NARRATOR : The earnest seeker and hopeful discoverer of this new world always haunts the outskirts of his or her time. Our history is written in the lives of such individuals.
Lyman Beecher had early recognized Harriet’s gifts. She and George were the readers of the family, but Harriet would sometimes fall into deep revery, and have to be shaken awake. When Harriet was seven, Lyman said—

LYMAN : Hattie is a genius. I would give a hundred dollars if she was a boy. She is as odd as she is intelligent and studious.

HARRIET : Mr. Brace, Sarah Pierce’s nephew, exceeded all teachers I ever knew in the faculty of teaching composition. The constant excitement in which he kept the minds of his pupils—the wide and varied regions of thought into which he led them—formed a preparation for teaching composition, the main requisite for which, whatever people may think, is to have something which one feels interested to say.

NARRATOR : At twelve, she wrote an essay, ‘‘Can the Immortality of the Soul Be Proved by the Light of Nature?’’

HARRIET : It was condensed and logical, fearfully vigorous in conception and expression, and altogether a very melancholy piece of literature to have been conceived and written by a girl of that age. Father, who was sitting on high by Mr. Brace, brightened and looked interested and at the close I heard him ask, ‘‘Who wrote that composition?’’ ‘‘Your daughter, sir!’’ was the answer. It was the proudest moment of my life. There was no mistaking father’s face when he was pleased and to have interested him was past all juvenile triumphs.

NARRATOR : When Lyman moved to Cincinnati, Harriet went along, in part to help Catharine establish a new school there, and to work as her main assistant.
Charles had already given his sister glimpses of slavery in New Orleans, center for the slave market for the plantations of the Deep South. She had seen and heard other stories, of the Underground Railway, of escapes over ice floes on the Ohio River. At Edward and Katy Beecher’s home in Jacksonville, Illinois, she had met the Rev. Josiah Henson, a Christian freedman, who gave her the model for Uncle Tom. The river trade and her own excursions with her father into Kentucky supplied other details, all of which would be of use later.
On a visit to brother William in Putnam, Ohio, Harriet reports:

HARRIET : The good people here, you know, are about half abolitionists. I should think them about as ultra as to measures as anything that has been attempted, though I am glad to see a better spirit than marks such proceedings generally.

NARRATOR : In Cincinnati, Catharine commented on the fact that, while she earned $30 from her stories, Harriet earned $300. Both she and Lyman encouraged Harriet’s ambitions to be a writer. So did Calvin Stowe.

CALVIN : My dear, you must be a literary woman. It is so written in the book of fate. Make all your calculations accordingly. Get a good stock of health and brush up your mind. Drop the E. out of your name. It only encumbers it and interferes with the flow and euphony. Write yourself fully and always Harriet Beecher Stowe, which is a name euphonious, flowing, and full of meaning.
I want you to come home as quick as you can. The fact is I cannot live without you, and if we were not so prodigious poor I would come for you at once. There is no woman lke you in this wide world. Who else has so much talent with so little self-conceit; so much reputation with so little affectation; so much literature with so little nonsense; so much enterprise with so little extravagance; so much tongue with so little scold; so much sweetness with so little softness; so much of so many things and so little of so many other things?

HARRIET : On the whole, my dear, if I choose to be a literary person, I have, I thing, as good a chance of making profit by it as anyone I know of. But with all this, I have my doubts whether I shall be able to do so.
Our children are just coming to the age when everything depends on my efforts. They are delicate in health, and nervous and excitable, and need a mother’s whole attention. Can I lawfully divide my attention by literary efforts?
There is one thing I must suggest. If I am to write, I must have a room to myself, which shall be my room. All last winter I felt the need of some place where I could go and be quiet and satisfied.
I can earn $400 a year by writing, but I don’t want to feel that I must, and when weary with teaching the children, and tending the baby, and buying provisions, and mending dresses, and darning stockings, sit down and write a piece for some paper.

NARRATOR : Meanwhile, Cincinnati suffered a cholera epidemic again, and this time it claimed Samuel Charles Stowe, Harriet and Calvin’s baby. When Calvin received an offer from Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, they moved back East.
On the way, Harriet came to Boston with her children, to visit her brother Edward Beecher, the friend of the murdered abolitionist Elijah Lovejoy. Edward was revolted by the Fugitive Slave Law, and they talked of little else.
Even after Harriet and Calvin arrived in Brunswick, Katy, Edward’s wife, sent Harriet letters describing scenes of captured slaves, in the hope that Harriet would use her powers as a writer against slavery.

KATY : I remember distinctly saying, ‘‘Now, Hattie, if I could use a pen as you can, I would write something that would make this whole nation feel what an accursed thing slavery is.’’

HARRIET : Tell sister Katy I thank her for her letter and will answer it. As long as the baby sleeps with me nights I can’t do much at anything, but I will do it at last. I will write that thing if I live.
To me it is incredible, amazing, mournful! I feel as if I should be willing to sink with it, were all this sin and misery to sink in the sea. I wish father would come on to Boston, and preach on the Fugitive Slave Law as he once preached on the slave-trade, when I was a little girl in Litchfield. I sobbed aloud in one pew and Mrs. Judge Reeves in another. I wish some Martin Luther would arise to set this community right.

NARRATOR : When Lyman Beecher retired at the age of 75, Catharine urged him to return East to stay with various of his children, and to edit his papers.

CATHARINE : As for father, he is beating about to find places to preach so as to save souls. I think I never heard him preach better, and it grieves me to see how little he is appreciated and that half of his energies are out of employ. There are small minds at helm now in these parts and the sooner father is put where he can have full scope and fair appreciation the better for him and the cause he is serving. It will add years to his life to put him in the right place and that now is not at the West.

NARRATOR : But when he did move back to Boston to be by Edward, his spirits did not improve. He was no longer the patriarch, but the dependent. He gathered his papers, and published his sermons, but writing his autobiography was too much for him. As Charles reports, Lyman Beecher was declining.

CHARLES : His mind was gradually retreating and hiding itself as in some deep mysterious cave. When it was clear that he could no longer write, I then took responsibility for completing the autobiography.

NARRATOR : Catharine’s relationship with Harriet had suffered some ravages over money, especially during the failure of her Cincinnati school But differences were patched up, and Catharine agreed to help Harriet for one year, running the Stowe household of seven children.
It was an opportune time. Harriet Beecher Stowe was writing a serial, intended for the National Era, a small-circulation abolitionist paper out of Washington, D.C., edited by Gamaliel Bailey. Catharine’s volunteer effort to help Harriet gave her enough time to write some of the early chapters of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Catharine also organized a boarding school of Beecher nieces and nephews, and thereby was able to purchase a new furnace, furniture, carpets, wood, and coal.

CATHARINE : The only way I could make Calvin comfortable about this arrangement was by taking all the task myself and agreeing to foot all the bills that were not covered by the salary and income from the pupils.

HARRIET : Catharine’s affairs have now become in a measure interwoven with mine. She has agreed to give me a year of her time to act conjointly with me and my own children. Her help is essential here—though she has had to leave her work on behalf of women teachers.

CATHARINE : At eight o’clock we are through with breakfast and prayers and then we send off Mr. Stowe and Harriet both to his room in the college. There was no other way to keep her out of family cares and quietly at work and since this plan is adopted she goes ahead forthwith. I look forward with the greatest interest to our winter’s work.

NARRATOR : During this period, Lyman Beecher visited the Stowes—Calvin, after all, had been his star professor at Lane Seminary. He took over the kitchen table with his piles of papers, rearranging them into other piles of papers, not noticing that he had displaced Harriet, who sat on the back porch steps with a portfolio on her lap, writing chapters of her serial. She wrote other chapters while visiting Edward and Katy Beecher—the same Katy who had encouraged her to persevere.
The 1840s also saw the emergence of a remarkable man, an escaped slave named Frederick Douglass, speaking on behalf of the abolitionist movement. William Lloyd Garrison welcomed him to their ranks.

GARRISON : The experience of Frederick Douglass, as a slave, was not a peculiar one; his lot was not especially a hard one; his case may be regarded as a very fair specimen of the treatment of slaves in Maryland, in which State it is conceded that they are better fed and less cruelly treated than in Georgia, Alabama, or Louisiana. yet how deplorable was his situation! what terrible chastisements were inflicted upon his person! what still more shocking outrages were perpetrated on his mind! how like a brute he was treated.

NARRATOR : On speaking tours, Frederick Douglass told his own story.

DOUGLASS : I have had two masters. My first master’s name was Anthony. I do not remember his first name. He was not considered a rich slaveholder. He owned two or three farms, and about thirty slaves. The overseer’s name was Plummer. Mr. Plummer was a miserable drunkard, a profane swearer, and a savage monster. He always went armed with a cowskin and a heavy cudgel. I have known him to cut and slash the women’s heads so horribly that even master would be enraged at his cruelty.
He would at times seem to take great pleasure in whipping a slave. I have often been awakened at the dawn of day by the most heart-rending shrieks of an old aunt of mine, whom he used to tie up to a joist, and whip upon her naked back till she was literally covered with blood. No words, no tears, no prayers, from his gory victim, seemed to move his iron heart from its bloody purpose. The louder she screamed, the harder he whipped. Not until overcome by fatigue would he cease to swing the blood-clotted cowskin.
I remember the first time I ever witnessed this horrible exhibition. I was quite a child, but I well remember it. I never shall forget it whilst I remember anything. It was the blood-stained gate, the entrance to the hell of slavery, through with I was about to pass.

HARRIET BEECHER STOWE, BRUNSWICK, JULY 9, 1851
To Frederick Douglass, Esq.:
Sir,
You may perhaps have noticed in your editorial readings a series of articles that I am furnishing for the Era under the title of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly. In the course of my story, the scene will fall upon a cotton plantation. I am very desirous, therefore, to gain information from one who has been an actual laborer on one, and it occurred to me that in the circle of your acquaintance there might be one who would be able to communicate to me some such information as I desire. I have before me an able paper written by a Southern planter, in which the details and modus operandi are given from his point of sight. I am anxious to have something more from another standpoint. I wish to be able to make a picture that shall be graphic and true to nature in its details.
For some weeks past I have received your paper through the mail, and have read it with great interest, and desire to return my acknowledgments for it. It will be a pleasure to me at some time when less occupied to contribute something to its columns.

DOUGLASS : Sunday was my only leisure time. I spent this in a sort of beast-like stupor, between sleep and wake, under some large tree. At times I would rise up, a flash of energetic freedom would dart through my soul, accompanied with a faint beam of hope, that flickered for a moment, and then vanished. I sank down again, mourning over my wretched condition. I was sometimes prompted to take my life, and that of the overseer, but was prevented by a combination of hope and fear. My sufferings on this plantation seem now like a dream rather than a stern reality.
Our house stood within a few rods of the Chesapeake Bay, whose broad bosom was ever white with sails from every quarter of the habitable globe. Those beautiful vessels, robed in purest white, so delightful to the eye of freemen, were to me so many shrouded ghosts, to terrify and torment me with thoughts of my wretched condition. I have often, in the deep stillness of a summer’s Sabbath, stood all alone upon the lofty banks of that noble bay, and traced, with saddened heart and tearful eye, the countless number of sails moving off to the mighty ocean. The sight of these always affected me powerfully. I would pour out my soul’s complaint, in my rude way, with an apostrophe to the moving multitude of ships—
‘‘You are loosed from your moorings, and are free; I am fast in my chains, and am a slave! You move merrily before the gentle gale, and I sadly before the bloody whip! You are freedom’s swift-winged angels, that fly around the world! I am confined in bands of iron! Oh, that I were free! Oh, that I were on one of your gallant dekcs, and under your protecting wing! Go on, go on. Oh, that I could also go! Could I but swim! If I could fly! Oh, why was I born a man, of whom to make a brute!’’

HARRIET : I have noticed with regret your sentiments on the church. I am a minister’s daughter, and a minister’s wife, and I have had six brothers in the ministry; I certainly ought to know something of the feelings of ministers on this subject. I was a child in 1820 when the Missouri question was agitated, and one of the strongest and deepest impressions on my mind was that made by my father’s sermons and prayers, and the anguish of his soul for the poor slave at that time.
Every brother I have has been in his sphere a leading anti-slavery man. One of them was to the last the bosom friend and counselor of Lovejoy. As for myself and my husband, we have for the last seventeen years lived on the border of a slave State, and we have never shrunk from the fugitives, and we have helped them with all we had to give. I have received the children of liberated slaves into a family school, and taught them with my own children.
Everything is against you, but Jesus Christ is for you, and he has not forgotten his church, misguided and erring though it be. I have looked all the field over with despairing eyes; I see no hope but in him. This movement must and will become a purely religious one. The light will spread in churches, the tone of feeling will rise, Christians North and South will give up all connection with, and take up their testimony against, slavery, and thus the work will be done.

NARRATOR : The original commitment from the National Era was for three installments of a serial called Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly, starting in June 1851. It actually ran until April 1852. The abolitionist audience was not altogether pleased, for the story played up the picturesque and patriarchal side of the slavery system, showing some masters as fond of their slaves as if they were their own children (which was often the case). Uncle Tom’s first two owners were kindly Southerners, and the third, Legree, was a Yankee.
Altogether, Harriet Beecher Stowe received $300 for the serial publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin from Gamaliel Bradley of the National Era.

BRADLEY : Mrs. Stowe has at last brought her great work to a close. We do not recollect any production of an American writer that has excited more general and profound interest.

NARRATOR : Catharine’s own Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism, written to oppose the thorough-going abolitionism of the Grimke sisters, Angelina and Sarah, may have helped Harriet frame her appeal.

CATHARINE : Women should appeal to the kindly, generous, peaceful and benevolent principles of those they oppose; the woman’s influence is best pursued through the domestic and social circle.

NARRATOR : John P. Jewett, a Boston publisher, offered the Stowes a half share in profits for book publication of the work. Calvin Stowe protested that he was too poor to speculate; Mrs. Stowe should receive a ten percent royalty on all sales.

HARRIET : I did not know until a week afterward precisely what terms Mr. Stowe had made, and I did not care. I had the most perfect indifference to the bargain.

NARRATOR : While awaiting the first copy of the book, Mrs. Stowe read Horace Mann’s speeches, from the same publisher.

HARRIET : After sending the proof-sheet to the office I sat alone reading Horace Mann’s eloquent plea for these young men and women, then about to be consigned to the slave warehouse of Bruin ¿ Hill in Alexandria, Virginia—a plea impassioned, eloquent, but vain, as all other pleas on that side had ever proved in all courts hitherto. It seemed that there was no hope, that nobody would hear, nobody would read, nobody pity; that this frightful system, that had already pursued its victims into the free states, might at last even threaten them in Canada.

NARRATOR : And then, to this housewife who had one book to her name, who had never lived in the South, who had no reputation except as a writer of sentimental Christmas stories, the letters started coming in. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:

LONGFELLOW : I congratulate you most cordially upon the immense success and influence of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It is one of the greatest triumphs recorded in literary history, to say nothing of the higher triumph of its moral effect.

NARRATOR : John Greenleaf Whittier, the abolitionist poet.

WHITTIER : What a glorious work you have wrought. Thanks for the Fugitive Slave Law! Better would it be for slavery if that law had never been enacted; for it gave occasion for Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
My yound friend Mary Irving writes me that she has been reading it to some twenty young ladies, daughters of Louisiana slaveholders, near New Orleans, and amid the scenes described in it, and that they, with one accord, pronounce it true.

NARRATOR : William Lloyd Garrison.

GARRISON : I estimate the value of anti-slavery writing by the abuse it brings. Now, all the defenders of slavery have let me alone and are abusing you.

HARRIET : Calvin, I have been in such a whirl ever since I have been here in Boston. I found business prosperous, Jewett animated. He has been to Washington and conversed with all the leading senators, Northern and Southern. Seward told him it was the greatest book of the times, or something of that sort, and he and Sumner went around with him to recommend it to Southern men and get them to read it.

NARRATOR : Other letters threatened and damned the book.

HARRIET : They were so curiously compounded of blasphemy, cruelty, and obscenity, that their like could only be expressed by John Bunyan’s account of the speech of Apollyon: ‘‘He spake as a dragon.’’

NARRATOR : While Harriet was away in New York, Calvin Stowe received an invitation to the professorship of Sacred Literature at Andover, Massachusetts. The Stowes moved into an old stone workshop, briefly used as the seminary’s gymnasium—but not it was to become the Stone Cabin, where the Stowes were to receive famous guests, and where numerous philanthropic enterprises would be begun.
Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of copies came rolling off the newly available automatic printing presses. Dramatizations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin began appearing spontaneously—these rights had not been secured with the copyright. Plays of Uncle Tom began in New York, Boston, at two theaters in London. Calvin comments.

CALVIN : The drama of Uncle Tom has been going on in the National Theatre of New York all summer with most unparalleled success. Everybody goes night after night, and nothing can stop it. The enthusiasm beats that of the run in the Boston Museum out and out. The Tribune is full of it. The Observer, the Journal of Commerce, and all that sort of fellows, are astonished and nonplussed. They do not know what to say or do about it.

NARRATOR : Unauthorized English editions poured forth—there being no international copyright protection at the time—just as the Americans had pirated Dickens and Scott for years. Madame Belloc issued an authorized French translation, for which Mrs. Stowe wrote in her introductin:HARRIET : It has been said that the representations of this book are exaggerations! and oh, would that this were true! Would that this book were indeed a fiction, and not a close mosaic of facts! But that it is not a fiction the proofs life bleeding in thousands of hearts; they have been attested by surrounding voices from almost every slave state, and from slave-owners themselves. Since so it must be, thanks be to God that this mighty cry, this wail of an unutterable anguish, has at last been heard!
In its commencement slavery overspread every State in the Union; the progress of society has now emancipated the North from its yoke. In Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and Maryland, at different times, strong movements have been made for emancipation—movements enforced by a comparison of the progressive march of the adjoining free states with the poverty and sterility and ignorance produced by a system which in a few years wastes and exhausts all the resources of the soil without the power of renewal.
The time cannot be distant when these States will emancipate for self-preservation; and if no new slave territory be added, the increase of slave population in the remainder will enforce measures of emancipation.
Here, then, is the point of the battle. Unless more slave territory is gained, slavery dies; if it is gained, it lives. Around this point political parties fight and maneuver, and every year the battle wages hotter.
Fanny Kemble wrote a letter to the editor of the London Times in defense of the accuracy of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s portrayal of slavery in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

KEMBLE : In treating Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s work as an exaggerated picture of the evils of slavery, I beg to assure you that you do her serious injustice. Of its truth and moderation as a representation of the slave system in the United States, I can testify with the experience of an eyewitness, having been a resident in the Southern states. With the exception of the horrible catastrophe, the flogging to death of poor Tom, she has portrayed none of the most revolting instances of crime produced by the slave system.
The South Carolina gentry have been fond of styling themselves the chivalry of the South, and perhaps might not badly represent, in their relations with their dependents, the nobility of France before the purifying hurricane of the Revolution. The planters of the interior of the Southern and Southwestern states, with their furious feuds and slaughterous combats, their stabbings and pistolings, their gross sensuality, brutal ignorance, and despotic cruelty, resemble the chivalry of France before the horrors of the Jacquerie admonished them that there was a limit even to the endurance of slaves.
In Maryland, Kentucky, and Virginia, the outward aspect of slavery has ceased to wear its most deplorable features. Their soil and climate are alike favorable to the labors of a white peasantry; the slave cultivation has had time to prove itself destructive there.
I do not believe the planters have any disposition to put an end to slavery, nor is it perhaps much to be wondered at that they have not. How far they are right in anticipating ruin from the manumission of their slaves I think questionable, but that they do so is certain. The question is not alone one of foregoing great wealth or subsistence; it is not alone the consenting to social equality.
Freedom in America is not merely a personal right; it involves a political privilege. Freemen there are legislators. The rulers of the land are the majority of the people, and in many parts of the Southern states the black free citizens would become, if not at once, yet in process of time, inevitably voters, landholders, delegates to state legislatures, members of assembly—who knows?—senators, judges, aspirants to the presidency of the United States.

NARRATOR : George Sand said this in her review:

GEORGE SAND : Mrs. Stowe is all instinct; it is the very reason she appears to some not to have talent. Has she not talent? What is talent? Nothing, perhaps, compared to genius; but has she genius? She has genius as humanity feels the need of genius—the genius of goodness, not that of the man of letters, but that of the saint.

NARRATOR : Harriet’s book was the first best-seller. Even the new automatic book presses had a hard time keeping up with demand. Three hundred thousand copies were sold in the first year, and one and a half million overseas in twenty languages. Even in the South it was popular at first—it was the first time anyone on the anti-slavery side had even attempted to present the situation fairly.
To one of her children, Harriet wrote these words:

HARRIET : I well remember the winter you were a baby and I was writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin. My heart was bursting with the anguish excited by the cruelty and injustice our nation was showing to the slave, and praying God to let me do a little and to cause my cry for them to be heard. I remember many a night weeping over you as you lay sleeping beside me, and I thought of the slave mothers whose babes were torn from them.