In spite of the Civil War’s ravaging the United States, the White House was peaceful one evening in 1862 when President Abraham Lincoln shook hands with Harriet Beecher Stowe. Lincoln, at 6′ 4″, towered above the petite Stowe, but physical stature was irrelevant. Whatever her height, her influence was enormous. As Lincoln greeted her, he observed, “So this is the little lady who started this great big war!”1

Indeed she was. In 1850, 12 years earlier, Stowe penned Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a newspaper series for The National Era. The story was meant to prick the Christian conscience over the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law. When the series came out in book form, the novel swept the nation, sold 300,000 copies, and became the second best-seller next to the Bible. Slaveholders decried it as pure deception, but many of her fellow citizens accepted its message and became devout abolitionists. Word of its popularity soon reached Europe, and the book was translated into 37 languages. Stowe received accolades from such renowned writers as Lord Byron, George Elliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Leo Tolstoy. Nevertheless, others condemned her writing, questioned her research, and threatened her life. Yet Stowe was a driven woman: “I am obliged to write, as one who is forced by an awful oath.”2

Harriet Beecher Stowe grew up in Connecticut immersed in the company of famous ministers and politicians. Had Stowe and her sister, Catherine Beecher, been men, both would have likely continued the legacy of Congregationalist preaching that their father and brothers cultivated. As it was, Stowe became a teacher at her sister’s school, the Western Female Institute, in Cincinnati, Ohio. However, writing was always in the background: She and her sister compiled and published a children’s geography book, and Stowe contributed stories to the Cincinnati Literary Club. In 1836, she married a widowed professor of biblical literature, Calvin Stowe, who taught at Lane Theological Seminary, where her father was president. She and her husband had seven children, and she would often submit a story or two to supplement their income.

Though Stowe lived on “slave-free” soil, her family’s home in Cincinnati was just across the Ohio River from Kentucky, where slavery was legal. As fervent abolitionists, the family hid many fugitive slaves, and Stowe heard accounts about the cruelties of slavery. When her husband won a position at Bowdoin College in 1850 and the family relocated to Brunswick, Maine, she began her research for Uncle Tom’s Cabin, interviewing fugitive slaves and slave holders, even making contact with the great Frederick Douglass. 3The going was not easy, for she faced financial difficulties, family tragedy, and domestic responsibilities, but she was undeterred—and the result was extraordinary.

After the war, the Stowes purchased land in Florida, where they established a plantation providing employment opportunities for newly freed slaves.4 She also wrote effectively about theology and culture. Indeed, Hudson Taylor, founder of China Inland Mission, sent a copy of her How to Live in Christ to each of his staff.5

In the end, Stowe saw herself as a weak thing of the world used to shame the wise.6 Through it all, she faced formidable foes, but she never wavered from her task. As a model for all believers, she took her bearings and her calling from her Lord and never looked back: “I wrote what I did because, as a woman, as a mother, I was oppressed and heartbroken with the sorrows and injustice I saw; because, as a Christian, I felt the dishonor to Christianity; because, as a lover of my country, I trembled at the coming day of wrath.”7
 
Footnotes:
 
1  Mason I. Lowance, Jr., and Ellen E. Westbrook, The Stowe Debate (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), 3. Quoted in “Stowe’s Protest Novel,” University of North Carolina at Pembroke Website, http://www.uncp.edu/home/canada/work/markport/lit/amnovel/fall2002/04stowe.htm (accessed September 28, 2007).
 
2  Harriet Beecher Stowe, “To Elizabeth Cabot Follen, December 16, 1852,” in The Oxford Harriet Beecher Stowe Reader, ed. Joan D. Hedrick (New York: Oxford, 1999), 76.
 
3  C. D. Merriman, “Harriet Beecher Stowe,” The Literature Network Website, http://www.online-literature.com/stowe/ (accessed September 28, 2007).
 
4  “Harriet Beecher Stowe,” Ohioana Authors Website, http://www.ohioana-authors.org/beecher-stowe/highlights.php (accessed September 28, 2007).
 
5  Dr. and Mrs. Hudson Taylor, Hudson Taylor and the China Inland Mission: The Growth of a Work of God (London: The China Inland Mission, 1934), 187, n. 1.
 
6  Stowe, “To Elizabeth Cabot Follen,” 76.
 
7  Stowe, quoted in James William Massie, America: The Origin of Her Present Conflict (London: J. Snow, 1864), 109.

from Kairos Journal
First Baptist Church of Perryville, 4800 West Pulaski Highway, Perryville, MD.  Located across from Principio Health Center.