have given myself to Jesus and he has taken me." "Is it so?" said he.
"Then has a new flower blossomed in the kingdom this day." This is
very sweet and beautiful and it shows that Dr. Beecher had a tender
heart under his Calvinistic theology. "If she could have been let
alone," says her son, "and taught to 'look up and not down, forward
and not back, out and not in,' this religious experience might have
gone on as sweetly and naturally as the opening of a flower in the
gentle rays of the sun. But unfortunately this was not possible at a
time when self-examination was carried to an extreme that was
calculated to drive a nervous and sensitive child well-nigh
distracted. First, even her sister Catharine was afraid that there
might be something wrong in the case of a lamb that had come into the
fold without being first chased all over the lot by the shepherd:
great stress being laid on what was called being under conviction.
Then also the pastor of the First Church in Hartford, a bosom friend
of Dr. Beecher, looked with melancholy and suspicious eyes on this
unusual and doubtful path to heaven."
Briefly stated, these two spiritual guides put Harriet through a
process which brought her to a sense of sin that must have filled
their hearts with joy. She reached the stage when she wrote to her
brother Edward: "My whole life is one continued struggle; I do nothing
right. I am beset behind and before, and my sins take away all my
happiness."
Unfortunately for her, it was at this stage of Harriet's religious
experience that Dr. Beecher was called to Boston to stem the rising
tide of Unitarianism, with its easy notions about conviction of sin
and other cardinal elements of a true faith. To be thrown into the
fervors of a crusade was just the experience which Harriet's heated
brain did not need. Her life at this period was divided between
Hartford and Boston, but her heart went with Dr. Beecher to his great
enterprise in Boston, or, as Mrs. Fields says, "This period in Boston
was the time when Harriet felt she drew nearer to her father than at
any other period of her life."
It will not be necessary to go farther into this controversy than to
show what a cauldron it was for the family of Dr. Beecher. In his
autobiography, Dr. Beecher says, "From the time Unitarianism began to
show itself in this country, it was as fire in my bones." After his
call to Boston, he writes again, "My mind had been heating, heating,
heating. Now I had a chance to strike." The situation that confronted
him in Boston rather inflamed than subdued his spirit. Let Mrs. Stowe
tell the story herself. "Calvinism or orthodoxy," she says, "was the
despised and persecuted form of faith. It was the dethroned royal
family wandering like a permitted mendicant in the city where it once
held high court, and Unitarianism reigned in its stead. All the
literary men of Massachusetts were Unitarians. All the trustees and
professors of Harvard College were Unitarians. All the elite of wealth
and fashion crowded Unitarian churches. The judges on the bench were
Unitarian, giving decisions by which the peculiar features of church
organization, so carefully ordained by the Pilgrim Fathers, had been
nullified. The dominant majority entered at once into possession of
churches and church property, leaving the orthodox minority to go out
into schoolhouses and town halls, and build their churches as best
they could."
We can hardly suppose that Harriet had read the decision of the court,
or that she deemed it necessary; she knew it was wrong by instinct,
and the iron entered her soul. The facts appear to have been as
follows: The old parishes in New England included a given territory
like a school district or a voting precinct. Members of a given
parish, if they were communicants, formed themselves into a "church"
which was the church of that parish. The court decided that this
church always remained the church of that parish. Members might
withdraw, but they withdrew as individuals. They could not withdraw
the church, not even if they constituted a majority.
The correctness of this decision does not concern us here; it is
enough that Dr. Beecher thought it wrong and that Harriet thought it
wrong. "The effect of all this," she says, "upon my father's mind was
to keep him at a white heat of enthusiasm. His family prayers at this
period, departing from the customary forms of unexcited hours, became
often upheavings of passionate emotion, such as I shall never forget.
'Come, Lord Jesus,' he would say, 'here where the bones of the fathers
rest, here where the crown has been torn from thy brow, come and
recall thy wandering children. Behold thy flock scattered upon the
mountain--these sheep, what have they done! Gather them, gather them,
O good shepherd, for their feet stumble upon the dark mountains.'"
The fierce heat of this period was too much for a tender plant like
Harriet. For her state of mind, even Catharine thought the Boston home
life was not entirely suitable. It would be better for her in
Hartford. "Harriet will have young society here which she cannot have
at home, and I think cheerful and amusing friends will do much for
her." Catharine had received a letter from Harriet which, she says,
"made me feel uneasy," as well it might. Harriet had written her
sister: "I don't know as I am fit for anything, and I have thought
that I could wish to die young and let the remembrance of me and my
faults perish in the grave.... Sometimes I could not sleep, and have
groaned and cried till midnight, while in the daytime I tried to
appear cheerful, and succeeded so well that papa reproved me for
laughing so much." Life was too serious to permit even an affectation
of gaiety. "The atmosphere of that period," says Mrs. Field, "and the
terrible arguments of her father and of her sister Catharine were
sometimes more than she could endure." Her brother Edward was helpful
and comforting. She thanks him for helping her solve some of her
problems, but the situation was critical: "I feared that if you left
me thus I might return to the same dark, desolate state in which I had
been all summer. I felt that my immortal interest, my happiness for
both worlds, was depending on the turn my feelings might take."
Dr. Beecher was too much absorbed with his mission to observe what was
going on in his own family, unless there chanced to be an unexpected
outburst of gaiety. "Every leisure hour was beset by people who came
with earnest intention to express to him those various phases of
weary, restless wandering desire proper to an earnest people whose
traditional faith has been broken up.... Inquirers were constantly
coming with every imaginable theological problem ... he was to be seen
all day talking with whoever would talk ... till an hour or two before
the time (of service), when he would rush up to his study; ... just as
the last stroke of the bell was dying away, he would emerge from the
study with his coat very much awry, come down stairs like a hurricane,
stand impatiently protesting while female hands that ever lay in wait
adjusted his cravat and settled his collar ... and hooking wife or
daughter like a satchel on his arm, away he would start on such a race
through the streets as left neither brain nor breath till the church
was gained." Such, very much abbreviated, is Mrs. Stowe's portrait of
her father at this period. It is a good example of her power of
delineation; but what a life was this for a half distracted girl like
Harriet! Much better for her would have been the old serene, peaceful,
quiet life of Litchfield.
She had several kinds of religious trouble. It troubled her that in
the book of Job, God should seem "to have stripped a dependent
creature of all that renders life desirable, and then to have answered
his complaints from the whirlwind, and, instead of showing mercy and
pity, to have overwhelmed him with a display of his power and
justice." It troubled her that when she allowed herself to take a
milder view of deity, "I feel," she says, "less fear of God and, in
view of sin, I feel only a sensation of grief." This was an alarming
decline. It troubled her again that she loved literature, whereas she
ought only to care for religion. She writes to Edward: "You speak of
your predilections for literature being a snare to you. I have found
it so myself." Evidently, as she has before said, she was beset behind
and before. What was perhaps worst of all, the heavens seemed closed
to her. Calvinism was pure agnosticism; and she had been educated a
Calvinist. There was no 'imminent God,' in all and through all, for
Calvinism; that came in with Transcendentalism, a form of thought
which never seems to have touched Mrs. Stowe. She seems always to
have felt, as at this period she writes Edward, that "still, after
all, God is a being afar off." Nevertheless, there was Christ, but
Christ at this period was also afar off: "I feel that I love
God,--that is that I love Christ,--that I find happiness in it, and
yet it is not that kind of comfort which would arise from free
communication of my wants and sorrows to a friend. I sometimes wish
that the Savior were visibly present in this world, that I might go to
him for a solution of some of my difficulties."
It will be seen from this passage that Harriet's storm-tossed soul was
settling down upon Christ as the nearest approach to God one could
gain in the darkness, and with this she taught herself to be content.
"So, after four years of struggling and suffering," writes her son,
"she returns to the place where she started from as a child of
thirteen. It has been like watching a ship with straining masts and
storm-beaten sails, buffeted by the waves, making for the harbor, and
coming at last to quiet anchorage." One cannot help reflecting how
different would have been her experience in the household of Dr.
Channing; but Dr. Beecher would sooner have trusted her in a den of
wolves.
Harriet was seventeen years old when, mentally, she reached her quiet
anchorage but, physically as might be expected, it was with a
constitution undermined and with health broken. "She had not grown to
be a strong woman," says Mrs. Fields; "the apparently healthy and
hearty child had been suffered to think and feel, to study and starve
(as we say), starve for relaxation, until she became a woman of much
suffering and many inadequacies of physical life." A year or two later
Harriet herself writes, "This inner world of mine has become worn out
and untenable," and again, "About half my time I am scarcely alive....
I have everything but good health.... Thought, intense emotional
thought, has been my disease."
At the end of six restless and stormy years, in 1832, Dr. Beecher
resigned his Boston pastorate to accept the presidency of Lane
Theological Seminary at Cincinnati, Ohio, Catharine and Harriet
accompanying the family with the purpose of establishing a high grade
school for young women. The plan was successfully carried out, and the
"Western Female Institute" marked a new stage in education west of the
Alleghenies. One of Harriet's early achievements at Cincinnati was the
publication of a text-book in geography, her first attempt at
authorship. She made her entry into the field of imaginative
literature by gaining a prize of $50 for a story printed in _The
Western Magazine_.
Her connection with the "Western Female Institute" was brief, and the
prosecution of a literary career was postponed, by her marriage in
1836, with Prof. Calvin E. Stowe; or, as she announces this momentous
event: "about half an hour more and your old friend, schoolmate,
sister, etc., will cease to be Hattie Beecher and change to nobody
knows who."
The married life of Mrs. Stowe covered a period of fifty years and was
a conspicuously happy one. Prof. Stowe, who seemed so much like a myth
to the general public, was a man of great learning and keen
intelligence, unimaginative as he says himself, but richly endowed
with "a certain broad humor and drollery." His son tells us that he
was "an inimitable mimic and story-teller. No small proportion of Mrs.
Stowe's success as a literary woman is to be attributed to him." The
Sam Lawson stories are said to be a little more his than hers, being
"told as they came from Mr. Stowe's lips with little or no
alteration." For her scholarly husband, Mrs. Stowe had the highest
appreciation and the prettiest way of expressing it: "If you were not
already my dearly loved husband," she writes him, "I should certainly
fall in love with you." Prof. Stowe could also write a love-letter:
"There is no woman like you in this wide world. Who else has so much
talent with so little self-conceit; so much reputation with so little
affectation; so much literature with so little nonsense; so much
enterprise with so little extravagance; so much tongue with so little
scold; so much sweetness with so little softness; so much of so many
things and so little of so many other things." If a man's wife is to
have her biography written, he will not be sorry that he has sent her
some effusive love-letters.
Fourteen years of Mrs. Stowe's beautiful married life were spent in
Cincinnati, with many vicissitudes of ill-health, some poverty, and
the birth of six children, three sons and three daughters. One can get
some idea both of the happiness and the hardship of that life from her
letters. In 1843, seven years after marriage, she writes, "Our straits
for money this year are unparalleled even in our annals. Even our
bright and cheery neighbor Allen begins to look blue, and says $600 is
the very most we can hope to collect of our salary, once $1,200."
Again she writes, "I am already half sick from confinement to the
house and overwork. If I should sew every day for a month to come I
should not be able to accomplish half of what is to be done." There
were trials enough during this period, but her severest affliction
came in its last year, in the loss of an infant son by cholera. That
was in 1849, when Cincinnati was devastated; when during the months of
June, July and August more than nine thousand persons died of cholera
within three miles of her house, and among them she says, "My Charley,
my beautiful, loving, gladsome baby, so loving, so sweet, so full of
life and hope and strength."
In these years, Mrs. Stowe's life was too full of domestic care to
permit many excursions into the field of literature. In 1842, a
collection of sketches was published by the Harpers under the title of
the "Mayflower." Occasionally she contributed a bright little story to
a monthly or an annual. An amusing account is given of the writing of
one of these stories, by a lady who volunteered to serve as amanuensis
while Mrs. Stowe dictated, and at the same time supervised a new girl
in the kitchen: "You may now write," said Mrs. Stowe, "'Her lover
wept with her, nor dared he again touch the point so sacredly
guarded--(Mina, roll that crust a little thinner). He spoke in
soothing tones.--(Mina, poke the coals).'"
These literary efforts, produced under difficulties, inspired Prof.
Stowe with great confidence in her genius. He wrote her in 1842, "My
dear, you must be a literary woman. It is so written in the book of
fate." Again he writes, "God has written it in his book that you must
be a literary woman, and who are we that we should contend against
God! You must therefore make all your calculations to spend the rest
of your life with your pen." Nevertheless the next eight years pass as
the last six have passed without apparently bringing the dream of a
literary career nearer fulfilment. With a few strokes of the pen, Mrs.
Stowe draws a picture of her life at this period: "I was married when
I was twenty-five years old to a man rich in Greek and Hebrew and,
alas, rich in nothing else.... During long years of struggling with
poverty and sickness, and a hot, debilitating climate, my children
grew up around me. The nursery and the kitchen were my principal
fields of labor. Some of my friends, pitying my trials, copied and
sent a number of little sketches from my pen to certain liberally
paying annuals, with my name. With the first money that I earned in
this way I bought a feather bed! for as I had married into poverty and
without a dowry, and as my husband had only a large library of books
and a good deal of learning, the bed and pillows were thought the most
profitable investment. After this I thought that I had discovered the
philosopher's stone. So when a new carpet or mattress was going to be
needed, or when at the close of the year it began to be evident that
my family accounts, like poor Dora's, 'wouldn't add up,' then I used
to say to my faithful friend and factotum Anna, who shared all my joys
and sorrows, 'Now, if you will keep the babies and attend to things in
the house for a day, I'll write a piece and then we'll be out of the
scrape.' So I became an author,--very modest I do assure you."
The hardships and privations of Mrs. Stowe's residence in Cincinnati
were more than compensated to her by the opportunity it afforded for
intimate acquaintance with the negro character and personal
observation of the institution of slavery. Only the breadth of the
Ohio river separated her from Kentucky, a slave State. While yet a
teacher in the Female Institute, she spent a vacation upon a Kentucky
estate, afterward graphically described in 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' as Col.
Shelby's plantation. A companion upon this visit said, "Harriet did
not seem to notice anything in particular that happened....
Afterwards, in reading 'Uncle Tom,' I recognized scene after scene of
that visit portrayed with the most minute fidelity." A dozen years
before there were any similar demonstrations in Boston, she witnessed
in 1838, proslavery riots in Cincinnati when Birney's Abolition press
was wrecked and when Henry Ward Beecher, then a young Cincinnati
editor, went armed to and from his office. She had had in her service
a slave girl whose master was searching the city for her, and whose
rescue had been effected by Prof. Stowe and Henry Ward Beecher who,
"both armed, drove the fugitive, in a covered wagon, by night, by
unfrequented roads, twelve miles back into the country, and left her
in safety." This incident was the basis of "the fugitive's escape from
Tom Loker and Marks in 'Uncle Tom's Cabin.'"
Lane Theological Seminary, in which Prof. Stowe held a chair, had, it
is said, "become a hot-bed of abolition." Partly for protection, a
colony of negroes had settled about the seminary, and these families,
says Mrs. Stowe, "became my favorite resort in cases of emergency. If
anyone wishes to have a black face look handsome, let them be left as
I have been, in feeble health, in oppressive hot weather, with a sick
baby in arms, and two other ones in the nursery, and not a servant in
the whole house to do a turn." "Time would fail me," writes Mrs.
Stowe, "to tell you all that I learned incidentally of the slave
system in the history of various slaves who came into my family, and
of the underground railroad which, I may say, ran through our house."
A New England education alone would not have given Mrs. Stowe the
material to write the story of "Uncle Tom." A youth passed on a
Southern plantation would have made her callous and indifferent, as it
did so many tender-hearted women. A New England woman of genius,
educated in New England traditions, was providentially transferred to
the heated border line between freedom and slavery and, during
eighteen years, made to hear a thousand authentic incidents of the
patriarchal system from the victims themselves. Then "Uncle Tom's
Cabin" could be written. Perhaps one other element of preparation
ought to be mentioned since Mrs. Stowe laid stress upon it herself.
The woman who should write "Uncle Tom's Cabin" needed to be a mother
who had known what it is to have a child snatched from her arms
irrevocably and without a moment's notice. It was at her baby's "dying
bed and at his grave that I learned," she says, "what a poor slave
mother may feel when her child is torn away from her. In those depths
of sorrow which seemed to me immeasurable, it was my only prayer to
God that such anguish might not be suffered in vain.... I allude to
this because I have often felt that much that is in that book ('Uncle
Tom') had its roots in the awful scenes and bitter sorrows of that
summer."
In 1850, this western life, with its mixture of sweet and bitter
waters, came to an end. The climate of Cincinnati was unfavorable to
the health of both Mr. and Mrs. Stowe, and Mr. Stowe accepted a
professorship in Bowdoin College, at the small salary of $1,000 a
year, declining at the same time an offer from New York city of
$2,300. Why he accepted the smaller salary is not said. Certainly it
assured him his old felicity, his Master's blessing upon the poor. The
situation, however, was better than it seems, as Mrs. Stowe had
written enough to have confidence in her pen, and she purposed to
make the family income at least $1,700 by her writings. She
accomplished much more than that as we shall presently see.
From the car window, as one passes through Brunswick, Maine, he can
see the house in which Mrs. Stowe passed the three following very
happy years, in which her seventh child was born, a son who lived to
be her biographer, and in which she wrote "Uncle Tom's Cabin." It will
be remembered that the year 1850 was made memorable by the enactment
of the Fugitive Slave Law. How the attempted execution of this law
affected Mrs. Stowe can be anticipated. "To me," she says, "it is
incredible, amazing, mournful. I feel as if I should be willing to
sink with it, were all this sin and misery to sink in the sea.... I
sobbed, aloud in one pew and Mrs. Judge Reeves in another."
In this mood, Mrs. Stowe received a letter from Mrs. Edward Beecher
saying, "Hattie, if I could use a pen as you can, I would write
something to make this nation feel what an accursed thing slavery is."
Her children remember that at the reading of this letter, Mrs. Stowe
rose from her chair, crushing the letter in her hand, and said, "I
will write something,--I will if I live." The fulfilment of this vow
was "Uncle Tom's Cabin."
This story was begun in _The National Era_, on June 5, 1851; it was
announced to run through three months and it occupied ten. "I could
not control the story," said Mrs. Stowe; "it wrote itself." Again, she
said, "I the author of 'Uncle Tom's Cabin!' No, indeed. The Lord
himself wrote it, and I was but the humblest instrument in his hand."
It has been said that "'Uncle Tom's Cabin' made the crack of the
slave-driver's whip and the cries of the tortured blacks ring in every
household in the land, till human hearts could bear it no longer," and
that it "made the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law an
impossibility."
It is possible to discuss the question whether "Uncle Tom's Cabin" is
a work of art, just as it is possible to discuss whether the Sermon on
the Mount is a work of art, but not whether the story was effective,
not whether it hit the mark and accomplished its purpose. Mrs. Stowe's
story is not so much one story as a dozen; in the discriminating
language of her son, it is "a series of pictures," and who will deny
that the scenes are skilfully portrayed!
Mrs. Stowe did not know that she had made her fortune; she had not
written for money; nevertheless when the story was republished in a
volume, her ten per cent. of the profits brought her $10,000 in four
months. It went to its third edition in ten days, and one hundred and
twenty editions, or more than 300,000 copies were sold in this country
within one year. This astounding popularity was exceeded in Great
Britain. Not being protected by copyright, eighteen publishing houses
issued editions varying from 6d to 15s a copy, and in twelve months,
more than a million and a half of copies had been sold in the British
dominions. The book was also translated and published in nineteen
European languages. It was dramatized and brought out in New York in
1852, and, a year later it was running still. "Everybody goes," it was
said, "night after night and nothing can stop it." In London, in 1852,
it was the attraction at two theatres.