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.
The explosive success of Uncle Tom’s Cabin was unprecedented. Tribute came from every direction. Suddenly Harriet Beecher Stowe was a household word, a focus for many people’s frustrated energies, especially since she was the sister of the reformist preacher Henry Ward Beecher.
Henry describes how he managed the daily life of the most famous preacher in America.

HENRY : There are but three rules. Eat well, sleep well, and laugh well.
Let me give you an example. It is six o’clock in the morning. The day is begun. The family is emerging. Breakfast will be ready in half an hour. You look for The Tribune. The bell rings. A man has called thus early for fear you might be out. You dispatch his business.
Sitting down to breakfast the bell rings and the servant says the man will wait. But what pleasure can one have at meal with a man upstairs waiting for him? You run up. Can you marry a couple at so-and-so? That is settled. Prayers are had with the family. The bell rings once, twice, three times.
When you rise there are five persons waiting for you in the front parlor. A young man from the country wishes your name on his circular for a school. A young woman in failing health by confinement to sewing does not know what to do; behind in rent; cannot get away to the country; does not wish charity, only wishes someone to enable her to break away from a state of things that will in six months kill her. Another calls to inquire after a friend of whom he has lost sight. While you are attending to these the bell is active and other persons take the place of those who go.
A kind woman calls in behalf of a boarder who is out of place, desponding, will throw himself away if he cannot get some means of livelihood. Another calls to know if I will not visit a poor family in great distress in Morton Street. A good and honest-looking man comes next; is out of work, has ‘‘heard that your riverince is a kind man’’ etc. Another man wants to get his family out of Ireland; can pay half, if someone will intercede with ship-owners to trust him the balance. A stranger has died and a sexton desires a clergyman’s services. Several persons desire religious conversion.
It is after ten o’clock. A moment’s lull. You catch your hat and run out. Perhaps you have forgotten some appointment. You betake yourself to your study, not a little flurried by the contrariety of things which you have been considering.
You return to dine. There are five or six persons waiting for you. At tea you find others also with their diverse necessities.
This is not overdrawn and for many months of the year it is far underdrawn. There is no taxation compared to incessant various conversation with people for whom you must think, devise and for whose help you feel yourself often utterly incompetent.

NARRATOR : To escape this pressure, Henry went to his summer home in Peekskill on the Hudson. During hay fever season, he and Eunice went to the White Mountains.
While visiting Henry in Brooklyn, Harriet learned of the case of the Edmondsons. Three years before, Henry Ward Beecher had raised $2,250 from his congregation to purchase the freedom of two daughters of a free black and his slave wife. Harriet took on the financial responsibility for their education; Mrs. Edmondson now sought $1,200 for the release of her two remaining children, and Harriet Beecher Stowe made an appeal for funds. Before she left New York, she wrote out a check for the whole amount.

HARRIET : Had a very kind note from A. Lawrence enclosing a $20 gold piece for the Edmondsons. Isabella’s ladies gave me $25, so you see our check is more than paid already.

NARRATOR : One indirect encounter that Harriet had while she was in New York, was with Jenny Lind, the Swedish Nightingale.’’

HARRIET : Well, we have heard Jenny Lind, and the affair was a bewildering dream of sweetness and beauty. Her face and movements are full of poetry and feeling. She has the artless grace of a little child, the poetic effect of a wood nymph, is airy, light, and graceful.
Today I sent a note of acknowledgment with a copy of my book. I am most happy to have seen her, for she is a noble creature.

NARRATOR : Jenny Lind sent back this note.

JENNY LIND : My dear Madam—Allow me to express my sincere thanks. You must feel and know what a deep impression Uncle Tom’s Cabin has made upon every heart that can feel for the dignity of human existence: so I with my miserable English would not even try to say a word about the great excellency of that most beautiful book, but I must thank you for the great joy I have felt over that book.
I have the feeling about Uncle Tom’s Cabin that great changes will take place by and by, from the impression people receive out of it, and that the writer of that book can fall asleep today or tomorrow with the bright, sweet conscience of having been a strong means in the Creator’s hand of operating essential good in one of the most important questions for the welfare of our black brethren. God bless and protect you and yours, dear madam.

NARRATOR : Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts wrote to Calvin Stowe:

SUMNER : All that I hear and read bears testimony to the good Mrs. Stowe has done. The article of George Sand is a most remarkable tribute, such as was hardly ever offered by such a genius to any living mortal. Should Mrs. Stowe conclude to visit Europe, she will have a triumph.

NARRATOR : And Charles Kingsley in England wrote her.

KINGSLEY : As for your progress and ovation here in England, I have no fear for you. You will be flattered and worshipped. You deserve it and you must bear it. I am sure that you have seen and suffered too much and too long to be injured by the foolishyet honest and heartfelt lionizing which you must go through.
I have many a story to tell you when we meet about the effects of the great book upon the most unexpected people.

NARRATOR : Prince Albert persuaded Queen Victoria to read it; Lord Carlisle wrote a preface for an English edition, Lord Macaulay reviewed it in England, George Sand in France, Heinrich Heine in Germany. George Sand said:

GEORGE SAND : The book has faults. We need not pass them in silence, we need not evade the discussion of them—but you need not be disturbed about them, you who are rallied on the tears you have shed over the fortunes of the poor victims in a narrative so simple and true. These defects exist only in relation to the conventional rules of art which never have been and never will be absolute. If its judges, possessed with the love of what they call artistic work, find unskilled treatment in the book, look well at them to see if their eyes are dry when they are reading this or that chapter.

NARRATOR : Meanwhile, the abolitionist movement, unsure of this unexpected ally, carried on its activities. Wendell Phillips had joined the abolitionist camp at the time of the Alton riots. Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave, added great moral force to the movement.

PHILLIPS : Frederick Douglass, some years ago, when you were beginning to tell me your real name and birthplace, you may remember I stopped you, and preferred to remain ignorant of all. I reflected that it was still dangerous, in Massachusetts, for honest men to tell their names! You publish your declaration of freedom with danger compassing you around. In all the broad lands which the Constitution of the United States overshadows, there is no single spot—however narrow or desolate—where a fugitive slave can plant him/herself and say, ‘‘I am safe.’’ I am free to say that, in your place, I should throw the manuscript into the fire.

NARRATOR : At a certain point in his life as a slave, something happened to Douglass. It changed his life. Mr. Covey, his second master, was about to tie him up for a whipping, calling for help from one of his hands.

DOUGLASS : Hughes came, and, while Covey held me, attempted to tie my right hand. While he was in the act of doing so, I watched my chance, and gave him a heavy kick close under the ribs. This kick fairly sickened Hughes, so that he left me in the hands of Mr. Covey. This kick had the effect of not only weakening Hughes, but Covey also. When he saw Hughes bending over with pain, his courage quailed. He asked me if I meant to persist in my resistance. I told him I did, come what might; that he had used me like a brute for six months, and that I was determined to be used so no longer.
With that, he strove to drag me to a stick that was lying just out of the stable door. He meant to knock me down. But just as he was leaning over to get the stick, I seized him with both hands by his collar, and brought him but a sudden snatch to the ground.
By this time, Bill came. Covey called upon him for assistance. Bill wanted to know what he could do. Covey said, ‘‘Take hold of him, take hold of him!’’ Bill said his master hired him out to work, and not to help whip me; so he left Covey and myself to fight our own battle out. We were at it for nearly two hours. Covey at length let me go, puffing and blowing at a great rate, saying that if I had not resisted, he would not have whipped me at all. The whole six months afterwards, that I spent with Mr. Covey, he never laid the weight of his finger upon me in anger.
This battle with Mr. Covey was the turning-point in my career as a slave. It rekindkled the few expiring embers of freedom, and revived within me a sense of my own manhood. From this time I was never again what might be called fairly whipped, though I remained a slave four years afterwards. I had several fights, but was never whipped.
The only explanation I can now think of is that Mr. Covey enjoyed the most unbounded reputation for being a first-rate overseer and negro-breaker. That reputation was at stake, and had he sent me—a boy about sixteen years old—to the public whipping post, his reputation would have been lost.

NARRATOR : Once the criticism of Uncle Tom’s Cabin started in earnest, Harriet set her face to the task of refuting it with a massive compilation of facts culled from laws, newspapers, court records, and private papers, called A Key top Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
When Harriet and Calvin Stowe were given the opportunity of a free transatlantic trip for the anti-slavery movement, the Stowes plunged ahead. Charles Beecher went along as Harriet’s secretary. They were in for quite a reception.

HARRIET : Much to my astonishment, I found quite a crowd on the wharf, and we walked to our carriage through a long lane of people, bowing and looking very glad to see us. Everywhere there was a warm welcome. What pleased me was that it was not mainly from the literary, nor the rich, nor the great but the plain, common people. The butcher came out of his stall and the baker from his shop, the miller dusty with flour, the blooming comely young mother, with that hearty, intelligent, friendly look as if they knew we should be glad to see them.

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING : Never did lioness roar so softly.

NARRATOR : Those were the words of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, as the Stowe entourage departed for a tour of Scotland.

HARRIET : We found similar welcomes in many succeeding stopping-places; and though I did wave a towel out of the window, instead of a pocket handkerchief, and commit other awkwardnesses, from not knowing how to play my part, yet I fancied, after all, that Scotland and we were coming on well together.
At Glasgow, friends were waiting in the stationhouse. Earnest, eager, friendly faces, ever so many. Warm greetings, kindly words. A crowd parting in the middle, through which we were conducted into a carriage, and loud cheers of welcome, sent a throb, as the voice of living Scotland.
All this day is a confused dream to me of a dizzy and overwhelming kind. So many letters that it took brother Charles from nine in the morning till two in the afternoon to read and answer them in the shortest manner; letters from all classes of people, high and low, rich and poor, in all shades and styles of composition, poetry and prose; some mere outbursts of feeling; some invitations; some advice and suggestions; some requests and inquiries; some presenting books, or flowers, or fruit.

NARRATOR : The high point of the trip may have been back in London, a Lord Mayor’s luncheon at Stafford House.

HARRIET : At about eleven o’clock we drove under the arched carriage-way of a mansion externally not very showy in appearance.
When the duchess appeared, I thought she looked handsomer by daylight than in the evening. She received us with the same warm and simple kindness which she had shown before. We were presented to the Duke of Sutherland. He is a tall, slender man, with rather a thin face, light-brown hair, and a mild blue eye, with an air of gentleness and dignity.
Among the first that entered were members of the family, the Duke and Duchess of Argyll, Lord and Lady Blantyre, the Marquis and Marchioness of Stafford, and Lady Emma Campbell. Then followed Lord Shaftesbury with his beautiful lady, and her father and mother, Lord and Lady Palmerston. Lord Palmerston is of middle height, with a keen dark eye and black hair streaked with gray. There is something peculiarly alert and vivacious about all his movements; in short, his appearance perfectly answers to what we know of him from his public life.
One has a strange, mythological feeling about the existence of people of whom one hears for many years without ever seeing them. While talking with Lord Palmerston I could but remember how often I had heard Father and Mr. Stowe exulting over his foreign dispatches by our own fireside. There were present, also, Lord John Russell, Mr. Gladstone, and Lord Granville. The latter we all thought very strikingly resembled in his appearance the poet Longfellow.
After lunch the whole party ascended to the picture gallery, passing on our way the grand staircase and ahll, said to be the most magnificent in Europe. The company now began to assemble and throng the gallery, and very soon the vast room was crowded. Among the throng I remember many presentations, but of course must have forgotten many more. Archbishop Whateley was there, with Mrs. and Miss Whateley; Macaulay, with two of his sisters; Milman, the poet and historian; the Bishop of Oxford, Chevalier Bunsen and lady, and many more.
When all the company were together, Lord Shaftesbury read a very short, kind, and considerate address in behalf of the ladies of England, expressive of their cordial welcome.
This Stafford House meeting, in any view of it, is a most remarkable fact. Kind and gratifying as its arrangements have been to me, I am far from approprating to myself individually as a personal honor. I rather regard it as the most public expression possible of the feelings of the women of England on one of the most important questions of our day, that of individual liberty considered in its religious bearings.

NARRATOR : It was on this occasion that the Duchess of Sutherland presented a gold chain and shackle to Mrs. Stowe.
She was also presented with five hundred thousand signatures of the women of England, from every economic class, bound in 26 volumes, as a petition to the United States against slavery.
Cassius Clay commented:

CLAY : It will help our cause by rendering it fashionable.

NARRATOR : Another day she had lunch with Lady Byron.

HARRIET : We had a few moments of deeply interesting conversation. She is of slight figure, formed with exceeding delicacy and her whole form, face, dress and air unite to make an impression of a character singularly dignified, gentle, pure, and yet strong.

NARRATOR : Then they were off to Paris, where Hilaire Belloc, husband of Mrs. Stowe’s French translator, painted her portrait. On the way to Geneva, Charles noted:

CHARLES : The people of the neighborhood, having discovered who Harriet was—it was Scotland over again. We have had to be unflinching to prevent her being overwhelmed. It was touching to listen to the talk of these secluded mountaineers. All had read Uncle Tom, and it had apparently been an era in their life’s monotony, for they said, ‘‘Oh, madam, do write another! Remember our winter nights here are very long!’’

NARRATOR : After her return to the United States, Harriet Beecher Stowe threw herself fulltime into anti-slavery work. She had been entrusted with a lot of English momey to be used in the anti-slavery campaign—some was used in freeing slaves, and supporting them, some for anti-slavery lectures, publications, schools, public meetings—for many of which she herself wrote speeches. Her correspondence with people all over the world was voluminous. In the midst of all this, she continued to be a mother, and to write. Sunny Memories, a journal of the English trip, drawing extensively on Charles’s journal of their travels, was soon published, as well as a revision of her earlier book, The Mayflower.
Back in America, Mrs. Stowe found her brother Henry Ward, and her nephew Edward Everett Hale, absorbed in the Kansas-Nebraska problem. The South wanted to bring in Kansas as a slave state; Stephen Douglas developed his own attempt at compromise, the doctrine of squatter’s sovereignty, or the right of each new territory to decide for itself whether or not slavery would be allowed. Missouri raiders immediately began interfering in Kansas territory politics with threats and violence. Harriet followed the debate and at last issued her own appeal addressed to the women of America.

HARRIET : A question is now pending in our national legislature which is most vitally to affect the temporal and eternal interests, not only of ourselves, but of our children and our children’s children for ages yet unborn. Through our nation it is to affect the interests of liberty and Christianity throughout the world.
There is but one feeling and one opinion upon this subject among us all. I do not think there is a mother who clasps her child to her breast who would ever be made to feel it right that that child should be a slave, not a mother among us who would not rather lay that child in its grave.
All this is inherent in slavery. It is not the abuse of slavery, but its legal nature. And there is not a woman in the United States, where the question is fairly put to her, who thinks these things are right.
But though our hearts have bled over this wrong, there have been many things tending to fetter our hands, to perplex our efforts, and to silence our voice. We have been told that to speak of it was an invasion of the rights of states.
But a time has now come when the subject is arising under quite a different aspect.
The question is not now, Shall the wrongs of slavery exist as they have within their own territories, but shall we permit them to be extended all over the free territories of the United States?—a region nearly equal in extent to the whole of the free states?
Nor is this all! By a decision of the Supreme Court in the Lemmon case, it may be declared lawful for slave property to be held in the Northern States.
And now you ask, What can the women of a country do?
The women of England refused to receive into their houses the sugar raised by slaves. Women were unwearied in going from house to house distributing books and tracts upon the subject. They were associated in corresponding circles for prayer and labor. Petitions to the government were prepared and signed by women of every station in all parts of the kingdom.
When I was in England, althought I distinctly stated that the raising of money was no part of my object there, it was actually forced upon me by those who could not resist the impulse to do something for this great cause. Nor did it come from the well-to-do alone; but hundreds of most affecting letters were received from poor working men and women, who enclosed small sums in postage-stamps to be devoted to freeing the slaves.
Nor is this deep feeling confined to England alone. I found it in France, Switzerland, and Germany. There has been a universal expectation that the next step taken by America would surely be one that should have a tendency to right this great wrong. Those who are struggling for civil and religious liberty in Europe speak this word slavery in sad whispers, as one names the fault of a revered friend. They can scarce believe the advertisements in American papers of slave sales of men, women, and children, traded like cattle. The advocates of despotism hold these things up to them and say: ‘‘See what comes of republican liberty!’’

NARRATOR : Harriet spent an extra day, on returning from Italy, with Lady Byron, and as soon as she got home, wrote her.

HARRIET : Dear Friend—I left you with a strange sort of yearning throbbing feeling—you make me feel quite as I did years ago, a sort of girlishness quite odd for me. I often think how strange it is that I should know you—you who were a sort of legend of my early days—that I should love you is only a natural result.

NARRATOR : Among the intimacies that Harriet and Lady Byron shared was a common interest in spiritualism. Harriet hoped to communicate with her drowned son Henry, and daughter Eliza. Her ideas of the spirit-world, influenced by Calvin’s experiences, also affected her religious conceptions.

HARRIET : My dear Friend—I did long to hear from you at a time when few knew how to speak, because I knew that you did know everything that sorrow can teach—you whose whole life has been a crucifixion, a long ordeal.
I think very much on the subject on which you conversed with me once—the future state of retribution. It is evident to me that the spirit of Christianity has produced in the human spirit a tenderness of love which completely revolts from the old doctrine on the subject.
I have become acquainted with a friend through whom I receive consoling impressions of these things—a Mrs. E., of Boston, a very pious, accomplished, and interesting woman, who has had a history much like yours in relation to spiritual manifestations. Without doubt she is what the spiritualists would regard as a very powerful medium. I have found that when I am with her I receive very strong impressions from the spiritual world, so that I feel often sustained and comforted, as if I had been near to my Henry and other departed friends.
I cannot, however, think that Henry strikes the guitar—that must be Eliza. Her spirit has ever seemed to cling to that mode of manifestation, and if you would keep it in your sleeping room, no doubt you would hear from it oftener.
One thing I am convinced of—that spiritualism is a reaction from the intense materialism of the present age. Luther, when he recognized a personal devil, was much nearer right. We ought to enter fully, at least, into the spiritualism of the Bible. Circles and spiritual jugglery I regard as the lying signs and wonders with all deceivableness of unrighteousness, but there is a real scriptural spiritualism which has fallen into disuse, and must be revived. There are, doubtless, people who, from some constitutional formation, can more readily receive the impressions of the surrounding spiritual world. Such were apostles, prophets, and workers of miracles.

NARRATOR : George Eliot and Harriet corresponded on the same subject.

ELIOT : Apart from personal contact with people who get money by public exhibitions as mediums or with semi-idiots such as those who make a court for Mrs. X, or other feminine personages of that kind, I would not willingly place any barriers between my mind and any possible channel of truth affecting the human lot.

NARRATOR : While in Rome after the death of the Stowes’ son Henry, Harriet saw a great deal of the Brownings—Robert and Elizabeth—and found they shared an interest in the occult. Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote her:

ELIZABETH : I don’t know how people can keep up their prejudices against spiritualism with tears in their eyes—how they are not, at least, thrown on the ‘‘wish that it might be true,’’ and the investigation of the phenomena, by that abrupt shutting in their faces of the door of death which shuts them out from the sight of their beloved. My tendency is to beat up against it like a crying child. Not that this emotional impulse is the best for turning the key and obtaining safe conclusions—no. I did not write before because I always do shrink from touching my own griefs, one feels at first so sore that nothing but stillness can be borne.
I should congratulate you, my dear friend, on the great crisis you are passing through in America. If the North is found noble enough to stand fast on the moral question, whatever the loss or diminution of territory, God and just men and women will see you greater and more glorious as a nation.
I had much anxiety for you after the Seward and Adams speeches, but the danger seems averted. How you must feel, you who have done so much to set this accursed slavery in the glare of the world, convicting it of hideousness! They should raise a statue to you in America and elsewhere.

NARRATOR : Harriet’s second novel on slavery, Dred, exposed the demoralizing effect that slavery had on the masters, and on white people generally. The English edition sold 100,000 copies in the first month—some, including the Queen, liked it better than Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
So it was that in 1856, the Stowes were in England again, invited by Harriet Martineau and others. This time, they would have an unexpected encounter. Calvin Stowe describes the scene.

CALVIN : Yesterday we had just the very pleasantest little interview with the Queen that ever was. None of the formal, drawing-room, breathless receptions, but just an accidental, done-on-purpose meeting at a railway station while on our way to Scotland. The Queen seemed really delighted to see my wife and remarkably glad to see me for her sake. She pointed us out to Prince Albert who made two most gracious bows to my wife and two to me while the four royal children stared their big blue eyes almost out looking at the little author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.