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Harriet Beecher Stowe

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  Harriet Beecher Stowe was born on June 14, 1811 in Litchfield, Connecticut. She was the seventh of the nine children of famous Protestant preacher, Lyman Beecher. Her mother, Roxana, died when she was four years old. Within a year, Lyman was remarried. Harriet's new step-mother was Harriet Porter and the marriage brought about 2 more children. Until she was twelve years old she lived in Litchfield- a famous resort of ministers, judges, lawyers and other intellectual professionals. When she was approximately twelve, she moved to Hartford, where her sister Catherine had opened a school. While she was there, she was reportedly an absent-minded, bookish, odd and moody young girl but a very good scholar, and a particularly good writer of compositions. She idolized the poetry of Lord Byron.

  In 1832, Harriet's father became president of Lane Theological Seminary in Ohio. Harriet moved with her family to Cincinnati. There she met Calvin E. Stowe, widower of a dear friend of hers, Eliza Tyler. Calvin was a professor and clergyman who opposed slavery, and Harriet married him in 1836. Not long after they were married, Harriet gave birth to twin daughters: Eliza and Isabella. She started writing to help out financially. Her first book, The Mayflower, or Sketches of Scenes and Characters Among the Descendants of The Pilgrims, was published in 1843. About a year after the birth of her daughters, she had another child- a son, named Samuel Charles. Unfortunately, cholera, which was rampant in Cincinnati, claimed his life while he was still a baby. Also in Cincinnati, she first came in contact with fugitive slaves. The work of the Underground Railroad became part of Harriet and Calvin's lives soon after they were married. They sheltered fugitive slaves until 1850, when they moved to Maine when Calvin accepted a position at Bowdin College.

  During the first years of her stay in Maine, she started writing for local magazines and papers. In 1852, however, Harriet was thrown into international fame with the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin. First published in weekly installments from June 5, 1851 to April 1, 1852, in the journal National Era, Uncle Tom's Cabin spoke out loudly against slavery and threw the ugly picture of a slave's life out into the open. It was the first novel ever to feature a black hero and became one the most effective pieces of reform literature ever to be written. On the first day, the novel sold 3,000 copies. It sold 30,000 copies within the first year and eventually sold more than 3,000,000 copies world wide and is translated into 22 different languages. The novel created such a controversy, and was considered such an important factor of starting the Civil War, that when she met the President, Abraham Lincoln, in 1862, legend says he greeted her with the words,"So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war!"

  Now a celebrity, she spoke out against slavery both in America and Europe. She moved to Andover, Massachusetts in 1852. She published A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1853, where she extensively documented the realities on which she based her book, to prove critics who argued the book was inauthentic wrong. A second anti-slavery book, titled Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp, was published in 1856. During this time, both Harriet and Calvin made three trips to Europe, where she spoke to throngs of fans of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Unfortunately, on their return from Europe in 1857, they found their eldest son, Henry, had drowned in the Connecticut River, while he was a freshman at Dartmouth College. This saddened Harriet greatly because Henry was one of her closest children but she continued to write. In 1859, The Minister's Wooing was published, The Pearl of Orr's Island in 1862.

  During this time, the Civil War broke out. Harriet's son, Fredrick, joined the Northern army and was wounded at the Battle of Gettysburg. Harriet's father passed away during the war also. After the war, Fredrick got better and Harriet and her family moved to Hartford, Connecticut. However, Fredrick never fully recovered and couldn't cope with his mother's success. He disappeared in San Francisco after the war and despite everything Harriet tried, they never saw him again. However, in Hartford, she continued to write but instead of anti-slavery books, she started to write books about the evils of society and about her childhood. Some of these include:Sojourner Truth, The Libyan Sibyl in 1863, Oldtown Folks in 1868, and Poganuk People in 1878. (Look at HBS Works for the complete listing of her works)

  In August of 1886, Calvin died. Sometime before her husband passed away, her daughter, Georgiana, died in her forties because of a morphine addiction. During the last few years of her life, her remaining twin daughters lived with and took care of her. Her other son, Charles Edward, also comforted Harriet. July 1, 1896, Harriet passed away, at the age of 85. She was buried next to her husband and the children whose death preceded hers in a burial ground at Andover.

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