In this period, then, between her marriage in 1836 and the removal to Maine in January, 1850, we see our brave little woman putting up the stiffest kind of fight against the most disheartening odds. Under household conditions that grew less and less encouraging for the housekeeper, she toiled on. Sickness visited various members of the family and the burdens grew heavier than the little mother was able to bear. Her knowledge was deepening, and her heart was enlarging, but her strength was too sorely tired. Her struggle was tragic; it is sad to reflect upon, but it is also inspiring! Many who read the pathetic record of these years of privation and suffering will lose sight of the great author in their sympathetic interest in the woman, the wife, and the mother; through her heroism and sweetness and nobility of character during this crucial time she is endeared to us as no fame and glory could ever endear her. Her entry into the profession of literature came through the welcome prospect of a “douceur that might eke out a domestic accommodation.” Her literary training was gained when she was “a young mother and housekeeper in the first years of her novitiate, amid alternate demands from an ever dissolving ‘kitchen cabinet’ and from the two, three and four occupants of her nursery.” And if she had not been what Sam Lawson would call “one of these ’ere facultized persons,” she never could have accomplished the prodigies of work that came from her hands.
During these years of poverty in Cincinnati six children came to add their cares and their loves to Mrs. Stowe’s life. First twin daughters arrived and were named Eliza Taylor and Harriet Beecher. Two years later Henry Ellis was born. Then came Frederick William, named for the Prussian King for whom his father had a great admiration. Georgiana May followed and Samuel Charles was the next. This, omitting the last little one whose life was sacrificed in the cholera epidemic, made the circle of five who went with the little mother when she preceded her husband to the new home in Maine. Soon after her arrival there her seventh child was born and was named Charles Edward. This son survived to write in two noble transcriptions the chronicles of her happy and her tragic experiences.
Her children were the very heart of her life. “When I can stop and think long enough to discriminate my head from my heels, I must say,” she said, “that I think myself fortunate in both husband and children. My children I would not change for all the ease, leisure and pleasure I could have without them.” To Mrs. Stowe motherhood was literally a religion. She knew in her heart what the love of a mother could be, and she said, “God invented mothers’ hearts, and He certainly has the pattern in His own.” So she found within herself a proof of the love of God, a beautiful path to spiritual attainment that is open to every woman that learns in any way to understand the meaning of a mother’s love.
Mrs. Stowe was a hard working woman, constantly beset by trials of housekeeping and home-making. Her husband was rich in Greek and Hebrew and Latin and Arabic, and, alas! rich in nothing else. But then, she said, she was abundantly enriched with wealth of another sort—meaning the children from the curly-headed twin daughters down. She considered that her first and best mission lay in this circle; and she maintained that to feel the importance of order and system and to carry it out through the family requires very much the same kind of talent which a good prime minister needs. She was the kind of housekeeper that she has shown us in the Aunt Betsey of “The Mayflower,” who was “the neatest and most efficient piece of human machinery that ever operated in forty places at once. She was always everywhere, supervising everything.”
Mrs. Stowe’s dowry consisted of eleven dollars’ worth of china. That served her for two years. But when her brother, Edward, with his bride, came to visit her, she found that she could not set the table with the plates and tea cups she possessed. So she bought an additional set for ten dollars, and this supply lasted her for many years. Mrs. Stowe seems to have inherited all the cleverness of her mother, Roxana, in making and making over, in fitting and polishing up all sorts of things for the household. While she was getting settled in Maine she wrote to a sister, “Mrs. Mitchell and myself made two sofas and lounges, a barrel chair, divers bedspreads, pillow-cases, pillows, bolsters and mattresses; we painted rooms; we revarnished furniture; we—what didn’t we do?”[10] She could nail a carpet in the corner and tack gimp on to mended furniture; she could make a loose screw firm, and, I am certain, drive in a nail without hitting her fingers. While she was as feminine as any woman that ever lived, she had the simple practical efficiency that is—or was—supposed to be characteristically masculine. She could lay the cloth on the floor and cut out a dress for herself without any pattern; “I guess I know my own shape,” she said to one who caught her doing this. She made her husband’s coats and her own shoes. In the days when the congress gaiters were in fashion, she made very pretty ones for herself, fitting them nicely; she was an excellent cobbler and could cut the leather soles and nail on the heel with perfect art, and when she found the elastic on the sides difficult to set in she invented a way of lacing the shoe up behind, thus overcoming the trouble and giving a dainty and trim effect to the foot-gear.
In the winter of 1839 the Belle Rivière was choked up with ice; provisions could not be brought in and a famine was threatened; consequently there was a stiff rise in prices. Coarse salt was three dollars a bushel, rice was eighteen cents a pound, coffee was fifty cents a pound, white sugar the same; brown sugar was twenty cents a pound, molasses was one dollar a gallon and potatoes were one dollar a bushel. What was to be done? They simply did without these things. For months the diet consisted of bread and bacon, and happy they were to get that!
In spite of her blithe resistance, Mrs. Stowe’s health for a time gave way entirely, and she was obliged to go to a water-cure in Vermont. Her sister Catherine was there at the same time and for much the same reason; so the two sisters had many hours of communion, and, no doubt, some fun. While she was there Harriet’s husband, who was rather inclined to look on the dark side, wrote her a most melancholy letter. She answered that she wished he could be with her at Brattleboro to coast down hill on a sled, or go sliding and snowballing by moonlight. “I would snowball every bit of the hypo out of you,” she said. Then to amuse him she copied a poem that Kate had just been writing on the cheerful subject of tombstones. It was accompanied by two pictures of tombstones they had drawn. On one was inscribed “Eheu me miserum = Hic jacket,” and over the stone on the branch of a tree was hung—a jacket! The poem, in two cantos, was written, she said, for the edification of certain dolorous individuals in the Semi-colon.
Canto I
In the Kingdom of Mortin
I had the good fortin