Harriet Beecher Stowe

Life

Stowe was born on June 14, 1811, in Litchfield, Connecticut. Her father, Lyman Beecher, was a Congregationalist minister, a leader of the Second Great Awakening, and one of the foremost preachers of New England Calvinism. Having lost her mother at an early age, she was raised by her eldest sister, Catharine Beecher, and studied at the Hartford Female Seminary, which Catharine had founded. Her younger brother, Henry Ward Beecher, later became a renowned preacher.

In 1832 her father became president of Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati, Ohio, and pastor of a Presbyterian church there, and the family moved with him. In 1836 she married Calvin Ellis Stowe, a professor of biblical literature at the seminary; they had seven children. She later followed her husband to Maine and then to Andover, Massachusetts. She died on July 1, 1896, in Hartford, Connecticut.

Work and Achievements

In 1852 Stowe published Uncle Tom's Cabin, a novel indicting slavery. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 is said to have prompted her to write the book. The story follows Tom, a devout slave who suffers as he is sold from one master to another, and it was widely read both in the United States and abroad. The novel is regarded as having deepened the conflict between North and South in the years before the Civil War. According to a well-known anecdote, Abraham Lincoln called Stowe "the little woman who made this great war," but the story's authenticity is uncertain.

She followed the novel with A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1853), which compiled the source material behind the novel, and with the novel Dred (1856). In her novels set in New England, she addressed theological themes such as Calvinism, Arminianism, and the Puritan Sabbath. She also wrote hymns.

In matters of faith, she gradually moved away from her father's Calvinism. She came to question doctrines such as the eternal punishment of unbelievers, and she is reported to have joined the Episcopal Church around 1864.

Assessment

Stowe is regarded as one of the foremost American women writers of the nineteenth century, credited with broadening public support for abolition. In the South of her day, however, critics objected that the novel exaggerated the realities of slavery. Since the twentieth century she has been criticized for portraying Black characters in stereotypical terms, and "Uncle Tom" came to be used as a derogatory term for a Black person regarded as servile toward whites. Regarding her religious development, some view her as having departed from the Calvinist tradition, while others see her as attempting to show that one could live as a Christian without adhering to strict Puritanism. Her biographer Nancy Koester pointed to Stowe's dabbling in spiritualism (the belief that one can communicate with the dead), among other matters, as weaknesses.