Harriet Beecher Stowe: a biography for girls

by Martha Foote Crow

Negroes were negotiable currency; they were collateral security on half the contracts that were at that time being made between the thriving men of Cincinnati and the planters of the adjoining slave states. It was natural that when the structure of business included this kind of property and no one was willing to open the case of the rightfulness of keeping possession in that form at all, the excitement of the discussion should rise to a great pitch. It did reach such a height at last that there were mobs in the streets and danger to the lives of all about the city and the region.

Meantime Mrs. Stowe’s family were pursuing the even tenor of their way in the Walnut Hills suburb. Her husband was busied with Biblical exegeses, and she was giving her attention chiefly to pinafores and dishwashing; but each of them took the liveliest interest in what was going on. Mrs. Stowe’s brother Henry was one of the editors of the Cincinnati Journal and he took a great part in the activities of the hour; Mrs. Stowe also did some writing for his paper. Yet all this is in the very midst of the period in her life when, as she afterward said, she was trying her best not to think of the workings of slavery at all, because she did not see what could be done about it and could not bear to think about a wrong that she could do nothing to prevent!

Meantime the circle of friends about Mrs. Stowe must have thrashed out the whole subject, trying, as were many people elsewhere, to decide what was the right course to pursue. Good people felt that something ought to be done but were divided as to what was the wisest step to take first. There were extremists on both sides and many angry differences of opinion. Mrs. Stowe thought that no one could have the system of slavery brought home to him without an irrepressible desire to do something; but what was there to be done?

For a time she, with many others, believed that the solution must lie in some intermediate position, in some scheme like the proposal of the Colonization Society to send the negroes back to Africa, or perhaps in some segregation plan. That a civil war could be the outcome of the disagreement was not imagined.

Among the students in the Theological Seminary was a young enthusiast named Theodore Weld who, in a lecturing tour through the southern states, had seen much of slavery and slave owners, and who, as a result, held the strongest views against the system, which he did not hesitate to declare. He had converted to his views Mr. J. G. Birney, of Huntsville, Alabama, who then proceeded to free his slaves and become an ardent supporter of the doctrine. Together with Dr. Bailey of Cincinnati he founded a paper called The Philanthropist. His strong anti-slavery utterances in this paper aroused much question in that city in the summer and fall of 1836.

As matters grew more serious the excitement increased. The printing establishment was mobbed and when Mrs. Stowe saw her brother Henry putting pistols in order, declaring, with set face, that he stood ready to fight if need be, she could see how critical was the time. The mobs even threatened the houses of all that professed abolition sentiments and there was danger that the Theological Seminary might be attacked. From her home at Walnut Hills, Mrs. Stowe could see the light of the burning houses upon the sky for many nights. What was right to think or do, she could not see, but whatever the outcome was she thought that the rule of mob was wrong. While she believed the cause was a just one, she deplored the excesses of the excited people. As for herself, she was not afraid. They were protected, she said afterward in her funny way, by the distance of the Seminary from the city and by the providential depth and adhesiveness of the Cincinnati mud. She was, however, excited, indignant, and thoroughly aroused. She hoped that Mr. Birney would stand his ground in his fireproof building and assert his rights. If she were a man, she cried, she would go and she believed she could take good care of at least one window.

By this time Mrs. Stowe had gained some practical knowledge of what the slavery system really meant. When she had been but one year in Cincinnati she had gone with friends to visit a plantation across the river. Here she had seen a happy prosperous slave life, under owners that seemed to be the sincere well-wishers of the negroes who served them. There was little to shock or distress her in what she saw. Most of the day she moved about as one in a dream. She sat apart, heeding not the antics and gambols of the little darkies. But we know that the scenes she saw that day were unconsciously laid up in her memory to be recalled when the building of the book had come into her mind and she needed the material for her great purpose. Years afterward, when the friend who accompanied her on that Kentucky visit read the account of the doings on the Shelby Farm as Mrs. Stowe depicted them in the “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” she saw in the description an exact correspondence to the events of that day as she remembered them.

Here was, then, a picture of the slave system at its best. Perhaps her gravity and absorption during the picnic merriment of the day was caused by the thought that the owners of the happy plantation had it in their power to separate any husband and father there from his family or any little girl from her mother, and, if he needed the money, sell them to slave traders who would carry them “down the river” to be lost to their own forever. Of what such a fate might mean Mrs. Stowe learned from her brother Charles, who acted for some months as collecting agent for a New Orleans commission house. On one of the trips up the Red River he had come upon a plantation where the slaves were treated with a brutality almost indescribable. Of this he tried to draw a faithful picture in his next letter to his sister, and she had thus placed in her storehouse another chapter for the book she was unconsciously preparing to write. Almost incredible as it may seem, the Legree plantation was, therefore, a scene taken directly from life. In another letter Charles Beecher told how from the deck of a steamer on which he was traveling he had seen a slave mother seek death by springing into the river with her child clasped to her bosom. She preferred death for herself and her child rather than to allow her little girl to enter the life into which she knew she would be sold.

Still other ways of seeing the under side of the movement that was going on were being afforded the quiet little woman in the Cincinnati suburb. Every month there was something happening. A press that printed abolition matter was destroyed, a house was mobbed, a free negro was kidnapped, the shop of an abolitionist was riddled, or a negro schoolhouse razed to the ground. And in the mobs of 1840 there was a general attack upon the negro population in the midst of which rescued slaves were caught and hurried back across the line to their plantations. Houses were battered down by cannon, violence and crime naturally followed in the wake of mob law. The smoke of the conflagration could be seen from the house where Mrs. Stowe lived and the sorrowful processions of colored people with what remained of their possessions starting out for Canada, passed by her door; mothers passed with children in their arms or toddling along by their side, and discouraged men, bearing heavy burdens. Sometimes at night she heard the rattle of a big covered wagon in which she would be sure was an escaping woman being helped to the border.

In such ways as these Mrs. Stowe was unconsciously trained for a special work. So far the preparation had been mostly by hearsay. The practical demonstrations that followed it were to be even more effective.