Born in 1811, Harriet Beecher Stowe was one of 11 children of Congregationalist minister and professor of theology Lyman Beecher and his first wife, who died when Harriet was 5 years old, and his second wife, who would die at age 35. All seven of Harriet’s brothers were men of the cloth, including Henry Ward Beecher, one of the best known and most influential abolitionist preachers of his day. Stowe’s husband Calvin Ellis Stowe was a biblical scholar, and her longest-living son Charles Edward was a minister. Harriet Beecher Stowe was the daughter, sister, wife and mother of clergymen.

The world view that guided Stowe’s life’s work, including the writing of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” (UTC), was a product of two primary factors. The first was a love of learning and a quest for knowledge that her father instilled in all his children. The second was a strong, unwavering Christian faith that she initially received from her father and was later reinforced by her minister brothers and biblical scholar husband.

Lyman Beecher gave his daughters a well-rounded academic education (highly unusual in that day) as opposed to a home and family, wife and mother schooling in the “ornamental arts.” He encouraged his children to write and think, and taught them how to argue. These lessons were not lost on Harriet, who began writing sophisticated essays on religion and philosophy at age 10. At age 13, Harriet was a student, then a teacher at a prestigious girls’ school founded by her sister Catherine.

The convergence of talent, intelligence and dedication embedded in an action-oriented Christianity resulted in an exemplary woman. For Stowe, it was not enough for Christians to believe in God. Rather, belief was the foundation of Christian activism in the service of the downtrodden. (After the war, she took on the cause of women’s rights.)

As a young woman, Stowe saw two versions of Christianity regarding slavery. Southern ministers stridently defended and justified human bondage via their interpretation of biblical teachings while most Northern ministers preached about the evils of slavery but did nothing to bring about its demise. For Stowe, the enslavement of blacks was “a clear violation of the great law which commands us to love our neighbors as ourselves.”

Stowe’s views on slavery were based on more than her reading of scripture. As a young wife and mother in Cincinnati, Stowe had met runaways who crossed the Ohio River. She traveled to Kentucky on several occasions and witnessed slavery firsthand. Later, living in Brunswick, Maine, where her husband taught at Bowdoin College, Stowe violated the much-despised Fugitive Slave Act by hiding runaways.

Historian David Reynolds (author of “Mightier Than The Sword: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Battle for America”) argues that in UTC Stowe challenged the passive Christian acceptance of human bondage. According to Reynolds, the straightforward message in UTC is that the Bible is clearly anti-slavery. Stowe gave her many readers a “democratic redefinition of Christianity … a religion of love to all – black and white, the enslaved and the free, the poor and the rich.”

In 1849 – two years before she began writing UTC – her son Samuel Charles, whom she called “my sunshine child,” died of cholera. Stowe would later say the devastating loss of this child allowed her to empathize with slave women who routinely experienced children being taken from them and sold at auction. (Stowe would lose two more children. Henry Ellis drowned at age 19, and Frederick William, who was wounded in the head at the Battle of Gettysburg, drank heavily after the war, departed for California at age 30 and was never heard from again).

One day a frustrated Stowe told her sister-in-law Isabelle Porter that she felt powerless to combat the evil of slavery that was tearing the nation apart. Isabelle replied that “if I could use a pen as you, Hatty, I would write something that would make the whole nation feel what an accursed thing slavery is.” Stowe was also encouraged to write about slavery by her brother, Henry Ward Beecher.

Stowe began to write about a character who would become Uncle Tom. Nursing one child and caring for five others with little help from her husband, it’s amazing that UTC was ever completed. Stowe told a close friend that “I am but a drudge with few ideas beyond babies and housekeeping. … I am sick of the smell of sour milk, sour meat, sour everything.” The world would soon learn that Harriet Beecher Stowe was hardly a woman bereft of ideas or passion.

Reynolds states that Stowe’s ideas on race dovetailed with her religious beliefs. The characters in UTC (especially the compassionate, Christ-like Uncle Tom) indicate that she was likely influenced by one of the new racial theories of her day. Alexander Kinmont argued that not all races have the same innate qualities. He claimed that whites tended to be aggressive, intellectual, scientific and ambitious. Blacks were spiritual, imaginative, non-intellectual and childlike. While Kinmont’s racial views would be considered unsubstantiated racist nonsense today, in Stowe’s time this characterization of blacks was often associated with Christian virtue, and she held this virtue in the highest regard. Uncle Tom became a symbol of Christian suffering for many, as he was often portrayed with his arms extended outward from his shoulders while being flogged, a bodily position similar to that of Christ hanging on the cross.

While Stowe was praised by many, she was vilified by others, especially in the South. In response to the many harsh critics of UTC (one sent her a severed black ear), Stowe noted in 1853, “I wrote what I did because as a woman, as a mother, I was oppressed and broken-hearted with the sorrows of injustice I saw, because as a Christian I felt the dishonor to Christianity – because as a lover of my country, I trembled at the coming day of wrath.”

Although she is remembered almost exclusively for writing UTC, Stowe was a productive author, penning 30 books as well as scores of articles and short stories that regularly appeared in newspapers and journals.

On numerous occasions Stowe noted that she did not write UTC. Rather, the scenes came to her “in visions one after another, and I put them in words.” As an elderly woman, Stowe would say that God wrote UTC; “I merely did His dictation.”

George J. Bryjak lives in Bloomingdale, retired after 24 years of teaching sociology at the University of San Diego.

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Sources:

“Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Life” (accessed 2015) Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, www.harrietbeecherstowecenter.org

Hughes, L. (1952) Introduction, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” by Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Cornwell Press: New York

Reynolds, D. (2011) “Mightier Than The Sword: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Battle for America,” W.W. Norton Company: New York

Stowe, H.B. (1952) “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” The Cornwell Press: New York

Weaver, R. (1938) preface, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Random House: New York