Harriet Beecher Stowe: a biography for girls

by Martha Foote Crow

When “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” had been some four months in the hands of the people, the publishers sent Mrs. Stowe a check for ten thousand dollars! Professor Stowe held this magical piece of paper in his hands and looking helplessly at his wife, said, “Why, Harriet, I never saw so much money in my life!” He had hoped that the book would be successful enough in the financial way to buy for her what she very much needed, a new silk dress. The returns from the sale, however, besides accomplishing that modest result, also brought within reach many comforts hitherto unknown in the house of the professor’s family. More than this, they assured the opportunity for foreign travel and for the beneficial meeting with people in England and elsewhere who sympathized with the cause to which Mrs. Stowe had dedicated her heart.

In the spring of 1853, then, we find her starting out for her first sea voyage. This new experience with that “restless, babbling giant,” the ocean, was described in her first letter home in her accustomed merry vein. If you are going to sea, she wrote to her children, you must have everything ready; you must set your house—that is, your stateroom—in order as if you were going to be hanged, for you may be sure that in half an hour after sailing an infinite desperation will seize you in which the grasshopper will be a burden. Her voyage she declared gave her a new sympathy for babies who are rocked at home without so much as a “by your leave”; she thought it no wonder there are so many stupid people in the world! There were moments, however, when she could conquer the nervous horror she always had of that “rude, noisy old servant” of the Lord, and could feel that the ocean was always obedient to His will, and could not carry her beyond His power and love, wherever and to whatever it might bear her. At one time on a later journey she had this faith put to the test when her ship was run into by another, and she found that it did not fail her, but kept her calm and serene throughout the ordeal.

When Mrs. Stowe, together with her husband and brother, reached England a great surprise awaited them. She had had no realization of the real significance of having written a book of universal pity and love that would awaken a response in every heart among rich and poor. She was dazed that so many people came to the boat to meet her, that she walked up the wharf through a long lane of kindly, welcoming faces, and that wherever she went in England, and especially in Scotland, her carriage was run after by wild flocks of sympathetic people anxious to catch one glimpse of the author of “Uncle Tom.”

She felt, she said, like a child who had set fire to a packet of gunpowder. And if on the approach to some cathedral door her way was blocked by the crowd waiting to see her as she passed in, she could only, in her amazement, quote the words, “What went ye out for to see? A reed shaken with the wind?” “It seems to me so odd,” she wrote home from England, “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 this world!”

Evidently Mrs. Stowe had very little conceit about herself. She was always a quiet, unostentatious little body, “a little bit of a woman,” as she described herself, “just as thin and dry as a pinch of snuff.” She must have been utterly wanting in vanity, for when she began to be famous and everybody was desiring to see her, she thought it all simply wonderful and declared that she was “never very much to look at” in her best days.

There have been so many things to say about Harriet Beecher that too little attention has perhaps been given in this book to her personal appearance. Let us make up for that at one stroke. When the Beecher children’s stepmother came to live with them she said that the four youngest children—George, Harriet, Henry and Charles—were all very pretty, and that Harriet and Henry were as lovely children as she ever saw. Harriet combined the aquiline Foote brow with the stronger lines of the Beecher family. She was small in figure and quick in her movements. Her hands were plastic and mobile, the most controlled and manageable hands in the world; their motion made a language in itself. Her dark-brown hair that never lost a warmness of tone until the snow began to fall upon it, curled about her face, and, in the fashion that prevailed during her young ladyhood, was allowed to fall in ringlets on each side. Her eyes were of the blue-gray that takes on all colors as emotion moves the soul; they had often a far-away dreamy expression that came from her complete absorption in thought. For instance, at a luncheon in her honor she did not join in the flow of conversation at all, but sat absorbed in her own thoughts, explaining afterward that she had been making the scheme of a new book and thinking out the characters for it, and had forgotten where she was. In this respect she was like Tennyson who, under similar conditions, is said to have remarked only that he had eaten “too much, much too much!” At other times, however, Mrs. Stowe delighted her fellow guests at some dinner table by her interest in the subject discussed; her heightened color, and her shining eyes, together with the ardor and good sense of her talk, the vivacity of her expression, and the nobility that characterized her points of view, charmed all that came within her circle. After such a time the hostess might go away and complain, as one did, that she had not been told beforehand how beautiful Mrs. Stowe was! The printed pictures that appeared in the English papers never did her justice. But she had too little vanity to mind that. When she saw them she was amazed at the loving kindness of her English and Scottish friends who could keep up such a warm affection for such a Gorgon. She thought that the Sphinx at the British Museum must have sat for most of them. She planned to make a collection of them to carry home to her children—they would be useful, like the Irishman’s signboard, to show where the road did not go! These monstrous pictures, however, did her this service, that everybody was surprised and relieved when they came to her and found that she was not such a perfect Gorgon after all! There was one picture made of her about this time, however, that is worthy of preservation, a beautiful drawing by Richmond. Although Mrs. Stowe said when she saw it, “I shall look like that when I am in heaven!”—still many that knew her in earlier years thought it a good likeness.

Mrs. Stowe found not only curiosity but also friendly welcome among the English people. One typically pleasant English home was opened to them at once. The morning after her arrival she was asked to breakfast at the sister-in-law’s of her host, and on running over in the most informal way found forty people sitting with bonnets on waiting for a chance to meet the lion; all of which would have been embarrassing had not the friendly warmth and cordiality of the circle been made evident by their smiling faces. As she traveled along, friends arose everywhere. Now she rested in some delightful, homelike room by a cheerful fire that flickered on pictures, statuettes, bookcases and all comfortable things, with an armchair drawn up before it and a pot of moss on the table set in the center of a round pin-cushion; or if in the vicissitudes of travel she found herself in the middle of the night in the street with baggage thrown about her and a vociferous circle of cabmen declaring they could do no more to discover a lost address, she would be sure to find shelter in a quiet house which would turn out to be the very place friends had prepared for her and her party. But it was not only in the quiet homes that she found welcome; she saw the routine in a ducal castle from morning prayers on through the joyous drives and visiting of the day to the putting out of the last candle at night. With the Queen herself she had what Professor Stowe called the “pleasantest little interview that ever was.” He described her as a “real nice little body, with exceedingly pleasant, agreeable manners!” And four royal children stared their eyes almost out looking at the author of “Uncle Tom” while the interview was going on.

Mrs. Stowe’s first visit to England was made on the invitation of the Anti-Slavery Society of Glasgow, and the occasion became therefore semi-official in its character. Not only was there a great deal of interest in her personality, but there was also so much enthusiasm for the cause she was held everywhere to represent that associations as well as individuals were anxious to meet her and to do honor to her. Deputations came to greet her from the cities through which she passed and others that were in the vicinity. Every community seemed bent upon putting itself on record. At Glasgow there were deputations from Paisley, Greenock, Dundee, Edinburgh; and not to be outdone by the mother island, Belfast sent one over from Ireland. At the entrance to Edinburgh the magistracy of the city met her and made approaches to her. She was carried through long passages made in the masses of the people and conducted to a gallery where she took her tea with a thousand people and thought the teapot of Hadji Baba, the father of all teakettles, must have been there to go around so large a company. Enthusiastic meetings were held and speeches were made. For the quiet little figure on the platform the answer was always given by her husband whose handsome face and fine presence won everybody to admiration and regard; and when he said that he could not imagine how any sort of a written book could have brought forward such expressions of friendliness as they were showing, that he thought the book had not been written at all, that he “’spected it grew,” the vociferous applause of the audience testified not only to their delight in his sally of wit, but to the fact that they knew by heart their “Uncle Tom,” and especially their excellent Topsy.

They made a practical expression of their sympathy with the cause Mrs. Stowe represented in wonderful gifts. At Edinburgh a national penny offering, summed up in a thousand gold sovereigns, was presented to her on a silver salver; Belfast sent a bogwood casket lined with gold, carved with national symbols and containing an offering for the cause; at Surrey Chapel in London she received an inkstand, which was a beautiful piece of silver work, carved into a group of figures representing Religion with a Bible in her hand giving liberty to the slave. A band of children gave her a gold pen, and she made her only public speech in talking a little to them. Above all other gifts in interest was that presented by the Duchess of Sutherland at Stafford House in London, a bracelet made in the form of a slave’s shackle of ten links and a clasp. On one of the links was inscribed the date of the abolition of the slave trade March 25, 1807, and of slavery in the English colonies August 1, 1834. On the clasp was written the number of signatures to an Address that was presented to Mrs. Stowe on the occasion of that meeting at Stafford House. The number was 562,448. Of this Address we shall hear more after a while. On the other links of the bracelet it was suggested that Mrs. Stowe should have placed the date of the freeing of slaves in our own country; but Mrs. Stowe did not at that time believe that she should live to see the day when that happy event should come about. She was, however, as we know, to have that good fortune within a dozen years, and to record it upon the other links of the historic bracelet.

Many of these meetings were marked by tremendous excitement, such meetings as England has been famous for throughout modern days and such as have brought about many reforms. Attending such a meeting and realizing the strength of the feeling that flowed under the outward expression, Mrs. Stowe said: “I do not believe that there is in all America more vehemence of democracy, more volcanic force of power, than comes out in one of these great gatherings in our old fatherland. I saw plainly enough where Concord, Lexington, and Bunker Hill came from; and it seems to me there is enough of this element of indignation at wrong, and resistance of tyranny, to found half a dozen republics as strong as we are.”