Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896) came from a family with deep commitments to progressive social causes. Her father, Reverend Lyman Beecher, became famous for preaching antislavery sermons in response to the Missouri Compromise of 1821. All six of Harriet’s brothers also became ministers, and one would open a school in Florida for emancipated slaves. One sister, Catherine, became an early leader of the women’s education movement and founded the Hartford Female Seminary, where Harriet studied. Another sister, Isabella, was a founder of the National Women’s Suffrage Association.
Harriet’s talent for writing was clear from the age of seven, when she won an essay contest at her grammar school. The first of her 30 books, Primary Geography for Children, was published in 1833. Three years later, she married the theologian Calvin Stowe, who encouraged her to continue her career as a “literary woman.” She was also inspired to keep writing by her growing sense of slavery’s injustice. Stowe and her husband employed emancipated slaves and aided one runaway in the 1830s, and her sense of slavery’s injustice grew in the following decade. She felt that the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, which threatened imprisonment for northerners who refused to assist in capturing fugitive slaves, was particularly appalling, especially after a runaway slave sought her help in the following year.
Sister-in-law Isabella Porter Beecher urged Harriet to use her literary talents to fight the law, and an opportunity arose quickly when the antislavery newspaper The National Era contracted her to “paint a word picture of slavery” in three or four installments. She did extensive research, reading the growing number of slave narratives that were surfacing (a process described in her subsequent book, A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin), and the project expanded to 40 installments. When these were collected in two volumes as Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852, the books became an immediate sensation in the United States, where 300,000 copies were sold in the first year. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was even more successful in Great Britain, where 1.5 million copies were sold in a year; a figure that its publisher claimed was “10 times the sales of any book other than the Bible and prayer book.”
By humanizing slaves and focusing on her readers’ emotions rather than their intellect, Harriet Beecher Stowe had a tremendous impact on northern attitudes toward ending slavery. This explains the legend that President Lincoln greeted her in 1862 as “the little woman who wrote the book that started this Great War.” Yet in some ways, she subscribed to the more conservative attitudes of her era. She attended abolitionist rallies but did not feel it was a woman’s place to speak in public and had her husband read her statements. She also considered the theater immoral and declined an invitation to collaborate on a dramatic version of her book. The limited copyright protection of the era did not stop others from making their own adaptations, and these often-sensationalized “Tom Shows,” with white actors in blackface, remained popular for decades.
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