Harriet Beecher Stowe

American · 1811 to 1896

Born Harriet Elisabeth Beecher on June 14, 1811, in Litchfield, Connecticut, the sixth of eleven children of the Calvinist preacher Lyman Beecher and his deeply religious first wife Roxana Foote, she was five when her mother died, an absence she said marked every later sentence she wrote. Her sister Catharine ran the Hartford Female Seminary, where Harriet received an unusually classical education for a girl of her century. In 1832 the family moved to Cincinnati so her father could preside over Lane Theological Seminary, and she crossed the Ohio River into the slave state of Kentucky, met escaped enslaved people, attended the Lane Debates on slavery, and married Calvin Stowe, a biblical scholar at the seminary, in 1836. They had seven children. Three died young; the oldest, Henry, drowned in the Connecticut River at eighteen. When the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 made every northerner a potential agent of recapture, Stowe was in Brunswick, Maine, where Calvin taught at Bowdoin. The novel she said came to her in a single vision during a communion service at the college chapel was serialised by the abolitionist paper the National Era beginning in 1851. Uncle Tom's Cabin appeared in two volumes in 1852, sold 300,000 copies in its first year in America and a million in Britain, and was translated into sixty languages. Lincoln, meeting her in 1862, is said to have remarked: so this is the little woman who made this great war. She wrote twenty-nine more books, settled in Mandarin, Florida, after the Civil War, and died in Hartford, Connecticut, on July 1, 1896, seventeen days after her eighty-fifth birthday.