Harriet Beecher Stowe: a biography for girls

by Martha Foote Crow

In response to the President’s humorous remark about her book, Mrs. Stowe no doubt answered, as she so many times did, by disclaiming any intention to do anything except to obey the inner voice that commanded her to write. “I did not write it, not I myself alone,” she always said. “It seemed to me that God himself made me write it, that I wrote it at his dictation.” And Lincoln, from the depths of his profoundly reverent nature, probably answered that he could understand how that could be said with all simplicity and true worship.

Gazing into that homely, noble, pain-marked face, and knowing so well how many reasons there were for its look of inexpressible sadness, her heart was touched with a great pity for him as a man. After they had talked for a few moments, some one came through the room and spoke with him for a little while; then in passing out the visitor said casually, “Where do you dine?” The President answered, “Well, I don’t dine; I just browse around a little now and then.” To the woman that sat there waiting and letting nothing escape her eye, there was something irresistibly pathetic in the tone in which this was spoken. Where indeed could President Lincoln find an hour of rest in the midst of his overweighted days? The whole city was one hospital of wounded soldiers, the borders outside were one vast camp looking for battle. Even the Emancipation Proclamation, that one firm stone in the wide morass of despondency on which the wearied man at last had set firm foothold, did not just now seem to lead toward the land of promise. Struggling with an extraordinarily difficult problem, he was at that moment misunderstood on all sides. People criticized him for what he did and for what he did not do. He was too hasty, he was too slow. They called him stupid blockhead, satyr, ape, gorilla. They named his military plans imbecility; his humor they took for irreverence. But Mrs. Stowe understood him, and she somehow struck the note at the beginning which made them at home with each other. If this had not been the case, he would never have said the things to her that we know he did say.

Of her interview with the President, however, Mrs. Stowe never gave any full account. I suppose it would not have been right for her to do so. It must, however, have been a very illuminating hour, for her sketch of Lincoln in a volume called “Men of Our Times,” which she wrote six years later shows a certainty of impression and an intimacy of view that could only have come from personal knowledge. Moreover, she tells us definitely of several things that were said; and from these as well as from references in that sketch, and from the influence of this conversation upon the “Reply” to the English “Address” which she was writing on the evening of the day when she saw the President, and from what we know was dwelling in the mind of the President and in hers in this month of November in 1862, we may to some extent reorganize that hour of vital converse between two souls that were sharing in the heavy woe of the national conflict.

As early in the conversation as possible, she called his attention to the “Address” on the part of the five hundred thousand women of England who had spoken to the women of America through her, and of the necessity that was upon her now to answer.

“They have called upon us,” she said, “in the name of a common origin, a common faith, and a common cause. They have said: ‘We appeal to you as sisters, as wives, and as mothers, to raise up your voices to your fellow-citizens, and your prayers to God, for the removal of this affliction and disgrace from the Christian world.’ Now,” she continued, “in this eight years we have been answering this appeal. Step after step has been taken; chain after chain has fallen; now the day of emancipation has been set. Mr. President, it is of that that I must speak with you to-day.” Thus Mrs. Stowe brought forward the question that was pressing upon her mind. “Mr. Lincoln,” she said, “I feel that I must ask you about your views on emancipation.” At this point the President withdrew with her to the embrasure of a window-seat, where they sat together for an hour or more in uninterrupted conversation.

Mrs. Stowe had much to tell him about the condition of thought in England which she had learned from observation during her visits there and through the letters she constantly received from people of weight and importance who were watching with intense interest the progress of our bitter conflict. He on his part was able to interpret to her his border state policy which had been a burden of misunderstanding upon her mind; he explained the reasons why it had been necessary for him to proceed slowly and why the time for a more decided step had come at last. We know comparatively little about the conversation that went on by the window, but we do know that these were its subjects. She said that she desired, if possible, to have it made clear to her that the government was not to take any steps backward in the course on which it had started out, before she could with dignity write the answer to the “Address.”

Abraham Lincoln made it clear. He set her mind quite at rest on that point. Before they parted he said in effect what he afterwards repeated in the Second Inaugural: “If this struggle were to be prolonged till there was not a home in the land where there was not one dead, till all the treasure amassed by the unpaid labor of the slave should be wasted, till every drop of blood drawn by the lash should be atoned by blood drawn by the sword, we could only bow and say, ‘Just and true are thy ways, thou King of Saints!’”

This was indeed a passage from his inmost soul. Sometimes a great man has an hour in which he finds it comforting to open his heart to the compassionate ear of a woman. Without disrespect to his revered memory we may believe that President Lincoln did on this day find such a relief in talking with a woman whose book with its key and whose letters and articles had proved not only the sensitive sympathy and flame-like patriotism of her soul, but also the statesman-like grasp of her mind.

Then perhaps in this interview with its high emotional tension there may have come a moment when personal things could be mentioned, for I do not know how otherwise to account for the great confidence he reposed in her in one of the things that he said in that interview. Perhaps the way may have been opened by her saying something about her own feelings in writing “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” She may have told him how acutely she suffered when she was working on that book. Elsewhere she has said, “Many times, in writing ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin,’ I thought my health would fail me utterly, but I prayed earnestly that God would help me till I got through, and still I was pressed beyond measure and above strength.” Something of this sort she doubtless told Mr. Lincoln. To this the President must have listened with full understanding. “It lies like lead on my heart,” she would continue. “It shadows my life with sorrow. The more so since I feel for the south as for my own brothers, and am pained for every horror I have been obliged to describe, as one who is forced by an awful oath to disclose in court some family disgrace. Many times I have thought I must die, and yet I pray God that I may live to see the end of this struggle.”

These are the words of Mrs. Stowe; if she used the same words in speaking with President Lincoln it would surely be in response that he must have said what we know he did say in some part of this conversation, that he did not think that it would be given to him to rejoice in the successful outcome of the great rebellion. “Whichever way it ends, I have the impression that I shan’t last long after it is over,” was what he said. Mrs. Stowe afterwards said that she felt that no man had suffered more or more deeply than he, although it was a dry, weary, patient pain that seemed to some like insensibility, but was not—Oh, never was at all! After he was gone his countrymen understood this perfectly. Mrs. Stowe understood it then. She said, “When we have passed through this trouble we shall think that no private or individual sorrow can ever make us wholly comfortless. If my faith in God’s presence and living power in the affairs of men ever grows dim, that thought shall make it impossible for me to doubt.”