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.​

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?
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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.

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).
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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.

Question: How did HBS deal with the cholera epidemics?
 
It is noteworthy that the scourge of cholera bookends Harriet Beecher Stowe’s time in Cincinnati. By the time of her arrival in autumn 1832, the illness had reached Cincinnati, probably brought by people traveling along the Ohio River. She departs for the East following the 1849 epidemic that took her beloved son Samuel Charles Stowe, affectionately known as Charley. Charley was one of three thousand people who died in Cincinnati in the epidemic of 1849. 
 
Cholera is a disease spread via contaminated water and sewage, of which Cincinnati had a generous share due to its pig processing industry. It was greatly feared because it was so lethal, its cause unknown at the time and the common belief that it was a consequence of God’s anger with his Christian flock.

Cholera struck close to Harriet. She grieved over the death of her friend Eliza Stowe, comforted Calvin and as we know, later became his wife. She herself displayed the symptoms in 1845. But without question it is the loss of young Charley that shaped her private and public expressions of grief.
 
When Charley fell ill, Harriet wrote to her husband Calvin that she had little hope of his recovery. There was no medical intervention available at the time, and all Harriet could do was watch helplessly while her eighteen-month-old child was wracked by convulsions and lost all the fluids in his body.
 
She writes:

“Today is a rather dejecting day. I don't particularly feel like talking about it because my heart can barely take all the emotion of today. I am overwhelmed with confusion and sadness. Today my eighteen month old son died of Cholera. As I sat cradling him in my arms for the last minutes, the last breath of his short life, I could see the life being sucked right out of his small, frail body. His eyes were glassy and his skin was as dry as the dust on my boots. It felt as if the life was being sucked out of me the longer I sat there staring into his blank expression. He seemed so disconnected; So helpless. That was one of the hardest things I have ever done. No way to help, all I could do was sit there and accept that my child was breathing his last breaths. I referred to him as my sunshine child. At only one year and six months he lit up my day like the sun fills the sky with light and gives everyone a feeling of warmth. I will never forget my baby boy. Having experienced losing someone so close to me I can sympathize with all the poor, powerless slaves at the unjust auctions. You will always be in my heart Samuel Charles Stowe.”
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She later wrote that there were circumstances of such bitterness in the manner of Charley's death that she didn't think she could ever be reconciled for it unless his death allowed her to do some great good to others. Losing Charley made her understand what a slave woman felt when her child was taken away at the auction block. Harriet poured her grief onto the pages of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Her description of the evil of slavery are vividly displayed in a prose style that touched the hearts of many Americans, particularly those in the North.
 
As Joan Hedrick writes, “Harriet Beecher Stowe had a profound effect on nineteenth-century culture and politics, not because her ideas were original, but because they were common.”
 
Note: The source material for most of the information contained within this brief essay is Harriet Beecher Stowe: A life by Joan Hedrick published 1994 by 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.