The Girl Whose Story of Slavery Aroused the Whole World

It was the night of the annual exhibition of the Litchfield Academy. Twelve-year-old Harriet Beecher waited eagerly for a certain part of the program. Presently she heard read before all the learned people assembled the familiar words of her own composition, one of the three chosen for this great occasion.

As Harriet listened to the sentences that she had composed with so much care, she watched the face of her father who sat on the platform. It brightened. She knew that he was interested.

At the close of the entertainment she heard him ask, “Who wrote that composition?”

Her teacher replied, “Your daughter, sir.”

It was the proudest moment of Harriet’s life. When this little academy student became a woman she wrote a book which set the whole world to thinking of the evil of slavery. It was Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Harriet Beecher was born at Litchfield, Connecticut, June 14, 1811. Her father had only a country parson’s meagre salary to provide for the wants of eleven children. What a father he was—grave and serious enough in the pulpit, but full of fun and enthusiasm at home. It was mere play for Harriet and the boys to pile wood, when their father superintended.

Harriet was very rich in sisters and brothers. She loved them all dearly, especially the merry, energetic big sister, Catherine, and the chubby little boy two years younger than she, Henry Ward Beecher, who grew up to be a famous minister.

Little Harriet had only a sweet memory of her mother who had died when she was a small child. Wherever she went, she was told of her mother’s beautiful life. It made her very happy to know that she had a mother whom everyone loved.

There were no expensive toys in the Beecher family, but Harriet was well content without them. She played with her glass-eyed wooden doll and a set of cups and saucers made by her own hands out of codfish bones. In the woodpile she found treasures in the moss and lichens on the logs. From them she fashioned little pictures using the moss for green fields, sprigs of spruce for the trees, and bits of glass for lakes and rivers.

Some of Harriet’s happiest hours were spent curled up in a corner of her father’s study, surrounded by her favorite books. It was a peaceful, restful place, she thought. She liked to glance up at her dear father as he was writing or thinking over his sermons. She enjoyed looking at the friendly faces of the books on the shelves. Very few of them, however, were books that she could understand.

One day while rummaging in a barrel of old sermons in the attic, Harriet came upon a copy of the Arabian Nights. How she and her brothers pored over its pages! Another precious treasure discovered in a barrel was Shakespeare’s play, The Tempest.

Harriet’s delight in stories was satisfied in another way. Every fall it was the custom to make enough apple sauce to last for the winter. It took a whole barrelful for the big Beecher family. All the little fingers were pressed into service to peel or quarter apples. Mr. Beecher would then ask who could tell the best story. As the apples bubbled and hissed in the big brass kettle, story after story went around. Mr. Beecher, himself, recited scenes from Sir Walter Scott’s novels, which were then new.

In the unheated, barnlike meetinghouse where Mr. Beecher preached, Harriet also spent many happy hours, although she was cold and cramped from sitting through the long sermons. Usually she did not understand her father’s big words, but one day he spoke so earnestly and simply about God’s love that Harriet never forgot it.

When Harriet grew up, she married Calvin Ellis Stowe. He was a professor in the Lane Theological Seminary, in Cincinnati, Ohio, of which her father had become the president.

In Ohio, adjacent to the slave state of Kentucky, everybody was thinking and talking about slavery. The Fugitive Slave Law, whereby runaway slaves must be returned to their masters, was causing heated discussions. Mrs. Stowe and her husband believed this to be a very unjust law and they helped a colored girl, the “Eliza” of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, to escape from her pursuers. Mrs. Stowe opened a school for colored children in her house, and raised money to buy the freedom of a slave boy.

Ever since the days of her school compositions Mrs. Stowe had enjoyed writing, and some of her stories had found their way into the papers. When Professor Stowe went to Bowdoin College, in Brunswick, Maine, to teach, his wife tried to do a little writing to add to his small salary. However, the work of looking after a large house and her family of small children left her little time for writing stories. Sometimes with her paper on the corner of the kitchen table and her ink on the teakettle, she managed to write a story, superintend the making of pastry, and watch the baby at the same time.

One day Mrs. Stowe received a letter from a relative urging her to write something that would stir the country against the evil of slavery. She earnestly declared that she would.

Soon thereafter the plot for her story, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, flashed across her mind. She wrote a chapter as quickly as possible and sent it to the National Era, an antislavery paper. Chapter after chapter followed, written rapidly as the scenes of the story presented themselves to her. When it was completed it was published as a book. In a few days ten thousand copies were sold; in a year, three hundred thousand copies.

Mrs. Stowe wrote many other books, though none of them attained the prominence of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. This book is considered to have been one of the most influential and widely read novels in literature.

From distinguished people all over the world came letters of congratulation to Mrs. Stowe. What she had written just because she felt that she must, with no thought of money or fame, brought her both. Harriet Beecher Stowe was further honored by being elected to the Hall of Fame in 1910.

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s gift of expression, which she had been cultivating for many years under all sorts of difficulties, made it possible for her to draw a picture of slavery that aroused the whole world.