Harriet Beecher Stowe

(1811-1896)
American writer and abolitionist, author of
Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852)

Author of Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), a forceful indictment of slavery and one of the most powerful novels of its kind in American literature. Born in Litchfield, Connecticut, Stowe was the daughter of the liberal clergyman Lyman Beecher. Her husband, the Reverend Calvin Ellis Stowe, was also an ardent opponent of slavery. Her first book, The Mayflower, or Sketches of Scenes and Characters Among the Descendants of the Pilgrims, appeared in 1843.

While living in Brunswick, Maine, Stowe wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin. It was serialized in 1851 and 1852 in an abolitionist paper, the National Era, and issued as a book in 1852.

As a serial, the story attracted no unusual notice. The success of the book, however, was unprecedented; 500,000 copies were sold in the United States alone within five years, and it was translated into more than 20 foreign languages. It did much to crystallize militant antislavery sentiment in the North, and therefore was an important factor in precipitating the American Civil War (1861-1865).

Uncle Tom's Cabin, like most of Stowe's novels, is rambling in structure, but rich in pathos and dramatic incident. It is one of the best examples of the so-called sentimental fiction that enjoyed popularity in the United States during the 1800s. Sentimental writers focused on domestic scenes, and their work evoked strong emotions. Like Stowe, many of these authors were social reformists, but they were criticized for creating overly idealized characters.

In 1853 Stowe issued A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, containing an impressive array of documentary evidence in support of her attack upon slavery. She returned to the attack in Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856). The Minister's Wooing (1859) is the best known of Stowe's several romantic novels dealing with New England life in the 18th and early 19th centuries.
She also wrote short stories and religious poetry.

~ Abolitionists ~

Abolitionists were reformers of the 18th and 19th centuries dedicated to eliminating slavery, especially in the English-speaking countries. Although the Quakers had long opposed slavery, abolitionism as an organized force began in England in the 1780s, when William Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect-a group of wealthy evangelical Anglicans-began agitating against the African slave traffic. Their success (1807) stimulated further political assaults on slavery itself. With compensation to owners and apprenticeship arrangements, Parliament abolished West Indian slavery in 1833.

The abolitionist movement worked to end slavery in the United States through political and religious persuasion. In 1839 the movement separated into two sections-the gradualists, who tried to achieve emancipation through legal means, and the radicals, who defied the law in attempting to end slavery.

~ Sentimental Fiction ~

The sentimental novel is a major form of American fiction that grew out of the responses of white writers to the abuses of slavery. The most famous and historically most significant work of American sentimental fiction is Uncle Tom's Cabin (1851).

Sentimental fiction aimed to arouse pity for the oppressed and offered a natural form for novelists writing about the evils of slavery. In Stowe's novel and in novels that followed in this tradition, pity for the oppressed did not necessitate revolutionary change but rather called for an outpouring of Christian love. Sentimental fiction elicited this "Christian" sympathy from Northern white women in particular by demonstrating how the slave system violated the most basic bonds of humanity, such as that between mother and child.

Some sentimental fiction focused on gender by showing the dangers faced by young women, who might be driven to compromise their morals as a result of extreme poverty or the loss of their family and subsequent loss of social position. One such novel was Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World (1850).

(See Bibliography below)

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Photograph: Library of Congress
Bibliography: Brewer, E. Cobham. The Reader's Handbook of Famous Names in Fiction, Allusions, References, Proverbs, Plots, Stories, and Poems (1966); Friedman, Lawrence J. Gregarious Saints: Self and Community in American Abolitionism, 1830-1870 (1982); Gerson, Noel B. Harriet Beecher Stowe (1976); Kraut, Alan M., ed. Crusaders and Compromisers (1983).