Harriet Beecher Stowe
|  | ||||||||||
For More information please visit: | |||||||||||
Audio Archives: | |||||||||||
| The most famous of the Beecher daughters, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), one of the most popular novels in American history; Harriet was called by Abraham Lincoln "the little lady whose book started the Civil War."
Harriet was one of eleven siblings born to Lyman Beecher, a prominent Congregational minister from Litchfield. Their father's intellect and dynamic religious energy had an effect on all of his children and many of them, including Harriet, her sister Catherine and half sister Isabella, proved in their adult years that his influence and intelligence had been passed on to the next generation. As a young woman, Harriet was both a student and an employee the Hartford Female Seminary, started by her sister Catherine Beecher. The Seminary's emphasis on a full education meant school work on par with that of a male education institution. Students of the Female Seminary were schooled in courses such as Latin and hours of time were dedicated to writing essays. When Harriet's father and sister moved the family to Cincinnati, Harriet joined them. It was here that Harriet met her husband, Calvin Stowe; six of their seven children were both in Cincinnati. It was also here that Harriet saw first hand the issue of abolition and the inspiration for Uncle Tom's Cabin was born. While living in Cincinnati, located just across the river from Kentucky, a slave state, Harriet became acquainted with abolitionists and runaway slaves, helping several to escape through the underground railway. The passage of the Fugitive Slave Law horrified her and ultimately led her to detail slavery's atrocities in A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin and Dred, a novel based on Nat Turner's rebellion. Uncle Tom's Cabin was first published in an abolitionist newspaper, The National Era, in 1851 while Harriet was living in Brunswick, Maine. Following the fame and influence of Uncle Tom's Cabin, Stowe continued to write extensively on domestic science and horticulture and to publish children's stories and poems. Her later novels satirized post-Civil War New York . She was the mother of seven children, only three of whom outlived her. | |||||||||||
|