Harriet
Beecher,
the daughter of the Congregationalist minister,
Lyman
Beecher, was born in Litchfield, Connecticut, on 14th June, 1811.
Her brother was the famous preacher, Henry
Ward Beecher. After an education at the Connecticut Female Seminary
she taught at schools in Hartford and Cincinnati.
In 1834 Harriet began to write short stories for the Western
Monthly.
Two years later she married the Rev. Calvin
Ellis Stowe, a clergyman and biblical scholar. Over the next few years
Harriet had seven children but continued to write stories and articles
for numerous magazines.
Harriet was converted to anti-slavery
campaign after hearing Theodore Weld speak
at a public meeting. She was determined to do something to help the
cause. One day, while in church, she decided to write a novel about
slavery. The main character in the book was based on Josiah
Henson, an escaped slave whose narrative Harriet had read. Weld's
book, Slavery
As It Is,
also provided her with plenty of background material.
Uncle
Tom's Cabin
was written as a serial and began appearing in the anti-slavery journal,
the National
Era,
in 1851. It was published in book form the following year. In the
preface Stowe wrote: "The object of these sketches is to awaken
sympathy and feeling for the African race, as they exist among us;
to show their wrongs and sorrows, under a system so necessarily cruel
and unjust as to defeat and do away with the good effects of all that
can be attempted for them by their best friends."
The publisher decided to print 5,000 copies of Uncle
Tom's Cabin.
It was an immediate best-seller. The first edition sold out in seven
days. Despite being banned in the South, over 300,000 copies were
sold in its first year. As Frederick Douglass
was later to point out: "Its effect was amazing, instantaneous
and universal".
Translated into many languages, Uncle
Tom's Cabin
was also a great success in Europe. In England alone over a million
copies were sold. Supporters of slavery were furious and Stowe received
hundreds of hostile letters. Thirty pro-slavery novels were published
in an attempt to reverse public sympathies in what had now become
a propaganda battle. Stowe responded by publishing The
Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin
(1853), a book of source material on slavery.
Stowe visited England where she met Queen
Victoria. She also made three tours of Europe and this inspired
her book Sunny
Memories of Foreign Lands
(1854). A second anti-slavery novel, Dred:
A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp
appeared
in 1856. The story of a slave rebellion was followed by The
Minister's Wooing
(1859).
Other books written by Stowe include Agnes
of Sorrento
(1862), Oldtown
Folks
(1869) Pink
and White Tyranny
(1871) and We
And Our Neighbours (1875).
Harriet
Beecher Stowe
died on 1st July, 1896.
(1)
Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1853)
The author will now enter
into a consideration of slavery as it stands revealed in slave law.
What is it according to the
definition of law-books and legal interpreters? "A slave,"
says the law of Louisiana, "is one who is in the power of a master
to whom he belongs. The master may sell him, dispose of his person,
his industry, and his labour; he can do nothing, possess nothing,
nor acquire anything, but what must belong to his master." South
Carolina says: "Slaves shall be deemed, sold, taken, reputed,
and adjudged in law, to be chattels personal in the hands of their
owners and possessors, and their executors, administrators, and assigns,
to all intents, constructions and purposes
whatsoever." The law of Georgia is similar. Judge Ruffin, pronouncing
the opinion of the
Supreme Court of North Carolina, says a slave is
"one doomed in his own person, and his posterity, to live without
knowledge, and without the capacity to make anything his own, and
to toil that another may reap the fruits.'
This is what slavery is, this is what it
is to be a slave! The slave-code, then, of the Southern States, is
designed to keep millions of human beings in the condition of chattels
personal; to keep them in a condition in which the master may sell
them, dispose of their time, person, and labour; in which they can
do nothing, possess nothing, and acquire nothing, except for the benefit
of the master; in which they are doomed in themselves and in their
posterity to live without knowledge, without the power to make anything
their own, to toil that another may reap. The laws of the slave-code
are designed to work out this problem, consistently with the peace
of the community, and the
safety of that superior race which is constantly
to perpetrate this outrage.
(2)
Harriet
Beecher Stowe, The Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1853)
With what face can we
exhort our Southern brethren to emancipate their slaves, if we do
not set the whole moral power of the Church at the North against such
abuses as this? Is this course
justified by saying that the negro is vicious and idle? This is adding
insult to injury.
What is it these Christian States
do? To a great extent they exclude the coloured population from their
schools; they discourage them from attending their churches by invidious
distinctions; as a general fact, they exclude them from their shops,
where they might learn useful arts and trades; they crowd them out
of the better callings where they might earn an honourable livelihood;
and having thus discouraged every elevated aspiration, and reduced
them to almost inevitable ignorance, idleness, and vice, they fill
up the measure of iniquity by making cruel laws to expel them from
their States, thus heaping up wrath against the day of wrath.
(3)
Harriet
Beecher Stowe, The Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1853)
The thing to be done,
of which I shall chiefly speak, is, that the whole American Church,
of all denominations, should unitedly come up, not in form, but in
fact, to the noble purpose avowed
by the Presbyterian Assembly of 1818, to seek the entire abolition
of slavery throughout America and throughout Christendom.
To this noble course
the united voice of Christians in all other countries is urgently
calling the American Church. She must undertake it because she alone
can perform the work peaceably. If this fearful problem is left to
take its course as a mere political question, to be ground out between
the upper and nether millstones of political parties, then what will
avert agitation, angry collisions, and the desperate rending of the
Union? No, there is no safety but in making it a religious enterprise,
and pursuing it in a Christian spirit, and by religious means.
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