Daughters of the Puritans: A Group of Brief Biographies

by Seth Curtis Beach

Lane Theological Seminary, in which Prof. Stowe held a chair, had, it is said, "become a hot-bed of abolition." Partly for protection, a colony of negroes had settled about the seminary, and these families, says Mrs. Stowe, "became my favorite resort in cases of emergency. If anyone wishes to have a black face look handsome, let them be left as I have been, in feeble health, in oppressive hot weather, with a sick baby in arms, and two other ones in the nursery, and not a servant in the whole house to do a turn." "Time would fail me," writes Mrs. Stowe, "to tell you all that I learned incidentally of the slave system in the history of various slaves who came into my family, and of the underground railroad which, I may say, ran through our house."

A New England education alone would not have given Mrs. Stowe the material to write the story of "Uncle Tom." A youth passed on a Southern plantation would have made her callous and indifferent, as it did so many tender-hearted women. A New England woman of genius, educated in New England traditions, was providentially transferred to the heated border line between freedom and slavery and, during eighteen years, made to hear a thousand authentic incidents of the patriarchal system from the victims themselves. Then "Uncle Tom's Cabin" could be written. Perhaps one other element of preparation ought to be mentioned since Mrs. Stowe laid stress upon it herself. The woman who should write "Uncle Tom's Cabin" needed to be a mother who had known what it is to have a child snatched from her arms irrevocably and without a moment's notice. It was at her baby's "dying bed and at his grave that I learned," she says, "what a poor slave mother may feel when her child is torn away from her. In those depths of sorrow which seemed to me immeasurable, it was my only prayer to God that such anguish might not be suffered in vain.... I allude to this because I have often felt that much that is in that book ('Uncle Tom') had its roots in the awful scenes and bitter sorrows of that summer."

In 1850, this western life, with its mixture of sweet and bitter waters, came to an end. The climate of Cincinnati was unfavorable to the health of both Mr. and Mrs. Stowe, and Mr. Stowe accepted a professorship in Bowdoin College, at the small salary of $1,000 a year, declining at the same time an offer from New York city of $2,300. Why he accepted the smaller salary is not said. Certainly it assured him his old felicity, his Master's blessing upon the poor. The situation, however, was better than it seems, as Mrs. Stowe had written enough to have confidence in her pen, and she purposed to make the family income at least $1,700 by her writings. She accomplished much more than that as we shall presently see.

From the car window, as one passes through Brunswick, Maine, he can see the house in which Mrs. Stowe passed the three following very happy years, in which her seventh child was born, a son who lived to be her biographer, and in which she wrote "Uncle Tom's Cabin." It will be remembered that the year 1850 was made memorable by the enactment of the Fugitive Slave Law. How the attempted execution of this law affected Mrs. Stowe can be anticipated. "To me," she says, "it is incredible, amazing, mournful. I feel as if I should be willing to sink with it, were all this sin and misery to sink in the sea.... I sobbed, aloud in one pew and Mrs. Judge Reeves in another."

In this mood, Mrs. Stowe received a letter from Mrs. Edward Beecher saying, "Hattie, if I could use a pen as you can, I would write something to make this nation feel what an accursed thing slavery is." Her children remember that at the reading of this letter, Mrs. Stowe rose from her chair, crushing the letter in her hand, and said, "I will write something,—I will if I live." The fulfilment of this vow was "Uncle Tom's Cabin."

This story was begun in The National Era, on June 5, 1851; it was announced to run through three months and it occupied ten. "I could not control the story," said Mrs. Stowe; "it wrote itself." Again, she said, "I the author of 'Uncle Tom's Cabin!' No, indeed. The Lord himself wrote it, and I was but the humblest instrument in his hand." It has been said that "'Uncle Tom's Cabin' made the crack of the slave-driver's whip and the cries of the tortured blacks ring in every household in the land, till human hearts could bear it no longer," and that it "made the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law an impossibility."

It is possible to discuss the question whether "Uncle Tom's Cabin" is a work of art, just as it is possible to discuss whether the Sermon on the Mount is a work of art, but not whether the story was effective, not whether it hit the mark and accomplished its purpose. Mrs. Stowe's story is not so much one story as a dozen; in the discriminating language of her son, it is "a series of pictures," and who will deny that the scenes are skilfully portrayed!

Mrs. Stowe did not know that she had made her fortune; she had not written for money; nevertheless when the story was republished in a volume, her ten per cent. of the profits brought her $10,000 in four months. It went to its third edition in ten days, and one hundred and twenty editions, or more than 300,000 copies were sold in this country within one year. This astounding popularity was exceeded in Great Britain. Not being protected by copyright, eighteen publishing houses issued editions varying from 6d to 15s a copy, and in twelve months, more than a million and a half of copies had been sold in the British dominions. The book was also translated and published in nineteen European languages. It was dramatized and brought out in New York in 1852, and, a year later it was running still. "Everybody goes," it was said, "night after night and nothing can stop it." In London, in 1852, it was the attraction at two theatres.

What the public thought of the story is evident, nor did competent judges dissent. Longfellow said: "It is one of the greatest triumphs recorded in literary history, to say nothing of the higher triumph of its moral effect." George Sand said: "Mrs. Stowe is all instinct; it is the very reason that she appears to some to have no talent.... I cannot say that she has talent as one understands it in the world of letters, but she has genius as humanity feels the need of it,—the genius of goodness, not that of the man of letters, but of the saint.... In matters of art, there is but one rule, to paint and to move." I give but a paragraph of a paper which Senator Sumner called "a most remarkable tribute, such as was hardly ever offered by such a genius to any living mortal."

Apologists for the slave system have declared that "Uncle Tom's Cabin" is a libel upon the system. One must do that before he can begin his apology; but the remarkable fact is that not even in the South was the libel detected at the first. That was an after-thought. Whittier knew a lady who read the story "to some twenty young ladies, daughters of slave-holders, near New Orleans and amid the scenes described in it, and they with one accord pronounced it true." It was not till the sale of the book had run to over 100,000 copies that a reaction set in and then, strange to say, the note of warning was sounded by that infallible authority upon American affairs, the London Times.