When Harriet Beecher Stowe met President Abraham Lincoln in 1862, he is said to have exclaimed, “So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this Great War!”
The book she wrote, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, still resonates into today’s world, according to Chris Desimio and Helen Spoon of the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center in Cincinnati, Ohio, speaking recently at the Florence Rotary Club meeting about Ms. Stowe and her ties to the Greater Cincinnati area. The Harriet Beecher Stowe House is operated as an historical and cultural site that also includes a look into the family, friends, and colleagues of the Beecher-Stowe family, Lane Seminary, and the abolitionist rights and Underground Railroad movements in which these historical figures participated in the 1830’s to 1860’s, as well as African-American history of the time.
Harriet Beecher Stowe was born in Litchfield, Connecticut, but moved to Cincinnati to be with her father in the 1830s. She was well known during her lifetime as an author, abolitionist and advocate for women’s suffrage. “Harriet Beecher Stowe was the second most influential woman of the 19th century,” said Helen Spoon, “second only to Queen Victoria of England.”
The family house, located at 2950 Gilbert Avenue in Cincinnati, was home to Harriet Beecher Stowe prior to her marriage, and to her father, Rev. Lyman Beecher, and his large family, a prolific group of religious leaders, educators, writers, and antislavery and women’s rights advocates. The Beecher family includes Harriet’s sister, Catherine Beecher, an early female educator and writer who helped found numerous high schools and colleges for women; brother Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, a leader of the women’s suffrage movement and considered by some to be the most eloquent minister of his time; General James Beecher, a Civil War general who commanded the first African-American troops in the Union Army recruited from the South; and sister Isabella Beecher Hooker, a women’s rights advocate.
In Cincinnati, Harriet Beecher Stowe met and married Calvin Stowe, a theology professor she described as “rich in Greek & Hebrew, Latin & Arabic, & alas! rich in nothing else…” Six of Stowe’s seven children were born in Cincinnati, and in the summer of 1849, Stowe experienced for the first time the sorrow many 19th-century parents knew when her 18-month old son, Samuel Charles Stowe, died of cholera. Stowe later credited that crushing pain as one of the inspirations for Uncle Tom’s Cabin because it helped her understand the pain enslaved mothers felt when their children were taken from them to be sold.
The Beechers lived in Cincinnati for nearly 20 years, from 1832 to the early 1850’s, before returning east. Shortly after leaving Cincinnati and basing her writing on her experiences in Cincinnati, in 1851-1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe authored the best-selling book of its time, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a fictionalized popular account of the pain slavery imposed on its victims and of the difficult struggles of slaves to escape and travel, on the Underground Railroad, to freedom in the northern states or Canada.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a runaway best-seller, selling 10,000 copies in the United States in its first week; 300,000 in the first year; and in Great Britain, 1.5 million copies in one year. It resonates with an international audience as a protest novel and literary work.
Published just after the draconian fugitive slave laws were enacted by the US Congress in 1850, the book made Harriet Beecher Stowe’s name a household word in the United States. Uncle Tom’s Cabin has been published in over 75 languages and is still an important text used in schools all over the world.
Written at a time when women did not vote, have legal rights, or even speak in public meetings, Uncle Tom’s Cabin became an important part of the social fabric and thought that eventually caused the Civil War to break out and the southern slaves to be emancipated by President Abraham Lincoln, effective in 1863. Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a remarkable example of how one person can make a huge impact to improve the lives of millions of people.
Visit the Harriet Beecher Stowe House in Cincinnati to learn more about this important champion of people’s rights, at 2950 Gilbert Avenue, Cincinnati OH 45205, or learn more online at www.stowehousecincy.org.
