“The pen is mightier than the sword,” wrote Edward Bulwer-Lytton in 1839. Two crucial works in American history buttress his point. The pamphlet “Common Sense,” penned by Thomas Paine in January, 1776 helped galvanize the original thirteen colonies to throw off British rule. The second came from a woman named Harriet Beecher Stowe.
Harriet Beecher was born in Litchfield, Connecticut on June 14, 1811, the sixth of seven children of Calvinist preacher Lyman Beecher and his wife Roxana. Roxana died when Harriet was five years old. The next year Lyman married Harriet Porter, who bore him four additional children. Harriet Beecher’s older sister Catharine ran a school called the Hartford Female Seminary. There she received a rarity for women of her day, a formal education in literature, languages, and mathematics.
In 1832 she moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, where her father had become the president of Lane Theological Seminary. In her new city she met a number of former slaves who had escaped from the south, only to be attacked by ethic Irish in the north, with whom they competed for jobs on the state’s canals and railroads.
In 1833 a cholera epidemic in Cincinnati forced Harriet to flee to Washington, Kentucky, where she stayed with the family of a prominent Kentuckian named Marshall Key. Key took her to witness a slave auction in Maysville, where she saw first-hand the treatment of slaves as commodities. Then in 1834 she attended a series of debates on slavery at the seminary. All of these experiences solidified her conviction that slavery was immoral.
During that time, she also met the Reverend Calvin Ellis Stowe, a professor of Biblical Literature at the seminary. They were married on January 6, 1836 and had seven children.
In 1850 her husband accepted a teaching position at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. That same year congress passed the Fugitive Slave Law, criminalizing assistance to runaway slaves from the south. In defiance of the law, Calvin and Harriet opened their Brunswick home as an Underground Railroad way station for runaway slaves fleeing to sanctuary in Canada. Also during that time, she received a fateful letter from her younger half-sister Isabella Porter Beecher.
“If I could use a pen like you, Hattie, I would write something that would show the entire world what an accursed thing slavery is.”
On March 9, 1850 Harriet wrote to Gamaliel Bailey, editor of the weekly anti-slavery journal, “The National Era,” informing him that she planned to write a story about the evils of slavery. It would come to him chapter by chapter, to be published in serial form. She invited students from Bowdoin College to read and discuss the chapters before she sent them off. One of those students was Joshua Chamberlain, who later earned the Medal of Honor for his heroics at the Battle of Gettysburg. After the war he became the governor of Maine.
On June 5, 1851 the first installment of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” subtitled “Life Among the Lowly” appeared. Chapters continued weekly until April 1, 1852. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was then published in full book form on March 20, 1852. In less than a year it sold 300,000 copies and went on to become the second best-selling book of the nineteenth century, behind the Bible. Her book roused the North against slavery and at the same time enraged the South. A number of pro-slavery novels appeared from there to refute her book. The most note-worthy was “Aunt Phillis’s Cabin,” subtitled “Southern Life as it Is,” by Mary Henderson Eastman.
On November 25, 1862 Harriet met President Abraham Lincoln at the White House. Lincoln’s son Robert reported years later that his father greeted her with the words “So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.” Such is the power of the pen.
In her novel Uncle Tom is a middle-aged slave with a wife and children, owned by a Kentucky farmer named Arthur Shelby. Heavily in debt, Shelby is forced to sell Tom to a Mr. Haley, who takes him down the Mississippi River to sell to a plantation owner at a profit. During the trip Tom rescues a little white girl named Eva, who has fallen into the river. In gratitude, Eva’s father Augustine St. Clare buys Tom from Mr. Haley and takes him to their family home in New Orleans. Tom and Eva become friends due to the sincere Christian faith both share. After two years in New Orleans, Eva becomes ill and dies. But before dying she has a vision of heaven that she relates to her loved ones. As a result, Augustine resolves to free Tom. But when Augustine dies from a stab wound, his wife sells Tom to a cruel slave owner named Simon Legree. When Tom refuses Legree’s order to whip a fellow slave, he is beaten viciously and ordered to stop reading his Bible. When Tom continues to read his Bible, Legree has him beaten to death.
After her husband Calvin died in 1886, Harriet declined in health, both physically and mentally. She died on July 1, 1896 at the age of eighty-five. Her half-sister Isabella, who inspired her to write “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” was at her bedside when she breathed her last.
