She did some research in Boston and corresponded with Frederick Douglass on certain details. But for all that, the book would be written more out of something within her, something she knew herself about bondage and the craving for liberation, than from any documentary sources or personal investigation of black slavery in the South. Indeed she really knew very little about black slavery in the South. Her critics would be vicious with her for this, of course, and she would go so far as to write a whole second book in defense of her sources. But Uncle Tom’s Cabin could never be accounted for that way.
There is probably something to the story that she began the book as a result of a letter from Edward’s wife. “Hattie,” wrote her sister-in-law from Boston, “if I could use the pen as you can, I would write something that will make this whole nation feel what an accursed thing slavery is.” To which Hattie answered, “As long as the baby sleeps with me nights, I can’t do much at anything, but I will do it at last. I will write that thing if I live.”
The story appeared first as a serial in the National Era, an antislavery paper, beginning in June 1851. It took her a year to write it all, and apparently she did Uncle Tom’s death scene first and at a single sitting, writing on brown wrapping paper when her writing paper ran out. The finished story was brought out in book form by the publisher, John P. Jewett, in two volumes on March 20, 1852, a month before the serialized version ended.
Calvin thought the book had little importance. He wept over it, but he wept over most of the things she wrote. Her publisher warned that her subject was unpopular and said she took too long to tell her story. On the advice of a friend who had not read the manuscript, she decided to take a 10 percent royalty on every copy sold instead of a 50-50 division of profit or losses, as had also been offered to her.
She herself expected to make no money from it; she thought it inadequate and was sure her friends would be disappointed with her. Within a week after publication ten thousand copies had been sold. The publisher had three power presses running twenty-four hours a day. In a year sales in the United States came to more than three hundred thousand. The book made publishing history right from the start. In England, where Mrs. Stowe had no copyright and therefore received no royalties, sales were even more stupendous. A million and a half copies were sold in about a year’s time. The book appeared in thirty-seven different languages. “It is no longer permissible to those who can read not to have read it,” wrote George Sand from France, who said the author had no talent, only genius, and called her a saint.
The book had a strange power over almost everyone who read it then, and for all its Victorian mannerisms and frequent patches of sentimentality much of it still does. Its characters have a vitality of a kind comparable to the most memorable figures in literature. There is sweep and power to the narrative, and there are scenes that once read are not forgotten. The book is also rather different from what most people imagine, largely because it was eventually eclipsed by the stage version, which Mrs. Stowe had nothing to do with (and from which she never received a cent), and which was probably performed more often than any play in the language, evolving after a few years into something between circus and minstrel show. One successful road company advertised “…a pack of genuine bloodhounds; two Toppsies; Two Marks, Eva and her Pony ‘Prince’; African Mandolin Players; ‘Tinker’ the famous Trick Donkey.” In the book, for example, no bloodhounds chase Eliza and her baby across the ice.
What the book did at the time was to bring slavery out into the open and show it for what it was, in human terms. No writer had done that before. Slavery had been argued over in the abstract, preached against as a moral issue, its evils whispered about in polite company. But the book made people at that time feel what slavery was about. (“The soul of eloquence is feeling,” old Lyman had written.)
Moreover, Harriet Stowe had made a black man her hero, and she took his race seriously, and no American writer had done that before.
The fundamental fault, she fervently held, was with the system. Every white American was guilty, the Northerner no less than the slaveholder, especially the churchgoing kind, her kind. Simon Legree, it should perhaps always be remembered, was a Vermonter.
That Uncle Tom would one day be used as a term of derision (“A Negro who is held to be humiliatingly subservient or deferential to whites,” according to the American Heritage Dictionary) she would have found impossible to fathom, and heartbreaking. For her he was something very close to a black Christ. He is the one character in all her book who lives, quite literally, by the Christian ideal. And if one has doubts that she could see black as beautiful or that she saw emancipation for the black man as a chance for full manhood and dignity, there is her description of Eliza’s husband, George Harris, as straight-backed, confident, “his face settled and resolute.” When George and his family, having escaped into Ohio, are cornered by slave hunters, Mrs. Stowe writes a scene in which George is fully prepared to kill his tormentors and to die himself rather than permit his wife and son to be taken back into slavery. “…I am a free man, standing on God’s free soil,” George yells from the rock ledge to which he has retreated, “and my wife and my child I claim as mine…. We have arms to defend ourselves and we mean to do it. You can come up if you like; but the first one of you that comes within the range of our bullets is a dead man, and the next, and the next, and so on till the last.”
She seems to have been everywhere at once after the book was published—Hartford, New Haven, Brooklyn, Boston. Almost immediately the South began boiling with indignation. She was a radical, it was said. All the Beechers were radicals. She began receiving threatening letters from the South, and once Calvin unwrapped a small parcel addressed to her to find a human ear that had been severed from the head of a black slave. Calvin grew more and more distraught. They decided it was time to move again, now to Andover, Massachusetts, to take up a previously offered teaching job at the seminary there.
Then they were sailing to England, where huge crowds waited for her at railroad stations, hymns were composed in her honor, children came up to her carriage with flowers. She went about in a gray cloak carrying a paint box. She was a tireless tourist. And she worried. “The power of fictitious writing, for good as well as evil, is a thing which ought most seriously to be reflected on. No one can fail to see that in our day it is becoming a very great agency.”
When war came, everyone told her it was her war, and she thought so too. In South Carolina, as the war commenced, the wife of a plantation owner wrote in her diary that naturally slavery had to go, but added, “Yes, how I envy those saintly Yankee women, in their clean cool New England homes, writing to make their fortunes and to shame us.”
Harriet Stowe never saw the Civil War as anything but a war to end slavery, and all her old Beecher pacifist principles went right out the window. “Better, a thousand times better, open, manly, energetic war, than cowardly and treacherous peace,” she proclaimed. Her oldest son, Frederick, put on a uniform and went off to fight. Impatient with Lincoln for not announcing emancipation right away, she went down to Washington when he finally proclaimed that the slaves would be free, and was received privately in the White House. The scene is part of our folklore. “So this is the little woman who made this big War,” Lincoln is supposed to have said as he shook her hand.
She was sitting in the gallery at the Boston Music Hall, attending a concert, on January 1, 1863, the day the Emancipation Proclamation became effective. When an announcement of the historic event was made from the stage, somebody called out that she was in the gallery. In an instant the audience was on its feet cheering while she stood and bowed, her bonnet awry.
After the war she kept on writing. In fact, as is sometimes overlooked, that is what Harriet Beecher Stowe was, a writer, and one of the most industrious we have ever had. Unwittingly she had written the abolitionist manifesto, although she did not consider herself an abolitionist. She agreed with her father that abolitionists “were like men who would burn d
own their houses to get rid of the rats.” She was not a crusader pure and simple. She never considered herself an extremist, and she seldom took an extreme position on any issue. She was a reformer, and there was an evangelical undercurrent to just about everything she wrote. But writing was her work, her way to make herself useful.
Her life was about half over when she wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but for thirty years more she wrote almost a book a year on the average, plus innumerable essays, poems, children’s stories, and magazine articles, many of which she did under the pseudonym Christopher Crowfield. Perhaps her most artful novel, The Minister’s Wooing, ran to fifty printings, and a magazine article, “The True Story of Lady Byron’s Life,” which appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in 1869, caused more furor than anything published in America since Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
During a second visit to England she had become fast friends with the widow of Lord Byron, who confided the terrible secret that the great Byron had committed incest with his half sister and that a child had been born as a result. Mrs. Stowe kept the secret for thirteen years, but when Byron’s former mistress, Countess Guiccioli, published her memoirs and portrayed Lady Byron as a self-righteous tyrant who would drive any mortal male to excesses, Harriet Stowe decided it was time to strike a blow in her friend’s behalf, Lady Byron by this time having been dead for nearly a decade. So she told the whole story.
All kinds of accusations were hurled at her, some quite unpleasant. She rode out the storm, however, and again, as with Uncle Tom, she wrote a book to justify what she had written. But her standing with the American public would never be the same.
She could write in all kinds of places, under every kind of condition. She was always bothered by deadlines, and it seems she was always in need of money. The royalties poured in, but the more she had the more she spent—on a huge Gothic villa in Hartford that was all gables and turrets and was never finished completely; on a cotton plantation in Florida where she intended to provide blacks with a program of work and education; and later, when that failed, on an orange and lemon grove at Mandarin, Florida, “where the world is not,” she said, and where she hoped her unfortunate son Frederick might find himself.
Frederick had trouble staying sober. His problem had started before the war, but at Gettysburg he had been hit in the head by a shell fragment, and, his mother would always believe, he had never been himself again. “After that,” one of her grandsons would write, “he not only was made drunk by the slightest amount of alcohol but he could not resist taking it.”
Calvin grew enormously fat, ever more distant, and of even less use than before when it came to the everyday details of life. Moreover, Harriet found fame increasingly difficult. She had become a national institution. Her correspondence alone would have drained a less vigorous spirit.
Tragedy struck repeatedly. In 1857, upon returning from Europe, she learned that her son Henry, a student at Dartmouth, had drowned while swimming in the Connecticut River. In 1870, Frederick, unable to endure his mother’s Florida experiment any longer, wrote her a touching apology and went to sea, shipping around the Horn. It is known that he got as far as San Francisco, but after that he disappeared and was never heard from again. She would go to her grave with every confidence that he would return one day.
But it was the Brooklyn scandal that hurt her worst of all, she said. In November of 1872 a New York paper reported that her beloved brother Henry Ward, by then the most popular preacher in America, had been carrying on an adulterous affair with one of his parishioners. His enemies swept in for the kill. For all the Beechers the gossip was agonizing. A sensational trial resulted, the husband bringing suit against Beecher for alienation of his wife’s affections. It dragged on for six months and was the talk of the country. Whether Beecher was guilty or innocent was never proved one way or the other. He denied everything, the jury was unable to agree on a verdict, and as far as his sister was concerned his character was never even in question.
The whole story was a slanderous fabrication, she said, and she stood by him through the entire grisly, drawn-out business, as did all the Beechers except Isabella Beecher Hooker, who was only a half sister, it was noted, and was regarded by many as just a little unbalanced. (Isabella, who called herself “the inspired one,” wanted to take charge of a service at Plymouth Church herself and “as one commissioned from on high” declare her brother’s guilt from his own pulpit. Years later, when he was dying, she even tried to force her way into his house to get a deathbed confession.)
But it would be mistaken to suggest that Harriet’s life became increasingly burdensome. Quite the contrary. As time passed she seems to have grown ever more liberated from her past. She drew further and further from the shadow of her harsh Calvinist heritage, eventually rejecting it altogether. She had long since discarded the doctrine of original sin. Neither man nor nature was necessarily corrupt, she now held. Hers was a faith of love and Christian charity. She had a seemingly limitless love for the whole human family. Years before, Catherine, her spinster sister, had been the first of the Beechers to rebel against the traditional faith when a young man she was engaged to marry, a gifted Yale professor of philosophy, was lost at sea and Catherine had had to face the terrible Calvinist conclusion that the young man was consigned to eternal damnation because he had never repented. In time all of Lyman Beecher’s offspring would desert the faith. Henry Ward would even go so far as to preach that there is no hell.
For Harriet, Calvinism was repugnant, a “glacial” doctrine, although she admired enormously the fervor it had given the Puritan colonists of her native New England and the solid purpose and coherence of the communities they established. Like many of her time she sorely lamented the decline of Christian faith in the land. It was the root of the breakdown of the old order, she believed. Mostly, it seems, she admired the backbone the old religion gave people. “They who had faced eternal ruin with an unflinching gaze,” she wrote, “were not likely to shrink before the comparatively trivial losses and gains of any mere earthly conflict.” If she herself could not accept the articles of the Puritan faith, she seemed to wish everybody else would. And once from Florida she wrote: “…never did we have a more delicious spring. I never knew such altogether perfect weather. It is enough to make a saint out of the toughest old Calvinist that ever set his face as a flint. How do you think New England theology would have fared, if our fathers had landed here instead of on Plymouth Rock?”
Like numerous other literary figures of the day she tried spiritualism and claimed that her son Henry had returned from somewhere beyond to pluck a guitar string for her. She became an Episcopalian, and she developed an open fondness for such things as Europe (Paris and Italy especially), Rubens, elegant society, and Florida, in particular Florida (“…this wild, wonderful, bright, and vivid growth, that is all new, strange and unknown by name to me”). The theater and dancing were no longer viewed as sinful. She rejected the idea that “there was something radically corrupt and wicked in the body and in the physical system.” She took a little claret now on occasion. An account of a visit to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, suggests that once at least she may have taken a little too much claret.
She was asked to give readings, to go on the lyceum, as the contemporary lecture circuit was called, like Robert Ingersoll, P. T. Barnum, and the feminists. She needed the money, so at age sixty-one, having never made a public speech before, she embarked on a new career with its endless train rides, bad food, and dreary hotels. She was very shy at first and not much good at it. But she got over that and in time became quite accomplished. “Her performance could hardly be called a reading,” reported the Pittsburgh Gazette, “it was recitative and she seldom glanced at the book. Her voice betrayed the veritable Yankee twang…. Her voice is low, just tinged in the slightest with huskiness, but is quite musical. In manner she was vivacious and gave life to many of the pages, more by suggestive action than by utterances…. She seemed perfectly possessed on the stage, and read with easy
grace.”
She found she could move her audiences to great emotional heights, but to laughter especially. And she loved the life. Her health picked up. “I never sleep better than after a long day’s ride,” she wrote.
Her appearance never changed much. She put on no new airs. Nothing, in fact, good or bad, seemed capable of changing that plain, earnest, often whimsical manner. She acquired a number of new friendships that meant a great deal to her, with Oliver Wendell Holmes and Mark Twain particularly. Henry Drummond, the noted Scottish religious writer, wrote, after a visit to Hartford: “Next door to Twain I found Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, a wonderfully agile old lady, as fresh as a squirrel still, but with the face and air of a lion.” And he concluded: “I have not been so taken with any one on this side of the Atlantic.”
Her affections for Calvin seem to have grown stronger, if anything. He had become absorbed in Semitic studies, let his beard grow, and took to wearing a skullcap. She began calling him “My Old Rabbi.” His apparitions took up more and more of his time, and for a while he was having nightly encounters with the Devil, who came on horseback, Calvin said. But otherwise his mind stayed quick and clear until the end, and she found him exceedingly good company.
In their last years they seem also to have had few financial worries. Among other things a book of his, The Origin and History of the Books of the Bible, had a surprisingly large sale. And their affairs in general were being capably managed by their twin daughters, Eliza and Harriet, who apparently had considerable “faculty.”
Calvin died peacefully enough, with Harriet at his bedside, on August 6, 1886. She lived on for another ten years, slipping off ever so gradually into a gentle senility.
In a letter to Oliver Wendell Holmes she wrote: “I make no mental effort of any sort; my brain is tired out. It was a woman’s brain and not a man’s, and finally from sheer fatigue and exhaustion in the march and strife of life it gave out before the end was reached. And now I rest me, like a moored boat, rising and falling on the water, with loosened cordage and flapping sail.”
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