What Did Lincoln Say to Mrs. Stowe?

Lincoln Meets Stowe, Bruno Lucchesi, 2006, Lincoln Financial Sculpture Walk, Downtown, Hartford, Connecticut, USA

People taking a tour of the Stowe House may notice a framed photo that hangs near the foot of the staircase, just visible above a large monitor screen. It shows a sculpture of President Abraham Lincoln and Harriet, highlighting their difference in stature.  Located in Hartford, CT, this sculpture by Bruno Lucchesi depicts the meeting of President Lincoln and abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe in Washington, D.C. in 1862. A plaque attached to the sculpture's mounting is inscribed: “Lincoln Meets Stowe.”

This is the meeting in which Lincoln is reported to have greeted Harriet saying, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war!”  Though often related, the story and the quote are considered by scholars to be an apocryphal anecdote, that is, one for which there is no writing by either Lincoln or Stowe reporting it.  English professor Daniel R. Vollaro went so far as to claim in a 2009 article in The Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association that the quote was invented by the family later to burnish Harriet’s legacy.

In fact, the story was first reported by Harriet’s son Charles Edward, and her grandson Lyman Beecher Stowe in their 1911 book Harriet Beecher Stowe: The Story of Her Life.  They are careful to say that it was “Mrs. Stowe, in telling of her interview with Mr. Lincoln…dwelt particularly on the rustic pleasantry with which the great man received her.”  Their account relates many details of the meeting and the conversation.

Historians have wondered why there is no earlier account of the meeting.  Her son Charles wrote a biography of his mother, The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe, in 1889 in which the only mention of it is in reproducing a letter written by Harriet to her husband.  However, it is important to remember that this work was written with the participation of its subject – Harriet.  She wrote an introduction that reads: “At my suggestion and with what assistance I have been able to render, my son, Ross Charles Edward Stowe, has compiled from my letters and journals, this biography. It is this true story of my life, told for the most part, in my own words and has therefore all the force of an autobiography. It is perhaps much more accurate as to detail & impression than is possible with any autobiography, written later in life.”

As for accounts of the meeting at the time by those who were present, Harriet’s letter to her husband Calvin, says only, “I had a real funny interview with the President…the particulars of which I will tell you.”  Her daughter Hatty wrote to her twin sister “It was a very droll time that we had in the White House,” saying that she and her mother were “ready to explode with laughter…(but)…were trying to keep it in.”

Nancy Koester in her biography entitled Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Spiritual Life discusses a letter written by HBS to her daughters in the spring of 1862, and in so doing sheds light on why Harriet herself did not mention Lincoln’s greeting.  Koester writes “Harriet was distressed that her daughters, especially the twins, seemed so frivolous and worldly... Then Harriet got down to cases.  How often she had heard her daughters indulge in mockery!... How could they go to church and pray ‘Our Father’ and in the very next breath make fun of others?”

Is it not obvious that to Harriet it would be the height of disrespect and lack of refinement to “make fun” of Lincoln by reporting a facetious and jocular remark?  After all she had traveled to Washington to meet the President with the serious purpose of encouraging him to issue the Emancipation Proclamation.  The 1911 account has Harriet recalling her words “Mr. Lincoln, I want to ask you about your views on emancipation.”

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.