Daughters of the Puritans: A Group of Brief Biographies

by Seth Curtis Beach

She had several kinds of religious trouble. It troubled her that in the book of Job, God should seem "to have stripped a dependent creature of all that renders life desirable, and then to have answered his complaints from the whirlwind, and, instead of showing mercy and pity, to have overwhelmed him with a display of his power and justice." It troubled her that when she allowed herself to take a milder view of deity, "I feel," she says, "less fear of God and, in view of sin, I feel only a sensation of grief." This was an alarming decline. It troubled her again that she loved literature, whereas she ought only to care for religion. She writes to Edward: "You speak of your predilections for literature being a snare to you. I have found it so myself." Evidently, as she has before said, she was beset behind and before. What was perhaps worst of all, the heavens seemed closed to her. Calvinism was pure agnosticism; and she had been educated a Calvinist. There was no 'imminent God,' in all and through all, for Calvinism; that came in with Transcendentalism, a form of thought which never seems to have touched Mrs. Stowe. She seems always to have felt, as at this period she writes Edward, that "still, after all, God is a being afar off." Nevertheless, there was Christ, but Christ at this period was also afar off: "I feel that I love God,—that is that I love Christ,—that I find happiness in it, and yet it is not that kind of comfort which would arise from free communication of my wants and sorrows to a friend. I sometimes wish that the Savior were visibly present in this world, that I might go to him for a solution of some of my difficulties."

It will be seen from this passage that Harriet's storm-tossed soul was settling down upon Christ as the nearest approach to God one could gain in the darkness, and with this she taught herself to be content. "So, after four years of struggling and suffering," writes her son, "she returns to the place where she started from as a child of thirteen. It has been like watching a ship with straining masts and storm-beaten sails, buffeted by the waves, making for the harbor, and coming at last to quiet anchorage." One cannot help reflecting how different would have been her experience in the household of Dr. Channing; but Dr. Beecher would sooner have trusted her in a den of wolves.

Harriet was seventeen years old when, mentally, she reached her quiet anchorage but, physically as might be expected, it was with a constitution undermined and with health broken. "She had not grown to be a strong woman," says Mrs. Fields; "the apparently healthy and hearty child had been suffered to think and feel, to study and starve (as we say), starve for relaxation, until she became a woman of much suffering and many inadequacies of physical life." A year or two later Harriet herself writes, "This inner world of mine has become worn out and untenable," and again, "About half my time I am scarcely alive.... I have everything but good health.... Thought, intense emotional thought, has been my disease."

At the end of six restless and stormy years, in 1832, Dr. Beecher resigned his Boston pastorate to accept the presidency of Lane Theological Seminary at Cincinnati, Ohio, Catharine and Harriet accompanying the family with the purpose of establishing a high grade school for young women. The plan was successfully carried out, and the "Western Female Institute" marked a new stage in education west of the Alleghenies. One of Harriet's early achievements at Cincinnati was the publication of a text-book in geography, her first attempt at authorship. She made her entry into the field of imaginative literature by gaining a prize of $50 for a story printed in The Western Magazine.

Her connection with the "Western Female Institute" was brief, and the prosecution of a literary career was postponed, by her marriage in 1836, with Prof. Calvin E. Stowe; or, as she announces this momentous event: "about half an hour more and your old friend, schoolmate, sister, etc., will cease to be Hattie Beecher and change to nobody knows who."

The married life of Mrs. Stowe covered a period of fifty years and was a conspicuously happy one. Prof. Stowe, who seemed so much like a myth to the general public, was a man of great learning and keen intelligence, unimaginative as he says himself, but richly endowed with "a certain broad humor and drollery." His son tells us that he was "an inimitable mimic and story-teller. No small proportion of Mrs. Stowe's success as a literary woman is to be attributed to him." The Sam Lawson stories are said to be a little more his than hers, being "told as they came from Mr. Stowe's lips with little or no alteration." For her scholarly husband, Mrs. Stowe had the highest appreciation and the prettiest way of expressing it: "If you were not already my dearly loved husband," she writes him, "I should certainly fall in love with you." Prof. Stowe could also write a love-letter: "There is no woman like you in this wide world. Who else has so much talent with so little self-conceit; so much reputation with so little affectation; so much literature with so little nonsense; so much enterprise with so little extravagance; so much tongue with so little scold; so much sweetness with so little softness; so much of so many things and so little of so many other things." If a man's wife is to have her biography written, he will not be sorry that he has sent her some effusive love-letters.

Fourteen years of Mrs. Stowe's beautiful married life were spent in Cincinnati, with many vicissitudes of ill-health, some poverty, and the birth of six children, three sons and three daughters. One can get some idea both of the happiness and the hardship of that life from her letters. In 1843, seven years after marriage, she writes, "Our straits for money this year are unparalleled even in our annals. Even our bright and cheery neighbor Allen begins to look blue, and says $600 is the very most we can hope to collect of our salary, once $1,200." Again she writes, "I am already half sick from confinement to the house and overwork. If I should sew every day for a month to come I should not be able to accomplish half of what is to be done." There were trials enough during this period, but her severest affliction came in its last year, in the loss of an infant son by cholera. That was in 1849, when Cincinnati was devastated; when during the months of June, July and August more than nine thousand persons died of cholera within three miles of her house, and among them she says, "My Charley, my beautiful, loving, gladsome baby, so loving, so sweet, so full of life and hope and strength."

In these years, Mrs. Stowe's life was too full of domestic care to permit many excursions into the field of literature. In 1842, a collection of sketches was published by the Harpers under the title of the "Mayflower." Occasionally she contributed a bright little story to a monthly or an annual. An amusing account is given of the writing of one of these stories, by a lady who volunteered to serve as amanuensis while Mrs. Stowe dictated, and at the same time supervised a new girl in the kitchen: "You may now write," said Mrs. Stowe, "'Her lover wept with her, nor dared he again touch the point so sacredly guarded—(Mina, roll that crust a little thinner). He spoke in soothing tones.—(Mina, poke the coals).'"

These literary efforts, produced under difficulties, inspired Prof. Stowe with great confidence in her genius. He wrote her in 1842, "My dear, you must be a literary woman. It is so written in the book of fate." Again he writes, "God has written it in his book that you must be a literary woman, and who are we that we should contend against God! You must therefore make all your calculations to spend the rest of your life with your pen." Nevertheless the next eight years pass as the last six have passed without apparently bringing the dream of a literary career nearer fulfilment. With a few strokes of the pen, Mrs. Stowe draws a picture of her life at this period: "I was married when I was twenty-five years old to a man rich in Greek and Hebrew and, alas, rich in nothing else.... During long years of struggling with poverty and sickness, and a hot, debilitating climate, my children grew up around me. The nursery and the kitchen were my principal fields of labor. Some of my friends, pitying my trials, copied and sent a number of little sketches from my pen to certain liberally paying annuals, with my name. With the first money that I earned in this way I bought a feather bed! for as I had married into poverty and without a dowry, and as my husband had only a large library of books and a good deal of learning, the bed and pillows were thought the most profitable investment. After this I thought that I had discovered the philosopher's stone. So when a new carpet or mattress was going to be needed, or when at the close of the year it began to be evident that my family accounts, like poor Dora's, 'wouldn't add up,' then I used to say to my faithful friend and factotum Anna, who shared all my joys and sorrows, 'Now, if you will keep the babies and attend to things in the house for a day, I'll write a piece and then we'll be out of the scrape.' So I became an author,—very modest I do assure you."

The hardships and privations of Mrs. Stowe's residence in Cincinnati were more than compensated to her by the opportunity it afforded for intimate acquaintance with the negro character and personal observation of the institution of slavery. Only the breadth of the Ohio river separated her from Kentucky, a slave State. While yet a teacher in the Female Institute, she spent a vacation upon a Kentucky estate, afterward graphically described in 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' as Col. Shelby's plantation. A companion upon this visit said, "Harriet did not seem to notice anything in particular that happened.... Afterwards, in reading 'Uncle Tom,' I recognized scene after scene of that visit portrayed with the most minute fidelity." A dozen years before there were any similar demonstrations in Boston, she witnessed in 1838, proslavery riots in Cincinnati when Birney's Abolition press was wrecked and when Henry Ward Beecher, then a young Cincinnati editor, went armed to and from his office. She had had in her service a slave girl whose master was searching the city for her, and whose rescue had been effected by Prof. Stowe and Henry Ward Beecher who, "both armed, drove the fugitive, in a covered wagon, by night, by unfrequented roads, twelve miles back into the country, and left her in safety." This incident was the basis of "the fugitive's escape from Tom Loker and Marks in 'Uncle Tom's Cabin.'"