Birth of Harriet Beecher Stowe

Lyman Beecher was a famous Presbyterian preacher in New England in the early 19th century. The son and grandson of blacksmiths, he delighted to wield the hammer of denunciation on the anvil of error and he was a fierce opponent of both Roman Catholicism and Unitarianism. He had three wives and 13 children, several of whom became substantial figures in their own right. The most notable was his daughter Harriet Elizabeth, born in Litchfield, Connecticut, in the Presbyterian parsonage which the family shared with numerous boarders and which Harriet described as ‘a wide, roomy, windy edifice that seemed to have been built by a succession of afterthoughts’.

Harriet was the pastor’s seventh child by his first wife Roxana Foote, who bore him nine children before dying of consumption at the age of 41, when Harriet was five. Harriet had few memories of her. Lyman Beecher soon married again, but her stepmother made Harriet feel uncouth and the main influences on her were her father and her sister Catharine, who was ten years older. Even in a family of exceptionally bright and lively children she stood out. When she was seven her father described her in a letter to his brother-in-law as ‘a great genius’ and ‘as odd as she is intelligent and studious’. He said he would give $100 for her to be a boy and her brother Henry a girl.

That would have pleased Harriet. She envied her brothers, who were brought up far less strictly than was thought proper for her as a girl. At eight she was sent to a progressive school for girls in Litchfield, which had been founded ‘to vindicate the equality of female intellect’. An essay she wrote there was read aloud at a gathering of parents, including her father. He was profoundly impressed and she afterwards called it the proudest moment of her life.   

All Lyman Beecher’s children were brought up to embrace his Calvinistic view of the world and human nature. They were persistently interrogated about the condition of their souls and were expected to have a conversion experience, as they all duly did. Harriet’s came as she turned 14 and she proudly reported to her father that Christ had taken her for his own. She was now at the small private school for girls that her sister Catharine had founded in Hartford, Connecticut. Harriet became a teacher there herself and her gift for writing convinced her that her mission in life was ‘to preach on paper’ while her brothers, who all became ministers, held forth from their pulpits.  

In 1832 the family moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, where Lyman Beecher had been appointed president of the new Lane Theological Seminary, set up to train ministers to make sure that Protestantism prevailed in the territories opening up in the American West. In Cincinnati Harriet was confronted with the issue of slavery, as fugitive slaves from the South were sheltered and aided there. It was there too that she met Calvin Ellis Stowe, a teacher at the Lane Seminary, whom she married in 1836 when she was 24. In a letter to a friend just before the wedding she said she would soon cease to be Hattie Beecher and change to ‘nobody knows who’.

What was really in store was the opposite. Calvin encouraged her to write stories and essays that were published in various magazines and collected in a book, The Mayflower, in 1843. Their marriage produced seven children and lasted for 50 years, but was not without strain. They were temperamentally very different: where she was reserved and cautious, he was hasty and impulsive. Her domestic management has been described as ‘haphazard’ and he was a hypochondriac, but they managed.

The tragic death in 1849 of their sixth baby brought home fully to Harriet Stowe the horror of so many black mothers arbitrarily separated from their children and inspired her to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly, which came out in weekly parts from 1851 in The National Era, an anti-slavery periodical. It created a sensation. Published as a book in 1852, it sold 300,000 copies in its first year and reinforced abolitionist feeling in the North in the years leading up to the Civil War. She followed it with a second anti-slavery novel in 1856, Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp. The Stowes had moved back to New England by then and she would publish many more novels, children’s stories and biographies, but it was Uncle Tom’s Cabin that brought her lasting fame. Calvin Stowe, who was proud of her but also resented being known only as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s husband, died in 1886. Harriet survived until 1896, when she died in Hartford, Connecticut at the age of 85.