Freedom Author
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s
Childhood
-Harriet Elisabeth Beecher was born June 14, 1811 in Litchfield, CT.
-She was born The daughter of Reverend Lyman Beecher and Roxanna Foote Beecher.
-The sixth of 11 children.
-All seven sons became ministers, then the most effective way to influence society.
-Oldest daughter Catharine pioneered education for women.
-Youngest daughter Isabella was a founder of the National Women's Suffrage Association.
-Harriet believed that writing is what she was meant to do.
-Her most famous literary work exposed the truth about the greatest social injustice of her
day human slavery.
-Roxanna Beecher died when Harriet was only five years old.
-After he mothers death Harriet pursued art which honored her mother’s talents.
-In place of there mother the eldest sister Catherine held the maternal position in the house.
-Lyman's second wife, Harriet Porter Beecher, brought another two children into the family.
Education
-Stowe learned how to make persuasive argument at the family dinner table.
-Harriet began her formal education at Sarah Pierce's academy.
-In 1824 Stowe became a student and then a teacher at Hartford Female Seminary,
founded by sister Catharine.
-One of the earliest schools to encourage girls to study academic subjects and not
simply home economics.
-Stowe furthered her writing talents by frequently spending hours composing essays.
Life After Marriage
-In 1832 Twenty-one year old Harriet Beecher moved with her family to Cincinnati,
OH
-Her father Lyman Beecher became President of Lane Theological Seminary.
-In Cincinnati she met and married Calvin Stowe.
-Calvin Stowe was a theology professor.
-Six of the seven children that Stowe had were born in Cincinnati.
-In the summer of 1849 her 18-month old son, Samuel Charles Stowe, died of cholera.
-Cholera is an infection of the small intestine that causes a large amount of watery
diarrhea.
-Stowe later gave credit to the extreme sorrow as one of the inspirations for Uncle
Tom's Cabin.
-Because after her son died she was able to understand the pain enslaved mothers
felt when there children were taken from them to be sold.
-In 1850 Harriet Stowe joined the faculty of his alma mater, Bowdoin College in
Brunswick, ME.
-The Stowe family moved to Maine and lived in Brunswick until 1853.
Literary Works
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
-Best selling book
-The book she is most famous for
-Accurately depicted slave life
-Stowe’s writing was informal and because of this informality reached a broader
range of people of all ages.
-The book demanded that the United States deliver on the promise of freedom
and equality
-contributed to the outbreak of the Civil War
-the title itself became a racial slur
Primary Geography for Children
-Stowe wrote for pay, before her success with Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which lead her to
write anything from school books to DIY and newspaper articles
Literary Works Continued
Dred; A Tale of the Great
Dismal Swamp
-This fictional novel depicts slave life in a more
radical way, focusing on slave rebellion and a
hero instead of the brutality on innocent
people.
The Minister’s Wooing
-Stowe expressed her views against some
tight-knit Puritan beliefs and shows her
respect for it’s morals.
Inspiration for Uncle Tom’s Cabin
-As a wife and mother living in Cincinnati, Harriet Beecher Stowe met former
and fugitive enslaved individuals
-Cincinnati was an ethnically and culturally vibrant city
-On the Ohio River across from Kentucky, a slave state, the city exposed
Harriet to the true face of slavery
-Stowe knew a little bit about slavery before she moved to Ohio
-Stowe’s own grandmother kept African American servants who had
originally been enslaved
-In Ohio Stowe heard first hand stories from former enslaved people
-Harriet also witnessed slavery while visiting Kentucky
-She even decided to employed fugitive slaves in her home
-When Harriet and her husband Calvin learned that their servant was
actually a runaway slave in danger of being returned to slavery, Calvin and
Harriet's brother Henry Ward Beecher helped the woman escape and reach
Canada and legal freedom along with it.
-Stowe quickly learned that even the discussion of slavery could divide a
community when students at her father's school, Lane Seminary, rioted after
anti-slavery debates were forbidden
Exert from Uncle Tom’s Cabin
It is one of the bitterest apportionments of a lot of slavery, that the
negro, sympathetic and assimilative, after acquiring, in a refined
family, the tastes and feelings which form the atmosphere of such a
place, is not the less liable to become the bond-slave of the coarsest
and most brutal,--just as a chair or table, which once decorated the
superb saloon, comes, at last, battered and defaced, to the barroom
of some filthy tavern, or some low haunt of vulgar debauchery. The
great difference is, that the table and chair cannot feel, and the
_man_ can; for even a legal enactment that he shall be "taken,
reputed, adjudged in law, to be a chattel personal," cannot blot out
his soul, with its own private little world of memories, hopes, loves,
fears, and desires.
Harriet Beech Stowe
Harriet Beech Stowe
Video for Uncle Tom’s Cabin
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v
=u5gLVulWa4s