stowe's own house states plainly. The unlicensed stage versions did most of the damage: the touring 'Tom shows' of the later nineteenth century used minstrel conventions, with white actors in blackface, and turned Tom into a shuffling comic servant. In 1949 James Baldwin opened his career with the essay 'Everybody's Protest Novel', which attacks Uncle Tom's Cabin head-on as sentimentality standing in for humanity — a book in which the Black characters are moral counters rather than people. Both things are true of it: it was a weapon that worked, and its portraiture did lasting harm.

Andover, March 1853: Frederick Douglass comes to dinner

Before sailing for Europe, Stowe sent to Rochester, New York, for Frederick Douglass — the escaped slave who had become the most formidable Black orator and newspaper editor in America — and asked him to spend a day at her house in Andover, Massachusetts. She had a proposal. Admirers in Britain were raising a large sum of money to present to her, and she wanted to spend it on something permanent for free Black Americans; what, she asked, would do the most good?

Douglass argued against a purely academic institution and for a series of workshops where Black students could learn trades — iron, wood, leather — alongside a plain English education, on the grounds that poverty was the root of everything else. Stowe agreed, and asked him to put it in a letter she could show her supporters in England; he wrote it on 8 March 1853. It is the reason the European tour mattered politically as well as personally. The sequel was a disappointment he never got over: on her return she reconsidered, and the industrial school was never built.

Paris, 1853: dreamland

The party — Stowe, her brother the Rev. Charles Beecher, who kept the journal for the Continental leg, and their travelling companions — left London on 4 June 1853, crossed from Folkestone to Boulogne, and reached Paris that evening past the windmills of Montmartre. They were taken in by American friends who rented the ground floor of an old mansion in the rue de Verneuil, in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, the quarter of the old French nobility: a gateway, a paved courtyard, a waxed parquet floor, a garden outside the window. 'French life is different from any other,' wrote Charles Beecher, who kept the journal for the Continental leg. 'Elsewhere you do as the world pleases; here you do as you please yourself.'

At last I have come into dreamland; into the lotus-eater's paradise; into the land where it is always afternoon. I am released from care; I am unknown, unknowing.

What she did with the freedom was look at pictures. The Musée du Louvre was a short walk across the Seine, and she went at it systematically, catalogue in hand, morning after morning — the Greek, Assyrian and Egyptian antiquities, the Italian rooms, and above all the armless Greek statue then called the Venus de Milon, which got a letter of its own. She heard a sermon at the Madeleine, walked home through the Tuileries gardens and was startled to find that Paris kept no Sabbath at all, watched the sun set over the city from the top of the Arc de Triomphe, and spent one whole day, as her brother's journal puts it, consecrated to knick-knacks.

The Parisian who took charge of her was Louise Swanton Belloc, who with her friend Adélaïde de Montgolfier had made the best French translation of Uncle Tom's Cabin, and whose husband Jean-Hilaire Belloc was a painter and director of the École Impériale de Dessin — the government's free drawing school for the working classes. On 13 June Stowe sat to him in his studio, among the plaster arms and legs and the fireless stove. He decided to paint her looking away rather than at the viewer, because a friend had said she always had the air of an observer: 'en observatrice, mais pas en curieuse' — with the air of observation, but not of curiosity. While he worked, the publisher and bookseller Gervais Charpentier came in and told her that in thirty-five years in the trade he had known nothing like the success of her book, and that Alfred de Musset had said of it: this leaves us all behind — all, all, miles behind.

She left in mid-June for Switzerland, Germany and the Rhine, and came back to Paris in August for a second stay, this time lodging inside the drawing school itself, in a room Madame Belloc had filled with flowers and engravings. She went round the students' prize work — plaster casts of leaves and vine branches, skeletons copied bone by bone — and concluded that French feeling for beauty was not affectation but training. One August morning the Bellocs took her to call on Pierre-Jean de Béranger, the most popular songwriter in France, who had not yet had breakfast at eleven and ate his chop and coffee while they all talked. Her verdict on French conversation is the best sentence in the book: it is like the gambols of a thistledown, or the rainbow changes in soap bubbles, and one laughs with tears in one's eyes.

Hartford, and after

She went on writing for another quarter-century: the anti-slavery novel Dred (1856), the New England novels, The American Woman's Home (1869) with her sister Catharine, and Lady Byron Vindicated (1871), a defence of a friend that dragged her into a scandal of her own. After the Civil War the Stowes wintered in Mandarin, Florida, where she bought an orange grove and her brother Charles ran a school for freed people. From 1873 she lived at 77 Forest Street in Hartford, Connecticut, in a brick Gothic cottage in the Nook Farm neighbourhood — where her nearest neighbour was Mark Twain, a generation younger, whose family and hers went to the same lawn parties. The house is now the Stowe Center, and open to visitors.

She corresponded for years with writers she never met. In 1869 she wrote out of the blue to George Eliot in England, addressing her as 'dear friend'; Eliot, who found the letter waiting after nine weeks of travel, wrote back that she valued very highly the warrant to call her friend, and the two women exchanged letters for the rest of Eliot's life without ever being in the same room. Stowe died in Hartford in 1896. The line everyone quotes about her — Abraham Lincoln greeting her as 'the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war' — the Library of Congress records carefully as something Stowe herself reported, not as a transcript, and it should be repeated on that footing. The Orwell essay on Rudyard Kipling pays her the sideways compliment that lasts better: Kipling, Orwell wrote, is as a poet what Harriet Beecher Stowe was as a novelist — a writer whose obvious faults never quite explain why the work refuses to die.