Daughters of the Puritans: A Group of Brief Biographies

by Seth Curtis Beach

In 1852, the year following the publication of "Uncle Tom" Prof. Stowe accepted a chair in the Theological Seminary at Andover, and that village became the home of the family during the ten following happy years. In 1853, Mr. and Mrs. Stowe went to England upon the invitation of Anti-Slavery friends who guaranteed and considerably overpaid the expenses of the trip. "Should Mrs. Stowe conclude to visit Europe," wrote Senator Sumner, "she will have a triumph." The prediction was fulfilled. At Liverpool she is met by friends and breakfasted with a little company of thirty or forty people; at Glasgow, she drinks tea with two thousand; at Edinburgh there was "another great tea party," and she was presented with a "national penny offering consisting of a thousand golden sovereigns on a magnificent silver salver." She had the Highlands yet to see as the guest of the Duke of Argyll, not to mention London and Paris. After five months, she sailed from Liverpool on her return, and is it any wonder that she wrote, "Almost sadly as a child might leave its home, I left the shores of kind, strong Old England, the mother of us all!"

In 1856, Mrs. Stowe visited Europe a second time for the purpose of securing an English copyright upon "Dred," having learned something of business by her experience with "Uncle Tom." It will be interesting to know that in England "Dred" was considered the better story, that 100,000 copies of it were sold there in four weeks, and that her English publisher issued it in editions of 125,000 copies each. "After that," writes Mrs. Stowe, "who cares what the critics say?"

She was abroad nearly a year, visiting France, Switzerland, and Italy, and returned in June, 1857, to experience another sad bereavement. Her son Henry was a Freshman in Dartmouth college and, while bathing in the Connecticut river, he was drowned. This was a severe trial to Mrs. Stowe and the more so because, whatever her religion may have done for her, the theology in which she had been educated gave no comfort to her soul. "Distressing doubts as to Henry's spiritual state were rudely thrust upon my soul." These doubts she was able to master at least temporarily, by assuming that they were temptations of the devil, but three years later in Florence, on a third voyage to Europe, she wrote her husband, in reply to his allusions to Henry, "Since I have been in Florence, I have been distressed by inexpressible yearnings for him,—such sighings and outreachings, with a sense of utter darkness and separation, not only from him but from all spiritual communion with my God." It will be interesting to know that relief was brought her in this painful crisis, by the ministrations of spiritualism.

Mrs. Stowe returned in 1860 from her third visit to Europe to find the country hovering upon the verge of Civil War. The war brought her another sore bereavement. At the battle of Gettysburg, her son, Capt. Frederick Stowe, was struck by the fragment of a shell and, though the wound healed, he never really recovered. His end was sufficiently tragic. With the hope of improving his health by a long sea voyage, he sailed from New York for San Francisco by way of Cape Horn. That he reached San Francisco in safety, writes his brother, "is known: but that is all. No word from him or concerning him has ever reached the loving hearts that have waited so anxiously for it, and of his ultimate fate nothing is known." Whatever may have been the "spiritual state" of this son, Mrs. Stowe had now somewhat modernized her theology and could say, "An endless infliction for past sins was once the doctrine that we now generally reject.... Of one thing I am sure,—probation does not end with this life." To stamp out that very heresy had been no small part of Dr. Beecher's mission in Boston.

In 1863, Prof. Stowe having resigned his chair in Andover, Mrs. Stowe removed with her family to Hartford where for the remaining thirty-three years of her life, she made her summer home. The winter of 1866, she spent with her husband in Florida and, the year following, she bought in that semi-tropical state an orange orchard, the fruit of which the year previous had "brought $2,000 as sold at the wharf." Here for sixteen winters Mr. and Mrs. Stowe made their home, until her "poor rabbi," as she affectionately calls him, became too feeble to bear the long journey from Hartford. There she built a small Episcopal church and she invites her brother Charles to become an Episcopalian and come and be her minister.

Her son says that "Mrs. Stowe had some years before this joined the Episcopal church for the purpose of attending the same communion as her daughters." That she desired to attend the same communion as her daughters does not seem a sufficient reason for leaving the communion of her husband. Certainly, she had other reasons. From her fourth year, she had known the service and, as read by her grandmother at that time, its prayers "had a different effect upon me," she says, "from any other prayers I heard in early life." Moreover, she had a mission to the negro race and believed that the Episcopal service is specially adapted to their needs: "If my tasks and feelings did not incline me toward the Church," she writes her brother, "I should still choose it as the best system for training immature minds such as those of our negroes. The system was composed with reference to the wants of the laboring class of England, at a time when they were as ignorant as our negroes are now."

The picture of her southern life which she gives in a letter to George Eliot, is very attractive, her husband "sitting on the veranda reading all day," but during these years, Mrs. Stowe must have spent much of her own time at a writing-table since, for the ten years after 1867, when the Florida life began, she published a volume, sometimes two volumes, a year. In 1872, she was tempted by the Boston Lecture Bureau to give readings from her own works in the principal cities of New England, and the following year, the course was repeated in the cities of the West. Her audiences were to her amazing. "And how they do laugh! We get into regular gales," she writes her lonely husband at home.

Her seventieth birthday was celebrated at a gathering of two hundred of the leading literary men and women of the land, at the residence of Ex-Governor Claflin in Newton. There were poems by Whittier, Dr. Holmes, J. T. Trowbridge, Mrs. Whitney, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Mrs. Fields, and others, many excellent speeches, and finally a speech by the little woman herself. This garden party, says her son, was the last public appearance of Mrs. Stowe.

Her "rabbi" left her a widow in 1886, dying at the age of 84. Mrs. Stowe survived him ten years, dying in 1896, at the age of 85, leaving behind her a name loved and honored upon two continents.