Harriet’s Childhood Lessons about Slavery

​Recently while reading a letter from Harriet Beecher Stowe to Frederick Douglass I was struck by a passage in which she wrote about her childhood influences that made her “what I am from my soul the enemy of slavery…”  The letter was written in the summer of 1851, shortly after Harriet began writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin as installments published in The National Era, and in it she asked Douglass for information about a cotton plantation.

Frederick Douglass

​Harriet credited her father with teaching her the evil of slavery when she was 10 years old, at the time of the national debate over the Missouri Compromise, which admitted Missouri to the Union as a slave state and Maine as a free state.  She wrote “…one of the strongest & deepest impressions on my mind were my father’s sermons & prayers…his prayers night & morning in the family for ‘poor oppressed bleeding Africa’ that the time for her deliverance in the family might come…which indelibly impressed my heart…”  She ascribes the fact that “every brother I have has been in his sphere a leading anti slavery man” to this upbringing.

Biography of Harriet

Another source of Harriet’s view that slavery was sinful came from her mother’s sister, Mary Foote Hubbard.  In the biography Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Story of Her Life By Her Son Charles Edward Stowe and Her Grandson Lyman Beecher Stowe we learn that “As a very little girl Mrs. Stowe had heard of the horrors of slavery from her aunt, Mary Hubbard, who had married a planter from the West Indies, and been unable to live on her husband's plantation because her health was undermined by the mental anguish that she suffered at the scenes of cruelty and wretchedness she was compelled to witness. She returned to the United States, and made her home with the Beechers. Of her Mrs. Stowe writes: ‘What she saw and heard of slavery filled her with constant horror and loathing.’”

At the conclusion of the letter to Douglass Harriet speaks of the mission she was undertaking with the writing of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, her method of preaching against slavery by her story that showed that the enslaved were true Christians: “This movement must and will become a purely religious one…christians north and south will give up all connection with & take up their testimony against it…”  Clearly the seeds of her writing her anti-slavery novel were sown in her childhood.

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.