Stay tuned for additional posts answering questions posed by the participants of the Harriet Beecher Stowe House Community Connection Facebook group. CLICK HERE to join the group and submit your own questions to our volunteer team! Today's question is answered by youth docent Emmett Looman. Harriet Beecher Stowe began writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1851. By that time, she had already written several stories and published books. Writing was definitely not new to her. By the time Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published she had already published two other books, not counting the many articles she had already written for magazines and newspapers. I was interested in how Harriet learned to write a novel, let alone one as widely known as Uncle Tom’s Cabin, so I explored the basis for her writing career. Harriet was educated at her older sister Catharine’s school, the Hartford Female Seminary. The Hartford Seminary was a rarity at the time, as it educated women. While at the Hartford Seminary, she wrote long essays. Harriet even taught there after her education. When Harriet moved to Cincinnati in 1832, she taught at Catharine’s new school, the Western Female Institute. There, she published her first book, which was a geography textbook. While there, she also began to write short stories. It was around this time that Harriet joined the Semi-Colon Club, you may have heard of it. The Semi-Colon Club was a literary group in Cincinnati that wrote stories and shared them anonymously. It was through the Semi-Colon Club that Harriet learned and grew as a writer. The Semi-Colon club became crucial in her life, as she met her good friend Eliza and future husband, Calvin Stowe. In the perspective of writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet already had the writing skills necessary. However, in order to write a book like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, she needed another skill. This skill was firsthand experiences of slavery. In 1851, Harriet already had these experiences. Throughout her eighteen years in Cincinnati, she had heard stories, taken trips, and even had important life events that helped her write Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Harriet became an abolitionist in Cincinnati because of what she heard and who she met there. On trips to friends, she heard harrowing tales of slaves escaping across the Ohio River. Harriet even traveled to Kentucky during a cholera epidemic and witnessed a slave auction. In 1849, Harriet lost her son, Samuel Charles, to a cholera epidemic in Cincinnati. She later wrote that that the loss of her son helped her to understand how slave mothers felt losing their children at auctions. All of these experiences were used to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin. After writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet went on to write even more books. In 1853, she wrote A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which was essentially a list of all of her sources for the novel. Harriet then continued to write and publish thirteen more books, ending with Poganuac People in 1878. My favorite fact that I discovered was that of the origin of the name "Semi-Colon." Note that it is spelled with a hyphen, not as one word, which hints at its meaning. Christopher Columbus was also called Colon. As an extension based upon the theory that “he who provides a new pleasure is entitled to half the praise accorded to a discoverer of a new continent,” the group was entitled to half the praise of Columbus, or Colon, because of the stories they created together (Centennial History of Cincinnati).
In conclusion, while in Cincinnati between the years of 1832 and 1850, Harriet gained the writing skills and experiences necessary to write such an influential book as Uncle Tom’s Cabin. About the author: Emmett Looman is a Youth Docent at the Harriet Beecher Stowe House in Cincinnati. He enjoys history and is always happy to learn new interesting facts about the past. Sources:
For those interested in the complete list of books (taken from the Volunteer Handbook):
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Harriet Beecher Stowe House Marketing Manager Abigail Zhang sat down (virtually!) in late March with Russell Ihrig of the Cincinnati Art Museum to talk about the impact Harriet Beecher Stowe made with her book Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and look at the sculpture The Fugitive’s Story from 1869 by John Rogers.
The Harriet Beecher Stowe House volunteer team is dedicated to sharing their love of Harriet's Cincinnati story with visitors from across the city and around the world. This profile series celebrates them! When did you first visit the HBSH? December 8, 2016 for the member party What is your favorite thing about volunteering at the Harriet Beecher Stowe House? Collaborating with the volunteers, the staff, and the Board. Share a memorable visitor encounter. In summer 2019 I gave a tour of the house to a couple from Brooklyn, NY (the Maslows) with whom I struck up a friendship, with the result that they sent me a book about a socialist congressman from NY city in the 1940’s and I sent them a DVD of an oral history interview of my father. How does volunteering at the HBSH inspire you? It feeds my devotion to learning and sharing the history of humanity’s efforts to perfect our society and right the wrongs. How do you keep in touch with your family while you are apart? Today, as we stay at home and social distance, how do you keep in contact with family members you can’t see physically? - Do you Facetime with Nana? - Text Aunt Brenda every other day? - Have you hosted a Zoom game night with your cousins? Harriet Beecher Stowe lived in a different time. Technologies that are all too common today were not invented yet. Yet she easily stayed in contact with her siblings – a large, socially mindful family through the Circular Letter. By this means, the Beecher family could share news, talk about events in their daily lives, and generally remind each other of the important things in which they believed. The Circular LetterHere's how it worked:
Although not immediate, like today’s Zoom session, it certainly shared the news with the whole family. Give this “old-fashioned” communication a try. Write your letter and send it along with this explanation. See how many relatives and friends it goes to before returning to you. Freestyle your letter or use our template to get started. See how many stops it can make before returning to you!
Stay tuned for additional posts answering questions posed by the participants of the Harriet Beecher Stowe House Community Connection Facebook group. CLICK HERE to join the group and submit your own questions to our volunteer team! Today's question is answered by docent Nicholas Andreadis. Question: How did Harriet and her father get along since they seem to be on opposite sides on how to accomplish abolition? In the nineteenth century no issue was more divisive within American families than slavery; what should be done about the institution and more specifically who should fight for it or against it. Side-stepped by the framers of the Constitution, it fell to American families to resolve the great questions. This was certainly a topic in the hearts and minds of the Beecher family; no more so than Harriet and her father, Lyman. It was natural that Harriet would first look to her father (along with her sister Catharine and her Aunt Harriet) for guidance and perspective. Like many important men of the 1820s, Lyman Beecher supported the American Colonization Society’s program of helping free Blacks emigrate to West Africa. Colonization proved over time to be an ineffectual method for calming the turbulent waters of slavery. Milton Rugoff tells us that William Lloyd Garrison, editor of the anti-slavery newspaper The Liberator, became a member of Beecher’s congregation in Boston. Garrison, he writes, was soon urging Beecher toward the abolitionist stance. But Beecher was not moved easily and like many ministers of the time he argued that even the Bible had at times vacillated on the issue of slavery. He allowed that slavery was evil but appealed to God’s righteousness to destroy the institution. One might conclude that Lyman “walked the fence” between what was morally right and what was pragmatic. His stances during the Lane Debates provide further evidence for this. He oscillated between support for the students and submission to the wishes of the school’s trustees. Harriet by nature and disposition was a quiet, introspective thinker and she brought these characteristics to her evolving attitude regarding slavery. She developed her own philosophical, moral and spiritual touchstones ultimately becoming a fierce abolitionist.
Harriet recalls from her childhood overhearing discussion among her elders over the great debate of that time, the Missouri Compromise. Only later would she realize that no compromise would settle the greatest issue facing America in the Nineteenth century. She was a witness to the famous Lane Debates organized in 1834 by the firebrand, Theodore Weld. And certainly, she was influenced by her brother Edward’s Narrative of Riots at Alton (Illinois) describing the brutal killing of abolitionist minister and editor Reverend Elijah Lovejoy. She was later Influenced by Angelina Grimke and began to view abolition and women’s rights as linked issues. It was the death of her son Charley to cholera in 1849 and the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act that drove her to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Harriet carefully listened to the arguments within her community and the experiences of free and fugitive slaves choosing the written word to express her contempt for slavery, often doing so anonymously to avoid drawing unpleasant attention to her father. Though later she veered away from her father on the issue of abolition and abandoned the strict principles of Calvinism, I found no evidence that she held any antipathy toward him. Rugoff offers that in her autobiography Harriet paid tribute to her father in his prime. She was to my mind and by most accounts a loyal daughter. Source material for this essay: The Beechers: An American Family in the Nineteenth Century by Milton Rugoff (1981) Harper and Rowe Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life by Joan Hedrick (1994) Oxford University press About the author: Dr. Nicholas Andreadis is a docent at the Harriet Beecher Stowe House. He was a professor and dean at Western Michigan University prior to moving to Cincinnati. Stay tuned for additional posts answering questions posed by the participants of the Harriet Beecher Stowe House Community Connection Facebook group. CLICK HERE to join the group and submit your own questions to our volunteer team! Today's question is answered by docent and board member Frederick Warren. Question: How did Harriet Beecher Stowe learn to write a novel?
Growing up in Litchfield, Connecticut, Harriet became an avid reader. As the child of a Congregational minister she was steeped in the Bible. Though her father Lyman’s faith frowned on fiction, the Beecher family was introduced to Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe and to Lord Byron’s poetry by Harriet’s uncle Samuel Foote, a sea captain fluent in French and Spanish, and the ban on novels was lifted. Harriet remembered discovering her father Lyman’s copy of Arabian Nights and being “transported to foreign lands.” Litchfield was a cultural center, boasting the first stand-alone law school in the U.S. and the country’s first important early school for women, Sarah Pierce’s Female Academy. Harriet entered there at the age of eight, four years earlier than the normal starting age. There she read classics of English literature from Milton, Dryden, and Fielding. She began writing weekly compositions at the age of nine, leading her father to observe that “Harriet is a great genius…She is as odd as she is intelligent and studious…” Just as important as her schooling in Harriet’s learning to write were the domestic literary efforts within the Beecher family. People entertained themselves with readings of essays and poems, and Harriet remembered her eldest sister Catharine often writing for the family. People also wrote letters, a skill that was taught at school, and they were often read aloud in the parlor. And formal literary clubs that met in people’s homes were popular. Harriet honed her powers of observation of character and her story-telling ability in this fashion. She then completed her formal education at Catharine’s academy for women in Hartford, where she began her journalism career by editing issues of the school newspaper. Harriet served her literary apprenticeship in Cincinnati, beginning in 1833 by writing a Primary Geography for Children for Catharine’s Western Female Institute in downtown Cincinnati. The book’s success, due to its personal voice and evocative descriptions, led to her invitation to join the Semi-Colon Club, a literary society that was sponsored by the very same uncle Samuel Foote who has so influenced her as a child. The members would contribute stories, essays, and sketches. Soon Harriet’s character sketch “Uncle Lot” had won the Western Monthly Magazine’s prize competition and was the first of many to be published. By 1843 she had published her first collection of such pieces, The Mayflower: Or, Sketches of Scenes and Characters Among the Descendants of the Pilgrims. She was well on the way to finding her literary voice that we know from Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Note: The source material for this brief essay is Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life by Joan Hedrick (Oxford University Press 1994) and Crusader in Crinoline: the Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe by Forrest Wilson (J. B. Lippincott 1941). About the author: Frederick Warren is a docent at the Harriet Beecher Stowe House, as well as a tour guide for the Friends of Music Hall. He is a retired estimator for a book printing and binding firm in Cincinnati. |
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