HARRIET BEECHER STOWE
The name of Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) is in all likelihood
not so well known as the title of her most famous work, "Uncle Tom's
Cabin." Millions upon millions have read her story, both for its
interest and because of its place in American history. Yet relatively
few have read her other novels, and to-day those who turn to them do
so not so much for their own sakes as because they contribute a minor
chapter in the history of the American novel. She entered literature
by the pathway of reform. "The heroic element was strong in me, having
come down by ordinary generation from a long line of Puritan ancestry,
and ... it made me long to do something, I knew not what: to fight for
my country, or to make some declaration on my own account." Then, when
the story-telling gift was developed and the reform was accomplished,
she continued to hold her mirror up to nature--a kind of Claude
Lorraine glass with a strong tint of moralistic blue in it.
She was born in 1811 at Litchfield, Connecticut, one of the five
children of the Reverend Lyman Beecher by his first marriage. Her
famous brother, Henry Ward Beecher, was two years younger. The death
of her mother when she was but four years old resulted in her having a
succession of homes during girlhood: first with an aunt, then for some
years under her father's roof after his remarriage in 1817, and next
from 1824 to 1832 with her older sister, Catherine, who had established
a school in Hartford. In all these experiences she lived under kindly
protection and in somewhat literary surroundings, and in all of them
she breathed an atmosphere which was heavy with the exhalations of the
old-school Calvinistic theology. In 1832, when Harriet was twenty-one
years old, her father, after a six-year pastorate of a Boston church,
went to Cincinnati as president of the Lane Theological Seminary, and
the two sisters joined him there.
This move into what was then the Far West was not, however, a
banishment into the wilds, for Cincinnati was in those days a sort of
outpost of Eastern culture. The Ohio River, which flowed by its doors,
served as the great highway from the East to the Mississippi Valley.
The city attracted early travelers like Mrs. Trollope and Harriet
Martineau as visitors, and stimulated them to ungracious comment, which
was offset by longer or shorter residence of a distinguished succession
of Massachusetts men. There were literary clubs, good and prolific
publishing houses, and, in the _Western Monthly_, the beginning of a
succession of magazines. Catherine wrote back from an advance trip of
inspection:
I have become somewhat acquainted with those ladies we shall have
most to do with, and find them intelligent, New England sort of
folks. Indeed, this is a New England city in all its habits, and
its inhabitants are more than half from New England.... I know of
no place in the world where there is so fair a prospect of finding
everything that makes social and domestic life pleasant.
The seminary, a new institution, and Mr. Beecher, its first president,
were located together at Walnut Hills, about two miles out of the city;
and while the father was occupied in his pioneer work the two daughters
started a school for girls, with the double promise of Catherine's
Hartford experience and the type of people among whom they were
settling. But Harriet was not to be a schoolmistress for long. In 1833
she was the winner of a fifty-dollar prize in a short-story competition
conducted by the _Western Monthly_, and in 1836 she married the
Reverend Calvin E. Stowe, her father's colleague in Lane Seminary. How
she persisted to combine authorship and maternity in the next sixteen
years is a marvel; none the less so because since the days of Anne
Bradstreet an occasional woman has succeeded. In 1842 her husband wrote
to her: "My dear, you must be a literary woman. It is so written in
the book of fate. Get a good stock of health and brush up your mind."
In the next year her first volume, a book of selected stories, was
published by Harpers; but by 1848 she was the mother of six children,
the oldest only eleven, and no more books had appeared.
Nevertheless she was not to sink under the tide of home drudgery.
She had visited in the South, witnessing the more kindly aspects of
slavery, and in her own town she had seen the pursuit of fugitives, the
conscientious defiance of law by devoted abolitionists, the violence
of proslavery mobs, and had feared for the life of her brother, who
was reported to have suffered death with his friend Lovejoy, when the
latter was shot in Alton by a band of Missourians. In these exciting
times it came to her more and more insistently that her writing must
be turned to good account. Lane Seminary was a seat of antislavery
doctrine and was very likely saved from destruction by its fortunate
remoteness from the town. But "Uncle Tom" was not to be written from
here. In 1850, impelled by ill-health, Professor Stowe accepted a call
to Bowdoin College, in which he had been a student. With three children
she preceded him, and for the two months before the birth of her
seventh child, in Brunswick, she carried the entire responsibility of
choosing, equipping, and settling in their new home. In the meanwhile
the family bank account was disturbingly low, and she was attempting to
write. And in the meanwhile, too, Webster's "Seventh of March Speech"
on compromise with the slavery forces had stirred the North as nothing
before and carried the country one step nearer to the Civil War. In
the winter that followed Mrs. Stowe came to her great resolve to write
something that would arouse the whole nation; and at a communion
service in February of 1851 there appeared to her, as in a vision, the
scene of the death of Uncle Tom.
The story began its appearance in the _National Era_, June 5, 1851,
and was announced to run for three months, but as it was allowed to
take its own course it was not actually concluded until April of the
next year. Although it had already attracted the widest attention, the
question of publication in book form was in some doubt until it was
undertaken by an obscure Boston firm, and the outcome was so uncertain
that the Stowes did not dare to assume half the risk of publication
for a prospect of half the proceeds. Three thousand copies were sold
on the day of issue, and three hundred thousand in America within the
first year. In England, also, after an initial hesitation, reprinting
was soon started, and by the close of the year eighteen different
houses had put on forty editions, and in the end a million and a half
copies were circulated in Great Britain and the colonies.[23] Mrs.
Stowe's "fortune was made" of course; but of quite as much moment to
her was the fact that her influence was made in the great fight in
which she was enlisted. In 1853 she sailed for what turned out to be a
sort of triumphal tour in Great Britain, in the course of which large
sums of money were given her for use in antislavery outlay. Leading
men and women, who had been formerly indifferent, became through her
book secondary sources of influence. Moreover, there was value even
in the opposition she had aroused. Whittier wrote to Garrison: "What
a glorious work Harriet Beecher Stowe has wrought. Thanks for the
Fugitive Slave Law! Better would it be for slavery if that law had
never been enacted; for it gave occasion for 'Uncle Tom's Cabin.'"
And Garrison wrote in turn to Mrs. Stowe: "I estimate the value of
anti-slavery writing by the abuse it brings. Now all the defenders of
slavery have let me alone and are abusing you." The volume of objection
was so great and so much of it was directed at the honesty of the work
that the author reluctantly compiled soon after a "Key to Uncle Tom's
Cabin," in which she presented documentary evidence for every kind of
fact used in the story; and of this she was able to write: "Not one
fact or statement in it has been disproved as yet. I have yet to learn
of even an _attempt_ to disprove."
[23] In view of the lack of any copyright protection it is
interesting to record that three of the London publishers
offered Mrs. Stowe an interest in the sales of their editions.
The only fair basis for criticizing "Uncle Tom" is as a piece of
propagandist literature. It was not even a "problem novel." It was a
story with an avowed "purpose": "to awaken sympathy and feeling for the
African race, as they exist among us; to show their wrongs and sorrows,
under a system so necessarily cruel and unjust as to defeat and do
away the good effects of all that can be attempted for them, by their
best friends, under it." Mrs. Stowe felt no pride in it as a story,
referring with perfect composure to the criticisms on its artistry.
But as a popular document she composed it with the greatest of art. It
was based on a profound conviction and on unassailable facts. It was a
passionate assault on slavery, but it was candid in its acknowledgments
that many a slaveholder was doing his best to alleviate the system. Far
more than half the book is devoted to kindly masters and well-treated
bondsmen; the tragedy of Uncle Tom is emphasized by the frustrated
or careless benevolence of the Shelbys and St. Clare. The appeals to
antislavery prejudice, moreover, could not have been more effective.
The democratic movement which had swept Europe in 1848 was fresh in
the minds of all thinking people. The challenge to Biblical Christian
principle was made in a day when the citation of Scriptural authority
was almost universally effective. The natural resentment at beholding
virtue thwarted by viciousness was stimulated at every turn in the
story. And the frank association of beauty of character with beauty
of form served its purpose. "Let it be considered, for instance,"
wrote Ruskin in "Modern Painters," "exactly how far in the commonest
lithograph of some utterly popular subject--for instance, the teaching
of Uncle Tom by Eva--the sentiment which is supposed to be excited
by the exhibition of Christianity in youth, is complicated by Eva's
having a dainty foot and a well-made slipper." This was a chance
illustration for Ruskin, who was writing about pictorial art, but the
point of it is fully illustrated by the visible charms of Eliza, Eva,
Emmeline, and Cassie, as well as of George Harris, George Shelby, and
St. Clare. Uncle Tom was almost the only good character who needed
the defense "Handsome is that handsome does." It is not at all likely
that Mrs. Stowe calculated on these various appeals--democratic,
theological, sentimental. In fact we have her word for it that the book
"wrote itself." With a moderately developed talent for story-writing
she happened to have just the tone of mind and the level of culture
which were attuned to the temper of her day, and she employed them to
the utmost effect. Moreover, she used them just as Whittier used his
powers in some of his moralistic poetry, not relying on her narrative
to carry its own burdens but expounding it as she went along and
appending a chapter of "Concluding Remarks" with various odds and
ends of afterthought--matters which do not belong in a novel and
which do not even belong together in any well-organized chapter, but
matters which in a persuasive document doubtless were of great value
in bringing back to the application the minds of those readers who may
have been diverted by the sheer human interest of the tale.
"Uncle Tom" was a success which, of course, could not be duplicated.
The second antislavery novel, "Dred, a Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp,"
sold enormously on the strength of its predecessor and on its own
merits, but it could only fan the embers which had previously been
inflamed. The task had been done; and though it was well repeated,
and though the application pointed this time to the degrading effects
of slavery on the master class, "Dred" could never be anything but an
aftermath to "Uncle Tom."
With a removal to Andover, Massachusetts, in 1852, Mrs. Stowe
accompanied her husband to his last post in another theological school,
settling into a congenial New England village in comfort at last
and among cultured and orthodox neighbors. And here she continued to
write until her final move to Hartford, doing her best work in the
field of provincial stories of New England life and character. The
first of these, "The Minister's Wooing," was her contribution to the
newly established _Atlantic Monthly_. With her recent successes fresh
in the public mind, she was an indispensable "selling feature" for
the ambitious magazine. With this novel she made her first attempt,
since the forgotten "Mayflower" volume, to write a story in which the
moral should take care of itself. There was a moral, to be sure, and
a striking one, for it pointed to a distrust of the older New England
Calvinism and made clear the distinction between a religion that
uplifts and a theology that turns to scorn the religion it assumes to
fortify. In Simeon Brown she developed the obnoxious professor of the
declining faith.
He was one of that class of people who, of a freezing day, will plant
themselves directly between you and the fire, and there stand and
argue to prove that selfishness is the root of all moral evil.... He
was one of those men who suppose themselves submissive to the divine
will, to the uttermost extent demanded by the extreme theology of
that day, simply because they have no nerves to feel, no imagination
to conceive what endless happiness or suffering is, and who deal
therefore with the great problem of the salvation or damnation of
myriads as a problem of theological algebra, to be worked out by
their inevitable _x_, _y_, _z_.[24]
[24] See "Theological Tea," chap. iv.
It answers to the refrain of "The Deacon's Masterpiece," which appeared
while she was writing the book: "Logic is logic. That's all I say."
It is no accident, therefore, that she represents Simeon, this piece
of corrugated inflexibility, as equally far from Dr. Hopkins, the
large-hearted Puritan who was bigger than his creed, and from young
James Marvin, who wanted to be better than he was but had no creed at
all. In the chapter "Which Treats of Romance" Mrs. Stowe perhaps did
not let the moral wholly take care of itself, since she came into court
as a special pleader for beauty as an ally of religion and brought an
indictment against the niggardliness of a life founded on a dogmatic
dread of eternal fire. The moral of the book, if one must be given in a
sentence, is that love realized is even finer than love renounced.
Like "Uncle Tom" and "Dred," "The Minister's Wooing" has its element of
instruction as well as of edification, for it is a studied and faithful
picture of Rhode Island life just after the Revolution--a period about
as remote from Mrs. Stowe as the slave-story epoch is from the modern
reader. And because it is less of an allegory the characters are more
lifelike, not having to carry each his Christian's pack of argument on
his shoulders. As Lowell stated,[25] they were set in contrast not by
the simple and obvious method in fiction of putting them in different
social ranks--aristocrat and commoner, master and man, Roundhead and
Cavalier, pioneer, Indian and townsman. Between Mrs. Stowe's village
folk caste distinctions were of little moment; a careful realism was
taxed to show the vital and homely differences between one individual
and another. Her success in this respect is what gives any distinction
to "The Pearl of Orr's Island" (1862). The Pearl herself, who is a bit
of labeled symbolism (chap. xxviii),--a Little Eva transported to the
Maine coast and thence to heaven,--is almost the only insignificant
character. Moses Pennell, an exotic, is comparatively lifelike, and the
actual village people are as real as can be.
[25] _New York Tribune_, June 13, 1859.
"Oldtown Folks" (1869) is Mrs. Stowe's most effective and least
adulterated novel. The people of the story are many and varied, ranging
from Sam Lawson, the village Rip Van Winkle, to the choicest of Old
Boston adornments of society. While the book had no social purpose it
had the avowed narrative "object ... to interpret to the world the New
England life and character in that particular time in its history
which may be called the seminal period"--a statement followed by the
complacent and thoroughly provincial assertion that "New England was
the seed-bed of this great American Republic, and of _all_ that is
likely to come of it." It should be remembered in Mrs. Stowe's defense
that when she wrote these words the cleavage between North and South
could account for many asperities from both sides and that to most
Easterners "Trans-Mississippi" meant territory rather than people. In
"breadth of canvas," to resort to the slang of criticism, "Oldtown
Folks" is in Mrs. Stowe's whole output what "Middlemarch" is in George
Eliot's. It is filled with popular tableaux--in the old Meeting House,
in the Grandmother's Kitchen, at the Manor House, in the coach on its
grave progress to Boston, in the school and its surroundings; and it is
red-lettered with festivals in which the richest flavor of social life
in the early nineteenth century is developed.
As a life story of the four youthful characters it does not linger
vividly in mind. One does not recall them and their subjective
experiences half so clearly as one does their intellectual and social
and material surroundings. Yet the shape of their life experience was
determined by just these external influences; and how clearly they
belonged to a bygone period appears at a glance of comparison with any
similar twentieth-century story.[26]
[26] This distinction is valid even though the Oldtown folks belonged
to Mrs. Stowe's childhood. The Andover of her later years was
Oldtown in all essential respects.
Margaret Deland's "The Iron Woman," for example, is a companion
picture of four young people, but with how great a difference! The
new industrialism, the decline of a theology which is only a relic
in the iron woman, Mrs. Maitland, the post-Victorian attitude toward
sex and the family, suggest the vast change in the fashions of human
thought in a half century; and this is no less convincing because the
conclusions of Mrs. Deland's characters are practically identical
with those of Mrs. Stowe's. With Mrs. Stowe marriage is a finality and
sexual sin a damnation in the sight of God. With Mrs. Deland marriage
is an expedient and a protection for the woman who may otherwise be
abandoned, and sin is punished in remorse and loss of reputation. Mrs.
Stowe is moved by the thought of hell; Mrs. Deland, by the possibility
of Promethean tortures from within. And in the later book capital and
labor loom up to afford the background supplied in the earlier story by
the church and its communicants.
In the quarter century remaining to her after the writing of "Oldtown
Folks," Mrs. Stowe's life was a quiet fulfillment of her earlier
career. From a Florida plantation on which she spent her winters
she worked for the welfare of the negro and the upbuilding of the
South. She labored as before in coöperation with the church, but
her repugnance for the grimness of Calvinism had led her to become
an Episcopalian. As a novelist she kept on in the exposition of New
England and Northern life to the mild gratification of the reading
public which she had already won--a reading public who enjoyed what
Lowell almost too cleverly called "water gruel of fiction, thinned
with sentiment and thickened with morality." Her enduring fame will
doubtless rest on the fact that she was a story-writer of moderate
talent who in one memorable instance devoted her gift to the making of
American history.
BOOK LIST
HARRIET BEECHER STOWE. Works. The writings of Harriet Beecher Stowe,
with biographical introductions. 1899. 16 vols. These appeared
in book form originally as follows: Mayflower, 1843; Uncle Tom's
Cabin, 1852; A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, 1853; Sunny Memories of
Foreign Lands, 1854; Dred, 1856; The Minister's Wooing, 1859; The
Pearl of Orr's Island, 1862; Agnes of Sorrento, 1862; House and
Home Papers, 1864; Little Foxes, 1865; Religious Poems, 1867;
Queer Little People, 1867; The Chimney Corner, 1868; Oldtown
Folks, 1869; Pink and White Tyranny, 1871; Oldtown Fireside
Stories, 1871; My Wife and I, 1871; We and Our Neighbors, 1875;
Poganuc People, 1878; A Dog's Mission, 1881.
=Biography and Criticism=
The standard life is by Charles E. Stowe. 1890. The biographical
introductions in the standard set are valuable.
CROWE, MARTHA FOOTE. Harriet Beecher Stowe. 1913.
ERSKINE, JOHN. Leading American Novelists. 1910.
FIELDS, MRS. ANNIE. Life and Letters of Harriet Beecher Stowe.
1897.
STOWE, C. E. and L. B. Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe. 1911.
The following are among the more important of the many magazine
articles that appeared in the months just after the death of
Mrs. Stowe:
BURTON, RICHARD. _Century_, Vol. XXX, p. 690.
COOKE, G. W. _New England Magazine_ (N. S.), Vol. XV, p. 3.
FIELDS, MRS. ANNIE. _Atlantic_, Vol. LXXVIII, p. 15.
HIGGINSON, T. W. _Nation_, Vol. LXIII, p. 24.
LEE, G. S. _Critic_, Vol. XXX, p. 281.
PHELPS (WARD), E. S. _McClure's_, Vol. VII, p. 3.
WARD, W. H. _Forum_, Vol. XXI, p. 727.
TOPICS AND PROBLEMS
Contrast the conditions of authorship and the circumstances of
publication for Jane Austen and Mrs. Stowe. Compare those of George
Eliot and Mrs. Stowe.
With reference to "Uncle Tom's Cabin" read Agnes Repplier's essay
"Books that have Hindered Me" in "Points of View."
Read "Uncle Tom's Cabin" for Mrs. Stowe's attitude toward the people
of the South in distinction to her attitude toward the institution of
slavery.
Read "Oldtown Folks" or "The Minister's Wooing" for Mrs. Stowe's
exposition of the orthodox theology in either. If you can read both,
note whether there is any difference in her attitude toward the faith
of her fathers in the two books.
Compare Mrs. Stowe's New England village characters with those of
Oliver Wendell Holmes in any of his three novels.
Compare for the broad picture of a community and an epoch George
Eliot's "Middlemarch" and Mrs. Stowe's "Oldtown Folks."
Develop more fully the comparison or the contrast between "Oldtown
Folks" and Mrs. Deland's "The Iron Woman."