With her sensitive sympathy, Mrs. Stowe probably knew that Lincoln’s mind was dwelling upon his own painful loss in the death of his dear young son the spring before; and she, for her part, was reminded of the day when, as she stood by the grave of the most beautiful and most beloved of her seven children, she learned the woe a slave mother feels when her child is torn away from her. She thought also of the crushing sorrow that came to her at Andover in the loss by drowning of her first-born son, Henry Ellis. Perhaps in this hour of quiet, intimate conversation she was able, in order to give comfort to the man before her, to speak of these things, for it is by showing to those in deep suffering that we suffer with them that we comfort them most.
And then perhaps she told the President that she, too, had a son at Washington, and saw the smile that she remembered so well all her life afterwards, light up that homely-beautiful face as he said, “One of the twenty thousand encamped about the city?” and she answered that he was one of that vast company and that he had been made lieutenant for honorable service on several battlefields. And then she no doubt told how he was one of the first to volunteer when the First Massachusetts Infantry was formed. He had been a student of medicine under Dr. Holmes, who had tried to persuade him not to become a soldier, but to finish his studies and then go into the army as a surgeon. The boy would not hear of this; he threw his hat on the floor and cried, “I could not look my fellowmen in the face if I did not enlist. People shall never say that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s son is a coward!” And if in telling this she took a motherly pride, who shall blame her?
With this the interview ended. Mrs. Stowe was rejoined by her son and daughter, and the guests took their departure. That evening Mrs. Stowe wrote the greater part of her “Reply,” and it was soon on its way to Great Britain.
This “Reply” she wrote far more boldly and confidently than would have been possible if she had not talked with the President. She courteously acknowledged the compliment of the “Address” and its great weight with her and with the American people. She spoke of its influence upon north and upon south; and then she recounted the history of affairs in this country up to the Proclamation of Emancipation which was to take effect in the following January. She spoke frankly of the things that were filling her with pain and solicitude, especially of the lack of English sympathy toward us in our struggle for union. “Alas, then, is it so? In this day of great deeds and great heroisms ... do we hear such voices from England?” She went on to tell the story of the Jubilee she had witnessed the day before and of the psalm of the modern exodus, “Go down, Moses,” sung by that strange company with all the barbaric fire of the Marseillaise and the religious fervor of the old Hebrew prophet. Giving free rein to her impassioned eloquence, she said: “Sisters (in your ‘Address’), you have spoken well; we have heard you; we have heeded; we have striven in the cause, even unto death. We have sealed our devotion by desolate hearths and darkened homesteads, by the blood of sons, husbands and fathers.... Now we beg leave in solemn sadness to return to you your own words: we appeal to you, as sisters, as wives, as mothers, to raise your voices to your fellow-citizens and your prayers to God, for the removal of this affliction and disgrace from the Christian world.”
Mrs. Stowe’s “Reply” was published widely in Great Britain, and was one of the most powerful agents in changing the public sentiment from a hostile to a friendly attitude. Meetings were held all over England and the tone of the speeches and of the newspapers and of the discussions in Parliament was no longer favorable to the division of our country into two separate governments, a north and a south, but was for union and abolition. John Bright wrote to Mrs. Stowe stating that such had been the happy result of the outspoken and appealing home-thrust in her “Reply.” All this, we must remember, happened before the Battle of Gettysburg, which was the crisis following the 1862 phase of the war.
This assistance that Harriet Beecher Stowe was so fortunate as to be able to give in one of the epoch-making crises of our history, was one of her great services to our country. In the next chapter we are to see how she performed another real service, for which we owe her another debt of gratitude.
CHAPTER XX
WRITING STORIES OF OLD NEW ENGLAND LIFE
Harriet Beecher Stowe did for her country more than one inestimable service that should win for her the gratitude of her countrymen. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” besides being a clarion call to the world, happened also to be a book that was to become immortal. This was incidental; but it was not a small thing to do—thus to focus the attention of the whole world upon one American book. And it was no small service to the literary life and hopes of this country to write a book that should, as Sir Arthur Helps said, “insist on being read when once begun.” On the wave of a great enthusiasm of pity and love, her name was carried around the globe. Therefore, it is not too much to say that it was because of her that the famous British taunt, “Who reads an American book?” has now been answered, “Everybody!”
But “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” although the most famous, was not the only book that Mrs. Stowe wrote. On the contrary, it was one of a long series of novels, some of which are to be specially valued for their historical import and some to be read for the sheer enjoyment of the pictures of life drawn in them. Mrs. Stowe was a great story-teller, a true raconteur. The story flows from her pen with a delightful smoothness and ease. In her later books she turned with a very glad and loving heart to the portrayal of scenes such as she had known in her girlhood and of the native and unique spirit of that life which was as the very marrow of her bones. We cannot be sufficiently thankful that the old-fashioned Thanksgiving, the quilting-bee, and the wood-spell survived to the year when the seeing eye and the recording memory came to the Connecticut parsonage in the person of Harriet Beecher. To every one that values those elements of our national character that were formed in the struggles of the heroic Pilgrim fathers and mothers in the wilderness and their inspired successors, this part of Mrs. Stowe’s writing ought to be doubly precious. Her work in the books that describe early New England life is a gift that every impulse in us of patriotic reverence should leap to acknowledge.
It will be remembered that in her first book of stories, “The Mayflower,” she drew from the rich field that was her native heath. Uncle Tim, the hero of her very first story, was a living, breathing expression of the New England spirit, and the town, the church, the ways, the turns and queernesses of speech were of immortal simplicity and truth to life. Scattered through the stories in that book are found little character sketches of amazing vividness. How she makes us see these solemn and important brethren in the church! Here they are, Deacon Enos Dudley, solemn as an ancient Israelite, and, for contrast, the brisk little Deacon Abrams, who came to a meeting to manage things and to see that everything went off rightly!