In the unheated, barnlike meetinghouse where Mr. Beecher preached, Harriet also spent many happy hours, although she was cold and cramped from sitting through the long sermons. Usually she did not understand her father’s big words, but one day he spoke so earnestly and simply about God’s love that Harriet never forgot it.
When Harriet grew up, she married Calvin Ellis Stowe. He was a professor in the Lane Theological Seminary, in Cincinnati, Ohio, of which her father had become the president.
In Ohio, adjacent to the slave state of Kentucky, everybody was thinking and talking about slavery. The Fugitive Slave Law, whereby runaway slaves must be returned to their masters, was causing heated discussions. Mrs. Stowe and her husband believed this to be a very unjust law and they helped a colored girl, the “Eliza” of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, to escape from her pursuers. Mrs. Stowe opened a school for colored children in her house, and raised money to buy the freedom of a slave boy.
Ever since the days of her school compositions Mrs. Stowe had enjoyed writing, and some of her stories had found their way into the papers. When Professor Stowe went to Bowdoin College, in Brunswick, Maine, to teach, his wife tried to do a little writing to add to his small salary. However, the work of looking after a large house and her family of small children left her little time for writing stories. Sometimes with her paper on the corner of the kitchen table and her ink on the teakettle, she managed to write a story, superintend the making of pastry, and watch the baby at the same time.
One day Mrs. Stowe received a letter from a relative urging her to write something that would stir the country against the evil of slavery. She earnestly declared that she would.
Soon thereafter the plot for her story, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, flashed across her mind. She wrote a chapter as quickly as possible and sent it to the National Era, an antislavery paper. Chapter after chapter followed, written rapidly as the scenes of the story presented themselves to her. When it was completed it was published as a book. In a few days ten thousand copies were sold; in a year, three hundred thousand copies.
Mrs. Stowe wrote many other books, though none of them attained the prominence of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. This book is considered to have been one of the most influential and widely read novels in literature.
From distinguished people all over the world came letters of congratulation to Mrs. Stowe. What she had written just because she felt that she must, with no thought of money or fame, brought her both. Harriet Beecher Stowe was further honored by being elected to the Hall of Fame in 1910.
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s gift of expression, which she had been cultivating for many years under all sorts of difficulties, made it possible for her to draw a picture of slavery that aroused the whole world.