Harriet Beecher Stowe

Harriet Beecher Stowe
Stowe circa 1852
Born	Harriet Elisabeth Beecher (1811-06-14)June 14, 1811 Litchfield, Connecticut, United States
Died	July 1, 1896(1896-07-01) (aged 85) Hartford, Connecticut, United States
Pen name	Christopher Crowfield
Spouse	Calvin Ellis Stowe
Signature

Harriet Elisabeth Beecher Stowe (/stoʊ/; June 14, 1811 – July 1, 1896) was an American abolitionist and author. She came from the Beecher family, a famous religious family, and is best known for her novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), which depicts the harsh conditions for enslaved African Americans. The book reached millions as a novel and play, and became influential in the United States and Great Britain, energizing anti-slavery forces in the American North, while provoking widespread anger in the South. Stowe wrote 30 books, including novels, three travel memoirs, and collections of articles and letters. She was influential for both her writings and her public stances on social issues of the day.

Legacy

Harriet Beecher Stowe House in Cincinnati, Ohio

Bust by Brenda Putnam at Hall of Fame for Great Americans

Landmarks

Multiple landmarks are dedicated to the memory of Harriet Beecher Stowe, and are located in several states including Ohio, Florida, Maine and Connecticut. The locations of these landmarks represent various periods of her life such as her father's house where she grew up, and where she wrote her most famous work.

The Harriet Beecher Stowe House in Cincinnati, Ohio, is the former home of her father Lyman Beecher on the former campus of the Lane Seminary. Her father was a preacher who was greatly affected by the pro-slavery Cincinnati Riots of 1836. Harriet Beecher Stowe lived here until her marriage. It is open to the public and operated as a historical and cultural site, focusing on Harriet Beecher Stowe, the Lane Seminary and the Underground Railroad. The site also presents African-American history.

In the 1870s and 1880s, Stowe and her family wintered in Mandarin, Florida, now a neighborhood of modern consolidated Jacksonville, on the St. Johns River. Stowe wrote Palmetto Leaves while living in Mandarin, arguably an eloquent piece of promotional literature directed at Florida's potential Northern investors at the time. The book was published in 1873 and describes Northeast Florida and its residents. In 1874, Stowe was honored by the governor of Florida as one of several northerners who had helped Florida's growth after the war. In addition to her writings inspiring tourists and settlers to the area, she helped establish a church and a school, and she helped promote oranges as a major state crop through her own orchards. The school she helped establish in 1870 was an integrated school in Mandarin for children and adults. This predated the national movement toward integration by more than a half century. The marker commemorating the Stowe family is located across the street from the former site of their cottage. It is on the property of the Community Club, at the site of a church where Stowe's husband once served as a minister. The Church of our Saviour is an Episcopal Church founded in 1880 by a group of people who had gathered for Bible readings with Professor Calvin E. Stowe and his famous wife. The house was constructed in 1883 which contained the Stowe Memorial stained glass window, created by Louis Comfort Tiffany.

The Harriet Beecher Stowe House in Brunswick, Maine, is where Stowe lived when she wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin. Her husband was teaching theology at nearby Bowdoin College, and she regularly invited students from the college and friends to read and discuss the chapters before publication. Future Civil War general, and later Governor, Joshua Chamberlain was then a student at the college and later described the setting. "On these occasions," Chamberlain noted, "a chosen circle of friends, mostly young, were favored with the freedom of her house, the rallying point being, however, the reading before publication, of the successive chapters of her Uncle Tom's Cabin, and the frank discussion of them." In 2001 Bowdoin College purchased the house, together with a newer attached building, and was able to raise the substantial funds necessary to restore the house. It is now open to the public.

The Harriet Beecher Stowe House in Hartford, Connecticut, is the house where Stowe lived for the last 23 years of her life. It was next door to the house of fellow author Mark Twain. In this 5,000 sq ft (460 m²) cottage-style house, there are many of Beecher Stowe's original items and items from the time period. In the research library, which is open to the public, there are numerous letters and documents from the Beecher family. The house is open to the public and offers house tours on the half-hour.

In 1833, during Stowe's time in Cincinnati, the city was afflicted with a serious cholera epidemic. To avoid illness, Stowe made a visit to Washington, Kentucky, a major community of the era just south of Maysville. She stayed with the Marshall Key family, one of whose daughters was a student at Lane Seminary. It is recorded that Mr. Key took her to see a slave auction, as they were frequently held in Maysville. Scholars believe she was strongly moved by the experience. The Marshall Key home still stands in Washington. Key was a prominent Kentuckian; his visitors also included Henry Clay and Daniel Webster.

The Uncle Tom's Cabin Historic Site is part of the restored Dawn Settlement at Dresden, Ontario, which is 20 miles east of Algonac, Michigan. The community for freed slaves founded by the Rev. Josiah Henson and other abolitionists in the 1830s has been restored. There's also a museum. Henson and the Dawn Settlement provided Stowe with the inspiration for Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Honors

• Stowe is honored with a feast day on the liturgical calendar of the Episcopal Church (USA) on July 1.
• On June 13, 2007, the United States Postal Service issued a 75¢ Distinguished Americans series postage stamp in her honor.
• In early 2010, Stowe was proposed by the Ohio Historical Society as a finalist in a statewide vote for inclusion in Statuary Hall at the United States Capitol.

In popular culture

In the fictional North American Confederacy Series by L. Neil Smith, in which the United States becomes a Libertarian state in 1794 after a successful Whiskey Rebellion and the overthrowing and execution of George Washington by firing squad for treason, Harriet Beecher Stowe served as the thirteenth President of the North American Confederacy from 1859, when Arthur Downing died, to 1860, when Lysander Spooner succeeded her. She was the first woman to hold the office of the presidency and was called her own First Lady.

Partial list of works

• The Mayflower; or, Sketches of Scenes and Characters Among the Descendants of the Pilgrims (1843)
• Mark Meriden (1841)
• Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852)
• A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1853)
• Dred, A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856)
• The Minister's Wooing (1859)
• Agnes of Sorrento (1862) (reading online)
• The Pearl of Orr's Island (1862)
• The Chimney Corner (1866) (chapters published in Atlantic Monthly Volume 18)
• The American Woman's Home (1869) (with Catherine Beecher) (see summary and links to the book here)
• Old Town Folks (1869) (reading online)
• Little Pussy Willow (1870)
• Lady Byron Vindicated (1870)
• My Wife and I (1871)
• Pink and White Tyranny (1871)
• Six of One by Half a Dozen of the Other (one of several contributors, 1872)
• Woman in Sacred History (1873)
• Palmetto Leaves (1873) (reading online)
• Betty's Bright Idea (1875)
• Deacon Pitkin's Farm (1875)
• The First Christmas of New England (1875)
• We and Our Neighbors (1875)
• Poganuc People (1878)
• The Poor Life (1890)
• Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe (1890)
• Queer Little Folks (1897)
• He's Coming Tomorrow (unknown)

As Christopher Crowfield

• House and Home Papers (1865)
• Little Foxes (1866)

See also

• Harriet Beecher Stowe House (Cincinnati, Ohio)
• Origins of the American Civil War

Further reading

External videos
Presentation by Joan Hedrick on Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life, October 17, 1996, C-SPAN

• Adams, Bluford. "'A Word or Two on the Other Side': Harriet Beecher Stowe in the Debate Over Women's Health." ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 60.4 (2014): 593-633.
• DiMaggio, Kenneth. "Uncle Tom's Cabin: Global Best Seller, Anti-slave Narrative, Imperialist Agenda." Global Studies Journal 7.1 (2014).
• Hedrick, Joan D. "Harriet Beecher Stowe." Prospects for the Study of American Literature: A Guide for Scholars and Students (1997): 112-32. a heavily cited article
• Hedrick, Joan D. Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life (Oxford University Press, 1994).
• Holliger, Andrea. "America's Culture of Servitude at War: The Servant Problem, The Soldier Problem, and Harriet Beecher Stowe's House and Home Papers." ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 61.1 (2015): 37-72.
• Kellow, Margaret MR. "Women and Abolitionism in the United States: Recent Historiography." History Compass 11#11 (2013): 1008-1020. online
• Klein, Rachel N. "Harriet Beecher Stowe and the domestication of free labor ideology." Legacy 18#2 (2001): 135-152. online
• Koester, Nancy. Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Spiritual Life (Eerdmans, 2014). Pp. xi, 371.
• Nichols, Anne. "Harriet Beecher Stowe'S Woman In Sacred History: Biblical Criticism, Evolution, and the Maternal Ethic." Religion & Literature 47.3 (2016).
• Pelletier, Kevin. "David Walker, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and the Logic of Sentimental Terror." African American Review 46.2 (2013): 255-269. online

External links

• Harriet Beecher Stowe at the Encyclopædia Britannica
• Harriet Beecher Stowe's Cat Calvin
• Harriet Beecher Stowe at IMDb
• Works by Harriet Beecher Stowe at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Harriet Beecher Stowe at the Internet Archive
• Works by Harriet Beecher Stowe at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin: an Electronic Edition of the National Era Version — Edited by textual scholar Wesley Raabe, this is the first edition of the novel to be based on the original text published in the National Era
• Uncle Tom's Cabin and American Culture — A multimedia archive edited by Stephen Railton about the Stowe's novel's place in American history and society
• Harriet Beecher Stowe House & Center — Stowe's adulthood home in Hartford, Connecticut
• Harriet Beecher Stowe Society — Scholarly organization dedicated to the study of the life and works of Harriet Beecher Stowe
• The Online Books Page (University of Pennsylvania)
• Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe Compiled From Her Letters and Journals by Her Son Charles Edward Stowe at Project Gutenberg
• Harriet Beecher Stowe's brief biography and works
• "Uncle Tom's Cabin: the book that ignited a nation"
• "How To Live on Christ" a pamphlet by Harriet Beecher Stowe, taken from her Introduction to Chistopher Dean's "Religion As It Should Be or The Remarkable Experience and Triumphant Death of Ann Thane Peck" published in 1847 Hudson Taylor sent a pamphlet using the words of this preface out to all the missionaries of the China Inland Mission in 1869.
• Barron's BookNotes for Uncle Tom's Cabin - The Author and Her Times
• "Writings of Harriet Beecher Stowe" from C-SPAN's American Writers: A Journey Through History
• Letter from Harriet Beecher Stowe to Horace Mann, 2 March 1852 from the Horace Mann Papers III at the Massachusetts Historical Society, retrieved June 4, 2012
• Beecher-Stowe family Papers. Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.
• The 1849 Cholera Epidemic in Kentucky and Ohio and its connection to Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin"