Harriet Beecher Stowe - A Klos Family Project
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Harriet Beecher
Stowe
STOWE, Harriet Elizabeth
Beecher, born in Litchfield, Connecticut, 14 June, 1812, is the third daughter
and sixth child of Reverend Dr. Lyman Beecher. When she was a mere child of four
years, Mrs. Beecher died, yet she never ceased to influence the lives of her
children. Mrs. Stowe writes: "Although my mother's bodily presence
disappeared from our circle, I think that her memory and example had more
influence in moulding her family than the living presence of many mothers."
After her death, Mrs. Stowe was placed under the care of her grandmother at
Guilford, Connecticut Here she listened, with untiring interest, to the ballads
of Sir Walter Scott and the poems of Robert Burns The "Arabian
Nights," also, was to her a dream of delight--an enchanted palace,
through which her imagination ran wild. After her father's second marriage, her
education was continued at the Litchfield academy under the charge of Sarah
Pierce and John Brace. Of Mr. Brace and his methods of instruction Mrs. Stowe
ever speaks with the greatest enthusiasm.
"Mr. Brace exceeded all teachers that I
ever knew in the faculty of teaching composition," she writes. "
Much of the inspiration and training of my early days consisted not in the
things I was supposed to bestudying, but ill hearing, while seated unnoticed at
my desk, the conversation of Mr. Brace with the older classes."
Nor, indeed, were the influences in her home less stimulating to the
intellect. Dr. Beecher, like the majority of the Calvinistic divines of his day,
had his system of theology vast and comprehensive enough to embrace the fate of
men and angels, and to fathom the counsels of the Infinite. His mind was kept in
a state of intense and joyous intellectual activity by constantly elaborating,
expounding, and defending this system. Consequently her children grew up in an
atmosphere surcharged with mental and moral enthusiasm. There was no trace of
morbid melancholy or ascetic gloom in Dr. Beecher. He was sound in body, sound
in mind, and the religious influence which he exerted on the minds of his
children was healthy and cheerful. Under such circumstances it is not surprising
to find a bright and thoughtful child of twelve years writing a school
composition on the profound theme "Can the Immortality of the Soul be
proved from the Light of Nature?"
The writer took the negative side of the question, and argued with such
power and originality that Dr. Beecher, when it was read in his presence, not
knowing the author, asked with emphasis, " Who wrote that ? .... Your
daughter, sir," quickly answered Mr. Brace. Says Mrs. Stowe, speaking of
this event: "It was the proudest moment of my life. There was no
mistaking father's face when he was pleased, and to have interested him was past
all juvenile triumphs." Dr. Beecher read with enthusiasm, and
encouraged his children to read, both Byron and Scott. When nine or ten years of
age, Mrs. Stowe was deeply impressed by reading Byron's "Corsair."
"I shall never forget how it electrified and thrilled me," she writes.
"I went home absorbed and wondering about Byron, and after that listened
to everything that father and mother said at table about him."
Byron's death made an enduring, but at the same time solemn and painful,
impression on her mind. She was eleven years old at the time, and usually did
not understand her father's sermons, but the one that he preached on this
occasion she remembers perfectly, and it has had a deep and lasting influence on
her life. At the time of the Missouri agitation Dr. Beecher's sermons and
prayers were burdened with the anguish of his soul for the cause of the slave.
His passionate appeals drew tears down the hardest faces of the old farmers who
listened to them. Night and morning, in family devotions, he appealed to heaven
for "poor, oppressed, bleeding Africa, that the time of deliverance
might come." The effect of such sermons and prayers on the mind of an
imaginative and sensitive child can be easily conceived. They tended to make
her, what she has been from earliest childhood, the enemy of all slavery.
In 1824, when thirteen years
of age, Mrs. Stowe went to Hartford to attend the school that had been
established there by her eldest sister, Catherine. Here she studied Latin, read
Ovid and Virgil, and wrote metrical translations of the former, which displayed
a very respectable knowledge of Latin, a good command of English, with
considerable skill in versification. At the age of fourteen she taught with
success a class in "Butler's Analogy," and gained a good
reading knowledge of French and Italian. As scholar and teacher she remained
with her sister in Hartford till the autumn of 1832, when both removed with
their father to Cincinnati, Ohio, where Dr. Beecher assumed the presidency of
Lane theological seminary and the pastorate of the 2d Presbyterian church. At
this time Mrs. Stowe compiled an elementary geography for a western publisher,
which was extensively used, and again engaged in teaching with her sister in
Cincinnati. She wrote lectures for her classes in history, and, as a member of a
literary club, called the Semi-Colon, humorous sketches and poems.
In January, 1836, she married Mr. Stowe. During her residence in
Cincinnati she frequently visited the slave states, and acquired the minute
knowledge of southern life that was so conspicuously displayed in her subsequent
writings, fugitive slaves were frequently sheltered in her house, and assisted
by her husband and brothers to escape to Canada. During the riots in 1836, when
James G. Birney's press was destroyed and free blacks were hunted like wild
beasts through the streets of Cincinnati, only the distance from the city and
the depths of mud saved Lane seminary and the Yankee Abolitionists at Walnut
Hills from a like fate. Many a night Mrs. Stowe sank into uneasy slumber,
expecting to be roused by the howlings of an angry mob, led by the agents of
exasperated and desperate slave-holders.
In 1849 Mrs. Stowe published "The Mayflower, or Short Sketches of
the Descendants of the Pilgrims" (New York; new ed., with additions,
Boston, 1855), being a collection of papers which she had from time to time
contributed to various periodicals. In 1850 she removed with her husband and
family to Brunswick, Maine, where the former had just been called to a
professorship in Bowdoin. It was at the height of the excitement caused by the
passage of the fugitive-slave law. It seemed to her as if slavery were about to
extend itself over the free states. She conversed with many benevolent,
tender-hearted, Christian men and women, who were blind and deaf to all
arguments against it, and she concluded that it was because they did not realize
what slavery really meant. She determined, if possible, to make them realize it,
and, as a result of this determination, wrote " Uncle Tom's Cabin, or
Life among the Lowly."
In the mean time Professor Stowe was appointed to the chair of biblical
literature in the theological seminary at Andover, Massachusetts, and removed
thither with his family about the time that this remarkable book was published.
Neither Mrs. Stowe nor any of her friends had the least conception of the future
that awaited her book. She was herself very despondent. It, does not seem to
have been very widely read when it appeared in the "National Era,"
at Washington, D. C., from June, 1851, till April, 1852, before it was issued in
book-form (Boston, 1852). Mrs. Stowe says:" It seemed to me that there
was no hope; that nobody would hear; that nobody would read, nobody would pity;
that this frightful sys-tern which had pursued its victims into the free states
might at last threaten them even in Canada." Nevertheless, nearly
500,000 copies of this work were sold in the United States alone in the five
years following its publication. It has been translated into Armenian, Bohemian,
Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Illyrian, Polish, Portuguese,
modern Greek, Russian, Servian, Spanish, Swedish, Wallachian, Welsh, and other
languages. These versions are to be found in the British museum in London,
together with the most extensive collection of the literature of this book.
In reply to the abuse and recrimination that its publication called forth,
Mrs. Stowe published, in 1853, "A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, presenting
the Original Facts and Documents upon which the Story is founded, together with
Corroborative Statements verifying the Truth of the Work." She also
wrote "A Peep into Uncle Tom's Cabin, for Children" (1853). The
story has been dramatized in various forms; once by the author as "The
Christian Slave; a Drama" (1855). The character of Uncle Tom was
suggested by the life of Josiah Henson (q. v.) So reduced was Mrs. Stowe's
health by her severe and protracted labors that complete rest and change of
scene became necessary. Consequently, in the spring of 1853, accompanied by her
husband and brother, the Reverend Charles Beecher, she sailed for England.
In the following year appeared "Sunny Memories of Foreign
Lands," a collection of letters of Mrs. Stowe and her brother during
their travels in Europe (2 vols., Boston, 1854). In 1856 she published "Dred,
a Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp." The same book was reissued, in 1866,
under the title "Nina Gordon," but has now been again issued
under the original title. About this time Mrs. Stowe made a second visit to
England, and an extended tour of the continent.
In the judgment of some critics, by far the ablest work that has come from
Mrs. Stowe's pen, in a purely literary point of view, is the "Minister's
Wooing" (New York, 1859). It was first given to the public as a serial
in the "Atlantic Monthly," and James Russell Lowell said of it:
"We do not believe that there is any one who, by birth, breeding, and
natural capacity, has had the opportunity to know New England so well as she, or
who has the peculiar genius so to profit by the knowledge. Already there have
been scenes in the 'Minister's Wooing' that, in their lowness of tone and quiet
truth, contrast as charmingly with the timid vagueness of the modern school of
novel-writers as the 'Vicar of Wakefield' itself; and we are greatly mistaken if
it do not prove to be the most characteristic of Mrs. Stowe's works, and that on
which her fame will chiefly rest with posterity." Mrs. Stowe received
letters containing similar expressions of commendation from William E.
Gladstone, Charles Kingsley and Bishop Whately.
Because of her works against slavery, Harriet Beecher Stowe rallied
Northern sentiments against Southern slave owners. When
Stowe met President Lincoln in 1862, he is said to have exclaimed, "So
you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war!"
In 1864 Professor Stowe resigned his professorship at Andover and removed
to Hartford, Connecticut, built her dream house, Oakholm, They wintered
in Mandarin, Florida, until Professor Stowe's increasing infirmities made
the journey no longer possible. In 1870 the high maintenance cost of Oakholm and
the intrusion of factories caused her to sell it in 1870. Before she
moved, in 1869 Mrs. Stowe published "Old-Town Folks," a tale of
New England life, and in September of the same year, moved thereto by reading
the Countess Guiccioli's "Recollections of Lord Byron,"
contributed a paper to the "Atlantic Monthly" on "The
True Story of Lady Byron's Life." In reply to the tempest of adverse
criticism that this paper evoked, she published " Lady Byron vindicated:
a History of the Byron Controversy" (Boston, 1869).
In 1873, she moved to a Hartford brick Victorian cottage-style house on
Forest Street.
Her seventieth birthday was celebrated with a garden party, mainly of
literary people, in Cambridge, Massachusetts She spent the summer of 1888, in
failing health, at North Haven, Long Island. George Sand has paid the following
tribute to the genius of Mrs. Stowe : "I cannot say she has talent as
one understands it in the world of letters, but she has genius as humanity feels
the need of genius--the genius of goodness, not that of the man of letters, but
of the saint Pure, penetrating, and profound, the spirit that thus fathoms the
recesses of the human soul." Harriet Beecher Stowe died on July 1, 1896.
The above steel engraving represents Mrs. Stowe as she appeared in middle
life; the vignette, at threescore and ten Besides the works that have been
mentioned, Mrs. Stowe has written "Geography for my Children" (Boston,
1855); "Our Charley, and what to do with him" (1858) ; "The
Pearl of Orr's Island; a Story of the Coast of Maine" (1862) ; "Agnes
of Sorrento" (1862) ; "Reply on Behalf of the Women of America
to the Christian Address of many Thousand Women of Great Britain"
(1863) ; "The Ravages of a Carpet" (1864) ; "House and
Home Papers, by Christopher Crowfield" (1864); "Religious
Poems" (1865) ; "Stories about our Dogs" (1865) ; "Little
Foxes" (1865) ; "Queer Little People" (1867): "Daisy's
First Winter, and other Stories " (1867) ; "The Chimney Corner,
by Christopher Crowfield" (1868); "Men of our Times"
(Hartford, 1868); "The American Woman's Home," with her sister
Catherine (Philadelphia, 1869); "Little Pussy Willow" (Boston,
1870) ; "Pink and White Tyranny" (1871); "Sam Lawson's
Fireside Stories" (1871) ; "My Wife and I" (1872) ; "Palmetto
Leaves" (1873); "Betty's Bright Idea., and other Tales"
(1875); "We and Our Neighbors" (1875) ; "Footsteps of
the Master" (1876) ; "Bible Heroines" (1878); "Poganuc
People" (1878) ; and "A Dog's Mission" (1881). Most of
these works have been republished abroad. There is also a selection from her
writings entitled "Golden Fruit in Silver Baskets" (London,
1859).
In 1868 she became co-editor with Donald G. Mitchell of "Hearth
and Home" in New York. Her life will be written by her son, the
Reverend Charles Edward Stowe, who is pastor of Windsor Avenue Congregational
church in Hartford, Connecticut
STOWE, Calvin Ellis, clergyman, born in Natick,
Massachusetts, 6 April, 1802; died in Hartford, Connecticut, 22 August, 1886.
His ancestors came from London to Boston in 1634. Mr. Stowe was a lad of six
years when his father died, leaving a widow and two boys to struggle with
poverty, and at the age of twelve he was apprenticed to a paper-maker. He was
early distinguished for his insatiable craving for books, and acquired the
rudiments of Latin by studying at odd moments during his apprenticeship in the
paper-mill. His earnest desire and determined efforts to gain an education
attracted the attention of benevolent people, who resolved to assist him, and in
November, 1820, he was sent to the academy in Gorham, Maine He was graduated at
Bowdoin in 1824, remained there one year as librarian and instructor, and in
September, 1825, entered the theological seminary at Andover, Massachusetts In
the seminary, at the instigation of Professor Moses Stuart, he completed a
scholarly translation of Jahn's "Hebrew Commonwealth" (Andover, 1828 ;
2 vols., London, 1829). In 1828 he was graduated, and in the following year he
became editor of the Boston "Recorder," the oldest religious paper in
the United States. In addition to his editorial labors, he published a
translation from the Latin, with notes, of "Lowth's Lectures on the Sacred
Poetry of the Hebrews" (1829).
In 1830 he was appointed professor of Greek in
Dartmouth, and he married in 1832 Eliza, daughter of Reverend Bennett Tyler, of
Portland, Maine The same year he removed to Walnut Hills, near Cincinnati, Ohio,
having been called to the chair of sacred literature in Lane theological
seminary. In August, 1834, his wife died wit, hour children, and in January,
1836, he married Harriet Elizabeth, daughter of Dr. Lyman Beecher, the president
of the seminary. Professor Stowe became convinced by his experience as an
instructor that the great need of the west at that time was an efficient
common-school system, and, without neglecting his professional duties, he
devoted himself heart and soul to this work. In May, 1836, he sailed for
England, primarily to purchase a library for Lane seminary, but he received at
the same time an official appointment from the state legislature to visit as
agent the public schools of Europe, particularly those of Prussia. On his return
he published his "Report on Elementary Education in Europe."
In 1850 Professor Stowe accepted a professorship in
Bowdoin, and in 1852 he was appointed to fill the chair of sacred literature at
Andover seminary. In 1853 and 1856 he visited Europe with Mrs. Stowe. In 1864,
owing to failing health and increasing infirmities, he resigned his
professorship and removed to Hartford, Connecticut Besides the works mentioned
above, he published "Introduction to the Criticism and Interpretation of
the Bible" (Cincinnati, 1835) ; "The Religious Element in
Education," a lecture (1844); "The Right Interpretation of the Sacred
Scriptures," inaugural address (Andover, 1853); and "Origin and
History of the Books of the Bible, both Canonical and Apocryphal"
(Hartford, 1867).
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Harriet
Beecher Stowe American Civil War Women
Harriet Beecher Stowe, 1811-1896. Harriet Beecher Stowe was born
on
June 14, 1811 at Litchfield, Connecticut. The first twelve years ...
ClassicNotes:
Harriet Beecher Stowe
... Harriet Beecher Stowe. Biography of Harriet Beecher Stowe.
Harriet Elizabeth Beecher
was the seventh of Lyman and Roxana Foote Beecher's nine children, born on ...
Harriet
Beecher-Stowe
... Harriet Beecher Stowe was born in Litchfield, Connecticut,
and brought
up with puritanical strictness. She had one sister and six brothers. ...
Welcome
to the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center
... Harriet Beecher Stowe was born June 14, 1811 in Litchfield,
Connecticut, where
her father, the Reverend Lyman Beecher (1775-1863), was a prominent and ...
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Harriet
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... Domestic Goddess Harriet Beecher-Stowe(1) is most famous for
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Harriet
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NAME: Harriet Beecher Stowe BORN: June 14, 1811 PARENTS: Lyman
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Foote Beecher COMMUNITY AFFILIATIONS: born...Litchfield, Connecticut family ...
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- Book_Author: Stowe Harriet Beecher
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Frederick
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...
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Harriet Beecher Stowe
... 14. Review Test 1. In what city was Harriet Beecher Stowe
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Born in 1811, Harriet Beecher Stowe was daughter of Lyman
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Harriet
Beecher Stowe
... Harriet Beecher Stowe was born in Litchfield, Connecticut on
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1811 in into one of America's most notable religious families. ...
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She was born Harriet Elizabeth
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26: University of North Florida, Jacksonville
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Fiction:
Harriet Beecher Stowe
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Harriet Beecher Stowe. (1811-1896). Harriet Beecher (Stowe) was
born on June 14,
1811, in Litchfield Connecticut, to Lyman Beecher (1775-1863) and his first wife
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Harriet
Beecher Stowe
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Biography
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Biography of Harriet Beecher Stowe. HARRIET ELIZABETH BEECHER
STOWE
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... Date of Death: July 1, 1896. Place of Death: Hartford, CT.
Harriet Beecher
Stowe was born on June 14, 1811 in Litchfield, Connecticut. ...
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... Harriet Beecher Stowe was born on June 14, 1811, in
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Uncle
Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe 24
... by Harriet Beecher Stowe. ... can hurt him." "And
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EAF
Authors -- Harriet Elizabeth Beecher Stowe
(1811-1896) Harriet Beecher Stowe was born in Litchfield,
Connecticut, into
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Harriet
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Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–96). Harriet Beecher Stowe was
born
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Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe: Chapter 23
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Creative
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... Creative Quotations from . . . Harriet Beecher Stowe
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Beecher
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... 13, 1837. He died on July 1, 1843. Harriet Beecher Stowe was
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American
Writers: Harriet Beecher Stowe
... Born: June 14, 1811 - Litchfield, Connecticut Died: July 1,
1896 - Hartford, Connecticut ... Works
by Harriet Beecher Stowe. The Mayflower (1843 ...
