Harriet Beecher Stowe, who was born on this day in 1811, knew something that we, thanks in part to her, will never be forced to confront: American slavery as it was.
Stowe claimed that “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” came to her “in visions,” that she did not so much write it as receive it from God.
Stowe, a deeply religious woman, claimed that “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” came to her “in visions,” that she did not so much write it as receive it from God. But even before the novel was written God helped the process along by having her reared in a family that was the perfect incubator for her talent. Stowe, born on June 14, 1811, in Litchfield, Connecticut, was the seventh of the nine children of Lyman and Roxana Beecher. Her brother Henry Ward Beecher was born two years later.
Stowe’s early life was as conventional as that of a member of the Beecher family could be. She was educated at female academies, including the Hartford Female Seminary, which her older sister Catherine had founded and ran. Stowe herself started teaching there in 1827, but in 1832, when her father became president of Lane Theological Seminary, in Cincinnati, she went along. It was a fateful decision, personally and professionally.
What was needed was a story with characters, fully realized, in whom readers would develop a stake. The novel’s two plotlines, Northern and Southern, emphasize slavery’s national reach. An enslaved woman, Eliza Harris, escapes north with her young son and joins her husband, George. Though out of the South, the Harrises must contend with the Fugitive Slave Law, which required Northerners to help return escaped slaves to their masters.
Mrs. Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s log cabin is a foul and atrocious Libel upon the slave holders of the Southern States, and was a garbage suited to the appetite of sectional hate. As true as if the description of the morals of New York, had been drawn from the five points or of Boston from its brothels.