5 March: Boreham on H Beecher Stowe

A Housewife’s Triumph
Just a century ago a busy little mother published a book that, scribbled in odd moments snatched from her many children and her many chores, was soon selling by the million. Before very long, too, "Uncle Tom's Cabin" had been translated into forty languages, had precipitated a civil war and had shattered the shackles of the slaves.

The most vivid description of Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe is her own. "I am a little bit of a woman, somewhat more than forty," she says, "just as thin and dry as a pinch of snuff; never very much to look at in my best days and very much used-up by now." She had spent her life in an atmosphere in which the theology was inexorable, the drudgery illimitable, the finances infinitesimal, and the children innumerable.

She produced her masterpiece soon after the birth of her seventh child. She used to say that she was always glad when the time for her accouchement come, because it gave her an excuse for going to bed for a week or two and enjoying a delicious rest. As the children entered the home in quick succession, the financial problem became desperate. Was there any way of augmenting her husband's slender income? Her fingers had always itched to write.

Defying the multiplicity of her domestic duties, she resolved to make the attempt. She produced a thin little volume of stories that did little or nothing to relieve the strained economy of the home and that gave little or no promise of better things to come. But a crisis followed, and, with the crisis, came a challenge that awoke a sensitive soul to grandeur and greatness.

Stirred By The Sight Of Slavery
Born in 1811, Harriet Beecher Stowe was a minister's daughter; she herself married a minister, and she had six brothers in the ministry. She proclaimed these facts for all they were worth whenever she heard it affirmed, as it often was, that the churches looked with approbation, or at least with tolerance, upon slavery. "I ought to know," she would retort, "and, indeed, I do know; you may take it from me that the churches hate slavery like poison!" There were exceptions, of course, but, generally speaking, her contention was sound.

Her mother died when Hatty was only a few weeks old. Whilst she was still a toddler, her father married again. The lady impressed everybody by her sense, beauty, and charm. Hatty fell in love with her as soon as they were introduced; but some mysterious instinct in her baby breast revolted against the relationship between her father and this attractive intruder. "All right!" she exclaimed, while this strange mood was upon her, "you married my daddy; when I grow up I'll marry yours!"

In 1832, the year in which Hatty came of age, her father was made president of Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati, and, four years later, she married one of the professors on his staff. Cincinnati is separated only by a narrow waterway from Kentucky. Whenever she crossed that barrier, Hatty had the opportunity of witnessing the horrors of slavery. She said little at the time, but she was stung to the quick by the indignities to which the coloured girls were exposed, by the way in which members of families were torn from each other by the auctioneer's hammer, and by the callous cruelty of the marketeers. She even helped some of the slaves to escape.

The idea that the whole iniquitous traffic might be abolished, root and branch, and that she herself might become a potent instrument in its destruction, never entered Hatty's head until a sister-in-law wrote a letter that changed the course of history.

A Spark Kindles A Huge Conflagration
If, this lady said, if she possessed Hatty's literary gift, she would write a book that would stir the whole nation to a recognition of the evils of slavery. Mrs. Stowe rose from her chair, clasping the letter in her hand. Pacing the floor for a moment, she suddenly turned to those about her, to whom she had read the letter aloud. "I will!" she exclaimed, "I will."

And, as all the world knows, she did. The book was written on all sorts of scraps of paper in odd moments that could be snatched from making beds, cooking meals, mending socks, and washing babies. Between the beginning of a sentence and its close she was sometimes interrupted three or four times by pressing household duties. But she contrived to finish the herculean task at last and nobody was more amazed than she at its phenomenal success.

For that success was both immediate and overwhelming. On the day of its publication, 3,000 copies were sold; within a year 300,000 had been demanded, and the numbers soon ran into millions.

"Uncle Tom" was dramatised and played in first-class theatres all over the world. For the first time in her life, Mrs. Stow was lifted above pecuniary anxiety although the wealth that surprised her was but a fraction of what it would have been had her rights been properly secured. The most eminent literary figures in both hemispheres smothered her with congratulations. Abraham Lincoln referred to her as "the little lady who made the big war." Whittier addressed an ode:

To her, who, in our evil time,
Dragged into light the nation's crime
With
strength beyond the strength of men,
And, mightier than their swords, her
pen.
To her who worldwide entrance gave
To the log-cabin of the slave.

In England she was welcomed by Queen Victoria and was feted everywhere. She blinked like an owl in the glare. Following her husband's death in 1886, she spent the last ten years of her long life in pensive retirement at Hartford, the home of her girlhood, delighting above everything else in winning the affection of people who had never so much as heard of Uncle Tom.

F W Boreham

Image: Harriet Beecher Stowe