Harriet Beecher Stowe: the story of her life

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RRIET-BEECHER'STOWE

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HARRIET BEECHER STOWE
THE STORY OF HER LIFE

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HARRIET BEECHER STtmK

THE STOBY OF HKB UTB

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CBAItI,ES EDWABI) gTvmU

HARRIET BEECHER STOWE
THE STORY OF HER LIFE

BT HER BON

CHARLES EDWARD STOWE

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AND BEB GBAND30N

LYMAN BEECHER STOWE

WITH POBTHA1T8 AND
OTBBB ILLDBTRATIONS

BOSTON AND NEW YORK

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

mc KUbrMiSE pceo CamErrtbst

1911

^

PREFACE

This life of Harriet Beecher Stove is not a
biography in the ordinary sense. It is rather the
story of a real character ; telling, not bo much
what she did as what she was, and how she be-
came what she was.

Each of the ten chapters is meant to be com-
plete in itself, and to tell how the child grew, how
she became a teacher and writer, a wife and mother ;
and, as the author of " Uncle Tom's Cabin," rose
from obscurity to fame. Then, we see her in the
storm and stress of a war that she had done much
to bring on ; in her Southern home; as a delineator
of New England life and character, and, finally,
as she waits the muffled oar beside the silent sea
and gently drifts away with the ebbing tide. She
herself is ever at the centre, and everything else is
subordinated to her and viewed through her con-
sciousness, and we look at the facts of her life as
they were mirrored there. What her critics in the
past thought of her, or what they think of her in
the present, or may think of her in the future, is
not a matter that concerns us.

New Tobx, Uaroh 3,

PREFACE

All that ioterests ua is to know and to tell how
the experiences of her life appeared to her, and
how she appeared to herself. We are not so hold

! as to assume that our attempt has been entirely

successful, hut we are confident that the aim
was well worth the effort.

We wish to express our obligation to Harper &
Brothers for generously permitting us to utilize
material contained in the "Autobiography and
Correspondence of Lyman Beecher," and to Mrs.
James T. Fields for her permission to use mate-
rial to be found only in her invaluable " Life and
Letters of Harriet Beecher Stowe."

I Charles Edward Stowe.

L Lyman Beecqee Stowe.

CONTENTS

L How THB Child Grxw 1

IL Ov THB Thbeshold 88

HL Tbaohkb AiTD Wbioee 88

lY. Wm AiTD Mothxs 85

V. How <«UvcLB Tom's Cabin " was Built • • 124

YI. Fbom Obsousftt to Famb 158

Til. THROuaH Smoke of Battle 188

YUL Im TK THE South 217

IX. Deldisatoe of New England Life and Chab-

AOTBB 2i2

X. The Ebbino Tide 274

Index: 303

ILLUSTRATIONS

Harriet Bebcher Stowe. Photogravure • • • FranHtpiece
From a photograph taken In 18G2.

Mrs. Stowe'b Birthplace, Litchfield, Conk. ... 6

From a drawing by CharleB Copeland.

Calvin Ellis Stowe 118

After a photograph taken In 1882.

Mrs. Stowe's Home, Brxtnbwick, Maine, where ** Uncle
Tom's Cabin" was written 130

Facsimile of Manuscript page of ** Uncle Tom's
Cabin" 160

Mrs. Stowe, Henrt Ward Beecher, and their father,
Dr. Ltman Beecher 188

The Stowe Home at Andoyer 206

From a painting in 1860, 1^ F. RondeL

Harriet Beecher Stowe 216

From a photograph taken in 1862.

HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

^THE STORY OF HER LIFE

CHAPTER I

HOW THB CHILD GREW

Most of us have some recollections of early
childhood which stand out in our minds as vividly
as the most important events of later life. Harriet
Beecher's earliest recollections were of her mother,
■who died September 25, 1816, when Harriet waa
five years old. She says of her mother, in describ-
ing the first of tliese incidents, " Mother was an en-
thusiastic horticulturist in all small ways that her
limited means allowed. Herbrother John, in New
Tork, had just sent her a small parcel of fine tulip-
bulbs. I remember rummagiug these out of an ob-
scure corner of the nursery one day when she was
gone out, and being strongly seized with the idea
that they were good to eat, and using all the httle
English I then possessed to persuade my brothers
that these were onions such as grown people ate,
and would be very nice for us. So we fell to and
devoured the whole, and I recollect being some-

2 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

what disappointed at the odd sweetish taste, and
thinking that onions were not as nice as I had
supposed.

" Then mother's serene face appeared at the
nursery door, and we all ran towards her and
began to tell our discovery and achievement, — we
had found this bag of onions and had eaten them
all up I

" Also I remember that there was not even a
momentary expression of impatience, but that
she sat down and said, ' My dear children, what
you have done makes mamma very sorry ; those
were not onions, but roots of beautiful flowers;
and if you had let them alone, mamma would have
had in the garden next summer great beautiful
red and yellow flowers such as you never saw.' I
remember how drooping and dispirited we all grew
at this picture, and how sadly we regarded the
empty paper bag,"

This was one o£ the two incidents which, as she
says, " twinkle like rays through the darkness."
The other was " of our all running and dancing
out before her from the nursery to the sitting-
room one Sabbath morning, and her pleasant
voice saying after us, ' Remember the Sabbath day
to keep it holy.' "

HOW THE CHILD GREW 3

She goes on to saj, " Then I have a recollection
of her reading to the children, one evening, Misa
Edgeworth's * Frank,' which had just come out,
I beheve, and was exciting a great deal of interest
in the educational circles of Litchfield. After that
I remember a time when every one said she was
sick. ... I used to be permitted once a day to
go into her room, where she lay bolstered up in
bed. I have a vision of a very fair face with a
bright red spot on each cheek, and a quiet smile as
she offered me a spoonful of her gruel ; of our
dreamiug one night, we little ones, that mamma
had got well, and waking in loud transports of
joj, and being hushed down by some one coining
into the room. Our dream was indeed a true one.
She was forever well ; but they told us she was
dead, and took us in to see something that seemed
so cold and so unlike anything we had ever seen
or known of her."

Then came the funeral, which in those stem
days had none of the soothing accessories of
GUI gentler times. We are told of Harriet's little
baby brother, Henry Ward, that after the funeral
he was seen by his sister Catherine digging with
great energy under her window, the bright sunlight
shining through the long curls that hung down on

4 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

either side of his little flushed face. When she
ashed what he was doing, be replied, " I 'm doing
down to find mamma I "

"Although mother's bodily presence disappeared
from onr circle," sajs Mrs. Stowe, " I think that
her memory and example had more influence in
moulding her family, in deterring from evil and
exciting to good, than the living presence of many
mothers. It was a memory that met us everywhere,
for every person in the town seemed to have been
so impressed by her character and life that they
constantly reflected some portion of it back upon
us. The passage in ' Uncle Tom ' where Augus-
tine St. Clair describes his mother's influence is a
simple reproduction o£ this mother's influence as
it has always been in her family." Such a woman
was Eoxana Foote, Doctor Lyman Beecher's first
wife and the mother of eight of Doctor Beecher's
eleven children.

The scenery of Litchfield, Connecticut, where
Harriet Beecher was bom June 14, 1811, had a
deep and lasting effect upon the moulding of her
character. Her lifelong love of nature was early
cultivated by the rare beauty of Litchfield's hills
and woods and streams. Of these she says : —

"My earliest reooUeotioQS of Litchfield are those

p

HOW THE CHILD GREW 5

of its beautiful scenery, which impressed and
formed my miud long before I bad words to give
names to my emotions, or could analyze my men-
tal processes. To the west of us rose a smooth-
bosomed hill, called Prospect Hill ; and many a
pensive, wondering hour have I sat at our play-
room window, watching the glory of the wonder-
ful sunsets that used to burn themselves out amid
voiuminous wreathings or castellated turrets of
clonds proper to a mountainous region.

" On the east of us lay another upland, called
Chestnut Hills, whose sides were wooded with a
rich growth of forest trees, whose change of tint
and verdure, from the first misty tints of spring
green through the deepeoing hues of summer
into the rainbow glories of autumn, was a subject
o£ constant remark and of pensive contemplation
to us children. We heard them spoken of by older
people and pointed out to visitors, and came to
take pride in them as a sort of birthright."

The bouse where Harriet was born was origi-
nally a square building with a hipped roof, to which
before her birth her father bad built an addition
known as " the new part." In the " Autobiography
and Correspondence of Lyman Beecher," it is de-
scribed in part as follows : —

J

6 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

" The ground floor of the new part was occu-
pied by a large parlor, in which memory recalls
ministers' meetings with clouds of tobacco smoke,
and musical soirees, with piano, flute, and song.
Over this were sleeping-rooms, and in the attic
was the study, the windows of which looked out
into an apple orchard."

Mrs. Stowe wrote of this home and her father:
" Father was very fond of music, and very suscepti-
ble to its influence ; and one of the great eras of
the family in my childish recollection is the tri-
umphant bringing home from New Haven a fine-
toned upright piano, which a fortunate accident
had brought within the range of a poor country
minister's means. The ark of the covenant was
not brought into the tabernacle with more glad-
ness than this magical instrument into our abode.
Father soon learned to accompany the piano on
his viohn in various psalm tunes and Scotch airs,
and brothers Edward and William to perform
their part on their flutes. So we had often domes-
tic concerts which, if they did not attain to the
height of artistic perfection, filled the house with
gladness.

" One of the most decided impressions of the
family, as it was in my childish days, was of a

n

HOW THE CHILD GREW 7

great household inspired by a spirit of cheerful-
ness and hilarity, and of my father, though
pressed and driven with business, always lending
an attentive ear to anything in the way of life
and social fellowship. My oldest sister, whose Hfe
seemed to be a constant stream of mirthfulness,
was his favorite and companion, and he was al-
ways more than indulgent towards her pranks
ajid jokes." This eldest sister says of her father,
"I remember him more as a playmate than in any
other character during my childhood." In spite of
the fact that he was ever bubbling over with f un
he was respected and obeyed by his children in
the minutest particulars. His oldest daughter,
Catherine, says of her father, *' As to family gov-
ernment, it has been said that children love best
those that govern them best. This was verified in
our experience. Our mother was tender, gentle,
and sympathizing; but all the discipline of gov-
ernment was with father. With most of his chil-
dren, when quite young, he had one, two, or three
seasons in which he taught them that obedience
must be exact, prompt, and cheerful, and by a dis-
cipline so severe that it was thorougldy remem-
bered and feared. Ever after, a decided word of
command was all-suf&cient. The obedience was to

8 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

be speedy and without fretting or frowns. ' Mind
your mother ! Quicli ! No crying ! Look pleasant ! '
These were words of command obeyed with almost
mihtary speed and precision."

Never was a father more idolized by his chil-
dren than was Lyman Beecher. Mrs. Stowe men-
tions especially his power for exciting family
enthusiasm. " Whenever he had a point to be car-
ried, or work to be done, he would work the whole
family up to a pitch of fervent zeal in which the
strength of each aeemed quadrupled. For instance,
the wood for the family usedto be brought in winter
on ox-sledfi, and piled up in the yard exactly over the
spot where father wished to plant his cucumbers
and melons. Of course as all thia wood was to be
cut and split and carried into the wood-house be-
fore the garden could be started, it required a mira-
cle of generalship to get it done, considering the
immense quantity of wood required to keep an old
windy castle of a house comfortable in winter
weather. The axes would ring and the chips fly;
but jokes and stones would fly faster tUl all was
cut and split. Then came the great work of wheel-
ing in and piling."

Harriet would work like one possessed, sucked
into the vortex of enthusiasm by her father's re-

HOW THE CHUJ) GREW

9

I

I

marking, " I wish Harriet were a boy ! She would
do more than any of them!" Then would she
throw aside her booh or her needle and thread
and, donning a little black coat which she thought
made her look more Uke a boy, she would try to
outdo all the rest till the wood was all in and the
chips swept up. Frequently Doctor Beecher would
raise a point of theology and start a discussion,
taking the wrong or weaker side himself, to prac-
tice the youngsters in logic. If the children did
not make good their side of the case, he would
stop and explain to them the position and say,
"The argument ia thus and so! Now if you take
thifl position you will be able to trip me up ! " Thus
he taught them to reason as if he had taught them
to box or wrestle by actual face-to-face contest.

The task done, the Doctor always planned to
have a great fishing expedition with the children.
When Harriet was too little to go, she looked on
these fishing expeditions as something pertaining
only to her father and the older boys, and watched
the busy preparations with regretful interest. They
were all going to Great Fond and to Fine Island,
to that wonderful blue pine forest that she could
just see on the horizon, and who could tell what
strange adventures they might meet!

J

10 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

When they were gone the house seemed so still
and deserted all day long, — no singing, shouting,
tramping, and wrestling of noisy, merry boys. Har-
riet would sit silent and lonely, sewing a long seam
on a sheet by way of beguiling the time. At last
it would begin to be dark, and the stars peeping
out one by one would look down as if surprised to
find a little girl who had gone to bed but not to
sleep. With what joy she finally hailed in the
distance the tramp of feet, the shouts and laughter
of her father and brothers as, glad with triumph,
they burst into the kitchen with long strings of
perch, roach, pickerel, and bull-heads, with waving
blades of sweet-flag and lofty heads of catrtail,
and pockets full of fragrant wintergreen, a gen-
erous portion of which was always bestowed upon
her! To her eyes these were trophies from the
dreamland of enchantment for which she had
longed. She was then safe for an hour or more
from being sent back to bed, and watched with de-
light the cheerful hurrying and scurrying to and
fro, the waving of lights as the fish were cleaned
in the back shed and the fire was kindled into a
cheerful blaze, while her father stood over the
frying-pan frying the fish. To hla latest day
Doctor Beecher was firm in the conviction that no

HOW THE CHILD GREW

11

fenuDine hand could fry fish with that perfection
of skill which was his as a king of woodcraft
and woodland cookery.

One of Harriet's favorite haunts was her father's
study. It was an arched garret room, high above
all the noise aud confusion of the busy household,
with a big window that commanded a ^lew of
Great Pond with its fringe of steel-blue pines. Its
walls were set round from floor to ceiling with the
qniet friendly faces of books, and there stood her
father's study-chair and his writing-table, on which
always lay open before him his Cruden's Concor-
dance and the Bible. Here Harriet loved to re-
treat and eurl herself up in a quiet corner with
her favorite books around her. Here she had
a restful, sheltered feeling as she thus sat and
watched her father at his sermon-writing, turning
his books and speaking to himself from time to
time in a loud and earnest whisper. She vaguely
felt that he was about some holy and mysterious
work, far above her childish comprehension.

The books ranged around filled her too with
solemn awe. There on the lower shelves were
enormous folios, on whose hacks she spelled in
black letters " Lightfooti Opera," a title whereat
she marveled, considering the hulk of the volumes.

1

12 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

And overhead, grouped along m sociable rows,
were books of all sizes and bindings, the titles of
'which she had read so often that she knew them
by heart. There were Bell's " Sermons," Bon-
nett's " Inquiries," Bogue's " Essays," " Toplady
on Predestination," " Boston's Fourfold State,"
Law's " Serious Call," and other works of the
kind that she had looked over wistfully day after
day, without finding even a bope of something'
interesting.

It was a happy hour for Harriet when her fa-
ther brought home and set up in his bookcase
Cotton Mather's "Magnalia." What wonderful
stories these, and stories too about her own coun-
try, — stories that made her feel that the very
ground under her feet was consecrated by some
special dealings of God's wonder-working provi-
dence! When the good Doctor related how a
plague had wasted the Indian tribes, and so pre-
pared a place for the Pilgrim Fathers to settle un-
disturbed, she felt in no wise doubtful of his ap-
plication of the text, " He drave out the heathen
and planted them." No Jewish maiden ever grew
up with a more earnest faith that she belonged
to a consecrated race, a people specially called
and chosen of God for some great work on earth.

HOW THE CHILD GREW

Her faith in every word of the marvels related in
this book was fully as great as the dear old credu-
lous Doctor Mather could have desired. It filled
her soul with a great eagerness to go forth and do
some great and valiant deed for her God and her
country. She wanted then, as always, to translate
her feelings into deeds.

But aside from her father's study Harriet found
poetry and romance in the various garrets and
cellars of the old parsonage. There was, first, the
garret over the kitchen, the floors of which in
the fall were covered with stores of yellow pump-
kins, fragrant heaps of quinces, and less fragrant
piles of onions. There were bins of shelled com
and of oats, and, as in every other garret in the
house, there were also barrels of old sermons and

But most stimulating to the imagination of a
Puritan child, steeped in that wonderful allegory.
Banyan's "Pilgrim's Progress," was the smoke-
house, which was a wide, deep chasm made in the
kitchen chimney, in which the dried beef and the
hama were prepared. The door which opened into
this dismal recess glistened with condensed creo-
sote, and Harriet trembled as she listened to an
awful rumbling within, followed by crackling re-

14

HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

verberatioDs. One daj alie summoned courage to
open the door and peep in, and was reminded of a
passage in tlie " Pilgrim's Progress," which reads,
" Then I saw in my dream that the shepherds had
them to another place, in a bottom, where was a
door in the side of a hill ; and they opened the
door and bid tbem look in.

"Tbej looked in, therefore, and saw that within
it was dark and smoky ; they also thought that
they heard a rumbling noise as of fire and a cry
of some tormented, and they smelt the smell of
brimstone."

Harriet closed the door and ran away trembling.

She delighted in upsetting the barrels of old
sermons and pamphlets on the floor, pawing
about in the contents, and reading with astonished
eyes the queer titles. It seemed to her that there
were thousands of unintelligible things. " An Ap-
peal on the Unlawfulness of a Man's Marrying
his Wife's Sister," turned up in every barrel she
investigated. But — oh joy and triumph ! one rainy
day she found at the bottom of a barrel a copy of
the " Arabian Nights " ! Thenceforth her fortune
was made. She had no idea of reading as is the
fashion in these days — to read and dismiss a book.
To read with her was a passion, and a book once

HOW THE CHILD GREW

15

read was read daily ; becoming ever dearer as an
old friend. The '' Arabian Nights " transported
her to fai^oS lands, and gave her a new world of
her own. Thereafter, whea things went wrong, when
the boys went away to play higher than she dared
climb in the ham, or started for fishing excursions,
on which they considered her an encumbrance, she
would find a snug corner, where, curled up in a quiet
lair, she could at will sail forth into fairy-land on
her bit of enchanted carpet.

It was also a great day when she discovered an
old torn copy of the " Tempest." This experieuce
she has wrought into that romance of the Maine
coast, " The Pearl of Orr's Island," where she pic-
tures Mara exploring the garret and finding in an
old barrel of cast-off rubbish a bit of reading which
she begged of her grandmother for her own. "It
was the play of the ' Tempest,' torn from an old
edition of Shakespeare, and was in that delight-
fully fragmentary condition that most particularly
pleases children, because they conceive a mutilated
treasure thus found to be more particularly their
own property."

There was one class of tenants, whose presence
and influence on Harriet's youthful mind must
not be passed over. They were the rats. They

16

HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

had taken formal possession of the old parsonage,
grown, multiplied, and become ancient in spite of
traps, cats, or anything that could be devised
against them. The family cat in Harriet's day,
having taken a dispassionate survey of the situa-
tion, had given up the matter in despair and set
herself philosophically to attending to other con-
cerns. She selected a corner of the Doctor's study
as her special domestic retreat. Here she made
her lair on a heap of old pamphlets and sermons,
whence, from time to time, she led forth litters
of well-educated, orthodox kittens, who, like their
mother, gazed on the rats with respectful curios-
ity, hut ran no imprudent risks. Consequently the
rats had, as it were, *'the freedom of the city" in
the old parsonage.

They romped all night on the floor of the gai^
ret over Harriet's sleeping-room, apparently busy
hopping ears of com across the floor and rolhng
them down into their nests between the beams.
Sometimes she would liear them gnawing and saw-
ing behind the wainscoting at the head of her bed
as if they had set up a carpenter's shop there, and
would be filled with terror lest they should come
through into her bed. Then there were battles
and skirmishes and squealings and fightings, and

HOW THE CHILD GREW

at times it would seem as if a whole detachment
of rats rolled in an avalanche down the walls with
the cobs of corn thej had heen stealing. When
the mighty winds of the Litchfield winters were
let loose and rumbled and thundered, roaring and
tumbling down the chimneys, rattling the windows
and doors; when the beams and rafters creaked
and groaned like the timbers of a ship at sea, and
the old house shook to its very foundations, then
would the uproar among the rats grow louder and
louder, and Harriet would dive under the bed-
clothes quaking with fear. Thus did the old par-
sonage exert its subtle influence, every day fash-
ioning the sensitive, imaginative child.

Among Hairiet'E earliest recollections were those
of a visit to Nutplains in Guilford, Connecticut,
immediately after her mother's death. Her aunt
Harriet Foote, for whom she was named, and who
was with her mother during her sickness, brought
her home to stay with ber for a time. It was in
Nutplains and Guilford that, little child that she
was, she was deeply impressed by finding herself
treated with a tenderness almost amounting to ven-
eration by those who had known her mother.

Mrs. Stowe writes of this visit : " At Nutplains
our mother lost to us seemed to live again. We

18 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

saw lier paintings, her needlework, and beard a
tbousand little doings and sayings of her daily life.
And so dear was everything that belonged to grand-
mother and our Nutplains home, that the Episco-
pal service, even though not well read, was always
chosen during our visits therein preference to our
own. It seemed a part of Nutplains and the life
there.

" There was also an interesting and well-selected
library, and a portfolio of fine engravings; and,
though the place was lonely, yet the cheerful hos-
pitality that reigned there left it scarcely ever with-
out agreeable visitors.

" I can nowrememberatthe close of what seemed
to me a long day's ride, arriving after dark at a
lonely little white farmhouse, and being brought into
a large parlor where a cheerful wood-fire was crack-
ling, partly burned down into great heavy coals.
I was placed in the anna of an old lady, who held
me close and wept silently, a thing at which I mai>
veled, for my great loss was already faded from
my childish mind. But I could feel that this dear
old grandmother received me with a heart full of
love and sorrow. I recall still her bright white
hair, the benign and tender expression of her ven-
erable face, and the great gold ring she wore,

HOW THE CHILD GREW

19

which seemed so curious to my childish eyes. There
was a little tea-table set out before the fire, and
Uncle George came in from hia farm-work, and
sat down with grandma, and Aunt Harriet to
tea.

" After supperl remember grandmother reading
prayers, as was her custom, from a great prayer-
book, which was her constant companion."

There were no amusements then specially pro-
vided for children. There were no children's books,
and no Sunday-schools. It was a grown people's
worid, not a child's. Even the children's toys were
80 few and poor that, in comparison with our mod-
ern profusion, they could scarcely be said to exist.
Harriet had toys, however, and her own play-
things, as every child of lively fancy will. Child-
hood is poetic and creative, and can make to itself
toys out of anything. She had the range of the
great wood-pile in the back yard. She slopped, and
climbed, and sang among its intricacies and found
there treasures of wonder, — green velvet mosses,
little white trees of lichen, long graybearded mosses
and fine scarlet cups, and fairy caps which she
collected and cherished. With these she arranged
landscapes in which green mosses made the fields,
and little sprigs of spruce and ground-pine the

A

20

HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

trees, and bits of broken glass represented rivers
and lakes, reflecting the oversliadowing banks.

She had, too, hoards of chestnuts and walnuts
that a squirrel might have envied, picked up with
her own hands from under the autumn leaves ; and
— chief treasure of all — a wooden doll, with star-
ing glass eyes, which was the central point of all
her arrangements. To her she showed the chest-
nuts and walnuts, gave her the jay's feathers and
the blue-bird's wing, — a trophy secured from the
boys. She made her a bed of divers colors, and a
set of tea-cups out of the backbone of a codfish ;
she brushed and curled ber hair till she took all
the curl out of it, and washed all the jmint off her
cheeks in motherly ablutions. This doll came to a
tragic end. Harriet was awakened one morning by
her little brother Charles calling out in the most
cheerful voice imaginable, " O Hattie, wake up I
Henry and I have pulled your doll all to pieces I "
To her dying day she carried the remembrance of
the pang that went to her heart at these words.

There was probably no one who more profoundly
influenced Mrs. Stowe's intellectual development
than did her seafaring uncle, Captain Samuel Foote.
Of him ber sister Catherine says, " After we re-
moved to Litchfield, Uncle Samuel came among

I

I

HOW THE CHILD GREW

us, on his return from each voyage, as a sort of
brilliant genius of another sphere, bringing gifts
and wonders that seemed to wake up new faculties
in all. Sometimes he came from the shores of
Spain, with mementoes of the Alhambra and the
aocient Moors ; sometimes from Africa, bringing
Oriental caps or Moorish slippers; sometimes from
South America, with ingots of silver or strange im-
plements from the tombs of the Incas, or hammocks
wrought by South American tribes of Indians.

" He was a man of great practical common
sense, united with large ideality, a cultivated taste
and very extensive reading. With this was com-
bined a humorous combat! veness, that led him to
attack the special theories and prejudices of his
friends, sometimes jocosely and sometimes in
earnest.

" Of course he and father were in continual
good-natured skirmishes, in which all the New
England peculiarities of theology and of character
were held up, both in caricature and in sober
verity.

"I remember long discussions in which he
maintained that Turks were more honest than
Christians, bringing very startling facts in evi-
dence. Then I heard his serious tales of Roman

22 HARRIET BBECHER STOWE

Catholic bishops and archbishops whom be had
carried to and from Spain and America, and he
affirmed them to be as learned and as truly pious
and devoted to tiie good of men as any Protestant
to be found in America.

"The new fields of vision presented by my
uncle, the skill and adroitness of his arguments,
the array of his facts, combined to tai my father's
powers to the utmost.

"Whenever Uncle Sam came to Litchfield he
brought a stock of new books which he and Aunt
Mary read aloud. This was the time when Scott,
Byron, Moore, and that great galaxy of contem-
porary writers were issuing their works at inter-
vals of only a few months, all of which were read
and re-read in the family circle."

When Harriet was between six and seven years
old, her father married Miss Harriet Porter, of
Portland, Maine. She has herself thus described
the advent of the new mother: "I was about six
years old and slept in the nursery with my two
younger brothers. We knew father was gone away
Bomewbere on a journey, and was expected home,
and thus the sound of a bustle or disturbance in
the bouse more easily awoke us. We heard father's
voice in the entry, and started up, crying out as

I

HOW THE CHILD GREW 23

he entered our room, * Why, here 's pa ! ' A cheer-
ful voice called out from behind him, ' And here's
ma ! '

" A beautiful lady, very fair, with bright blue
eyes, and soft auburn hair bound round vrith a
black velvet bandeau, came into the room, smiling,
eager, and happy-looking, and, coming up to our
beds, kissed us, and told us that she loved little
children and would be our mother. We wanted
forthwith to get up and be dressed ; but she paci-
fied us with the promise that we should find her
in the morning.

"Never did mother-in-law make prettier or
sweeter impression. The next morning I remember
we looked at her with awe. She seemed to us so
fair, so elegant, so delicate that we were afraid to
go near her. We must have been rough, red-
cheeked, hearty country children, honest, obedient,
and bashful. She was pecuUarly dainty and neat
in all her ways and arrangements ; I remember I
used to feel breezy, rough, and rude in her pres-
ence. We felt a little in awe oE ber, as if she
were a strange princess, rather than our owu
mamma ; but her voice was very sweet, her ways
of moving and speaking very gracef ul.and she took
us up in her lap and let ns play with her beautiful

J

24 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

hands, which seemed like wonderful things made
of pearl and ornamented with rings."

Once in a fit of delirious boldneas Harriet marched
op to her, and putting her little hands behiod her
back, and thrusting her head somewhat forward,
said defiantly, " You have come and married my
pa ! and when I grow up I will go and marry your
pal"

One Sunday evening, shortly after the arrival of
the new mother, Doctor Beecher, who was at that
time given to an undiscriminating admiration for
the works of the great Jonathan Edwards, was read-
ing to her from a volume of sermons by that great
divine. It happened to be the sermon with the pun-
gent title, " Sinners in theHandsof an Angry God."
Harriet was curled up on the sofa, apparently ab-
sorbed in a book of her own. Drawn to observe
closely her new mother, she saw that she seemed to
be listening with abhorrence and suppressed emo-
tion. A bright red spot suffused each cheek, every
moment growing brighter and redder. Finally rift-
ing to her stately height, she swept out of the room,
saying as she went, " Mr. Beecher, I will not listen
to another word ! Why, it is horrible ! It is a slan-
der on the character of my Heavenly Father I "
Harriet was impressed with the stupefaction pic-

HOW THE CHILD GREW

25

tured on her father's face. If a bucket of ice-water
had been thrown over him, the effect could not have
been more etarthng. He probably never again read
Edwards's lurid pages with the same ease of mind
as formerly. Doubtless this incident placed his
foot on the first rung of a ladder which the ultra-
orthodoz of the period thought led anywhere but
to heaven. Harriet Porter, though orthodox was
human, and she belonged to a different age from
Edwards.

Harriet attended a school for young women kept
by a Miss Sarah Pierce, who is described as a woman
of " more than ordinary talent, sprightly in conver-
sation, social, and full of benevolent activity." la
process of time the school was enlarged and her
nephew, Mr. John Brace, became her assistant. Of
him Mrs. Stowe writes : " Mr. Brace was one of
the most stimulating and inspiring instructors that
I ever knew. He was himself widely informed, an
enthusiast in botany, mineralogy, and the natural
sciences generally. The constant conversation that
he kept up on these subjects tended more to de-
velop the mind and inspire a love of literature than
any mere routine studies could do.

" This school was the only one I ever knew that
carried out a thorough course of ancient and mod-

J

26

HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

ern history. . . . The interest of these historical
recitations, with a preceptorso widely informed and
80 fascinating in conversation as Mr. Brace, ex-
tended further than the class. Much of the training
and inspiration of my early days consisted, not in
the things I was supposed to he studying, but in
hearing, while seated unnoticed at my desk, the con-
versation of Mr. Brace with the older classes. There
from hour to hour I listened to historical criticisms
and discussions, or to recitations in such works
as Paley's 'Moral Philosophy,' Blair's 'Rhetoric,'
Alison ' On Taste,' all full of most awakening
suggestions to my thoughts.

" Mr. Brace exceeded all the instructors that I
ever knew in the faculty of teaching the art of Eng-
lish composition. The constant excitement in which
he kept the minds of his pupils — the wide and
varied regions of thought into which be led them
— formed a preparation for teaching composition,
the main requisite for which, whatever people may
think, is to have something that one feels inter-
ested to say.

" His manner was to divide his school of about one
hundred pupils into divisions of about three or four,
one of which was to write every week. At the same
time he inspired an ambition to write by calling

HOW THE CHILD GREW

27

every week for volunteers, aod every week there
were those who volunteered to write.

" I remember I could have been but nine years
old, and my handwriting hardly formed, when the
enthusiasm he inspired led me, greatly to hisamuse-
ment, I believe, to volunteer to write every week.
The first week the subject of the composition
chosen by the class was, ' The Difference between
the Natural and the Moral Sublime.'

" One may smile at this for a child nine years of
age ; but it is the best account I can give of hia
manner of teaching to say that the discussion that
he had held in the class not only made me under-
stand the subject as thoroughly as I do now, but
so excited me that I felt sure that I had something
to say about it ; and that first composition with
half the words misspelled amused him greatly.

"By two years of constant practice, under his
training and suggestioo, I had gained so far as to
be appointed one of the writers for the annual ex-
hibition, a proud distinction as I then viewed it.
The subject assigned me was one that had been
very fully discussed in the school in a manner to
show to the best advantage Mr. Brace's peculiai^
ity in awakening the minds of his pupils to the
higher regions of thought. The question was,

d

28 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

*Can the Immortality of the Soul be Proved by
tbe Light of Nature?'

" Several of the young ladieshad written strongly
in tbe affirmative. Mr. Brace himself had written
in tbe negative. To all theBe compositions and con-
sequent diHcussions I bad listened, and, in view of
them, chose to adopt tbe negative.

*' I remember the scene at that exhibition to
me 80 eventful. The hall was crowded with all tbe
literati of Litchfield. Before them all our compo-
sitions were read aloud. When mine was read I
noticed that father, who was sitting oa high by
Mr. Brace, brightened, and looked interested, and
at tbe close I beard bim ask, * Who wrote that
composition?' 'Your daughter, bir!' 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."

"Never shall I forget the dignity and sense of
importance which swelled my mind when I was
first pronounced old enough to go to meeting,"
writes Mrs. Stowe in another account of those
early Litchfield days.

"To my childish eyes our old meeting-bouse
was an awe-inspiring place. To me it seemed

HOW THE CHILD GREW

fashioned very nearly on the model of Noah's
ark and Solomon'3 Temple, as set forth in the
pictures of my scripture catechism — pictures which
I did not doubt were authentic copies ; and what
more respectable and venerable architectural pre-
cedent could any one desire ? Its double rows of
windows of which I knew the number by heart,
its doors with great wooden curls over them, its
belfry projecting out of the east end, its steeple
and bell, all inspired as much sense of the sublime
in me as Strasburg Cathedral itself; and the in-
side was not a whit less imposing. How magnifi-
cent to my eye seemed the turnip-like canopy
that hung over the minister's head, hooked by a
long iron rod to the wall above ! How apprehen-
sively did I consider the question, what would
become of him if it should fall. With what
amazement I gazed on the panels on either side
of the pulpit, in each of which was carved and
painted a flaming red tulip, bolt upright, with its
leaves projecting out at right angles. Then there
was a grapevine, basso-relievo in front, with its
exactly triangular bunches of grapes, alternating
at exact intervals with exactly triangular leaves.

" To me it was a faultless representation of
how grapevines ought to look, if they would only

30

HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

be straight and regular, instead o£ curling and
scrambling, and twisting themselves into all sorts
of uncanny shapes.

" It was good orthodox custom ol old times to
take every part o£ the domestic establishment to
meeting, even down to the faithful dog, who as
he had supervised the labors of the week, also
came with due particularity to supervise the
worship on Sunday. I think I can see now the
fitting out on a Sunday morning — the one
vagon, or two, as the case might be, tackled up
with an ' old gray,' or ' old bay,' with a buffalo
skiD thrown over the seat by way of a cushion,
and all the family in their Sunday best packed
in for meeting; while waiting Bose, Watch, or
Towser stood to be an outguard, and went meekly
pattering up bill and down dale behind the
'wagon.

" Arrived at meeting the cauine part of the
establishment generally conducted themselves with
great decorum, lying down and going to sleep as
decently as anybody present, except when some
mischief- loving flies would make a sortie on them,
when you might hear the snap of their jaws as
they vainly tried to lay hold upon the intruder.

" Now and then, between some of the sixthliea.

HOW THE CHILD GREW

Hventhlies, and eighthlies of the long sermon,
you might hear some old patriarch of a dog giv-
ing himself a rousing shake, and pitpatting
soberly up and down the broad aisle as if to see
that everything was going properly, after which
he would lie down and compose himself to sleep
again. This was certainly as improving a way of
spending Sunday as a good Christian dog could
desire.

** We are compelled to acknowledge that Trip,
the minister's dog, did not always conduct him-
self with that propriety and decorum that befitted
his social station and reBponsible position. He
was emotional and nervous, and never could be
taught to respect conventionahties. If anything
about the performance in the singers' seat did
not please him he was apt to express himself in a
lugubrious howl. If the sermon was longer than
suited him, he would gape with such a loud creak
of his jaws as would arouse everybody's attention.
If flies disturbed his afternoon naps, he would
give sudden snarls or snaps ; or if he had troubled
dreams, he would bark out in his sleep in a
manner not only to interrupt his own slumbers,
but those of worthy deacons and old ladies,
whose sanctuary repose was thereby sorely broken

I

n

32

HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

up and troubled. For these reasons Trip bad been
denied the sanctuary privileges usually accorded
to good dogs of the period. He was shut up on
Sunday for private meditation. Trip of course
waa only the more strongly bent on social wor-
ship with dogs and men. He would bide behind
doors, jump out of windows, sneak through by-
ways and alleys, and lie hid till the second bell
had done tolling, and then patter up the broad
aisle, innocent and happy, and take his position
right under the pulpit and in front of the
ministfir'a pew,

" One Sunday Doctor Beecher exchanged
with the Rev. Father Mills of Torringford. He
was a thin, wiry, frisky httle man, in a powdered
white wig, black tights, and silk stockings, with
bright knee-buckles and shoe-buckles ; with round,
dark snapping eyes; and a curious high, cracked,
squeaking voice, the very first tones of which made
all the children stare and giggle.

"On the Sunday morning when the event we are
about to relate transpired, we children went to the
house of the Lord in a very hilarious state, all
ready to explode with laughter on the slighteBt
provocation.

*' The occasion was not long wanting. Directly

HOW THE CHILD GREW 33

after the closing not«s of the tolling bell, Master
Trip walked soberly up the centre aisle and seating
himself gravely in front of the pulpit, raised hia
nose critically and expectantly towards the scene
of the forthcoming performance. He wore an
alert, attentive air that befitted a soundly ortho-
dox dog that scents a possible heresy, and deems
it his sacred duty to narrowly watch the perform-
ance.

"He evidently felt called upon to see who and
■what were to occupy that pulpit in his master's ab-
sence. Up rose Father Mills, and up went Trip's
nose vibrating with attention. The good man
began to read the opening hymn : —

'Sing to the Lord ftloud,'
when Trip broke into a dismal howl.

" Father Mills went on to give directions to the
deacons to remove the dog in the same tone in
which he read the hymn, so that the effect of the
whole performance was somewhat as follows: —

' Sing to the Lord alond, (Please put that dog oot !)
And make a joffal noise.'

"We youngsters were delivered over to the
temptations of Satan and sank in waves and bil-
lows of hysterical giggles while Trip was put out

34 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

and the choir did its best at maldng a 'joyful
noise.' "

In front of the pulpit was a bench on which at
noon between the two long sermons some members
of the congregation who came from afar sat and
ate their dinners. Consequently there would be by
time of the afternoon service sundry crumbs of
cheese and bread on the floor. In the base of the
pulpit just above the floor dwelt a number of
pious church mice, and in the afternoons when
Doctor Beecher was thundering away in the lofty
pulpit, Harriet would see their little bright eyes
shining cautiously out of their holes. If the Doc-
tor became quieter they would venture out and
begin a meal on the crumbs ; but suddenly some
awful words, like reprobation or foreordlnation,
would come roaring down from above, and the
mice would run for their lives, and not venture
out again till they thought the danger past.

Harriet had hallowed as well as humorous associa-
tions connected with the thought of the old church.
"One beautiful, fresh, dewy, summer morning, when
it seemed as if all nature were hushed and listening
for the music of higher spheres," she stood at her
open 'window looking out on the green hills oppo-
site, the stately trees feathered with their varied

HOW THE CHILD GREW

greens, and the meadows waving with buttercups
and daisies. On the old apple tree under her win-
dow, a bobolink was tilting up and down chatter-
ing and singing with all bis might. Early that
morning sbe had been reminded that it was Sun-
day, the holy Sabbath day, by this incident. Her
two younger brothers, Henry and Charles, slept
together in a little trundle-bed in a corner of the
nursery where she also slept. She was waked by
the two little fellows chattering to one another,
while tliey lay in their bed making httle sheep
out of the cotton pulled from the holes in the old
quilt that covered them, and pasturing them on
the undulating hill-sides and meadows which their
imaginations conjured up amid tlie bedclothes.
Suddenly Charles's eyes grew big with fright and
he cried out, "Henry, this is wicked! It's Sun-
day ! " There was a moment of consternation, fol-
lowed by silence, as both little curly heads disap-
peared under the old coverlid.

Yes, it was Sunday, and Harriet was trying her
best to feel herself a dreadful sinner, but with very
poor success. She was so healthy and the blood
raced and tingled so in her young veins. She tried
to feel her sins and count them up, but the birds,
and the daisies, and the buttercups were a con-

CHAPTER n

ON THE THRESHOLD

Harriet was between twelve and thirteen when
she came to Hartford, GoDnecticut, to attend a
school recently estabhshed by her sister Cather-
ine. The schoolroom was over a harness store,
which, after the fashion of the day, had for a sign
two white horses. Great was the surprise and
pleasure with which Harriet gazed upon this tri-
umph of artistic skill as it then appeared to her.
One of the young men who worked in the harness
shop in the rear of the store had a fine tenor
voice, and often delighted her by singing in school
hours: —

" When in cold oblmon's shade,
Beauty, wealth, and power are laid,
When around the eculptured shrine,
Moaa stiall cl!iig, and ivy twine
Where immortal spirits reign,
There Bhall we all meet again."

The expense of her board was provided for by
a kind of exchange common in those days. Mr.

ON THE THRESHOLD 39

Isaac D. Bull, of Hartford, sent a daughter to
Miss Pierce's school in Litchfield, who boarded io
Doctor Beecher's family in exchange for Harriet's
board in his own. The very soul of neatness and
order pervaded the whole estabUshment, and Mrs.
Stowe has said that her own good, refined, par-
ticular stepmother could not have found a family
better suited to her taste had she searched the
whole town. Mr. Bull, "a fine vigorous man on
the declining slope of life, but full of energy and
kindness," kept a large wholesale drug store, and
his oldest son had established a retail drug store
of his own at the sign of the Good Samaritan.
Harriet frequently contemplated with reverence a
large picture of the Good Samaritan relieving the
wounded traveler, which formed a conspicuoua
part of this sign.

Harriet occupied a little hall bedroom which
looked out over the Connecticut River. Mrs. Bull
took her young boarder into her heart as well as
into her house. If Harriet was sick, nothing could
exceed her watchful care and tender nursing. The
daughter, Miss Mary Ann Bull, was a beauty of
local celebrity, with long raven curls falling from
a comb on the top of her head. She had a rich
soprano voice and was one of the leading singers

40

HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

in the choir of the Congregational Church. She
received freijuent and impressive calls from a sol-
emn young man who lived next door. The three
brothers were also singers, and the family circle
was often enlivened hy quartette-singing and Hute-
playJng.

In Hartford Harriet found what she had long
craved, real and lasting friendships with girls of
her own age. One of these friends was Catherine
Cogswell, a daughter of Hartford's leading physi-
cian. The other was Georgiana May. Georgiana
had two younger sisters and a number of brothers-
She was older and more sedate than Catherine,
and consequently less attractive to the other girls,
but the friendship that sprang up between her
and Harriet endured undimmed through life. Mrs.
Stowe has described Catherine Cogswell as "one
of the most sunny-tempered, amiable, lovable, and
sprightly souls she had ever known." Her compan-
ionship was so much in demand that it was diffi-
cult for Harriet to see much of her. Her time was
all bespoken by tlie various girls who wanted to
walk to or from school with her, and at the half-
hour recess Harriet was only one of the many
suppliants at her shrine. Yet among the many
claimants there was always a little place kept here

ON THE THRESHOLD

41

and there for Hattie Beecher. Catherioe and
Georgiana were reading Virgil when Harriet en-
tered the school and hegan the study of Latin, but
by the end of the first year she had made a trans-
lation of Ovid into verse that was so creditable as
to be read at the final exhibition of the school.

Harriet was, at this time, much interested in
poetry, and it was her dream to be a poet. Con-
sequently, she began to write a metrical drama
which she called " Cleon." Cleon was a Greek
lord residing at the court of the Emperor Nero,
who after much searching, doubting, and tribula-
tion became a convert to Christianity, This theme
filled her thoughts sleeping and waking, and
blank book after blank book bore testimony to her
industry, till finally her sister Catherine pounced
upon her and declared that she must not waste her
time trying to write poetry, but must discipline her
mind by the study o£ Butler's " Analogy." Young
as she was, she was set to instructing a class of girls
as oldas herself in the " Analogy " ; a task for which
she had been fitted by listening to Mr, Brace's
lectures at the Litchfield school. She wrote out
abstracts of the " Analogy," and mastered chapter
after chapter just ahead of her pupils. This she
did in addition to her regular work as a pupU in

42 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

the school. From then on she hecame both pupil
and teacher.

At thi8period,too,she read for the first time Bax-
ter's " Saints' Everlasting Rest," and she often said
that no book ever affected her more powerfully.
As she walked the pavements she wished that they
might sink beneath her, and she awake in heaven.

Among her manifold duties was the instruc-
tion of her jolly, little, round-faced brother, Henry
Ward, One time in desperation she said, " Now,
Henry, please do stop your fun and attend to your
grammar lesson ! Now, Henry, listen! His is the
possessive pronoun. You would not say him book;
you would say his book."

"Why can't I say himbook, sister Hattie? I
say hymnbook every Sunday," This sally quite
destroyed the gravity of the exasperated little
teacher.

Shortly after going to Hartford Harriet made a
call upon the Rev. Dr. Hawes, her father's friend,
and her spiritual adviser, which left an enduring
impression upon her mind. It was her father's ad-
vice that she join the church in Hartford, as he
had received a call to Boston, and the breaking
up of the Litchfield home was imminent. Accord-
ingly, accompanied by her two school friends, she

ON THE THRESHOLD

43

went one day to the pastor's studj to consult him
coDcerning the contemplated step. In those days
much stress was placed on religious experience,
and more especially on what was termed a convic-
tion of fiin, and self-examination was carried to
an extreme calculated to drive to desperation a
sensitive, high-strung nature. The good man lis-
tened to the child's simple and modest statement
of her Christian experience, and then with an
awful though kindly solemnity of speech and
manner, said, " Harriet ! do you feel that if the
universe should be destroyed (alarming pause)
you could be happy with God alone ? " After
struggling in vain to fix in her mind the meaning
of the sounds which fell on her ears like the mea-
sured tolling of a funeral bell, the child of fourteen
stammered out, "Yes, sir! "

" You realize, I trust, in some measure, at least,
the deeeitfulness of your own heart, and that in
punishment for your sins God might justly leave
you to make yourself as miserable as you have
made yourself siuful."

Having thus effectually, and to his own satis-
faction, fixed the child's attention on the morbid
and over-sensitive workings of her own heart, the
good, and truly kind-hearted man dismissed her

44

HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

with a fatherly benediction. He had been alarmed
at her simple and natural way of entering the
Kingdom. It was not theologically sound to make
short cuts to salvation. The child went into the
conference full of peace and joy, and she came
out full of distress and misgivings, but the good
Doctor liad done his duty as he saw it.

It was a theological age, and in the Beecher
family theology was the supreme interest. It filla
their letters as it filled their lives. Not only was
the age theological, hut transitional, and charac-
terized by intense intellectual activity, accom-
panied by emotional excitement. The winds of
doctrine were let loose, blowing first from thia
quarter and then from that. Doctor Beecher spent
his days in weathering theological cyclones, hut
the worst of all arose in his own family, among
his own children. Great as were his intellec-
tual powers he was no match for his daughter
Catherine and his son Edward, — the metaphysi-
cal Titans who sprang from his own loins. It was
almost in a tone of despair that this theological
Samuel, who had hewn so many heretical Agags
in pieces before the Lord, wrote concerning his
own daughter: "Catherine's letter will disclose
the awfully interesting state of her mind. . . .

ON THE THRESHOLD

45

You perceive she is now handling edged tools
with powerful grasp. ... I have at times been
at mj wits' end to know what to do. ... I con-
clude that nothing safe can be done, but to assert
ability and obligation and guilt upon divine au-
thority, thromng in at the same time as much
collateral light from reason as the case admits
of." Catherine was at this time breaking out of
the prison-house of the traditional orthodoxy, and
her brother Edward was in many ways in sym-
pathy with her, though not as radical as she.
Doctor Beecher was contending with might and
main for the traditional Calvinism, and yet in his
zeal for its defense he often took positions that
surprised and alarmed his brother ministers, seri-
ously disturbed their dogmatic Blumbers, and
caused tbem grave doubts as to his orthodoxy. So

" CaDnon to right of them.
Cannon to left of them, . . .
Volley 'd and thuniler'd."

Harriet, keenly alive and morbidly sensitive to the
spiritual atmosphere in which she was compelled
to live, was driven nearly distracted by the strife
of tongues and division of opinion among those to
whom she looked for counsel and for guidance.

46 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

The events of family history that led to this
situation, so decisive in its influence on Harriet's
mental development and subsequent literary ac-
tivity, were as follows. When Harriet wag In her
eleventh year her sister Catherine had become en-
gaged to Professor Alexander Fisher of Yale Col-
lege. He was a young man of brilliant talents, and
specially noted for his mathematical genius. As an
undergraduate at Yale he distinguished himself by
original and valuable contributions to mathemati-
cal astronomy. Immediately on graduation he was
appointed a professor of mathematics, and sent
abroad by his alma mater to devote some time to
study and the purchase of books and mathematical
instruments. The ship Alhion, on which he sailed,
was wrecked on a reef off the coast of Ireland.
Of the twenty -three cabin passengers only one
reached the shore. He was a man o£ great phys-
ical strength, and all night long clung to the
jagged rocks at the foot of the cliff, against which
the sea broke, till ropes were lowered down from
above, and he was drawn up limp and exhausted.
He often told of the calm bravery with which
Professor Fisher met his end,

Up to this time in her life Catherine bad been
noted for the gayety of her spirits and the bril-

ON THE THRESHOLD 47

liancy of her mind. Ad inimitable story-teller and
a great mimic, it seemed her aim to keep every one
laughing. Her versatile mind and ready wit en-
abled her to pass brilliantly through her school
days with comparatively little mental exertion,
and before she was twenty-one she had become a
teacher in a school for girls in New London, Con-
necticut. It was about this time that she met
Professor Fisher, and they soon became engaged.
When the news of his death reached her, to the
crushing of earthly hopes and plans was added an
agony of apprehension for his soul. He had never
been formally converted ; and hence, by the teach-
ings of the times, his soul as well as his body was
lost. She writes to her brother Edward : "It is not
BO much ruined hopes of this life, it is dismay and
apprehension for his Immortal spirit. Oh, Edward,
where is he now ? Are the noble faculties of such
a mind doomed to everlasting woe?" Anxiously,
but in vain, she searched his letters and journals
for something on which she might build a hope
of his eternal welfare. " Mournful contemplations
awakened when I learned more of the mental ex-
ercises of him I mourned, whose destiny was for-
ever fixed, alas, I know not where I I learned from
his letters, and in other ways, as much as I could

48 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

have learned from his diary. I found that, even
from early childhood, he had ever been uncom-
monly correct and conscientious, so that his par-
ents and family could scarcely remember of his
doing anything wrong, bo far as relates to outward
conduct; and year after year, with persevering
and unexampled effort, he sought to yield that
homage of the heart to his Maker which was re-
quired, but he could not ; like the friend who fol-
lowed his steps he had no strength. ... It seemed
to me that my lost friend had done all that unas-
sisted human strength could do ; and often the
dreadful thought came to me that all was in vain,
and that he was wailing that he ever had been
born in that dark world where hope never comes,
and tliat I waa following his steps to that dreadful
scene."

So she struggled on in the grasp of that New
England Calvinism which her own father preached.
Once she wrote to him, " I feel as Job did, that I
could curse the day in which I was born. I wonder
that Christians who realize the worth of immortal
souls should be willing to give life to immortal
minds to be placed in such a dreadful world."
The letters which Doctor Beecher wrote to her at
this time were considered a very able defense of

ON TEE THRESHOLD

49

New England Calviuism, but tbey did not satisfy
her. It may be doubted if they even satisfied him,
or if he from this time ever rested with the same
serenity of mind on the traditional foundations.
It was an epoch in the history of the Beecher
family, and in the history of the New England
theology. It was in this event of family history that
both Edward Beeeher's " Conflict of Ages " and
Mrs, Stowe's " Minister's Wooing " found their
peculiar inspiration. It is certain that, without
this tragedy, neither of these works, so influential
in determining the current of religious thought in
America, would have been written.

Misa Beecher passed the two years following
the death of Professor Fisher at Franklin, Massa-
chusetts, at the home of his parents, where she
listened to the fearless and pitiless Calvinism of
Doctor Nathaniel Emmons. Her mind was too
strong and buoyant to be overwhelmed and crushed
by an experience that would have driven a weaker
and less resolute nature to insanity. Not finding
herself able to love a God whom she had been
taught to look upon, to use her own language, " as
a perfectly happy being unmoved by my sorrows
or my tears, and looking upon me only with dislike
and aversion," and gifted naturally with a capacity

50 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

for close metaphysical analysis and a robust feai^
lessDess in following her premises to logical cod-
elusions, she arrived at results which, if not always
of permanent value, were certainly Btartling and
original.

The conventional New England Calvinism gave
her no satisfactory solution for her difHculties.
She was tormented with doubts. " What has the
Son of God done which the meanest and most self-
ish creature upon earth would not have done?"
she asked herself. " After making such a wretched
race and placing them in such disastrous circum-
stances, somehow, without any sorrow or trouble,
Jesus Christ had a human nature that suffered and
died. If something else besides ourselves will do
all the suffering, who would not save millions of
wretehed beings, and receive all the honor and
gratitude without any of the trouble?" Yet when
such thoughts passed through her mind she felt
that it was " all pride, rebelHon, and sin." So she
struggled on, sometimes floundering deep in the
mire of doubt, and then lifted out of it by her
constitutionally buoyant spirits.

It was in this condition of mind that she came
to Hartford in the winter of 1824 and opened
her Bchool. In the practical ezperieoce of teaching

ON THE THRESHOLD

she found at last the solution of ber trcubles.
TurniDg aside from doctrinal difficulties and theo-
logical quagmires, she determined " to find happi-
ness in living to do good." She says : " It was right
to pray and read the Bible, and so I prayed and read
the Bible. It was right to try to save others, and so
I tried to save them. In all these years I never
had any fear of punishment or hope of reward."

Without ever baling heard of pragmatism, she
became a kind of pragmatist. She continues :
" After two or three years I commenced giving
instruction in mental philosophy, and at the same
time began a regular course of lectures and in-
structions from the Bible and was inucb occupied
with plans for governing my school, and in devis-
ing means to lead my pupils to become obedient,
amiable, and pious." These " means " resulted in
a code of principles for the government of her
school which were nothing more nor less than
carefully formulated common sense with plenty of
the "milk of human kindness" thrown in. These
principles she carefully compared with the gov-
ernment of God, and came to the conclusion that
He in his infinitely mighty and complex task of
governing the universe was applying the same
fondamental principles as she in the relatively

I

52 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

infiDitesimal and simple task of governing her
school. This was her solution, and this the view
of the divine nature that was for so many years
preached by her brother Henry Ward, and set
forth in the writings of her sister Harriet.

Harriet and Henry Ward took this position
with their hearts, and held it with their heads.
They ever felt their way with their hearts and fol-
lowed with their intellects. The reverse was true
of Edward and Catherine. They were the great
metaphysicians of the family. Doctor Beecher
presented just the inconsistent mingling of the
two kinds of mental process which one might ex-
pect in the father of such children. It was said of
him that he was the father of more brains than
any other man in America. It might with equal
truth have been said that he was the father of
more heart than any other man in America. The
view of God as manifested in Jesus Christ, which
came to Catherine Beecher as the solution of her
difficulties by long mental stru^le, was essentially
the same that came to Harriet by intuition as a
child of thirteen in the old meeting-house at Litch-
field. It was truly religious, non -theological, and
practical. But because it was non-theological they
were not to be permitted to rest in it peacefully.

ON THE THKESHOLD

53

In March, 1826, Doctor Beecher, having re-
signed his pastorate in Litchfield, accepted a call to
the Hanover Street Church in Boston. In making
this change he was actuated partly by personal mo-
tives, his salary in Litchfield being inadequate to
the support of his large family, and partly by the
great strategic importance of the Boston church
in the war against Unitariaiiism, In Boston his
preaching, which has been called " logic on fire,"
became more aggressively theological than it had
ever been before. He felt that God had placed
him there to fight and crush a soul-destroying
heresy. The stake was nothing so paltry as power
and empire, or even human lives. It was the im-
mortal souls of men. Now, although Mrs. Stowe's
loyal aoul would never have acknowledged that
her father's preaching acted unfavorably on her
mental development, such was unmistakably the
case. The atmosphere of mental excitement and
confiict in which her father lived and preached at
this time drove her already ovei^stimulated mind
to the point of distraction. Too much mental
strain and too little exercise had brought her to
her seventeenth year without the strength which
should have been the heritage of her robust
childhood.

54 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

In February, 1827, her sister Catherine writes
to her father : " I have received some letters from
Harriet to-<laj which make me feel uneasy. She
says, ' I don't know that I am fit for anything and
I have thought that I could wish to die young,
and let the remembrance of me and my faults
perish in the grave rather than live, as I fear I do,
a trouble to every one. You don't know how per-
fectly wretched I often feel ; so useless, so weak,
so destitute of all energy. Mamma often tells me
that I am a strange, inconsistent being. Some-
times I could not sleep and have groaned and
cried till midnight, while in the day-time I have
tried to appear cheerful, and have succeeded so
well that Papa has reproved me for laughing so
much. I was so absent sometimes that I made
strange mistakes, and then they all laughed at me,
and I laughed too, though I felt I should go dia-
tracted. I wrote rules, made out a regular system
for dividing my time; but my feelings vary so
much that it is almost impossible for me to be
regular.' " Catherine also writes to her brother
Edward that she thinks it the beat thing for Har-
riet to return to Hartford where she can talk freely
with her. "I can get her books," continues Cath-
erine, "and Catherine Cogswell and Georgiana

ON THE THRESHOLD

55

May, and her frieDds here can do more for her
than any one in Boston, for they love her and she
loves them very much. . . . Harriet will have
young society here all the time, which she cannot
have at home, and I think cheerful and amusing
friends will do much for her. I can do better In
preparing her to teach drawing than any one else,
for I know best what is needed."

The result was that Harriet returned to Hart-
ford where she passed a mouth or so and then in
the spring went with her frieud Georgiana May
to visit Nutptains, in Guilford, which, as we have
already learned, was dear to her from childhood.
The August following her visit to Guilford she
writes to her brother Edward in a strain that re-
veals a state of mind bordering on religious meir
ancholy, but at the same time shows that she is
returning to mental health and cheerfulness.
" Many of my objections you did remove that
afternoon we spent together. After that I was not
as unhappy as T had been. I felt, nevertheless,
that my views were very indistinct and contradic-
tory, and feared that if you left me thus, I might
return to the same dark desolate state in which I
had been all summer. I felt that my immortal in-
terest for both worlds was depending on the turn

56 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

jay feelings might take. In my disappointment
and distress I called upon God, and it seemed as
if I -vblb heard. I felt that He could supply the loss
of all earthly love. All misery and darkness were
over. I felt as if restored, never more to fall. Such
sober certainty of waking bliss had long been a
stranger to me. But even then I had doubts as to
whether these feelings were right, because I felt
love to God alone without that ardent love to my
fellow creatures that Christians have often felt.
... I cannot say what it is makes me reluctant
to speak of my feehngs. It coats me an effort to
express feeling of any kind, but more particularly
to speak of my private religious feelings. If any
one questions me my first impulse is to conceal all
I can. Aa for expression of affection towards
my brothers and sisters, and companions and
friends, the stronger the affection the less inclina-
tion I have to express it. Yet sometimes I think
myself the most frank, communicative, and open
of all beings, and at other times the most reserved.
If you can resolve all my caprices into general
principles you will do more than I can. Your
speaking so much philosophically has a tendency
to repress confidence. We never wish to have our
feelings analyzed down, and every little nothing

ON THE THRESHOLD

57

that we say brought to the test o£ mathematical
demoustration.

" It appears to me that If I could only adopt the
views o£ God you preseuted to my mind they
would exert a strong and beneficial influence over
my character. But I am afraid to accept them for
several reasons. First, it seems to be taking from
the majesty and dignity of the divine character to
suppose that his happiness can be at all affected
by the conduct of his sinful, erring creatures. Sec-
ondly, it seems to me that such views of God would
have an effect on our own minds in lessening that
reverence and fear which is ooe of the greatest
motives to us for action. For, although to a gener-
ous mind the thought of the love of God would be
a sufficient incentive to action, there are times o£
coldness when that love is not felt, and then there
remains no sort of stimulus. I find as I adopt
these sentiments I feel less fear of God, and, in
view of sin, I feel only a sensation of grief which
is more easily dispelled and forgotten than that I
formerly felt." This letter shows how she was
driven hither and thither by the powerful and
somewhat contradictory influences brought to bear
upon her mind by her father, her brother Edward,
and her sister Catherine.

I

58 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

' She is naturally drawn to the winning and rest-
ful conception of God as like Jesus Christ which
both her brother Edward and her sister Catherine
unite in presenting to her, but at the same time
she shows how the iron of her father's Calvinism
has passed into her soul. It may make her very
unhappy and depressed, but still she cannot let it
go immediately. For dull, lethargic souls Calvinism
may be a most excellent tonic under given condi-
tions, but on her artistic and sensitive nature it
acted Hke a subtle poison. It appealed to her rea-
son and left her heart unsatisfied, — nay, even
wounded and bleeding. She is drawn hither and
thither by conflicting tendencies within herself.
Again she writes to Edward and unconsciously
paraphrasing a saying of F^nelon, remarks: "It
is only to the most perfect Being in the universe
that imperfection can look and hope for patience.
You do not know how harsh and forbidding every-
thing seems compared with his character! All
through the day in my intercourse with others,
everything seems to have a tendency to destroy the
calmness of mind gained by communion with Him.
One flatters me, another is angry with me, another
is unjust to me.

" You speak of your predilection for literature

ON THE THRESHOLD

59

having been a snare to you. I have fouQtl it so my-
self. I can scarcely think without tears and indig-
nation, that all that is beautiful, lovely, and poetic,
has been laid on other altars. Oh, will there never
be a poet with a heart enlarged and purified by
the Holy Spirit, who shall throw all the graces of
harmony, all the enchantments of feeling, pathos,
and poetry, around sentiments worthy of them ?
... It matters little what service he has for me
... I do not mean to live in vain. He has given
me talents and I will lay them at his feet well
satisfied if He will accept them."

This rhapsodical, overstrained state of mind was
highly characteristic of this period of her He. The
high tension was naturally followed by seasons of
depression and gloom.

During the winter of 1829 she is in Hartford
again assisting her sister Catherine in the school.
She writes to her brother Edward, " Little things
have great power over me, and if I meet with the
least thing that crosses my feelings, I am often
rendered unhappy for days and weeks. I wish I
could bring myself to feel perfectly indifferent to
the opinions of others. I believe that there never
was a person more dependent on the good and evil
opinions of those around than I am ! " This despair

60 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

is inevitable to one earnestly seeking the truth as
she was, araid conflicting couDsels. She is now eigh-
teen, but still morbidly introspective, sensitive, and
overwrought. She apparently lives largely in her
emotions. In closing one of her letters she says,
" This desire to be loved Forms, I fear, the great
motive for all my actions." Again she writes to her
brother Edward, "I have been carefully reading the
book of Job, and I do not find in it the views of God
you have presented to me. God seems to have
stripped a dependent creature of all that renders life
desirable, and then to have answered his complaints
from the whirlwind ; and, instead of showing mercy
and pity, to have overwhelmed him by a display
of his justice. From the view of God that I re-
ceived from you, I should have expected that a
being that sympathizes with his guilty, afflicted
creatures would not have spoken thus. Yet, after
all, I do believe that God is such a being as you
represent him to be, and in the New Testament I
find in the character of Jesus Christ a revelation
of God as merciful and compassionate ; in fact, just
such a God as I need ! " This was the vision of
God that came to her at the time of her conversion.
It was tlie confusing and perturbing influence of
her father's Calvinistic theology that had dimmed

ON THE THRESHOLD 61

that gracious vision. Out of the prisou-house of
Giant Despair she had heen delivered by the teach-
ings of her sister Catherine and her brother Ed-
ward.

But again in the same letter we have a passage that
shows that her feet are still meshed in the net of
Calvinistic theology. She writes : *' My mind is
often perplexed and such thoughts arise in it that
I cannot pray, and I become bewildered. The won-
der to me is, how all ministers and all CbriatiaDB
can feel themselves so inexcusably sinful, when it
seems to me that we all come into the world in such
a way that it would be miraculous if we did not
sin! Mr. Hawes always says in his prayers, ' We
have nothing to oSer in extenuation of any of our
sins,' and I always think when he says it that we
have everything to offer in extenuation.

" The case seems to me exactly as if I had been
brought into the world with such a thirst for ardent
spirits that there was just a possihihty, but no hope
that I should resist, and then my eternal happiness
made to depend on my being temperate. Some-
times when I try to confess my sins I feel that I
am more to be pitied than blamed, for I have never
known the time when I have not had a temptation
within me so strong that it was certain that I should

62

HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

not overcome it. This thought shocks me, but it
comes with such force, and so appealing!;, to all
my comciousiiess, that it stifles all sense of sin."

It was such reflections and arguments as these
that had aroused Doctor Beecher to despair over
his daughter Catherine's spiritual condition. The
fact was, he. belonged to one age and his children
to another. Yet the brave old man lived to sym-
pathize with them.

Harriet at last learned to give up her introspec-
tion and morbid sensitiveness, and to live more
healthily and humanly. At the age of twenty-one
she was able to write thus to her friend Georgiaua
May: "After the disquisitiou ou myself above
cited you will be able to understand the wondei^
ful changes through which Ego et me ipse has
passed.

"The amount of the matter has been, as this
ioner world of mine has become worn out and un-
tenable, I have at last concluded to come out of

it and live in the eternal one, and, as F

S once advised me, give up the pernicious

habit of meditation to the first Methodist minister
who would take it, and try to mix in society some-
what as other persons would.

"' Horas non numero non nisi serenae.' Uncle

ON THE THRESHOLD

63

Sam, who sits by me, has just been reading the
above motto, the inscription on a sun-dial in Ven-
ice. It strikes me as having a distant relationship
to what I was going to say. I have come to a
firm resolution to count no hours but unclouded
ones, and let all others slip out of my memory and
reckoning as quickly as possible.

" I am trying to cultivate a spirit of general kind-
liness towards everybody. Instead of shrinking
into a comer to notice how other people behave,
I am holding out my hand to the right and to the
left, and forming casual and incidental acquaint-
ance with all who will be acquainted with me. In
this way I find society full of interest and pleasure,
— a pleasure that pleaseth me more because it is
not old and worn out. From these friendships I
expect little, and therefore generally receive more
than I expect From past friendships I have ex-
pected everything, and must of necessity have been
disappointed. The kind words and looks that I call
forth by looking and smiling are not much in them-
selves ; but they form a very pretty flower-border
to the way of life. They embellish the day or the
hour as it passes, and when they fade they only do
just as I expected they woidd. This kind of plea-
sure in acquaintance is new to me. I never tried it

64 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

before. When I used to meet persons tlie first in-
quiry was, ' Have they such and such a character,
or have they anything that might be of use or
harm to me?'"

In this new hfe she was able to write to her
brother Edward, " I have never been so happy as
this summer. I began it in more suffering than
I ever before have felt, but there is One whom 1
daily thank for all that suffering, since I hope
that it has brought me at last to rest entirely in
Him." So she learned to suffer and to love. To
suffer and to love and at last to rest. After five
years of struggling she returns to where she
started when converted as a child of thirteen.
Love became her gospel, the Alpha and Omega of
her existence, love for her God, for her friends, and
finally for humanity. The three words, " God is
love," summed up her theology. Her love of hu-
manity was not the vague charitable emotion which
the phrase usually denotes. It was as real, as vital,
and as impelling as the love for her friend which
she thus expressed in closing this letter, —

" Oh, my dear G , it is scarcely well to love

friends thus . . . those that I love; and oh, how
much that word means. I feel sadly about them.
They may change ; they must die ; they are sep-

ON THE THRESHOLD

65

arated from me, and I ask myself why should I
wisb to love with all the pains and penalties of
such conditions? I check myself when expressing
feelings like this, so much has been said of it by
the sentimental, who talk what they could not
have felt. But it is so deeply, sincerely so in me,
that sometimes it will overflow. Well, there is a
heaven — a heaven, — a world of love, and love
after all is the life blood, the existence, the all in
all of mind."

CHAPTER m

TEACHER AND WRITEB

In January, 1831, Doctor Beecher, in the height
of his Boston ministry in point of popularity and
influence, began a series o£ sermons on the Roman
Catholic Church, in which he sounded the alarm
as to the supposed designs of the Papacy on the
liberties of our nation. At this time he was con-
sidering a call to become president of the newly
established Lane Theological Seminary at Walnut
Hilla, near Cincinnati, Ohio. The leading motive
in determining him to accept this appointment
was the desire to hold the great West for Protest-
antism. He was thrilled by the greatness of the
enterprise. His whole family sympathized with
him, and entered heartily into his plans. They
felt that he waa called to a great mission in which
they all had a share. Catherine immediately de-
termined to establish a school in Cincinnati to raise
up teachers for the West.

In a letter to Miss May, Harriet, who was at
this time about twenty years old, writes minutely

TEACHER AND WRITER

67

and at len^Ii of their plans : " We mean to turn
over the West by means of model schools in this
its capital (Cincinnati). We mean to have a young
ladies' school o£ about fifty or sixty, a primary
school of little girls to the same amount, and
then a primary school for boys. We have come
to the conclusion that the work of teaching will
never be rightly done till it comes into female
hands.

" This is especially true with regard to boya. To
govern boys by moral influence requires tact, and
talent, and versatility ; it requires also the same
division of labor that female education does. But
men of tact, versatility, talent, and piety, will not
devote their lives to teaching. They must be min-
isters, and missionaries, and all that, and while
there is such a thrilling call for action in this way,
every man who is merely teaching feels aa if he
were a Hercules with a distaff ready to spring at
the first trumpet that calls him away. As for di-
vision of labor, men must have salaries that can
support wife and family, and, of course, a revenue
would be required to support a requisite number
of teachers if they could be found.

" Then, if men have more knowledge they have
less talent in communicating it, nor have they the

68

HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

patience, the long-suffering, and the gentleness
necessary to superintend the formation of char-
acter. We intend to make these principles under-
stood, and ourselves to set the example of what
females can do in this way. You see that first-rate
talent is necessary for all that we mean to do, es-
pecially for the last, because here we must face
down the prejudices of society, and we must have
exemplary success to be believed. We want origi-
nal planning minds, and you do not realize how
few there are among females, and how few we can
command o£ those that exist." Catherine had vis-
ited Cincinnati with her father before the removal
was made, and had written to Harriet, " The folks
are very anxious to have a school on our plan set
on foot here. We can have fine rooms in the city
college building, which is now unoccupied, and
everybody is ready to lend a helping hand."

The sense of having a mission in the world was
a ruling characteristic of the Beechers which Har-
riet shared to an unusual degree. It was only a
strong sense of humor that saved them from fa-
naticism. Harriet took a very serious view of the
migration of the family to the West, and believed
most devoutly that it was in obedience to a divine
call, and yet she could write thus from Fhiladel-

TEACHER AND WRITER

ptia on the journey West : "I saw a notice in the
Philadelphiayi about father, setting forth how
'this distinguished brother with his large family,
having torn themselves from tbe endearing scenes
of their home,' etc., ' were going like Jacob,' etc.,
— very scriptural and appropriate flourish. It is
too much after the manner of men, as Paul says,
* speaking as a fool.' " This joyous, kindly humor
is a strongly marked characteristic of the Beecher
family. Mrs. Stowe often said that one of the
most vivid impressions of her father's family as it
was in her childhood was that of " a great house-
hold inspired by a spirit of cheerfulness and hilar-
ity." Cheerfulness and hilarity is the characteristic
Beecher atmospliere. The letter in which Mrs.
Stowe pictures the events of the journey westward
is overflowing with fun.

We have first a vivid picture of the sojourn in
New York City ; of Doctor Beecher rushing about
in high spirits, soliciting funds for the new insti-
tution, preaching, dipping into books, and con-
sulting authorities for his oration, " going around
here, there, and everywhere ; begging, borrowing,
and spoiling the Egyptians, delighted with past
success, and confident for the future." Harriet,
however, finds New York too exciting and *' scat-

1

70 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

teriug," and begins to long for " the waters of
quietness."

They take the boat from New York and arrive
in Philadelphia late on Saturday evening of a dull,
drizzling day. Poor Aunt Esther Beecher and
Mrs. Beecher are in despair over strayed trunks,
for the recapture of which George Beecher, one
of the sons, has been left behind. In the whole
caravan not a clean dress or cap to put on! Part
of the family are entertained at the house of Doc-
tor Beecher's old friend, the Rev. Dr. Skinner, and
Harriet with Catherine, Isabella, and James goes
to the house of a Mrs. Elmes, — " rich, hospitable
folks, who act the part of Gains in apostolic
times." The trunks arrive in a day or so, and
Doctor Beecher, after seeing tliem safely landed
in Doctor Skinner's entry, swings his hat around
his head with a joyful, "Hurrah."

The next day they traveled about thirty miles
in a private conveyance to Dowingtou. The driver
was obliging, the roads good, and the scenery fine.
All were in high spirits and gave vent to their
joy in psalms and hymns. George had provided a
goodly supply of tracts which they tossed to the
way-farers whom they met. Harriet declared that
he was "peppering the land with moral and spir-

TEACHER AND WRITER

71

itual influences." As Harriet writes, they are com-
fortably seated in the front parlor of a little coun-
try inn, as much at home as if still in Boston.
Doctor Beecher is reading. Thomas and Isabella
are writing in their daily journals. Catherine is
writing to her sister, Mrs. Thomas Perkins, and
Harriet to her friend, Georgiana May. She says,
"Among the multitude of present friends my
heart still makes occasional visits to absent ones,
— visits full of cause for gratitude to Him who
gives us friends. I have thought of you often to-
day, my Georgiana. We stopped this noon at a
substantial Pennsylvania tavern, and among the
flowers in the garden was a late monthly honey-
suckle, like the one in North Guilford. I made a
spring for it ; but George secured the finest hunch,
which he wore in bis button-hole the rest of the
noon.

"This afternoon as we were traveling, we struck
up and sang 'Jubilee.' It put me in mind of the
time when we used to ride along the rough North
Guilford roads, and make the air vocal as we went.
Pleasant times, those ! Those were blue skies, and
that was a beautiful lake with pine trees that hung
over it. But those we shall look upon 'na mair!'

" Well, my dear, there is a land where we shall

72 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

Dotlove and leave. Those skiesahall never cease to
shine, the waters of life we shall never be called
upon to leave."

Sunday finds them in Harrisburg, sixty -two
miles from Wheeling, where they were to take the
boat for Cincinnati. On arriving in Wheehngthe
Dews of cholera in Cincinnati leads them to wait
for eight days and then go on by private stage.
Then, again, at Granville they spend part of a
week and assist at revival meetings.

Arrived at Walnut Hills, Harriet, in the first
blush of her enthusiasm, writes to Georgiana May
this glowing description of the new home: "How
I wish you could see Walnut Hdls! It is about
two miles from tlie city, and the road to it is as
picturesque as you can imagine a road to be, without
'springs that run among the hills.' Every possible
variety of hillandvaleofbeautifulslope, and undu-
lations of land set off by velvet richness of turf,
and broken upbygrovesandforestsof every outline
of fohage, make the scene Arcadian. You might
ride over the same road a dozen times a day, un-
tired, for the constant variation of view caused by
ascending and descending hill relieves you from
all tedium. Much of the wooding is beech of a
noble growth. The straight, beautiful shafts of

I

TEACHER AND WRITER 73

these trees as one looks up the cool green recesses
of the woods seem as though they might form very
proper columns for a Dryad temple."

Miss Catherine Beecher thus pictures the site
of the seminary: "The Seminary is located on a
farm of one hundred and twenty-five acres of fine
land, with groves of superb trees around it. . . .
I have become somewhat acquainted with those
ladies we shall have the most to do with, and find
them intelligent New England sort of folks. In-
deed, Cincinnati is a New England city in all its
habits, and its inhabitants are more than half from
New England.

"The second church, which is the best in the
City, will give father a unanimous call to be their
minister, with the understanding that he will give
them what time he can spare from the Seminary."

Many years afterwards Mrs. Stowe, writing of
her hfe in Cincinnati at this time, says : " Doctor
Beecher's house on Walnut Hills was in many
respects peculiarly pleasant. It was a two-story
brick edifice of moderate dimensions, fronting the
West with a long L running back into the prime-
val forest, or grove, as it was familiarly called,
which here came up to the very door. Immense
trees, beech, black oak, and others, spread their

1

74 HARRIET BEECHER STOWB

protecting arms over the back yard, afEordiDg in
summer an almost impenetrable shade.

'* An airy veranda was built in the angle formed
by the L along the entire inner surface of the
house, from which during the fierce gales of au-
tumn and winter we used to watch the tossing of
the spectral branches and listen to the roaring of
wind through the forest."

". . . During the first year of Doctor Beecber's
Walnut Hills life the care of the family was shared
by Mrs. Beecher and Aunt Esther, though, as the
health of the former declined, the burden fell more
and more upon the latter. The family was large,
comprising, including servants, thirteen in all, be-
sides occasional visitors.

" The house was full. There was a continual
high tide of life and animation. The old carryall
was continually vibrating between home and the
city, and the excitement of going and coming
rendered anything like stagnation an impossibility.
... It was an exuberant and glorious life while
it lasted. The atmosphere of his household was
replete with moral oxygen, — full charged with in-
tellectual electricity. Nowhere else have I felt any-
thing resembling or equaling it. It was a kind
of moral heaven, the purity, vivacity, and inspira-

1

TEACHER AND WRITER

75

tion of which only those can appreciate who have
felt it."

In 1832 while visiting her brother William in
Newport, Rhode Island, Harriet had begun an
elementary geography. This little hook, her first
published work, was completed during the winter
of 1833, and published by Corey, Fairbank &
Webster of Cincinnati. Shortly after its publica-
tion she writes to Miss May, " Bishop Purcell vis-
ited our school to-day, and expressed himself as
greatly pleased that we had opened such an one
here. He spoke of my poor little geography and
thanked me for the unprejudiced manner in which
I had handled the Catholic question in it. I was
of course flattered that he should have known
anything about the book."

When we remember that Doctor Beecher's great
motive in going to Cincinnati was to oppose the
influence of the Roman Catholic Church in every
way possible, and that he frequently attacked it
in the pulpit and in the press, this incident reflects
great credit, not only on the wisdom and tolerance
of Archbishop Purcell, but on that of Harriet
Beecher as well. When the father, whom the
daughter revered, honestly regarded the Catholic
Church as a great evil, and a peril to our free

d

76 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

institutions, it required no little courage and inde-
pendence of thought in the daughter to so handle
the Catholic question as to win words of hearty
appreciation from one of the highest ecctesiastica
of that communion. That the good bishop TiBited
the school and made such kind comments on its
mission showed a broad, wise, and tolerant spirit
which must have tended to confirm in Harriet's
mind what she had often heard her Uncle Samuel
gay in the old Litchfield days about the Roman
Catholic prelates, whom he carried on his ships
between Spain and America, being as learned and
as devoted to the good of men as any Protestants
to be found in America.

With all her enthusiasm and ideality, Harriet
nevertheless felt the wear and tear of the routine
work of the schoolroom. She writes to Miss May
during the first year of her school hfe in Cincin-
nati: "Since writing the above my whole time
has been taken up in the labor of our new school,
or wasted in the fatigue and lassitude following
such labor. . . .

" Now, Georgiana, let me copy for your delec-
tation a list of matters that I have jotted down
for consideration at a teachers' meeting to be
held to-morrow night. It runneth as follows. Just

TEACHER AND WRITER

77

hear! 'About quills and paper ou the floor;
forming classes ; drinking in the entry (cold
water, mind you) ; giving leave to speak ; recess
bell,' etc., ' You are tired, I see,' said John Gilpin,
so am I ! and I spare you.

" I have just been bearing a class of little girls
recite, and telling them a fairy story that I had
to spin out as it went along beginning with,
' Once upon a time there was,' etc., in the good
old-fashioned way of stories."

To conceive great things is to smolie enchanted
cigarettes, hut to execute is drudgery. Harriet
learned to know such drudgery in full measure.
Her ill-health was largely due to unregulated and
unrestrained feeling. She lived overmuch in her
emotions. Nothing like drudgery to tame the
feelings ! About this time she writes to Miss
May, " To-day is Sunday, and I am staying at
home because I think it is time to take some
efBcient means to dissipate the illness and bad
feelings of various kinds that have for some time
been growing upon me. At present there is and
can be very Httle system and regularity about me.
About half of my time I am scarcely alive, and
a great part of the rest, the slave and sport of
morbid feeling and unreasonable prejudice. I

HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

have everything but good health. . . . How good
it vrould be for me to be put in a place that breaks
up and precludes thought. Thought, intense, emo-
tional thought, has been my disease. How much
good it would do me to be where I could not but
be thoughtless. . . .

'^ Recently I have been reading the hfe of
Madame de Stael and ' Corinne,' I have felt an
intense sympathy with many parts of that book,
with many parts of her character. But in America
feeliugs vehement and absorbing like hers become
still more deep, morbid, and impassioned by the
constant habits of self -government which the
rigid forms of our society demand. They are re-
pressed and they burn inwardly till they burn the
very soul, leaving only dust and ashes. It seems
to me that the intensity with which my mind has
thought and felt on every subject presented to it
has had this eSect. It has withered and exhausted
it, and though young I have no sympathy with
the feelings of youth. All that is enthusiastic, all
that is impassioned in admiration of nature, of
writing, of character, in devotional thought and
emotion, or in emotions of affection, I have felt
with vehement and absorbing intensity, — -felt
till my mind is exhausted and seems to he sinking

TEACHER AND WRITER

79

into deadness. Half of my time I am glad to re-
main in a listless vacancy ; to busy myself with
trifles since thought is pain and emotion is pain."
The sense of humor was for Mrs. Stowe indeed a
saviDg grace. She could not have lived without
it. Her nature so intense and emotional would, to
use her own figure, have burned itself to ashes.
Her letters at this time are full of playfulness.
For example, she writes to her sister Mrs. Perkins
in Hartford : " By the by, Mary, speaking of the
temptations of cities, I have much solicitude on
Jamie's account lest he should form improper in-
timacies, for yesterday or the day before we saw
him parading by the house with his arm over the
neck of a great hog, apparently on the most inti-
mate terms possible ; the other day he actually
got on tbe back of one and rode some distance.
So much for allowing these animals to promenade
the streets, a particular in which Mrs. Cincinnati
has imitated the domestic arrangement of some
of her elder sisters, and a very disgusting one it
is ! " Of the same quiet vein of humor is the de-
scription of the family physician. " Our family
physician is one Dr. Drake, a man of a good deal
of science, theory, and reputed skill, but a sort of
general mark for the opposition of aU the medical

n

HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

cloth of the city. He is a tall, rectangular, per-
pendicular sort of a body, stiff as a poker, and
enunciates his prescriptions much as if he were
giving a discourse on the doctrine of election.
The other evening he was detained from visiting
Kate, and sent a very polite, ceremonious note
containing a prescription, with Dr. D.'s compli-
ments to Miss Beecher, requesting that she would
take the inclosed with a little molasses at nine
o'clock precisely." These descriptions of the life
about her would hardly seem to come from the
young woman who had written, "About half my
time I am scarcely alive."

It was during her first year in Cincinnati that
Harriet, in company with a Miss Button, one of
the teachers in the school, made a visit to a Ken-
tucky slave plantation. Years afterward, on read-
ing "Uncle Tom's Cabin," Miss Button commented
with amazement that, although during this visit
Harriet had seemed too dreamy and abstracted to
notice what was passmg about her, nevertheless
scenes, incidents, and persons, met with during
this brief visit, were graphically reproduced and
woven into the texture of her story.

About this time a wealthy and cultivated family
came from Louisiana to Ohio, and settled near

TEACHER AND WRITER

81

Cincinnati. They brought with them a number of
skves whom they set at liberty, and among them
was a quaint little Jim Crow of a negro girl who
was the original of "Topey." It was in attempt-
ing to give this wild little savage some religious
instruction, in a little mission Sunday-school, that
Mrs. Stowe got her material for the celebrated
dialogue between Miss Ophelia and Topsy.

" Miss Ophelia, ' Have you ever heard anything
about God, Topsy ? '

" The child looked bewildered but grinned as
usual.

"*Do you know who made you?*

" * Nobody as I knows on,' said the child with
a short laugh.

" The idea appeared to amuse her considerably;
for her eyes twinkled, and she added : —

" ' I 'spect I grow'd, nobody never made me ! ' "

Harriet's two uncles, Captain Samuel Foote and
Mr. John Foote, also lived in Cincinnati at this
time. Captain Samuel Foote's house was on a height
in the upper part of the city, and commanded a
fine view of the whole lower town. It was a centre
for persons of artistic and Uterary tastes. Here
often met the "Semi-Colon Club," among the
membership of which were names afterwards as

HAERIET BEECHER STOWE

promineot in state aud national affairs as those
of Salmon P. Chase; Mrs. Peters, founder of the
Philadelphia School of Desig;n ; Mrs. Caroline Lee
Hentz; C. P. Crancb, the poet; Worthington
Whittredge, the artist; General Edward King,
Miss Catherine Beecher, Professor Calvin E.
Stowe, Judge James Hall, editor of the Western
Magazine, and many others.

At the meetings of this club the members read
papers and stories, or discussed interesting topics
previously announced. In a letter to Miss May,
Harriet Beecher gives au amusing description of
her part in these meetings : " I am vondering
as to what 1 shall do next. I have been writing a
piece to be read next Monday evening at Uncle
Sam's soiree (the Semi-Colon). It is a letter pur-
porting to be from Dr. Johnson. I have been
stilting about in his style so long that it is a
relief to me to come down to the jog of common
English. Now, I think of it, I will just give you
a history of my campaign in this circle.

" My first piece was a letter from Bishop Butler,
written in his outrageous style of parenthesis and
fogification. My second, a satirical essay on the
modern uses of languages. This I shall send to
you as some of the gentlemen, it seems, took a

TEACHER AND WRITER 83

fancy to it, anil requested leave to put it in the
Western Magazine. It is ascribed to Catherine,
or I don't know that I should let it go, I have no
notion of appearing in propria persona.

" The next piece was a satire on certain mem-
bers who were getting very much into the way of
joking on the worn-out subjects of matrimony and
old maid and old bachelorism. I therefore wrote a
set of legislative enactments purporting to be from
the ladies of the society forbidding all such allu-
sions in the future. It made some sport at the time.
I try not to be personal, and to be courteous even
in satire.

"But I have written a piece this week that is
making me some disquiet. I did not Uke it that
there was so little that was serious and rational
about the reading. So I conceived the design of
writing a set of letters and throwing them in as
being the letters of a friend.

" I wrote a letter this week for the first of the
set, — easy, not very sprightly, — describing an
imaginary situation, a house in the country, a
gentleman and lady, Mr. and Mrs. Howard, as
being pious, literary, and agreeable. I threw into
the letter a number of little particulars and inci-
dental allusions to give it the air of having been

84 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

really a letter. I meant thus to give myself an
opportunity for the introduction of different Buh-
jects and the discussion of different characters
in future letters.

*' I meant to write on a great number of sub-
jects in the future. Cousin Elizabeth only was in
the secret ; Uncle Samuel and Sarah Eliot were
not to know.

" Yeflterdaymorninglfinishedmyletter, smoked
it to make it look yellow, tore it to make it look
old, directed it and scratched out the direction,
postmarked it with red ink, sealed it and broke
the seal, all this to give credibility to the fact of
its being a real letter. Then I inclosed it in an en-
velope, stating that it was a part of a set that
had fallen into my hands. This envelope was
written in a scrawny, scrawly gentleman's band.

" I put it into the office In the morning, directed
it to 'Mrs. Samuel E. Foote,' and then sent word
to Sis that it was coming, so that she might be
ready to enact the part.

"Well, the deception took. Uncle Sam exam-
ined it and pronounced, ex cathedra, that it must
have been a real letter. Mr. Greene (the gentle-
man who reads) declared that it must have come
from Mrs. Hall, and elucidated the theory by

TEACHER AND WRITER

85

spelling out the names and dates that I had
had erased, vhich, of course, he accommodated to
his own tastes. But then, what makes me feel
uneasy is that Elizabeth, after reading it, did not
seem to he exactly satisfied. She thought it had
too much sentiment, too much particularity of in-
cident, — she did not exactly know what. She was
afraid it would be criticised unmercifully. Now,
Elizabeth has a tact and quickness of perception
that I trust to, and her remarks have made me
uneasy enough. I am unused to being criticised,
and don't know how I shall bear it."

It was about this time that Judge Hall offered
a prize of fifty dollars for the best short story
that should be sent in to the Western Magazine
within a given period. The prize was awarded
to Harriet Beecher for a story entitled " Uncle
Lot," which was afterwards incorporated in the
" Mayflower," published by Harper & Brothers in
1843. It was at this time that Harriet Beecher
was laying the foundation of her fame as a writer.
In a letter to Mrs. FoUen, written immediately
after the publication of " Uncle Tom's Cabin,"
she gives the following account of the way she
came to be a writer : " During long years of
struggling with poverty and sickness, and a hot,

I

86 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE
debilitating climate, my children grew up around
me. The unraery and the kitchen were my prin-
cipal fields of labor. Some of my friends, pitying
my trials, copied and sent a number of little
sketches from my pen to a number of liberally
paying Annuals, with my name. With the first
money that I earned in this way I bought a feather-
bed ! For as I had married into poverty and with-
out a dowry, and as my husband had only a large
library of books and a great deal of learuing, the
bed and pillows were thought the most profitable
investment.

"After this I thought I had discovered the
philosopher's stone. So when a new carpet or
mattress was going to be needed, or when at the
close of the year it began to be evident that my
family accounts, like poor Dora's, 'would n't add
up,' then 1 used to say to my faithful friend and
factotum Anna, who shared all my joys and sor-
rows, ' Now, if you will keep the babies, and
attend to the things in the house for one day, I '11
write a piece, and then we shall be out of the
scrape.'

" So I became an author, — very modest at first,
I do assure you, and remonstrating very seriously
with friends who had thought it best to put my

1

TEACHER AND WRITER 87

name to the pieces by way of getting up a reputa-
tion ; and if jou see a wood-cut of me, with an im-
moderately long no&e, on the cover of all the U. S.
Almanacs, I wish you to take notice that I have
been forced into it contrary to my natural modesty
by the imperative solicitations of my dear five
thousand friends, and the public generally."

So it appears that writing was with Mrs. Stowe
before marriage a diversion, but after marriage
a stern necessity.

Miss Catherine Beecher wrote this graphic ac-
count of her efforts in stirring her sister up to
literary activity after her marriage: "During a
visit to her [Mrs. Stowe], I had an opportunity
one day of witnessing the combined exercise of
her literary and domestic genius in a style that to
me was quite amusing.

"'Come, Harriet,' said I, as I found her tending
one baby and watching two others just able to
walk, ' where is that piece for the Souvenir which
I promised the editor I would get from you and
send him on next week? You have only this one
day left to finish it, and have it I must.'

"•And how will you get it, sister of mine?' said
Harriet. ' You will have at least to wait till I get
house-cleaning over and baby's teeth through.*

HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

" * Aa to house-cleaning, you can defer it one
day longer; and aa to baby's teeth there is no end
to them as I can see. No, to-day that story must
be ended. There Frederick has been sitting bj
Ellen and saying all thoae pretty things for more
than a month now, and she has been turning and
bluahing till I am sure it is time to go to her
relief.

" ' Come, it would not take you three hours at the
rate you can write to finish the courtship, mar-
riage, catastrophe, ecJaircissenient and all ; and
this three hours of your brains will earn enough
to pay for all the sewing your fingers could do for
a year to come. Two dollars a page, my dear, and
you can write a page in fifteen minutes ! Come,
then, my lady housekeeper, economy is a cardinal
virtue ; consider the economy of the thing.'

" 'But, my dear, here is a baby iu my arms, and
two little pussies by my side, and there is a great
baking down in the kitchen, and there is a green
girl for help, besides preparations to be made for
house-cleaning next week. It is really out of the
question, you see.'

"* I see no such thing. I do not know what gen-
ius ia given for if it is not to help a woman out of
a scrape. Come set your wita to work and let me

U

TEACHER AND WRITER 89

have my way, and you shall have all the work
done, and finish the atory too.'

"'Well, but kitchen affairs?'

'"Weean manage them too. You know that you
can write anywhere, and anyhow. Just take your
seat at the kitchen table with your writing weap-
ons, and while you superintend Mina, fill up the
odd snatches o£ time with the labors oi your
pen.'

" I carried my point. In ten minutes she was
seated ; a table with flour, rolling-pin, ginger, and
lard on one side ; a dresser with eggs, pork, and
beans and various cooking utensils on the other,
near her an oven beating, and beside her a dark-
skinned nymph waiting for orders.

" ' Here, Harriet,' said I, ' you can write on this
atlas in your lap ; no matter how the writing looks,
I will copy it.'

" ' Well, well,' she said, with a resigned sort of an
amused look. ' Mina, you may do what I told you,
while I write a few minutes, till it is time to mould
up the bread. Where is the inkstand?'

" * Here it is, on top of the tea-kettle, close by,'
said I.

"At this Mina giggled, and we both laughed
to see her merriment at our literary proceedings.

90 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

*' I began to overhaul the portfolio to find the
right sheet. * Here it is,' said 1, ' here is Frederick
sitting by Ellen glancing at ber brilliant face, and
saying something about "guardian angel," and
all that — you remember? '

" 'Yes, yes,' she said, falling into a muse as she
attempted to recover the thread of ber story.

"'Ma'am, shall I put tbe pork on the top of the
beans ? ' asked Mina.

"'Come, come,' said Harriet, laughing. 'You see
how it is. Mina is a new hand and cannot do any-
thing without me to direct her. We must give up
the writing for to-day.'

" ' No, no, let us have another trial. You can dic-
tate as easily as you can write. Come, I can set
the baby in this clothes basket and give him some
mischief or another to keep him quiet; you shall dic-
tate and I will write. Now, this is the place where
you left off : you were describing the scene between
Ellen and her lover : tbe last sentence was, " Borne
down by the tide of agony she leaned her head on
her bands, the tears streamed through her fingers,
and her whole frame shook with convulsive sobs."
What next?'

"' Mina, pour a little milk into this pearlashl'
said Harriet.

TEACHER AND WRITER

91

"'Come/ said I, '"The tears streamed through
her fingers, and her whole frame shook with con-
vulsive sobs." What next?'

" Harriet paused, and looked musingly out of
the window as she turned her mind to her story.
' You may write now,' said she, and she dictated
as follows : —

" ' Her lover wept with her, uor dared again to
touch the point so sacredly guarded. — Mina, roll
that crust a little thinner. — He spoke in soothing
tones.

*" — Mina poke the coals in the oven,'

*' ' Here,' said I, ' let me direct Mina about these
matters and write a while yourself.'

" Harriet took the pen and patiently set herself
to work. For a while my culinary knowledge and
skill were proof to all Mina's investigating in-
quiries, and they did not fail till I saw two pages
completed.

" ' You have done bravely,' said I, as I read over
the manuscript ; ' now you must direct Mina a while.
Meantime dictate, and I will write.'

'* Never was there a more docile literary lady than
my sister. Without a word of objection she fol-
lowed my request.

" 'I am ready to write,' said I. 'The last sen-

92 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

tence was, " What is tbia life to ooe who has suf-
fered as I have?" What nest?'

"'Shall I put in the brown, or the white bread
first?' asked Mina.

" ' The brown first,' said Harriet.

" ' " What is this life to one who has suffered as
I have?" ' said I.

" Harriet brushed the flour off her apron, and
sat down for a moment in a muse. Then she dic-
tated as follows: —

"'Under the breaking of my heart I have borne
up. I have borne up under all that tries a woman,
— but this thought, — oh, Henry!'

"'Ma'am, shall I put ginger in this pumpkin?^'
queried Mina.

" ' No, you may let that alone just now,' rephed
Harriet. She then proceeded : —

"'I know my duty to my children. I see the
hour must come. You must take them, Henry ; they
are my last earthly comfort.'

" ' Ma'am, what shall I do with these eggshells,
and all this truck here?' interrupted Mina.

" 'Put them in the pail by you,' answered Har-
riet.

*' ' " They are my last earthly comfort," ' said I.
*What next?'

TEACHER AND WRITER

93

" She continued to dictate, —

"'You must take them away. It may he — per-
haps it must be — that I shall soon follow, but the
breaking heart of awifestill pleads, "alittle longer,
a little longer." '

" ' How much longer must the ganger-bread stay
in?' asked Mina.

"'Five minutes,' said Harriet.

" ' " A little longer, a little longer," ' I repeated
in a dolorous tone, and we hurst out into a laugh.

" Thus we went on, cooking, writing, nursing,
and laughing, till I finally accomplished my object.
The piece was finished and copied, and the next
day sent to the editor."

No wonder Mrs. Stowe describes her writing as
" rowing against wind and tide ! "

During the summer of 1834 the young writer
made her first visit to New England since leaving
there for the West two years before. The occasion
was the graduation o£ her brother, Henry Ward,
from Amherst College. She covered the earlier
part of the trip by stage to Toledo, and thence
bj steamer to Buffalo. It was on this journey that
she saw Niagara for the first time, and in a letter
to Mrs. Samuel Foote she thus pictures her sensa-
tions : " I did not once think whether it was high

94 HAKRIET BEECHER STOWE
or low ; whether it roared or (lid n't roar ; whether it
equaled my expectations or not. My mind whirled
off it seemed to me into a new and straoge world.
It seemed unearthly, Hke the strange dim images
iu the book of Revelation.

" I thought of the great white throne; the rain-
bow around it ; the throne in sight like unto an
emerald ; and 0, that beautiful water rising like
moonlight, falling as the soul sinks when it dies,
to rise refined, spiritualized, and pure. That rain-
bow breaking out, trembUng, fading, and again
coming like a beautiful spirit walking the waters.

" Oh, it is loveher than it is great ; it Is like the
nind that made it, great, but so veiled in beauty
that we gaze without terror. I felt as if I could
have gone over with the waters ; it would be so
beautiful a death; there would be no fear in it.

" I felt the very rock tremble under me with a
sort of joy. I was so maddened that I could have
gone, too, if it had gone."

CHAPTER IV

WIPE AMD MOTHER

Hahbibt Beecher's journey to the East was
saddened by the news of the death of her intimate
friend, Mrs. Stowe, wife of Professor Calvin Ellis
Stowe. Mrs. Stowe was a daughter of the Rev. Ben-
net Tyler, at one time the president of Dartmouth
College, then Doctor Payson's successor in Portr
land, Maine, and finally president of East Windsor
Theological Seminary, in Connecticut. She was
beautiful, talented, and had a wonderful voice, and
all this, added to unusual dignity and sweetness of
character, had made her universally loved. In a
letter written to her sister Mary, Harriet had thus
described Mrs. Stowe : '* Let me introduce you to
Mrs. Stowe, — a delicate, pretty little woman, with
hazel eyes, auburn hair, fair complexion, fine color,
a pretty little mouth, fine teeth, and a most inter-
esting timidity and simplicity of manner ; I fell in
love with her directly."

His loss drove Professor Stowe nearly insane,
and Harriet on her return to Cincinnati became

90 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

his comforter. In about two years tliis friendship
ripened into love, and they became engaged. Har-
riet seized the last moments before the wedding
to write to Miss May.

CiKCiNK ATI, Jan. 6, 1836.

Well, my dear G., about half an hour more, and
your old friend, companion, schoolmate, sister, etc.,
will cease to be Hattie Beecher and change to no-
body knows who. My dear, you are engaged, and
pledged in a year or two to encounter a similar
fate, and do you wish to know how you will feel?
Well, my dear, I have been dreading the time, and
lying awake all last week wondering how I should
live through this overwhelming crisis, and lo I it
has come and I feel nothing at all. The wedding
is to be altogether domestic, nobody present but
my own brothers and sisters, and my old colleague,
Mary Dutton ; and as there is a sufficiency of the
ministry we have not even to call in the foreign
aid of a minister. Sister Katy is not here, so she
will not witness my departure from her care and
guidance to that of another. None of my numerous
friends and acquaintances who have taken such a
deep interest in making the connection for me even
know the day, and it will all be done and over be-
fore they know anything about it.

WIFE AND MOTHER

Well, it is a mercy to have this entire apathy
come over one at this time. I should he crazy to
feel as I did yesterday, or indeed to feel anything
at all. But I inwardly vowed that my last feel-
ings and reflections on this subject should be
yours, and as I have not got any it is just as well
to tell you that. Well, here comes Mr. Stowe,
so farewell, and so for the last time I subscribe
myself

Your own

Hattib E. Bbecheb.

The letter was not posted, and she later added :
"Three weeks have passed since writing the
above, and my husband and I are now seated by
oar own fireside, as domestic as any pair of tame
fowl you ever saw ; he writing to his mother, and
I to you.

" Two days after our marriage we took a wed-
ding excursion so called, though we would have
most gladly been excused this conformity to ordi-
nary custom, had not necessity required Mr. Stowe
to visit Columbus, and I had too much adhesive-
ness not to go too. Ohio roads at this season are
no joke, I can tell you, though we were, on the
whole, wonderfully taken care of, and our expe-

98 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

ditdon included as many pleasures as an expedi*
tion at this time of the year ever could.

" And now, my dear, perliaps the wonder to you,
as to me, is, how this momentous crisis in the life
of such a whisp of nerve as myself has been trans-
acted so quietly. My dear, it is a wonder to my-
self. I am tranquil, quiet, and happy. I look only
on the present and leave the future to Him who
has hitherto been so kind to me.

" * Take no thought for the morrow ' is my
motto, and my comfort is to rest on Him in whose
house there are many mansions provided when
these fleeting earthly ones shall pass away."

Largely through the influence of his very warm
friend, General Harrison, Professor Stowe had
been appointed a commissioner by the State of
Ohio to investigate and report on the public
school systems of Europe. To this commission was
soon added another. The faculty and friends of
Lane Seminary found this an excellent opportu-
nity to make many sorely needed additions to the
seminary library, and intrusted him with funds
for the purpose. Professor Stowe, since his ar-
rival in Ohio, had been untiring in his labors for
popular education. It was largely through his in-
flaence that "The College of Teachers" was

WIFE AND MOTHER

99

founded in Cincinnati in 1833, the object of which
was to popularize the common schools by iucreas-
ing their teaching efBciencj, and so to increase
the demand for education among the people. He
was ably seconded in his efforts by such prominent
citizens as General Harrison, Smith Grimk^, Arch-
bishop Purcell, A. H. McGufEy, Doctor Beecher,
Lydia Sigourney, and others. Mr. Stowe sailed
from New York on the ship Montreal, June 8,
1836, just five months after his marriage.

During her husband's absence Mrs. Stowe con-
tinued to live at her father's house, and employed
herself in writing short stories, articles, and es-
says which appeared from time to time in the West-
ern Monthly Magazine,tixe New York Evangel-
ist, and other publications. She also assisted her
brother Henry Ward in editing the Joumaly a
small daily paper published in Cincinnati. In the
letter to Mrs. FoUen, already referred to, she
gives this account of her early married life : " I
was married when I was twenty-five years of age
to a man rich in Greek and Hebrew, Latin and
Arabic, and, alas, rich in nothing else. When I
went to housekeeping, my entire stock of China
for parlor and kitchen was bought for eleven dol-
lars. That lasted very well for two years till my

100 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

brother was married, and brought bis bride to
visit U3. I then found, on review, tbat I bad
neither plates nor tea-cups to set a table for my
father's family ; whereupon I thought it best to
reinforce the establishment by getting me a tea-
set tbat cost ten dollars more, and this, I be-
lieve, formed my whole stock in trade for many
years.

" But then I was abundantly enriched with
wealth of another sort. I had two little, curly-
headed twin daughters to begin with, and my
stock in this line has gradually increased till I
have been the mother of seveu children, the most
beautiful and the most loved of whom lies buned
near my Cincinnati residence.

"I lived two miles from the city of Cincinnati,
in the country, and domestic service, not always
to be found you know in the city, is next to an
impossibihty to obtain in the country, even by
those who are willing to give the highest wages;
so what was to be expected for poor me, who had
very little of this world's goods to offer ?

"Had it not been for my inseparable friend,
Anna, a noble-hearted English girl, who landed
on our shores in destitution and sorrow, and clave
to me as Ruth to Naomi, I had never lived through

1

WIFE AND MOTHER

101

all the trials which this uncertainty and want of
domestic service imposed upon us both."

While Professor Stowe was abroad his wife
kept him informed of the very signifioaDt events
that took place in Cincinnati during the summer
and fall of the year 1836. The burning question
of negro slavery had begun to be agitated ia Cin-
cinnati, and I^ne Theological Seminary came to
be looked upon as a hot-bed of abolitionism.

The Abolition movement was confined to the
students, however, and was led by Mr. Theodore
D. Weld, a man of remarkable decision and en-
ergy of character. He was unusually eloquent, a
strong, logical reasoner, and his personal influ-
ence was even greater than his eloquence, though
that enabled him to hold crowded audiences spell-
bound for many hours together. He had earned
money for his education by lecturing through the
Southern States, and what he then saw of slavery
made him, from the depths of his soul, its bitter
enemy. He had succeeded in converting a num-
ber of slave-holders to his views. Among them
was Mr. James G. Birney, of Hnntsville, Alabama,
who not only liberated his own slaves, but in con-
nection with Dr. GamaHel Bailey of Cincinnati,
founded and conducted in that city an AbolitioD

102 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

paper called the Pkilantkrojmt. This was
paper which was suppressed, and its office wrecked
by a mob, as recounted in Mrs. Stowe's letter
which follows : " Yesterday evening I spent scrib-
bling for Henry's newspaper, the Journal. It
was in this wise: 'Birney's printing press has
been mobbed, and many of the respectable citi-
zens are inclined to wink at the outrage in con-
sideratioD of its moving in the line of their pre-
judices.'

" I wrote a conversational sketch, in which
I rather satirized this inconsistent spirit, and
brought out the evil results of patronizing any
violation of private rights. It was in a light,
sketchy vein, and designed to draw attention to
a long editorial of Henry's in which he consid-
ered the subject fully and seriously. His piece is,
I think, a powerful one ; indeed, he does write
very strongly. lam quite proud of his editorials;
they are well studied, earnest, and dignified. I
think he will make a first-rate writer. Both of
our piecea have gone to press to-day, with Charles*
article on music, and we have had not a little di-
version about our family newspaper.

" I thought when I was writing last night, that
I was like a good wife defending one of your prin-

WIFE AND MOTHER

103

I

ciples in your absence, and wanted you to see how
manfully I talked about it. Henry has also taken
up and examined the question of the Semmole
Indians and done it very nobly.

"The excitement about Birney continues to in-
crease. The keeper of the FranbUn Hotel was as-
sailed by a document subscribed to by many of
his boarders demanding that Birney should be
turned out of doors. He chose to negative the
demand, and twelve of his boarders immediately
left. ... A meeting has been convoked by means
of a hand-bill, in which some of the most respect-
able men of the city are invited by name to come
together and consider whether tliey will allow Mr.
Birney to continue his paper in the city. Mr.
Greene says that, to bis utter surprise, many of
the most respectable and influential citizens gave
out that they should go.

"He was one of the number they invited, but
he told those who came to him that he would have
nothing to do with disorderly public meetings, or
mobs in any shape, and that be was entirely op-
posed to the whole thing.

*' I presume they will have a hot meeting if they
have any at all. I wish father were at home to
preach a sermon to his church, for many of the

preach a sermo

104 HARRIET BEECHEK STOWE

members do not frown on these things as thej
ought.

"Later: The meeting was lield, . . . The mob
madness is certainly upon this city when men o£
sense and standing will pass resolutions approving
in so many words of things done contrary to law,
as one of the resolutions of this meeting did. It
quoted the demolition of the tea in Boston harbor
as being authority and precedent.

" A large body, perhaps the majority, of citizens
disapprove, but I fear there will not be public dis-
avowal. . . . The editor of the Gazette, in a very
dignified and judicious manner, has condemned
the whole thing, and Henry has opposed, but
otherwise the papers have either been silent or in
favor of the mobs. We shall see what the result
will be in a few days.

" For my i)art I can easily see how such pro-
ceedings may make converts to abohtionism, for
akeady my sympathies are strongly enlisted for
Mr. Bimey, and I hope he will stand his ground
and assert his rights.

" The office is fire-proof and inclosed by high
walls. I wish he would man it with armed men
and see what can be done. If I were a man, I
would go for one, and take good care of at least

WD'E AND MOTHER

105

one window. Henry sits opposite to me writing a
most valiant editorial, and tells me to tell you he
is waxing mighty in battle."

One day during this period Mrs. Stowe found
Henry in the kitchen busily engaged in making
lead bullets for his pistols.

" What are you making those for, Henry ? " she
asked.

"To kill men with, Hattie!" he replied. Many
years later in telling this incident to her son, Mrs.
Stowe said, "I never saw Henry look so terrible!
I did not like it, for I feared he was growing
blood-thirsty."

"Were you never afraid, mother?" asked her
son.

"No, I don't remember being afraid exactly, —
I was excited, indignant, and thoroughly roused."

" I suppose that there was danger both then and
afterwards," she added, " but we were protected
by the distance of Lane Seminary from the city,
and the Providential depth and adhesiveness of
the Cincinnati mud in those days."

In her next letter to her husband, she says : " I
told you in my last that the mob broke into Bir-
ney'fi press, where, however, the mischief done
was but slight. The object appeared to be prin-

106 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

cipally to terrify. Immediately tbere followed a
general excitement in ^vhicb even good men in
their panic and prejudice about abolitionism foi^
got that mobs were worse evils than that, talked
against Birney, and winked at the outrage. . . .
Meanwhile, the turbulent spirits went beyond this
and talked of revolution and of righting things
without law that could not be righted by it, . . ,
A meeting was convoked at lower Market St. to
decide whether they would tolerate the publication
of an Abolition paper, and to this meeting all the
most respectable citizens were by name sum-
moned.

"There were four classes in the city then:
Those who meant to go as revolutionists, and
support the mob ; those who meant to put down
Birney but rather hoped to do it without a mob ;
those who felt ashamed to go, foreseeing the
probable consequences, and yet did not decidedly
frown upon it ; those who sternly and decidedly
reprehended it."

In the next paragraph we learn that Salmon
P. Chase was prominent in this last class.

She continues: "All the papers in the city
with the exception of Hammond's and Henry's
were either silent or openly mobocratic. As might

WIFE AND MOTHER

107

have been expected, Birnej refused to leave, and
that night the mob tore down his press, scattered
the types, dragged the whole to the river and
threw it in, and then came back to demolish the
office.

". . . The mayor was a silent spectator of theee
proceedings, and was heard to say, ' Well, lads,
you have done well, so far ; go home now before
you disgrace yourselves ' ; but the ' lads ' spent
the rest of the night, and a greater part of the
nest day, Sunday, in pulling down the houses of
inoffensive and respectable blacks. The Gazette
office was threatened, the Journal office was to
go next; Lane Seminary and the water works
were also mentioned as probable points to be at-
tacked by the mob.

" By Tuesday morning the city was pretty well
alarmed. A regular corps of volunteers was organ-
ized, who for three nights patrolled the streets
with fire-arma, and with legal warrant from the
mayor, who by this time was glad to give it, to
put down the mob even by bloodshed.

"For a day or two we did not know but there
would actually be war to the knife, as was
threatened by the mob, and we really saw Henry-
depart with his pistols with daily alarm, only we

108 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

were all too full of patriotism not to have sent
every brother we had rather than not have had
the principles of freedom and order defended.

" But here the tide turned. The mob, unsup-
ported bj a now frightened community, slunk
into their dena, and were still, . . ."

In speaking of the events of this crucial time
in her life Mrs. Stowe once said to her son : " I
saw for the first time clearly that the institution
of slavery was incapable of defence, and that it
■was for that reason that its supporters were com-
pelled to resort to mob-violence. I saw that it
was clearly incompatible with our free institutiona
and was confident that it was doomed, and that
it would go, but how or when I could not picture
to myself. That summer and fall opened my eyes
to the real nature of slavery as they had never
been opened before."

In September, 1836, while her husband was
still in Europe, Mrs. Stowe gave birth to twin
daughters, Eliza and Isabella as she named them,
but when Professor Stowe landed in New York in
Januaty, 1837, after a two months' passage by
sailing ship, be insisted that they should be
called Eliza Tyler and Harriet Beecher.

In the summer of 1837 Mrs. Stowe's health

WIFE AND MOTHER

109

forced her to put aside household cares, and
accordingly she made a long visit at the house of
her brother, the Rev, William Beecher, in Put-
nam, Ohio. From Putnam she writes: " The good
people here, you know, are about half Abolition-
ists, A lady who takes a leading part in the
female society in this place, called yesterday and
brought Catherine the proceedings of the Female
Anti-Slavery Convention.

" I should think them about as ultra as to mea-
sures as anything that has been attempted, though
I am glad to see a better spirit than marks such
proceedings generally.

" To-day I read some in Mr. Birney's Philan-
thropist. Abolition being the fashion here it is
natural to look at its papers. It does seem to me
there needs to be an intermediate society. If not,
as light increases, all the excesses of the AbohtioD
party will not prevent humane and conscientiouB
men from joining it."

The attitude of Mrs. Stowe and her husband
at this time towards the Abolition party was very
similar to the position of thousands of thought-
ful people to-day with regard to the Socialist
party. While deploring its excesses and unwisdom
in many particulars, they know it stands for great

110 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

and radical reforniB for which there ia a crying
need.

At the close of the letter Mrs. Stowe adda :
"Pray what is there in Cincinnati to satisfy one
whose mind is awakened on this subject (slavery)?
No one can have the system of slavery brought
before him without an irrepressible desire to do
Bomethiog, and what is there to be done ? "

Little did she then dream that she was " to
do something" which would be as potent as aoy
other one thing in "cutting the Gordian knot" of
this giant problem. At this time her husband wrote
her, "We all of course feci proper indignation at
the doings of the last General Assembly, and shall
treat them with merited contempt. This alliance
between the Old School Presbyterians and the
slave-holders will make more Abolitionists than
anything that has been done yet."

Great events hung like storm clouds on the
horizon of the year 18U8. In May of that year
the powerful Presbyterian Church of the United
States was rent asunder, tlie nominal cause being
differences in theological opinion, the underlying
cause slavery. Doctor Beecher and his sons were
conspicuous leaders in this great secession. At this
tinie a Lane student writes to Mrs. Stowe from

WIFE AND MOTHER

111

Philadelpbia aa follows : " Your father and brother
distinguished themselves In the Convention on
Monday and Tuesday. I did not hear them — did
not reach Philadelphia till yesterday evening.

" The Assembly Is by no means the most exciting
matter at present to the citizens. The heavens at
this moment are lighted up by the flames of the
Abolition or Liberty Hall in Sixth Street. The
mob have set it on fire. Itwas dedicated two weeks
ago, and cost forty tbousaud dollars. The Anti-
Slavery Society are holding a convention in it. Miss
Grimke,or rather Mrs. Weld,' spoke there (she was
married on Tuesday). The mob broke the windows.
Dr. Parrish told them not to hold night -meet-
ings; but they would. The ladies walk arm iu arm
with the blacks. I was there this afternoon : the
women were holding a convention. The streets
were thronged by the mob watching the door.

" So long as the Abolitionists kept away from
the negroes the street was still as the grave, — the
mob only looked on, — -but when they saw a huge
negro darken the door with a fair Quaker girl
hanging on his arm, they screamed and swore ven-
geance. The Mayor and Sheriff were on the ground.
The fire raged with great violence. The fire engines

t The wife of Theodore D. Weld.

112 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

refused to play upon the building. . . . TLe bell
of the State House is tolling again — there are
cries offirel . .. The heavens are lighted up I The
African Hall on Thirteenth St. is on fire. The mob
is cutting the hose that no water may reach it. . . .
That the Convention have been imprudent there
is no doubt ; but that the rabble in the midst of a
powerful and enlightened community should he
permitted to trample on all law is shameful."

History wan making fast about the humble
household in Cincinnati. In January of this event-
ful year Mrs. Stowe's third child, Henry Ellis, was
born. The following June she writes to Miss May :

" Only think how long it is since I have written
to you, and how changed I am since then — the
mother of three children ! Well, if I have not kept
the reckoning of old times, let this last circum-
stance prove my apology, for I have been hand,
heart, and head full since I saw you.

" Now to-day, for example : I will tell you what I
had in my mind from dawn till dewy eve. In the
first place I waked about half after four and
thought, 'Bless me, how light it is ! I must get out
of bed and rap to wake Mina up, for breakfast must
be ready at six o'clock this morning. So out of
bed I jump and seize the tongs and pound, pound,

WIFE AND MOTHER

113

pound, over poor Mina'a sleepy head, charitably
allowing her about half an hour to get waked up
in, — that being the quantum of time it takes me,
or used to. Well, then baby wakes, qua, qua, qua,
and I give him his breakfast, dozing meanwhile
and soliloquizing as follows : ' Now I must not for-
get to tell about the starch and dried apples ' —
doze — ' ah ! um dear me ! why does n't Mina get
up ? ' 'I don't hear her ' — doze — *a um I I won-
der if Mina has soap enough ! I think there were
two bars left on Saturday ' — doze again — I wake
again, ' Dear me ! broad daylight, I must get up
and go down and see if Mina is getting breakfast.'
Up I jump and up wakes baby, ' Now little boy be
good, and let mother dress for she is in a hurry.'
I get my frock half on, and baby by that time haa
kicked himself down off his pillow, and is crying
and fisting the bedclothes in great order. I stop
with one sleeve off and one on to settle matters
with him. Having planted him bolt upright and
gone all up and down the chamber bare-footed to
get blankets and pillows to prop him up, I finish
putting my frock on and hurry down to satisfy
myself by actual observation that breakfast is in
progress. Then back I come into the nursery,
where, remembering that it is washing day, and

114 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

that there is a great deal of work to be done, I set
myself to sweeping and dusting, and setting to
rights where there are three little mischiefs always
pulling down as fast as one can set up.

"Then there are Miss H and Miss E ,

concerning whom Mary will furnish you with all
suitable particulars, who are chattering, hallooing,
or singing at the tops of their voices, as may suit
theii various states of mind, while the nurse is
getting their breakfast ready.

"ThiB meal being cleared away and Mr. Stowe
dispatched to the market with various memoranda
of provisions, etc., and the baby being washedand
dressed, I begin to think what next must be done.
I start to cut out some little dresses, have just
calculated the length, and got one breadth torn
off when Master Henry makes a doleful hp, and
falls to crying with might and main. I catch
him up and turning around, see one of his sisters
flourishing the things out of my work-box in fine
style. . . .

" But let this sufBce, for of such details as these
are all my days made up. Indeed my dear I am a
mere drudge, with few ideas beyond babies and
housekeeping. As for thoughts, reflections, and
sentiments, good lack ! good lack I

WIFE AND MOTHER

115

" I suppose I am a dolefully uninteresting person
at present, but I hope I shall grow young again
one of these days, for it seems to me that matters
cannot always stand exactly as they do now,

" Well, Georgy, this marriage is— yes, I will
speak well of it, after all ; for when I can stop
and think long enough to discriminate my head
from my heels, I must say I think myself a fortu-
nate woman both in husband and children. My
children I would not change for all the ease, plea-
sure, and leisure I could have without them. They
are money on interest whose value will be con-
stantly increasing."

In May, 1840, a second son was bom, and
named Frederick William, in memory of the sturdy
Prussian King, for whom Professor Stowe cher-
ished an unbounded admiration. In December of
the same year Mrs. Stowe writes to Miss May
that for a year she has written nothing except an
occasional business letter. For months she could
not bear the least light and was confined to her bed
with severe neuralgic pain in face and eyes. Yet
she persistently looks on the bright side of it all
and reflects that, although she has been ill six
months out of twelve, she has had Anna the best
of nurses and a good home to be sick in, her chil-

116 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

dren have thriveo, and all things considered, her
troubles have been only sufficient to keep her from
loving this eaith too well.

In 1843 she visits her sister Mary in Hartford,
Connecticut, and while there, writes to her hus-
band, confiding to him some of her cherished litr
erary schemes. To this tetter he replies with
enthusiasm: "My dear, you must be a Uterary
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, flow-
ing, and full of meaning. Then my word for it,
your husband will lift up his head in the gate and
all your children will rise up and call you blessed."

To this she replies: " On the whole, my dear,
if I choose to be a literary lady, I have, I think,
as good a chance of making profit by it as any one
I know of. But with all this I have my doubts as
to whether I shall be able to do so.

" Our children are just coming to the age when
everything depends on my efforts. They are deli-
cate in health, and nervous and excitable, and

WIFE AND MOTHER

117

need a mother's whole atteotioD. 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 that shall he
mj room. ... I intend to have a regular part of
each day devoted to the children, and then I shall
take them in there,"

In his reply to this letter Professor Stowe contin-
ues : " You have it in your power by means of this
little magazine, the Soucenir [a new magazine to
which Mrs. Stowe was the leading contributor], to
form the mind of the West for the coming genera-
tion. It is just as I told you in my last letter. God
has written it in his book that you must be a liter-
ary woman, and who are we that we should con-
tend against God ? You must therefore make all
your calculations to spend the rest of your life
with your pen."

The following winter was one of sickness and
gloom. Typhoid fever raged among the students
of the seminary, and the house of the president
and those of the professors were turned into hos-
pitals. In July, 1843, a few weeks before the
birth of her third daughter, Georgiana May, Mrs.
Stowe was overwhelmed by a crushing blow that
fell like a thunder-holt out of a clear sky. Her

118 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE H

brother, Rev. George Beeeher, accidentally shot
himself ia his own garden. Of his funeral she
writes : '' And so it is at last ; there must come a
time when all the most heart-broken, idolizing love
can give us is a coffin and a grave. After all, the
deepest and most powerful argument for the re* 1
ligion of Christ is its power in times like this."

After three years filled with all imaginable
troubles of poverty, sickness, and death, she writes
in March, 1846 : " For all that I have bad trouble
I can think of nothing but the greatness and rich-
ness of God's mercy to me in giving me such
friends, and in always caring for us in every
strait. There has been no day this winter when I
have not bad abundant reason to see this. Some
friend has always stepped in to cheer and help bo
that I have wanted for nothing. My husband has
developed wonderfully as a housefather and nurse.
You would laugh to see him in his spectacles
gravely marching the little troop in their night-
gowns up to bed, tagging after them, as he says,
'like an old hen after a flock of ducks.'

" The money for my jouruey to the East has
been sent in a wonderful manner. All this shows
the c&re of our Father, and encourages me to re-
joice and to hope in Him." This letter is an apt

WIFE AND MOTHER

iUostration of her never failing faculty for being
strengthened instead of cruahed by trials. The
purpose of Mrs. Stowe's visit to the East was to
try hydropathic treatment at Dr. Wessellhofrs
Water Cure at Brattleboro, Vermont, Her allusion
to the way funds were piovided is explained in
this letter received from her husband a few days
after her departure: "I was greatly comforted
by your brief letter from Pittsbuj^. When I re-
turned from the steamer the morning you left, I
found in the post-office a letter from Mrs. G. W.
Bull of New York, inclosing fifty dollars on
account of sickness in my family. There was
another inclosing fifty dollars more from a Mrs.
Devereaux of Raleigh, North Carolina, besides
some smaller sums from others. My heart went
out to God in aspiration and gratitude. None of
the donors 80 far as I know have I ever seen or
heard of before."

When her water cure treatment is drawing to a
close. Professor Stowe writes to her : *' And now,
ray dear wife, 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 like
you in this wide world. Who else has so much

120 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

talent with ao little aelf-conceit; so much reputa-
tion with 90 little affectatiou ; so much literature
with so little nonseuae ; so much euterpme with
BO little extravagance ; so much tongue with so
little scold ; so mucli sweetness with so little soft-
ness; BO much o£ BO many things and so little of
BO many other thingB." In reply Mrs. Stowe writes :
"I told Belle that I did not know till I came away
how much I was dependent upon you for iuforma'
tion. There are a thousand favorite subjects on
which I could talk with you better than with any
one else. If you were not already my dearly loved
husband, I should certainly fall in love with you."
Unlike " the prophet in his own land," Mrs. Stowe
was most emphatically appreciated in her own
household long before the world knew her.

Just before her return from Brattleboro, Mrs.
Stowe writes to her husband: "In returning to
my family, from whom I have been so long sepa-
rated, I am impressed with a new and solemn
feeling of responsibility. It appears to me that I
am not probably destined for long life; at all
events, the feeling is strongly impressed upon my
mind that a work is put into my hands which I
muBt be earnest to finish shortly. It is nothing
great or brilliant in the world's eye ; it lies in one

WIFE AND MOTHER

121

Bmall family circle, of which I am called to he the
central point." This letter was written only six
years before the puhhcation of "Uncle Tom's
Cabin."

For six months after her return from this Water
Cure her eyes were so affected that she could write
very Uttle. Her health improved, however, after
the birth of her third son, Samuel Charles, id
January, 1848.

Finally, the Professor breaks down and has in
turn to seek health at Brattleboro. While he is
there Mrs. Stowe writes to her friend that she is
so crushed with cares as to be drained of all ca-
pacity for "thought, feeling, memory, or emo-
tion." In conclusion she adds with a return to
something of her old playfulness : " Well, Georgy,
I am thirty-seven years old ! I am glad of it. I
like to grow old and have six children, and cares
endless. I wish you could see me with my flock
all around me. They sum up my cares, and were
they gone I should ask myself, ' What now re-
mains to be done ? ' They are my work over
which I fear and tremble."

In 1849, while Professor Stowe was still in
Brattleboro and Mrs. Stowe and the faithful
Anna were struggling with the "cares endless"

HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

and the six children in Cincinnati, a terrible
scourge of cholera descended upon the city. The
disease was malignant and virulent. People fell
dead in the streets. Coffins containing the bodies
of the victims were often stacked up before the
houses waiting for any sort of a vehicle to take
them to a place of burial. The children enjoyed
the excitement, and ran into the house continually
with pew bulletins as to the number of coffins
borne past the house in the last half hour and
other equally exhilarating particulars. Large heaps
of coal burned day and night on the cross streets
and in the public squares, and the air had a deadly
oppressiveness that seemed to weigh like lead on
brain and heart. The death roll rose to one hun-
dred and sixteen in one day. And still all were
well in the Stowe household, and the Death Angel
had passed by the door. Then one hundred and
twenty deaths in a day became no unusual record.
People got accustomed to the situation. When
neighbors met on the street they made themselves
agreeable by reciting the number of deaths in
this or that house. Cholera dietetics, cholera medi-
cines, chloride of lime, and funerals became the
staple of daily conversation. Serious and reli-
gious persons threw in such moral and spiritual

WIFE AND MOTHER

123

reflections as seemed appropriate to the occa-
sion.

Then little Samuel Charles and Henry were both
taken sick. The little dog, Daisy, whom they all
loved, and who loved them all, was taken with
the dread disease, and died in frightful spasms in
half an hour. Little Charley followed, Mrs. Stowe
writes to her husband in Brattleboro : "At last it is
over, and our dear little one is gone from us. He
is now among the blessed. My Charley, my beauti-
ful, loving, gladsome baby, so loving, so sweet, so
full of life and strength — now lies shrouded pale
and cold in the room below. ... I write as if there
■were no sorrow like my sorrow, yet there has been
in this city, as in the land of Egypt, scarce a house
without its dead. This heart-break, this anguish,
has been everywhere, and where it will end God
only knows."

This was the grief of which she later said : " In
those depths of sorrow which seemed to me im-
measurable, it was my only prayer to God that
such anguish might not be suffered in vain. . . .
I felt that I could never be consoled for it, unless
this crushing of my own heart might enable me to
work out some great good to others."

CHAPTER V

HOW "tmCLE TOM 8 CABIN WAS BUILT

As a very little girl Mrs. Stowe had heard of the
horrors of slavery from her aunt, Mary Hubbard,
who had married a planter from the West Indies,
and been unable to live on her husband's planta-
tion because her health was undermined by the
mental anguish that she suffered at the scenes of
cruelty and wretchedness she was compelled to wit-
ness. She returned to the United States, and made
her home with the Beechers. Of her Mrs. Stowe
writes: "What she saw and heard of slavery filled
her with constant horror and loathing. I often
heard her say that she frequently sat by her win-
dow in the tropical night, when all was still, and
wished that the island might sink in the ocean,
with all its sin and misery, and that she might sink
with it." The effect of such expressions on the
mind of a sensitive child like Harriet Beecher may
well be imagined.

When she was about twenty years old she
went to live iii Cincinnati, on the very borders of

UNCLE TOM'S CABIN

125

a slave State, and frequently visited Kentucky
slave plantations, wbere she saw negro slavery in
that mild and patriarchal form in which she pic-
tures it in the opening chapters of '* Uncle Tom's
Cabin." At the time the Beechers were living in
Cincinnati, her brother Charles was driven nearly
distracted by trying to appropriate to himself his
father's Calvinistic theology, and the study of
Kdwards on the Will. Filled with fatalism and
despair, he gave up all hope of ever being able to
preach, left Cincinnati, and took a position as clerk
in a wholesale commission bouse in New Orleans
that did business with the Hed River cotton plan-
tations. It was from him that Mrs. Stowe obtained
the character of Legree. No character in the whole
book was drawn more exactly from life. Charles
Beecher and a young Englishman who was his
traveling companion, while on a Mississippi steam-
boat going from New Orleans to St. Louis, actually
witnessed the scene where the Legree of real life
showed his fist and boasted that it was "hard as
iron knocking down niggers, and that he didn't
bother with sick niggers, but worked his in with
the crop."

The scene in " Uncle Tom's Cabin " in which the
Senator takes Eliza into his carriage, after her wild

126 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

flight over the Ohio River on the floating ice, and
carries her on a dark and stormy Dight to a place
of safety, is a description of an event that took
place in Mrs. Stowe's own Cincinnati household.

She had in her family as a servant a young
woman whose little boy was the original uf the
"little Harry" of the story. One day she came to
Mrs. Stowe in great distress, and told her that her
old master was in the city looking for her, and
might at any moment appear and drag her hack
to slavery. That very night, dark and stormy
though it was, Professor Stowe and Henry Ward
Beecher, who was at that time a student in lane
Seminary, took the woman and her child in the
family carriage over just such roads as are de-
scribed in the book, and brought them to the lonely
farmhouse of a man named Van Sant, who ran
one of the stations of the underground railroad.
As they drove up to the house, Van Sant came
out with a lighted candle in his hand, shielding
the light from his eyes with his immense palm.

Professor Stowe sang out: "Are you the man
who will shelter a poor woman and her child from
slave-catchers?"

"I rather think I am," answered the big, honest
fellow.

I

UNCLE TOM'S CABIN

127

" I thought 90," exclaimed Professor Stowe, help-
ing the woman out of the carriage. So character
after character, and sceue after scene, in " Uncle
Tom's Cabin " might be traced to the actual events
and persons that inspired them years before the
faintest notion of writing such a book had ever
entered Mrs. Stowe's mind.

It was early in the month of May of the year
1850 that Mrs. Stowe, on her way to Brunswick,
Maine, reached the house of her brother, the Rev.
Edward Beecher, in Boston. She was weary and
physically exhausted with the long journey which
she had been compelled to make alone with the
whole charge of children, accounts, and baggage,
pushing her way through hurrying crowds, look-
ing out for trunks, and bargaining with express-
men and hackmen. Yet in Boston there was no
rest for her. She had to buy furniture and house-
hold supplies and have them packed and ready for
shipping by the Bath steamer, which she herself
was to take the following week, as on the whole
the easiest and cheapest way to reach Brunswick-
She had to save in every imaginable way, and to
keep a strict account of all money expended. As
a result she was able to write her husband, who was
ill in Cincinnati, that the whole expense of the

V28 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

journey from Cincinnati to Brunswick would be
only a trifle more than seventy-six dollars.

She found her brotlier Edward and his wife
greatly agitated over the Fugitive Slave Bill,
which was at the time being debated in Congress.
This law not only gave the slave-holder of the
South the right to seek out and drag back into
slavery any colored person that he claimed as bis
property, but commanded the people of the free
States to assist in this pitiless business. Doctor
Edward Beecherbad been the intimate friend and
supporter of Lovejoy, who bad not long before
been murdered by a pro-slavery mob for publishing
an Anti-Slavery paper. The most frequent topic
of conversation while Mrs. Stowe was in Boston
was this proposed law, and as the result her soul
was all on fire with indignation and grief over
what she felt to be a new enormity and wrong
about to be inflicted by the slave power on an
innocent and defenseless race.

On the eve of her departure for Brunswick she
wrote to her old friend of Hartford school days,
Greorgiana May, now Mrs. Sykes : " I am wearied
and worn out with seeing to bedsteads, tables,
chairs, mattresses, and with thinking about ship-
ping my goodsj and making out accounts, and I

UNCLE TOM'S CABIN

129

have my trunk yet to pack to go od board the
Bath steamer this evening.

" I beg you to look up Brunswick on the map;
it is about half a day's ride in the cars from Bos-
ton. I expect to reach there by the way of Bath
by to-morrow forenoon. There I have a house en-
gaged and kind friends who offer every hospitable
assistance. Come, therefore, to see me, and we will
have a loog talk in the pine woods, and knit up
the whole history from the place where we left it."

On her arrival in Brunswick, Mrs. Stowe was
treated to an instructive if depressing lesson in
New England weather. She says : " After a week
of most incessaiit northeast storm, most discourag-
ing and forlorn to the children, the sim has at
length come out. . . . There is a fair wind blow-
ing, and every prospect, therefore, that our goods
will arrive from Boston, and that we shall be in
our own house by next week."

In a letter written the following December to
her sister-in-law, Mrs. George Beecher, we have in
her own words a graphic and amusing picture of
that first spring and summer in Brunswick: —

" Is it really true that snow is on the ground
and Christmas coming, and I have not written unto
thee, most dear sister? No, I don't believe it! I

130 HARKIET BEECHEE STOWE

haven't been so naughty — it's all a mistake. Yes,
written I muat have, — and written I have, too, —
in the night watches as I lay ou my bed — such
beautiful letters — I wish you had only gotten
them; but by day it has been hurry, hurry, and
drive, drive, drive ! or else the calm of the uck-
room, ever since last spring.

"... 1 put off writing when your letter first came
because I meant to write you a long letter, — a
full and complete one ; and so the days slipped bj,
and became weeks, and then my little Charley
came.'

" Sarah, when I look back, I wonder at my-
self, not that I forgot anything that I should re-
member, but that I have remembered anything.
From the time that I left Cincinnati with my
children to come forth to a country that I
knew not of, almost to the present time, it has
seemed that I could scarcely breathe, I was so
pressed with care. My head dizzy with the whirl
of railroads and steamboats ; then ten days' so-
journ in Boston, and a constant toil and hurry
in buying my furniture and equipments ; and then
landing in Brunswick in the midst of a drizzly,
inexorable northeast storm, and beginning the

< HerteTeutbaadlastchUd.Cbu'les Edvard.boraJul; 8, 1850.

1

I

I

I

UNCLE TOM'S CABIN

131

work of getting in order a deserted, dreary, damp
old house. AH day long, running from one thing
to another, as for example thus : —

'"Mrs. Stowe, how shall I make this lounge,
and what shall I cover the back with first ? '

"Mrs. Stowe. 'With the coarse cotton in the
closet.'

*' Woman. ' Mrs. Stowe, there isn't any more
soap to clean the windows. Where shall I get
soap ? '

" Mrs. Stowe. * Here, Hattie, run up to the
store and get two bars.'

" ' There is a man below wants to see Mrs. Stowe
about the cistern.'

'* ' Before you go down, Mrs. Stowe, show mo
how to cover this round end of the lounge.'

" ' There 's a man up from the station, and he
says that there is a box that has come for Mrs.
Stowe, and it's coming up to the house ; wiU you
come down and see about it? '

" ' Mrs. Stowe, don't go till you have shown
the man how to nail the carpet in the corner.
He 's nailed it all crooked ; what shall he do ?
The black thread is all used up ; what shall I do
about putting gimp on the back of that sofa ?
Mrs. Stowe, there is aman come with a lot of pails

132 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

aDd tinware from Furbifili ; will you aettle the bill
now?'

'"Mrs. Stowe, here is a letter just come from
Boston incloaing that bill of lading; the man wants
to know what he shall do with the goods. If you
will tell me what to say, I will answer the letter
for you.'

" ' Mrs. Stowe, the meat-man is at the door.
Had n't we better get a little beef-steak or some-
thing for dinner ? '

'"Shall Hattie go to Boardman's for some
more black thread ? '

" * Mrs. Stowe, this cushion is an inch too wide
for the frame; what shall we do now? '

" ' Mrs. Stowe, where are the screws of the
black-walnut bedstead? '

" * Here 's a man has brought in those hills for
freight ; will you settle them now ? '

" ' Mrs. Stowe, I don't understand using this
great needle. I can't make it go through the
cushion ; it sticks in the cotton.'

" Then comes a letter from my husband, saying
that he is sick abed, and all hut dead ; don't ever
expect to see his family again ; wants to know how
I shall manage in case I am left a widow ; knows
that we shall get into debt and never get out ;

UNCLE TOM'S CABIN

133

wonders at my courage ; thinks that I am very
sanguine ; warns me to be prudent, as there won't
be much to live on in case of his death, etc., etc.,
etc. I read the letter, and poke it into the atOTe,
and proceed. . . .

" Some of my adventures were quite funny ; as,
for example, I had in mj kitchen elect no sink,
cistern, or any other water privileges, so I bought
at the cotton factory two of the great hogsheads
that they bring oil in, which here in Brunswick
are often used for cisterns, and had them brought
up ia triumph to my yard, and was congratulating
myself on my energy, when, lo and behold ! it
was discovered that there was no cellar door ex-
cept the one in the kitchen, which was truly a
straight and narrow way down a long flight of
stairs. Hereupon, as saith John Bunyan, ' I fell
into a muse ' — how to get my cisterns into my
cellar. In the days of chivalry I might have
got me a knight to make me a breach through
the foundation walls; but that was not to be
thought of now, and my oil hogsheads standing
disconsolately In the yard seemed to reflect no
great credit on my foresight. In this strait, I fell
upon a real honest Yankee cooper, whom I be-
sought, for the reputation of liis craft and mine.

134 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

to take my hogsheads in pieces, and carry them
down m staves, and set them up again, which the
worthy man actually accomplished in one fair sum-
mer forenoon, to the great astonishment of us
Yankees. When my man came to put up the
pump, he stared very hard to see my hogsheads
thus translated and standing as innocently and
quietly as could be in the cellar. Then I told him
in a very quiet and mild way how I got them taken
to pieces and put together again, just as if I had
been always in the habit of doing such things.

*' Professor Smith came down and looked very
hard at them, and then said, * Well, nothing can
beat a willful woman ! '

" In all my moving and fussing Mr. Titcomb
has been my right-hand man. This same John
Titcomb, my very good friend, is a character pecul-
iar to Yankeedom. He is part owner and land-
lord of the house I rent, and connected by birth
with all the best families in town, — a man of real
intelligence and good education, a great reader,
and quite a tliiuker. . . . Whenever a screw was
loose, a nail to be driven, a lock to be mended,
a pane of glass to be set, — and these cases were
manifold, — he was always ou hand. My sink,
however, was no fancy job, and I believe that

UNCLE TOM'S CABIN

135

nothing but a very particular friendship would have
moved him to undertake it. , . . How many times
I have entered his shop, and seated myself in one
of the old rocking-chairs, and first talked of the
news of the day, the railroad, the last proceedings
in Congress, the probahilities about the millen-
nium, and thus brought the conversation by little
and little round to my sink ; because, till the sink
was done, the pump could not be put up, and
we could n't have any rain water. Sometimes
my courage quite failed me to introduce the sub-
ject, and I would talk of everything else, turn
and get out of the shop, and then come back,
as if a thought bad just struck my mind, and
say: —

"'Mr. Titcomb, about that sink?'

'"Yes, ma'am; I was thinking about going
down street this afternooD to look out stuff for

" ' Yes, sir, if you would be good enough to get
it done as soon as possible; we are in great need
of it.'

"'I think there's no hurry. I believe we are
going to have a dry time now, so that you could
not catch any water, and you won't need the pump
at present.'

136 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

"These negotiations extended from the first of
June to the first of July, and at last my sink was
completed, as also was a new house-spout, eoncem-
ing which I had divers communings with Deacon
Dunning of the Baptist Church.

" Also, during this time, good Mrs. Mitchell and
myself made two sofas, or louuges, a barrel-chair,
divers bedspreads, pillow-cases, pillows, bolsters,
mattresses; we painted rooms; we revarnished fur-
niture; we — what didn't we do?

"Then came Mr. Stowe, and then came the
eighth of July, and my little Charley. I was really
glad for an excuse to lie in bed, for I was full tired,
I can assure you. Well, I was what folks call very
comfortable for two weeks, when my nurse had to

.ve me.

"During this time I have employed my leisure
hours in making up my engagements with news-
paper editors. I have written more than anybody
or I myself would have thought to be possible. I
have taught an hour a day in our school, and I
have read two hours every evening to the children.
The children study English history in school, and
I am reading Scott's historical novels with them
in their order. To-night I finish ' The Abbot,' and
shall begin ' Kenilworth ' next week. Yet I am con-

L^

UNCLE TOM'S CABIN

137

Btantlj pursued and hauuted by the idea that I
don't do anything.

"Since I began this note, I have been called off
at least a dozen times : once for the fish-man, to
buy a codfish ; once to see a roan who had brought
me some barrels of apples; once to see a book agent;
then to Mrs. Upbam's to see about a drawing I
promised to make for her ; then to nurse the baby ;
then into the kitchen to make a chowder for din-
ner; and now I am at it again, for nothing but
deadly determination enables me ever to write ; it
is rowing against wind and tide."

While all this was going on in Brunswick, her
brother's family in Boston were consumed with
righteous indignation over the workings of the
Fugitive Slave Law.

Mrs. Stowe received letter after letter from Mrs.
Edward Beecher and other friends, picturing the
heartrending scenes which were the inevitable re-
sults of the enforcement of this inhuman law. Cities
were betteradapted than the country to the work of
capturing escaped slaves, and Boston, called the
" Cradle of Liberty," opened her doors to slave-hun-
ters. The sorrow and anguish caused was indescrib-
able. Famihes were broken up. Some of the hunted
ones hid in garrets and cellars. Others fled to the

138 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

wharves and embarking in ships, sailed for Europe.
Others tried to make their way to Canada. One poor
fellow who had long been supporting his family well
as a crockery merchant, when he got word that his
master was in the city seeking him, set out in mid-
winter to walk to Canada, as he dared not take a
public conveyance, and froze both his feet on the
journey. They had to be amputated.

Mrs. Edward Beecher, writiug of this period to
Mrs. Stowe's youngest son, says: —

"I had been nourishing an Anti-Slavery spirit
since Lovejoy was murdered for publishing in his
paper articles against slavery and intemperance,
when our home was in Illinois. These terrible
things that were going on in Boston were well
calculated to rouse up this spirit. What can I do?
I thought. Not much myself, but I know one who
can. So I wrote several letters to your mother,
telling her of the various heartrending events
caused by the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave
Law, I remember distinctly saying in one of them :
'Now, Hattie, if 1 could use a pen as you can, I
would write something that would make this whole
nation feel what an accursed thing slavery is!'"

A daughter of Mrs. Stowe well remembered her
whole life long the scene in the httle parlor in Bruits-

UNCLE TOM'S CABIN 139

wick when this letter was received and read. Mrs.
Stowe read it aloud to tlie assembled family, and
■when she came to the words, " I would write aome-
thiog that would uiake this whole nation feel what
an accursed thing slavery is," rising from her chair,
and crushing the letter in her band, she exclaimed,
with an egression on her face that stamped itself
permanently on the miuds of her children : —

*' God helping me, I will write something. I will
if I live."

This purpose, though then definitely formed,
could not be immediately carried out. In a letter
written in the month of December, 1850, she re-
fers to the matter In a way that shows how it
weighed upou her mind : —

"Tell sister Katy that I thank her for her let-
ter, and will answer it. As long as the haby sleeps
with me nights, I can't do much at anything; hut
I will do it at last. I will write that thing if I
live.

"What are folks in general saying about the
slave law, and the stand taken by Boston ministers
in general, except Edward?

"To me it is incredible, amazing, mournful! I
feel that I should be willing to sink with it, were
all this sin and misery to sink in the sea. ... I

140 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

wish father would come on to Boston and preach
on the Fugitive Slave Law, as he once preached
on the slave trade, when 1 was a little girl in Litch-
field. I sohhed aloud in one pew, and Mrs. Judge
Reeve in another. I wish some Martin Luther would
arise to set this community right."

At this time Mrs. Stowe was not an Abolition-
ist, nor did she ever become one after the Garri-
Bonian type. She remembered hearing her father
say about Garrison and Wendell Phillips that they
were like men that would burn their houses down
to get rid of the rats. She was virtually in sympa-
thy with her father on the subject of slavery, and
had unlimited confidence in his judgment. What
Doctor Beecher thought of the Abolitionists, he
expressed with a vigor and clarity that left no
doubt as to his position. He said: —

"I regard the whole Abolition movement, under
its most influential leaders, with its distinctive max-
ims and modes of feeling, and also the whole tem-
per, principles, and action of the South in justifica-
tion of slavery, as a singular instance of infatuation
permitted by Heaven for purposes of national re-
tribution. God never raised up such men as Gar-
rison and others like him as the ministers of his
mercy for purposes of peaceful reform, but only

UNCLE TOM'S CABIN

as the fit and fearful ministers of his vengeance
upon a people incorrigibly wicked."

These words were written in 1838, and show how
true was the prophetic sense of Lyman Beeeher.
Garrison was at this time preaching secession and
praying for the dissolution of the Union, and call-
ing the Constitution of the United States a " Cove-
nant with Death and an Agreement with Hell."
No true Abolitionist should vote or have anything
to do with the Government as then constituted.
In this sense, neither Mrs. Stowe nor her husband
were Abolitionists. Mrs. Stowe wished to be more
than fair to the South. She intended to be gener-
ous. She made two of Uncle Tom's three masters
men of good character, amiable, kind, and gener-
ous. She tried to show that the fault was not with
the Southern people, but with the system. A friend
of hers, who had many friends in the South, wrote
to her : " Your book is going to be the great
pacificator; it will unite North and South." Mrs.
Stowe did not expect that the Abolitionists would
be satisfied with the story, but she confidently ex-
pected that it would be favorably received in the
South. Great was her surprise, then, when from
the whole South arose a storm of abuse, while the
Abolitionists received her with open arms. Mr.

142 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

Garrison wrote : " I measure the value of Abolition
literature by the abuse it brings- Since ' Uncle
Tom's Cabin ' has been published, all the defend-
ers of slavery have let me alone and are spending
their strength in abusing you."

It was in the winter of 1850 that she wrote to ber
husband, who was in Cincinnati, giving a picture
of her life in the old, wind-swept castle of a house
in Brunswick.

" Sunday night I rather watched than slept.
The wind howled, and the house rocked, just as
our old Litchfield house used to do. ... I am
projecting a sketch for the Era on the capacity
of bberated blacks to take care of themselves.
Can't you find out for me how much Willie Wat-
son has paid for the liberation of his friends? Get
any items of that kind that you can pick up in
Cincinnati. . . .

** When I have a headache, and feel sick, as I
do to-day, there is actually not a place in the house
where I can lie down and take a nap without being
disturbed. Overhead is the schoolroom ; next door
is the dining-room, and the girls practice there two
hours a day on the piano. If I lock my door and
lie down, some one is sure to be rattling the latch
before two minutes have passed. , . .

UNCLE TOM'S CABIN

143

"There is no doubt in my mind that our ex-
penses this year will come two hundred dollars, if
not three, beyond our salary. We shall be able to
come through notwithstanding; but 1 don't want
to feel obliged to work as bard every year as I
have this. I can earn four hundred dollars a year
by writing ; but I don't want to feel that I must,
when weary with teaching the children,andtendiDg
the baby, and buying provisions, and mending
dresses, and darning stockings, sit down and write
a piece for some paper."

Again she writes : —

" Ever since we left Cincinnati to come here,
the good hand of God haa been visibly guiding
our way. Through what difficulties have wo been
brought ! Though we knew not where means were
to come from, yet means have been furnished at
every step of the way, and in every time of need.
I was just in some discouragement with regard to
my writing, thinking that the editor of the Era
was overstocked with contributors and would not
want my services another year, and, lo, he sends
me one hundred dollars, and ever so many good
words with it. Our income this year will be seven-
teen hundred dollars in all, and I hope to bring
our expenses wittiln thirteen hundred." At the

144 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

time she wrote these words she had no idea or
conception of writing such a serial story as " Uncle
Tom's Cahin." It is true that she was determined
to write something to make the whole nation feel
that slavery was an "accursed thing," but what
she was to write had not, in the dimmest outline,
as yet formed itself in her mind.

About the last of January, 1850, she went to
Boston to visit her brother Edward, and there she
met, for the first time, the Rev. Josiah Henson.
She beard his story of his escape from slavery.
He remembered seeing his own father lying on
the ground, bruised, bloody, and dying from the
blows of a white overseer, because, mere slave and
"nigger" that he was, he had pretended that the
mother of his children was his wife, and had tried
to defend her from an indecent assault that this
same overseer had attempted on her person. What
struck her most forcibly in Henson's story was the
Bweet Christian spirit of the man, as manifested
even when he spoke of injuries calculated to rouse
a human being to a frenzy of vindictive revenge-
fulness.

Shortly after this visit to Boston, Mrs. Stowe
was seated in her pew in the college church at
Brunswick during the communion service. She

UNCLE TOM'S CABIN

145

T^as alone with her children, her husband having
gone awaj to deliver a course of lectures. Sud-
denly, like the unrolling o£ a picture scroll, the
scene of the death of Uncle Tom seemed to pass
before her. At the same time, the words of Jesus
were sounding in her ears : " Inasmuch as ye have
done it unto one of the least of these my hretb-
ren, ye have done it unto me." It seemed as if
the crucified, but now risen and glorified Christ,
were speaking to her through the poor black man,
cut and bleeding under the blows of the slave
whip. She was affected so strongly that she could
scarcely keep from weeping aloud.

That Sunday afternoon she went to her room,
locked the door, and wrote out, substantially as it
appears in the published editions, the chapter
called " The Death of Uncle Tom." As sufficient
paper was not at hand, she wrote a large part of
it in pencil on some brown paper in which gro-
ceries had been delivered. It seemed to her as if
what she wrote was blown through her mind as
with the rushing of a mighty wind. In the even-
ing she gathered her little family about her and
read them what she had written. Her two little
boys of ten and twelve hurst into tears, sobbing
out, " Oh, mama, slavery is the most cruel thing

HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

in the world ! " This was the beginniog of " Uncle
Tom's Cabin." She was not apparently conscious
of what she had done, nor did she immediately
consider making use of the fragment she had
written.

In an introduction to " Uncle Tom's Cabin,"
written late in life, Mrs. Stowe refers to the inci-
dent of Eliza's flight over the ice as the first
" salient point " in the story. She also refers to
the incident as though she had learned o£ it for
the first time in the pages of an Anti-Slavery
magazine. As a matter of fact, it was an actual
occurrence during her residence in Ohio. She
had known and had often talked with the very
man who helped Eliza up the bank of the river.
This was years before she had ever thought of
writing such a book as " Uncle Tom's Cabin."
No one is entirely reliable as a witness to events
long past. Furthermore, in Mrs. Stowe's case, the
great burden of so many overtaxed years had by
this time made her memory more treacherous than
she or her family realized. Professor Stowe, who
was still living at the time, called attention to
these and other inaccuracies, but for some reason
not known they were never corrected.

At the time this occurred Mrs. Stowe's mind

UNCLE TOM'S CABIN 147

was apparently so absorbed by pressiag domestic
duties tbat what she had written was laid one
side and for the time forgotteo. She did not even
show it to her husband, on his return from his
lecture trip. One day she found him dissolved in
tears over the bits of brown paper on which
she had written the first words of " Uncle Tom's
Cabin." Largely at his suggestion, she determined
to write a serial story, the climax of which was
to be the death of Uncle Tom. Some weeks
slipped by before she wrote the first instalment
of the proposed novel. In the mean time she h.id
written to Gamaliel Bailey, editor of the National
Era, an Abolition paper published in Washings
ton, District of Columbia, that she contemplated a
serial story under the title, " Uncle Tom's Cabin,
or Life Among the Lowly," and asking if it would
be acceptable to the Era.

Neither Mrs. Stowe nor her husband had the
remotest idea of the unique power and interest of
the story that was being written. Nor, indeed,
did it dawn upon either of them until after the
publication of the first edition in book form.
Professor Stowe was a very emotional man, and
was accustomed to water his wife's literary efforts
hberally with his tears ; so the fact that he

148 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

had wept over the bits of brown paper bad for
them DO unusual portent. As to pecuniary gain,
he often expressed the hope that she would make
monej enough by the story to buy a new silk
dress.

It was a jolly, rollicking household in Bruns-
wick, and Mrs. Stowe was herself full of fun. It
was during the writing of "Uncle Tom's Cabin"
that there occurred the following incident charac-
teristic of the family Ufa. Professor Stowe was at
heart one of the most genial of men ; but, being
of an exceedingly nervous temperament, he was
liable to go oif at half cock on the slightest pro-
vocation, and become for the time being unplea-
santly peppery. One day he bought a dozen eggs
to set under a brooding hen, with a view to pro-
ducing an unusually fine lot of chickens. With-
out disclosing his purpose be hid the eggs, as he
thought securely, in the wood-shed. One of the
children discovered them, and bore them in tri-
umph into the house. Mrs. Stowe was on the
point of sending to the store for eggs, and look-
ing upon this discovery as providential, took
them and had them cooked. Upon returning from
one of his lectures, the Professor felt himself
the most abused of men when he sought his eggs

UNCLE TOM'S CABIN

149

and found them not, and vented his wrath upon
his innocent household in a form at once dramatic
and picturesque. Then off he went to another
lecture, ia a forbidding frame of mind.

" Pa 'a mad ! " observed one of the children.

" I tell you what we '11 do, children ; when he
comes back to dinner, we will make him laugh
and he '11 get all over it," said Mrs. Stowe, with
a roguish twinkle in her eye. The Professor re-
turned, and found the dinner on the table, ready
and waiting, but not one of the family visible.
While speculating on this unusual state of aSairs,
he beard a very human imitation of the cackling
of hens proceeding from the wood-shed. It made
up in vigor what it lacked in genuineness. On in-
vestigation, he found his wife and all the children,
and even Rover, the dog, perched on a beam,
after the manner peculiar to hens. He hurst into
laughter, and they all trooped into the house and
had a very jolly time at dinner.

" Uncle Tom's Cabin " began as a serial in the
National Era, June 5, 1851, and in July of the
same year Mrs. Stowe wrote as follows to Fred-
erick Douglass : " You may perhaps have noticed
in your editorial readings a series of articles that
I am furnishing for the Era, under the title

150 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

of 'Uncle Tom's Cabin, or Life Among the

Lowly.'

" In the courae 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 such information as I desire. I have before
me an able paper written by a Southern planter,
in which the details and vtodus ojierandi are
given from his point of sight. I am anxious to
have something more from another standpoint. I
wish to make a picture that shall be graphic and
true to nature in its details. Such a person as
Henry Bibb, if in the country, might give me just
the kind of information I desire. You may pos-
sibly know of some other person. I will subjoin
to this letter a list of questions, which in that case
you will do me a favor by inclosing to the indi-
vidual, with the request that he will at earliest
convenience answer them. . , ."

Then, after a vigorous defense of churches and
ministers whom Douglass had assailed, she con-
tinues: —

" I am a minister's daughter, and a minister's

UNCLE TOM'S CABIN

151

wife, and I have had slx brothers in the ministry
(ooe is in Heaven) ; I certainly ought to know
something; of the feelings of ministers on this snb-
ject.

"I waa 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.
I remember his preaching drawing tears down the
hardest faces of the old farmers of his congrega-
tion.

" I remember his prayers, morning and evenings
in the family for ' poor, oppressed, bleeding Af-
rica,' that the time of her deliverance might come ;
prayers offered with strong crying and tears,
prayers that indelibly impressed my heart, and
made me, what I am, the enemy of all slavery. . . .

" Every brother I have has been in his sphere
a leading Anti-Slavery man. One of them, Edward,
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 lib-

152 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

erated slaves into a family school, and taught them
with my own children. . . ."

In a letter written to Mrs. Follen in February,
1853, after the publication of " Uncle Tom's
Cabin," Mrs. Stowe throws additional light on the
way in which that Cabin was built out of the sor-
rows and experiences of her own life. Speaking
of her life in Cincinnati, she writes : —

" A number of poor families settled in our vicin-
ity, from whom we could occasionally obtain do-
mestic service. About a dozen families of liberated
slaves were among the number, and they became
my favorite resort in cases of emergency. If any
one wants to see a black face look handsome, let
them be left, as I have been, in feeble health, in
oppressive weather, with a sick baby in arms, and
two or three other little ones in the nursery, and
not a servant in the whole house to do a single
turn. Then, if they could see my good old Aunt
Frankie coming with her honest, bluff, black face,
her long strong arms, her chest as big and stout
as a barrel, and her hilarious, hearty laugh, per-
fectly delighted to take one's washing, and do it
at a fair price, they would appreciate the beauty
of black people. My cook, Eliza Buck, was a reg-
ular epitome of slave life in herself, — fat, gentle.

UNCLE TOM'S CABIN

153

easy, loving, and lovable, always calling my very
modest house and door-yard ' The Place,' as i£ it
had been a plantation with seven hundred hands
on it. She had lived through the whole sad story
of a Virginia- raised slave's life. In her youth she
must have been a very handsome mulatto girl.
Her voice was sweet, and her manners refined and
agreeable. She was raised in a good family as a
nurse and seamstress. When the family became
embarrassed, she was suddenly sold on to a plan-
tation in Louisiana. She has often told me how,
without any warning, she was suddenly forced
into a carriage, and saw her little mistress scream-
ing and stretching her arms from a window toward
her as she was driven away. She has told me of
scenes on the Louisiana plantation, and she has
often been out at night by stealth, ministering to
poor slaves who had been mangled and lacerated
by the lash. Then she was sold into Kentucky,
and her last master was the father of all her chil-
dren. On this point she always maintained a deli-
cacy and reserve that seemed to me remarkable.
She always called him her husband, and it was not
till after she had lived with me some years that I
discovered the real nature of the connection. I
shall never forget how sorry I felt for her, nor my

164 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

feelings at her humble apology, ' You know, Mrs.
Stowe, slave womeu caiinot help themselves.' She
had two very pretty quadroon daughters, with
her hair and eyes, — interesting children, whom I
instructed in the family school with my own chil-
dren. Time would fail to tell you all that I learned
incidentally of the slave system in the history of
various slaves who came into my family, and of
the underground railway, which, I may say, ran
through our house."

Later in this same letter she connects intimately
the writing of "Uncle Tom's Cahin" with her
own griefs and bereavements. " I have been the
mother of seven children, the most beautiful and
most loved of whom lies buried near my Cincin-
nati residence. It was at his dying bed and
at his grave that I learned what a poor slave
mother may feel when her child is torn away
from her. In these depths of sorrow, which
seemed to me immeasurable, it was my only
prayer to God that such anguish might not be
suffered in vain. There were circumstances about
his death of such peculiar bitterness, of what
seemed almost cruel suffering, that I felt that I
could never be consoled for it, unless this crush-
ing of my own heart might enable me to work

UNCLE TOM'S CABIN

155

oat some great good to others. I allude to this
here, for I have often felt that much that is in
that book, * UdcIb Tom's Cabin,' had its root in
the awful scenes and bitter sorrows of that sum-
mer. It has left DOW, I trust, no trace on my mind
except a deep compassion for tlie sorrowful, espe-
cially for mothers who are separated from their
children."

Such is Mrs. Stowe's own account of where and
how she gained tlie material and the inspiration
for writing " Uncle Tom's Cabin." The book
came as the ripe fruit of ber whole life experience
up to the time when she wrote the first words on
the rough pieces of brown paper.

It was written mostly in Brunswick, Maine.
Some of the chapters were written in Boston,
while she was visiting her brother, Edward Beecher,
and part of the concluding chapter in Andover.
Begun as a serial in the National Era, June 5,
lS51,andannounced to run for but three months,
it was not completed till April 1, 1852, and was
published in book form March 20 of the same
year.

John P. Jewett, a young publisher of Boston,
made overtures for the publication of " Uncle
Tom's Cabin " in book form long before it was

156 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

finished as a serial in the National Era. The con-
tract was finally signed March Vi, 1852. Not long
before this, Mr. Jewett wrote Mrs. Stowe, express-
ing the fear that she was making the story too
long for one volume. He reminded her that the
subject was unpopular, and that, while one short
volume might possibly sell, two volumes might
prove a fatal obstacle to the success of the book.
Mrs. Stowe replied that she did not make the story,
that the story made itself, and that she could not
stop till it was done.

Mr. Jewett offered her either ten per cent on all
sales, or half profits with half the risk in case the
venture proved unprofitable. Professor and Mrs,
Stowe had for their business adviser Mr. Philip
Greeley, who had formerly been Collector of the
Port of Boston and was then a member of Con-
gress. On this matter, without reading the story,
he strongly advised them to accept the ten per
cent on all sales, and to take no risk whatever in
the enterprise. He reasoned that the subject was
very unpopular, and that a book written by a
woman could not be expected to have a very large
sale in any case. Doctor Stowe took the first copy
of the first edition to the railroad station and put
it into Mr. Greeley's haods just as he was leaving

UNCLE TOM'S CABIN

157

for Washington. Greeley was a sedate and self-
contained man, — a characteristically unemotional
New Englaoder. Afterward he wrote to Professor
Stowe that he began the hook shortly after the
train pulled out of the station, and that as he read
he began to cry. He was humiliated. He bad never
before shed tears over a novel, still less over the
work of a woman. Yet after he had begun it, he
could not stop reading, nor could he keep the tears
back as he read. Consequently, ou reaching Spring-
field, he left the train and went to a hotel, took a
room, and sat up till he finished the book in the
early hours of the morning.

CHAPTER VI

PBOH OBSCUHITT TO FAME

OifB apparently trivial incident in Mrs. Stowe's
life ploughed itself so deeply into her memory
that it left an enduring impression. It was at the
time when she, with her five little children, was
making her way alone from Cincinnati to Bruns-
vick, bargaining with hackmen and baggage men,
amid the confusion of hurrying crowds and the
rush and roar of steamboats and trains. Uncon-
scionably early one morning she found herself at
a railroad station where she must wait three weary
hours for the next train. She sat on her baggage,
her children grouped about her, looking, according
to her own testimony, extremely shabby and dis-
consolate. In this attitude she was discovered by
a brisk and self-important little station agent, who
evidently regarded her with suspicion as an un-
desirable citizen, and questioned her with extreme
asperity o£ manner as to where she came from and
where she was going. When she had answered
quietly and briefly, the peremptory little function-

FROM OBSCURITY TO FAME 159

axy strode away and left her 'with an uDreasoiiable
but keen consciousness o£ her own insignificance.
This was Harriet Beecher Stowe two years before
the writing of " Uncle Tom's Cabin." That this
brisk httle watch-dog of respectability felt called
upon to bark at her struck her sense of humor,
and she often told of it with a twinkle in her eye.
George Eliot has somewhere remarked that even
the great Sir Isaac Newton surveying his counte-
nance in the convex lense of a highly polished
door knob would have been compelled to rest sat-
isfied " with the facial angles of a bumpkin," hut
Harriet Beecher Stowe was not inchned to seek
consolations of this nature at the expense of the
brisk little station agent. On the contrary, the
Apostle Paul himself could not have had a keener
sense of his own weakness according to the flesh
than had Mrs. Stowe. " So you want to know
something about what sort of a woman I am ! "
she writes Mrs. Follen immediately after the pub-
lication of " Uncle Tom's Cabin." " Well, if this is
any object, you shall have statistics free of charge.
To begin, then, I am a little bit of a woman, — •
somewhat more than forty, just as thin and dry as
a pinch of snuS ; never very much to look at in
my best days, and looking like a used-up article

160 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

now." This was the Harriet Beeober Stowe that
the aggressive little station master found sitting
on her luggage with her five children about her
in the dim and misty dawn of an April morning
in the year 1850.

Two years later this little woman "just as thin
and dry as a pinch of snuff " had written a story
called "Uncle Tom's Cabin." Looking back on that
time more than thirty years afterwards, she writes :
" * Uncle Tom's Cabin ' was published March 20,
1852. The despondency of the author as to whether
anybody would read or attend to her appeal was
soon dispelled. Ten thousand copies were sold in
a few days, and over three hundred thousand within
a year, and eight power presses running day and
night were barely able to keep pace with the de-
mand for it. It was read everywhere, apparently,
and by everybody, and she soon began to hear
echoes of sympathy from all over the land. The
indignation, the pity, the distress, that had long
weighed upon her soul seemed to pass off from her
and into the readers of the book."

It was like the kindling of a mighty confiagrar
tion, the sky was all aglow with the resistless tide
of emotion that swept all before it and even
crossed the broad ocean, till it seemed as if the

■^

i

i

"ii

4

^v

^ ^^-^

.1 -

^Miil

^

FROM OBSCURITY TO FAME 161

whole world scarcely thought or talked of any-
thing else. Theu, multitudes began to ask who
had done this thing? Who had set the world on
fire? And, lo, there stood outlined against the
great light *' a little bit of a woman . . . just
as thin and dry as a piuch of snuff."

That was Harriet Beecher Stowe. lake the
noise of mighty winds, like the rushing of the
waters, there arose from the earth a tumult of
human voices. There was the voice of weeping,
and the cry of those who said, " Can nothing
be done to banish this accursed thing from off
the face of the earth?" Then followed the out-
burst of rage, hatred, and defiance. The hells
were stirred to their very depths, and belched
obscenity and profanity.

There came to Mrs. Stowe letters " so curiously
compounded of blasphemy, cruelty, and obscenity
that their like could only be expressed by John
Bunyan's account of the speech of ApoUyon:
'He spake as a dragon.' "

Let us hear again what Mrs. Stowe herself
said: —

" For a time, after it [' Uncle Tom's Cabin ']
was issued, it seemed to go by acclamation. From
quarters most unexpected, from all political parties,

162 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

came a moet unbroken chorus of approbation. I
was very much surprised, for I knew the explosive
nature of the subject. It was not till the sale had
run to over a hundred thousand copies that re*
action began, and the reaction was led oS by the
London Times. Instantly, as by a preconcerted
signal, all papers of a certain class began to abuse ;
and some who had at first issued articles entirely
commendatory now issued others equally depre-
ciatory. Religious papers, notably the New York
Obseroer, came out and denounced the book as
anti-Christian, anti-evangelical, resorting even to
personal slander of the author as a means of di-
verting attention from the work.

"My book ... is as much under an interdict
in some parts of the South as the Bible in Italy.
It is notallowed in the book-stores, and the greater
part of the people hear of it and me only through
grossly caricatured representations in the papers,
with garbled extracts from the book.

" A cousin residing in Georgia this winter says
that the prejudice against me is so strong that she
dares not have my name appear on the outside of
her letters, and that very amiable and excellent
people have asked her if such as I could be received
into reputable society at the North.

I

FROM OBSCURITY TO FAME 163

'* The storm of feeling that the book raises id
Italy, Germany, and France is all good, though
truly 'tis painful for us Americans to bear."

Within a year the obscure little woman had be-
come a figure of international importance. Not
only had her boob been universally read, but it had
been taken so seriously as to become a great po-
litical and moral force in the world.

How was she herself affected by this dazzlingly
sudden transition from the quiet obscurity iQ
which she had hitherto passed her days to this pro-
digious fame ? One might almost say that she was
not affected at all ! As Mrs. Fields has most truly
said in the " Life and Letters " : " The sense that
a great work had been accomplished through her
only made her, if possible, less self-conscious." No
one who knew Mrs. Stowe will deny that she pos-
sessed the artistic temperament, but she was not
preeminently an artist. She never looked at things
solely from the testhetic point of view. In the
daughter of Lyman Beecher, the artist was dom-
inated by the preacher and reformer. Hence,
" Uncle Tom's Cabin " was to her a sermon hurled
against a great moral evil. Never once does she
display the artist's quiet satisfaction in a work of
art done for art's sake. No! far from it! She

164 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

is determmed that the world shall be convinced
that ahe baa apoken the truth.

With this aim in view, she sets herself immedi-
ately to write the "Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin"!
In those lirst months after the publication of the
book she is too much in earnest to think of her-
self at all, any more than old Lyman Beecber
tbougbt of himself when, with tears in his eyea
and three or more pairs of spectacles on top of
his head, he urged sinners to repentance. While
at work on the " Key " she writes to Mrs. Follen :
" I am now writing a work which will contain
perhaps an equal amount of matter with ' Uncle
Tom's Cabin.' It will contain all the facts and docu-
ments on which that story was founded, an im-
mense body of facta, reports of trials, legal doc-
uments, and testimony of people now living South,
which will more than confirm every statement in
' Uncle Tom's Cabin.'

*' I must confess that till I began the examina-
tion of facts to write this book, much as I thought
I knew before, I had not begun to measure the
depths of the abyas.

" The law records of courts and judicial proceed-
inga are so incredible aa to fill me with amazement
whenever I think of them. It seems to me that the

I

PROM OBSCURITY TO FAME

book cannot but be felt, and, coming upon the
seoBibility awakened by the other, do something.

" I suffer exquisitely in writing these things. It
may be truly said, I write them with my heart's
blood. Many times in writing ' Uncle Tom's Cabin '
I thought my health would fail utterly ; but I
prayed earnestly that God would help me till I got
through, and atiU I am pressed beyond measure
and beyond strength. . . .

"It seems so odd and dreamlike that so many
persons desire to see me, and now I cannot help
thinking that they will think when they do, ' that
God hath chosen the weak things of the world.' "

As her renown flowed in upon her from without,
it was constantly met by that deeper and stronger
tide which welled up from the deeps of her own
soul. Professor Stowe had at this time accepted
a chair at the Andover Theological Seminary in
Massachusetts. She writes to him from Andover,
speaking of the home that they are to have there.

" It seems almost too good to be true, that we
are to have such a house, in such a beautiful place,
and to live here among all these agreeable people,
where everybody seems to love you so much, and
think 80 much of you.

" I am almost afraid to accept it, and should

166 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

not, did I not see the Hand that gives it all, and
know that it is both Brm and true.

" He knows if it is beat for ua, and His blessing
addeth no sorrow therewith. I cannot describe to
you the constaQt under-current of love and joj
and peace ever flowing through my Boul. I am so
happy — so blessed ! "

It was this undercurrent of love, joy, and peace
that, about this time, found expreBsion in that
hymn by which Mrs. Stowe is perhaps as favor-
ably known as by anything she wrote : —

Still, Btill, with Thee when pur])le ntoniing brenketh,
When tliu bird waketli, Btid ihu hIioiIows flee,

Fairer tliun morning, lovelier than the daylight,
Dawtis the sweet consciousneax I am with Thee.

One month after the publication of " Uncle
Tom's Cabin " she writes to her husband : " It is
not fame nor praise that contents me. I seem
never to have needed love so much as now. I long
to hear you say how much you love me."

There could he no truer picture of her inner life
than she herself has given in that reatful liymn : —

Wlion wintU »ra raging o'er the upper ocean,
And billows wild contend with angry roar,

T is said far down beneath the wild conunotion,
That peaceful stillnesH reignetli e'

FROM OBSCURITY TO FAME 167

So this woman, whose name was on every toDgue,
whose words were beiug translated into nearly
every language and read in every land, lived in
the midst of it all, hid as in a pavilion from the
strife of tongues. So above and beyond it all was
she, that it seemed but trivial to her who realized
so intensely how "God's greatness flows about
our incompleteness, and about our restlessness
his rest."

The work on the "Key" completed, Professor
and Mrs. Stowe accepted the invitation o£ the
friends of the cause of emancipation in England to
visit that country as their guest. When they landed
at Liverpool, Mrs. Stowe was astonished to find a
crowd waiting at the pier, — so little had it ever
dawned upon her that she was a person of impor-
tance. " I had an early opportunity of making
an acquaintance with my English brethren ; for,
much to my astonishment, I found quite a crowd
on the wharf, and we walked up to our carriage
through a long lane of people, bowing, and look-
ing very glad to see us." She left Liverpool " with
a heart a little tremulous and excited by the vibra-
tion of an atmosphere of universal sympathy and
kindness." At Lockerbie, it is with a strange kind
of thrill " she hears her name inquired for in the

168 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

Scottish accent. Men, women, and children are
gathered, and hand after hand is presented with the
hearty greeting : ' Ye 're welcome to Scotland.' "
OE the many kindnesses offered her that she
could not accept or return, she says: "For all
these kindnesses what could I give in return?
There was scarce time for even a grateful thought
on each. People have often said to me that it must
have beeu an exceeding bore. For my part, I
could not think of regarding it so. It only op-
pressed me with an unutterable sadness." She writes
of her ™it to the Edinburgh Cathedral : " As I
saw the way to the cathedral blocked up by a
throng of people that had come out to see me, I
coidd not help saying, ' What went ye out for to
see : a reed shaken with the wind ? ' In fact, I was
so worn out that I could hardly walk through the
building. The next morning I was so ill as to need
a physician." Everywhere her life is a constant
fight with physical exhaustion. She consoles her-
self with the reflection : " Everybody seems to
understand how good-for-nothing I am ; and yet,
with all this consideration, I have been obliged to
beep my room and bed for a good part of the time.
Of the multitudes that have called, I have seen
scarcely any." She reflects in this connection, —

FROM OBSCURITY TO FAME 169

'What 1

r it would

; a coDTemence in sigbt-seeing
be if one could bare a relay of bodies, as of
clothes, and slip from one into the other."

Nothing pleased her so much as the sympathy
and appreciation everywhere shown by the work-
ing people. She speaks with genuine pleasure of
putting her hand " into the great prairie of a
palm " of one of the Duke of Argyle's farmers
who had read " Uncle Tom's Cabin," and walked
many miles to shake the hand of the author. She
writes of the journey through Scotland : " We
rode through several villages after this, and were
met everywhere with a warm welcome. What
pleased me was that it was not mainly from the
literary, or the rich, or the great, but the plain,
common people. The butcher came out of hia
stall, and the baker from his shop, the miller
dusty with flour, the blooming, comely young
mother, with her baby in her arms, all smiling
and bowing, with that hearty, intelligent, friendly
look, as if they knew we should be glad to see
them." To her the conventional was trivial and
unimportant. She reached out instinctively to
grasp those organic elements of human nature
that are common to cultivated and uncultivated,
rich and poor alike. It was the chord of the uni-

170 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

veraal human which she had struck so powerfully
in " Uncie Tom's Cabin " that was ringing in the
hearts of these simple, sturdy people when they
instinctively greeted her as their friend. She had
appealed to humanity, and humanity was respond-
ing to the call. Only sheer exhaustion forced her
to decline invitations from the workingmen of
Dundee and Glasgow to attend receptions given
in her honor. After one such public reception,
where she was long and lustily cheered, her re-
flection is : " Alter all, I consider that these
cheers and this applause are Scotland's voice to
America, a recognition of the brotherhood of the
nations."

Of her multitudinous eogagementB on this tour,
which she had ingenuously looked forward to as
a vacation, she writes: "As to all engagements, I
am in a state of happy acquiescence, having re-
signed myself as a very tame Hon into the hands
of my keepers. Whenever the time comes for me
to try to do anything, I try to behave myself as
well as 1 cau, which, as Dr. Young says, is all that
an angel could do under the same circumstances."
To find herself in the company of very distin-
guifihed people excites her sense of humor, and
she laughs to herself: "Oh, isn't this funny, to

K

FROM OBSCURITY TO FAME 171

Bee poor little me with all the great ones of the
earth?" She writes to her hushand from London
about a concert at Stafford House: "The next
day from my last letter came off Miss Greenfield's
concert, of which I send a card. Vou see in what
company they have jmt your poor little wife!
Funny — Is n't it? Well, the Hons. and the
Right Hons. all were there, and 1 sat by Lord
Carlisle."

The most notable event ia which Mrs. Stowe
was the central figure during this her first visit
to England was the reception given her by the
Duke and Duchess of Sutherland at Stafford
House, on the occasion when Lord Shaftesbury
presented to her, in behalf of the women of Eng^
land, an address of welcome and appreciation. Of
this Mrs. Stowe writes: "When the Duchess ap-
peared, I thought she looked handsomer by day-
light than in the evening. She received ua with
the same warm and simple kindness which she
had shown before. . . . Among the first that en-
tered were the membera of the family, the Duke
and Duchess of Argyle, Lord and Lady Blantyre,
the Marquis and Marchioness of Stafford, and
Lady Emma Campbell. Then followed Lord
Shaftesbury with his beautiful lady, and her

172 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

father and mother, Lord and Lady FalmerBton.
Loi-d PalmerstoD is of middle height, with a keen
dark eye and black hair streaked with gray.
There is something peculiarly alert and viracious
about all his movements; in short, \ns appearance
perfectly answers to what we know of him from
his public hfe. 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. S. 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 strik-
ingly resembled in his appearance the poet Long-
fellow.

"After lunch the whole party ascended to the
picture-gallery, passing on our way the grand
staircase and hall, 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 remem-
ber many presentations, but of course must have
forgotten many more. Archbishop Whately was
there, with Mrs. and Miss Wbately; Macaulay,

L

FROM OBSCURITY TO FAME 173
with two of his sisters; Milman, the poet and
histui-ian ; the Bishop of Oxford, Chevalier Bun-
sen and lady, and many more.

" When all the company were together, Lord
Shaftesbury read a very short, kind, and consider-
ate address in behalf of the women 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
appropriating it to myself individually as a personal
honor. I rather regard it as the most public ex-
pression 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."

What would thelittlestation agent have thought
could he have seen the erstwhile victim of hia offi-
cial contempt in these surroundings ? When the
reports of this Stafford House meeting reached
America, Calhoun remarked that its chief signifi-
cance lay in the fact that it would make abolition-
ism fashionable. A despised movement made fash-
ionable by a little Yankee woman "just as thin
and dry as a pinch of snuff."

After a partial rest in Paris, where she escaped

174 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

publicity through some strategy, she went into
Switzerland, where her presence became generally
known in spite of precautions and she was hailed
everywhere as "Madame Besshare." It was Scot-
land over again. All had read her book, and their
enthusiasm seemed boundless. " Oh, Madame, do
write another 1 Remember, our winter nights here
are very long I " entreated the peasants in an Al-
pine village.

She Bnally returns to England, whence she
writes as she leaves for home : " Thus, almost sadly,
as a child might leave its home, I left the shores of
kind, strong old England — the mother of us all."

She returns to America to he plunged into the
thick of the Kansas and Nebraska struggle. She
could think of nothing hut slavery, and planned
a story to be elaborated out of the material gath-
ered in fashioning the " Key" for " Uncle Tom's
Cabiu." In her own words, the purpose of " Dred"
is " to show the general effect of slavery on so-
ciety ; the various social disadvantages that it
brings, even to its more favored advocates ; the
shiftlessness and misery, and backward tendency
of all the economic arrangements of slave states;
the retrograding of good families into poverty ;
the deterioration of land ; the worst demoralization

PROM OBSCURITY TO FAME 175

of all classes, from the aristocratic tyrannical planter
to the oppressed and poor white, which is the re-
sult of the introduction of slave labor." In " Dred "
the didactic purpose is even more pronounced than
in " Uncle Tom." Yet the book made a profound
sensation in its day. Crossing again to England
to secure a copyright, Mrs. Stowe wrote to her
husband at Andover : " ' Dred' is selling over here
wonderfully. Low says that, with all the means at
his command, he has not been able to meet the
demand. He sold fifty thouEiand in two weeks, and
probably will sell as many more." And later she
adds : " One hundred thousand copies of ' Dred *
Bold in four weeks ! After that, who cares what
critics say ? . . . It goes everywhere, is read
everywhere, and Mr. Low says that he puts the
hundred and twenty-fifth thousand to press confi-
dently. The fact that many good judges like it
better than ' Uncle Tom ' is success enough ! "

A little later she wrote from Paris : ** It is won-
derful that people here do not seem to get over
* Uncle Tom ' a bit. The impression seems fresh
as if just published. How often have they said,
' That book has revived the gospel among the poor
of France ; it has done more than all the books
we have published put together. It has gone among

176 HARRIET BEECHKR STOWE

les ouvriers, among the poor of Faubourg St. An-
toine, and nobody knows how many have been led
to Christ by it.' Is not this blessed, my dear hus-
band? la it not worth all the suffering of writ-
ing it?"

Mrs. Stowe returned from this second trip to
Europe to meet the supreme sorrow of her life, —
the death of her eldest son, Henry Stowe. One
beautiful summer day in the year 1857, while
swimming in the Connecticut River near Hanover,
New Hampshire, where he was a student in Dart-
mouth College, he was seized with a cramp. He
threw his arms about a classmate who tried to
save him, and both sank together. As they rose
to the surface, the friend cried out, "You're
drowning me, Henry ! " Immediately he relaxed
his grasp, and sank to rise no more.

His mother was away on a visit when a telegram
summoned her home. His classmates had just ar-
rived with his body. As she looked upon his strong,
peaceful young face, it was impossible for her to
realize that her voice, which had ever had such
power over him, could never now recall him. As
she wrote to the Duchess of Sutherland, whom she
and Henry had visited together only a few months
before : " There had always been such unioa,8uch

FROM OBSCURITY TO FAME 177

peculiar tenderDess, between us. I had had such
power always to call up answering feelings to my

n, that it seemed impossible that he could be
unmoved at my grief." No one had understood
her as he had. No one had treated her with such
constant and chivab-ous tenderness. Her strange
lapses of memory often excited outbursts of nerv-
ous irritability from other members of the family,
but never from him. " A dreadful faintness of
sorrow " came over her at times. As she went
about the house, the pictures of which he was fond,
the presents she had bought him, the photographs
she was to show him, all pierced her heart. She
writes that she would have been glad, " like the
woman in the St. Bernard, to lie down with her
arms around the wayside cross, and sleep away into
a brighter scene."

" Henry's fair, sweet face looks down upon me
now and then from out a cloud, and I feel again
all the bitterness of the eternal ' No ! ' which says
that I must never, never in this life, see that face,
and lean on that arm, bear that voice."

She wrote from Hanover, where she was visiting
shortly after Henry's death : " A poor, deaf old
slave woman, who has still five children in bondage,
came to comfort me. ' Bear up, dear soul,' she said ;

178 HAKRIET BEECHER STOWE

*you must bear it, for the Lord loves ye.' . . .
She went on to say : ' Sunday is a heavy day to
me, 'cause I can't work, au' I can't hear preachin',
an' can't read, so I can't keep my mind off my poor
children. Some on 'em the blessed Master's got,
and they's safe; but oh, tbe'er five I don't know
where they are,' "

"What are our mother sorrows to this?" ex-
claims Mrs. Stowe. "I shall try to search out and
redeem these children. . . . Every sorrow I have,
every lesson on the sacredness of family love,
makes me the more determined to resist to the last
this dreadful evil that makes so many mothers so
much deeper mourners than I ever can be." So
even in this supreme sorrow she seeks added
strength for her warfare against the infliction of
unnecessary suffering upon others.

On the completion of " The Minister's Wooing"
in 1859 Professor and Mrs. Stowe returned to
England for the third and last time. The whole
family were abroad at this time except the young-
est son Charley, then nine years old, to whom
his father wrote the following graphic account o£
their experiences in England : " As it was court
time ... we wanted to go and see the court, so
went over to St. George's Hall, a most magnificent

FROM OBSCURITY TO FAME 179

structure, that beats the Boston State House all
hollow, and Sir Robert Gerauld himself (the high
sheriff of Lancashire) met us, and said he would
get us a good place. So he took us away round a
narrow, crooked passage, and opened a little door,
where we saw nothing but a great, crimson curtain,
which he told us to put aside and go straight on ;
and where do you think we all found ourselves?
"Right on the platform with the judges in their
big wigs and long robes, and facing the whole
crowded court ! It was enough to frighten a body
into fits, but we took it quietly as we could, and
your mamma looked as meek as Moses in her little,
battered straw hat and gray cloak, seeming to say,
'I didn't come here o' purpose.' . . . Tuesday
. . . we called at Stafford House, and enquired
if the Duchess of Sutherland were there. A servant
came out and said that the Duchess was in and
woidd be very glad to see us ; so your Mamma,
Georgie, and I went walking up the magnificent
staircase in the entrance hall, and the great, noble,
brilliant Duchess came sailing down the stairs to
meet us, in her white morning gown, . . . took
your mamma into her great bosom, and folded her
up till the little Yankee woman looked like a small
gray kitten half covered in a snowbank, and kissed

180 HAKRIET BEECHER STOWE

and kissed her, and then she took up little Georgie
and kissed her, and then she took my hand, and
did n't kiss me.

"Next day we went to the Duchess's villa, near
Windsor Castle, and had a grand time riding round
the park, sailing on the Thames, and eating the
very best dinner that was ever set on a table."

Professor and Mrs. Stowe's interest in things
spiritual, keen as it had ever been, was greatly in-
tensified by the death of their son, Henry. It took
the form of a pathetic yet rational outreaching
toward the future life, ^ a kind of calm but fervent
protest against the eternal "No." In a letter writ-
ten to her husband after he had returned home
and she was in Italy, Mrs. Stowe says: "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 cuter 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 unrigbt-
eouKness; but there is a real spiritual spiritualism
which has fallen into disuse, and must be revived,
and there are, doubtless, people who, from consti-
tutional formation, can more readily receive the im-

FROM OBSCURITY TO FAME 181

pressions of the surrounding spiritual world. Such
were apostles, prophets, and workers of miracles."

At this time Mrs. Stowe was not only acquainted
with many of the emiueDt characters of Europe,
but had among them a considerable number of real
friends, of whom were the Ruskins, father and son,
the Brownings, Mr. and Mrs. Lewes (George Eliot),
Lady Byron, Mr. Low, her London pubUsber, the
Duke and Duchess of Sutherland, the Duke and
Duchess of Argyle, Lord Shaftesbury, Charles
Kingaley, Lord Carlisle, who wrote tbe preface to
the English edition of " Uncle Tom's Cabin," and
Monsieur and Madame Belloc, he the Director of
the French Academy of Design, and she tbe trans-
lator of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" into French.

In Mrs. Browning she found a particularly quick
and ready response to her own feelings regarding
things spiritual. In a letter written about a year
after their friendship started, Mrs. Browning says :
" Your letter, which would have given me pleasure
if I had been in the midst of pleasures, came to
me when little beside could have pleased. Dear
friend, let me say it, I had had a great blow and
loss in England, and you wrote things in that let-
ter which seemed meant for me, meant to do me
good, and which did me good, — the first good any

182 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

letter or any talk did me; and it seems to me ai
strange, as more than a coincidence, that your first
■word since we parted in Rome last spring should
have come to me In Rome, and bear so directly od
an experience which yon did not know of.

"... 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 investiga-
tion of the phenomena, by the 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.

" . . . It [' De Prof undis '] refers to the great-
est afHiction of my life, — the only time when I
felt despair, — written a year after or more. For-
give all these reticences. My husband calls me
'peculiar' in some things, — peculiarly ZficAe, per-
haps. I can't articulate some names, or speak of
certain afflictions; — no, not to him, — not after'
all these years! It's a sort of dumbness of the
soul. Blessed are those who can speak, I say. But
don't you see from this how I must want 'spiritu*
alism ' above most persons ? "

In a letter to George Eliot, Mrs. Stowe thus
speaks of spiritualism : " I am perfectly aware of

I

FROM OBSCURITY TO FAME 183

the frivolity and worthleasoess of much of the re-
vealinga purporting to come from spirits. In my
view, the worth or worthlessneas of them has no-
thing to do with the question of fact.

" Do invisible spirits speak in any wise, — wise
or foolish? — is the question k priori. I do not
know of any reason why there should not be as
many fooHsh virgins in the future state as in this.
As I am a behever in the Bible and Christianity,
I don't need these things as confirmations, and
they are not likely to be a religion to me. I regard
them simply as I do the phenomena of the Aurora
Borealis, or Darwin's studies on natural selection,
as curious studies into nature. Besides, I think
some day we shall find a law by which all these
facts will fall into their places. . . ."

To this George Ehot replies : " . . . I desire on
all subjects to keep an open mind . . . 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 a Mrs. ,

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." At about this period George Eliot
writes Mrs. Stowe a letter in which she touches

J

184 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

npon her owq religious views in words which nov
appear startliagly prophetic. She says : " . . . Both
traveliDg abroad and staying at home among our
English sights and sports, one must continually
feel how slowly the centuries work toward the
moral good of men, and that thought hes very
close to what you say you wonder concerning my
religious point of view. I believe that religion, too,
has to be modified according to the dominant
phases ; that a reUgion more perfect than any yet
prevalent must express less care of personal con-
solation, and the more deeply awing sense of re-
sponsibility to man springing from sympathy with
that which of all things is most certainly known
to UB, — the difticulty of the human lot. Letters
are necessarily narrow and fragmentary, and, when
one writes on wide subjects, are likely to create
more misunderstanding than illumination. But I
have little anxiety in writing to you, dear friend
and fellow laborer; for you have had longer ex-
perience than I as a writer, and fuller experience
as a woman, since you have borne children and
known a mother's history from the beginning."

On the eve of her return to America for the
third and last time, Mrs. Stowe received from John
Ruskin this outburst of whimsical and affectionate

I

I

FROM OBSCURITY TO FAME 185

. . What a dreadful thing it is that
people should have to go to America again, after
coming to Europe ! It seems to me an iuversion
of the order of nature. I think America is a sort of
* United States of Probation ' out of which all wise
people, being once delivered, and having obtained
entrance into this better world, should never be ex-
pected to return (sentence irremediably ungram-
matical), particularly when they have been mak-
ing themselves cruelly pleasant to friends here. . . .
I 've no heart to write about anything in Europe
to you now. When are you coming back again?
Please send me a line as soon as you get safe over,
to say you are all — wrong, but not lost in the
Atlantic."

CHAPTER Vn

THBOUGH SMOKB OF BATTLE

Ik June, 1860, just aa Mrs. Stowe was on the
eve of returning from Europe, she received the
news of the death of ISIiss Annie Howard, the
beautiful daughter of her intimate friend, Mrs.
Tasker Howard. She had been almost as near and
dear to Mrs. Stowe as an own daughter. To Mrs.
Howard she writes : " Ah ! Susie, I who have
walked in this dark valley now for three years,
what can I say to you who are entering it? One
thing I can say — be not afraid and confounded
if you find no apparent religions support at first."
Her own heart, sore and bleeding from the loss
of her sou Henry, she had written to her husband :
"Since I have been in Florence I have been
distressed by unutterable yearnings after him
[Henry], such sighlugs and outreachings, with a
sense of utter darkness and separation." So she
had moved in the midst of all the popularity and
adulation that she received, with a hungry, aching
heart. She wrote to her husband : *' I long for my

J

THROUGH SMOKE OF BATTLE 187

husband, my children, my room, my yard and
garden and the beautiful trees of Andover."

The voyage home was as delightful as smooth
seas and congenial company could make it. Hra.
Stowe, Mr. and Mrs. Hawthorne, and Mr. and
Mrs. James T. Fields made a rare assemblage of
choice spirits. Hawthorne exclaimed one moon-
light evening, " 0, that we might never get there ! "
On the pier at East Boston, as the steamer docked,
■were Professor Stowe and Charley, adorned with
smiles and cobwebs, — the latter acquired by pok-
ing their heads out of all sorts of unfrequented
nooks and crannies in their efforts to get a first
glimpse of the home-returning travelers.

The political horizon at this time was dark and
threatening, but no one dreamed of what was
coming or realized that the storm of war was about
to break upon the nation. In a conversation at
this time held in the Stone Cabin at Andover be-
tween Frederick Douglass, Mrs. Stowe, and an old
colored woman, a kind of prophetess, called So-
journer Truth, Douglass, in all the bitterness of
his soul, jjainted the hopelessness of the situation.
What Mrs. Stowe said on the more hopeful side
was swept away like a dam of rushes before the
flood of his eloquence. Sojourner finally rose up

188 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

to her majcBtic height and cried out, " Frederick !
Frederick ! Is God dead ? " One evening, not long
after, Professor Stowe and Doctor Lyman Beecher
were talking over the situation which both ad-
mitted to be very dark indeed. They were sitting
in rocking-chairs on opposite sides of the fire-
'place. " Well, Father Beecher," exclaimed Pro-
fessor Stowe, " there is one comfort ! The Lord
reigns ! "

" Yes, Stowe," said the old man, making that
characteristic gesture with hia right fore-finger so
well known to all who had heard him preach, " and
the devil tries to, yes, the devil tries to ! "

Never was there a more impressive scene in that
old stone house in Andover than that which fol-
lowed the receipt of the news of the attack on
Fort Sumter. Twenty or thirty sturdy old farm-
ers came to talk matters over with Professor
Stowe, who was full of fight and courage. There
was to be war he thought, but it would be short
and decisive, and the Union would be saved.
Neither Professor nor Mrs. Stowe ever had the
least sympathy with Garrison's idea of secession.
They often said that the Northern States were
equally culpable with the Southern for the exist-
ence of slavery, and hence should not leave them

":

«

THROUGH SMOKE OF BATTLE

alone to grapple unaided with dangers and dif-
ficulties which they had so largely helped to bring
upon them. Mrs. Stowe asserted that the agita-
tion kept up by the Anti-Slavery party in the
United States, augmented by the general anti-
pathy of Europe to slavery, had made unbearable
the position of the slave-holding aristocracy. They
felt themselves under the ban of the civilized
world. " Two courses only were open to them,"
Bays Mrs. Stowe, — "to abandon slave institutions,
the source of their wealth and political power,
or to assert them with such an overwhelming force
as to compel the respect and assent of mankind.
They chose the latter."

She did not state, what was nevertheless the
fact, that the strong sentiment in Europe againat
slavery was largely the result of "Uncle Tom's
Cabin." The above quotation is taken from her
reply to the " Address from the Women of Eng-
land," published in the Atlantic Monthly in Jan-
uary, 1863. This address shows how clearly she
grasped the situation. The thunder of the cannon
in Charleston harbor spoke to her ears with no
uncertain sound. The slave power had determined
to sever a union they coidd no longer dominate.
The address concludes: "The time of the Presi-

J

190 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

dential canvasB that elected Mr. Lincoln was the
crisis of this great hattle between slavery and
freedom. The conflict had become narrowed down
to the one point of the extension of slave terri-
tory. If the slave-holders could get states enough
they could control and rule ; if they were outnum-
bered by free states, their institutions by the very
law of their nature would die of suffocation. . . .
A President was elected pledged to opposition to
this one thing alone (the extension of slavery) —
a man known to lie in favor of the Fugitive Slave
Law, and other so-called compromises of the Con-
stitution, but honest and faithful in his deter-
mination on this one subject. That this was indeed
the vital point was shown by the result. The
moment Lincoln's election was ascertained, the
slave-holders resolved to destroy the Union they
could no longer control,"

Mrs. Stowe had herself contributed in a larger
measure than she ever suspected to this situation.
When Lincoln sent out his call for troops, thou-
sands of young men responded whom " Uncle
Tom's Cabin" had made the deadly enemies of
slavery. One of the first to volunteer was her own
son, the little boy who had cried out ten years
before, when " Uncle Tom's Cabin " was read for

THROUGH SMOKE OF BATTLE 191

the first time, " Oh, mama, slavery is the most
cruel thing in the world ! " The little boy of eleven
was now a young man of twenty-one. He was at
the time a student of medicine, studying under
Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes at the Harvard
Medical School. Mrs. Stowe's son was full of the
patriotic enthusiasm which filled the very air he
breathed. He wished to enlist immediately. His
mother wanted him to finish his studies and then
enter the army as a surgeon. Dr. Holmes tried
to persuade him to the same effect. One day when
the three were arguing the matter in Dr. Holmes's
study, throwing bis hat on the floor with a dra-
matic gesture, the young man cried out hotly, "I
should be ashamed to look my fellow men in the
face if I did not enlist. People shall never say,
' Harriet Beecher Stowe's son is a coward.' "

There was no more resistance, and the next day
he enlisted in Company A of the First Massachu-
setts Infantry. The young man felt very strongly
that a son of the author of " Uncle Tom's Cabin "
should be in the very front of the physical conflict
which that book had done so much to precipitate.
Mrs. Stowe was to learn from personal experience
what thousands of mothers were feeling through-
out the land. Immediately after the first battle of

192 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

Bull Rim a poor mother whose son had fallen in
that action came a long distance to see Mrs. Stowe.
*' O, Mrs. Stowe, God only knows what 1 suffer,"
she said, the tears streaming down her wrinkled
face, " but I wanted to see you and tell you about
it," she continued, as she tightened her grasp on
the hand that held hers. Mrs. Stowe, the tears
rolling down her own cheeks, turned on the poor
woman a face in which it seemed as if the sorrows
of the nation were pictured in all their tragic
greatness and said, " Yes, you suffer, I suffer, we
all suffer I " And she continued, " But we do not
suffer alone. There is a Great Heart of Infinite
Love that suffers with and for us ! " The simple-
hearted woman went away greatly comforted.
Probably there arose in Mrs. Stowe's mind at that
moment those prophetic words which she after-
wards wrote : " It was God's will that this nation
— the North as well as tlie South — should deeply
and terribly suffer for the sin of consenting to
and encourt^ng the great oppressions of the
South ; that the ill-gotten wealth, which had arisen
from striking hands with oppression and robbery,
should be paid back in the taxes of war ; that the
blood of the poor slave, that had cried so many
years from the ground in vain, should he answered

I

THBOUGH SMOKE OF BATTLE 193

bj the blood of the bods from the beat hearth-
stones through all the free States ; that the slave
mothers, whose tears nobody regarded, should have
with them a great company of weepers, North and
South, — Rachels weeping for their children and
refusing to be comforted ; that the free States
that refused to listen when they were told of lin-
gering starvation, cold, privation, and barbarous
cruelty, as perpetrated on the slave, should have
lingering starvation, cold, hunger, and cruelty
doing its work among their own sons, at the bands
of these slave-masters, with whose sins oar nation
had connived."

On June 11, 1861, she wrote to her husband
from Brooklyn, " Yesterday noon Henry [Ward
Beecher] came in, saying that the Commonwealth,
with the First Massachusetts Regiment on board,
had just sailed by.

" Immediately I was of course eager to get to
Jersey City to see Fred. Sister Eimice said she
would go with me, and in a few minutes she, Hattie,
Sam Scoville, and I were in a carriage driving to-
wards the Fulton Ferry, Upon reaching Jersey
City we found that the boys were dining in the
depot, an immense building with many tracks and
platforms. It has a great cast-iron gallery just

3

' 194 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

under the roof, apparently placed there with pro-
phetic instinct of these times. There was a crowd
of people pressing against the grated doors which
were locked, but tliroiigh which we could see the
soldiers. It was with great difficulty that we were
at last permitted to go inside, and that object
seemed to be greatly aided by a bit of printed
satin that some man gave Mr. Scoville.

" When we were in, a vast area of gray caps
and blue overcoats was presented. The boys were
eating, drinking, smoking, singing, and laughing.
Company A was reported to be here, there, and
everywhere. At last Sam spied Fred in the dis-
tance and went leaping across the tracks towards
him. Immediately afterwards a blue-overcoated
figure bristling with knapsack, and haversack,
and looking like au assortment of packages, came
rushing towards us.

" Fred was overjoyed you may be sure, and my
first impulse was to wipe his face with mj hand-
kerchief before I kissed him. He was in high
spirits in spite of the weight of blue overcoat,
knapsack, etc., etc., that he would have formerly
declared intolerable for half an hour.

" I gave him my handkerchief and Eunice gave
him hers, with a sheer motherly instinct that is bo

THROUGH SMOKE OF BATTLE 195

strong witbin her, and then v/e filled bis haversack
with oranges.

" We stayed with Fred about two hours, dur-
ing which time the gallery was filled with people
cheering and waving their handkerchiefs. Every
now and then the band played inspiring airs in
which the soldiers joined with hearty voices. While
some of the companies sang others were being
drilled, and all seemed to be having a general jol-
lification. The meal that had been provided was
plentiful, and consisted of coffee, lemonade, sand-
wiches, etc.

" On our way out we were introduced to the
Rev. Mr. Cudworth, chaplain of the regiment. He
is a fine-looking man, with black hair and eyes set
off by a white havelock. He wore a sword, and
Fred toucbing it asked, * Is this for use or orna-
ment, sir ? '

" * Let me see you in danger,' answered the
chaplain, 'and you'll find out.'

" I said to him I supposed he had bad many en-
trusted to bis kind offices, but I could not forbear
adding one more to the number. He answered,
' You may rest assured, Mrs. Stowe, I will do all
in my power.'

" We parted from Fred at the door. He said he

J

196 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

felt lonesome eoough Saturday evening oo the
Common in Boston, where everybodj was taking
leave of somebody, and he seemed to be the only
one without a friend, but that this interview made
up for it all.

" 1 saw also youDg Henry. Like Fred he is mys-
teriously changed, and wears an expression of
gravity and care. So our boys come to manhood
in a day. Now I am watching anxiously for the
evening paper to tell me that the regiment has
reached Washington in safety."

Then came the news of the first battle of Bull
Run. Again there was a long line of fanners'
wagons drawn up before the Stone Cabin whose
owners wanted to talk matters over with the Pro-
fessor and his wife. Then came two lively letters
from Fred Stowe written on the battle-field. The
first day he did not get ao opportunity to fire hiB
gun at a real live"reb"all day, and the eun waa,
as he phrased It, " thundering hot." The shells,
as they whizzed through the air, reminded him of
great bumble-bees. For his part he had been
neither hurt nor scared, and fired bis gun only
once, and that when he shot a young pig which
they roasted on their bayonets and ate with great
relish.

THROUGH SMOKE OF BATTLE 197

It 13 impossible for human beings to live aU the
time on a strain like a how strung to its utmost
tension. Not sombre gloom, but a cheerful excite-
ment, pervaded the household in the old Stone
Cabin at Andover most of the time during the
War. Cheerfulness, hopefulness, and courage was
indeed the atmosphere of Mrs. Stowe's life. She
concluded a tittle speech at the celebration of her
seventieth birthday with these words, " Let us
never doubt. Everything that ought to happen is
going to happen." This was her philosophy of
Ufe.

During the darkest days of the Civil War, when
disaster and defeat to our armies in the field
coupled with rumors of possible foreign interven-
tion to compel the Northern States to recognize
the Coufederacy were filling the stoutest hearts
with gloomy forebodings, Mrs. Stowe was talking
one day with Dr. Holmes in Mr. James T. Fields's
study in Boston. She was speaking with unusual
animation of her confidence that all would come
out right in the end, and Dr. Holmes and Mr.
Fields were listening intently. As she paused for
a moment, Dr. Holmes eagerly exclaimed, " 0,
Mrs. Stowe, do go on! I do love to hear any one
talk who believes so much more than I can ! " It

k

3

198 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

was about this time that her younger son went to
his mother's room to bid her good-night and found
her reading her New Testament, a candle in one
hand, and in the other an iron crucifix that al-
ways hung over her bed. " What are you doing,
mother ? " he exclaimed in surprise. She looked
up and said impressively, " My dear child, I am
seeking the strength to bear what God has given
us to hear in these sad days 1 "

" But why do you bold that crucifix in your
hand ? "

" Because it is a visible, tangible emblem of my
Crucified Lord, and it helps me to cling to Him !
I want to feel that I hold fast to Him ! That I
have a dear friend to whom I can cling as well fts
a God to adore." The rest of the conversation waa
past repeating, but left an ineffaceable impression
on her son's mind. Once when this same bod
rashly risked his life in skating over thin ice, his
mother said to him as he was going to bed, " 0,
Charley boy, you've kept the angels very busy
to-day ! " For Mrs, Stowe there was no natural
and supernatural any more than to the writers of
the New Testament. To her the supernatural was
the habitual. It lay about us like a cloud, a world
we might not see. " Our dead," she wrote, " are

I

J

»

THROUGH SMOKE OF BATTLE 199

jninistering angela: they teach us to love, they fill
us with tenderness for all tliat can suffer."

In November, 18G2, Mrs. Stowe, with many
others, was invited to visit Washington, and at-
tend a great Thanksgiving dinner which was to
be provided for the thousands of fugitive slaves
who had flocked to that city. This invitation she
accepted the more gladly because her son's regi-
ment was then encamped near the city. She wished
also to have a talk with Mr. Lincoln. By a pro-
clamation issued September 22, 1862, he had
warned the states still in rebellion that unless they
should return to their allegiance by January 1,
1863, he would, purely as a matter of military
necessity, declare the slaves within their borders
free. Mrs. Stowe was anxious to learn from his
own lips what was to be his policy in this matter.

From Washington she writes to Professor Stowe
in Andover: " Imagine a quiet little parlor with a
bright coal fire, and the gaslight burning above
the centre-table about which Hattie, Fred, and I
are seated. Fred is as happy as happy can be with
mother and sister once more. All day yesterday
we spent in getting him. First we had to procure
a permit to go to camp, then we went to the fort
where the Colonel is, and then to another where

J

200 HARRIET BEECHEK STOWE

the Brigadier-General is stationed. I was so afraid
that thej would not let him come with us, and
was never bappier than when at last he sprang
into the carriage free to go with us for forty-eight
hours. ' ! ' he exclaimed, in a sort of a rap-
ture, ' this pays for a year and a Iialf of fighting
and hard work ! '

*' We tried hard to get the five o'clock train
out to Laurel where James' [James Beecher, her
youngest brother] regiment is stationed, as we
wanted to spend Sunday all together; but could
not catch it, and so had to content ourselves with
what we could have, I have managed to secure a
room for Fred next ours, and feel as if 1 had my
boy at home once more. He is looking very well,
and has grown in thickness, and is as loving and
affectionate as a boy can be.

"I have jnst been writing a pathetic appeal to
the Brigadier-General to let him stay with us for
a week. I have also written to General Bucking-
ham with regard to changing him from the in-
fantry, in which there seems to be no prospect of
anything but garrison duty, to the cavahy, which
is full of constant activity.

"General B. called on us last evening. He
seemed to think that the prospect before us was*

THROUGH SMOKE OP BATTLE 201

at best, of a long war. He was the officer deputed
to carry the order to General McClellan relieving
him of command of the army. He can-ied it to him
in his tent about twelve o'clock at night. Bum-
side was there. McClellan said it was very unex-
pected, but immediately turned over the com-
mand. I said I thought he ought to have expected
it after disregarding the President's order. Gen-
eral B. smiled, and said he supposed McClellan
had done that so often before that he had no idea
any notice would be taken of it this time."

On Thanksgiving Day, 1862, Mrs. Stowe at-
tended the great dinner given to the Freedmen in
Washington. In her reply to the " Address from
the Women of England" sent to her so many
years before, she thus alludes to this occasion :
*' This very day the writer of this [reply] has
been present at a solemn religious festival in the
national capital, given at the home of a portion of
those fugitive slaves who have fled to our lines for
protection, — who under the shadow of our flag
find sympathy and succor. The national day of
thanksgiving was there kept by over a thousand
redeemed slaves, for whom Christian charity had
spread an ample repast. Our sisters, we wisli you
could have witnessed the scene. We wish you

202 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

could have heard the prayer of a blind old negro,
called among his followers John the Baptist, when
in touching, broken EtighBh he poured forth his
thanksgiving. We wish you could have heard the
sound of that strange rhythmical chant, Tvhich is
now forbidden to be sung on Southern plantations,
the psalm of this modern exodus, — which com-
bines the barbaric fire of the 'Marseillaise' with
the religious fervor of the old Hebrew prophet : —

' Oh, go down Moses,
Way down into Egypt's land I

TeU King Pharaoh
To let my people go I

Stand away dere,

Stand away dere,
And let my people go ! ' "

What impressed Mrs. Stowe most strongly was
that the burden of this old negro's prayer was for
humility. His great fear for himself and his peo-
ple seemed to be that, becoming filled with pride,
they might forget the God who had saved them.

Mrs. Stowe, in telUng of her interview with
Lincoln at this time, dwelt particularly on the
rustic pleasantry with which that great man re-
ceived her. She was introduced into a cosy room
where the President had been seated before an
open fire, for the day was damp and chilly. It was

THROUGH SMOKE OF BATTLE 203

Mr. Seward who introduced her, and Mr. Lincohi
ro8e awkwardly from his chair, saying, "Why,
Mrs. Stowe, right glad to see you ! " Then with a
humorous twinkle in his eye, he said, " So you 're
the little woman who wrote the book that made
this great war ! Sit down, please," he added, as
he seated himself once more before the fire, medi-
tatively warming his immense hands over the
smouldering embers by first extending the palms,
and then turning his wrists so that the grateful
warmth reached the backs of his hands. The first
thing he said was, " I do love an open fire. I al-
ways had one to home." Mrs. Stowe particularly
remarked oo the expression "to home." "Mr.
Lincoln," said Mrs. Stowe, "I want to ask you
about your views on emancipation." It was on
that subject that the conversation turned. Mrs.
Stowe, like so many others at this time, had failed
to grasp Lincoln's far - sighted statesmanship.
" Mr. Lincoln has been too slow," she said, speak-
ing of what she called his " Confiscation BUI."
"He should have done it sooner, and with an im-
pulse. . . ." Bismarck has said something to the
effect that a statesman who should permit himself
to be guided exclusively by abstract moral con-
siderations in his public acts would be like a man

204 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

taking a long pole in his mouth and trying to run
through a thick woods on a dark night. Would
it have heen for the hest interests of bumanit; to
have had a John Brown or a Garrison in Lincoln's
place in those critical moments of the Civil War?

At this period Mrs. Stowe's interest in litera*
ture was overwhelmed by the intensity with which
she entered into the great struggle that was going
on about her. She wrote to the Independent, " The
agitations and mental excitements of the war
have in the case of the writer, as in the case of
many others, used up the time and strength that
would have been devoted to authorship.

" Who could write on stories that had a son to
send to battle, with Washington beleaguered, and
the whole country shaken as with an earthquake? "

Notwithstanding all this, " Agnes of Sorrento"
and "The Pearl of Orr's Island" were finished
during the darkest days of the Civil War. Not
long after writing thus to the Independent Mrs.
Stowe received the following letter : —

Gktttsbcrg, Pkkn., Satard^r, July II, 9.30 P. u.

Mrs. H. B. Stowe :

Deab Madam, — Among the thousands of
wounded and dying men on this war-scarred field.

B.

THROUGH SMOKE OF BATTLE 205

I have jiiat met with your son, Captain Stowe. If
you have not already heard from him, it may
cheer your heart to know that he is in the hands
of good kind friends. He was struck by a frag-
ment of a shell which entered his right ear. He is
quiet and cheerful, and longs to see some member
of his family, and is, above all, anxious that they
should hear from him as soon as possible. I as-
sured him I would write at once, aud though I am
wearied by a week's labor here among scenes of
terrible suffering, I know, that to a mother's anx-
ious heart, even a hasty scrawl about her boy will
be more than welcome.

May God bless aud sustain you in this troubled
time 1

Yours with sincere sympathy,

J. M. Cromwell.

A similar letter came to Rev. Charles Beecher
of Georgetown, Massachusetts, and he, together
with Professor Stowe, started immediately for the
battle-field. At Springfield, Massachusetts, Profes-
sor Stowe had all his money stolen, and returned
to Andover in abject despair. In a few days, how-
ever, young Captain Stowe was stretched in the
sun on the veranda of the old stone house, while

HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

his cousin, Lieutenant Fred Beecher, literally shot
to pieces, lay on a couch in his fatlier's home, flut-
tering between life and death. So were the Btern
realities of the war brought home to Mrs. Stowe
and her family circle.

Mrs. Stowe's most prominent public act during
the Civil War was her reply to the " affectionate
and Christian address to the women of America,"
which had been sent her immediately after the
publication of " Uncle Tom's Cabin." It had been
exhibited for the first time at the Boston Anti-Slav-
ery Fair in 1853. It was in twenty-six stout folio
volumes bound iu morocco, an Amerlcao eagle on
the back of each, the address finely illuminated in
vellum on the first page of the first volume, and
contained nearly six thousand autograph signa-
tQree of Englishwomen of every rank and class,
from tlie foot of the throne to the back-kitchen
areas. It was an appeal to the women of America
to use their utmost efforts to do away with slavery
and all its horrors, immediately and forever ! Con-
sidering the state of public feeling at the time, this
remarkable document was hardly an olive-branch.
While unquestionably prompted by the highest
motives, its wisdom and timeliness were more than
doubtful.

J

THROUGH SMOKE OF BATTLE 207

For nearly ten years it had slumbered in its
solid oak case, unanswered, when on the twenty-
seventh day of November, 1862, Mrs. Stowe wrote
her reply to which we have already frequently re-
ferred. Mrs. Stowe's motive in this reply was to
enlist the sympathies of the English public on the
side of the Northern States. It was the same mo-
tive that prompted her brother, Henry Ward
Beecher, to undertake his mission to England.
This purpose she herself explains in these few
vigorous sentences : " It became important for the
new Confederation to secure the assistance of for-
eign powers, and infinite pains were then taken
to blind and bewilder the mind of England as to
tlie real issue of the conflict in America.

" It has been often and earnestly asserted that
slavery had nothing to do with this conflict; that
it was a mere struggle for power ; that the only
object was to restore the Union as it was, with all
its abuses. It is to be admitted that expressions
have proceeded from the national administration
which naturally gave rise to misapprehension, and
therefore we beg to speak to you on this subject
more fully."

Mrs. Stowe did not write this reply until she
had had the personal interview with Mr. Lincoln

208 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

already described, and had learned from the Presi-
dent himself the policy of his administration re-
garding slavery, — notably hia Uttle understood
BorderState policy. Not till then did she break
the silence she liad maintained for nearly ten
years. She did not reply sooner because she felt
that any reply that she might write would, in the
existing state of public feeling, do far more harm
than good. She waited until the time was ripe,
and then struck effectively. "In the beginning of
the struggle," she writes, " the voices that reached
US across the water said, ' If we were only sure
you were fighting for the abolition of slavery, we
should not dare to say whither our sympathies for
your cause might not carry us.' Such, as we heard,
were the words of the honored and religious
nobleman [Lord Shaftesbury] who drafted this
very letter you signed, and sent us, and to which
we are now replying.

" When these words reached us, we said, * We
can wait, our friends in England will soon see
whither this conflict is tending.' A year and a
half have passed, step after step has been taken for
liberty ; chain after chain has fallen, till the march
of our armies is choked and clogged by the glad
flocking of emancipated slaves ; the day of final

THROUGH SMOKE OF BATTLE 209

emancipation is set; the Border States begin to
move in voluntary assent. [Here we see plainly
traces of her interview with Lincoln. It was he
who called her attention to the gradual change of
sentiment in the Border States that had made the
Emancipation Proclamation possible and expedi-
ent.] Universal freedom for all dawns like the
sun in the distant horizon, and still no voice from
England. No voice ? Yes, we have heard on the
high seas the voice of a war-steamer, built for a
man-stealing Confederacy, with English gold, in
an English dockyard, going out of an English
harbor, manned by EngHsh sailors, with the full
knowledge of English government officers, in de-
fiance of the Queen's proclamation of neutrality !
So far has English sympathy overflowed ! We
have heard of other steamers, iron-clad, designed
to furnish to a slavery-defending Confederacy its
only lack, — a navy for the high seas. We have
heard that the British Evangelical Alliance re-
fuses to express sympathy with the liberating
party when requested to do so by the French
Evangelical Alliance. We find in the English
newspapers all those sad degrees in the downward
sliding scale of defending and apologizing for
slave-holders and slave-holding, with which we

210 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE
have so many years contended in our owo coun-
try. We find the President's Froclamation of
Emancipation spoken of in those papers only as
an incitement to servile insurrection. Nay, more,
— we find in your papers from thoughtful men
the admission of the rapid decline of Anti-Slavery
sentiments in England."

This reply produced a profound sensation in
England, and did much to prevent armed interven-
tion in behalf of the Confederacy. John Bright
wrote to Mrs. Stowe : " I read every word of it
[the reply] with intense interest, and am quite
sure that its eSect upon public opinion here has
been marked and beneficial. It has covered some
with shame, and it has compelled many to think,
and it has stimulated not a few to act. Before this
reaches you, you will have seen what large and
earnest meetings have been held in all our towns
in favor of Abolition, and the North. No town has
a building large enough to contain those who
come to listen, to applaud, and to vote in favor of
freedom and the Union. The effect of this is evi-
dent on our newspapers and on the tone of Par-
liament, where now nobody says a word in favor
of recognition or mediation, or any such thing."
This letter, written on the 9th of March, 1863,

THROUGH SMOKE OF BATTLE 211

before the battle of Gettysburg, shows that Mrs.
Stowe's "reply" was one of the great influences
that changed the seotimeot of the English people
towards the Confederacy.

On January 1, 1863, in the terms of his announce-
ment previously made, Lincoln issued the Eman-
cipation Proclamation. Mrs. Stowe was at a con-
cert in the Music Hall when the news reached
Boston and was announced from the stage to the
immense audience. During the wild demonstra-
tions of enthusiasm which followed some one in
the audience called attention to Mrs. Stowe's pre-
sence in the gallery. Instantly the multitude
turned their faces up towards hers, waving their
handkerchiefs and smiling. Her face all aglow
with pleasure and excitement, she rose and bowed
to right and left. It was a moment of triumph, —
the crowning of a life's work-
That Lincoln had been none too deliberate in
issuing this proclamation was abundantly proved
by the falling off in the Republican vote which
'was its immediate though temporary effect. Of
course it did not apply to slave states not in re-
helUon, nor to those that had been conquered.
The real work was to be accomplished by the con-
stitutional amendment passed later. It virtually

212 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

marked, however, the end of slavery in the United
States, and so did away with the underlying cause
of the Civil War. For no one can deny had there
been no slavery there would have been no seces-
sion and no war.

It was during this dark period of the war that
Mrs. Stowe moved from Andover to Hartford,
Connecticut. In a grove of oaks on the bank of
a little river she built a large and expensive house,
far better planned for the climate of Florida than
Connecticut. The spot had been one of her favoi^
ite resorts as a schoolgirl. Here she had dreamed
away many a summer and autumn day with Georg-
iana May or Catherine Cogswell. She had often
whimsically assured these friends that here would
she build a house when she was rich. She pur-
chased the land with part of the proceeds of the
first sale of " Uncle Tom's Cabin." The house
was finished largely in the natural wood from the
oaks and chestnuts cut on the place. The whole
enterprise, an effort to realize a girlhood dream,
took time, strength, and money far beyond her
resources. It was a hungry octopus that nearly
sucked the life blood out of the brave little
woman. From Professor Stowe she could expect
no aid, as he was the most helpless and unprac-

THROUGH SMOKE OP BATTLE 213

tjcal of men ; and little sympathy, as the whole
undertaking was contrary to his best judgment
and repeated warnings. Gloomy prognostications
of disaster were his only contributions to a solution
of the difficult situation. In the mean time, as the
spider spins its home out of its own vitals, so Mrs.
Stowe spun her way out of her pecuniary troubles
by the creations of her own brain. Then her son
came home from the war with broken body and
shattered will. What to do for him was a perplex-
ing problem. Had it not been for the kind help-
fulness of her sister Mary and her big-hearted
husband, Mr. Thomas Perkins, a leading lawyer
of Hartford, Mrs. Stowe must have sunk into her
grave under the burdens that crushed down upon
her at this time. Yet these burdens she had
largely brought upon herself. With all her power
and sound sense she was a dreamer of dreams.
Her ideas of finance might work among angels,
but they were not adapted to New England. She
believed in everybody and trusted everybody, and
was cheated and imposed upon without let or hin-
drance.

She wrote, at this time, to her publisher, Mr.
Fields : " Can I tell you what it is to begin to keep
house in an unfinished home and place, dependent

2U HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

on a carpenter, a plumber, a mason, a bell-hanger,
who come and go at their own sweet will, break-
ing in, making all sorts of dust, chips, dirt, going
off in the midat leaving all standing, — reappeai^
ing at uncertain intervals making more dust, chips,
and dirt ? One parlor and my library have thua
risen piecemeal by disturbance and eonvulsions.
They are almost done now, and the last box of
books is almost unpacked, but my head aches so
with the past confusion that I cannot get up any
feeling of rest. I can't enjoy, — can't feel a minute
to sit down and say ' it is done.' "

Then again she writes, speaking of her daugh-
ter's coming marriage : " I am in trouble, — have
been in trouble ever since my turtledoves an-
nounced their intention of pairing in June instead
of August, because it entailed on me an immediate
necessity of bringing everything, out of doors and
in, to a state of completeness for the wedding exhi-
bition in June. The garden must be planted, the
lawn graded, harrowed, rolled, seeded, and the
grass got up and growing, stumps got out and
shrubs and trees got in, conservatory made over,
beds planted, holes filled, — and all by three very
slippery sort of Irishmen, who had at any time
rather be minding their own business than mine.

THROUGH SMOKE OF BATTLE 215

I have back door-steps to be made, and trougha,
screens, and ^bat not ; papering, painting, var-
nishing hitherto neglected, to be completed ; also
spring house-cleaning, also dress-making for one

bride and three ordinary Females, also and

and 's wardrobes to be overlooked, car-
pets to be made and put down ; also a revolution
in the kitchen cabinet, threatening for a time to
blow up the whole establishment altogether." It is
needless to say that authorship under such condi-
tions would appear to be a sheer impossibility. It
■would have been to any one but Mrs. Stowe.

The house was a most delightful one for sum-
mer, but when the severe cold of winter came it
was impossible with any expenditure for fuel to
heat it properly. Water pipes were continually
freezing and bursting, so that the establishment
proved an annuity to the fortunate plumber, who,
with an eye to future business, bad arranged a
complicated system that kept more than one man
busy during the entire season. The Professor was
submerged in waves and billows of the blues, and
made daily predictions that the whole family
would end in the poorhouse. One day, in a spasm
of economy, be attempted to mend personally a
broken pane of glass in one of the ceUar windows

21G HARRIET BEECHEE STOWE
with a sheet of tin, two shingle nails, and a tack-
hammer. After hreaking out all the remaining
glass in the sash, he went to his room in an agony
of despair, whUe Mrs. Stowe quietly sent for a gla-
zier to attend to the matter properly. In all mat-
ters pertaining to literature and scholarship he
■was a ready help in every time of need, but the
problem of taking care of a great house with ex-
tensive grounds on inadequate means kept him
palpitating with anxiety and woe.

Every one thought Mrs. Stowe had made a for-
tune out of her hooks, and all were piously re-
solved to relieve her of the dangers and tempta-
tions of great wealth so Ear as lay in their power.
Although she received large sums from her pub-
lishers, all was swallowed up by the Octopus on
the river-side ; that is, by architect, builder, carpen-
ters, and plumbers. They had good digestions and
swallowed her dollars as fast as she could feed
them to them.

CHAPTER Vm

LIFE IN THE SOUTH

In 1865 Mrs. Stowe's son, Captain Stowe, re-
sided his commission in the army, and attempted
to resume his medical studies. This, however,
proved impossible. From time to time the pain of
the wound received at Gettysburg drove him to
the verge of insanity. In such a state continuous
mental application was out of the question. Ju8t
at thia time a number of Conuecticut people, re-
tired army officers among them, had taken an
old cotton plantation ia Florida to raise cotton
by free labor. Mrs. Stowe was enthusiastic over
the scheme ! Here was not only a solution of her
perplexity with regard to her son, but a mission I
She was always looking for a mission. It was a
necessity of her mind to persuade herself that
some higher end was being sought in everything
she did from raising potatoes to writing a book.
Consequently, she put money into the project that
she could ill afford to lose. Naturally enough the
whole thing was a failure, and practically amounted

218 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE
to maintaiuing a free boarding house for a year
or more for a gang of lazy negroea. What cotton
was laised cost more than it could have been sold
for ; and, as a matter of fact, it was never sold,
because what was not ruined by mildew was eaten
by army worms. In this enterprise Mrs. Stowe
lost in the neighborhood of ten thousand dollars.
She apparently felt little or no regret for the
pecuniary loss. So much good had been done
among the negroes by the preaching, praying,
and hymn singing ! Many souls had probably
been saved, and if so what was the loss of ten
thousand dollars compared with such a gain 1

About this time Captain Stowe rowed across
the St. Johns River on a fishing excursion and
discovered Mandarin Cove and a snug little
orange grove that the owner was anxious to sell
for a reasonable price. Here was a new possibil'
ity I If be could not raise cotton, he could at
least raise oranges, and there seemed a lair pros-
pect of a good profit in the enterprise.

It was impossible, however, for his mother to
take a merely commercial view of any undei^
taking. She immediately turned her mind to the
possibilities of doing good that were connected
with the scheme. She writes to her brother, the

LIFE IN THE SOUTH

219

Rev. Charles Beeeher of Georgetown, Massachu-
setts, as follows ; " Mj plan of going to Florida,
aa it lies in my mind, is not in any sense a mere
worldly enterprise. I have for many years had
a longing to be more immediately doing Christ's
work OQ earth. My heart is with that poor people
whose cause in words I have tried to plead, and
who, now ignorant and docile, are just in that
formative stage in which, whoever seizes, has
them.

" Corrupt politicians are already beginning to
speculate on them as possible capital for their
schemes, and fill their poor heads with all sorts
of vagaries. Florida is the state into which they
have, more than anywhere else, been pouring.
Emigration is positively and decidedly setting
that way; but as yet it is mere worldly emigra-
tion, with the hope of making money, nothing
more.

" The Episcopal Church is, however, undertak-
ing, under direction of the future Bishop of
Florida, a wide embracing scheme of Christian
activity for the whole state. In this work I
desire to be associated, and my plan is to locate
at some salient point on the St. Johns River,
where I can form the nucleus of a Christiaa

220 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

neigliborbood whose influeDce shall be felt far
beyond its own limits."

About a year later she writes him : " We are
now thinking of a place in Mandarin much more
beautiful than any other in the vicinity. It has
on it five large date palms, an olive tree in full
bearing, besides a fine orange grove that this
year will yield about seventy-five thousand oranges.
If we get that, then, I want you to consider the
expediency of buying the one next to it. It con-
tains about two hundred acres of land, on which
is a fine orange grove, the fruit of which last
year brought in two thouBand dollars as sold at
the wharf.

" It is right on the river, and four steamers
pass it each week on their way to Savannah and
Charleston. There is on the place a very comfort-
able cottage, as bouses go out there, where they
do not need to be built as substantially as with

"I am now in correspondence with the Bishop
of Florida, with a view to establishing a line of
churches along the St. Johns River, and if I
settle at Mandarin it will be one of my stations.
Will you consent to enter the Episcopal Church
and be our clergyman V You are just the man we

LIFE IN THE SOUTH

221

'want ! H my tastes and feelings did not incline
me towards the Church, I should still choose it as
the best system for training immature minds such
as those of our negroes. The system was com-
posed with reference to the wants of the laboring
class of England at a time when they were as
ignorant as our negroes now are.

" I long to he at this work and cannot think
of it without my heart burning within me. Still
I leave all with my God, and only hope He will,
open the way for me to do all that I want to for
this poor people."

Mrs. Stowe bought the place, and in one of her
letters to George Eliot thus describes how the
home was established : " The history of the
cottage is this : I found a hut built close to a
great live-oak twenty-five feet in girth, and with
overarching houghs eighty feet up in the air,
spreading like a firmament, and all swaying with
mossy festoons. We began to live here, and
gradually we improved the hut by lath, plaster,
and paper. Then we threw out a wide veranda
all around, for in these regions the veranda is the
living room of the house. Ours had to be built
around the trunk of the tree, so that our cottage
has a peculiar and original air, and seems as if it

222 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

-were half tree, or something that has grown out
of the tree. We added on parts, and have thrown
out gahles and chambers, as a tree throws out
new branches, till our cottage is Uke nobody's
else, and yet we settle into it with real enjoytnent.
There are all sorts of queer little rooms in it, and
we are at present accommodating a family of
seventeen souls. In front, the beautiful, grand
St, Johos River stretches five miles from shore to
shore, and we watch the steamboats plying back
and forth to the great world we are out of. On all
sides large orange trees, with their dense shade,
and ever-vivid green, shut out the broiling sun so
that we can ait, and walk, and live in the open
air. Our winter here is only cool, bracing, out-
door weather without snow. No month without
flowers blooming in the open air and lettuce and
peas growing in the garden. The summer range
is about 90°, but the sea breezes keep the air de-
lightfully cool.

" Though resembling Italy in climate Florida is
wholly different in the appearance of nature, — the
plants, the birds, the animals, are all different.
The green tidiness of England here gives way to
a wild and rugged savageness of beauty. Every
tree bursts forth with flowers; wild vines and

LIFE IN THE SOUTH 223

creepers execute delirious gambols, and weave and
interweave in interminable labyrinths. Yet bere,
in the great sandy plains back of our house, there
is a constant wondering sense of beauty in the
wild wonderful growths of nature. First of all
the pines — high as the stone pines of Italy —
with long leaves, eighteen inches long, through
which there is a constant dreamy sound as if of
dashing waters. Then the live-oaks, and the
water-oaks, narrow-leaved evergreens, which grow
to enormous size, and whose branches are draped
with long festoons of the gray moss. There is a
great wild park of these trees back of us, which,
with the dazzling varnished green of the new
Bprbg leaves and the swaying drapery of moss,
looks like a sort of enchanted grotto. Underneath
grow up lilies and ornamental flowering shrubs,
and the yellow jessamine climbs up into and over
everything with fragrant golden bells and buds.
This wild, wonderful, bright, and vivid growth,
that is all new, strange, and unknown by name to
me, has a cbarm for me. It is the place to forget
the outside world and live in one's self.

" We emigrate in solid family : my two dear
daughters, husband, self, and servants come to-
gether to spend the winter here, and so together

224 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE
to our Northern home in summer. My twin daugh-
ters relieve me from all domestic care ; they are
lively, vivacious, with a real genius {or practical
life. We have around us a little settlement of
neighbors, who, like ourselves, have a winter home
here, and live an easy, undress, picnic kind of a
life far from the world and its cares.

*' When I get here I enter another life. The
world recedes ; I am out of it ; it ceases to influ-
ence ; its hustle aud noise die away in the far dis-
tance, and here is no winter; an open-air life, —
a quaint, rude, wild wilderness life, both rude and
rich, but when I am here I write more letters to
friends than I do elsewhere. The mail comes only
twice a week and is a great event. My old rabbi
and I here set up our tent, he with German and
Greek aud Hebrew, devouring all sorts of black-
letter books, and I spinning ideal webs out of
bits he lets fall here and there."

But with all this enjoyment of the material
vorld, with its tangible realities, the spiritual aim
was not forgotten. She carried out her desire to
"form the nucleus of a Christian neighborhood
whose influence shall be felt far beyond its own
hmits." With her own money she built a little
church and schoolhouse, where for many years

LIFE IN THE SOUTH

225

Professor Stowe preached earuest, eloquent ser-
mons, and sbe taught a Sunday-school class of
colored childreu. In a letter written to her soa in
1875, she gives the following picture of an Easter
Sunday in the little church and schoolhouse : —

"It was the week before Easter, and we had on
our minds the dressing of the church. There were
my two Gothic fireboards to be turned into a pul-
pit for the occasion. I went to Jacksonville and
got a five-inch moulding for a base, and then had
one fireboard sawed in two, so that there was an
arched panel for each end. Then came a rummage
for something for a top, and to make a desk of,
until it suddenly occurred to me that our old black
walnut extension table had a set of leaves. They
were exactly the thing. The whole was triomied
with a heading of yellow pine, and rubbed, and
pumice-stoned, and oiled, and I got out my tubes
of paint and painted the nail holes with Vandyke
brown. By Saturday morning it was a lovely lit-
tle Gothic pulpit, and Anthony took it over to the
schoolhouse and took away the old desk which I
gave him for his meeting-bouse.

" That afternoon we drove into the woods and
gathered a quantity of superb Easter lilies, paw-
paw, sparkleberry, great fern leaves, and cedar.

226 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

In the evening the girU went over to the Meads
to practice Eaxter hymns ; but I gut at home and
made a cross eighteen inches long of cedar and
white lilies. This Southern cedar is the most ex-
quisite thing, — - it is bo feathery and delicate.

'* Sunday morning was coot and bright, a most
perfect Easter. Our little church was full, and
everybody seemed delighted with the decorations.
Mr. Stowe preached a sermon to show that Christ
is going to put everything right at last, which is
comforting. So the day was one of real pleasure,
and also I trust of real bene6t, to the poor souls
who learned from it that Christ is indeed risen for
them."

It was a number o£ years before Mrs. Stowe
was able to carry out her original plan of estab-
lishing an Episcopal church in Mandarin. It was
not till 1884 that she writes, " Mandarin looks
very gay and airy now with its new villas, and our
new church and rectory. Our minister is perfect.
I wish you could know him. He wants only physi-
cal strength. In everything else he is all one
could ask."

Nothing delighted Mrs. Stowe more than the
growing prosperity of the colored people. It was
this that she emphasized in her little talk at the

LIFE IN THE SOUTH

227

celebration of her seventieth birthday, when she
said: —

"... If any one of you have doubt, or sor-
row, or pain, if you doubt about this world, just
remember what God has done ; just remember
that this great sorrow of slavery has gone, has
gone forever. I see it every day at the South. I
walk about there and see the lowly cabins. I see
these people growing richer and richer. X see men
very happy in their lowly lot ; but, to be sure,
you must have patience with them. They are not
perfect, but have their faults, and they are serious
faults in the view of white people. But they are
very happy, that is evident, and they do know
how to enjoy themselves, — a great deal more than
you do. An old negro friend in our neighborhood
has got a new, nice two-story house, and an orange
grove, and a sugar mUI. He has got a lot of money
besides. Mr. Stowe met him one day, and he said,
' I 've got twenty head of cattle, four head of
" boss," forty head of hen, and I have got ten
children, all mine, even/ one mine!'' "Well, now,
that's a thing that a black man could not say
once, and this man was sixty years old before he
could say it. With all the faults of the colored
people, take a man of sixty and put him down

228 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

Trith nothing but his bands, how many could say
as much aa that? I think they have done well.
A little while ago they had an evening festival at
his house and raised fifty dollars. We white folks
took our carriages, and when we reached the
house we found it fised nicely. Every one of his
daughters knew how to cook. They had a good
place for the festival. Their suppers were spread
on little white tables with nice clean cloths on
them. People paid fifty cents for supper. They
got between fifty and sixty dollars, and had one
of the best frolics you could imagine. They had
also for supper ice cream that they made for
themselves. That's the sort of thing I see going
on around me." And then she concludes with
the words already quoted, " Let us never doubt.
Everything that ought to happen is going to
happen."

Mrs. Stowe first visit«d Mandarin in 1866. She
and her youngest son made the journey by way
of Washington, and thence by steamboat to Aqua
Creek, and from there to Charleston, South Caro-
lina, by a special military train. On their arrival at
Charleston, a Southern gentleman called upon
them ; and introducing himself as a former major
in the Confederate army, explained that hia mother

LIFE IN THE SOUTH

229

and Bistera were anxious to entertain them at their
home, because of what they owed to Mrs. Stowe's
nephew, Colonel Robert Beecher, for the way in
which he had protected them from the brutahty of
some Northern soldiers when they were defenseless
in their home during the burning of Columbia.
When the three ladies were alone and unprotected
in the burning city, a mob of half-drunken soldiers
broke into their house. One of the daughters was
seriously ill, and her mother feared that the shock
and fright might kill her. Seeing an office
ing the house in the uniform of a Federal Colonel,
she rushed to the door and begged him for pro-
tection. With drawn sword and revolver, Colonel
Beecher drove the drunken soldiers from the house,
and while the Union army remained in Columbia
be was both the guest and the protector of this
family. Mrs. Stowe's son has never forgotten a
letter he saw while he and his mother were enjoy-
ing the ideal hospitality of this family, — a letter
written on the battle-field by a dying soldier to
his mother. The young man had joined the Con-
federate army as he was about to enter the Pres-
byterian ministry, and he bravely faced death with
as much confidence that he was fighting for right-
eousness as ever inspired a crusader. The whole

230 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

tone of his letter breathed satisfaction that he had
been permitted to lay down his life for the cause of
God and truth as against injustice and oppression.
Even the Greek mind never conceived a tragedy
more terrible than the war between the states in
North America.

From Charleston they proceeded to Mandarin
by the steamer Dictator, commanded by Captain
Atkins, who had been a blockade runner dui^
ing the war. He was a brisk little man, with a
very red face and bristling whiskers, who showed
an almost pathetic solicitude for Mrs. Stowe's
comfort and safety. One fair Sunday afternoon
the Dictator sailed majestically into Mandarin
Cove, and landed them within a stone's throw of
the Stowe cottage. Here at Mandarin Professor
Stowe, ably seconded by Mrs. Stowe, acted as a
pastor to the whole neighborhood, both white and
black. There was not a secluded nook on the
river bank, or a lonely hut in the pine woods, that
they did not visit together, jolting over roots and
stumps and laboring through the sand, seated in
camp chairs in a rude, two-wheeled cart drawn
by Fly, a meditative and philosophical mule. As
Mrs. Stowe writes ; *' You ought to see us rid-
ing out in our mule cart. Poor Fly, the last of

LIFE IN THE SOUTH

231

pea time, who looks like an animated hair trunk,
and the wagon and harness to match! It is too
funny ; but we enjoy it hugely 1 " The big, corpu-
lent, gray-bearded Professor, with his gold specta-
cles and broad-brimmed Quaker hat, and his thin
little wife, dreamy and abstracted, with her shabby
dress and old straw bonnet all awry, gazing up into
the pine trees and singing in utter self-forgetful-
ness as they jolted along : —

" ' We 're on our journey home

Where Christ our Lord has gone,' " etc.,

made a picture both amusing and appealing.

Way back in the woods in a barren clearing
among the whispering trees was a Uttle Roman
Catholic church, bUsteriug in the tropical sun.
Adjoining it was a nunnery where lived three
French Sisters of the Church. Near by in a little
hut lived an Italian priest. Father Batazzi. If ever
tlie spirit of the Christ dwelt in human souls, it
dwelt in these self-sacrificing representatives of the
Roman Catholic Church. Once or twice a month
Fly was harnessed into the mule cart, and the
Professor and his wife started with baskets of
oranges and packages of all sorts of creatureKiom-
forts to visit Father Batazzi and the Sisters.
When they met there was no Catholic or Protest-

232 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

ant, but an absolute oueuess of spirit. The Fro<
fesBor in bis bluff, bearty way, always suggested
tbat tbese visits be closed witb prayer. The good
priest and tbe Sisters made do objection, Father
Batazzi frequently joining in ia bis broken Eng-
lish.

Tbe priest started a little vineyard in tbe dreary
pine waste, whicb greatly cheered his heart. It was
bke a bit of his own beloved Italy in this faw)£E
land. But one night some of those Florida cows,
which might well serve as prototypes of the lean
kine that King Pharnob saw in bis troubled
dreams, broke into tbe inclosure and ate up all
the vines. " Ob, Father Batazzi," exclaimed Mrs.
Stowe a day or two afterwards, " what a perfect
shame that those wretched cows ate your vines I "

" Oh no, Mrs. Stowe, dat iz all right 1 It vaa
gut for ze cows, and it vas gut for me ! I fear zat
I have made an iddel of dose vines ! "

When the terrible scourge of yellow fever broke
out iu Fernandina, and people forsook their dead
and their dying to flee in blind and unpityiug ter^
ror, Father Batazzi and the Sisters went to tbe
plague-stricken city, nursed the sick, cared for tbe
dying, and buried tbe dead. In this noble service
one of the Sisters laid down her life.

I

LIFE IN THE SOUTH

233

One day the Professor and his wife went on foot
I charitable errand. Returning they com-
pletely lost their way in the delirious labyrinth of
a live-oak hummock. Mrs. Stowe lost her eye-
glasses, and the Professor's spectacles were snatched
from his nose by a malicious creeping vine. It was
growing late and the light was waning. The Pro-
fessor, availing himself of his mighty vocal powers,
set up a stentorian shouting. Anthony, their
negro man, who was on his way home, was drawn
to the spot by the alarming uproar. He was a
preacher with native and timely eloquence, Peei^
ingat them through the gloom, he sang out, "Well,
well, is datyou? Why you dun gone got loss, eh?
jah 1 jah ! I will proceed to lead you out by a more
delectable way dan dat by which you entered dis
ar thicket ! "

Although very proud of his wife and her repu-
tation, nevertheless it was galling to Mr. Stowe at
times to be set completely in the shade by his more
distinguished wife. On one occasionalady remarked
to him, *' I am delighted to meet you, Professor
Stowe, but I must confess I should have preferred
to have met Mrs. Stowe ! "

" So had I, madam 1 " was the prompt and sig-
nificant retort.

234 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

An enterprising steamboat company in Jack-
sonville advertised excursions to Mandarin and
Mrs. Stowe's orange grove, — so much for the
round trip, — without consulting her, or offering
her consideration of any sort for being made a
public spectacle. The Professor and his wife took
it, however, very good-naturedly, and received
those who came with a courteous hospitality. For
the most part these persons were well behaved, and
to one who enjoyed sociability as heartily aa
did Professor Stowe the ex])erience had its plea-
sant side. One day, however, a man broke off a
branch of an orange tree directly under the Pro-
fessor's eyes. On Mr. Stowe's addressing him in
vigorous language, he timidly replied, " Why, I
thought this was Mrs, Stowe's place ! "

" I would have you understand, sir ! " thundered
the Professor, " that I am the proprietor and pro-
tector both of Mrs. Stowe and this place I "

While at Mandarin Mrs. Stowe made many ex-
cursions to various parts of the state, and was
everywhere treated with cordial and courteous
hospitality. On one of these trips a Southern
woman was heard to say, " I am sure that I have
been told that Mrs. Stowe is sorry that she wrote
* Uncle Tom's Cabin.' She is a good, kind-hearted

LIFE IN THE SOUTH 235

woman, and I telieve she would have cut off her
right hand rather than write that book, if she
could have foreseen all the misery she was to
cause by it." After visiting her brother, the
Rev. Charles Beecher, at Newport, Florida, she
continued her journey to New Orleans, meeting
with nothing but kindness and cordiality from the
beat class of Southern people. Both at Tallahassee
and New Orleans she was warmly welcomed and
tendered public receptions, given to show that there
was no bitterness towards her personally. Through-
out the journeys the colored people thronged the
railroad stations to catch a glimpse of her as she
was whirled by.

No words can better describe her life in Man-
darin than these, " She went about doing good."
This incident is in point. There came to Mandarin
a gentleman who was suffering agonies from rheu-
matism. From very early life he had been bitterly
prejudiced against "Churchianity." He denounced
the churches, and all professing Christians as
knaves and hypocrites. His natural asperities of
temper had not been softened by bis sufferings.
His language and manners were far from engag-
ing, and he was not popular. Mrs. Stowe made
her observations on the man, and quietly managed

236 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

to drop in upon him almost daily to tell him a bit
of news or a funny story. Never a word, however,
about the Church, the Bible, or Christians, and if
he blazed out on these subjects she seemed dreamy
and abstracted till he had cooled off. To the
amazement of his family, he handed her one day
two crisp twenty-dollar bills, and said, "I want
you to let me have a little share in what you are
doing in your church and Sunday-school, Mrs.
Stowe. I don't make any professions of any kind,
but I know a good thing when 1 see it ! " She
took the money with a quiet smile, but said little.
She was uot 8uq)rised because she believed in
people. Just as the sun shines on the frozen
ground and says, *' You are not frozen ground,
but a garden, soft and warm, and full of flow-
ers," and lo ! it is so, so she kindled the best lu
people.

It was a great g^ef to her when this little
church and schoolhouse burned down, as it did
one windy night. She says: " But to tliink of our
church and schoollionse being burned down just
as we are ready to do something with it. I feel it
most for the colored people, who were so anxious
to have their school, and now have no place to
have it in. We are all trying to raise what we cao

1

1

I

UFE IN THE SOUTH

for a new building, and intend to get it up by
March. If I were North now I would try giving
some readings for this, and perhaps raise some-
thing."

There can be no doubt that the quiet Florida
days prolonged for many years Mrs. Stowe's life
and usefulness. Yet even this Fatmos was not all
rest for her. Financial difhculties still troubled
and beset her.

" On gold depends, to gold atill t«ndfl ;
All, all, alas we poor! "

Why should she have been poor when she wrote
such popular books that brought her such hand-
some returns ? Her publishers were liberal, eveu
generous. She received ten thousand dollars for
" Oldtown Folks," mostly in prepayments. Pro-
fessor Stowe received ten thousand dollars in
royalties for his book on the Bible, — a most re-
markable record for a book of that nature. Yet
they were, as the Professor said, " always plagued
and poor!" We find Mrs. Stowe doing hack
work like the editorship of a book entitled " The
Men of Our Times." Fly and the mule cart
could hardly be called family extravagances. No
one who ever saw the Professor, his wife, or any
of the family could suspect them of being unduly

238 HARRIET BEECHKR STOWE

in bondage to the pomp and vanities of this world.
As the Professor and his wife advanced in years
there developed certain startling eccentricities in
their mode of dress, but never any extravagances.
To explain their chronic poverty is, however, not
difficult.

In the first place they were lamentably deficient
in that " root of all evil, the love of money." That
is a Beecber failing from the old Doctor Lyman
down. Henry Ward Beecher was as deficient in
this way as his sister Harriet. He said, " Money
is like gunpowder. It 's no use except you fire it
off! " As for old Lyman Beecher, when the ladies
of his Boston church gave him fifty dollars to buy
anew overcoat, he ran round the corner and popped
it all into a missionary collection. His children
were all like him. Thomas K. Beecher, when hla
Elmyra church tried to give hira an annuity, said
that " he 'd take to the woods if they did, and that
it was the ambition of his life to be a worthy object
of charity in his old age." Ooe might as well give
money to a resurrection angel as to a genuine
Beecher, and Mrs. Stowe was a Beecher, and very
genuine. As to Professor Stowe, he was as like to
her as like could be in this respect. He was de-
scended from JohD Stow, the Chronicler of Lon-

LIFE IN THE SOUTH

239

don, to whom James I gave letters patent to solicit
the alms of the good people of London because
he had spent a life of unrequited service in col-
lecting the historical monuments of England.
Stow collected seven shillings and a sixpence, and
the letters patent were extended for another twelve-
month. As a money-getter, his descendant was
little more successful.

First, there was an open-handed generosity that
gave without stint in private and public charities
of every description. Then, there was an unsuspect-
ing trustfulness in those who were ever eager to
invest their money for them. As Mrs, Fields says
in the "Life and Letters" Mrs. Stowe writes to
Mr. Howard, " I have invested thirty-four thou-
sand doUai^ in various ways, none of which can
give me any immediate income." The probability
is that these particular investments never gave her
any income. It had been far better if she had
spent it and got some satisfaction out of it. " My
investment in this Southern place," she writes
again, "is still one whose returns are in the
future." That future never came. The orange
grove was ruined by frosts and sold for a song I
The enterprise of foundingthe "Christian Union"
cost her and her brother, Henry Ward Beecher,

^v

^^1

240 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE H

thousands of dollars and never brought them a ^|
oent in retura. So faer money vanished like the ^M
morning cloud and the early dew, and she slaved
at her pen far into old age. In 1872 she lost her
truest friend and safest businesa adviser, Mr. _
Thomas C. Perkins, the husband of her sister Mary. fl
She writes : " The blow has fallen! My dear brother H
has left us I Nowhere in the world had I a truer H
friend. It is a blow that strikes deep on my life H
and makes me feel that it is like ice breaking under H
my feet. Those who truly love us, and on whom H
we may at all times depend, are not many, and all V
my life he has been one of these."

It is little that she did not have money, or the
faculty for getting and keeping it. She had wealth
far more satisfactory and abiding. " Sometimes in
my sleep I have such nearness to the blessed, it is
almost as if one voice after another whispers to
me, ' Thou shalt tread upon the Hon and theadder.'
'The eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath
thee are the everlasting arms.' . . . Depend upon
it, the spirit of the Lord did n't pitch me into this
seething caldron for nothing, and the Son of Man
walketh with me in the Hre."

The great reality above all other realities that
filled the thoughts by day and the dreams by night

LIFE IN THE SOUTH 241

of both Frofeasor and Mrs. Stowe was that o£ the
Eternal GoodneBS, —

" Oh Lore dirine that Btoopeil to ghare.
Our sharpest pang, our bitt'rut tear."
The older thej grew the more childlike and
simple was their faith. At last came the tune when
Professor Stowe's increasing infirmities made the
journey back and forth impossible, and Mrs. Stowe
writes of the Mandarin home, that Southern para-
dise where she had passed so many happy years:
'* I am quietly settled down for the winter in my
Hartford home. ... It has become clear that Mr.
Stowe cannot take the journey. We dare not un-
dertake it. Our Southern home has do such con-
Teniences as an invalid needs. It was charming
while Mr. Stowe was well enough to sit on the
veranda and take long daily walks, hut now it is
safer and better that we all stay with him here."

CHAPTER IX

DELINEATOR OP NEW ENGLAND LIFE AND
CHAKACTEB

Mrs. Stowb began her literary career as adeline'
ator of New England life and character. Her first
Buccess was " Uncle Lot"; a New England char-
acter sketch. She web an artist by nature and
would have been impelled to literary expression
under any circumstances, and the field In which
she would most naturally have exercised her tal-
ents was in portraying the people and life of New
England. By an accident of her life she waa
brought in contact with slavery and the Anti-Slav-
ery movement. In this field she achieved her first
and greatest triumph. Yet so acute a critic as Mr.
Lowell said in reviewing "The Minister's Woo-
ing" : " It has always seemed to us that the Anti-
Slavery element in the two former novels of Mrs.
Stowe stood in the way of the appreciation of her
remarkable genius, at least in her own country,
. , . Mrs. Stowe seems in her former novels to
have sought a form of society alien to her sympa-
thies, and too remote for exact study, or for the

DELINEATES NEW ENGLAND LIFE 243

acquirement of that local truth which is the alow
result of unconscious observation. There can be
no stronger proof of the greatness of her genius,
of her possessing that conceptive faculty which
belongs to the higher order of the imagination,
than the avidity with which 'Uncle Tom' was
read at the South. It settled the point that this
book is true to human nature if not minutely so
to plantation life.

" If capable of so great a triumph where soo-
cess must so largely depend on the sympathic in-
sight of her mere creative power, have we not a
right to expect something far more in keeping
with the requirements of art, now that her won-
derful eye is to be the mirror of familiar scenes,
aud in a society in which she was bred, and of
which she has seen so many varieties, and that,
too, in a country where it is most n^ve and origi-
nal ? It is a great satisfaction to us that in ' The
Minister's Wooing' she has chosen her time and
laid her scenes amid New England habits and tra-
ditions. There is no other writer who is so cap-
able of perpetuating for us, in a work of art, a
style of thought and manners which railroads and
newspapers will soon render as palaeozoic as the
mastodon, or the megalosaurians."

244 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

The summer of 1857 Mrs. Stowe was well-uigh
crushed beneath the weight of a great sorrow, —
the death of her eldest son. She dreaded every-
thing that she did. As she afterwards said : " I sat
hour after hour before my inkstand dreading to
begin. I let my plants die by inches, and did not
■water them. I felt as if I were slowly freezing to
death!"

Yet it was in this time of sorrow and heaviness
that she began composing both " The Minister's
Wooing" and "The Pearl of Orr's Island." Of
the latter she says : " I seem to have so much to
fill my time, and yet there is my Maine story wait-
ing. However, I am composing it every day, only
I greatly need living studies for filling in of my
sketches. There is ' Old Jonas ' my ' fish father,'
sturdy, independent fisherman farmer, who in his
youth sailed all over the world and made up hia
mind about everything. In his old age he attends
prayer-meetings and reads * The Missionary Her-
ald.' He has also plenty of money in an old brown
sea-chest. He is a great heart with an infiexible
will and iron muscles. I must go to Orr's Island
and see him again."

Here we see the promptings of Mrs. Stowe's
artistic nature. Had it not been for the *' Key "

DELINEATES NEW ENGLAND LIFE 245

aad "Dred," we should have had this id^t of the
coast of Maine Id all the perfection of quiet beauty.
Mrs. Stowe needed only the slow results of un-
conscious observation to have brought forth " The
Fearl of Orr's Island," rich with local truth and
color. As it was, this poor little flower of her gen-
ius was starved. She turned all her energies to
the completion of "The Minister's Wooingj" and
" The Fearl of Orr's Island" was for the second
time indefinitely postponed.

The reason for this is easy to understand. The
Maine story was now too filled with sad memories
of her lost son. She could not write upon it with-
out Henry's face seeming to look upon her sadly
from out the past happy days in Brunswick. When
she visited Maine to prepare herself for the task
she wrote to her daughters: " We have visited the
old pond, and, if I mistake not, the relics of your
old raft are there caught among the rushes. I do
not realize that one of the busiest and happiest of
the train that once played there shall play there
no more. ... I think I have felt the healing
touch of Jesus of Nazareth on the deep wound in
my heart, for I have golden hours of calm when I
say, *Even so, Father ; for so it seemed good in thy
sight.' " Yet the wound thus healed would ever

246 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

and agaia break out and bleed afresb. There were
memories in the Maine story that pierced her
heart as with a knife. Like the flowers she planted
over her son's grave that bloomed, and died, and
bloomed again, so were the consolations that came
to her soul. Under these circumstances " The Min-
ister's Wooing " was nearer to her mood. Suffei^
ing, sympathy, sorrow, are its undertone. More
than all the problems of the soul came the ques-
tion, Where was her Henry now ? " If ever I was
conscious of an attack of the devil trying to sepa-
rate me front the love of Christ, it was for some
days after the terrible news came. I was lu a great
state of physical weakness, most agonizing, and
unable to control my thoughts. Gloomy doubts as
to Henry's spiritual state were rudely thrust upon
my soul. It was as if a voice said to me : ' You
trusted in God did you? You believed that He
loved you? You had i)ei-fect confidence that He
would never take your child till the work of grace
was mature? Now He has hurried him into etei^
nity without a moment's warning, without prepa-
ration, and where is he?' " It was inevitable that
Buch reflections should come to the daughter of
Lyman Beecher, to a New England Christian of
the Evangelical faith. They have come to multi-

DELINEATES NEW ENGLAND LIFE 247

tudes ; but there is no power that can so effect-
ually shatter the stern logic of Calvinistic ortho-
doxy as the open grave. In " The Minister's Woo-
ing " she met this problem, and thought and wrote
herself out of her doubts and her agony. In Mrs.
Marvyn's anguish when she receives the news
of her son's suddea death at sea we have Mrs.
Stowe's own heart laid bare. Then, too, there was
the problem of suffering ! That also she met in
the doctrine of The Divine Sorrow regnant on the
throne of the universe. So it is quite evident why
"The Pearl of Orr's Island," though first taken
up, was laid aside for " The Minister's Wooing,"
Two years afterwards, when she turned to it
again, she wrote, as says Mrs, Fields in the '* Life
and Letters": "Authors are apt, I suppose, like
parents, to have their unreasonable partialities.
Everybody has, — and I have a pleasure in writ-
ing ' Agnes of Sorrento ' that gilds this icy winter
weather. I write my Maine story with a shiver,
and come hack to this as to a flowery home where
I love to rest."

" The Minister's Wooing " was very largely
dictated, and chapter after chapter thrown off at
white-beat. Each chapter as finished she read he-
fore the assembled family in a particular corner of

248 HARRIET BEECHEE STOWE

the loDg parlor of the old Stone Cahin at AndoTer.
Her son Charles remembers vividly these family
readings. The Professor with his long gray beard,
white hair, and piercing black eyes, sat with his
pocket handkerchief spread out upon his knees,
alternately shaking with laughter, or heaving with
sobs. Now and then with commanding voice he
would point out an error or inadequacy in the
argument on some point of theology, or call at-
tention to a lack of local color in some descrip-
tive passage. Such changes as he suggested Mrs.
Stowe made immediately and without discussion.
She never for a moment doubted the infallibility
of her "rabbi" as she fondly called him.

Mrs, Stowe's oldest daughters, or the "^1b,"
as they were always called, sat in judgment on the
love-making, and in their department were as
meekly obeyed as their father in his. The at-
mosphere of Mrs. Stowe's audience was, however,
one of admiration. As Mrs. Fields says with truth
in the " Life and Letters," in commenting upon
Mrs. Stowe's craving for sympathy when she was
writing : " It was a touching characteristic to see
how the ' senate of girls,' or of such household
friends as she could muster wherever she might
be, were always called in to keep up her courage.

DELINEATES NEW ENGLAND LIFE 249

and to give her a Eympatbetic etimulus. During
the days when she was writing it was never safe
to be far away, for she was rapid as light itself,
and before a brief hour was ended we were sure
to hear her voice calling, ' Do come and hear, and
tell me how you like it ! ' "

Mrs. Stowe writes to one of her children at this
time : " I have set many flowers around Henry's
grave which are blossoming : pausies, white im-
mortelle, white petunia, and verbenas. Papa walks
there every day, often twice or three times. . . .
To-night I sat there ; the sky so beautiful, all
rosy, with the silver moon looking out of it. Fapa
said with a deep sigh, ' I am submissive, but not
reconciled.* " In both Professor and Mrs. Stowe
there was no characteristic more strongly marked
than their constant sense of the supernatural and
the nearness of the world of spirits. Henry's grave
was to them a charmed spot, for there he seemed
nearer to them. Their son Charles well remem-
bers their communings at this oft visited grave.

" Are they not all ministering spirits sent to
minister unto them that shall be the heirs of salva-
tion ? " was the scriptural text most often on their
lips. One day Mrs. Stowe climbed on a step lad-
der to fix the curtains in her room. She fell and

250 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

marvelously escaped serious injury. The Professor
heard her fall, aod rushing into the room, found
her prostrate on the floor. When he had assured
himself that she was not seriously injured, he ex-
claimed with the utmost sincerity, " Oh, my dear,
it was Henry's spirit that saved you ! " She looked
up into his face, and said, "He shall give his
angels charge over thee, and they shall bear thee
up in their hands."

It was impossible for Mrs, Stowe to treat " The
Minister's Wooing" merely as a work of liter-
ary art. There lay behind it too many vital ei-
periences which she coidd not make public, and
which overbore the ordinary rules of literary com-
position. She wrote into it her heart anguish, as
Tennyson wrote his into the lyrics that make up
"In Memoriam."

The first conception of " The Minister's Woo-
ing " came to her in Newport. Rhode Island, dur-
ing the summer of 1830. Her brother William
began his ministry there, and she went to visit
him. She became acquainted with the facts of the
life and ministry of the Rev. Samuel Hopkins.
What first fixed her attention was the inherent un-
selfishness and nobleness of his character as illus-
trated by his conduct in fearlessly denouncing

DELINEATES NEW ENGLAND LIFE 251

slavery before his alave-bolding and slave-trading
congregation. She was struck and thrilled by the
thought that beneath the crust of dogmatic theo-
logy there could beat a heart so true to the no-
blest instincts of huioanity. Instantly about this
nucleus there gathered the memory of the heart-
break and anguish through which her sister Cath-
erine had passed, and of which she herself had felt
sympathetic vibrations.

There then floated before her mind the outhne
of a possible story in which these elements were
to be combined. The thought of introducing love
into the tale, as she afterwards did, came to her
even then. To show the noble unselfishness of
the Puritan divine he was to be in love with a
member of his flock, a sweet Christian girl with
a wild sailor lover. At the end the good minister
shows himself capable of such supreme unselfish-
ness in giving her up as to change completely the
young man's attitude toward the Church and in-
stituted Christianity by showing him that a creed
is after all a plastic thing, and that even the stern
hereditary faith of New England had in it ele-
ments of tenderness and beauty. It is interesting
to note that though Mr. Whittier knew nothing
of this original conception of "The Minister's

I

252 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

Wooing," yet it was this motif that he emphasizeB
in his poem read at Mrs. StoWs birthday party.

" Welcome of each and all lo her
Whoee wooing of the MJnifiter
Revealed the warm heart of the man
Beneath the creed-hound Puritan,
And taught the kinship of the love,
Of man below and God above."

To this original conception of "The Minister's
Wooing," bom in the pain and anguish that came
upon her through Henry Stowe's death, was added
the cheerful pragmatisra of old Candace : "So
don't you go to laying on your poor heart what
no mortal creeter can live under; 'cause as we's
got to live in dis yer world, it 's quite clar de Lord
must ha' iixed it so we can ; and ef things was as
some folks suppose, why, we could n't live, and dar
wouldn't be no sense in anything dat goes on.

"I'm clar Mass'r James is one o' de 'lect; and
I'm clar dar's considerable more o' de 'lect dan
people tink. Why, Jesus didn't die for nothing,
— dat love ain't gwine to be wasted. De 'lect is
more'n you or I knows, Honey ! . . . and ef Mass'r
James is call and took, depend upon it de Lord
has got him. . . ."

Here, also, is the echo of the soul struggles of

DELINEATES NEW ENGLAND LIFE 253
her sister Catherine after the death of her lover.
Professor Fisher.

After the first two or three chapters of " The
Minister's Wooing" had been received, Mr. Low-
ell, then editor of the Atlantic Monthly, wrote
to Mrs. Stowe a letter full of encouragement.
Among other things he said: " When I got the
first number of the MS., I said to Mr. Phillips
that I thought that it would be the best thing you
had done, and what followed has only confirmed
my first judgment. . . .

" You are one of the few persons lucky enough
to be bom with eyes in your head, — that is, with
something behind the eyes that makes them of
value. . . .

" As for ' theology,' it is as much a part of
daily life in New England as in Scotland, and all
I should have to say about it is this, let it natu-
rally crop out where it comes to the surface ; but
don't dig down to it. A moral aim is a fine thing,
but in making a story an artist is a traitor who
does not sacrifice everything to art. . . ."

Mr. Ruskin with fine literary instinct felt that
Mrs. Stowe, for reasons to him unknown, had not
entirely followed Mr. Lowell's advice, for he wrote
to her after reading the book : " Still I know well

i

254 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

that in many respects it was impOBsible for you to
treat tliis story merely as a work of literary art.
There must have been many facts that you could
not dwelt upon, and which no one may judge by
common rules."

If Mrs. Stowe in any way fell short of Mr.
Lowell's ideal in " The Minister's Wooing " she
Certainly meant to redeem herself in "Oldtown
Folks." She wrote to Mr. Fields in 1868, "My
own book, instead of cooling, bolls and bubbles
daily and nightly, and I am pushing and spurring
like fury to get to it."

"The story which had so taken possession of her
mind and heart," remarks Mrs. Fields, " was ' Old-
town Folks,' the one which she at the time fancied
the best calculated of all her works to sustain the
reputation of the author of ' Uncle Tom's Cabin.' '

The many proofs of her own interest in it seem
to show that she had been moved to a livelier and
deeper satisfaction in this creation than in any of
her later productions. She writes respecting it,
" It is more to me than a story ; it is my r^sum^
of the whole spirit and body of New England, a
country which is now exerting such an influence
on the civilized world that to know it truly be-
comes an object."

DELINEATES NEW ENGLAND LIFE 255

Id her preface to tbe book she lias said: *'My
object is to interpret to tlie world tbe New Eng-
land life and character in that pai'ticular time in
its bistory that may be called the seminal period.
I would endeavor to show you New England in
its seed-bed, before the hot suna of modern pro-
gress had developed its sprouting germs into the
great trees of to-day. . . . New England people
cannot be so interpreted without calling up many
grave considerations and necessitating some serious
thinking.

" In doing this work I have tried to make my
mind as still and passive aa a looking-glass, or a
mountain lake, and then to give you tbe images
reflected there. I desire that you should see the
characteristic persons of those times, and hear
them talk ; and sometimes I have taken an au-
thor's liberty of explaining their charactera to you,
and telling you why they talked and lived aa they
did.

"My studies for this object have been Pre-
Raphaelite, — and taken from real characters, real
scenes, and real incidents. And some of the things
that may appear most romantic and like fiction
are simple renderings and applications of facts. . . .

" In portraying the various characters that I

256 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

have introduced, I have tried to maintaiD the part
simply of a spectator. I propose neither to teach
nor preach through them, any farther than any
spectator of life is preached to hy what he sees of
the workings of human nature around him.

"Though Calvinist, Armiuian, High -Church
BpiBCOpaliau, sceptic, and simple believer all speak
in their turn, I merely listen, and endeavor to un-
derstand and faithfully represent the inner life of
each. I myself am but the observerand reporter,
seeing much, doubting much, questioning much,
and beheving with all my heart only in a very few
things."

Mrs. Stowe found it no easy task to carry out
this conception. For three long years or more the
Btory, or whatever it may most fittingly be called,
dragged its weary length along. She wrote to Mr.
Fields : " As my friend Sam I^wson says, ' There 's
things that can be druv, and then again there 'b
things that can't,' and this is that kind, as has to
be humored. Instead of rushing on, I have often
turned back and written over with care, that nothing
that I wanted to say might be omitted ; it has cost
me a good deal of labor to elaborate this first part,
namely, to build my theatre and to introduce my
actors. . . ." The fact is the brave little woman

I

DELINEATES NEW ENGLAND LIFE 257

was hard pressed by many cares, — an iDsufficient
iDcotne, an invalid husband, and domestic griefs.
She could certainly have done better work at this
time bad it not been for the grinding necessity she
was under of writing for money.

" The thing has been an awful tax and labor,"
she writes again, " for I have tried to do it well.
I may also say to you confidentially, that it has
seemed as if every private care that could hinder
me as woman and mother has been crowded into
just this year that I have had this to do."

Again before she sails for Florida she writes to
Mr. Fields : " A story comes, grows like a flower,
sometimes will and sometimes won't, like a pretty
woman. When the spirits will help I can write.
When they jeer, flout, make faces, and otherwise
maltreat me, I can only wait humbly at their gates,
and watch at the posts of their doors."

The material for "Oldtown Folks" was fur-
nished by Professor Stowe. *' Oldtown " was the
Natick of his boyhood, a little hamlet some twenty-
five miles from Boston, now known as South Na-
tick. Before beginning the story, Mr. and Mrs.
Stowe made frequent and extended visits to the
place. In the main the characters and the events
were as he remembered and reported them to her.

2

258 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

That they lost Dothiog Id dramatic iaterest or
quaintness by passing through the alembic of his
mind is very certain. Professor Stowe was an in-
imitable story-teller, with an ine}diaustible fund of
humor. As a gentleman once remarked in view of
a visit from him : " We must eat all we can before
Professor Stowe comes, for after he arrives, I doubt
if we can eat anything, be will keep us laughing
so ! " Nearly every character and incident not only
in "Oldtown Folks," but in the "Oldtown Fire-
side Stones," were familiar to the whole Stowe
family, from their having heard of them repeat-
edly from Professor Stowe's lips, many years be-
fore they were committed to writing. Yet Mrs.
Stowe was not writing history or biography, but,
as she has said, *' interpreting to the world New
England life and character at a particular time of
its history." Her aim was not to give an accurate
portraiture of departed worthies of South Natick,
which would have been at best a dreary and un-
profitable enterprise. Some characters, however,
are drawn to the life more nearly than others.
Horace Holyoke is, for example, in spite of wide
deviations from fact, Professor Stowe himself.

Professor Stowe's father was not an auiemic,
consumptive schoolmaster, but a jolly, jovial baker.

I

DELINEATES NEW ENGLAND LIFE 259

the life of the village. He died early, leaving a
widow and two boys, William and Calvin. Cal-
vin's mother was the daughter of Deacon Wil-
ham Bigelow, the Deacon Badger of " Oldtown
Folks." The " Uncle Bill " of the book was Pro-
fessor Stowe's uncle, William Bigelow, who gradu-
ated from Harvard College in 1793. He was a
brilliant but eccentric character, and in bis day
a writer, and possessed inexhaustible fecundity as
a maker of rhymes. For many years he was the
Headmaster o£ the Boston Latin School, where be
accompanied his instructions by the most aston-
ishing extempore rhymes, as, for example : —

" If yoa '11 bo good I '11 thank you.
Bat if you won't I '11 epank you."

After ruling over bis intractable school for many
years with a rod of rattan, if not of iron, be was
finally hurled from bis throne by an uprisingamong
bis pupils, of which Ralph Waldo Emerson, him-
self a stndent in the institution at the time, has
given a graphic account.

The Indians that figure in *' Oldtown Folks "
are all drawn to the life, and even the names are
authentic. William Bigelow was a great fun-maker
and caricaturist, and Calvin Stowe was one of bis

260 HAKRIET BEECHER STOWE

apt pupils. Uucle Fly, Grandma Badger, and Sam
LawfiOD, together with many other characters of
the book, are given largely ae they appeared in the
eyes of these two incurable humorists. Some of
the characters are of a more recent date, as, for
example, Tina, who was Mrs. Stowe's youngest
daughter.

The supernatural element that is introduced so
prominently into the book owes its presence to
Professor Stowe's unusual psychic experiences. In
March, 1872, he wrote to George Eliot : —

" My interest in the subject of spiritualism arises
from the fact of my own experience, more than
sixty years ago, in my early childhood.

" I then never thought of questioning the ob-
jective reality of all I saw, and supposed that every-
body else had the same experience. Of what this
experience was you may gain some idea from cer-
tain passages in 'Oldtown Folks.'"

In a letter written to Mrs. Stowe shortly after-
wards, Mrs. Lewes says, " I was much impressed
with the fact — which you have told me — that he
[Professor Stowe] was the original of the 'vision-
ary boy ' in ' Oldtown Folks.'"

Soon after the publication of the book Mrs.
Stowe received from Geoi^e Eliot the following

DELINEATES NEW ENGLAND LIFE 261

encouraging words: "I have received and read
'Oldtown Folks.' I think that few of your read-
ers can have felt more interest than I have felt
in that picture of an older generation ; for my
interest in it has a double root, — one in my
own love for our old-fashioned provincial life,
which has its afEinities with contemporary life,
even all across the Atlantic, and of which I have
gathered glimpses in different ])ha8es from my
father and mother, with their relations ; the other
is my experimental acquaintance with some shades
of Calvinistic orthodoxy. I think your way of pre-
senting the religious convictions that are not your
own, except by way of indirect fellowship, \a a tri-
umph of insight and true tolerance."

The very heart of " Oldtown Folks " as a de-
lineator of New England life and character is the
chapter called " My Grandmother's Blue Book."
It is drawn from nature with what Mrs. Stowe has
designated as "Fre-Kaphaelite" exactness. It is a
faithful portraiture of Mr. Stowe's grandmother,
as he had known her, and through her of old New
England : —

"My grandmother, as I have shown, was a
character in her way full of contradictions and
inconsistencies, brave, generous, energetic, large-

262 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

hearted, and impulfiive. Theoretically she was the ,
disciple o£ the sharpest aud severest Calvinism,
and used to repeat Michael Wigglesworth's * Day
of Doom ' to UB iu the chimuey corner of an even-
ing with a reverent acquiescence in all its hard
sayings, while practically she was the most pitiful,
easy-to-he-eutreated mortal on earth, and was ever
faUing a prey to any lazy vagabond who chose to
make an appeal to her abounding charity. . . .

" She could not in cool, deliberate moments even
inflict transient and necessary pain For the greater
good of a child, and resolutely shut her eyes to
the necessity of such infliction. But there lay at
the bottom of all this apparent inconsistency a deep
cause that made it consistent, and that cause was
tlie theologic stratum in which her mind, and the
mind of all New England, was embedded.

" Never, in the most intensely religious ages
of the world, did the insoluble problems of the
tchence, the tchi/, and the whither of mankind re-
ceive such earnest attention. New England was
founded by a colony who turned their backs on
the civilization of the Old World on purpose that
they might have nothing else to think of. Their
object was to form a community that should think
of DOthing else.

L

DELINEATES NEW ENGLAND LIFE 263

" Working on a hard soil, battling with a harsh,
uncongenial climate, everywhere being treated by
nature with the most rigorous severity, they asked
no indulgence, they got none, and they gave
none."

This conception of the inevitable connection
between physical conditions and theological beliefs
was a favorite one with Mrs. Stowe. Buckle could
not have emphasized it more strongly. In 1873
she wrote from Mandarin, Florida, to her brother
Charles : " Never did we have so delicious a spring 1
I never knew such altogether perfect weather. It is
enough to make a saint out of the toughest old
Calvinist that ever set his face as a flint. How do
you think New England Theology would have
fared if our fathers had landed here instead of on
Plymouth Rock?"

To turn again to her picture of the Puritan
character in "Oldtown Folks" : " They never ex-
pected to find truth agreeable. Nothing in their
experience of hfe had ever prepared them to think
that it would be so. Their investigations were
made with the courage of the man who hopes
little, bat determines to know tbe worst of his
affairs. . . . The underlying foundation of life,
therefore, in New England, was one of profound.

264 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

unutterable, and therefore unuttered melancholy,
which regarded human existence as a ghastly risk,
and, in the case of the vast majority of human
beings, an inconceivable misfortune."

We have only to recall what her own sister
Catherine had written her brother Edward in 1822
to realize how this cheerless view of life had been
early impreased upon Mrs. Stowe's mind : " I am
most unhappy in the view which thia doctrine
presents of my own state aud that of my fellow
creatures, except the few who are redeemed from
the curse. When I look at little Isabella, it seems
a pity that she ever was born, and that it would
be a mercy if she were taken away. I feel as Job
did, that I could curse the day in which I was
born. I wonder that Christians who realize the
worth of an immortal soul should be wilhng to
give life to immortal minds to be placed in such a
dreadful world."

" There is something most affecting," to con-
tinne to quote from the book, " in the submissive
devotion of these old Puritans to their God. No-
thing shows more completely the indestructible
nature of the filial tie that binds man to God . . .
than the manner in which these men loved and
worshipped and trusted God as the All-lovelyt

DELINEATES NEW ENGLAND LIFE 265

even in the face of monstrous assertions of theo-
logy ascribing to Him deeds which no lather
could imitate without being cast out of human
society and no governor without being handed
down to all ages as a monster. . . .

" I must beg my reader's pardon for all this,
bat it is a fact, that the true tragedy of New
England life, its deep, unutterable pathos, its en-
durances and its sufferings, all depended upon and
were woven into this constant wrestling of thought
with infinite problems that could not be avoided,
and which saddened the days of almost every one
who grew up under it. . . ."

To show how men and women were bom, and
lived, and loved, suffered, hoped, and feared, in
this bygone theological world, is the purpose
of "Oldtown Folks." The otherwise unutterable
gloom of the picture is alleviated by the quaint
sayings and doings of Uncle Fly, Sam Lawson,
and other mirth-provoking figures, that from time
to time flit across the stage. The humor is the
more effective because of the dark background
against which it is shown. It ripples on the sur-
face of the sadness of the life she is picturing as
the sunlit waves dance on the bosom of the sullen
stream, whose impenetrable depths no eye can

d

266 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

fathom. In 1877 Mrs. Stowe wrote her last serial
story. " Poganuc People " was to picture the
scenes of her childhood as had " Oldtown Folks"
those of Professor Stowe'a. " Poganuc " was
Litchfield, and " Dolly," Hattie Beecher. It is
a complete autobiography of Mrs. Stowe's child-
hood. The old parsonage, with its garrets and
cellars, yard and wood-pile, her father, her mo-
ther, and her brothers, Litchfield hills and walks,
the orchard, the meadow, the mowing lot and the
woods, the beautiful lakes and the cleai^flowing
Bantum River, are all sketched with loving fidel-
ity. It is a pity that she had not done this earlier.
As Dr. Holmes once said of her, " She was tired
far into the future" long before she began it,
and her days of authorship were all but spent. It
lacks the strength and vigor of what she wrote of
her reminiscences of childhood days for her far
ther*s " Autobiography and Correspondence " j but
for all that it has a sweet and quiet beauty all its
own, like that of a fading sunset sky.

When she began it she wrote to her son
Charles : *' I am again entangled in writing a
serial, a thing I never meant to do again, but the
story, begun for a mere Christmas brochure, grew
so under my hands that I thought I might as

L

DELINEATES NEW ENGLAND LIFE 267

well fill it out and make a book of it. It ia the
last thing of the kind I ever expect to do. In it
I condense my recollections of a by-gone era, in
which I was brought up, the ways and manners
of which are nearly as obsolete as the Old England
of Dickens' stories.

" I am so hampered by the necessity of writing
this story that I am obliged to give up company
and visiting of all kinds and keep my strength
for it. I hope I may be able to finish it, as I
greatly desire to do so, but I begin to feel that I
am not so strong as I used to be. Your mother
is an old woman, . . . and it is best that she
should give up writing before people are tired of
reading her."

After it was finished she wrote to Dr. Holmes :
"I sent ' Poganuc People' to you and Mrs.
Holmes as being among the few who knew those
old days. It is an extremely quiet story for these
sensational times, when heaven and earth seem to
be racked for a thrill ; but as I get old I love to
think of those quiet, simple times when there was
not a poor person in the parish, and the changing
glories of the year were the only spectacle."

In " Poganuc People " Mrs. Stowe figures as
" DoUy."

268 HARRIET BEKCHER STOWE

" It was Dolly's lot to enter the family at a pe-
riod whcD babies were no longer a novelty, when
the house was full of the wants and clamors of
older children, and the mother at her very wita'
end with a confusion of jackets, and trousers, soap,
candles, and groceries, and the endless harassments
of making both ends meet that pertain to the lot
of a poor country minister's wife." Here is a most
faithful picture of the conditions under which
she herself came into the world. And there fol-
lows a picture of her brothers as she remembered
them in her childhood : "Dolly's brothers nearest
her own age were studying in the academy, and
spouting scraps of superior Latin at her to make
her stare and wonder at their learning. They were
tearing, noisy, tempestuous boys, good-natured
enough and wilHng to pet her at intervals, but
prompt to suggest ' that it was time for Dolly to
go to bed,' when her questions or her gambols
interfered with their evening pleasures."

The interest of tlie book turns largely on that
event in the history of the Stute of Connecticut
known as "The Downfall of the Standing Order,"
which took place through the adoption of a new
constitution whereby the Congregational churches
DO longer enjoyed the peculiar privileges that had

I

DELINEATES NEW ENGLAND LIFE 269

been theirs from the first; they were, in fact, dis-
established. This was accomplished by a combi-
nation of many elements against the Federalists,
among others the Democrats and the Episcopa-
lians. Doctor Beecher was, of course, a staunch Fed-
eraUst, and looked with consternation on what was
transpiring about him and in spite of him. As he
afterwards said to his children many times in look-
ing back upon this period, " I suffered more thao
tongue can tell for the best thing that ever hap-
pened to the churches of Connecticut."

The day after the election he sat in an old rush-
bottomed chair in the kitchen, his face buried in
his hands, and the tears trickling through his fin-
gers, the picture of dejection and despair.

"What are you thinking about, father?" asked
his daughter Catherine.

"The Church of God, my child ! The Church
of God ! " he sobbed. This scene made an endui^
ing impression on Mrs. Stowe's mind in her child-
hood, and she has pictured it in " Poganuc People"
as it took form in ber memory.

"Dolly went to bed that night, her little soul
surging and boiling with conjecture. All day long
scraps of talk about the election had reached her
ears. She heard her brother Will say that ' the

270 HABRIET BEECHER STOWE

Democrats were goiQg to upset the whole state, for
father said so.'

" Exactly what this meant DoUy could not con-
ceive, but, coupled with her mother's sorrowful
face and her father's agonizing prayers, it must
mean something dreadful. Something of danger
to them all might be at hand, and she said her
'pray God to bless my dear father and mother*
with unusual fervor. . . .

" Id the morning, she sprang up, and dressed
quickly, and ran to the window. Evidently the
state had not been upset during the night, for the
morning was bright, clear, and glorious as ihe
heart could desire. . . ."

Then, there is this real incident of her tittle girl-
hood. At family prayers her father poured out the
anguish that oppressed his soul "in a voice trem-
ulous and choking with emotion. . . .

" Little Dolly cried from a strange, childish fear
because of the trouble in her father's voice. The
pleading tones affected her, she knew not why.
The boys felt a martial determiuatioo to stand by
their father, and a longing to fight for him. All
felt as if something deep and dreadful must have
happened, and after prayers Dolly climbed into her
father's lap, and put both arms around his neck.

DELINEATES NEW ENGLAND LIFE 271

and said, 'Papa, there sbaa't any thing hurt you.
I '11 defend you ! ' She was somewhat abashed by the
cheerful laugh that followed, but the doctor kissed
her, and said, 'So jou shall, dear I Be sure and
not let anything catch me.' And then he tossed
her up in his arms gleefully, and she felt as if the
trouble, whatever it was, could not be quite hope-
less."

In the following extract we have the restful at-
mosphere of Mrs. Stowe's childhood : " It is diffi-
cult in this era of railroads and steam to give any
idea of the depths of absolute stillness and repose
that brooded in the summer skies over the wooded
hills of 'Poganuc' [Litchfield]. No daily paper
told the news of distant cities. Summer traveling
was done in stages, and was long and wearisome,
and therefore there was little of that. Everybody
stayed at home and expected to stay there the year
through. A journey from Litchfield to Boston or
New York was more of an undertaking in those
days than a journey to Europe is in ours. Now and
then some of the great square houses on the street
of Litchfield Centre received a summer visitor, and
then everybody in town knew it, and knew all
about it. The visitor's family, rank, position in life,
probable amount of property, and genealogy to

272 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

remote ancestors were freely discussed and settled,
till all Litchfield was fully informed. Tlie elect cii^
cle of Litchfield called ou them, and made stately
tea-parties iu their honor, and these entertainments
pleasantly rippled the placid surface of society.
But life went on therewith a sort of dreamy still-
ness. The different summer flowers came out in
their successive ranks in the neatly kept gar-
den ; roses followed peonies and white lilies came
and went, and crimson and white phloxes stood
ranged in midsummer ranks, and the yellow
tribes of marigolds brought up the autumnal sea-

Goethe, in oft-quoted and familiar lines, has said
that a talent is born in quietness and repose, but
that a character is formed in the storm of life.
Mrs. Stowe had both. She carried repose even into
the storm of life, as if the quietness of those child-
hood days, pictured in "Poganuc People," had
passed into her inmost soul. Just as she lived all
phases, so she has portrayed all phases of New
England ; its restfuloess and calm, its storm and
stress.

One who bad known and delineated New En^
land life and character side by side with Mrs. Stowe,
and who knew it as well and had portrayed it

DELINEATES NEW ENGLAND LIFE 273

as truthf uUy as she^ the poet Whittier^ brings a
fitting tribute to her in the lines : —

'^ To her whoee yigoroiu pencil strokes
Sketched into life her Oldtown Folksy

Whoee firetide stories grave or gay
In qaaint Sam Lawson's vagrant wajr.

With old New England's flavor rife,
Waifs from her rude idyllic life."

CHAPTER X

THE EBBING TIDE

One of Mr8. Stowe's most strongly marked char-
acteristics was her love for am] devotion to her
friends. As she wrote to herfriend GeorgianaMay,
when still a very young giri: "The greater part
that I see cannot move me deeply. They are pres-
ent, and I eujoy them ; they pass, and I forget them.
But those that I love differently ; those that I
love; and oh, how much that word means I"
There was nothing that she would not do for those
she loved. Her time, her strength, her purse, and
everything that she had, was theirs. No gift was
too costly, no sacrifice too great, to lay at their
feet. This side of Mrs. Stowe's nature was to find
its crowning manifestation in the publication by
her, in the September Atlantic in 1869, of the
article on Lord Byron which made her the storm
centre of a perfect cyclone of adverse criticism.

She was at this time at the summit of her fame.
Her name was a revered and honored one in thou-
sands of homes and hearts on either side of the

THE EBBING TIDE 275

Atlantic. Whatever she wrote was read with con-
fidence and appreciation. To jeopardize all this by
dragging out into the light o£ day a scandal so
reeking with moral rottenness as to befoul each
and every mind that should come in contact with it
seems, from a purely worldly point of view, reck-
lessness little short of madness. She was urged not
to do it ; even her own husband plead with her and
begged her to stay her hand. Her son Charles
joined his father in urging her not to publish
the article after she bad read it to him at a quiet
sea-side resort during the summer of 1869. But
she set her face as a flint, and to every objection
she said, in substance : *' My friend Lady Byron is
Tilified, disgraced, and covered with infamy by the
hand of Lord Byron's mistress ! I know the truth
in all this horrid business I I am one who can speak
the truth that shall set her right before the world
If others who could speak would speak and clear
her name of these vile slanders then I could be si-
lent. I could never respect myself, nor have one
moment's peace, did I keep silence at this time. I
cannot, and I will not, sit calmly by and see my
friend insulted, outraged, and her fair name tram-
pled in the dust while I have it in my power to de-
fend her ! "

276 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

So she acted and braved the consequences^ which
were what her friends had foreseen. She felt most
keenly the abuse that was hurled at her. Not all
the denunciation that came upon her for the writing
of " Uncle Tom's Cabin " was to be compared with
that which this article brought on the devoted little
woman. Deeply as she felt it, she was sustained by
the thought, " This is the sacrifice I bring to a dear
friend who is silent in the grave, and for whom I
speak as she cannot speak for herself." Constituted
as she was, she could not have done otherwise.
Where the reputation of a friend was to be de-
fended, or the sacred trust which, as she felt, that
friend had laid upon her was to be executed, there
could be no counting of pain or loss. A colder and
more cautious nature would have acted very differ-
ently under the circumstances. It gives the whole
event a flavor of romance when we remember that
Byron was the idol of her childhood. It was like a
fairy story for her to be brought into such intimate
relations with Lady Byron. It was like a tragedy
for bertocome out as the accuser of Lord Byron.
Her son Charles vividly recalls his mother reading
to him from "The Bride of Corinth" the scene
■where the spirit wife returning to earth gives
her reckless and wicked husband time for repent-

THE EBBING TIDE

277

ance wbUea cloud is sweeping over the surface of
the mooD, and herapplication of this dramatic pas-
sage to the personal life of Lord Byron. She felt
that Lord Byron was possessed by an insanity of
TrickedneBS that made him say, "Evil be thou my
good!" Then she spoke of her conviction that
there was great good in ByroQ, that he had a
richly endowed and magniiiceDt being. She evi-
dently felt as her father had felt when he said,
"Oh, I'm sorry that Byron 's dead. I did hope he
would live to do something for Christ. What a
harp he might have swept! "

Even more intense than Mrs. Stowe's devotioo
to her friends was her love for her children. There
was an overflowing of her heart at times that
made her whole being tremulous with love. She
loved all her children with an equal bountifulness,
but any weakness, sickness, or waywardness only
intensified the love that loved the more, the more
the need of love. So when her son. Captain Fred
Stowe, came out of the war shattered in mind and
body, it was upon him she poured out all the rich-
ness of her affection. Over his saddened spirit and
wrecked and ruined life she hovered, throwing
about him an atmosphere of tender protection.
Since the all but fatal wound which he had received

I

278 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

on the field of GettyBburg, the poor fellow was so
infinn of purpose and weak of will that he was
swept hither aud thither by the impulse of the mo-
men t. Loving his mother most devotedly, and long-
ing to be to her what he felt he ought to be, he
lacked the will power to resist temptation. Every-
thing was done that could be done. For his sake
the Florida place was purchased. His father under-
took a voyage to Spain in his company and for his
benefit. The years that Mrs. Stowe was writing
"Oldtown Folks" were years of crushing domeB-
tio grief, largely on account of this invalid son. At
last, feehng that he was too heavy a burden to his
mother, and that she had done all she could for
him, he took passage on a ship, and sailed away
around Cape Horn to San Francisco. This was all
unknown to his mother, and came as a great shock.
On the arrival of the ship in San Francisco, be
was met by friends and taken to a hotel. He went
out from the hotel, saying that he would return in
a few minutes. Though every e£Fort was made by the
poUce, from that hour to this there has been nothing
to throw the least light upon his fate. In spite of
his infirmities, acquired in fighting for his country,
he was one of the most lovable of men. He had
many and unusual excellences of character, beside

THE EBBING TIDE

279

rare eodowments that migbt have made him a
hleasing to his kind in his profession as a physician.
His last act, even if misgitided, was unselfish and
noble. Having in vain tried and tried again to COQ-
quer his faults, he felt that he must go away and
never return home unless and until he should
again become master of himself. God only knows
how constantly his mother watched and waited and
longed for his return. She writes to a friend who
has lost a son, " Think of your blessedness by
my sorrow. Where is my poor Fred ? You know
where Frank is, and that he is safe and blessed.
I never forget my boy. Can a woman forget her
child ? " She could not give him up ; and at the
last, when her mental powers began to fail, it
was of him she talked most constantly, and for
him that her heart yearned with a longing unut-
terable.

In the autumn of 1871 Mrs. Stowe writes to
her daughters : " I have at last finished all my part
in the third book of mine that is to come out
this year, to wit, ' Oldtown Fireside Stories,' and
you can have no idea what a perfect luxury of
rest it is to have no literary engagements, of all
kinds, sorts, or descriptions. I feel like a poor
woman I once read about, —

280 HABEIET BEECHER STOWE

'Who always was tired,
Caiue she lived in a tioase
Where help was n't hired,'

and of vhom it is related that in her dying mo-
ments, —

' She folded her hands

With latest endeavor,

Saying nothing, dear nothing',

Sweet nothing forever.'

I am in about her state of mind. I luxuriate in
laziness. I do not want to do anything nor to go
anywhere. I only want to sink down into the lazy
enjoyment of living." It would seem that she had
earned the right to "sink down into the lazy en-
joyment of living " if any one ever had. She had
at this time written twenty-three hooks in addi-
tion to short stories, essays, letters of travel, and
magazine articles well-nigh innumerable. With all
this already accomplished there were still in wait-
ing seven hooks to be written before the close of
her literary career.

In 1872 a new and remunerative field opened
to her, which, though it entailed a formidable
amount of hard and exhausting work, she entered
upon with the ardor and enthusiasm of youth. It
was a proposal from the American Literary Bu-

THE EBBING TIDE 281

reaa of Boston to deliver a course of forty readiugs
from her own works in the principal cities of New
England. The offer was a liberal one, she needed
the money, and so accepted it on condition that
all should be over in time for her to return to her
Florida home in December, — a month or so later
than was her habit. She begins her lectures, and
writes to her husband that she thinks it " on the
whole as easy a way of making money as she has
ever tried, though no way of making money ia
perfectly easy." Professor Stowe, as usual, 13
heart-broken over her absence from home, and
writes her a most dismal epistle, threatening to die
if she does not come home immediately. To this
letter she replies half -playfully, half-earnestly,
" Now, my dear husband, please do wait, and try
to remain with us a little longer, and let us have
a little quiet evening together before either of as
crosses the river."

She evidently enjoys her andiences and they en-
joy her, and she reads Sam Lawson stories till all
are dissolved in laughter. Manifestly her person-
ality was the chief attraction. One woman, abso-
lutely deaf, came up to her after one of her read-
ings, and said, ^' Bless you. I come jist to see you,
and I 'd ruther see you than the Queen." Another

282 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

voman introduced her two daughters, the oldest
named Harriet Beecher, and the youngest, Eva.
Nothing escapes her quick, obBervaot eye as she
travels. As she rides along the banks of the Ken-
nebec she observes, " The scenery along this river
is very fine. The oaks still keep their leaves,
though the other trees are bare ; but oaks aod pines
make a pleasant contrast." She finds a great dif-
ference in audiences. " Some audiences," she ob-
serves, " take the spring out of you and some put
it in ! " At last she writes : " Well, my course is
almost done, and if I get through without any
sickness, cold, or accident, how wonderful it will
seem ! I have never felt the near, kind presence
of our Heavenly Father so much as in this, 'He
giveth power to the faint, and to them that have
no might He increaseth strength.' I have found
this true all my life. . . . Well, dear old man, I
think lots of yuu, and only want to end all this in
our quiet home, where we can sing 'John Ander-
son my Jo' together."

The next winter she reads at the West, and visits
her old home in Cinciunati. At Dayton she meets
a woman whom she had known as a little girl in
her brother George's parish many years before.
Of her she writes : " Now she has one son who is

THE EBBING TIDE 283

a judge of the Supreme Court and another id buei-
ness. Both she and they are not only Christians,
but Christians of the primitive sort, whose religion
is their alt ; who triumph and glory in tribulation,
knowing that it worketh patience. She told me
with a bright, sweet calm of her husband killed in
battle the first year of the war, of her only daugh-
ter and two grandchildren dying in the faith, and of
her own happy waiting on God's will, with bright
hopes of a joyful reunion. . . . When I thought
that all this came from the conversion of one giddy
girl, when George seemed to be doing so little, I
said, 'Who can measure the work of a faithful
minister?'" After completing this Western tour
Mrs. Stowe gave no more public readings, though
she often read in private parlors for the benefit
of churches and various charities.

After the death of Henry Stowe, the subject of
spiritualism came to have an unusual fascination
for his parents. Yet both of them came later into
a more critical attitude with regard to the whole
matter of physical manifestations. Professor Stowe
came to a point where he doubted very seriously
the objectivity of his own very marked and pecul-
iar psychic experiences. It was about this time that
Mrs. Stowe gave expression to the foUowing views

284 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

which may be regarded as her final conclusions
ODthe subject after many years of meditation and
patient research: "Each friend takes away a por-
tion of ourselves. There was some part of our being
related to him as to no other, and we had things
to say to him that no otber would understand or
appreciate. A portion of our thoughts have become
useless and burdensome, and again and again, with
involuntary yearning, we turn to the stone at the
door of the sepulchre. We lean against the cold,
silent marble, but there is no answer, — no voice,
□either any that regardeth. There are those who
would have us think that in our day this doom is
reversed ; that there are those who have the power
to restore to us the communion of our lost ones.
How many a heart, wrung and tortured with the
anguish of this fearful silence, has throbbed with
strange vague hopes at the suggestion. When we
hear sometimes of persons of the strongest and
clearest minds becoming credulous votaries of cer-
tain spirituahst circles, let us not wonder : if we
inquire we shall almost always find that the belief
has followed some stroke of death ; it is only an
indication of the desperation of that heart-hunger
which it in part appeases.

" Ah, were it true ! Were it indeed so that the

i
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THE EBBING TIDE

285

wall between the material and the spiritual is grow-
ing thin, and a new dispensation germinating in
which communion with the departed blest shall
he among the privileges of this mortal state. Ah,
were it so that when we go forth weeping in the
gray dawn, for the beloved dead, bearing spices
and odors wherewith to embalm them, we should
indeed find the stone rolled away and an angel
sitting on it.

" But for us the stone must be rolled away by
an unquestionable angel, whose countenance is as
the lightning, who executes no doubtful juggle
by pale moonlight nor starlight, hut rolls back the
stone in fair open morning and sits on it. Then,
we could bless God for his mighty gift, and with
love and awe and reverence take up that fellow-
ship with another life and weave it reverently and
trustingly into the web of our daily course. But
no such angel have we seen, — no such sublime,
unquestionable, glorious manifestation. And when
we look at what is offered to us, ah, who that had
friend in heaven could wish them to return in
such wise as this? The very instinct of a sacred soi^
row seems to forbid that our beautiful, our glori-
fied ones should stoop lower than even to the
medium of thetr cast-oS bodies, to juggle, rap, and

286 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

squeak, and perform mountebank tricks with tables
and chairs ; to recite over in wearj sameness harm-
less truisms, which we were wise enough to say
for ourselves j to trifle, and banter, and jest, or to
lead us through endless moonshinj mazes. Sadly
and soberly we say that if this be communion with
the dead we had rather be without it. We want
something a little in advance of our present life
and not below it. We have read with some atten-
tion weary pages of spiritual communication par-
porting to come from Bacon, Swedenborg, and
others, and long accounts from divers spirits of
things seen in the spirit-land, and we can conceive
of no more appalling prospect than to have them
true. If the future life is so weary, stale, flat, and
unprofitable as we might infer from these readings,
one would have reason to deplore an inunortality
from which no suicide could give an outlet. To
be condemned to be bored by such eternal prosing
would be worse than annihilation."

At the time that her brother, the Rev. Henry
Ward Beecher, was passing through with that most
painful experience of his life, — his trial in open
court on certain charges involving his character as
a man and a citizen, to say nothing of his standing
as a Christian minister, -~ Mrs. Stowe wrote die

THE EBBING TIDE

287

following letter to her friend Mrs. Lewea (George
Eliot) : " I feel myself at last as one who has been
playing and picnicking on the shores of life, and
waked from a dream to find everybody almost haa
gone over to the beyond. And the rest are sorting
their things and packing their trunks and waiting
for the boat to come and take them. It seems now
but a little time since my brother Henry and I were
two young people together. He was my two years
junior and nearest companion out of seven brothers
and three sisters. I taught him drawing and heard
his Latin lessons, for you know a girl becomes ma-
ture and womanly long before a boy. I saw him
through college, and helped him through the diffi-
cult love aSair that gave him his wife ; and then
be and my husband had a real enthusiastic Ger-
man sort of love for one another, which ended in
making me a wife. Ah ! in those days we never
dreamed that he or I, or any of us, were to be known
in the world. All he then seemed was a boy full of
fun, full of love, full of enthusiasm for protecting
abused and righting wronged people, which made
him in those early days write editorials, and wear
arms, and have himself sworn in as a special
policeman to protect poor negroes in Cincinnati,
where we then lived, when there were mobs insti-

288 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE '

gated by the slave-liolderB of Kentucky. Then he
married and lived a missionary life in the new
West, all with a joyousness, an eDthnsiasm, a chiv-
alry which made life bright and vigorous to us
both. Then in time he was called to Brooklyn, just
as the crisis of the great Anti-Slavery battle came
on, and the Fugitive Slave Law was passed. I was
then in Maine, and I well remember his riding till
midnight one snowy night to see me, and then our
talking till near morning, what we could do to
make headway against the horrid cruelties that
were being practiced against the defenceless blacks.
My husband was then away lecturing and my heart
was burning itself out in indignation and anguish.
Henry told me that he meant to fight the battle
in New York, and that he would have a church
that would stand by him in resisting the tyranni-
cal dictation of slave-holders. I said, ' I, too, have
begun to do something ; I have begun a story try-
ing to set forth the sufferings and the wrongs of
the slaves.' 'That's right, Hattie 1 ' he said, * finish
it, and I will scatter it thicker than the leaves of
Vallombrosa,' and so came ' Uncle Tom,' and
Plymouth Church became a stronghold where the
slave always found refuge and a strong helper.
One morning my brother found sitting on his

THE EBBING TIDE

289

doorstep old Paul EdiuuDsoti, weeping; his two
daughters, of sixteen and eighteen, had passed into
the elave-warehouse of Bruin and Hill, and were
to he sold. My brother took the man hy the
hand to a puhlic meeting, told his story for him,
and in an hour raised the two thousand dollars to
redeem his children. Over and over again after-
wards at Plymouth Church slaves were redeemed,
Henry and Plymouth Church became words of
hatred and fear through half the Union. From
that time we talked together about the Fugitive
Slave Law there has not been a pause or a stop in
the battle till we had been through the war and
slavery had been wiped out in blood. Through it
all be has been pouring himself out, wrestling,
burning, laboring everywhere, making stump
speeches when elections turned on the slave ques-
tion, and ever maintaining that the cause of Christ
was the cause of the slave. And when it was all
over, it was he and Lloyd Garrison who were sent
by the government to raise our national flag once
more over Fort Sumter. You must see that a man
does not so energize without making enemies. . . .
Then he has been a progressive in theology. He
has been a student of Huxley, and Spencer, and
Darwin, — enough to alarm the old school, and

290 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

yet remamed so ardent a Bupernaturaliat as to repel
the more radical destructiouists in religion. He and
I are Christ worshippers, adoring Him as the image
o£ the invisible God, and all that comes from be-
lieving this. Then he has been a reformer and an
advocate of universal suffrage and woman's rights,
yet not radical enough to please that reform party
who stand where the Socialists of France do, and are
for tearing up all creation generally. Last1y,he has
had the misfortune of a popularity that is perfectly
phenomenal. I cannot give you any idea of the
love, worship, and idolatry with which he has been
overwhelmed. He has something magnetic about
him that makes men follow him, and worship
him. . . .

*' My brother is hopelessly generous and con-
fiding. His inability to believe evil is something
incredible, and so has come all this suffering. Yoa
said you hoped I should be at rest when the
first investigating committee cleared my brother
aknost by acclamation. Not so. The enemy have
eo committed themselves that either they or he
must die, and there has followed two years of the
most dreadful struggle. First, a legal trial of six i
months, the expenses of which on his side were
one hundred and eighteen thousand dollars, and

THE EBBING TIDE

291

in which he and his brave wife sat side by side in
the court room and heard all that these plotters
who had been weaving their weba for three years
could bring. The foreman of the jury was offered
a bribe of ten thousand dollars to decide against
my brother. But with all their plotting the jury
decided against them, and their case was lost. . . .
This has drawn on my life, my heart's blood. He
is myself ; I know you are the kind of woman to
understand me when I say that I felt a blow at
him more than at myself. I, who know his purity,
honor, delicacy, know that he has been from
childhood of an ideal purity, who reverenced his
conscience as his king, whose glory was redress-
ing human wrong, who spake no slander, no, nor
listened to it! Never have I known a nature of
such strength and such almost childlike innocence.
He is of a nature so sweet and perfect that,
though I have seen him thunderously indignant at
moments, I never saw him fretful or irritable, —
a man who continuously and in every Httte act of
life is thinking of others, a man that all the chil-
dren on the street run after, and that every sor-
rowful, weak, or distressed person looks to as a
natural helper. In all this long history there has
been no circumstance in his relation to any woman

292 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

tbat hats not been worthy of himself, — pure,
dehcate, and proper ; and I know all sides of it,
and certainly should not say this if there were a
niiHgiving. Thank God, there is none, and I can
read my New Testament, and feel that by all the
Beatitudes my brother is blessed."

Almost ten years before this time Mrs. Stowe's
strong, prophetic insight had led her to foresee
that some such fate might one day overtake her
best loved brother. In a letter to Mr. Howard of
The Chriniian Union, she wrote : " I feel, the
more I think of it, sure that the world that hates
Christ is just as real in our times as it was in his.
... I have pondered that question in relation to
Henry's popularity ; but I feel that the world
really does hate him to a degree tbat makes it
safe to hope tbat he is about right. Such demon-
strations as now and then occur show that they
are only waiting for him to be down to spring on
him, ... in proportion as be makes Christianity
aggressive on sin they are malignant and will
spring joyfully on bim when their time comes."

It was about this time, 1882, that Mrs. Stowe
wrote to her son Charles : " I have been looking
over and arranging my papers with a view to sift-
ing out those that are not worth keeping, and to

THE EBBING TIDE 293

filing and arranging those that are to be kept
that my heirs and assigns may with less trouhle
know where and what they are. I cannot describe
to you the peculiar feelings which this review
occasions. Reading old letters, — when so many
of the writers are gone from earth, seems to me
like going into the world of spirits, — letters full
of the warm, eager, busy life that is forever past.
My own letters, too, full of bygone scenes of my
early life and the childish days of my children. It
is affecting to me to recall things that strongly
moved me years ago, that filled my thoughts and
made me anxious, when the occasion and the emo-
tion have wholly vanished from my mind. But I
thank God there is one thing running through
all of them since I was thirteen years old, and
that is the intense, unwavering sense of Christ's
educating, guiding presence and care. It is all that
remains now. The romance of my youth is faded,
it looks to me now, from my years, so very young,
— those days when my mind lived only in emo-
tion, and when my letters never were dated, be-
cause they were only histories of the internal, but
now that I am no more and never can be young
in this world, now that the friends of those days
are almost all iu eternity, what remains ? . . . I

k

294 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

waa passionate in my attachments in those far.
back years, and as I have looked over files of old
letters they are all gone [her oldest friends]
I have letters from them all, but they have beea
long in the spirit-land, and know far better how
it is there than I can. It gives me a sort of dizzy
feeling as to the shortness of life and the near-
ness of eternity when I see how many I have
traveled with are gone within the veil. Then there
are all my own letters written in the first two
years of my marriage, when Mr. Stowe was in
Europe and I was looking forward to motherhood,
and preparing for it. Then my letters when my
whole life was within the four walls of my nui^
sery, my thoughts absorbed by the developing
character of children who have lived their earthly
life and gone to the eternal one, — my two boys,
each in his way good and lovely, whom Christ has
taken in youth, and my little one, my first Char-
ley, whom he took away before he knew sin or
sorrow, — then my brother George, and sister
Catherine, the one the companion of my youth,
and the other the mother who assumed care of
me after I had left home in my twelfth year, —
and they are gone. Then my blessed father, for
80 many years for me so true an image of the

I

THE EBBING TIDE

295

Heavenly Father, — in all my afBictions he was
afflicted, in all my perplexities he was a sure and
safe counselor, aod he, too, is gooe upwards to
join the angelic mother whom I scarcely knew in
this world, but who has been to me only a spirit-
ual presence through life."

Nothing is sweeter than this devoted love that
Mrs. Stowe and all her brothers aod sisters bore
to theur mother. At the garden party tendered Mrs.
Stowe on her seventieth birthday by her pub-
lishers at the home of ex -Governor Claflin at
Newtonville, Massachusetts, Henry Ward Beecher,
when called upon to speak, had but one thought,
and that was " Our Mother." He said : " Of course
you all sympathize with me to-day ; but, standing
in this place, I do not see your face more clearly
than I see those o£ my father and mother. Her I
knew only as a mere babe child, he was my
teacher and companion. A more guileless soul
than he, a more honest one, more free from envy,
from jealou6y,and from selfishness, I never knew.
Though he thought he was great by his theology,
every one else knew he was great by his religion.
My mother is to me what the Virgin Mary is to
the devout Catholic. She was a woman of great
nature, profound as a philosophical thinker, great

296 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

in argument, with a kind of intellectual iraagina-
tdon, diffident, not talkative, such was the woman
who gave birth to Mrs. Stowe, whose graces and
excellences she probably more than any of her
children — we number thirteen - — has possessed.
I suppose that in bodily resemblance^ perhaps, she
is not like my mother, but in mind she is most
like her."

From this time on Mrs. Stowe devoted herself
to her husband, and refused to leave bis side.
She had very exalted ideals of what a wife should
be to an invalid hushaud, and her devotion knew
no bounds. He loved her with all the intensity of
his being, and with his increasing weakness clung
to her with the pathetic helplessness of a little
child. She went far beyond the limit of her
physical strength in ministering to his needs, and
probably in this way hastened the breaking down
of her own constitution. For a long time she
would not hear of having a nurse for him, and
insisted on doing herself everything that his con-
dition required, till at last compelled to yield him
up to trained and skillful hands. If this was a
failing, it may be truly said that " e*en her failings
leaned to virtue's side." Professor Stowe died
on the 6th of August, 1886. As the light of the

1

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I

THE EBBING TIDE 297

setting sun ehone into the room he opened his
eyes, and apparently gazing far oS beyond the
distant hills, murmured to himself, '* Peace with
God I Peace with God," then closed his eyes and
fell into a quiet slumber to wake no more. The
death of her husband was followed in quick suc-
cession by the death of her brother Henry Ward,
and her youngest daughter, Georgiana May.
Georgiana was the most brilliant and gifted of
all Mrs. Stowe's children, and was, in fact, the
only one who could be truly said to have inherited
real genius. Mrs. Stowe has drawn her to the life
in the character of Tina in " Oldtown Folks " ;
Tina, whose self-will runs in the channel of the
most charming persuasiveness. " She has all sorts
of pretty phrases, and would talk a bird oS a
bush, or a trout out of a brook, by dint of sheer
persistent eloquence ; and she is always so de-
lightfully certain that her way is the right one.
. . . Then she has no end of those peculiar gifts of
entertainment which are rather dangerous things
for a young woman. She is a born mimic, she is
a natural actress, and she has always a repartee or
a smart saying quite apropos at the tip of her
tongue."

Mrs. Stowe gives a letter of Tina's> every word

I

I

298 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

of which might have been written by her own
daughter, " Do you know, Aunty, I have got so
that I can look exactly like a squirrel ? We saw
ever so many on the way, and I got a great many
new hints on the subject, and now I can do squirrel
in four or five different attitudes, and the boys
almost kill themselves laughing." The loss of this
child, after a loug and depressing illness, was a
crushing grief to Mrs. Stowe. From this time on
her thoughts turned away more and more from
things of earth. " I have thought much lately of
iny leaving you all and going home," she writes
to a distant friend. " I have come to that stage of
my pilgrimage that is within sight of the River
of Death, and I feel that now I must have all in
readiness day and night for the messenger of the
King. I have sometimes had in my sleep strange
perceptions of a vivid spiritual hfe near to and
with Christ, and multitudes of holy ones, and the
joy of it is like no other joy, — it cannot be told
in the language of this world. What I have then
I know with absolute certainty, yet it ia so unlike
anything we conceive of in this world that it ia
difficult to put it into words. The inconceivable
loveUness of Christ ! It seems that about Him is
a sphere where the enthusiasm of love is the calm

THE EBBING TIDE

habit of the soul, that without words, without the
necessity of demonstratioos of a£FectioD, heart
beats to heart, soul answers to soul, we respond to
the Infinite Love, and we feel his answer in us,
and there is no need of words. All seemed to be
coming and going on ministries of good, and
passing each gave a thrill of joy to each, as Jesus,
the directing soul, and centre of all, over all, and
through all, was working his beautiful and merci-
ful will to redeem and save. I was saying as I
awoke : —

'Tis joy enough, my all in aU,
At Thy dear feet to lie.

Thou wilt not let me lower fall.
And none can higher fly.

This was but a glimpse ; but it has left a strange
sweetness in my mind."

It was about this time that she wrote to her
brother Edward, "I feel about aU things now as
I do about the things that happen in a hotel after
my trunk is packed to go home. I may be vexed
or annoyed; but what of it? I am going home
soon ! " Shortly after this, in the last real letter
which her sinking strength permitted, she writes
to Mrs. Howard : " My sun has set. The time of
work for me is over. I have written all my worda

300 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE "

and thought all my thoughts, and now I rest me in
the flickering light of the dying embers, in a rest
80 profound that the voice of an old friend arouses
me but momentarily, and I drop back again into
repose. . . •" The happy vision spoken of in this
letter she was oot immediately to realize. She
was to become again a little child, free from all
care and sorrow, wandering about the fields in
summer, picking the flowers she loved so weU,
and singing the old hymns with childlike joy.
"I love to sing this hymn," she would say, " for
when I sing it I think I hear my mother's voice ! "
Little children were dear to her, and she smiled
upon them, and greeted them as though she were
one of them. She was as a little child, — a Uttte
child, gentle, loving, forgetful, and dreamy. She
would rise early of a summer morning, when the
dew was on the grass, and go out into the woods
near her house gathering flowers. Then, on the
impulse of the moment, she would trail her wet
skirts through the dusty highway in utter uncon-
sciousness of the result, and enter the house sing-
ing, " Then just before the shining shore," to
be greeted with, " Oh, ma ! Just look at your

Where have you been ? " Her dress,
did not think of her dress ; no, not as much as the

THE EBBING TIDE

301

birds of their feathers. Where had she been ? She
did not know, — she had aot thought where she
had been. Never fretful, never impatient, living
only to love and to be loved, she moved about in
a world all ber own. A world of dreams where all
was bright and hopeful, and where there were no
burdens and no cares. She, who had suffered so
much and so long, now suffered no more. If she
suffered less, she loved more, till all her life was
love. Waking at midnight, she said, "01 have
had such a beautiful dream!" Then as ber faith-
ful nurse gave her her medicine, she looked up
into her face, and said, "/ love you." These
were her last words on earth. She fell asleep to
wake i:

(

. .'

INDEX

Abolttioniits, in Lane ThsoloKical
SeiniiiU7. 101 ; mobs ■gainiit, in
Cinainiiati, 1<«-108, III, 112; at
FntDaiD, Ohio, lOD ; Mn, Stova'i
•tdtnde tovard, 109, 140, 141,
1B8, 189 : how regarded b; Dt.
Baeeher, 140, 141.

Addrai to Che If on™ of America,
Mn. Stove's nplj to, 189, 190,
201, 204. 206-211.

Affnti 1^ Sortaaa, the irritiiiE of,
aM,247.

AndoTer Tbeologiol Setuiuary,
ProfeMor Sluwe goei Ia. 165.

^oiian Nighii, Un. Stove's >Arl;
gnjoymtnt of, 14, IS,

Atkio, Cvt^D, of tlw *tMiiwr
Diotktor, 390.

Bkile;, Gamaliel, editor of the JVn-
limal Era, 101, 147.

BatAid, Father, Italian priest, 231.
232.

Baxter, Riohard, hia Satnti' Ener-
lasting Jteit. 42.

Beeoher, Catherine (sister of Mn.
SloweJ. her Kmembnuicg of her
Eather, T ; her desoriptioD of
Oqitun Samuel Foots, 20-22 ; her
■ohool at Haitford, 38, 41, 47, K),
61 ; her tendeney to break from
the traditional oxthodozr, 44, 4S,
48-02; enga^ to Aleunder
Raher, 46 ; her gayetr and bril-
liancj, 46, 4T ; her anxiety for
Alexander Fiaher'a soul, 47, 49 j

at the home of Professor Plilier
in Franklin, Maes., 49; niWBsr

about bar niter, M, SS ; deter-
minea to set Dp a school at Cin-
cinnati, (Vr-GS ; her desoription of
the eite of the Aoadem; at Wal-
nut Hills, T3 ; her account of her
efforts in sdrring her aister to Utr
erary aotivity, 87-93.

Beecher, Chsrlea (brother of Mn,
Stowe), 20S, 219, 230-, t»kss a
position in New Orleans, 125.

Beecher, Edward (brother of Mrs.
Stowe). his tendeno; to break
from the traditiena] orthodoxy,
44, 4S ; his Coi\/Iicl of Agti, the
inspiration of, 49 ; letten to, from
his sister Borriet, on her mental
stato, 55-63 ; letter to, from his
sister Harriet, on her new mental
life, M, 65 ; Mn. Stowe visits,
127, 128 : agitated over the Fugi-
tive Slave Law, 128. 13T. 138.

Beecher, Mn. Edward, 137, 138.

Beecher, Esther (aunt of Mn.
Stowe), 70, 74.

Beecher, Lieutenant Fr«d, 206.

Besohar, Oeorsa (brother of Hn.
Stowe), 70, 294 ; death of, 118.

Beeoher, Mia. George, 1S9.

Beecher, Harriet. Stt Stowe, Har-

Beeohsr, Henry Ward (brother of
Mn. Stowe), incidents of hia
childhood, 3, 35 ; taught gram-
mar by hia sister, 42 ; his theo-

INDEX

logT,S2:i;ndii>tMfroiii Amhertt
CoU<«e. «!; wbtid hj Mn.
Stowe in •diting tlte Ciooinnkti
Journal, 90, KUi preparai to
make dflfeiue mgaiiwt CUunniMti
mob, 100 ; hu niew of the »■<■«
of numey, 23S-240; hU liitaT'i
MKKiuDt of hit «arl7 lift uid hi*
(rial by jorr, 2)46-2113 : bii nool-
iMtion of bia fathar and motbar,
290, 296 : deatb of, 3^.

Baccher, Jamea C. (brother of Mia.
StowB), 200.

Baaoher, hymtJi.hiM AitlMograpli]/
quDtad, 0, B : hia fondnMa for
mnaio, (1 ; loTad and respected by
bia ohildrea, T. 8 ; his power of
flXoitiuK family entbiuiaiia, K, !> ;
ans*K<<a ia diacuinioiu witb fail
ehildren, 9; hii fiihioK aipedi-
liaaa, 6-11; hia atudr, 11. i'2i
marriea Harriet Porter. 'i2 ; readn
Joutban Eilwardi to bia wife,
SI, 25 ; inoidents of hia preoehimt.
S6, 3T ; receiTaa a oall to Boston,
42, 03 ; on hia daD|[bter Cathe-
rina'i tbeoloffy, 44, 40 ; tbe rain-
(ling of two kinda of mantal pro-
a«a ID, 03 ; bii praaching at Boa-
ton more aiiiiiuMiTely thaolDgioal
than eTir. 63 ; reoeiTei a oall to
Lane Thenloeioal Seminary at
Walnot Hilla, near CinainDati,
6B ; bia motiTS in acoapting the
eall. 60, 76 1 hia trip to Walnut
Hilla, 6S-T2 -, bli booae at Wahrat
Hitla, TS-n ; ooaapioiioiii in i»-
eeMkin within the PreBbytetian
Cbnroh, 110; how he reganled
the Abolitioniata. 140, 14! ; Con-
with Mr. Stowe, on
politioal outlook, 188 ; hia view

of the oaa of money, 338; bii
oonatarution at " Tbe Downfall
of tbe Standing Order, " 269-271 ;
Henry Ward Ueecber'a laooUeo-
tion of, 'JSG.

Beechar, Mary (aialai of lira.
Stowe), letten to, 7R, 90 ; Hn.
BtoweTiaita.llO; help of, 213.

Beeoher, Colonel Robert (nephew
of Hre. Stowe), 220.

Beecber, Roiana Foote (modier of
Mrs. Stowe). Mra. Stowe'a recol-
lection of, 1-4 ; Henry Ward
Beeober'a recollection of, 296,206.

Beesher. Thomae K. (brother <d
Mrs. Stowe), U38.

Bescher, William H. (broUier of
Mra. Stowe), 100.

Beecber family, theology of an-
prenio intereat in. 44; tbe eenaa
of haTing a miuion, a oharaotar-
iatioof, nH; lack of Iotb of moBey,
a failing of, 2.18.

Bigclow, WilUam (Pnrfewor
Stowe'a DDcte), the original of
Uncle Bill in Oldlo^ Foaa,VO.

Bigelow, I>eaaia William, the ori-
ginal ol Deacon Badger in Old-

Bimey, Jnmet O., liberated hie
alaTaa, 101 ; holpeil foand no abo-
lition paper, the Philanthrapitt,
101, 102, 109; bia printing preea
mobbed. 102-107.

Boston. Haae., Dr. Beecber reeeiTea
a call to, 42. SS ; hie pr«schhig at,
aggreauTely tbaolo^eal, 03.

Brooe, John, teacher of Ura. Stowe.
25-2fl.

Brattteboro, Vt., Tinted by Un.
Stowe and Hr. Stove, lor Walar
Cure, 119-121.

Bright, John, vrite* to Hn. Ston
relatiTfl to her reply to tha Ad-
iIttu to Oit WomtJi if Antrica.

BrowninE, Mn. E. B., Ist(«r of, to

Hn. Stowa, 181, 182.
Bnuuwick, He., Hrs. Stove goea

ts, 137-130; Entting wtlled at,

\3\-\-Xi.
Back, EUia, 1!S2-1S4.
BaekiDKhniii, Osnsral, 300, 201.
Bnll. H™. G. W., 119.
Boll, Isua D., 39.
Boll, Hr«. Iu» D., 39.
BuU, Mw; Ann, 39, 40.
BonTan. John, his PilgrMi Fro-

grt», Hn. Stove's applioatioii

to the Bmoke home of a pusage

Batter. Joseph, his Analog]/. tBOcht

by Mrs, Stove, 41.
Bttod, G. G., Lord, Mn. Stove's

■ridole on, ST4-iTT.

Calhoun, J. C, 1T3.

Cftlvininn, Dr. Beeoher's, M,4S, 48,

4(1 : Harriet Beeoher's, 44-(i2.
Catholics, Romui, Harriet Baech-

er's fairness tovsrd, T5. T6.
Charleston, S. C, Hn. Stove at,

228-230.
Chase, Salmon P., 82, 106,
Cholera in Cincinnati, 132, 123.
Ckriitian Ciuon, money invi

339.
Church, Hn. Stove's early reool-

lecUoDS of, 35-37.
Cincinnati, Ohio, Dr. Beeohar re-

orives a call to, 66; arrival at, 73,

73; Harriet Baecher'a life at, 73-

137; nioba in, 103-108, 111, 113.

Stt Walnut HiUs.

CogaveD, Catherine, friend of Har-
riet Baacher, 40, 41,
College of Teachen, The, in Cin-

Composition, Harriet Baeeber's

<b*t, 27, 38.
Cotton plantation. Mn. Stove in-

217, 218.
Cnunvell, J. H,, vritea to 1i.T».

Stove of her son. 204, 20!l.

DeTereaai, Mrs., 119.

Dogs at ohtirch, 30-34.

Douelsn, Pnderiek. letter of Mrs,
Stove to, 119-163; at meeting
urith Mra. Stove and SojottmeT
Tmth, 187. 188.

DovinRtoD, the Beechera at, 70,71.

■• Dovnf all of tha Htandina Order,"

Drake, Dr., 79, 80.

Dreif, tha purpose of, 174, 176; r*-

caption of, in England, ITS.
Dutton.Uary, tesoher in the aohool

at Cindnoati, SO, 96.

E^(«, aneedote of, 148. 14!1.
Eliot, GaoTKO. Bet Lievas, Hr*.

G. H.
Klmaa, Hn., TO.

Entancipstion Proetamation, 211.
Emerson, B. W,. 2,19,
Emmons, Dr, Nathaniel, the Cal-

of, 49.
England, Hn. Stove's Tiuts to,

167-175, 178-180.

ttfHarritt Btecher Slowe qaoted.

lea, ZtO. 247-249, 25*.
Pinano*. Hn. Stove's idea of, S13-

218, 237-340.
FUier, Alexander, enEagvd to

Catherina Baaoher, 4S ; hia death

ia ahipwreok, 46; CaLherina'e

uuietT for hia •onl, 4T. 4H.
Flf, tha mole, 230, 2=11.
Follen, Mn., letter* of. to Mr*.

Stove, as, 9B. ia2~1M ; lettera of

Mn. Stowe to, infl, 104.
Foote, Oeorse (uncle of Mra. Stove),

19.
Fuote, Barriet (annt of Hn. Stove),

Haniat Baecber viaita, 1T-I9i

letter to, 93.
Foote, Jolui (niKils of Un. Stove),

81.
Foote, Captain Samuel (miDle of

Hn. Stove), 20-23, »1->H.
FraedmeB, dinner tA, in Washing-
ton, 199, 301, 202.
FoptiTe Slare Lav, U8, 137-140.

. L., 141; write* to
Mn. Stove, on the eSeot of
Unde Tam'i Cabin, 142,

GatetU, Cinlinnati paper, 104, 107.

Geographj, Barriet Bseoher'*. 79.

Goethe, J. W. Ton. 272.

OnnTille, Lord. Hie. Stove's im-
preaaioD of. 172.

OreeleT. Philip, affected b; Uncle
Toia'i CoAin, 166, 1B7.

Grimkd, Min. See Weld, Mn.
Theodore D.

Onilford, Harriet Beeohar viaita
Nntplainain, 17-lft, 69.

Hartford, Conn., Harriit Beechai
at Hhool at, 38-44, OS, SB ; Mn.
Stove g:oea to U*e at, 212.

Haves, ReT. Dr., Harriet Bemhar'a
interriev vith. 43-44.

Havthoms, Nathaniel, on Toyac*
home from England. 187.

Henson, Kbt. Joaiah, Mn. Stnve'i
firat maetine vith, 144.

fiohnea. 0. W., diisaadn Fredar-
iok Stove from enliitiDg, 191 ; re-
mark of, Co Mr*. Stove, on oonfi-
dence in outoome of the war, 197 ;
on Foganuc Peoplt, 266; Mn.
Stowe writes to, after fl&iahinf
Pcganac PtopU, 287.

Hopkini, Rev. Samuel, oonnaetad
vith the fir*t conoaptioD of 2%t
limiaer't Wooing, 250.

Honse-hailding. the tnniblaa ud
eipenie of, 212-210.

Howard, Annie, death of, 186.

Hnbbard,Marj (aoatof Mn3l«va),
124.

lareatmenta, Mn. Stowe'a, 21&-

Jevett, John P., pnbllahaa Cud*

Tom'i Cabin, ISO, IS&
Journal, a Cinoinoati dailj papM-,

Mn. Stove aasista her brother ia

ediUng, 99, 103.

Lane Tbeologioal Seminary ■(
Walnut Hilla. Or. Beecher ra-
oeiYea a call to, 6l>; Catherine
Baecher'i daaoription of the sitv
of, 73; oommiaiiona Profaoor
Stove to bu7 booka in Eniope,
98; a bot-bad of

I

I

I

101.

Level, Mre. G. H. (Qeoree Elio
OD Sir baao Newton, IG9 ; «
reapoadeoce of, witii Bin. Stoi
on BpiritDoliini vid religion, 1 f
1B4 ; letter to, on Mn. Slowi
life et Mandarin, 221~ZM ; letter
of Mn, Stowe to, on Oldti
Folia, 360 i lettws of, on Old-
toien Folks, 260, 261 ; letter of
Hn. Stove to, on Henry Ward
Besoher'a early life and bia trial
by jury, 286-292,

Linooln, Abraham, Mra. Stove's
■Utement of his beliefs, 190 ; Mn.
Stove's intsniav vith, 202, 20) ;
iMDea the Emancipation Proela-
matioii, 211.

Litchfield, Conn,, influenoe of iU
Bcenery on Hts. Stove, 4, 5 ; the
Poeanno of Foganue PfBpli.-2G6.

Literpool, Mre. Stove at, 167.

Lockerbie, Mn. Stove nt, 167.

Loveil, J. R., (|aoted on Mn.
Stove's genial. 242, 243 ; letter
of, to Mrs. Stove, oo The Minif
ler'i Wooing, 253,

HandaHa, the Stoves at, 21S-241.

Uather, Cotton, his Magnalltit Mra.
Stove'* faith in, 12, 13.

May, Georeiana. cl«e friend of
Harriet Beecher, 40, 41 ; Harriet
Beeoher Tisits Nutplaine vith,
60; lettera to, 62, 66, 71. 72. 75-
77, 82, 98, 113, 116, 121, 128, 27*.

UoCIelUn, General 0. B.. 201.

Hilli, Rot. Father, preaebea in Dr.
Beeoher's chorch, 32-34.

JfiRifltr'i Wooing, Tlu, inspiration
of, 49 : the vritiuE of, 244-248 ;
Mn. Stove vrote her heart an-
guish into. 250 ; the firat concep-

307

tion of, 2S0, 251 : the pi
of Candace added to the original
conception of, 252; latter of
Lowell to Mrs. Stove on. 263;
letter of Ruikin to Hie. Stove
on, 263, 254.

Mission, the senae of haring, a
oharaoteristie of the Beecher
family, 68; Mn. Stove alvaye
looking for, 130, 121, 217.

Mobs, Cincinnati. 102-109, 111, 112.

Nationai Era, the, 147, 149, 166,

Nev EJighuid. Mrs. Stove a dtdine-

ator of the life of, 242-273.
Nev York City, the Beeohen at,

69.
Niagara, Harriet Baecher'i impree-

sioni of, 1)3, 04.
Xntpluna. visits of Harriet Beeoher

to, 17-li), 65.

Oldlown Firttidt Sloria, 268, 2T9.

Oldlovm Folki, tan thousaod dol-
Un leoeiTed for, 237; Mn.
Stuwe'a aadifaiition in, 254; the
object of, 256, 26G, 265 : di£B-
cnltiee in vriting, 266, 257 ; nu-
terial for, f nmished by Mr. Stove,
2S7, 26S; the originals of the
oharacten of, 268-262, 297, 298;
the lupematnTal element in, 260;
the piotnre of the Pniitan chat^
aoter in, 263-265 ; the hnmor of,

Puriih, Dr., 111.

Ptarl qf Orr't liland. Tie, ioddii
of HuTiBt Beaohw'i diiooTeiy
of the Ttmptit iiiumghx into. IS;
th* vritiue of, 201, S44, 240, 24T.

Parkin*. Ste Beeubar. MvT.

Parkins, TbomM C, 213 ; dutk of,
240.

PhiUdalpbu, tha Beeehara at, 68-
70.

PKilanUiTipisl, Cindnuti paper,
101, 102. 100; aupprewHl, and
)ta office wraekGd \ij mob, 10!-
107.

PhTWcal onnditiona and theoloKieal
beliefa, the cooneetion betceen,
Mn. Stove's conception of, 263.

Piatee. Sarah. Uarriat Baeoher at-
Mnda aohool kept by, ^.

FkHtr;, Mn. Stove readi. 41.

Pof/amK People, a biographr of
Mn. Stove'a childhood, ae<;-2G8 ;
the intaren of, tnma largsl^ on
"Tha Downfall of tlieSUndiog
Order," 26H-'iTl j a qnotation
from, 271, 272.

Portar, Harriet (atapmother of Mn,
Stove), Mn. Stova'a fint uo-
pnaaiona of, 22-24 ; affact on, of
raading Jonathan Edwacdt'a
work*, 34, 2S.

Preabrterian Chnnb, i

Puroell, Arohbtibop, TO.

Puritan chanatar, Mr*. SUnre'i

pictnre of, 283-368.
Putnam, Ohio, 10!).

Rata in tha Litohfiald home, 15-17.
Beadinga, public, of Mn. Stove,

281-^283.
Ruakin, Johni, letter cf, to Mn.

Stova, oomminrDtlns her ratnni
to America, IM, IMS; Utter of,
to Mn. Stun*, un The MiniUtr't

Wooing, Wi, 2n4.

St, Oeona'a Hall, Mn. Stova at.
178. 179.

School at Litchfield attended bjr
Mn. Slove, 3S-28; at HaKford,
as, 41 ; aatabliahed by Harriet
Beecher and bar aiilar at Cini
nati, 67, 6H, 7S-77, 80; at Uan-
darin, 2%.

Sootland, Mn. Stove's Tint to. 167-
170.

SaoTille, Sam, 193, IW.

'■Semi-Colon nub," 81 -«0,

Shnkeapaare, WilUam. his Tenprit.
incident of Mn. blove'a diaooT-
arj of a copy of, vrooKbt into
Tht Pearl qf Orr', Iiland, 16.

Skinner. KaT. Dr., friend of Dr.
Beeober, 70.

laTerr, Been on a alava pUatatioli
br Mn. Stove, BO, 12^; Mn.
Stove foreaaaa tha and of, 106;
Mn. Stove wialies to do BOmo-
thinK tooppoae, 110; the homiim
ot, Mn. Stove leama aboni, in
her girlhood, 124 ; Mn. Stowe'i
kuovled)^ of, 12:^127, 144. 146,
ISO-IM; Mn. Stove detanmoea
to vrite lomethinit againat, 13i> ;
aantimant in Korope agnlut,
larKel]' tba result of Utule Tom'*
Cabin, im.

Smoke bonse, the, at the IjtohfiaU
home, 1», 14.

South, Mrs. Stove in the, 217-241.
piritaaliam, attitude of Mn. Stov«
tovard, 180, 182, IKt. 2«l,2Sa-28e:
of Un. BrowDioK, 182 ; of QsoiKe

Hiot, 183; o( Mr. BtBwt, 219,
aw, 2«l, 283.

Slaffoni House, reception to Mrs.
Stowe at. 171-1T3 ; Mr. uid Mn.
Slowe e»U at, lin. im.

StatioD BRent, aaecdote of, 158.

Stowe, Ptofeaaor Ciilvin Ellia, deotb
of his fint vile. VS; Harriet
Beecher become* eDgoged to. SO ;
•uIa for Europe aa commi^iouer
of Ohio, OH, W ; on the doinga <it
the Qaneral AiaamblT of Ohio,
IIU; biilieves that Mrs. Stove
must be a literary vomau. 116,
117 ; hia loie and sdiuiretioa for
hil wife, IIB, 120; breaka down,
121 ; orgefl 2rlra. Stove to write
UneU Tum't Cabin, 147; aneo-
dote of the aggt, 14S. 149 ; goea to
AndareT TheoloKioal Semioary,
16a i with Mia. Stove in EorLhuI,
178-180; oonTermtion with Ly-
man Beeoheron political outlook.
1K8 : not an AboIitioniBt of the
GamMuiui type. l^iS ; baa bis
money alolon, 20S ; peiaimiatio
with reeard to Mrs. Stove's
bnildine proieotH, 213. 213, 215,
216 ; at Mandariti, 230-217 ; beset
by fjoancial diffioultiea, 237-240 ;
his abiding faitb, 240, 241 ; his
seme of the supernatural, 249,
2E0 ; material for Oliilea-n FMn
furnished by. 2.'iT, 2.*<H ; be and
bis relations originals of charao-
tets in OldloKn Folks, 268. ZW,
261; his spiritualisra, 260, 283;
bis forlornnesa at Un. Slowe'a
absence, Sf 1 ; hia lait BiokaeBt and
desth, 200, 297.

Btove, Mn. Calvin EUii (fint wife
or Stawt}, 9B.

towe, Cbarles Edward (son of Mn.

Stovi

I, VMin

of his mother, 1

Stove. Eliia Tyler (dangbter of
Mn. Stove), birth, IDS.

StovB, Frederick William (son of
Mn. Stowe), birth, 115 ; enliala,
1W-1!IU ; with his mother in
WuhingtoD, 200 ; wounded, 205 ;
returns from the war, shattered,
21.t : BttempU to resume medical

B,bntaa

.t.2l7;l)

tioudne to his wound and bisdis-
appearanoe, 277-270.

Stove, Georgiana May (dkaghter
of Mn. Stove), birtb. 117 ; the
original of Tina in Otdlovn Falki,
260, 297;deatb. 297.

Stove, Harriet Beecber, ber ear-
liest recollections. 1. 2 ; berreeol-
lections of hei mother, 1^ ; in-
tluenee of her mutber un, 4 ; in-
fluence of the scenery of Litob-
field on. 4, 5 ; ber reoollectiooa of
her home and her father, 6, T ;
vorks at patting in wood, 8, 9;
her recuUections of ber father's
fiabing expeditions, 9-1 1 : ber de-
light in her father's study, 11, 12 ;
her futh in Cotton Matbsr's
Magaalia, 12, 13 ; finds romanos
in the giureta and oelUra of the
[UUKinage, 13; and the smoke
house, 1.1. 14 ; and the Arabian
yighlt, 14, 15 ; incident of her
disooTery of Ibe Trmpeat vrongbt
into Thr Ptarl of Orr's Isiand,
13 ; inHiience of the rats of tbe
parsonage on her youthful mind,
16-17; risitot, to NHtplains, 17-
19 ; her reeoUectiona of her aunt

IT-l

30; inflDeiue of Cap-

t of her lUp-
mulber, Z£-'H j her ■ohoolinK
onder Mr. Bno«, 2A~S8: bar fint
eonipaaitioti, 27, 28 ; ber reoollcc-
tiois of SDDdaj mafltinK. 2ft-37 ;
B<M* to Mbool >l Hartturd. 'M ; in
tho hoiuelioM of Mr. Boll, 39 ; her
friandaat Hartford. 40, 41:ii)akea
n of Grid into vaisa,
to writs a matrieal
(nUar'a

II 1 reada Baiter's
•erlaiting Srtt, 42 ;
taaohaa ber lirotber Brammar,
42 ; ber iolernew with Ker. I>r.
BawM. 42-41; the >piritaiJ at-
moaphere in which (he liied, 44.
40; Tht itiniaer't Wooing, the
Impirktiaii of, 4l> ; tbe tbeoloRj
of her writinga, S2 ; her father'i
proachinK acted DutBTDCiiblf on
bar mental deTelopment. G3-55 ;
Tettmn lo Hartford, RS; her men-
tal afaatfl after the Nntptuos Tisit,
aa rerealed in lettsr* to Edward,
S5-43 : apiin in Hartford, m ; a
Daw mental life, B2-AS ; ber the-
ology, " Ood ia Lore," G4; her
aeeonnt of the detuli of the
family phna in Cineintiati, 6T. W ;
' ra of teaching, GT, 68 : hei

■eofhi

hoa tbetriptnWalDnl
Hilli,68-T2; her description of
Walnnt Rilli, 72 ; hardeacriptioD
of her father'a bonae at Walnnt
Hilla, 73-70; ber KeoRTaphy, 75 ;
her fairnaaa toward the tComan
Catholics, Tn, T6 ; ber life at the
•ohool in Cinoiiuiati, 75-TT; ber

L

npaired hj atat^t^UA
; feeling, 77-79;
TinW a Blare plantation, SO, 13B ;
the originali of cbaraoten and
aoenee in tfoc/e Tom', Cabin, 80,
I2S-127. 146; the original of
Topay, 81 ; her writinea for tha
"Semi-Colon nob," 82-80 ;
awarded priie for itory. tTitcle
Lol, sent to Wattrn Hugo-

how aha cam* to be a writor, 8&-
87 ; bow ahe waa atirrad to writing
bj her aiaMr, 8T-03 ; rsTiaiU New
England, 93 ; her impreanona of
Niagara, SB, 94 ; ber deacriptioD
of Ifn. Calvin Ellia Stowe, 96;
beoomea aDgagvd to Mr. Stowev
9C ; letter of, written juat befora
marriage. 96, 117 ; letter of, writ'
tea three weeka after iiiariiaKe>
HT, 98; writea for the WtMem
ilotald]/ Magaziw. etc., 09; na-
■iata her brother in editing tha
Joamal, fW ; ber account of her
earlj married life, «»-101 ; hel
■cooDnt of a Cincinnati mob, 108-
108 ; aea for the fint time tlut
alaTcry rooat f all , 1 08 ; two dMi^i-
ten, Eliia Tyler mnd Haniat
Beech er, bom to, 108 ; TiainWa-
liam Besoher in Fntnam, 100;
her attitnde toward the Abolition
party. 10!), 140, 141. 188, 189;
wiabea to do aomething t4> oppoae
alaiery, ItO; aon. Henry EUia,
bom to, 112;accoantof b«9 dailT
life, 112-110; ion. Pr«dariek
William, bora to. 110; 01 wiUi
nennlgia, 110; her litanuy
aohemea, 110, 117; don^tai.
Gaoigiana May, bom to, 11T[

I

I

i

INDEX

jeus of poverty, uckotH, knd
deUh, tlT, 118; goea Ext for
waMr cnre, IIU; lore uidadniin-
tiiui of her husband for, 119. 1
impteued with the feeling that
■he hma ft work to perfon
121 : •on, Saiuael Ch&rlei. bun
to, 121:deBthof hersonCbitrles,
12S, 154, ISS; had heud of the
horroni of tlavery bb a girl, 124.
Ooe* from Cinciniuiti to Bruue'
wiek, 127-129 ; indiinaDC oTsr tb(
propoeed Fugitiie Slave Law,
12H ; HD. Chailea Edward, born
to, \30, 136 ; hsf acooUDt of fint
•prins and inmroer in Bmnswiak,
I29-13T; detenninea to write
■ome thing afainat alavi
Garrison writaa to, on the effect
of lladt Tom't Cabin. 142; for-
ther acooaut of har life a
wick, 142, H3; meeti the Rev.
Joiiah Henson, 144 ; a b^ntiiue
mndo of Undf Tom's Cabin i.Tht
Dtalh qf UncU Tarn). 144^1-
inacoDraciei in tha introduat
to UncU Tom'i Cabin, 14S ; det
mines to make a serial of Unde
Tom't Cabin, 14T; anecdat
thaagKi, 148.149; writes to Fred-
erick Douglass, 149-1

Fitb si

I, 151-1

rriting of VncU
Tom'i Caiin with her own ^ef,
154 ; Uncle Tom'i Caiin, where
written, 1S5 ; business arrange-

Unclt Tom'a Cabin. IBS, IBfi;
Mr. Greelaj affected bj reading
Uncle Tditi'j Caiin, 186, IBT ;
anecdoleof the station a(Bnt and,
168 ; her own desuription of bei-

•elf, 159; reeeptionotFnc/e Tom't
Catia, KiO-ltii); looked npoB
Uncle Totn'i Cabin as a sermon,
not as a work of art, lt>3 ; how
aha waa affected br her fame,
163-167 ; writes the Ktf fo UikU

Tom-

Cabin, l&t.

Her joy at going to Andorer,
165, 166 ; hymn by, 166 ; goes to
England. lUT ; her reeeption in
England and Scotland, 1CT-1T3;
the purpose of Drrd, 174. ITG ; her
■econd Tisit to England. 1T5 ; ra-
ception of Dred in England, ITS ;
UncU Ton'i Cabin in Pranoe,
ITS, ITS ;deBthof hereon Henry,
1T6-1T8, 244-247. 24H ; completion
of The Mininer'i Wooinf. and
third visit to EngUuid, ITS ; at St.
George'i Hall, 1T8, IT!) ; visita ths
Duohen of Sutherland, il9, 180;
her interest in things spiritual in-
tensified by the death of her eon,
180 ; her attitude toward apiritu-
alism, IHO. 182, IAS, 24!), 2.W. SK.V
286 ; eminent Eoropeani who
were her frienda, 181 ; letter of
Mrs. Browning to. 181, ISi; aof
rospondence with George Eliot
on spiritualism and religion, 182-
184 ; letter of Buskin to, commis-
ersting her retum to America,
1S4, 185 ; writea to Mrs. Howard
on death of latter's daughter,
186; longs for her dead son and
for home, 186, 18T ; returns home,
187 1 qaotations from her reply to
the Addraifrom the Women qf
England. 189, 190, 201, 202; ber
■on enliiti. 191-196; comforta a
mother whose son fell at Boll
Bod, ids ; her word* about tli»

INDEX

WWrMbttevlUviIbr a»<I, in-J, j flnt ooBcepHoM of Tht MiniMer't
M) ImT AMrfoluiiH BDd hops' Wooing, '250. ^1 ; the pngnw-
Mata dnitafl th* Wat. lUT.llKi I tumof CuiUMmddedtolIiHori-
tlMMf*'*''"**''**^^*^"'''! (in>l eonaaptiuD ot, 2S2 ; UtMr
Mk, IW, IW: *Um Waihiartoo. I of Lowdl to, on 7»r MiaiUtt;
IWiMMJ*4>adlMMrUtUFrMd-| ITogiiv. ^53; Utter of RiuIdd

r^b. SI : ^ obiMt w OUmm

INDEX

deth birtl)il>7, 29fi. 296 ; tendi hsc
hiuband in hi* last sickuelt, 290 ;
death of her daogbMr, Qeor^iaiui
Mbt. 29T, 2U8 ; her tboughu d-well
OD death, 298-3U0i u a child
agun, 300, 301 ; dsath, 301.

Stowe, Harriet Beesher (dBUghtw
of Mn. Stowe), birth, lOS.

StowB. HenT7 Ellii («on of Mn.
S(«ve), birth, 112; death, ITS-
ITS, 244 I moDmiiiK of hit mother
for, 244-^*T, 249.

Stoiire, Joho (auoeator of Pniteaior
Stowe), 338, 239.

Stowe, Samnel Charlea (>oD ot Mi*.
Stowe}, birth, 121 ; death, 123.

SnmWir, Fort, attack on. 198.

Sunday meeting, Mn. Stowe'i re-
coUectiooi of, 28-37.

SoCberland, Duke and DuoheM of,
reception giTsn Mn. Stowe by.
lTl-173 ; Mre. Stowe writes to
the Dacbese aboat HeniT'edeath,
178, 177; Mr. and Mr«. Stowe
Tint the Ducheai. 1T», 180.

Switzerland, Hn. Stowe in, IT4.

Sykea, Mn. See Ma;, Qeonciana.

TeaohioE, Harriet Beachar'a viewa
of, 6T, 08.

Theological beliefi, the ooniLeodan
between physical eondition* and,
Hn. Stflwe'i conception ot, 2IS.

Theolosy, of enpreme intereit in
the Beeober fsmil;, 44 ; of Cath-
nine and Edward Beecher, 44-
62 1 of Harriet Bewber, " God !•
Love," 6*.

Trip, the doe, 31-34.

Truth, Sojaumer, IST, 188,

Trier, Rer. Bsonet, father of Mr.
Stowe'* fint wife, 90.

242.
Vnclt Tom'i Ca6in, originali of per-
■ons and incident! of, 80. 81, I3&-
127, 146; eridence to the eSeot
of, HI, 142 ; a begioning madu of,
144-146; iuaccuraciea in the in-
troduction to, 146; MiH. StowB

147 ; Mn. Stowe connecte the
writing of, with her own grief.

1S4;

neis arrangement OTer tlie pabli-
estion of. IM, ISG ; Mr. Oreeter
affected b; reading, 196, 1^7 ; re-
ception of, liiO-163; oonidderad
hj Mn. Stowe aa a aermon, not a
work of art, 103 ; bow Mrs. Stowa
waa affeotfid hy fame from, 163-
167 ; Mn. Stove writea the Kty
to VncU Tom't Cabin, 101; In
France, ITS, 176.

Walnut HiUa, Dr. Beeoher notirm
a call to. 66; Harriet Beooher'a
description of, 72 ; description of
Dr. Beecher'* house at, 73-71).
See Cincinnati.

Washington, D. C, Mn. Stowe <ria-
iU, 199-203,

Water Cure, Mn. and Mi. Stow*
go to Brattlehoro tor, 119-121.

Weld.Theodore D., Abolitionist, 1 01.

Weld, Mre. Theodora D., ipeaks
before Anti->SlBvery Society, 111.

WtHtrn Magatint, priio story sent
to, by Harriet BMcher. KS ; Hn.
Stowe a oantribtitor to, 9SI.

Whittier, J. O., his poem read at
Mn. Stowe's birthday party. 201,
362; tribnta of, lo Mn. Sunre, 273.

«be AibtutlK ptt(«

r-.i''

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3 tlOS Oil 77H ^57 '■3- o