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Harriet Beecher Stowe

HARRIET BEECHER was born at Litchfield, Connecticut, in 1811. She died at Hartford, Conn, on July 1, 1896. She came of a family which achieved large reputation. Her father was Lyman Beecher, a militant clergyman, and her best-known brother, Henry Ward Beecher, was one of the preacher-orators of his time. In 1836 she married another clergyman, Calvin Stowe. Her inheritance and her sympathies were all toward the cause of anti-slavery. Her life in Cincinnati, on the borderland of free and slave territory, gave her an insight into the peculiar institution such as few Northerners possessed. The wife of a poor minister, occupied with the care of a large family, with little literary training, she seemed the last person to electrify the world and achieve a lasting historical importance. Yet probably none of the great names associated with the cause of anti-slavery did more to force the issue than the minister's wife. In 1852 there issued from Brunswick, Maine, where her husband had become a professor at Bowdoin College, the famous "Uncle Tom's Cabin"; within five years over half a million copies had been sold. How many million people have since read the book or seen the vast variety of plays based on it, no man can tell.

Mrs. Stowe wrote, later, "Dred," "The Minister's Wooing," "The Pearl of Orr's Island," "Old Town Folks," and other books, but "Uncle Tom's Cabin" was her great work. It was written with knowledge of the subject and with a noble purpose; the sincerity of the author and a spark of native genius created an effect that few other books have ever attained; the scene is true to life; the characters have remained alive long years after the circumstances which gave them birth have passed away. "Uncle Tom's Cabin" is part of the world's history of the struggle toward freedom.