00001.tif

PDF

Download

Open document

Flip pages

Contact Us

Copy asset link

Request this asset

Transcript (if available)

Content THE LITERARY ACHIEVEMENTS OF HARRIET BEECHER
STOWE: A SURVEY OF HER WRITINGS,
COLLECTED AND UNCOLLECTED
A Dissertation
Presented to
the Faculty of the Department of English
The University of Southern California
In Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements for the Degree
Doctor of Philosophy
by
John R. Adams
February 1940
UMI Number: DP22989
All rights reserved
INFORMATION TO ALL USERS
The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted.
In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript
and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed,
a note will indicate the deletion.
DJssertataorr Publishing
UMI DP22989
Published by ProQuest LLC (2014). Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author.
Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC.
All rights reserved. This work is protected against
unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code
ProQuest LLC.
789 East Eisenhower Parkway
P.O. Box 1346
Ann Arbor, Ml 48106 - 1346
£ H-o Q, aj'f-
T h is dissertation, w ritte n by
. . . . ........................ J .a lm -R » .. .M a m s ................................
under the guidance of F a c u lty Com m ittee
on Studies, and approved by a ll its members, has
been presented to and accepted by the C ou ncil
on G raduate Study and Research, in p a rtia l f u l
fillm e n t o f requirem ents fo r the degree of
D O C T O R O F P H I L O S O P H Y
/D e a n
Secretary
D a te February.,...JL9.4Q.
I (
(fir! mL
Com m ittee on Studies
Chairm an c
i d f j t y i ti ^ r . n i
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE PROBLEM ................... 1
Statement and justification of the problem . ' 1
Review of related investigations .......... 5
Organization of the study .......... 11
II. EARLY YEARS............................. 15
Harriet’s mother ................. 15
Harriet’s guardians . . . ............... IS
Cincinnati and marriage to Calvin Stowe ... 29
Recapitulation ........................... 35
III. EARLY WRITINGS ........................... 39
’ ’ Love versus Law”* Mrs. Stowe as local
colorist........................... 39
The Mayflower. 1843 ............... 50
James Hall and the Western Monthly Magazine . 56
The Cincinnati Chronicle and the Cincinnati
Journal............................. 70
Contributions to eastern publications .... 77
Mrs. ‘ Stowe’s type-of writer . ......... . 86
IV. UNCLE TOM’S CABIN........................ 96
The design of the book . ......... 96
The opening chapters ..................... 100
The central chapters: St. Clare’s views on
slavery............................. 107
iii
CHAPTER PAGE
Topsy, Evangeline, and Simon Legree ........ 113
The inspiration for Uncle Tom* s Cabin .... 118
Some authentic sources ................. 129
Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the National Era .... 135
V. THE AFTERMATH OF UNCLE TOM* S CABIN......... 143
Some attacks upon the b o o k ............... 143
Grounds for the attacks................... 148
A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. 1853 ........ 152
Bred. 1856 157
Frederick Douglass’ estimate of Mrs. Stowe . 164
VI. THE MIDDLE YEARS ................... 170
Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands. 1854 .... 170
Later trips abroad . ......... 175
The Civil War years . 180
Men of Our Times. 1868 184
A classification of Mrs. Stowe's later
writings.............................. 187
VII. THE COMPLETELY DIDACTIC BOOKS ............. 195
General traits of these books ............. 195
Two religious tracts . 199
Books on housekeeping............... 207
Two domestic novels....................... 210
Pink and White Tyranny. 1 8 7 1 ............. 216
Essays on domestic life................... 222
The meaning of these books............... 227
iv
CHAPTER PA®
Till. BOOKS ABOUT HEW ENGLAND............... 229
General traits of these books ............. 229
The masterwork: Oldtown Folks, 1869 .... 235
,The final word: Poganuc People, 1878 .... 240
Two other New England novels....... 245
Agnes of Sorrento. 1863, an unsympathetic
contrast . . . ....................... 252
Palmetto-Leaves. 1873, a sympathetic contrast 257
IX.. MRS. STOWE IN THE MAGAZINES........... 264
A network of names .'............... 264
The Independent .................... 269
Hearth and Home .................. . 278
The Christian Union................. 283
Other magazines . ....................... 288
X. MRS. STOWE AS A LITERARY ARTIST............. 292
Her attitude toward fiction ............... 292
Her views on Byron: Lady Byron Vindicated,
1870 295
Youthful romanticism: Corinne............. 302
Her favorite writers from the p a s t. 305
Her relationship to her literary contempo
raries ........... 311
Limitations of her craftsmanship ...... 319
XI. THE LAST OF EARTH.................... 329
V
CHAPTER PAGE
Final years of Mrs. Stowed l i f e ........... 329
Conclusions.......................... 340
BIBLIOGRAPHY....................................... 345
CHAPTER I
THE PROBLEM
I. STATEMENT AND JUSTIFICATION OF THE PROBLEM
Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe's long life (1811-1896) was
marked by the production of many books, some of which were
widely read as they appeared and have not yet been forgotten.
The most successful of them all, Uncle Tom's Cabin" , has be
come a part of American culture which is at least vaguely
known to every literate American. Not only Uncle Tom's
Cabin, but the numerous other writings of such a famous
woman must be of discernible importance in the development
of American literature.
The present study is a detailed estimate of Mrs.
Stowe's literary significance. Remarkably enough, in view
of her reputation as the leading woman writer of her time,
this study is the first attempt ever made to scrutinize crit
ically the entire mass of her writing. » The strong impres
sions she made on the sensibilities of her original readers
have never been corrected by later calculations, and no sys
tematic analysis of the basis of these impressions has ever
been undertaken. As a result, although her importance has
been taken for granted, perhaps too uncritically assumed,
the true import of her work has not been discussed, let alone
determined. The unexplored territory here is far more ex
tensive than most people realize.
Mr. Merle Johnson*s standard bibliography of American
writers, for example, lists almost forty titles of books and
pamphlets of her authorship.1 His entries by no means ex
haust her productions:(some never having been reprinted from
the periodicals in which they appeared), but even these forty
have proved to be more exhausting than any casual commenta
tor, such as a historian of American literature, has cared to
read. Professor Farrington’s comments in Main Currents in
American Thought are, of course, excellent for his purpose.;
but he appears to have read only five of her books. Professor
Boynton's treatment, in his recent survey entitled Literature
and American Life, is a clear record of the stir she made in
the world; but it ignores her books themselves. The most com
plete survey to date is that in the Cambridge History of
American Literature: a well-informed, carefully expressed
sketch five pages in length.2 The author of Uncle Tom’s
Cabin, the most popular American novel of its century, surely
deserves, somewhere or other, more detailed consideration
than this.
* * ■ Merle Devore Johnson, American First Editions, pp.
433-446.
2
Carl Yan Doren, ’ ’ The Later Novel,” Cambridge History
of American Literature. Ill, 69-73.
3
In further explanation of such a study as the follow
ing, it should he pointed out that in the absence of true in
formation about Mrs. Stowe's work, much legendary lore has
taken its place. The following example is unfortunately
typical of many: Late in the nineteenth century an estimable
writer of New England, Mr. Samuel Adams Drake, the author of
several other commercial successes, edited and published a
chunky volume of short biographies called Our World's Great
Benefactors. In the revised, enlarged and improved edition
which was soon called for, dated 1890, ninety-one sketches
appeared, of which only three concerned persons then living:
Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, and Harriet Beecher
Stowe. Despite their conventionality, the six pages devoted
to the feminine benefactor in this trio are noteworthy as
containing probably as much misinformation and misinterpreta
tion as any of the numerous longer appreciations of the time.
Mr. Drake and his anonymous contributors, dedicating
themselves to providing what they called an "abstract and
brief chronicle of the world's progress since the introduc
tion of the, art of printing,"3®wished to give two impressions
of Mrs. Stowe and her Uncle Tom's Cabin: that the novel was
the work of an inexperienced and untried writer, and that it
3 Samuel Adams Drake, Our World * s Great Benefactors, p.
iii.
4
was the result of a sudden inspiration. To quote from the
sketch:
That hook began a new era. Her "mission" in the world
--and the phrase has its true significance here— was
achieved at a single stroke through the simple and
truthful tale which flowed from her pen under the im
pulse of a noble passion that could not be restrained.^ ®
The implications of this quoted passage extend too far
»
for analysis in this introduction; yet obviously, to compress
the significance of a life of eighty years, to limit its
value to "a single stroke," is an audacious act. When the
moment is injudiciously chosen, the result is error. Yet
this idea of Mrs. Stowe is too often precisely the common one,
even today. Though a modern popularizer would have no excuse
i
for erring, as Mr. Drake did, in the dates of her birth and
marriage,^ he would be as likely as not to adopt an equally
easy interpretation of her literary significance. He might
even go as far astray in details as Granville Hicks in his
earnest Great Tradition, where, among other errors, one of
her novels, Oldtown Folks, is described as a collection of
short stories.6
U Ibid., p. 424.
* * Ibid., pp. 423 , 427 .
£
Granville Hicks, The Great Tradition, pp. 91, 55.
The simple fact is that since Mr. Drake’s Great Bene
factors first appeared, although several biographies of Mrs.
Stowe have been given to the world, there has been no ex
tended analysis of her literary work. As a result, in this
later day, as in her own, she has been misunderstood. In
» ,
spite of factual records of her life, the legendary appraisal
of her work has continued. Granville Hicks is not alone in
his errors or in the vague characterization of her work which
accompanies them. In agreement with Mr. Drake’s gilt-edged
volume, many a modern man would unhesitatingly place her
among those most eminent personages who ’ ’ have an undisputed
claim to be classed for all time among the benefactors of
the race.”7 Would any of them undertake to read her col
lected works in justification of this claim?
The following study is based, not only upon these col
lected writings but also, of almost equal importance, upon
more than two hundred uncollected magazine articles, cover
ing a full half century of work between 1833 and 1882, never
before considered by any writer about Mrs. Stowe.
II. REVIEW OF RELATED INVESTIGATIONS
Though so little systematic literary criticism has
7
Drake, o£. cit., p. iii.
been given Mrs. Stowe’s work, the story of her life has been
several times told at length, with incidental attention to
her writing. Mrs. Annie Fields’ Life and Letters of Harriet
Beecher Stowe (1897) is t£e most satisfactory biography, the
careful compilation of an old friend who was also a cultured
woman of letters. In the present study it is the ohief
source of dates and other noncontroversial details; for state
ments of fact where other credit is not given it may be as
sumed as the authority. It is well indexed and extremely
useful for rapid reference.
Y/ithin the limits of biography as Mrs. Fields under
stood them, her book is a fine achievement. With thorough
propriety Henry James mentioned, in an article written soon
after her death,® her sensibility and charm. His adjectives,
susceptible and finely sentimental, describe her writings
with superb accuracy of emphasis. "She was so intrinsically
charming a link with the past,” he wrote, ’ ’ and abounded so
in the pleasure of reference and the grace of fidelity.”^
Another deserved memorial to Mrs. Fields is the delightful
Memories of a Hostess (1922), edited from her journals by
M. A. DeWolfe Howe.
g
.Henry James, ”Mr. and Mrs. James T. Fields,” Atlantic
Monthly, 116:21-31, 1915.
9 Ibid.. p. 22.
Other full-length biographies of Mrs. Stowe commence
with Mrs. Florine Thayer McCray1s Life-work of the Author of
Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1889), a labor of love which, for all its
quaintness, deserves more attention than it customarily re
ceives. Mrs. McCray was a close friend and devoted admirer
of the older woman. Both she and Mrs. Stowe lived in
Hartford, Connecticut, at the time, and Mrs. McCray was a
frequent visitor at the Stowe home. By editing the City
Mission Record of Hartford,!^ and by writing a temperance
novel, she had proved that she shared at least two of Mrs.
Stowe’s enthusiasms. Her Life-work of the Author of Uncle
Tom’s Cabin, which was written with the consent of both the
subject and Charles Edward Stowe, the literary executor,-1 * * 1 -
contains those homey, gossipy touches that more formal writers
have avoided. It is also remarkable for the evidence it gives
that Mrs. McCray had actually read most of Mrs. Stowe’s books.
The official biography of -Mrs. Stowe by her son, * 1 - 2
which followed Mrs. McCray's book in the same year (1889),
and the briefer book her son and grandson prepared (1911)1?
Florine Thayer McCray, The Life-Work of the Author
of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, p. 26.
11 Ibid., p. 6.
Charles Edward Stowe, Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe.
13 Charles Edward Stowe and Lyman Beecher Stowe,
Harriet Beecher Stowe: the Story of her Life.
8
for the centenary of her birth, are both easily accessible.
They contain facts not to be found elsewhere, but they are
also of less literary interest than the shorter sketches in
the grandson’s Saints, Sinners and Beechers (1934) and in
Constance M. Rourke’s brilliant Trumpets of Jubilee (1927).
The most recent complete biography is the charmingly written
one by Catherine Gilbertson (1937).
In addition to the books devoted primarily to Harriet,
several others dealing with the Beecher family cannot be
disregarded in an interpretation of her career. Though the
Beechers have written voluminously about themselves, of all
the family chronicles the most colorful is the first, Lyman
Beecher’s Autobiography and Correspondence (1863), as edited
by his son Charles Beecher with the coSperation of Mrs.
Stowe, Catherine Beecher, and other members of the family.
For the aecount of Lyman Beecher’s presidency of Lane Theo
logical Seminary at Cincinnati and the abolitionist troubles
there during his administration, his own statement needs to
be supplemented by the impartial and fuller account given by
Gilbert Hobbs Barnes in his Antislavery Impulse 1830-1844
(1933) and in his edition of the Weld-Grimke letters (1934).^
14
Gilbert H. Barnes and Dwight L. Dumond, editors,
Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, Angelina Grimke Weld, and
Sarah Grimke, 1822-18447
9
The last few years have produced two documented bio
graphies of individual Beechers, Dr. Mae Elizabeth Harveson’s
Catharine Esther Beecher, Pioneer Educator (1932),-^ and
Paxton Hibben’s vivid Henry Ward Beecher: An American Portrait
(1927). There are, of course, many earlier biographies of
Henry Ward Beecher, among which Lyman Abbott’s (1903) is par
ticularly well xyritten and well planned. The bearing of
these books upon Mrs. Stowe’s literary development is, how
ever, slight: Abbott, for example, refers to her in only
three paragraphs of his entire book.-^
In addition to this sizable shelf of biographies, much
fugitive literary criticism is also available. Periodical
criticism cannot be ignored, nor can the comments in the let
ters and journals of literary figures wholly or partly con
temporary with Mrs. Stowe. Thus in the pages that follow,
citations will be found from Henry Adams, Thomas Wentworth
Higginson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, William Dean Howells, Henry
James, Lucy Larcom, James Bussell Lowell, Charles Eliot Norton,
Mark Twain, John G-reenleaf Whittier, and other men of letters.
Frequent reference will also be made to the strikingly il
luminating History of American Magazines, by John Luther Mott.
Note the spelling of Catharine with an a. Title
pages of Miss Beecher’s books show both spellings, but for
this study the usual one will be used, with an e.
Lyman Abbott, Henry Ward Beecher, p. 457.
10
But a complete list of writings about, or incidentally
mentioning, Mrs* Stowe would require a volume. Her name bobs
up in unexpected as well as expected contexts. The publisher
of a sober investigation of Negro laborers in the present
century inquires, on the dust jacket of his book, "What has
happened to Uncle Tom since he left his cabin for a factory?"
Farther from the original, the publisher of a recent novel
of the dust bowl asks, in his advertising, whether it will
be the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of our day. To take one further
step, when the proprietor of a new night club is asked why
he calls his establishment "Little Eva," he explains, to
quote a Variety reporter, "the Little Eva tag as just an
idea that was different and hoped would catch on and be easy
to remember."^7
In such casual ways, Mrs. Stowe has been referred to
by everybody, from presidents of the Republic to radio come
dians; and yet her works have never been studied as a group,
dll together, as the expression of a developing personality.
If more is used than a name, only a detail is taken here and
there, the death of little Eva, the flight of Eliza across
the ice, the cruelty of Simon Legree, Paradoxically, their
immediate source is less likely to be Mrs. Stowe’s novel, as
she wrote it, than the dramatization by George L. Aiken, a
17 Variety, No. 7, 135:45* 47, July 26, 1939.
11
production with which Mrs. Stowe had no connection, and which
she repudiated.^
III. ORGANIZATION OF THE STUDY
The scope of the following study is strictly limited
to literary investigation. The plan calls for reducing bio
graphical, historical and all other considerations to a
minimum, so that emphasis can be concentrated upon the exposi
tion of the long series of Mrs. Stowe’s works. In this liter
ary interpretation, however, certain biographical influences
are so important that they cannot be ignored. Accordingly
the second chapter will interpret Mrs. Stowe’s life from her
birth to the publication of Uncle-Tom’s Cabin (1811-18.52).
It will show, at least in part, how a preacher’s daughter and
a professor’s wife happened to become, not only a writer, but
also the particular kind of writer capable of Uncle Tom’s
Cabin. The third chapter will discuss Mrs. Stowe’s literary
output during the same formative period, a highly significant
topic which has been little investigated before, and is con
sequently almost completely new.
The fourth chapter will be a detailed, original analysis
of Uncle' Tom’s Cabin, and the following chapter will conclude
18
She prepared her own dramatic version, The Christian
Slave (1855)« for reading, not acting.
12
the discussion of Mrs. Stowe’s writings on slavery and
abolition.
After the close of the Civil War, when the success of
the Union armies had accomplished the reform she had worked
for, Mrs. Stowe had still before her thirty years of life
and nearly twenty years of writing. This lengthy period
needs to be discussed in detail, since little has been writ
ten about most of its literary products and even their titles
are likely to be unknown to students of American literature.
Fink and White Tyranny (1870) was highly praised by Oliver
Wendell Holmes, as the later discussion will show: but Pink
and White Tyranny is no better known now than Deacon Pitkin’s
Farm. The Chimney-Corner. A Dog*s Mission, or half a dozen
other among Mrs. Stowe’s later titles.
In preparation for these later works, Chapter VI will
present the biographical material essential for understanding
them. Chapter VII (which contains material completely new in
discussions of Mrs. Stowe) will select from the books them
selves those that deal with social problems; and Chapter VIII
will describe those that deal with New England, a group con
stituting the most .valuable part of her work, and her books
about Italy and Florida. Chapter IX will present entirely
new material about Mrs. Stowe as a professional writer— one
of the results of uncovering her numerous uncollected magazine
articles. This chapter, which shows her in the literary work
shop, will prepare for the next, the tenth, which will close
the main- discussion with an estimate of her preparation and
13
accomplishments as a literary artist. In this connection,
her book on the Byron controversy will find its place.
A final chapter, after briefly concluding the biograph
ical account, will summarize the formal conclusions drawn from
the study. Since the organization of the entire work is ac
cording to related topics, instead of by strict chronology,
the conclusions will have been already suggested in the
various chapters.
In connection with this survey of what is to come, a
certain warning should be issued, after which a note of en
couragement may be added. The warning is this: to any but
the most resolute, such an enterprise offers few thrills.
This clearing the ground is back-breaking work, difficult
for the writer and not much easier for the reader. It jus-
i
tifies itself primarily, one must hope, in the number of pre
viously unregarded facts that it brings to light. If it is
nothing else, a study such as this is a useful guide book for
a strange land; if it fails to discover many beauties to be
admired, it at least may locate several deserts to be avoided.
As Mrs. Stowe might say, it may not be much fun, but it should
be good for a person.
A measure of encouragement can be added to the fore
going warning: strictly limited as this plan of investigation
is, the conclusions should not be as barren as might be
i
feared. In addition to what may be learned about Mrs. Stowe
herself, she exemplified a type of person who has exerted,
and still exerts, a good deal of influence upon the current
of our thoughts. With the waning of her literary appeal the
enterprising critics who follow writers of merit have avoided
her for more spectacular or more remunerative subjects. To
the modern taste, most of her work must appear unexciting,
. ' i
and indeed her entire career might be thought interesting
primarily because of the conflicts that shaped it from be
ginning to end. Her Work was so typical of the confusion of
her time and class that solving the puzzle of its individ
uality compensates in many ways for the routine of stating
it. There is mpre value to thinking about her than in the
common view of the dilletante, expressed in Dorothy Parker's
"Pig's-eye ITiew of Literature”;
The pure and worthy Mrs. Stowe
Is one we all are proud to know
As mother, wife, and authoress—
Thank God I am content with less.19
19
Dorothy Parker, Sunset Gun, p. 30.
CHAPTER II
EARLY YEARS
I. HARRIET’S MOTHER
From the years of her earliest recollection Harriet
found cause to speculate upon her subordinate position in the
Beecher family. She was the youngest daughter and the seventh
child of Roxana Foote Beecher, Lyman’s first and favorite wife,
who, having given birth to nine of Lyman's children, had conten
tedly died. Of the eight children who remained to mourn their
mother, the eldest was Catherine and the two youngest Henry
Ward, two years Harriet’s junior, and baby Charles. There may
be significance in the fact that the only infant casualty in
the family had been another little girl named Harriet, whose
memory the future author of Uncle Tom* s Cabin was christened
to keep alive.^ The child, left early without a mother, pos
sessed not even a name of her own.
Though dead and buried, Roxana was not forgotten, and
her character, idyllic in its perfection, could not have
wielded in life more influence over her children than it did
in their memories. Her calm patience fascinated them by its
1
Charles Edward Stowe, Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe.
p. 1.
16
.contrast to their father’s fiery, unpredictable boisterous
ness. As a family legend she gained power through Lyman’s
marriage, two years later, to Harriet Porter, a woman born to
be respected but hardly equal in human kindness to the la
mented Roxana. lor her two most impressionable children the
dead mother became, as the one said, in a characteristic
analogy, what the Virgin Mary is to the devout Catholic
and the other sought to describe her in that bright and shin
ing angel to whom Augustine St. Clare directed his final
earthly gasp of joyful recognition.3
Throughout his life, in spite of a literal impossibil
ity, since at her death he was too young to have retained
any recollections of her, Henry Ward stoutly maintained that
Roxana had been the greatest influence upon him.^ Harriet
held the same belief, though her own memories were but a^
scanty three, and two of them were of rebukes to the children
for making too much noise and for eating the tulip bulbs.
”My dear children,” she recalled Roxana as patiently saying,
’ ’ those were not onion-roots, but roots of beautiful flowers. "'*5
2 Ibid.. p. 502.
3 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, end of
Chap. XXVIII.
^ Lyman Abbott, Henry Ward Beecher, p. 24.
C
* Annie Fields, Life and Letters of Harriet Beecher
Stowe, p. 11.
17
Mth such recollections, there is no doubt that Harriet’s
later canonization of motherhood had as one of its sources,
with her own position as the mother of Calvin Stowe’s brood,
a wistful longing for Roxana. Catherine, older and less
sentimental, wrote quite simply that with the death of their
mother a light passed from their lives that was never to be
replaced.6
To this the thrice-wedded Lyman agreed. In old age,
recalling among his children the days of his youth, he re
turned lovingly to the beauty and charm of the girlish wife,
to her quick perceptions and her angelic gaiety. The old
man, jovial in his senility, could well afford to chuckle
while recollecting his courtship, for Roxana had sworn never
to marry until she could find the equal of her fictional hero,
Sir Charles G-randison. If indeed, as he presumed, she ever
thought she had found a Sir Charles in the stern-faced, eager
divinity student, his love letters must, while disillusioning
her, have reconciled her to the homelier virtues of his Hew
England holiness. "I am like the troubled ocean,"7 he often
wrote, and received her comforting answer:
Charles Beecher, editor, Autobiography. Correspondence.
Etc., of Lyman Beecher. D.D., I, 219.
7
Annie Fields, 0£. cit., p. 91.
18
I am fully persuaded of the truth you have so much en
deavored to impress upon me, that mankind are wholly
depraved. I have long been sensible of my own inability
to do right. But I never did, I do not now give myself
up as lost ... I trust to your friendship to point out
the danger I am in. Spare me not because it is a deli
cate subject.°
In this same spirit of receptive inspiration Roxana
lived and died, a poetic memory to all who had known her, a
symbol to those who had lost her, and a special inspiration
to her writing daughter, Harriet.
II. HARRIET'S GUARDIANS
After her mother's death Harriet's education was left
principally to her father and her elder sister Catherine.
Both of these guardians of her youth were, to say the least,
tough-minded, by modern standards even harsh.
Lyman Beecher bore no resemblance to the cruel father
of the stage. He was not the quarrelsome, scolding elder
Capulet of Romeo and Juliet. nor was he the perverse Edward
Barrett of The Barretts of Wimpole Street. On the other
hand, he had not been affected by the Rousseauist doctrine of
kind adaptation to the special requirements of a child's na
ture. As head of the household, he exercised to the full the
traditional patriarchal right of commanding obedience.
^ IbM* > PP* 80-81.
19
Even in his good humor he was apt to tease his affec
tionate but apprehensive family. After fifty years Catherine
' remembered how, as an indifferent violinist, he annoyed them
by repeating interminably a certain monotonous melody; and
when for a change he played lively tunes to which they at
tempted to dance, he deliberately destroyed the rhythm to
spoil their pleasure.9 Sometimes this good humor showed it
self in more strenuous ways. Catherine remembered that he
once suddenly swung her out of a garret window by her hands,
to see how it would frighten her, and that at another time
he suddenly ducked her head into a tub of water, "to see
what I would do."^ like her father, Catherine was tough-
minded; but the sensitive younger children, Henry Ward and
Harriet, did not respond heartily to these rough and tumble
activities, either as fun or in complete seriousness. The
former confessed that as a child he had never felt at ease
with his father,and Harriet made the same confession almost
as directly in her fictional autobiography, Poganuc People.
"It was a grown people’s world," she recalled, "and not a
child’s world, that existed in those days.”- * -2 To a little
9 Charles Beecher, o£. cit., I, 145.
10 Ibid., I, 149.
11 Mae Elizabeth Harveson, Catharine Esther Beecher,
Pioneer Educator, p. 23.
12
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Poganuc People, p. 19.
20
girl like herself, much of childhood was "a dismal depression";
as an escape she "fancied the time when she should he a grown
woman and at liberty to do just as she pleased."^
In teaching his children to face life seriously, Lyman
Beecher was strict and uncompromising. "Our mother was gentle,
tender, and sympathizing," Catherine wrote, "but all the dis
cipline of government was with father. The further details
are illuminating, for they shorn that his method of training
children was that of an army drill-master in training troops:
With most of his children, when quite young, he had one,
two, or three seasonsj in which he taught them that obedi
ence must be exact, prompt, and cheerful, and by a disci
pline so severe that it was thoroughly remembered and
feared. Ever after, a decided word of command was all-
sufficient .15
Though Harriet never formally revolted from her father
> ■
as a person, she took special pains, upon attaining the inde
pendence of maturity, to advocate education exactly the re
verse of this severe discipline. What she objected to par
ticularly, rather than the unconscious cruelty of the system,
was the neglect of children as such, the lack of true companion
ship between adult and child. In her words, quoted from
Oldtown Folks:
13 Ibid., pp. 17, 19.
^ Charles Beecher, ojd. cit., I, 148.
^ Loc. cit.
21
It was the fashion of older times to consider children
... as being simply so many little creatures to be
washed, dressed, schooled, fed, and whipped, according
to certain general and well-understood rules. The
philosophy of modern society is showing to parents and
educators how delicate and how varied is their task;
but in the days we speak of nobody had thought of these
shadings and variations.16
A parallel passage from Poganuc People similarly voices Mrs.
Stowe’s mature criticism of the treatment she received as a
.child. It was not enough, she had learned, to shelter, feed,
and whip a child for its own good, if meanwhile it grew in .
emotional solitary confinement:
In those early times . . . children were let alone, to
think their own thoughts .... Not that children were
any less beloved, or motherhood a less holy thing. There
were many women of deep hearts, who, like the ’ ’ most
blessed among women,” kept all the sayings of .their dar
lings and pondered them in their hearts; but it was not
deemed edifying or useful to pay much apparent attention
to these utterances and actions of the youthful pilgrim.
Children’s inquiries were freely put off with the general
answer that Mamma was busy and they must not talk— that
when they were grown up they would know all about these
things, etc.; and so they lived apart from older people
in their own little child-world of uninvaded ideas.
Unfortunately for Harriet, after her mother’s death
she found no substitute in the elders of her immediate family
for the blessed J ’ women of deep hearts.” She enjoyed an ap
proximation in her Aunt Esther, whom she delighted in visit
ing; and her favorite Litchfield teacher, John Brace, who
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Oldtown Folks. p.; 109.
^ Harriet Beecher Stowe, Poganuc People, pp. 48-49.
22
encouraged her to write compositions, was another ideal of
stimulating helpfulness. She lost these pleasures, however,
when at the age of thirteen she moved to Hartford, first to
become a pupil and soon an assistant teacher in Catherine’s
newly founded school. Catherine Beecher was too like her
father to be a tender, sympathizing substitute for the dead
Roxana. As a professional educator, she relied upon the
strict external discipline under which she had herself
developed.
Catherine was only eleven years older than Harriet,
but the personal tragedy, which was later used in The
Minister’s Wooing, had already changed her from a gay child
into a sad and pitiful woman. Her fianc6, a promising mathe
matician and professor at Yale University, had died in a
shipwreck before undergoing the ritual of a Presbyterian
conversion. Though a young man of exemplary habits, he was
considered by both Lyman Beecher and Catherine as irretriev
ably damned, unless he had made a last-minute declaration of
the true faith. In the absence of evidence for this conver
sion, Catherine was tortured both by the sorrow of losing
him on this earth and by the possibility of never greeting
him in heaven. For several years she remained near complete
mental collapse.
Upon her recovery she resolved that, though she might
not be happy again, she could make herself useful in the
23
cause of education. With Professor Fisher’s legacy of two
thousand dollars as a nucleus she gathered funds to establish
the Hartford Female Seminary, and Harriet became one of her
first students and assistants, looking back upon this step,
Catherine recognized how poorly prepared she had been to
establish a seminary. She felt that she had been inadequately
educated at Miss Pierce’s•school; and she was no doubt in
capable of teaching some of the subjects that she tried;
Latin, for which she coached two weeks, and moral philosophy,
upon which she embarked equally unprepared.1^ At the time,
however, in 1824, she was confident of her adequacy, regard
ing herself as acting precisely as God, had he been a female
educator,,• would have chosen to act. That viewpoint solved
all her difficulties, she said, and dispelled all her doubts,
Her own words give a fairer insight into her mind than any
paraphrase:
The more I can make my scholars feel that I am actuated
by a spirit of self-denying benevolence, the more con
fidence they will feel in me, and the more they will be
inclined to submit to self-denying duties for the good
of others. After a while I began to compare my experi
ence with the government of God. I finally got through
the whole subject, and drew out the results, and found
that all-mv difficulties were solved and all my darkness
dispelled. J-9
^ Harveson, ojd. cit., p. 20.
^ Charles Fdward Stowe, op. cit., p. 28.
2U
Although Catherine must have taught superficially in
these early years, as she struggled with chemistry, rhetoric,
logic, history, algebra, natural philosophy, moral philosophy,
and Latin, she was from the first a perfect disciplinarian.
Her most famous pupil, young Harriet, never outlived her in
fluence. Unlike the gentle and appreciative John Brace,
Catherine discouraged literary expression. When the child
Harriet was discovered writing a poetic tragedy Catherine
stopped her and set her to studying instead. "One day sister
Catherine pounced down upon me," Mrs. Stowe wrote, "and said
I must not waste my time writing poetry, but discipline my
mind by the study of Butler*s Analogy.,t2Q
When Harriet was hardly fifteen she became her sister’s
assistant. It was work that the young girl did not enjoy,
and its evil effects upon her disposition, even her health,
can be observed in her letters of the period:
I don’t know as I am fit for anything, and I have
• thought that I could wish to die young, and let the
remembrance of me and my faults perish in the grave,
rather than live, as I fear I do, a trouble to every
one. You don’t know how perfectly‘ wretched I ofi?en
feel: so useless, so weak, so destitute of all energy.21
Others details show the unwholesome condition of Harriet’s
20
Annie Fields, op. cit., p. A9.
21
IMd., p. 63.
2 . 5
mind under this too strict regimen. As she describes her
self in her letters, she was dangerously nervous, groaning
and crying in her bed half the night and laughing irrationally
throughout the day. Her work as a teacher was a burden to her,
for she felt that her life was being destroyed in caring for
"little animals" (the words are her own) who drew all the
vitality from their teachers, "delicate young girls just com
ing into womanhood,"2^
Catherine, though uneasy at her sister’s sufferings,
was confident that she knew what was best. Not relieved of
the hated duties, Harriet reconciled herself to the inevit-
j
able. What Harriet’s husband later called "the strong, un
yielding mind of the older sister’ ’ ^ Won the younger to a
tolerance of teaching; but Mrs. Stowe, as soon as she could,
abandoned pedagogy for the more congenial work of writing.
While these difficult adjustments were still at their
most painful, during the decade of her teens, Harriet was
simultaneously suffering the tortures of an exhausting con
version to Christ. Her biographers, including her son, have
unanimously protested against the misguided zeal with which
her particular spiritual shepherd, her father, chased the
22 Annie Fields, loc. cit.
23 Ibid.. p. 5U.
26
lamb into the sheepfold.Without passing any judgment
upon Calvinism, the reader of Harriet’s letters can feel her
suffering. It is embodied also in the later novels, along
with her repudiation of her father’s Calvinistic interpreta
tions of Christianity. In a significant passage from
Oldtown Folks, her deepest treatment of this subject, Mrs.
Stowe attacked her father’s idol, Jonathan Edwards:
It was his power and his Influence which succeeded in
completely upsetting New England from the.basis on
which the Reformers and Puritan Fathers had placed her,
and casting out of the Church the children of the very
saints and martyrs who had come to this country for no
other reason than to found a church.25
By 1869* when Oldt'own Folks was published, Mrs. Stowe had
followed the other children of the saints and martyrs out of
her father’s church, for she had transferred her allegiance
to the milder Episcopalians. Total depravity, her father’s
doctrine, especially repelled her. Instead of inheriting
sin, she explained further in Oldtown Folks, the children of
Christians inherited generations of goodness, "so that, in
course of time, many might be born predisposed to good,
rather than to evil." As the proper treatment for children
she favored, instead of threats and harsh discipline, "a
21* Ibid., p. 52.
25
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Oldtown Folks, p. 364.
27
2 f t
mild and genial spirit of hope."*0 in this spirit she re
jected her youth, not her father personally, but the doc
trines that were his.
In her own girlhood conversion, mildness and geniality
were notably absent. A popular nickname for Lyman Beecher’s
Boston church was ’ ’ brimstone corner,”^7 and Beecher used the
same methods with his family’s souls as with his congrega
tion. That is to say, he preached the fear of hell and de
nounced any assurance of salvation. To the sensitive Harriet,
still ignorant of the rich implications of her father’s creed,
the harsh outline was all that was visible. Her first girl
ish realization was only that salvation depended upon being
frightened nearly to death. Even when she h§d made peace
with her father’s demands, she was far from happy in her lot.
s
From the start she made mental reservations, probably more
than she realized. Later on, in Oldtown Folks, she described
clearly what she had dimly understood during the pain of ex
perience:
i
. It was the fashion of the Calvinistic preaching of that
time to put the doctrine of absolute and unconditional
submission to God in the most appalling forms. . . .
After many struggles and real agonies, Aunt Lois had
brought herself to believe that she would be willing to
Of\
Harriet Beecher Stowe, loc. cit.
Frank Luth® Mott, A History of American Magazines.
I, 286.
28
resign her eternal salvation to the Divine glory . . .
and thus her self-will, as she supposed, had been en
tirely annihilated, whereas it was only doubled back
on it||lf, and ready to come out with tenfold intensity.
• • •
In this description one should notice particularly the "ap
palling forms" in which Christianity was presented to the
young by people like Lyman Beecher, the compromise through
which a convert brought himself to believe, as he supposed,
doctrines that ran counter to his deepest convictions, and
the resultant lack of harmony to be relieved only by further
adjustments. In this account of a fictional character Mrs.
Stowe was commenting upon exactly the process through which
she had herself passed.
Lyman Beecher inevitably had his way with young
Harriet, for his mind was as strong and unyielding as
Catherine*s. When the diversion of traveling and the pleas
ure of young companions had removed the longing for an early
death, Harriet could still look back yearningly upon the
image of her mother, dead these many years, and imagine that
if Roxana had lived she might have spared her daughter much
of the useless sorrow of Lyman’s struggle for her soul.^9
That Jesus loved her, she at last became convinced, and in
His companionship she found the perfect love denied by her
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Oldtown Folks, p. 4>1.
Annie Fields, 0£. cit., p. 65.
29
daily life. As she wrote her brother Edward in February,
1829, "The desire to be loved forms, I fear, the great motive
for all my actions."^ it was a clear self-appraisal, the
full meaning of which can be' grasped only by one who contrasts
the warm personal love of those who really care with the
colder, more distant "spirit of self-denying benevolence"
which her sister Catherine and her father practiced.
The effects of these experiences of adolescence upon
Mrs. Stowe’s literary career show clearly in her writings.
Meanwhile it should be noted that just as her mother’s death
provided her with an ideal of perfection, so her .education
by'her father and sister provided her with a standard of suf
fering. No adverse criticism of either Lyman or Catherine
Beecher is intended in this remark. Though they were less
sympathetic than most men and women of their time, they were
neither malicious nor inhuman. The worst that can be said
of them in Harriet’s behalf is that they mistook the quality
of the material with which they were ivorking. That they left
their mark upon it cannot be denied.
III. CINCINNATI AND MARRIAGE TO CALVIN STOWE
With the mass removal of the Beechers from New England
30 Ibid., p. 67.
30 ,
to Ohio in 1332, a period in Harriets life came to an end.
The possibilities of the new life of the Middle West were
not immediately observable, however, for Harriet was to con
tinue as assistant to Catherine in a new female college while
living in the home of her father, now president of the in
secure Lane Theological Seminary. Cincinnati, the border
settlement that Lyman had glowingly described as the London
of the West, first impressed the Connecticut-bred girl as
only an uncouth town. The father might satisfy himself with
i
visions of saving the West for Jonathan Edwards, but the
daughter faced the same old humdrum routine of teaching, ab
sorbed in annoying questions of quills and papers dropped on
the floor. Her exhausted mind, she felt, was sinking to its
death. Thought and emotion alike pained her, and she passed
half her time in listless vacancy, busied with trifles. ^3-
At this time of crisis, meditating upon Mme. de
Stael's Corinne, she reflected almost philosophically upon
the emotional starvation of America. To a friend she wrote
in detail:
In America feelings vehement and absorbing . . . be
come still more deep, morbid, and impassioned by the
constant habits of self-government which the rigid
forms of our society demand. They are repressed, and
they burn inward till they burn the very soul, leaving
31
Charles Edward Stowe, op. cit., p. 67.
31
only dust and ashes.^
In herself she recognized the repression of which she com
plained. MMy mind is exhausted, and seems to be sinking into
i
deadness," she concluded.33 From such melancholy introspec
tion she soon escaped, through new friendships, love, and
literary activity. Instead of brooding over her personal
problems, and perhaps solving them, she composed a few
magazine sketches which started her upon the long literary
career whose opening stages will form the subject of the
next chapter.
Literary fame and profit were not, however, to be hers
immediately, and meanwhile, having obeyed the call of love,
she was fully occupied with her growing family. If she ex
pected release in marrying Calvin Stowe, she was to be
grievously disappointed, for her husband, though he did not
imperiously impose his will upon her, as her father had done,
brought even greater responsibilities and hardships. Their
first children, twin girls born on September 29, 1836 (the
marriage had taken place on January sixth of the same year),
were followed by five others. Six of their seven children,
the last born in 18.50, survived childhood. The problem of
Charles Edward Stowe, loc. cit.
LoC. cit.
32
maintaining this family upon a small income was more dis
tressing than any Mrs. Stowe had encountered in her girlhood.
That pathetic fate, household martyrdom, was prepar
ing for her; but she saved herself by the strong combative
spirit that she shared with her father. Since there was
money in the world, she decided to help support the family,
by writing, rather than submit to grief over her frustrated
life. The Beechers had long complained about the poverty
suffered by the.Lord’s servants, and Roxana had supplemented
her husband’s income by offering instruction and board.34-
The children had grown tired of living from one Sunday col
lection to the next; and after Harriet’s marriage the lack
of money stimulated her to commercialize her literary
ability. When she said, in her later years, that she wrote
for money, that statement was as nearly true as its simplicity
permitted.
The husband, though less than ten years her senior,
was of a solemn cast of mind. No longer his were the prank
ish good spirits of his undergraduate days at Bowdoin College,
which he had attended with Longfellow, Hawthorne, S. S.
Prentiss, and Pranklin Pierce. In youth he had been a sober,
earnest student; and his later experiences as teacher of
Greek and theology, at Dartmouth and Lane Seminary, had made
34" Charles Beecher, op_. cit., I, 143.
33
him, in all respects, important to the young woman who became
his second wife, more nearly her father’s contemporary than
hers. He was a sincere servant of the lord, President
Lyman Beecher’s first professorial convert to the idea of
saving the West for orthodoxy, and for a while the entire
faculty of Lane Seminary. For this piety she respected and
honored him, as well as for his broad scholarship in a sub
ject, philology, unfortunately of no interest to her. By
far the strongest tie between them at the beginning was their
common affection for his dead wife, a love so enduring that
throughout the many years of their lives Calvin and Harriet
might have been seen hand in hand before her portrait upon
every anniversary of her birthday, communing with her,35
From their first friendship Harriet pitied this sad,
learned man, but she was never passionately excited by him.
On the morning of her marriage she wrote to her closest
friend, Georgians May, that she felt "nothing at all,"36 and
she seems to have continued in the same indifference. Not
even his hallucinations, the gnomes and fairies that appeared
to him in his daydreams, deeply moved her; and her marriage
was less of a thrill to her than the sight of the mighty
35 .
Lyman Beecher Stowe, Saints, Sinners, and Beechers,
p. 163.
Annie Fields, op. cit., p. 91. THe italics are
Mrs. Stowe’s.
34
Niagara that she had viewed in 1834, on her visit east for
Henry Ward’s graduation from Amherst. In those turbulent
waters, she felt, she would have gladly died; her husband
stimulated her to no such heavenly ecstacy.
For years the second Mrs. Stowe was not enthusiastic
about Calvin. After the birth of the third child she wrote
an old friend that she could speak well of her marriage
"after all";^ and this admission was about as far as she
would go. In 1841 she still felt herself destined to an
early death, and she wavered between devotion to her writing
and to her children. In her weakened health, rainy days
would reduce her to an extreme in which she could write that
she was so sick of the sour smells of meat, milk, wet clothes,
and everything, that she felt she would never care to eat
again.^ Only God sustained her, and He seemed far, far
away: she was more likely to go to Him than to find Him com
ing to her.
It was the promise of a new day when the Professor,
deserting Lyman’s Lane, received an appointment (1850) to the
faculty of Bowdoin College at Brunswick, Maine, his alma
mater.
37 Ibid., p. 97.
Ibid., p. 110. The italics are Mrs. Stowe’s.
17. RECAPITULATION
35
But what, the reader may ask, may be said of Harriet
herself through these early years? He has heard of the dis
cipline exercised by her father and elder sister and of the
restrictions imposed by her husband and children. He has
heard of female seminaries and border towns. He knows what
they did to her rather than what she was. Was she only an
obedient child, a dutiful daughter, a self-sacrificing wife
and mother? Throughout these years, almost two score, had
she no independent development of her own?
As a recognizable personality, the answer is none,
precisely none. Except for her writing, the story of her
first forty years is the record of what she bore. The normal
happy moments of youth were not denied her, for there was an
abundance of fun and affection to be found in her family re
lationships; yet she was moody, undecided, unadjusted. A
striking sentence from Oldtown Folks is applicable to her
youth: "Ours was a household clouded by suppressed regrets,
as well as embarrassed by real wants."^9 suppression and re
gret were the inevitable results of trying to fit herself into
a pattern of life with which she was not entirely congenial.
According to the family records, her independent personal life
39
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Oldtown Folks, p. 12.
36
had been restricted to such agreeable but unproductive ex
cursions as that one she was so fond of recalling, when, amid
the theological tracts stored in the attic, she discovered a
battered copy of The Arabian Nights.
Her rather sad, repressed life was eventually not as
unproductive as it seemed. Without her family exactly as it
was, she could never have written her books exactly as she
did. Catherine’s life was essential to The Minister’s Wooing,
Calvin Stowe’s to Oldtown Folks. The cholera epidemics of
Cincinnati found their place in Dred, and her visits into
Kentucky formed the basis of the opening chapters of Uncle
Tom’s Cabin. From her early sketch, ’ ’ Uncle Tim,” -to her last
novel, Poganuc People, forty-odd years later, Lyman Beecher’s
character, life, and ancestry furnished details without which
she could not have worked; and over this same period the dead
mother, Roxana, furnished equally essential dreams. Because
of the vividness and strength of their characters, the
Beechers were exceptional fictional material.
On a less objective level, these early experiences
were no less significant: her smouldering individuality,
when she ceased to be a wanderer in the strange country of
the West, amply compensated for .the scanty freedom of her
early years. Harriet’s later life was a beautiful illustra
tion of her own principle, that ’ ’ temperament gradually, and
with irresistable power, modifies one’s creed. ”4-° In her
40 Ibid., p. 15.
37
maturity, while retaining her love for her father, she
modified his type of Christianity in one important respect.
She subtracted nothing from his love of truth or his zeal
for serving God, but she obliterated from her own creed his
threats and terrors. She rejected the Calvinist "power of
lacerating the nerves of the soul and producing strange
states of morbid horror and repulsion,to use her own
phrase. The rest of her Puritan inheritance she retained.
Her best novels, those about the New England she had learned
of in her youth, are a paean of praise combined with a keen
sense of the fatal Calvinistic flaw. New England became to
her that part of the world "where the best and kindest and
most desirable of traits are enveloped in an outside wrapping
of sharp austerity.Her ideal of life was to release all
the beauty of Puritanism by freeing it from the outer
harshness.
Once the environment of Cincinnati was thrown off,
Mrs. Stowe began to feel in better spirits. Every stage of
the journey that carried her towards New England lightened
her burdens, and one can see how, with the release from this
pressure and the improvement in health which accompanied it,
41
Ibid., p. 26.
42 Ibid., p. 40.
38
the ambitious, energetic woman might throw herself into a
work of self-expression. For more reasons than one, then,
her husband’s appointment to the faculty of Bowdoin College
held a world of promise for his wife as well as for him.
This promise, however genuine, was slow of fulfill
ment; the bright dawn of a happier day lingered behind the
clouds of worry. Mrs. Stowe’s mind was still turbulent and
restless, and in her letters she is revealed as an over
worked, discouraged woman of forty. Thus her Uncle Tom’s
Cabin, her first work of importance, wonderfully expressed
her dissatisfaction with life as she had known it. Entirely
aside from its exciting melodrama or from its contribution
to a complex social problem, the book had the force of a
manifesto to battered and beaten humanity. With the power
of an explosion it shrieked the wail of a misspent lifetime,
and to millions of other men and women oppressed by fate it
offered the ideal of freedom.
CHAPTER III
EARLY WRITINGS
I. "LOVE VERSUS LAW": MRS STOWE AS LOCAL COLORIST
One hundred years ago the eurious reader of short
fiction might have picked up a small hook called The Mayflower.
Little as the author’s name might have meant to him, he would
have had one advantage over his twentieth century descendant:
whether he turned from Mrs. Stowe’s sketches pleased or dis
appointed, he would not have been disturbed by her subsequent
writings, as later critics have been, to warp his judgment
and destroy his vision.
Even in 1843, the year of publication, the attentive
reader would have been struck, as early as the first sketch,
with a sense of the older style of writing. "Love versus
Law,"1 as the opening tale of the collection is called, is
built in the casual way popular before Poe (Tales of the
Grotesque and Arabesque, 1840) and Hawthorne (Twice-Told
Tales, 1837) Rad introduced conscious unity of effect.
Starting with some gentle reflections on Christian
old age, "Love versus Law" progresses to a characterization
of Beacon Enos Dudley, who is contrasted with his fellow
The original title was "Deacon Enos,” in the Gift
for 1840, pp. 144-187.
40
officer, Deacon Abrams. When interest has been aroused in
these two gentlemen, they are both dropped from the story
(Deacon Abrams permanently dropped), while the action moves
into the bosom of the Jones family. Two orphaned girls, to
repeat Mrs. Stowe’s own word, the elder verging on forty and
the younger just eighteen, introduce a new complication, for
their dead father has cheated Deacon Enos out of five hundred
dollars, and-the only way in which he can collect is by tak
ing the money from the legacy of the younger girl, the beau
tiful and tender Susan. Understandably enough, he hesitates.
Mrs. Stowe’s story is not yet quite ready to get under
way, for another family is needed to save Susan from unhappy
poverty. Uncle Jaw Adams, a crabbed and contentious New
Englander, has always been at odds with his neighbors, suing
or threatening to sue them for innumerable grievances,
fancied or real. At the moment, his heart is set on getting
damages from the Jones girls, because their father and he
had never agreed on the exact boundaries between their farms.
Solely for the reader's benefit, the whole story of the Jones-
Adams feud is poured into the good Deacon’s unwilling ears.
When all the familiar details have tumbled out in a torrent
of rare colloquialisms, the author pauses to announce:
But all this while the deacon had been in a profound
meditation concerning the ways and means of putting
a stop to a quarrel that had been his torment from
time immemorial, and just at this moment a plan had
41
struck Ms mind which our story will proceed to un
fold.2
This promise of action is further delayed to intro
duce one other key character, the son of old Uncle Jaw.
Young Joseph Adams has been away at college, and the Deacon's
plan is the simple one of inducing the boy to marry Susan
Jones, thus settling the feud between the families without
recourse to the ugly law of the title. In the spirit of
love he plans to contribute to the young folks his five hun
dred dollar claim against the Jones estate.
From this point the complications disappear.. Of course
the stern and inconsiderate older sister fails to realize the
meaning of love to a delicate young girl: and of course the
hard-headed father forbids his son to court the daughter of
a traditional enemy. Such demonstrations are to be expected,
but against the basic goodness of human nature they mean
nothing. All such people are fundamentally good, Mrs. Stowe
shows, once their better natures are appealed to, and love
is bound to win. Thus this New England Romeo and Juliet, on
a suitably modest scale, reach the happy ending of consum
mated love.
The final paragraph of the tale is significant enough
to quote:
2 Harriet Beecher Stowe, "Love Yersus Law,” The
May Flower (1855), p. 5U.
42
And, accordingly, many happy years flew over the heads
of the young couple in the Stanton place, long after
the hoary hairs of their kind benefactor, the deacon,
were laid with reverence in the dust. Uncle Jaw was
so far wrought upon by the magnanimity of the good old
man as to be very materially changed for the better.
Instead of quarreling in real earnest all around the
neighborhood, he confined himself merely to battling
the opposite side of every question with his son;
which, as tjhe latter was somewhat of a logician, af
forded a pretty good field for the exercise of his pow
ers; and he was heard to declare, at the funeral of the
old deacon, that, "after all,' a man got as much, and
maybe more, to go along as the deacon did, than to be
all the time fighting and jawing; ’ ’though I tell you
what it is," said he, afterward, ’ "taint every one
that has the deacon’s faculty, anyhow."3
The connections between this tale and Mrs. Stowe’s
life are obvious throughout. Silence Jones is not, of course,
Catherine Beecher; yet her relationship with her younger
sister is similar to Catherine’s with Harriet. The conten
tious Uncle Jaw is not Lyman Beecher; yet the relationship
between him and his son is precisely that of the elder and
younger Beechers. Young Joseph Adams is not Henry Ward
Beecher; yet Susan’s pride in him, especially as valedictorian,
is precisely that which Harriet took in her favorite brother.
"If ever a woman feels proud of her lover,” she was to write
in Dred, years later, "it is when she sees him as a successful
public speaker.*’ ^ The passage brings to mind, by way of
^ Ibid., pp. 87-88. The italics are Mrs. Stowe's.
4
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Dred, II, 42.
43
contrast, earnest but uneloquent Calvin Stowe.
The love scenes between Joseph and Susan also suggest
Calvin Stowe by contrast. How would a young lady who upon
her marriage day felt nothing at all— how would such a lady
describe young love? Having led her couple into the moonlit
rose garden, what would she have them say? Might it not be
something like this?
Ah, my good reader, you may go on with this part of the
story for yourself. We are principled against unveil
ing the nsacred mysteries,” the "thoughts that breathe
and words that burn," in such little moonlight inter
views as these. You may fancy all that followed. . . .5
She had to fancy it, herself.
In addition to personal details like these, the little
story of "Love versus Law” owed to Mrs. Stowe’s past its
*
whole New England setting. In this setting there is some
realistic detail, a noticeable use of what has since been
called local color. Professor Canby’s definition, which is
as good as arty, specifies f , a story where the setting is quite
as important as the plot” and one ”to which a strong facti
tious interest is lent by the local peculiarities of place
and action, and by the racial peculiarities of the actors.
Because Mrs. Stowe from the first depended upon local color,
5
* Harriet Beecher Stowe, "Love versus Law,” The May
Elower, p. 70.
^ Henry Seidel Canby, The Short Story in English,
pp. 318-319.
as here defined, her relationship to other local colorists
needs to be definitely stated. The extent to which she was
a follower, rather than a leader, needs to be clearly
realized..
Since local color usually appears in dialogue, the
last paragraph from "Love versus Law" shows something of how
Mrs. Stowe used the specialized speech forms of New England.
One might note, first of all, the emphasized use of faculty,
a common New England localism, as well as the colloquial
fisting, .jawing, and ’taint. Such words appear, however,
only in the conversation of certain characters. When the
author speaks for herself, or when her elegant persons speak
for themselves, the language is the stiff formality of the
other quoted passages.
In this respect Mrs. Stowe was dutifully following
Sir Walter Scott, whose practices she knew exceptionally
well. :in The Bride of Lammermoor (1819), for example, the
retainer Caleb Balderstone speaks in a rich, almost incom
prehensible dialect: "Whisht, my lord .... If ye dinna
regard your ain credit, think on mine; we'll hae hard eneugh
wark to mak a decent night o't, wi' a' the lees I can tell."
The Lord of Ravenswood answers, in pure English: "Well, well,
never mind. ... Go to the stable. There is hay and corn,
7
I trust?" Mrs. Stowe was not as careful about propriety in
7 Walter Scott, The Bride of Lammermoor, p. 91.
language as was Sir Walter, for she had the elder Jones girl
speak, like Caleb, in the patois of the people, while the
younger girl, though reared entirely by her sister, spoke
pure English as did Ravenswood. Compare the speech of Silence
Now, Susan, here’s this man pretends to say that you’ve
been a-courting and snaring to get his son, and I just
want you to tell him that you ha’n’t never had no thought
of him; and that you won’t have, neither.®
with the answer of Susan:
I never would have come down if I had thought it was to
hear such things as this. Mr. Adams, all I have to say
to you is, that your son has sought me, and not I your
son. If you wish to know any more he can tell you bet
ter than 1.9
Susan’s speech is, one might specify, as colloquial
as Silence’s, but not as regional. In the "big” moments,
however, the ’ ’important” characters cease to be colloquial,
or regional. They turn back, perhaps, to the manner of
another of Mrs. Stowe’s favorites, Samuel Richardson. Says
Joseph to Susan:
Seriously, now, I know that something painful passed be
tween my father and you this morning, but I shall not
inquire what it was. I only tell you, frankly, that he
has expressed his disapprobation of our engagement, for
bidden me to go on with it, and— 10
Harriet Beecher Stowe, "Love versus Law,” The May-
Flower , pp. 74-75.
9 Ibid., p. 75.
Ihid., p. 80,
A 6
To which Susan replies, interrupting, in language worthy of
the valedictorian himself: "And consequently, I release you
from all engagements and obligations to me, even before you
ask it.Such mannerisms as these, such relapses into the
stilted or inappropriate, were to remain with Mrs. Stowe to
the very end. She learned to write exceptionally flavorful
dialogue, and to spoil it as easily as she wrote it.
There is no novelty about the local color of "Love
versus Law” to have surprised a reader one hundred years
ago. In the writings of the universal favorite, Scott, he
would have been accustomed to deeper colors and a grander
scale. Earlier still, in Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent
(1800) he would have stumbled over Irish place names like
the fair of Crookaghnawaturgh and the bog of
Allyballycarricko'shaughlin; and he would have noticed a
brogue so thick and so localized that the English themselves
had been provided a glossary. As her running footnotes show,
Miss Edgeworth was fully conscious in writing Castle Rackrent
that she was telling .a story possible only for Ireland in
language spoken only there.
Coming nearer home, the searcher for local color
would possibly recall some of the samples of it which had
appeared on this side of the Atlantic. In Augustus Baldwin
Harriet Beecher Stowe, loc. oit.
47
Longstreet’s Georgia Sketches (1835) any reader would have
recognized "The Horse Swap” as a sketch excelling Mrs.
Stowe1s "Love versus Law" as much in local color as in nar
rative skill. And if he had read Judge James Hall’s Legends
of the West (1832) he would have found the local color sketch
in its completeness: racy stories, weakly plotted but ex
pressed in the language of the place.
Before the publication of The May Flower, then, local
color, in the strict sense of the term, was a known market
able commodity. Long before Mrs. Stowe’s first stories, pub
lished in 1834, at least two Hew England ladies had estab
lished themselves as local colorists of note. The names of
Catharine M. Sedgwick and Lydia H. Sigourney, now almost for
gotten, were among the brightest. The latter especially, who
12
contributed to over three hundred different magazines, was
both the Sara Teasdale and the Kathleen Norris of her age.
I
Miss Sedgwick’s novels, beginning in 1822 with A New
England Tale, mark her as the pioneer in simple rustic scenes
of New England life. In the preface she pointed to her "hum
ble effort to add something to the scanty stock of native
American literature,”1^ and in a later note, for the reprint
12 Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines,
I, 499.
^ Catharine M. Sedgwick,. A New England Tale and
Miscellanies, p. 9.
48
of 18.52, she mentioned her story’s ’ blaim to sufferance from
its priority in time.”^ Miss Sedgwick was not a racy writer,
however, for her style was stilted and awkward. A moralist
who deliberately subordinated vivid writing to sound doctrine,
she nevertheless possessed the initiative to use the scenes
about her.^ Nor was she'alone in this.
In Mrs. Sigourney’s too little studied Sketch of
Connecticut, Forty Years Since, published in 1824, nine years
before Mrs. Stowe started to write, the true forerunner of
Mrs. Stowe’s work is undoubtedly found. Although there is
too much of the literary lady about Mrs. Sigourney, her book
hits most of the topics Mrs. Stowe later developed, as well
as some she overlooked. There is much about the Indians in
this story of 1784, and much about the Revolution. On the
other hand, since there are not so many preachers as in Mrs.
Stowe’s writings, a broader social view is given.
Like Mrs. Stowe, Mrs. Sigourney enjoyed references to
Saturday night baked beans and other local peculiarities; and
like her she also breathed the full spirit of love for the
land. Writing of Connecticut, Mrs. Sigourney said, precisely
as Mrs. Stowe would have said:
U Ihid., p. 15.
• Sister Mary Michael Welsh, Catharine Maria Sedgwick,
P. 147.
49
There, was exhibited the singular example of an aris
tocracy, less intent upon family aggrandizement, than
upon becoming illustrious in virtue; and of a community
where industry and economy almost banished want.4°
Although dialect abounds in the Sketch of Connecticut,
it is restricted, as in "Love versus Law,1 1 to the humble
characters, and especially to a certain Farmer Larkin:
Madam L had often taken pleasure in his conversa
tion, which was marked with that plain common-sense,
which seems the birthright of the New England farmer,
while the simplicity of his opinions on some subjects,
and the oddity of his dialect, administered to her
entertainment.
That is a sample of how Mrs. Sigourney speaks for herself,
and it is also the way in which her Madam L speaks. The
Indians are more eloquent and oratorical; but plain Farmer
Larkin preserves the flavor of the soil:
Your ha-ath, too, is as clean as a cheeny tea-cup,
Ma’am. I hate to put my coarse huffs on it. But I
ha’nt been used to seein’ kiverlids spread on the floor
to walk on. We are glad to get 'em to kiver us up with
a nights. This looks like a boughten one . . . 'Tis
exceedin’ curous.1®
There is a full store of such talk in as truly the
New England manner as Mrs. Stowe was ever to achieve.
Lydia Huntley Sigourney, Sketch of Connecticut,
Forty Years Since, p. 4.
17 Ibid., pp. 107-108.
18
Ibid., p. 110
50
Although no reader of The Mayflower in 1843 would
know all of these books, it is unlikely that he would know
none of them. Not only were Scott and Miss Edgeworth in
every home, but writers like Miss Sedgwick and Mrs. Sigourney
were so widely reprinted as to be inescapable. However
limited his background, he could hardly have felt that he
had found something new and freshening in the development of
fiotion. He could not have thought that in stories'like
"Love versus Law" he was reading what later critics have mis
takenly called the first genuine specimens of local color,
for he would have seen how closely linked they were with
their predecessors.
II. THE MAYFLOWER, 1843
The Mayflower volume of 1843 contained in all fifteen
sketches, several of which would repay as careful study as
"Love versus Law." The conclusions would be so nearly the
same, however, that the analyst would unpardonably overstay
his welcome. In brief, The Mayflower opened most of the
subjects to which firs. Stowe devoted herself in later years.
"Trials of a Housekeeper" was her first contribution in book
form to the servant problem, the subject of many of her
later essays and stories. "Let Every Man Mind hi,s own
Business" was her first contribution to the temperance cru
sade for which, following her father’s lead, she was always
51
ready to say a kindly word. Her reforming zeal showed mildly
for the causes of special Sunday services for children ("The
Sabbath"), kinder treatment of tradespeople ("The Seamstress"),
and greater financial support for religious institutions ("So
I
Many Calls"). The first of her long series of pathetic death
scenes was to be found in "Uncle Tim," and another in "Little
Edward," where the demise of a perfect child was recounted
with the same intent, though not the same powerful pathos, as
the death of Eva in Uncle Torres Cabin.
Aside from these themes that she was to develop later,
the half-dozen. Hew England sketches in the book, the only
ones that justified the subtitle, covered thinly ground that
she was subsequently to cultivate thoroughly. "Old Father
Morris," the best designed of the series, presented an old-
fashioned type of preacher with some of the charm of Qldtown
Folks. "Cousin William," planned along the same lines as
"Love versus Law," presented the amusing character of Mrs.
Abigail Evetts, the busybody or reformer gone wrong. "The
Sabbath" contained in its opening section a fine description
of services in the old days,
"Uncle Tim," another in this New England series, was
not only the most famous of the group— because it was a prize
winner— but was highly enough esteemed to be reprinted, in
1834, soon after its appearance in Judge James Hall’s We stern
Monthly Magazine. A pamphlet of fifty-two pages, it appeared
52
as A New England Sketch, with Mr. Gilman’s publisher’s notice
on the reverse of the title page;
The following story was introduced to the public through
the Western Monthly Magazine, a popular periodical; and
the publisher’s only object in throwing it before the
community in this form, is that an effort so successful
to delineate the character of New Englanders, by,one of
their daughters, may be preserved.- * - 9
"Throwing it before the' community" may seem an inept
phrase with which to introduce a new writer's effort, but it
was a marvel of elegant flattery in comparison with the
preface Catherine Beecher wrote for The Mayflower. Without
conscious malice, the elder sister was only following her
bent, for she had admired Harriet’s writing sufficiently to
allow some of it to be published as her own.^°
Catherine's well meant but patronizing comments would
have sunk a sturdier craft than Harriet’s flimsy Mayflower.
She would say nothing in favor of her little sister's sketches,
describing them coldly as "written by a young mother and
housekeeper in the first years of her novitiate.”2^ - Her own
interest as editor she confessed to be purely a general one
19
Harriet E. Beecher, A New England Sketch, reverse
of title page.
20
Annie Fields, Life and Letters of Harriet Beecher
Stowe, p. 83,
21
Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Mayflower (1843), p. v.
53
in moral fiction, as a type of writing preferable to the
frivolous stories of Dickens; and she offered The Mayflower
as an example of what might be attempted, without vouching
for Harriet's "qualifications” for doing the work well.22
Aside from her comments on the low moral tone and the
disrespect for governesses shown by Mr. Dickens,most 0f
Catherine's preface was a sermon on purity. Directed to
parents and clergymen, it concluded with the thought that
what was good in Harriet’s work could be traced to the ex
cellent education Catherine had given her.2^
With all this Harriet, as should be expected, agreed.
The condescension, unintended by the elder, was unrecognized
by the younger sister. Even in the days of fame, after she
had freed herself from her father’s ways, Harriet’s awe of
her elder sister remained, practically undiminished. One of
her last bits of writing was a flattering biographical
sketch.
Meanwhile, The Mayflower of 1843 was no sensation.
Harper and Brothers discontinued it within a few years, and
22
Ibid., p. xvi.
Ibid., p. viii.
Ibid., p. xvii.
Harriet Beecher Stowe, with others, Our Famous
Women, 1884, pp. 75-93.
54
it was forgotten until 1855, when, after the success of
Uncle Tom*s Cabin, it was republished (except for a single
sketch, ”So Many Calls”) as part of a much larger collection
of articles and stories called The May Flower, and Miscella
neous Writings, The twenty-one new sketches were similar to
the original fifteen. Two temperance tales were added to
’ ’ Let Every Man Mind his own Business,” strengthening Mrs.
Stowe’s position as a consistent prohibitionist rather than
her arguments in favor of prohibition, A few poems were also
added, but the only contribution showing a new interest was
’ ’ The Two Altars,”^6 written in 1851, a strong attack on
Negro slavery, a subject which had meant so little to Mrs.
Stowe in 1843 that no allusion to it can be found in the
entire Mayflower.
The commercial failure of her first collection of
stories did not grieve Mrs, Stowe as much as might be ex
pected, for she still regarded book publication as entirely
a sideline. The compilation had in all probability been,
as Catherine hinted in the preface, not Harriet’s own idea
but Catherine’s. Their joint textbook, the geography of 1833,
had likewise been Catherine's plan, for she was the educator
in the family and the senior collaborator on the book. Thus
Harriet Beecher Stowe, ’ ’ The Two Altars,” New York
Evangelist, Tune 12, 19, 1851. It was also published in
1852 as an anti-slavery tract.
55
when The Mayflower led to no permanent alliance with the pub
lishing firm of Harper and Brothers, Harriet shed no tears
and uttered no lamentations.
In truth, at this time her ambitions were still held
at the level of periodical publication. Books were a distant
world beyond her reach, whereas magazines were as near as her
fellow members of Cincinnati’s literary Semi-colon Club.
She knew personally editors James Hall of the Western Monthly
Magazinet and S. D. Mansfield of the Cincinnati Chronicle.
Others were almost as easily reached, and they paid two
dollars a page for sketches that she could turn out between
her housekeeping chores. In comparison with this assured
income, small as it was, the financial returns from books
were more than doubtful. Even Uncle Tom’s Cabin, her first
longer work, was originally written for a periodical. In
tended as short sketches, it grew into two volumes, but it
was paid for by the magazine editor. Subsequent book publi
cation was looked upon merely as a problematical addition to
the original four hundred dollars received from the National
Era.27
The psychological importance of this attitude toward
writing should not be overlooked, as has been the custom
27
Mott, op. cit., II, 22. Earlier writers give $300
as the sum.
among writers on Mrs. Stowe. Its effects can be seen in her.
work from the beginning to the end of her career, Even in her
later years, when her books sold so well, they were usually
first published in magazines. She wrote from month to month
or from week to week, under constant strain and in small
pieces without any chance of revision.
For an understanding of Mrs. Stowe’s writings, early
or late, a glance at the magazines which accepted her work
is essential. The logical place to begin is with the Western
Monthly Magazine of Cincinnati, her first market.
Ill. JAMES HALL AND THE WESTERN MONTHLY MAGAZINE
When the Beechers reached Cincinnati in October, 1832,
the city’s literary colony was agog over the promised new
magazine, the Western Monthly Magazine, to be started the
following January. ° Actually, the Western Monthly was not
entirely new, for it was a continuation, under the same
editor, of the Illinois Monthly Magazine, which Hall had
been issuing since October, 1830. Nevertheless, the estab
lishment of a high-class - literary journal in Cincinnati it
self was the cause of justifiable excitement. To Harriet
Beecher especially, whose literary ambitions had been
Cincinnati Chronicle, November 10, 1832.
57
simmering since childhood, the prospect of the promised
magazine must have been enticing.
No less enticing was the character of the editor,
Judge James Hall, whom the new residents soon met. Hall had
been soldier, lawyer, and politician, as well as jurist,
writer, and editor. His manner was dynamic, and his literary
work was dominated by consciously held theories, expressed
repeatedly with clarity and persuasiveness, that Harriet
Beecher soon adopted.
As his literary platform, Hall advocated cheerfulness,
morality, and regionalism. He was an outstanding defender
of fiction, and with rollicking good humor that sometimes
became biting satire he opened endless vistas of promise for
the young writers of the West. "That our country affords
materials to the novelist, worthy of his noblest efforts,”
he wrote in the Illinois Monthly Magazine, "has been suf
ficiently shown by those who have had the enterprise to cul
tivate this new field.”29 He went on, in this defence of
fiction, to praise Brown, Cooper, Miss Sedgwick, and Paulding,
whom he commended in italics for his "sterling Americanism. ”3Q
Hall was also a chivalrous admirer of women writers.
29
Illinois Monthly Magazine, 2:19, 1831-1832.
30
Lbid., p. 24.
58
By accepting their work for his magazines he proved how .
highly he esteemed, to quote him, "those attractive attri
butes of the female pen, and of the female heart, pure
morality and delicate sentiment. All of these attitudes
were to be carried over from the Illinois Monthly to the
Western Monthly, the only difference being that under its new
name the publication was expected to be, as indeed it was,
bigger and better,
Harriet Beecher, newly arriving from the east, could
hardly have known immediately that to become a contributor
to the new magazine she would need to exhibit in her writing
cheerful energy, local color, and refined morality. She
need not have remained long in ignorance, however, for Hall
was his own press agent. In the January, 1833, issue the
opening note "To the Reader" would have been especially in
teresting to the prospective contributor. "We live in a
32
country and an age, governed by moral influence,”^ was a
proposition to which the youngest Miss Beecher could murmur
a hearty assent. "The literature of our country has never
exerted the influence to which it is entitled,” was another
proposition to set one thinking. How was the Western Monthly
31 £bid-> 1*33. 6.,
32
Western Monthly Magazine. 1:2, ‘1833.
59
to meet this problem? Explained the editor, who made a
special appeal to educators:
Although devoted chiefly to elegant literature, it has
always been our wish and endeavor, to render it useful,
by making it the medium for disseminating valuable in
formation and pure moral principles . . . Sensible
that all literary effort, however refined or powerful,
which does not promote the cause of virtue, and elevate
public, sentiment, is worse than useless, we have directed
’ 'es towards the accomplishment of these
Tfithout this definite endorsement of virtue, Hall
might never have enlisted the interest of the Beechers. He
had to start, that is, with their dominant interest.
Satisfactory as his opening note was, Hall followed
it with an even more significant and suggestive article en
titled "American Literature." The emphasis here, partly
patriotic, was mainly financial. Mrs. Stowed later pro
fessional attitude toward her writing was no doubt encouraged,
if not actually instigated, by Hall. The English people, he
pointed out, paid their writers much more generously than
Americans did, and he complained especially that native book
publishers rejected native works because they objected to
paying authors* royalties. "The American writer must give
his labor for nothing,” he protested, "or be driven from the
field by this disadvantageous competition.”34
33 Ibid., p. 1.
34 Ibid., p. 8
60
Like Mips. Stowe in her later years, Hall was never one
to admit defeat. To improve the condition of American writers
he urged, in particular, greater financial support for
American periodicals. "Patronage should come first," he
insisted:
Money is needed to found such works, and foster their
infancy. In this country, money will buy anything. Any
desired amount of talent can be enlisted in any enter
prise which promises to yield a fair emolument. ....
Let the. wealthy, the patriotic, and the tasteful of our
countrymen . . . give their support to the best of our
own literary journals, and the proprietors of the latter
would soon be enabled to pay their contributors such a
compensation as would enlist the best talents of the
country.35
Was there ever played a sweeter prelude than this to a finan
cially and morally successful literary career?
Also in the first issue of the Western Monthly Magazine,
whatever else they may have skipped, were three other articles
that the Beechers must at least have scanned. One was an at
mospheric sketch of a Connecticut Negro,3& -the s@cond a reply
to communistic propaganda,^7 and the third an emotional eulogy
entitled simply "Woman: A Rhapsody."38 clearly enough,
Ibid., p. 9. The italics are Hall’s.
36 nQia. Eosy Posy," Western Monthly Magazine, 1:26-32,
1333.
37 ity/orking Men," 1:19-25, 1833.
38
"Woman: A Rhapsody," ?7estern Monthly Magazine,
1:38-42.
61
whatever novelty there might he in the literary platform of
this western editor, his prejudices were fundamentally sound.
Harriet must have sat down immediately to do some
writing, for she had her first contribution, "Modern Uses of
Language," finished in time to appear in the third issue,
signed simply "B," it was attributed to Catherine Beecher,
though it was Harriet’s work.39 while the elder sister thus
took undeserved credit, the younger found what was more im
portant and valuable, an introduction to the art of pleasing
editors.
Not much need be said about this light essay. Harriet
maintained whimsically in it that the modern uses of language
are to conceal ideas and to conceal the lack of ideas. She
drew her examples of obscurity from Milton and Dugald Stewart
and her examples of empty cliches from undesignated minor
writers. Her motto, chosen with inevitable cleverness, was
Hamlet’s "Words, words, wordsI"
In this same third issue of the Western Monthly was
another bit of writing perhaps more important to young Miss
Beecher’s future than her own essay. "Schoolmaster Sam," a
continuation of the Connecticut sketch in the first issue,
provided a pattern for her own early stories, a pattern less
remote than Scott or Edgeworth, or even Sedgwick and Sigourney.
39 Charles Edward Stowe, Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe,
p. 69.
62
The author, whoever he may have heen, shared her love of her
native state: ”It was an Elysium to him— the calm valley of
the Connecticut.He introduced, moreover, the very dialect
she was to follow: ’ ’’Lor now,’ said the reasoning ploughman
when he found himself dismissed. ’It’s main curus you should
think so hard o’ me, jist ’cause o’ - this, and yet I guess it’s
right,' too, seein’ as you pay me to work and not to look.’”^-1 -
A passage like that may well have given Harriet Beecher
a valuable hint. Though editor Hall used dialect in his own
local color sketches, it was always that of his western char
acters. Here was the speech of her own people, delivered
directly into her hands. Might she not experiment with it,
as her fellow contributor was already doing? The art of
story-writing was not to be learned overnight, but were not
the returns grand enough to justify the effort? Within a
year this question was to be answered in the affirmative.
Meanwhile, the next high spot in the Western Monthly
is to be found in the sixth issue, June, 1833. A brief
review, the briefest for the month, it can be quoted here
completely:
Primary Geography for Children, on an improved plan,
with twelve maps, and numerous engravings. By C. and
H. Beecher, Principals of the Western Female Institute.
’ ’ Schoolmaster Sam,” Western Monthly Magazine, 1:115,
1833.
^ Loo, cit.
63
Cincinnati: Corey and Eairbank.
This is a very capital little hook. The authoresses
are accomplished young ladies, who have made the tuition
of youth their study and business for several years, and
who unite to a competent knowledge of the subject, an.
intimate acquaintance with the best modes of teaching
children. Writing books for children is one of the most
difficult, and surely one of the most useful branches of
authorship. We most cordially recommend this, as a suc
cessful effort in this noble field.4-2
Any young author would enjoy such cordial praise as Hall’s,
even if her major interest lay elsewhere than in geographies.
However excellent she was as a teacher (and Catherine later
described her as one of the best),-the writing of school
texts was not the career the younger Miss Beecher was planning
for herself. This was Catherine’s field; yet Harriet should
have felt both proud of her success and friendly toward re
viewer Hall.
immediately following the review of the Primary
Geography for Children was another brief notice, on a subject
which was to remain of abiding interest to Mrs. Stowe, the
character of Lord Byron. Judge Hall’s conception of the poet,
she must have observed, was exactly that of her father; it
was also exactly the conception she was to hold, almost forty
years later, in her Lady Byron Vindicated. Said Hall: ’ ’ The
^ Western Monthly Magazine, 1:287, 1833.
/ 3
Catharine E. Beecher, Educational Reminiscences
and Suggestions, p. 83.
64
genius of Byron was of the highest order; but never was
genius so perverted, never were the gifts of Providence so
daringly abused."^
The September issue of the Western Monthly offered
another article of importance, the warm praise given Lovell's
Folly, a novel by Cincinnati's leading woman writer, Mrs.
Caroline Lee Hentz. Since Harriet knew the author, ^-*5 the
possibility of conducting a profitable literary career from
Cincinnati was no doubt recalled to her mind. Hall wrote of
Lovell's Folly;
It is a native production, and appeals strongly to the
pride of our country. ... As a story it is simple,
without complicated machinery, or stirring events; but
the style is chaste, and sometimes elegant; the morality
is pure and elevated; the tone of the work,is cheerful,
while its tendency is dedidedly virtuous.
Here again was Hall's familiar prescription for female
writers: a simple plot leading to an uplifting love of
America; an unaffected style, except for the purple passages;
and finally, cheerful virtue. The extracts from Lovell's
Folly were, however, a trifle on the flowery side, and no
one can accuse Harriet Beecher of undue ambition if she
^ Western Monthly Magazine, 1:288, 1833.
^ Charles Edward Stowe, op. cit., p. 69.
46 .
Western Monthly Magazine, 1:427, 1833.
65
resolved to improve upon Mrs. Hentz’s style.
The same issue of September, 1833, offered A PREMIUM
OF FIFTY DOLLARS, all in capital letters,^? for a story, and
a similar premium for an essay. In December the essay ap- -
peared as scheduled, "Themes for Western Fiction," by Isaac
Appleton Jewett. Since it gave Hall his own ideas back again,
he liked it and commended it highly.^® At the same time, he
extended the story contest, since no worthy entries had been
received. When a decision was finally reached, Harriet
Beecher’s winning story was used to open the April, 1831,
issue. On this occasion words of commendation were spared.
It would have been awkward for Hall to emphasize that he had
given the award to one of his contributors and friends, whose
book had been published by his own publisher. It is possible
that he was a little disappointed in the tale itself: though
it followed his program of uplifting regionalism, he would no
doubt have liked it better if its setting had been western.
While the award for the short-story contest was being
held back, the following eight lines of verse, signed "B," as
the sketch on "Modern Uses of Language” had been, appeared in
the November issue of the magazine:
^ Ibid., p. 429.
48 Ibid., p. 592.
To a Dark-Haired Lady
The morning ne’er, in light arrayed,
Was half so fair, as that fair maid,
Whose tresses showed her form of snow,
Like some dark cloud on morning’s brow.
A coronet they, rich raven tresses,
For-love’s display of lovelinesses;
An ivory neck, a form of snow,
And smile to deck fair morning’s brow.^°
One cannot assert definitely that Mrs. Stowe wrote
these lines, but there is a distinct possibility that she
did. In her collected Writings the reprinted Religious
Poems, thirty in all, - * 50 show a technical facility that re
quired practice. All the biographers tell the story of her
i
girlhood attempts at verse, and it is likely that she con
tinued her experiments at this time, when she was deliberately
exploring her literary abilities. The internal rhymes and the
refrain indicate that the lines to the dark-haired lady were.-
a metrical experiment. Though Harriet may have written these
lines, Catherine herself may have done so; or they may be the
work of an altogether different person. The credit would not
be great, one way or the other.
Three months later, in February of the following year,
an undoubted contribution appears by Harriet Beecher, the
^ Western Monthly Magazine, 1:506, 1833.
- 50 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Writings, XV, 301-364.
story signed "May” and entitled "Isabelle and her Sister
Kate, and their Cousin.This story precedes by two months
the prize-winning "New England Sketch" which has been con-
i
sidered her first published story. Nor can there be doubt
of the authorship, as the following abstract will show:
Miss Isabelle was beautiful and popular; her ypung sister
Kate was plain but nice. She excelled in "being happy" in
spite of her social eclipse. "She had a world of sprightli
ness, a deal of simplicity and affection, with a dash of
CO
goodnatured shrewdness,"-^ and she adored her elder sister.
"But if I am going to tell my story, I must not keep you all
night, looking at pictures; so now to my tale, which I shall
commence in manner and form the following.The girls are
visited by their cousin Edward, a valedictorian. The whole
town gossips about his affection for the grand Isabelle, but
he is really in love with quiet, retiring Kate. "No, Miss
Catharine, it’s you!" he finally blurts out. The last para
graph runs:
Poor little Kate I It was her turn to look at the cot
ton balls and to exhibit symptoms of scarlet fever; and
Cl
Harriet Beecher Stowe, "Isabelle and her Sister Kpte
and their Cousin," Western Monthly Magazine, : :2:72-75, 1834.
52 Ibid.» P* 72.
33 Ibid., p. 73
68
while she is thinking what to say next, you may read
the next piece in the magazine.54
The similarity of these situations to later stories
by Mrs. Stowe, especially "Love versus Law," is clear. The
sketch was also reprinted five years later, under Mrs. Stowe’s
name, in the Cincinnati Chronicle, though never in any of her
books, where it would have been a needless repetition of her
later reworkings of the material.
Following the prize story in April, Hall used her
"Frankness" in May, attributing it to "A Lady," and in July
"Sister Mary," with her initials. These three, reprinted in
The Mayflower of 184-3, show to what extent the young writer
was finding a recognizable manner of her own, commercially
valuable.
The part played by James Hall in developing this
manner has never been recognized. In the books about Mrs.
Stowe he has been barely mentioned, whereas his influence
deserves careful study. For a short period of time he was to
her what Lowell became after the founding of the Atlantic, , a
restraining influence upon her sentimentality, and an en
couragement to her better qualities of observation and humor.
For example, he could review Mrs. Sigourney’s Sketches (1834)
54
Ibid., p. 75.
69
favorably, because "It is calculated to do good," but he
could also make the reservation that "the sentiment is ex
cellent in its way, but there is a little more of it than
suits our taste.*^5 This is precisely the counsel Harriet
Beecher needed, and her work would have been better if Hall’s
influence had lasted longer.
But the editor of the Western Monthly Magazine was as
pugnacious a man as the president of. Lane Theological
Seminary, and in 1834 Hall quarreled violently with the
Beechers, because of his indignation over Lyman’s anti-
Catholic prejudice in his Plea for the. West. "A man may be
an honorable, and an officer of Lane Seminary," he wrote, as
the scope of the disagreement rapidly widened, "without pos-
r / !
sessing the homely virtue of veracity."-0 After this, there
were no further contributions from H.E.B.
Hall’s own interest seems to have shifted from the
magazine to the quarrel, and in June, 1836, he retired from
the Western Monthly. The new editor carried on for only
six unimportant issues before the magazine was abandoned.
Hall himself left journalism for banking, a suitable occupa
tion for the man who showed Harriet Beecher Stowe how litera
ture might be made to pay.
* ’ Western Monthly Magazine, 2:445, 1834
56 » 3:321.
70
As long as the magazine continued under his direction
it was filled with hints that show their effects in Mrs.
Stowe’s work. In February, 1834, to mention one example among
many, the leading article was an elaborate statistical survey
revealing that North America possessed 932 periodicals, that
is, 932 potential m a r k e t s . In the same issue appeared a
favorable review of the Religious Souvenir, to which she
was soon to become a contributor. In many such ways Hall
was clever enough to offer practical suggestions that Miss
Beecher was clever enough to follow successfully. The con
clusion of his magazine’s obituary notice of Hannah More
might have been prophetically written for the death of Mrs.
Stowe, over sixty years later. She was a lady, it read, who
was ’ ’ singularly and not undeservedly successful thro’ life;
her talents and her moral conduct deserved to be; but we think
she was one of those few literary persons who had their re
ward while living.”59
IV. THE CINCINNATI CHRONICLE AND
THE CINCINNATI JOURNAL
Of less importance than the story of the Western
57 Ibid., 2:57-71, 1834, immediately preceding her own
story.
5g Ibid., 2:105, 1834.
• 59 Ibid., 1:597, 1833.
71
Monthly Magazine, yet essential to an appreciation of Mrs.
Stowe’s early literary activities, is the account of her re
lationship to two Cincinnati weekly papers, the Chronicle and
th© Journal. Since complete files of these papers are un
available,^0 more information may possibly appear later.
.The case for the Chronicle is stated by its one-time
editor, E. D. Mansfield; "I published in the Cincinnati
Chronicle what, I believe, was her first printed story."^1
Again he writes of his paper: "Mrs. Stowe, then Miss Beecher,
published her first stories in it."^ 3^ explanation is
that these "first stories" were reprinted in the Chronicle;
editor Mansfield, after forty-five years, did not remember
correctly.
At various dates from May 3, 1334, the Chronicle re
printed Mrs. Stowe’s stories. The prize tale from Hall’s
Western Monthly, the first to be so honored, filled the whole
of page one and half of page two, perhaps the longest contri
bution ever to appear in a single issue of the Chronicle.
"It is a beauteous tale," wrote the editor, "and bears the
60
The best collections are at the library of the
Historical and Philosophical Society of Ohio, in Cincinnati.
6l
Edward Peering Mansfield, Personal Memories, p. 263.
62 IbicU» P. 295.
72
stamp of genius."^3 Later in the same month the Chronicle re
printed "Frankness" without the author’s name. Four years
later "Frankness" was again reprinted, to he followed by
"Cousin William" and "Isabelle and her Sister Kate, and their
Cousin." After it had grown into a daily, the Chronicle con
tinued the policy of reprinting Mrs. Stowe’s tales.
To Mrs. Stowe this publicity must have seemed as
profitable as it was gratifying. Writing was worth whatever
it would bring, she later told the young ladies who asked her
advice. Sell your early writing for what you can get, or
give it away, so that people will have a chance to read it
and develop a taste for more.64 Through the Chronicle re
prints she could give her stories away after she had been
paid for them.
By this means lies. Stowe’s work became known to every
citizen of Cincinnati, establishing her as a literary light
second only to the older, almost revered Mrs. Hentz. By im
plication, the Chronicle put her on a par vrith other writers
who were often reprinted. Of these the Chronicle’s favorites
were Mrs. Child, T. S. Arthur, Miss Sedgwick, and above all
^ Cincinnati Chronicle and Literary Gazette, May 3,
1834.
^ Harriet Beecher Stowe, "Writing— Commercially,"
Hearth and Home, March 13, 1869.
73
, Bars. Sigourney. To be, even locally, on terms of equality
with these writers was, in the thirties, to be well on the
way towards the literary heights. Newspaper readers would
have admitted that Bars. Stowe was at least distinctly promis
ing. The Chronicle reprints helped her gain this reputation.
Her connection with the Journal and Western Luminary
was much closer, though also of slight literary importance.
The Journal was a weekly Presbyterian paper, deeply devoted
to Lyman Beecher and Lane Seminary, and also on close terms
with the New York Evangelist, one of Mrs. Stowe’s other
markets. "While the Journal’s editor, T. Brainerd, was out of
town at the general assembly of the church, his place was
taken as editor pro tern, by young Henry ?»ard Beecher. The
year was 1836, and as Professor Stowe was also away, on his
mission to investigate European education, his young wife
had leisure to assist her favorite brother with the Journal.65
How much she assisted him, and to what purpose, is the
question.
When Mr. Brainerd announced, on May 5> 1836, his im
pending absence, he also announced that his place would be
taken by
a gentleman of piety, talents and scholarship, and a
thorough Presbyterian by birth, education, and choice.
' Charles Edward Stowe, 0£. cit., p. 81.
74
For all he may write we of course can assume no respon- ,,
sibility, hut we think he will give general satisfaction.
The gentleman so described, should have been Henry Ward
Beecher, but apparently the type of thorough Presbyterian was
common in the home city of Lane Seminary, On May nineteenth
Mr, Brainerd announced that the first editor pro tern, had
been too busy to undertake the Journal's work. His successor,
introduced without fanfare, was Henry Ward Beecher, who cer
tainly justified the high recommendation given his predecessor.
Immediately Henry Ward began to make his influence felt
and his personality known. Writing on June second about aboli
tion, he stated: ”We {Editor pro tern.) are partizans for
neither side."67 He also stated: ”Men have, or ought to have,
freedom of discussion in our country.” Discussion was a right
the young man was determined to exercise in his official
capacity. His leading editorial for June second repeated this
ideal. The Journal was, he said, ”open to judicious men of
both sides, and taking extreme ground with none.” Perhaps
the reason was that ”it has a wide circulation in slave-holding
states, and in free states,” for Henry Ward was no less aware
than his sister Harriet of the commercial aspects of doing
i
good.
Cincinnati J ournal and Western Luminary, May 5, 1836.
67 Ibid., June 2, 1836.
75
Thus it will be seen that the file of the J ournal
sheds light upon Henry ?/ard Beecher. It is almost a daily
record of the Beecher family for the period. Lyman was being
tried for heresy, Catherine was publishing her Letters on the
Difficulties of Religion, and even Calvin Stowe sent back
three letters about his European trip. The editor pro tem.
was busy with the Birney riots, the wrongs of the Seminole
Indians, and the other news stories of the eventful summer.
Only Harriet Beecher Stowe was left unaccounted for in
the pages of the Journal. Since her first children were born
in September, no doubt preparations for motherhood were her
main concern. Oddly enough, the one article she mentions
writing for the Journal never appeared. It was, she wrote
her husband, a protest against mob rule, done "in a light,
sketchy style, designed to draw attention to a long editorial
of Henry*s in which he considered the subject fully and
68
seriously.’ * Though two such full and serious editorials
69
appeared in successive issues, Mrs. Stowe’s breezy sketch
accompanied neither of them. It was obviously ’ ’ killed,"
either by the editor pro tent,ort more likely, by the inexor
able printer.
Charles Edward Stowe, 0£. cit., p. 82.
^ Cincinnati, Journal, August 4, 11, 1836.
76
Whatever writing Mrs. Stowe may have done for the
Journal, it was not, personal enough to reveal her authorship.
On purely internal evidence, one informal editorial may be
considered hers. It embodies the favorite Beecher recollec
tion of Roxana and the tulip bulbs; it demonstrates the edu
cational principles of Catherine’s Moral Instructor; and it
is on exactly the topic important to a retired school teacher
who was also an expectant mother. It is not an important
note, but it is thoroughly characteristic of Mrs. Stowe;
”Bring up a child in the way he should go”
It is very certain, that one way a child should go
in is the way of truth, of uncompromising veracity; yet
we verily believe that parents form habits of falsehood
and deceit in their children five times where they en
graft truth once. ’ ’ Charles, did you break that flower?
have I hot told you a hundred times not to touch it?
say, sir, did you not break it?” The child sees that
truth and a whipping lie on one side, a lie and escape
on the other— now however pure and bright truth looks
alone, in such company it has a very crabbed aspect to
young folks— Charles denies stoutly that he ever touched
the flower, and to make it good, lies a dozen times in
all sorts of shapes— ”he did not break the flower— he
did not know that it was broken— -he had not been into
the garden, and he did not know that it had been put
into the garden either;” each several part of which is
a falsehood. The child has done wrong undoubtedly— but
what has a parent done who put his child, whose habits
were not formed, into circumstances where it was morally
certain he would fall? In ninety-nine cases in a hundred,
if a parent puts his child to choose between a whipping
and a falsehood, he will choose the latter. We should
on the contrary, when a child has done wrong, encourage
it to confess it— never threaten— never assume an angry
look, nor in any way make the child afraid to speak
truth.’0
Cincinnati Journal, June 2, 1836.
77
V. CONTRIBUTIONS TO EASTERN PUBLICATIONS
From the Cincinnati Journal to the New York Evangelist
was a greater step geographically than culturally, for the
latter weekly paper, like the former, was staunchly
Presbyterian. The Evangelist accurately described itself as
"Devoted to Revivals, Doctrinal Discussion and Religious
Intelligence Generally." It reprinted matter from the
Cincinnati Journal, thereby repaying the compliment of the
Journal in quoting from it.?1 The medium of Harriet Beecher’s
introduction to it is thus easily seen. She was led to it
by her family, rather than introduced by a disinterested out
sider like James Hall.
Evangelist also ran a department of "Secular
Intelligence" and used nonsectarian material of a moralizing
tendency by writers like Mrs. Sigourney.?^ It was determined
in its opposition to theaters, and it once denounced the
singers of Italian opera in no doubtful language: "As for
usefulness, for making mankind better or happier, we cannot
envy their consciences."73
7^ Evangelist. September 17, 1831.
72 Ibid., October 22, 1831; March 15, 1834; August 1,
1844.
73 IMd*> April 27, 1833.
78
This editorial policy could never stimulate young
Harriet Beecher to literary growth, because it offered her
neither new ideas nor new methods of expression. Her first
contribution (1835), initialed "S.B." was a temperance tale
entitled "Uncle Enoch," a plotless narrative of how a bene
volent deacon induced people to sign the abstainer’s pledge.
As a brief quotation will show, its opening is typical of
her style at this time:
Few people have passed many hours in Elliston without
hearing, at least, of Uncle Enoch. Enoch Mullins was
his original nameV" but the latter part had long since
fallen into desuetude, and Enoch, with the affectionate
prefix of Uncle, was the title by which he was univer
sally known and addressed.74
To add that the kind deacon had three lovely daughters who
helped in his work, is to complete the story.
Sixteen years later, in 1851, almost on the verge of
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Mrs. Stowe was still writing for the
Evangelist. During the intervening years her offerings had
been neither frequent nor on the whole significant, but they
had maintained her relationship with her father’s creed.
Several sketches were reprinted in her collections of 1843 and
1855.
Of the unreprinted pieces several, like "So Many Calls,"
74
Ibid., May 30, 1835.
79
dealt with, the need of giving money to religious causes.
One spoke of the possibility of spiritualism, a subject of
great interest to her laterJ & Others presented, mildly but
77
firmly, her family’s objections to the Roman Catholics.
In addition to these strictly religious papers, a few spread
more widely, like two articles on "Literary Epidemics."7^
If Mrs. Stowe’s contributions to the Evangelist appear
subdued, on the whole, the reason may well be that her
father’s spirit was restraining her; for only after his death
in 1863 did she dare allow her benevolence to break away from
sectarian limitations. Especially in the Christian Union,
after 1870, was she able, aided and abetted by her favorite
brother, to have her full say on the subject nearest her
heart.
Meanwhile, as if in emulation of Mrs. Sigourney {who
stopped counting after she had published two thousand pieces
in periodicals)7^ Mrs. Stowe was releasing her work through
7 5
For example, "A. Parable," Evangelist. February 24,
1842.
7^ "On the Ministrations of Departed Spirits in this
World," Evangelist. January 25, 1849.
7^ "De Ranee and Fenelon— A Contrast," Evangelist.
July 7, 1842; "What Will the American People Do?" Evangelist.
January 28, February 5, I846.
^ Evangelist, July 28, 1842, and July 13, 1843.
79 Lydia H. Sigourney, Letters of Life, p. 366.
a large number of magazines and gift annuals. Mrs,
Sigourney*s own Religious Souvenir opened its pa.ges to her.
So did the Christian Keepsake, which numbered among its other
contributors Mrs. Sigourney, Mrs. Hale, and Catherine Beecher.
The Gift, as has been mentioned, printed "Love versus Law”
under the editorship of Miss Leslie, and somebody was so
struck by another of Mrs. Stowe’s tales, "Mark Meridian,"
that it was published in book form with a story by Miss Leslie
herself and two by T. S. Arthur.®^ The august Token, the
aristocrat of the annuals, printed one of her most character-
81
istic early stories, "The Yankee Girl.,* * which was never re
printed but is interesting because it foreshadows— in the
clash between a sturdy New England maiden and a questionable
aristocrat— a situation used in both The Minister* s Wooing
and Oldtown Folks. Her work also appeared in the Banquet,
the Christian Souvenir, and the Yiolet^ as well as,* later, in
Mr. T. S. Arthur*s Temperance Offering for 1853.^ In the
complete list of her contributions to the annuals, industri
ous marketing is shown as well as industrious writing.
Lyle H. Wright, American Fiction, 1744-1850, pp. 1 2 4 - 1 2 5 .
^ Harriet Beecher Stowe, "The Yankee Girl," Token and
Atlantic Souvenir for 1842, pp. 63-81.
82
See the index to Thompson, American Literary Annuals
and Gift Books.
^ The valuable unpublished index of American Annuals
by Dr. Bradford A. Booth, of the University of California at
Los Angeles, indicates that Mrs. Stowe contributed to nine
annuals between 1839 and 1865.
81
Godey’s Lady*s Book, another of her regular markets,
made much the same appeal as many of the annuals. Though it
published work by important authors (Emerson, Poe, Irving),®^"
its mainstays were such tried and true minor figures as Mrs,
Sigourney, who was also a member of the editorial board, Mrs.
Osgood, Mrs. Hentz of Cincinnati, Miss Leslie, Mrs. M. St.
Leon Loud, Miss Gould, and Mr. T. S. Arthur.
It was with such devotees of commercialized virtue that
Mrs. Stowe was thrown into competition in the pages of the
Lady’s Book. Several of her sketches later republished ap
peared cheek to cheek with their efforts. Among those never
reclaimed were a moral tale about a spoiled girl, "The Only
Daughter,"®-* a skit called " O l y m p i a n a , in which Greek
deities were modernized in the style of 1840, and a secular
poem translated from Goethe.®^
A complete analysis of Mrs. Stowe’s commercial writing
before Uncle Tom’s Cabin would be more wearisome than profit
able, and yet certain necessary conclusions follow such a
survey. She could write as carelessly as her more complaisant
editors permitted, or as carefully as her more exacting editors
Ruth E. Finley, The Lady of Godey’s, p. 256.
35 Harriet Beecher Stowe, "The Only Daughter,” Godey’s
Lady’s Book. 18:241-243, 1839.
Harriet Beecher Stowe, "Olympiana,” Godey’s Lady’s
Book. 18:241-243, 1839.
®? Harriet Beecher Stowe, "The Fisherman Caught,"
Godey’s Lady’s Book, 23:11, 1841.
82
demanded. "The Yankee Girl" is as superior to ’ ’ The Seamstress”
as the Token to the Religious Souvenir. She never wrote
against her conscience, and she never needed to appear in an
i
unworthy light, for her editors were fully as particular as
she was. The product she sold was wholesome entertainment,
her public the masses.
Yet however careless her writing, it must be remembered
in her favor that she never reached the extremes of sentimen
tality of some of her contemporaries. In.the same Religious
Souvenir (18-4-0) with ’ ’ The Seamstress” is a story in which the
sinfulness of giving a social party is wept over as if it
were the destruction of Pompeii. Mrs. Stowe was never to
equal that absurdity. ”The Seamstress” is, after all, a
worthy if wordy plea for the unfortunate that has at least
some connection with wholesome living. Whether or not her
writing was skillful, she never failed to show normal human
intelligence. As the best of these sketches show, she had
learned at least one valuable lesson from James Hall: to be
freshly observant, humorously moral. This was the abiding
influence of the Western Monthly Magazine.
This salutary principle was always in conflict with
another, which might be attributed to the Evangelist or,
further back, to sister Catherine’s pedagogy. The desire to
do good sometimes refused to be kept within the same limits
set by Judge Hall. The annuals allowed her to run wild,
confirming her bad habit of easy, conventional writing,
challenging neither her keenness of expression nor her sub-
I
tlety of thought. "The Tea-Rose," a special favorite with
Mrs. Hale, is only one example of many aesthetic misfortunes.®®
»
Nowhere is this tendency toward easy ineptitude clearer
than in two prefaces written during these early years. When
her brother Charles prepared a fictional treatment of pas
sages from scripture, published in 1849 as The Incarnation;
or. Pictures of the Virgin and Her Son, Harriet was called
.upon, as the fiction-writing Beecher, for an introduction.
Her brother’s book, as she described it, aimed "to reproduce
the sacred narrative, under the aspects which it presents to
an imaginative mind," and by "blending together the outlines
of truth and fiction" to reach "a reasonable probability."®9
Years later, this was to be exactly her own aim in Woman in
Sacred History and Footsteps of the Master.
The difficulties of the attempt impressed her:
To meet everyone’s ideal, to shock no one’s tastes, to
impinge on no one’s doctrinal views, and to make in so
extensive a subject, no mistakes in points of research,
is perhaps a height of success not to be dreamed of.90
i
®® In Godey’s Lady’s Book, 18:115-122, 1839; Sarah
Josenha Hale, Woman's Record; or Sketches of All'Distinguished
Women, pp. 837-33# (18527:
®9 Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Incarnation, pp. iv, vi.
9° Ibid., p. viii.
84
Charles’ success was something short of complete. When the
angel had informed Mary that she was to give birth to a
child, the comment of Charles Beecher was simply: “Such an
announcement, so plainly spoken to an affianced virgin by a
total stranger!”91 Even a sister, it seems, should have
paused over that exclamation. But Mrs. Stowe gave the im
pression of ranking The Incarnation above Paradise Lost, be
cause it would do more good.
Another early preface is also part of her spiritual
autobiography. Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, whose collected
works she was called upon to introduce to the reading public,
was a violently anti-Catholic writer. To her the Roman
Catholic Church was an "Apostate Church,” whose "wily and re
morseless instigators" incessantly "work the vast machinery
of Popish aggression and aggrandisement throughout the
world."92 since this was Lyman Beecher’s view, it was suit
able that Lyman Beecher’s daughter be called upon to praise
it in Charlotte Elizabeth’s fiction.
This duty she performed; and' also more. She used pre
cisely the approach to Catholicism that she was later to use
regarding slavery: that it was the system which,was at fault,
91 Ibid., p. 59-
92 Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, The. Siege of Derry, pp.
ix-x.
65
not individuals. The following words about Mrs. Tonna also
foreshadow what was to be said many times of herself: "She
belongs to a class whose logic is more of the heart than of
the head, and of whom therefore we may expect a strong lean
ing towards ultraism."93 Charlotte Elizabeth, like the
future author of Uncle Tom1 s Cabin, was a Noble Woman who
"relinguished every other prospect for the simple effort to
do good."94 Did she profit thereby? Yes, but "fame and
reputation have to her been unexpected, though we do not say
unappreciated accessions."95 Carried away by this spectacle
of female merit, Mrs.; Stowe asserted that Charlotte Elizabeth
was more moral, though less graphic, than Charles Dickens.
Going the whole distance of eulogy, she forgot her favorites
Bunyan and Baxter to say of Personal Recollections: "We know
of no piece of autobiography in the English language which
can compare with this in richness of feeling and description,
and power of exciting interest."96
Thus did Mrs. Stowe exhibit, before Uncle Tomis Cabin
and long before Lady Byron Vindicated, that intoxication with
93 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Preface, The Works of
Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, I, v.
94 cit.
95 Ibid., p. vi.
96 Ibid., p. v.
86
moral fervor which was later to mean so much to her. In
184-4 she was already a crusader, looking for a crusade.
51. MRS. STOWE’S TYPE OF WRITER-
Now that the details have been set down, one wants to
consider the picture they make, so as not to miss the forest
in the trees. Just how far did all this writing take Mrs.
Stowe, and where did it leavexher? Is there not a long jump
between these trifles and Uncle Tom’s Cabin? To answer the
first of these questions first, this early writing allied
Mrs. Stowe to a distinct group of women writers of the time,
with whom she never ceased to have relationship. She had
much more in common with some of these women than has ever
been explained, for they were all successors to Miss Sedgwick
and Mrs. Sigourney. Among them Miss Susan ?/arner and Mrs.
Elizabeth Prentiss are outstanding; and their similarities
with Mrs. Stowe need to be pointed out, so that her distinc
tions may be also observed. The situation is unfortunately
a complicated one, yet too essential to be scanted.
When Harriet Beecher decided to write professionally
she had, if not quite the World before her.and Providence.her
guide, at least three distinct possibilities for her own ex
ploration. The heady intellectual woman writer who was to
come a little later, in George Eliot and Mrs. Humphrey Ward,
was represented only by Margaret Fuller; and the independent
87
experimenter, like Emily Dickinson or Gertrude Stein, was
still farther in the future. - lacking these, the early
nineteenth century offered only the types of the sublimely
epic, the passionately romantic, and the piously domestic.
Harriet specialized almost entirely in the third of these.
Among women writers on the grand scale the most out
standing was Mrs. Brooks, known as Maria del Occidente, whose
Biblical epic Zophiel was lavishly praised by Rufus G.
97
Griswold. Amid her rich rhymes and a battery of poetic
names like Egla and Meles, Mrs. Brooks ' admiring contempora
ries found beauties equal to Dante and Milton. Less elevated,
but compensatingly more popular, were the stories such as
Godey*s used with titles like "Micaella; or, the Duchess of
Burgundy's Fool— an Historical Tale.” On the higher level,
Mrs. Louisa J. Hall is another of the type faithfully an
alyzed in Griswold's Female Poets of America. Her Miriam,
a poetic drama of early Christianity, was composed in 1825-
1826. Her conception of grandeur may be illustrated by the
following sentence from Miriam:
Within these mightly halls of sceptered Rome
A thousand temples rise unto her gods,
Bearing their lofty domes unto the skies,
Grac'd with the proudest pomp of earth; their shrines
Glittering with gems, their stately colonnades,
Their dreams of genius wrought into bright forms,
Instinct with grace and godlike majesty,
97
Rufus Wilmot Griswold, The Female Poets of America,
pp. 69-89.
88
Their ever smoking altars, white robed priests,
And all the pride of gorgeous sacrifice.98
Upon this limping sublimity Mrs. Stowe sternly, if
perhaps reluctantly, turned her back. Her childhood tragedy
99
Cleon, which introduced the cruelties of Nero, had been
indeed just such a play as Mrs. Hall’s Miriam or Mrs.
100
Elizabeth Oakes-Smith’s The Homan Tribute; and the record
states that she abandoned it with sadness. In her profes
sional days, though the magazines welcomed such flights into
baseless grandeur, she was seldom tempted. A forgotten
sketch in The Mayflower of 1855, a description of Christ’s
procession to the cross, is one of her few sustained attempts
101
in this vein. An epic vision from the Evangelist, ’ ’ Now
102
we see through a glass darkly,” was never salvaged. There
are passages, however, in her novels that recall such ”grace
and godlike majesty” as Mrs. Hall’s; and her Italian novel of
the reformation, Agnes of Sorrento, was planned too nearly in
the same vein for its own good.
As romantic passion meant so much less to her than
98
Ibid., p. 112.
99
For extracts, see Annie Fields, o£. cit., pp. 44-49.
100
Griswold, oj>. cit., p. 1?9.
101
Harriet Beecher Stowe, "A Scene in Jerusalem,” in
The Mayflower, 1855, PP. 412-419. Originally in the Evangelist.
i o?
Evangelist, June 8, 1843.
89
sublimity, Mrs. Stowe was less tempted by the lures of
feminine eroticism. Magazine editors might be susceptible
to melodious lovelorn maidens, but not Calvin Stowe’s wife.
She never referred to Mrs. Rowson who, back in the eighteenth
century, seems to have been the first native example of this
type of writer. Mrs. Stowe can have felt no urge to follow
her, or even that purer flame, Poe’s friend Frances Osgood who,
accusing herself of being "a soul-worn slave in Custom’s iron
✓
chain,” wrote:
Had we but met in life’s delicious spring,
Ere wrong and falsehood taught me doubt and fear,
Ere hope came back with worn and wounded wing,
To die upon the heart she could not cheer. ...
In Byron and Mme. de Stael, Mrs. Stowe had encountered such
wayward sentiments, but she kept them, when she could, for
misled, pathetic creatures like the light-headed girls in
The Pearl of Orr’s Island and Pink and White Tyranny. From
the very first she shunned girlish love-longing for the
soberer sentiments of the Christian wife and mother.
This last was, though not the only, by far the most
popular temperament among literary women. Mrs. Sigourney
and Miss Sedgwick were no more perfect in their pious resig
nation than Miss Hannah Gould, the housekeeper poetess, a
great favorite with Judge Hall and a steady contributor to
" k * 10 Western Monthly. But the ones most worthy of observation,
103
Griswold, o]3. cit., p. 273.
90
as showing the fine flower of the tradition in which Mrs.
Stowe worked, were the younger women, Susan Warner, author
Wide Wide Worldt the great success of 1850, and Mrs.
Elizabeth Prentiss, author of Stepping Heavenward, the great
success of 1869# Miss Warner prepared the way for Mrs.
Stowe's success, and Mrs. Prentiss, entirely without liter
ary encouragement, carried religious emotionalism to it3
ultimate extreme.
As far as The Wide, Wide World is concerned, its ac
count is easily reckoned, for pathos and piety were the lead
ing ingredients of this lengthy account of a troubled girl
hood. Sent from New York City into the country by her dying
mother, Ellen Montgomery suffered under a harsh but not in
human paternal aunt, found godly friends and, after becoming
an orphan, repeated the round of suffering and friendship
under the affectionate but rough guardianship of a maternal
uncle. A sweet and studious girl, she grew sweeter and more
studious through adversity, finally becoming a true Christian
of Mrs. Stowe's own model, earnest and charitable, strict
with herself but tender toward others. The undramatic story
depended principally upon the emotional appeal of mother,
home, and heaven.
Though the superiority of Uncle Tom's Cabin is obvious,
the two books have a common moral basis. Readers who liked
the first must have loved the second. Said Mrs. Montgomery:
91
"God bless my darling child! and make her His own— and bring
her to that home where parting cannot be."^^ It is the same
plea that Mrs. Stowe had made for the elected souls of her
early sketches. In her first novel, she broadened her plea
to include a subject race. Pilgrim*s Progress was a book
both authors loved, but Mrs. Stowe, out of her suffering,
realized more clearly the difficulties in the journey to
paradise.
Even more important than Susan Warner1s novel as a
commentary on Mrs. Stowe is the work of her humbler contem
porary, Mrs. Elizabeth Prentiss (1818-1S78). The two women’s
biographies show how much their backgrounds conform to a
type, for Mrs. Prentiss was also the daughter of a distin
guished New England minister, Edward Payson, whom Calvin
105
Stowe regarded highly. * * As a young woman, Elizabeth had
first taught school, but had later become the wife of a distin
guished minister and professor of theology. In her family,
as in Harriet’s , was a great female scholar, her elder sister
Louisa, who had directed her intellectual development, and a
great orator, her brother-in-law S. S. Prentiss, whose early
death alone deprived him of enduring fame,
. In more personal respects, the two women exemplified a
104 Susan Warner, The Wide, Wide World, p. 66.
105
• George L. Prentiss, Life and Letters of Elizabeth ,
Prentiss, p. 6.
92
common type. Although Mrs. Prentiss had the broader intel
lectual background, she shared Mrs. Stowe’s love of Hichard
Baxter and John-Bunyan, whose'Pilgrim* s Progress she had
learned complete in her childhood. Like Mrs. Stowe she had
undergone Puritan conversion, and later altered her views.
Even more than Mrs. Stowe, she suffered from ill-health and
worry, but she was strong enough to raise her family and
well enough to write twenty-five books, for young and old,
106
on New England, proper living, and above all proper dying.
Mrs. Prentiss was, as these similarities show, one of
the possible goals toward which Mrs. Stowe’s early work
pointed. To do good for people was her aim in writing; and
to induce tears was the means she used. Though Stepping
Heavenward sold its hundreds of thousands of -copies, it never
raised its author to a pinnacle. She became in fact what
Mrs. Stowe might have been--except for Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Stepping Heavenward, which was published in book form
in 1869, after having run as a serial in a Chicago church
paper, the Advance, is a classic of nineteenth century sen
timental piety. In form, the book is the journal of Katherine
Mortimer, beginning in 1831,when the girl is sixteen years old,
and relating her growth into grace. Katherine, an impish,
selfish girl, struggles vainly against the sentimentalism of
106 Ibid., pp. 568-573
93
her time. In .spite of herself, marriage, suffering, disci
pline transform the rebellious child of nature into a saint.
"It is a blessed thing to be a motherI" is almost a complete
summary of the lesson Katherine learned. -The reader’s last
glimpse of her is as a bed-ridden helpless invalid. The old
family physician is visiting her:
"Ah, these lovely children are explained
now,” he said.
"Do you really think," I asked, "that it
has been good for my children to have a . .
feeble, afflicted mother?"
"Yes, I really think so. A disciplined
mother— disciplined children."
This comforting thought is one of the
last drops in a cup of felicity already
full.107
To this extreme of self-abnegation Harriet Beecher
Stowe herself might have come, had not the success of Uncle
Tom’s Cabin given her a new direction. The early work that
has been surveyed in this chapter was as passive, almost as
gentle as Mrs. Prentiss’. A little longer social obscurity
was all she needed to decide that the life of the spirit was
best, without worldly prosperity. After a life of such ob
scurity, she would have been ready to put on her own tomb
stone Mrs. Prentiss’ lines for hers:
No more tedious lessons,
No more sighing and tears,
But a bound into home immortal.
And blessed, blessed years.108
107
Elizabeth Prentiss, Stepping Heavenward, entry of
June 13, 1858.
108
Marion Harland, Our Famous Women.
94
How then did Mrs. Stowe escape? Stylistically, she
never wholly escaped, hut emotionally she escaped through an
act of hold initiative. When she began writing Uncle Tom*s
Cabin she was forty years old, sick, poor, and overworked.
In many of her moods, as the second chapter of this study
has made clear, she was completely miserable. A lifetime of
work had brought only the necessity of more work.
At this moment chance interfered to help her. The
literary stage had been prepared for sentimentalism by such
as Mrs. Sigourney and Miss Warner. She had herself learned
the trade of writing. The Congress of the United States and
the Supreme Court of the land now miraculously provided the
occasion of the Fugitive Slave Law, by which sentimentalism
could be attached to a burning issue. Incidentally, with no
planning by the Congress or the Court, that burning issue,
the plight of the Negro, stirred the depths of her soul. Her •
means of expression was at hand in a paper for whieh she was
writing household stories. Her desire for a richer life at
tached itself to the symbol of the blaek race.
Into Uncle Tom’s Cabin, therefore, Mrs. Stowe was
able to pour her whole life, everything she had learned about
writing and everything she had learned about living. .The
sentiment of the annuals and the gift books was there; the
unction of the New York Evangelist; the lesson of sharp ob
servation learned from James Hall. It was all a wonderful
95
summary of- her past life, completely dwarfing anything she
had done before, yet built inevitably from her experiences.
The leap from Godey’s Lady* s Book to Uncle Tom* s Cabin was
inspired by her fear of the bloodhounds of her past. She was
the only literary lady of her generation whose life had been
a harsh apprenticeship.
CHAPTER IV
UNCLE TOM* S CABIN
I; THE DESIGN OF THE BOOK
A rhetorician could outline the design of Uncle Tom’s
Cabin in a paragraph, since it is easily stated. The book is
one of those Victorian novels in which, according to a common
practice,ffthe adventures of two groups of characters are al
ternated to give an inclusive picture of society and to pro
vide a variety of emotional appeal. Mrs. Stowe strictly con
forms to this pattern. In Uncle Tom1s Cabin the alternating
groups commence as slaves in the border state of Kentucky.
Tom, a middle-aged, intelligent colored man, is sold down
the river. His experiences, forming the main plot, introduce
numerous types of slaveholders and their human possessions.
In the second plot, Eliza, a young yellow-skinned matron, is
the central figure. As she flees to Canada various characters
are introduced typical of the abolitionist enthusiasts along
the underground railway.
Objectively skimmed, the story offers little more— for
unwary readers follow it through without noting even that if
Tom represents the passive suffering of a Christ, Eliza em
bodies maternal love.
For the greater part, the two distinct plots are devel
oped with an almost architectural balance that extends to the
obvious strong contrast between the final refuge of Eliza’s
party in free Ontario and the last solitary misery of Tom in
despotic Louisiana. This main design is easily kept in mind
and for a clear conception of the story as story one need
add only a few other characters, without more details than
might appear as notes describing the dramatis personae of a
printed play.
In the approximate order of their appearance the
reader meets:
Mr. Shelby, Tom’s first owner, a Kentucky gentleman
forced by economic stringency to sell Tom in spite of the
humanitarian objections of Mrs. Shelby and the affection of
the upstanding lad, Master Shelby.
* Haley, the crude slave dealer who buys both Tom and
Eliza's little boy; his friend Loker, a more brutal slave
dealer than Haley.
Slaves on the Shelby plantation, including Tom’s wife
Phoebe.
^ George Harris, Eliza’s husband, a highly talented,
nearly white slave on a neighboring plantation, who also es
capes to Canada and eventual reunion with his wife and child
Workers on the underground railway: specifically,
Mrs. Bird and her husband, United States Senator from Ohio;
various Quakers, and others, necessary to the action but not
carried throughout the story.
Mr. Augustine St. Clare, Tom’s second kind owner,
prevented by sudden death "from freeing Tom; his sister from
Vermont, Miss Ophelia, the voice of righteousness according
to the old Calvinistic standards; his wife, a cruel and vain
daughter of southern aristocracy; his saintly daughter Eva,
proof of the saying that the good die young.
Slaves of the St. Clare household, notably Topsy, a
youngster about the age of Eva.
y? Simon Legree, Tom’s third owner, viciousness incarnate,
defiler of women, torturer of the helpless, and murderer of
Tom.
Slaves on Legree's plantation, malicious or sodden
representations of the worst that slavery can do.
Such is the skeleton of the story. The substance of
the book eludes such tabulation, for the power and individu
ality of Uncle Tom* s Cabin do not consist of this conventional
literary type of material but, to a greater degree than in
most novels, of the author’s assumptions and incidental revela
tions. Actions and characters, whatever may be required of
them in the novel, are manipulated to stress the primary
ideas that were so dear to Lyman Beecher’s daughter and Calvin
Stowe’s wife, ideas in comparison with which the story is
secondary.
To follow tactfully a middle course, avoiding both
the obvious and the esoteric, is especially difficult in
99
speaking of Uncle Tom* s Cabin, for most people sadly deceive
themselves about their acquaintance with it. They have heard
enough about it to feel that they know it; yet their knowledge,
acquired by seepage rather than conscious effort, is more
likely to be fragmentary and incorrect than they realize.
Who really reads Uncle Tom* s Cabin nowadays? Pub
lishers’ catalogues and library records prove that the book
is read, but it is more than difficult to discover an adult
in the act. The fact that it is usually neglected after
childhood is unfortunate,1 for it has different values for
older, more critical readers than for children. Dabblers in
psychology can glean many a telling detail with which to
build up their own theories or illustrate Doctor Freud’s.
More than they, students of the American Scene can profit, if
their interest extends beneath the obvious surface.
Those contradictions inherent in human nature, which
art should and great art does objectify, show nowhere else -so
clearly as in the half-expression of a book like Uncle Tom* s
Cabin. Modern readers may not hope to find in it the excite
ment of their forefathers, to whom chattel-slavery was a burn
ing issue; but they can still find responses to the no less
significant issues of social restraint and personal freedom.
1 Stark Young is an exception. See his **Uncle Tom’s
Measure,** New Republic. 76:212-213, 1933*
100
Half-expression? In explanation, allow a careful
reader to catalogue the fundamental weaknesses of this famous
book, the flaws that preclude artistic excellence:
1. The author’s lack of information on the life of
the South.
2. Her excessive emotionalism,
3. Her unwearied repetition of her religious and eth
ical theories.
4. Her unconscious introduction of her personal prob
lems into her characters and situations.
With these topics in mind, readers will find it com
paratively easy to comprehend the scope of Mrs. Stowe’s book
as it grew out of her character and training.
II. THE OPENING CHAPTERS
To turn to the opening pages of Uncle Tom’s Cabin is
to be introduced to a lady whose sense of propriety, in her .
careful use of the word gentleman, is more acute than her
sense of diction, as shown by her careless use, in the suc
ceeding line, of the word parties:
For convenience’ sake, we have said, hitherto, two gentle
men. One of the parties, however, when critically ex-
amined, did not seem, strictly speaking, to come under
the species.2
2 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. 1878 edi
tion, p. 1. The italics are Mrs. Stowe’s.
101
Continuing with the description of the questionable party
drinking wine in a well-furnished dining parlor in the town
of P______ in Kentucky, one soon suspects the author of a
dislike for the fellow. Haley by name, he was overdressed,
she complains, wore too much jewelry, spoke ungrammatically,
and indulged in "various profane expressions, which not even
the desire to be graphic in our account shall induce us to
transcribe.”3 Obviously a virtuous lady, this author, to
whom morality means more than either art or fact. Will she
present the whole truth? Never! for this is to be a contro
versial tale.
As the objectionable Haley sits talking with Mr.
Shelby, drinking his reluctant host’s wine and brandy, the
narrative proper is promptly begun by the mention of Tom, not
yet avuncular, whose virtues are extolled by the master to
the prospective purchaser. Eliza’s child, rushing into the
room and performing an impromptu minstrel act with singing,
dancing, and mimicking, is soon followed by his mother, a
quadroon of about twenty-five whose ravishing beauty draws
justified praise from the businesslike Haley.
As these unusual persons appear, what fiction addict
can resist curiosity over their futures? Before he knows the
direction, he is eager to set out; no matter how long the
3 Harriet Beecher Stowe, loc. cit.
102
serial, he will be held fast until the end. With economy
and skill, the drama has already started, for the dismayed
mother Eliza has recognized the mission of the slave-trader.
The fear .which is to be one of the dominant notes of the book
is clearly indicated in an impassioned interview between her
and her mistress.
Meanwhile the crass Haley has expressed what Mrs. Stowe
consistently regarded as the most dangerous heresy about the
Negroes: "These critters ain’t like white folks, you know,"^
he explains, a denial of humanity to the slaves that was
anathema to Mrs. Stowe. And yet almost simultaneously is
introduced, in Haley’s references to ’ ’ yellow gals,”5 a horror
of racial intermixture that is irrational for an advocate of
equality. The problem of interbreeding was to keep recurring
to her, and she was to advance many explanations except the
obvious Gilbertian one that love levels ranks only within
reasonable limits.
For the remainder of the first chapter Mrs. Stowe
skillfully forces Haley to damn himself through his own
speeches, only to overdo the effect by permitting Mr. Shelby
to damn him in soliloquy. In the art of fiction, it becomes
immediately apparent, Mrs. Stowe is handicapped by her past,
^ Zkid.» P»' 6.
5 Ibid., p. S.
103
for her Lady*s Book mannerisms never leave her. Not content
with a story that speaks for itself, she speaks for it and
compels it to speak for her. No one sensitive to the niceties
of narration can read Uncle Tom* s Cabin without suffering.
She and T. S. Arthur belong almost to the same school; and
the National Era appropriately followed Uncle Tom* s Cabin
with one of its many serials by Mrs. Southworth.
In the second chapter, Eliza and her husband become
the center of attention. The young colored man, to whom is
ascribed mechanical genius equal to Eli Whitney’s, is shown
the victim of an envious master’s hatred. By the uncredited
artist who so felicitously illustrated the edition of 1878
he is portrayed as an aristocrat with the general facial cast
of a young Edgar Allan Poe; and one looking upon this image
of George Harris no longer doubts that his brow grew dark
and his eyes burned as he rehearsed the story of his wrongs
and planned his escape:
Yes, Eliza, it’s all misery, misery, misery! My life is
bitter as wormwood; the very life is burning out of me.
I’m a poor, miserable, forlorn drudge ... My master!
and who made him my master? That's what I think of,— >
what right has he to me? I’m a man as much as he is.
I’m a better man than he is. I know more about business
than he does . .
In such high dudgeon the noble slave announces his plans for
escape.
6 Ibid., _p. 18
104
After this emphatic preparation, the story shifts
from George to his wife. The spectacular climax, Eliza's
wild leap out of her pursuers' clutches and across the Ohio
River, is well known--and inaccurately, for there were no
bloodhounds in the original, only in Aiken's play. In Mrs.
Stowe's words:
She caught her child and sprang down the steps ... In
that dizzy moment her feet to her scarce seemed to touch
the ground, and a moment brought her to the water's edge.
Right on behind they came; and, nerved with strength
such as God gives only to the desperate, with one wild
cry and flying leap, she vaulted sheer over the turbid
current by the shore, on to the rafter of ice beyond.
It was a desperate leap,— impossible to anything but mad
ness and despair . . . The huge green fragment of ice on
which she alighted pitched and creaked as her weight
came on it, but she stayed there not a moment. With
wild cries and desperate energy she leaped to another and
still another cake; stumbling,— leaping,— slipping,—
springing upwards again! Her shoes are gone,— her stock
ings cut from her feet,--while blood marked every step;
but she saw nothing, felt nothing, till dimly, as in. a
dream, she saw the Ohio side, and a man helping her up
the bank.7
That is the whole account in a half page, so concise
that the unnamed artist of 1S?8 was able to present it com
plete in one action-picture. In a score of lines, Eliza
the brave young mother was immortalized.
The continued effectiveness of this frenzied concep
tion is well illustrated in the ballet scenario Tom by E. E.
Cummings, the modernist poet, which was published in 1935.
7 ^id., pp. 73-75.
105
Mr. Cummings seems, to have been following the play, rather
than the novel, but he has successfully preserved the spirit
of the original, although the selective process has gone far.
Here is his version of the ice-crossing, with his own align
ment slightly - changed:
dance of Crossing the Icechoked River . . . Eliza
rising: totteringly balancing herself; on the squirm
ing brightness, Eliza leapwhirls to another on which:
staggering; she sinks; rises: balancingly: and
whirlleaps to another— zigzagging gradually her way
outward, toward the audience, from brightness to
brightness
hither-and-thither meanwhile, in the high distant
darkness from which Eliza came, spurt brutally lumi
nous dogfaces; framing with intricate frustrations
her crude whirlleaping— reelsinking-staggerrising-
leapwhirling progress?
Around Mrs. Stowe’s account of Eliza’s jump, much of
the succeeding action gathers. The immediate result, Haley’s
conversation with his friend Loker, an even more brutal type
of slave dealer, affords another excellent opportunity for
Mrs. Stowe’s best literary device, the self-condemnation of
characters who act against God’s will. In the heart-breaking
stories told so glibly by these debased traders, there is a
. grotesque humor that strikes more deeply into the underground
passages of human nature than Mrs. Stowe was accustomed to
explore. She used the same device in the withering remarks
of noble-principled.Mrs. Shelby to her weak husband:
® ,1. E. Cummings, Tom, p. 17.
This is God’s curse on slavery ... I was a fool to
think I could make anything good out of such a deadly
evil. It is a sin to hold a slave under laws like ours,-
I always felt it was,'— I always thought so when I was a
girl,— I thought so still more after I joined the church;
but I thought I could gild it over,— I thought, by kind
ness, and care, and instruction, I could make the condi
tion of mine better than freedom,— fool that I was 19
Succumbing thus early to Noble Womanhood, by giving
Mrs. Shelby a sensitive conscience that not even a New
England Lady educated at Miss Pierce’s sohool would have op
portunity to develop, Mrs. Stowe was willing to sacrifice
historic probability to one of the smouldering undercurrents
of the entire story: the woes of woman, the griefs of
mothers. In telling of Eliza’s escape, she emphasizes the
mother’s struggle. and indeed the artist, following her text,
has made both Eliza and her son pure Caucasian types.
It is not correct to complain that Mrs. Stowe ignored
racial characteristics: she gave her Negroes the traits that
as often wrongly as rightly, had already been ascribed to
them:**-0 their high spirits and love of fun; their fondness
for imposing words which they cannot use correctly; their
childish misinterpretation of the religion they feel so fer
vently. Accepting these traditional marks, she added to them
only one other— the abolitionist’s discovery— that .they are
9 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom*s Cabin, p. 41*
10 Francis P. Gaines, The Southern Plantation, p. 39*
107
human beings, like white people and, with a few striking ex
ceptions, sinners all. "He was a man— and you are hut another
man,” she wrote of Tom.11 A slave1s tears, she said of a
minor character, "came as naturally as if he had been a white
man.”12 "If it were your Harry, mother, or your Willie, that
were going to be torn from you . . . how fast could you
walk?” she inquired of her feminine readers.1^
1j?his insistence upon equality was, as now appears, the
dangerous contribution of her book. Improving the conditions
of the Negroes was a task to which many a Southerner willingly
devoted himself; but to grant their equality with himself was
a horrible breach of the moral law.
III. THE CENTRAL CHAPTERS: ST. CLARE’S
VIEWS ON SLAVERY
How packed with life and action these opening chapters
Un°le Tom’s Cabin areI Carelessly strung together for
periodical publication, unlikely and exaggerated though they
are, they show one essential gift of the storyteller, an
ability to arouse a reader’s attention and to keep him guess
ing about future developments. Absorbed in such speculations,
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, p. 48.
12 Ibid*. P- 145.
1^ Ibid., pp. 61-62.
108
almost any reader could be trusted to ignore the incidental
revelations of the author’s character. But there they are:
her gentility, which found coarse language and strong liquor
equally abhorrent; her noble womanhood and the eloquence
with which she could express fear and misery; her puzzlingly
complex belief in human equality and evident disdain for un
worthy specimens.
The early reader, not knowing Mrs. Stowe and not ear
ing about her past or problems, merely wanted to know what
happened to Tom and Eliza after they left Kentucky; and as
he pressed on, greater thrills than ever were in store for
him. In the central division of the book Tom’s life with
his new masters is contrasted with the protection the refugees
find among the Quakers, examples of stout-hearted northern
abolitionists. Chronological exactness suffers here, for
while Tom is abiding two years and more with his kind masters,
Eliza and George do not reach Canada, toward which they are
hurrying at full speed, until after the death of St. Clare.
Their arrival in Ontario precedes immediately the chapter
presaging Tom’s Louisiana martyrdom. Readers have the priv
ilege of deciding whether the underground railway was slower
than the train through Arkansas or whether Mrs. Stowe, like
many a more experienced storyteller, has simply been ’ ’ two-
timing” them.
In the St. Clare family, inhabitants of a picturesque
109
mansion in New Orleans, she portrayed what she evidently con
sidered slaveholders at their "best. Tom found a kind master,
a heavenly young mistress, a puzzled Vermont aunt,, and against
them only a spoiled daughter of wealth, unthinkingly heart
less hut too indolent to he aggressively cruel. Tom adapted
himself to his new owners, for they had almost as sound an
appreciation of his virtues as he of theirs. In particular
was he idolized hy Eva, whom he had saved from drowning in
the Mississippi River, a river which might have flowed, as
Mrs. Stowe described it, straight from the exotic pages of
Chateaubriand’s Atala hut has never elsewhere appeared to
human eyes. Knowing how fortunate he was, Tom could have
been completely happy had he not been separated from his fam
ily and held in slavery. His existence lay in a calm before
the final storm precipitated by St. Clare’s sudden death.
Meanwhile, shrewdly holding Simon Legree offstage,
Mrs. Stowe delivered her keenest and fairest attacks upon
Negro slavery, the supposed subject of her book. As usual,
she put her criticism into the mouth of one of her characters.
Of all her creations serving this purpose, Augustine St.
Clare was the most engaging and the most convincing. He was
a man who liked to talk, who enjoyed being amusing and shock
ing, and whose principal conversational weapon was a straight
forward honesty that his slower-witted auditors mistook for
paradox. There was hope for him, Mrs. Stowe would have her
110
readers realize, if tie could be brought under uplifting in
fluences. Mrs. Stowe apologized profusely for his weaknesses,
pitying him for his unfortunate marriage and his loss in boy
hood of his saintly mother. Though he was admittedly at
fault in not acting, like the Quakers, fully in accord with
his knowledge of morality, his assumed worldliness hid a
troubled concern for life. She compared him to Moore, to
Goethe, and to Lord Byron.
With Miss Ophelia, the old-fashioned Calvinist aunt,
as interlocutor, St. Clare proved that human weakness was
found in the North as well as in the South. Laughing at the
prim spinster’s discomfort over the. familiarities permitted
between Tom and Lva, he chattered on at length:
I know the feeling among some of you northerners well
enough. Not that there is a particle of virtue in our
not having it; but custom with us does what Christianity
ought to do,— obliterates the feeling of personal preju
dice. I have often noticed, in my travels north, how
much stronger this was with you than with us. You loathe
them as you would a snake or a toad, yet you are indignant
at their wrongs. You would not have them abused; but you
don’t want to have anything to do with them yourselves.
You would send them to Africa, out of your sight and
smell, and then send a missionary or two to do up all the
self-denial of elevating them compendiously. Isn’t that
it?H
The points were well scored. In her own home the
author might have observed the Yankee prejudice against
blacks, and the proposal for colonization had also been
U Ibid., p. 208
Ill
seriously advocated by the Beechers. St. Clare’s ridicule
of it happens to have further point, for the suggestion was
soon to be revived by Mrs. Stowe herself in her search for a
practical solution to the Negro problem. It is sometimes
embarrassing for a novelist with a purpose to write on the
installment plan.
In the more serious vein which seized him upon occa
sion, St. Clare had much to say which pointed toward the es
sential identity of chattel-slavery and wage-slavery. No
wonder the Russians adapted Uncle Tom’s Cabin to their pro
letarian theater,^-5 when they found in it such passages as
this:
Look at the high and the low, all the world over, and
it’s the same story,— the lower class used up, body,
soul, and spirit, for the good of the upper. It is so
in England; it is so everywhere.16
Or this:
The slave-owner can whip his refractory slave to death,—
the capitalist can starve him to death. As to family
security, it is hard to say which is the worst,— to have
one’s children sold, or see them starve to death at home,17
Or this, a striking accidental parallel to the then recent
Communist Manifesto of Marx and Ingels:
^-5 Literary Digest, Vol. 114, July 2, 1932.
^•6 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, p. 249*
Ibid., p. 268.
112
One thing is certain,— that there is a mustering among
the masses, the world over; and there is a dies irae
coming on, sooner or later. The same thing is working
in Europe, in England, and in this country.
Incredible as it may seem, the sense of social eco
nomic responsibility implied in these speeches of St. Clare
was foreign to Mrs. Stowe1s thought. The thesis of some
modern historians, that the Civil War was the climax of a
long struggle between agrarian and industrial societies,
would have seemed impious to her. Chattel slavery she re
garded as iniquitous, and wage slavery as free choice. Never
for a moment did she consider the application of St. Clare’s
ideas to the North. She could denounce the capitalists of
monarchical England, but she honestly did not know that there
existed New England factories in which laborers were working
themselves to death for starvation pay. Quite to the con
trary, she pictured factories, in her First Geography for
Children (1855), as special evidence of God’s favor.^
In these speeches of St. Clare Mrs. Stowe let him run
away from her, and she barely succeeded in bringing him back
into the circle of her own ideas by turning his thoughts
heavenward. Recalling the millenium promised by his mother,
he staggered safely back into theology and away from the
18 > pp. 270-271.
19 Harriet Beecher Stowe, First Geography for Children.
113
dangers of political radicalism.
Unfortunately for Tom* St. Clare saved was also St.
Clare dead. The man's soul was in heaven, but Tom was left
at the mercy of his frivolous, heartless widow.
IV. TOPSY, EVANGELINE, AMD SIMON LEGREE
If St. Clare's role was an asset to Uncle Tom*s Cabin,
Topsy's was a gold mine of humor. The wayward slave-girl,
endowed with the supershowmanship of her race, was equipped
by nature to step into the cast of Christy's Ethiopian Min
strels, who were not only a metropolitan sensation in 1851-
1852 but had also appeared in Cincinnati in I846 and 1847.^
A challenge to Miss Ophelia's power of discipline, Topsy was
used to point the true moral of the tale, that love is above
law: for only Eva's superhuman love started her upon the path
towards decency and dependability.
As little Evangeline was admittedly a miracle, it is
not strange that the solution of the slavery problem looked
far away. Since proper relations between the races could be
attained only by the development of a personal love like
Eva's, as all inclusive as that of Jesus, the problem was a
religious one. All the more scandalous therefore was the
20 Raymond Walters, Stephen Foster: Youth* s Golden
Years, p. 60.
114
churches' refusal to do their duty. To be a reformer in
those days, said Mrs. Stowe, it was necessary to be unchris
tian, for churches were godless and ministers weak and hypo
critical. Not everybody liked this interpretation of the
churches, and Mrs. Stowe needed later to defend herself
against charges of impiety.
But up to this point in her book Mrs. Stowe had not
yet solved to her satisfaction- all the mysteries of Negro
slavery. From the beginning of its serial publication she
held for absolute legal freedom as a minimum, pointing out
upon one occasion that George Harris spoke and moved like
a different man as soon as he regarded himself as free,
though at the time he was still doubtful of his eventual
safety. Slavery, in its criminal regard of human souls as
mere property, was, she thought, a relation different in
kind from the woes of ordinary life. Uncle Tom took issue
with his creator upon this point, for she showed his basic
tragedy to be that he was a true Christian among the heathen,
a spiritual Ovid among the Goths; and he himself rightly re
garded slavery as only one added indignity. A certain "un
fashionable old book," from which he read only the New Testa
ment,21 separated him more completely from his fellow men
than either color or servitude. Tom wanted his freedom as
21 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin, pp. 139>
155.
115
ardently as Mrs. Stowe wanted it for him; but he preferred
slavery and martyrdom to dishonorable flight. He was a black
Christ shaming a Yankee Satan.
And so, to provide the catharsis of a soul-stirring
conclusion, Legree was provided. If he had not existed, it
would have been necessary to create him; but the finally
achieved character, as he came to life in the book, seems to
have been a combination of the real and the ideal. She had
heard about such men from escaped slaves. Josiah Henson had
known one,22 and she might have read of others in the stark
pages of the journals and in Frederick Douglass* vivid account
of Covey,23 the brutal Negro breaker, and of that other over
seer, Gore, of whom he wrote, as a specimen of the type, "His
very presence was fearful, and I shunned him as I would shun
a rattlesnake."2^ A few hints were enough to stir her imag
ination: and Legree, the blackest-hearted villain that ever
besmirched the fair New England soil, the coping-stone of her
tale, was neatly held in place by her readers' tears.
But terror does not exhaust the emotional offerings of
Uncle Tom* s Cabin. In considering the three sections into
which the book is divided, the careful reader observes that
22 Josiah Henson, Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction, p. 226.
23 Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick
Douglass. p. 1A9*
21* I*>id., p. 76.
116
the first, in its description of the Shelby estate, enriches
the tale of Tom's nobility with verisimilitude, for Mrs.
Stowe had been as far south as Kentucky; the second, in
Topsy and St. Clare, with humor; and the third, in Legree,
with terror. In Eliza's wild flight, a similar terror ap
pears at the opening of the story, a dramatic foreboding of
the powerful conclusion.
As a work of troubled imagination, there is much to
be said for Uncle Tom' s Cabin. For the episode of Legree
particularly, the secluded plantation in the wilderness, the
grotesque and cruel inhabitants, the pitiable victims, and
the intervention of supernatural powers offer material that
neither Anne Eadcliffe nor Monk Lewis could have used to bet
ter advantage than did Mrs. Stowe. In presenting her frenzied
imaginings as fact, Mrs. Stowe actually heightened their im
pressiveness for the simple novel reading public, which enjoys
above all else being deluded into thinking the ideal real.
When Tom manfully suffered martyrdom, lingering only long
enough to bid farewell to his young master from Kentucky, it
is not strange that, in 1852, tears fell upon the pages of
the National Era.
Certain suspicious incidents could be overlooked. It
was no reader's wish to doubt that a youth who five years
back had been a mere child could fell with one blow of his
fist a burly ex-pirate, for readers had long given up
117
questioning. Even less would they worry ahout the author’s
careless use of pronouns and participles. Eor the entranced
reader, these problems are not important; and.the original
readers of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the National Era, intent
upon their crusade against slaveholding, were less critical
than casual seekers after entertainment. Carried out of
themselves by the devices of sensational fiction, they dis
solved into tears, as the author herself had done, at the
death of Uncle Tom, the Christian slave.
As a matter of fact, when the book was completed its
success was not nearly so foregone a conclusion as the usual
accounts suggest, for abolitionist literature was frankly
boycotted by most publishers. Mrs. Stowe secured book pub
lication only by committing her story into the hands of an
unestablished publisher who would have preferred her to
share the commercial risk. For five hundred dollars he of
fered her a royalty of 50 per cent.2^ Not to have accepted
this gamble was a mistake for which she suffered the cruelest
penalties. The sales, commencing strong, swelled into hun
dreds of thousands, and the young publisher’s speculation
was amply rewarded. Mrs. Stowe was also rewarded, but her
meager 10 per cent royalty provided her with a permanent
complaint against fate, when she thought of the 50 per cent
25 Charles Edward Stowe, Life of Harriet Beecher
Stowe, p. 158.
118
she might have had. From the phenomenally profitable play,
the most successful in American history, she never received
a penny.
V. THE INSPIRATION FOR UNCLE TOM’S CABIN
The triumph of Uncle Tom’s Cabin was more astonishing
to the author than she could afterward explain to herself.
Her final suggestion, that she had not written it herself
but had merely taken it in dictation from God, seems to have
satisfied her in her old age.26 jn contrast with this in
tuition, one may consider the lengthy account which she wrote
as an introduction to the edition copyrighted in 1878. Ac
cording to this explanation, she had long seen the slave
trade from her home in Cincinnati, had visited Kentucky, and
had observed the separation of a man and his wife.2? During '
many years the material for her book had been accumulating,
but a feeling of the helplessness of protest had held her
from her work.
Finally "pondering the subject,"2* * she determined to
act. In an antislavery magazine she read an account of a
26 Annie Fields, Life and Letters of Harriet Beecher
Stowe. p. 377. Also Florine Thayer McCray, The Life-Work of
the Author of Uncle Tom*s Cabin. p. 66.
27 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, p. viii.
28 Ibid., p. ii.
119
slave's flight over an icy river, which she accepted as a
salient point of her story, hut the first part written was
the death of Uncle Tom, a scene which appeared to her, almost
as a vision, while she was sitting at the communion table
in the church at Brunswick, Maine. She read it to her two
little sons, since her husband was away, and the lads re
sponded by weeping, sobbing, and crying out against slavery.
She continued work on other parts of the novel, feverishly,
in the full swing of inspiration, feeling that the story was
leading her rather than she telling it, until finally, as
she wrote out the death of Uncle Tom, "it seemed as if the
whole vital force had left her."2^ She never could decide
when or how she had composed the death of Uncle Tom. In
the narrative summarized above it is stated as being both the
first and last part of the book to be set down,^® but Mrs.
Stowe was incapable of realizing the discrepancy.31
According to another of her stories, the sketch of
Tom's death was written at an Andover, Massachusetts,
boardinghouse, while her husband slept on a couch in the room
as she dashed off nine foolscap sheets. In his enthusiasm,
having been awakened to hear the results of his wife's
ibid., p. xiii.
3° Ibid., pp. xi, xiii.
31 Annie Fields, op. cit., p. 165.
120
inspiration, he immediately mailed the manuscript to the pub
lishers without revision. When Mrs. Fields had established
the Professor1s absence from Andover until after the publica
tion of the book, Mrs. Stowe flatly declined to accept that
absence as suggesting a discrepancy in her story.32
It is both natural and characteristic that though
Mrs. Stowe was at times inclined to grant God the complete
credit for Uncle Tom* s Cabin, she should at others have con
sidered that she also had some share in its success. Thus
in 1853 she stated that the book had been written in her
heart1s blood, against the greatest obstacle of poor health.33
Upon another occasion she wrote, in 1870, that she had been
driven to write it, like her other books, "by the necessity
of making some income for family expenses."3^ Her visionary
theory also went by the boards in a communication (1863) to
the Duchess of Argyle, in which she asserted that she had
learned about southern life from letters "showing a state of
society perfectly inconceivable."35
In addition to herself and God, the public would have
Henry Ward Beecher to thank for Uncle Tom* s Cabin.. if her •
32 Ibid., pp. 164-165.
33 IM-d., p. 171.
3^ Ibid., P. 327.
33 Ibid.. p. 271. The italics are Mrs. Stowe’s.
121
testimony could be absolutely trusted. Speaking to him
about the Fugitive Slave Law, and listening to his determina
tion to fight slavery in his church, she confided that she
too was trying to do her bit by a story setting forth the
sufferings and wrongs of the slaves. His offer to scatter
it thick as the leaves of Vallombrosa enabled her to work on
as she could never have done without his encouragement.3^
For a complete understanding of the origin of her
powerful novel, clarifying details from other sources must
be added to her own accounts. It is particularly important
to recognize a broader basis to the book than Negro slavery.
*Pke Mayflower, copyrighted in 1843, she had so lacked in
terest in this subject as not to afford it even passing men
tion. As a writer she had avoided the problem until the
Fugitive Slave Law awoke her. Suddenly, in the conception
tk® Christian slave— to quote the title she gave her book
of readings from Uncle Tom's Cabin— she found her inspiration.
With this she combined the themes of a mother's struggle for
her child and the sadness of death. The controversy over
Negro slavery provided a vivid and timely setting for these
universal problems.
The family history of the Beechers, although anti-
slavery, is not abolitionist, and whatever steps any of the
36 Ibid., p. 363.
122
children took towards abolitionism were in direct opposition
to their father’s principles and actions. Lyman Beecher
was not deeply interested in fighting slavery, since his
theology contained neither explicit nor implicit tendencies
toward social reform. He not only refused to help Garrison
on the reasonable ground of having already too many irons
in the fire,3? but he went further than necessary in publicly
ridiculing the abolitionists.38 Both he and Calvin Stowe
had been advocates of colonization, and in Cincinnati both
of them frequently spoke before the local colonization so
ciety. 39 Logical as the idea of exporting the Negroes
might seem, it was, for practical purposes, a delusion. More
than that, as shrewd people saw, the American Colonization
Society was double-dealing:^” ® while the agents in the free
states were collecting funds for getting rid of slavery,
their fellows in the slave states were pointing out that, by
exporting ithe free Negroes of the North, colonization really
worked toward the protection of-slavery in the South.
37 Gilbert Hobbs Barnes, The Antislavery Impulse.
1830-1844, p. 50.
Constance M. Rourke, Trumpets of Jubilee, p. 57*
39 Mae Elizabeth Harveson, Catharine Esther Beecher,
Pioneer Educator, p. 195.
4-0 Barnes, 0£. cit., p. 27. Also Booker T. Washington,
Frederick Douglass, p. 14.6; also Angelina E. Grimke, Letters
to Catherine E. Beecher, pp. 35-41.
123
But Lyman Beechers views on slavery are best exhibited
in his difficulties with Theodore Weld, at the time (1&34) a
student under him at Lane Seminary, later the brains of the
organized abolition movement. An interpretation of the Lane
Seminary dispute appears in the already mentioned The Anti-
slavery Impulse, Doctor G. H* Barnes* fascinating study in
public opinion, a careful appraisal which shows that through
out the difficulty Lyman Beecher acted like a confused oppor
tunist. When his students, led by Weld, wanted to discuss
abolition, he agreed to permit them, and offered to join with
them. At the first off-campus opposition he defended the
students, upholding their right to free speech.^ As the
opposition grew he changed his views and entered upon re
pressive measures. Before long he was urging the expulsion
of the leader, Theodore Weld.4-2 This was an unsuccessful
attempt to avoid social disturbance, for Weld and his friends
were not the kind to submit tamely to manifest injustice.
When Weld withdrew from the school, he took with him ninety-
two others, reducing the enrollment of Lane Seminary from an
even one hundred students to seven. To Lyman Beecher the
seven were saints and the ninety-three, in his words, "he-
goat men,” obstinate creatures "who think they do God a
^ Barnes, op. cit., p. 70.
42 Ikld-> PP* 229-230.
124
service by butting everything in the line of their march
which does not fall or get out of their way. "4-3
During this controversy Harriet was a quiet, dutiful
daughter. The Hew York Evangelist for April 5, 1S34, printed
a significant letter from Yfeld on the progress of the anti
slavery work in Cincinnati. A special need, he said, was
teachers for "a select female school" for blacks. He la
mented knowing only two women teachers sufficiently resolute
and self-denying for the work. Neither of them was a Beecher.
The family1s official position during these years was
presented by Catherine in her Essay on Slavery and Abolition
ism (1837), which shows that the Beechers, though opposed to
slavery, were equally opposed to abolitionists. "I have not
had time to read but 50 or 60 pages of it," wrote Weld in a
letter of May 26, 1837, "enough to see however that with its
show of candor and its surface plausibilities and sophistries
it will catch the great mass of prejudiced mind and be likely
to do mischief.”^ - Catherine advised readers of her Essay,
especially women readers, against joining the abolition so
cieties. More unwisely, in the light of her own intrusion
into the subject, she committed herself to the doctrine that
4-3 Charles Beecher, editor, Autobiography, Correspond
ence. Etc., of Lyman Beecher. D.D., II, 345*
44 Gilbert H. Barnes and Dwight L. Dumond, editors,
Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, Angelina Grimke Weld, and
Sarah Grimke, 182^-1^44. P.,391.
125
women should not meddle in public affairs. ’ ’ She has exposed
herself most egregiously,” wrote Weld.45 After the replies
had come in, Catherine never wrote on slavery again. The
abolitionists proved to be bitter controversialists, but it
is possible that Catherine considered that she had settled
the matter.
Hot all the family remained as true to the father as
Catherine and, for a time, Henry ?far& and Harriet. Moved by
Weld’s eloquence, George Beecher immediately turned aboli
tionist. In October, 1836, he became an agitator for the
cause, and the next year he converted his brother William.
The other children, one after another, gradually capitulated
to northern public opinion, Henry Ward and Harriet the last
of all.
In the seventeen years of agitation between her meet
ing with Theodore Weld and the writing of Uncle Tom’s Cabin,
what, in fact, was Harriet Beecher doing for the cause with
which she later became identified? In 1837 she professed
her disapproval of the Female Anti-Slavery Convention, re
garded abolitionists as faddists, opposed immediate freedom
for the Negroes, and decided finally that nothing could be
done.4^ When, the following year, mobs destroyed the press
45 ibid., p. 348.
46 Charles Edward Stowe, o£. cit., pp. 87-88.
126
of the abolitionist publisher Birney, she was indignant, not
because she shared his principles but because ’ ’ such proceed
ings may make converts to abolitionism."47 jn this respect,
as in so many others, her middle-of-the-path attitude was in
agreement with that of such a well-known proslavery advocate
of colonization as the Reverend N. L. Rice, pastor of the
Central Presbyterian Church of Cincinnati. As he said in the
course of a public debate:
I do, indeed, most strongly condemn both the principles
and the conduct of the abolitionists; but I have also
uniformly condemned all violence toward them. When Mr.
Birney*s press was destroyed in Cincinnati, I as editor
of a religious paper, condemned the course of his oppo
nents in language as strong as I could command.
During all the hard years of congressional agitation
Mrs. Stowe contributed nothing. She did not attend the
women’s conventions. Her writing for the cause, as the third
chapter of this study has shown, was negligible: a single
article, "Immediate Emancipation" (184-5) > which a kind
owner frees his slave. It is not in the family records that
she circulated the common petitions to Congress for the abo
lition of slavery in the District of Columbia— or, indeed,
that she signed them. Her achievements for the cause, which
she lists in the introduction to the 1878 edition of Uncle
4-7.Ibid., p. 84-. Annie Fields, o|>. cit., p. 95.
j. Blanchard and N. L. Rice, A Debate on Slavery,
p. 287.
127
Tom*s Cabin, were those personal eharities which many a
•I
southern matron of the time was gladly fulfilling for her
slaves: writing social letters for the illiterates and edu
cating young black children with her own.
The moderation of the Stowes at this time is shown in
the references to them, as holding middle ground, in a cele
brated Cincinnati debate between Doctor Rice and his aboli
tionist opponent, Reverend J. Blanchard, pastor of the city’s
Sixth Presbyterian Church, Calvin Stowe was present at the
debate, which ran for four days and occupies in its printed
form nearly five hundred pages. By the proslavery man, eager
for authorities, he was greeted as ”a leading abolitionist”;^
but the true abolitionist responded by admonishing ”Dr. Stowe,
who I regret on his account to say, has uttered sentiments
which brother Rice can quote in support of his doctrine.”^
In this middle path there was perhaps more wisdom than daring,
but it was no easy position to hold. With abolitionists like
Blanchard to remind them that Jonathan Edwards had held
slavery ”a greater sin than concubinage or fornication,”51
they must have felt keenly the difficulties of watchful
waiting.
49 Ibia.» PP. 85, 159.
5° Ibid,, p. 4-68.
51 Ibid., p. 363.
128
Personally, Mrs. Stowe may well have been disturbed;
yet she remained socially unawakened until the passage of the
Fugitive Slave Act in 1850. To that time, during the years
when scores of women were active enough to win-names for them
selves in the unpopular movement, she was silent. Not until
after 1850 did she blossom forth, from the harbor of New
England, at the moment when professional agitators, no longer
the fanatics they had previously appeared, became Crusaders
for the Lord.
One need not expect Harriet to see herself in this
light. As James Russell Lowell once said of her, she had
the mind of a romancer,52 from whom accuracy should not be
hoped. Like her father, she also frequently lacked self-
criticism. One of the Lane students referred to Lyman’s
" g a m e " 53 ^-th them, and game is a word appearing more than
once in their correspondence about him. Steadfast as rock
she liked to consider herself, on this question as on all
others. With her share in the family past, however, her zeal
for emancipation could hardly have been of long standing; it
is much more likely to have resulted from the sudden fusing
of the news value inherent in the fugitive slave controversy
with her brooding over her personal wrongs and hardships.
52 James Russell Lowell, New Letters, p. 146.
53 Barnes and Lumond, op. cit., p. 197.
VI. SOME AUTHENTIC SOURCES
129
Uncle Tom* s Cabin grew from other books as well as from
life. The autobiography of Josiah Henson, an escaped slave
who later became famous as the original of Uncle Tom, is one
of her sources. Henson was a lovable man, godly and respect
ful, enough like Tom in appearance and character to impress
his lecture audiences with his similarities to the fictional
martyr. In her 1S78 account and elsewhere Mrs. Stowe spe-
cifically mentioned her visits to antislavery reading rooms
in Boston to consult his autobiography, along with other abo
litionist books including the life of Lewis Clarke and
Theodore Weld*s American Slavery As It Is. In the later
stages of writing her novel she used these books to supplement
her limited knowledge of southern slavery. There are also
records of visits from Henson, at Boston and Andover. His
idealistic character was congenial to her, and his traits
found their v/ay into her depiction of Tom.
Undoubted as his services to her were, their exact
extent is debatable. Mrs, Stowe considered that her generosity
was ample in a reference to his autobiography as "an exempli
fication of the truth of the character of her Uncle Tom.n^4
According to him, however, he supplied her with the originals
54 Henson, oj>. cit., p. 219.
130
of George Harris (Lewis Clarke) and Eliza, who were his par
ticular friends; of Topsy, who was as near like a certain
Dinah on his old plantation as one pea to another; of Simon
Legree, in the person of Bryce Litton,- "who broke my arms
and marred me for life”;55 and also of St. Clare and Eva,
in the persons of a Mr. St. Clair Young and his daughter.
Except for George Harris, in these identifications
Henson was mistaken. To the limited degree in which she was
drawn from life, Eliza was either a fugitive whom Calvin
Stowe and Henry Ward Beecher had helped,^ or she was, accord
ing to another family explanation,57 the subject of an account
in an antislavery'paper. The original of Topsy was a colored
girl, Celeste by name, known to the family in Cincinnati.5^
The character of Legree is said to have been sketched for her
by her brother Charles, who had been a clerk in Louisiana,59
The original of Eva was her own dead daughter, who was also
later to serve as model for Tina in Oldtown Folks.6°
55 ibid., p. 226.
56 Charles Edward Stowe, oj>. cit., p. 93. Also,
Charles Edward Stowe and Lyman Beecher Stowe, Harriet Beecher
Stowe: The Story of Her Life, pp. 12$, 140.
57 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom*s Cabin, p. xi.
58 stowe and Stowe, 0£. cit., p. 81.
59 ibid., p. 125.
60 P* 26°-
131
To Theodore Weld, her debt was greater than to Josiah
Henson, and perhaps greater than she understood. Weld’s
tract, American Slavery As It Is. published in 1839* used for
both UnclQ Tom’s Cabin and the Key, was, like the latter book,
an accumulation of newspaper clippings with appropriate com
ments. The stories were, many of them, just the ones that
she had heard, during his Lane Seminary days, from his own
lips, cherished by her memory during the years she had re
jected their teachings. In her preface to the 1878 Uncle
Tom’s Cabin she acknowledged her use of the book and privately,
to Weld’s wife, Angelina Grimke, she went handsomely beyond
her public testimony in her description of how "she kept that
book in her work basket by day, and slept with it under her
pillow by night, till its facts crystallized into Uncle Tom.”61
Aside from such recognized obligations to Weld, Henson,
Clarke and a few others, reference has been made, by Doctor
Francis P. Gaines in his study, The Southern Plantation, to
the entire tradition of abolitionist and plantation fiction.
Although Mrs. Stowe nowhere in her published writings admitted
acquaintance with previous antislavery novels, there are many
similarities between her settings for Uncle Tom* s Cabin as
well as its successor Dred. and those which had already been
used in similar novels. Which of them are purely accidental,
6T Barnes, op. cit., p. 231.
132
which unconsciously reminiscent, and which frankly imitative?
Though these questions cannot he answered with any assurance,
a little reading in earlier antislavery fiction is enough to
show the nature, if not the extent, of Mrs. Stowe’s indebted
ness.
Doctor Gaines mentions that in Richard Hildreth’s The
Slave: or Memoirs of Archy Moore (1836), which he considers
the most effective abolition fiction of its period,62 the
lustfulness of the southern whites is depicted, as in Uncle
Tom’s Cabin and more notably in Dred, and that the prototype
of legree also appears in another cruel Yankee overseer. All
of this is true, but the similarities between Mrs. Stowe’s
novels and Richard Hildreth's do not stop there. Since The
Slave is now little known, a more detailed consideration of
it will not be amiss.
The Slave is the first-person narrative of Archy Moore,
whose father was a Virginia colonel, his mother a mulatto
concubine. "Though born a slave,” Archy writes, "I inherited
my father’s proud spirit, sensitive feelings and ardent tem
perament.”^ That is to say, he was much like Mrs. Stowe’s
George Harris, the husband of Eliza.
The easygoing old squire, with his eighteenth century
62 Gaines, oj>. cit., p. 31.
63 Richard Hildreth, The Slave: or Memoirs of Archy
Moore, I, 10.
133
liberal ideas— he is a possible, but not realized St. Clare—
is contrasted with his brutal son, the exact double of Tom
Gordon in Dred. "a tyrant from whose soul custom had long
since obliterated what little humanity nature had bestowed
upon him."64- Under such contrasting types of masters, life
fluctuates for Archy between better and worse. In one of
his better periods he becomes betrothed to a high yellow
named Cassy (a name which reappears in Uncle Tom*s Cabin)
only to find that she is his sister, and that his father has
reserved her as his own concubine.65
Strong scenes follow, including, as in Uncle Tom* s
Cabin, flight, and disguise, then recapture and savage lash
ing. The story includes ingenious details of plot, as well
as effective descriptions. Hildreth, who had lived two years
in the South, knew much more about plantations and slave mar
kets than Mrs. Stowe. The weakness of his story is its con
clusion: when Archy escapes and becomes a pirate, the inter
est is rather badly dissipated. A popular audience would
mind this less than the equivocal character of the hero.
Archy admits a foolish pride in his light skin, he confesses
himself a hypocrite, and he-succumbs to the temptation of
incest.
64 IMd-» ,I» 23.
65 ifria*» I. U.
134
It is doubtful whether Mrs. Stowe ever read this The
Slave.66 when it was published, in 1836, it was frankly abo
litionist literature, and Mrs. Stowe was not then an aboli
tionist. Aside from Hildrethfs book, however, the sources of
traditional details of action or interpretation were almost
limitless. It is likely that with her fondness for Maria
Edgeworth, Harriet Beecher had as a girl read the pathetic
story called "The Grateful Negro."67 Here were presented the
*
difference between bad and good owners; the resulting con
trast between benevolent and brutalized slaves; the separation
of families; and armed revolt ending in martyrdom. A similar
story of a slave rebellion, "The Black Patriot" by name, ap
peared in James Hall’s Western Monthly Magazine in July, 1833.
Like "The Grateful Negro," this sketch contains picturesque
details such as might lie indefinitely in the background of
memory.
Such a survey of books leads finally to something more
definite than mere possibilities: Mrs. Stowe’s explanations
of the sources of her novel as pure indignation or inspiration
can hardly be accepted at face value. Extraordinarily honest
66 go great are the similarities between the books that
an intelligent French scholar, ignorant of the date of
Hildreth’s book, complains that it is an imitation of Uncle
Tom’s Cabin (E. Lucas, La Litterature anti-esclavagiste, pp.
192-19JH
67 Maria Edgeworth, "The Grateful Negro," published in
1802 as reprinted in Popular Tales, pp“ . 419-441.
135
as she was throughout life, she lacked perspective for see
ing the complete truth about her work. The varied emphasis
of her statements depends upon the purpose to which each was
adapted. When she is writing primarily to defend her brother
she introduces him into incidents from whieh he is absent
when her thoughts are not about him. When she is displaying
her friendship for Mrs. Weld, she expresses more than her
customary gratitude to Weld. These facts are not mentioned
here to accuse Mrs. Stowe of more than human weakness, but
to illustrate the need of a cautious appraisal of her words.
VII. UNCLE TOM* S CABIN IN THE NATIONAL ERA
Of all the sources of Uncle Tom* s Cabin, probably the
most influential was one which has been least considered,
the periodical for which it was written, whose policies were
implicit in the entire planning and shaping of the story.
Here, as always, Mrs. Stowe was writing for an editor and a
public whose expectations she could not afford to disregard.
More than the author.knew, her story, shaped for the National
- Era. absorbed the spirit of the Era itself.
The National Era appeared on January 7, 1847, with
Gamaliel Bailey as editor and John Greenleaf Whittier as one
of the associates. Its last issue was that of March 22,
i860, shortly after Bailey*s sudden death. Mrs. Stowe had.
136
known about Bailey in Cincinnati^ where, as early as 1836,
he had been an associate of Birney and a minor victim of the
riots deplored by Mrs. Stowe and by Henry Ward Beeeher in
the Journal, His National Era, which was a four page weekly
like the Evangelist, was issued in Washington, D.C., a safer
haven for abolitionists than the border city of Cincinnati.
From the start the Era expressed determined antislavery
principles, but it was not exclusively a propaganda sheet.
It reported congressional debates from its first issue, and
it soon printed an appeal for the Irish poor, several articles
favoring temperance, full accounts of the French revolution
of 1848, and a news story on the woman*s rights convention
of the same year. Farther removed from such reforming activ
ities, it ran an enthusiastic account of Jenny Lind, written
by Fredrika Bremer, as well as an editorial on the same vocal
artist; and reviews of books and magazines constituted a reg
ular department.
The Era used a good proportion of literary material,
reprinting from Mrs. Sigourney, the New York Evangelist,
Herman Melville, Lowell, and other sources, and supplementing
these reprints with original contributions by T. S. Arthur,
Mrs. Sigourney, Lucy Larcom, Grace Greenwood (of the Lady*s
Book), Hawthorne, Bryant, and many others. Whittier himself
68 Annie Fields, 0£. cit., p. 94.
137
supplied much verse and prose, on such diverse subjects as
Richard Baxter, Samuel Hopkins (the hero of The Minister’3
Wooing), and Lord Byron, along with his routine journalistic
editorials on the progress of the cause.
On the Yfaole, the magazine justified its stated aim
to mingle literature with politics . . . and to keep
both subordinate to^the great movement on behalf of
human liberty . . .69
It was easy to read and no doubt effective. When Garrison’s
Liberator, a paper as much narrower as it was more evangeli
cal, denounced Bailey’s Era as ’ ’ milk and water,’ 1 the editor
replied, soundly— and these were Mrs. Stowe’s views also:
We take our stand as far South as we can, among slave
holders themselves . . . appeal to the Southern people
as men of like passions with ourselves ... in whom the
power of reform is not yet extinct.70
Though the Ira was as conciliatory as possible, it oc
casionally published horror stories, such as the lashing and
torturing of a colored maid mistakenly suspected of stealing
from her owner. Her last words were, however, the meat of
the account: ’ ’ Let me say my prayers before I die.”71 in
this item, as throughout the magazine, the appeal was funda
mentally moral. Many stories by Mrs. Southworth were used,
69 The National Era, December 14-, 1848.
7° Ibid., July 22, I847.
71 Ibid., September 2, 1847.
with, the editorial recommendation, "We need not say with
what effect Mrs. Southworth uses fiction as a vehicle of
truth.”72
Mrs. Southworth*s serials, such as Pride and Retribu
tion, were not abolitionist, for it was Bailey*s policy to
provide "original sketches and tales for home reading" along
with his political agitation. This was the need that Mrs.
Stowe was also expected to serve. Of her four contributions
before Uncle Tom* s Cabin, only one mentioned the slavery
issue. This was the first, a token of her antislavery sym
pathies, "The Freeman*s Bream: A Parable,"73 stating the
editor*s own view that the laws of God were above the consti
tution of the United States. After this good-will offering,
she sent "A Scholar’s Adventures in the Country," a mild
satire against the impractical man; "Christmas, or the Good
Fairy"; and "Independence," a story directed against late
parties. All of these, printed between August 1, 1850, and
January 30, 1851, were exactly the type of mild sketch she
had been doing for years; only on June 2, 1851, did her serial
begin, preceded by an editorial announcement of May 8, 1851.
What had occurred in the meantime to shift her interest
from late parties and impractical philologists was, of course,
72 Ibid.. August 16, 1849.
73 Ibid., August 1, 1850.
139
the Fugitive Slave Act. The National Era itself was full of
stories and editorials denouncing it, beginning as early as
September 26,_1850. In the issue of December 26, the first
page of the paper contained Mrs. Stowe* s story ' ’ Christmas**
and a discussion of the act in Congress. On January 2, 1851>
Whittier wrote against it. On June 5 it was discussed on the
same page with the first installment of Uncle Tom*s Cabin;
and after that date, as before, it was a burning issue with
both editors and contributors, who feared it as much as they
hated it. These were days in which even a small boy like
Henry James observed that **the question of what persons of
colour might or mightn’t do was intensely in the air";74 and
along with the excitement of writing on the highly emotional
serial, the weekly fuel supplied by the Era contributed much
to the increased emotion of later installments.
Uncle Tom*s Cabin, or the Man That Was a Thing, to
give it the original subtitle, began on June 5» 1851, and
was concluded on April 1,_1852. In all this period, Mrs.
Stowe missed only two installments, a good record for the
National Ira.75 By October 30, 1850, the "fan” mail was
beginning, with a letter making suggestions about future
book publication. Shortly afterward the editor stated that
74 Henry James, A Small Boy and Others, p. 263.
75 The National Era, August 21, December 18, 1851.
140
"nearly all our readers” were showing great interest in the
tale;76 this was directly after the death of Eva, which had
been spread over four installments, from November 20 to
December 11, 1851. Book publication was announced on March
2$, 1852, and by the next week, when the final chapter ap
peared in the National Era, literary history was being made
on a wider scale.
But beyond its excitement, hatred and fear, the Era
had furnished at least one other significant aid to Mrs.
Stowe, a hint for the death of Uncle Tom. On January.8,
1852, a striking poem appeared, signed "Giuliana" and called
"The Death of the Slave Lewis," Part of it will show how
clearly Tom’s death is here foreshadowed:
From out that holy realm of night, a shriek,
As of a soul in Hades, rent the veil
Of silence— then a prophet seemed to speak,
To anger roused not, "Turn th*unsmitten cheek";
But, "Blood for blood," answered the dismal wail.
And then I heard a piteous creature lift
His agonizing pleadings, where he stood
Bound, naked, marked with many a bloody rift,
While blows urged out, in torture cries, his shrift
To one with drunken fury in his blood.
The brute but flogged the harder for his cry,
It gave the horrid sport a keener zest . . .77
The following week, Mrs. Stowe introduced Simon Legree into
her story, by name only; on January 22 he was characterized
76 ibid., December 18, 1851
77 ibid., January 8, 1852.
141
as a man equal to the crime of flogging Tom to death; and
the scene itself, immeasurably stronger than that in
Giuliana's poem, was ready for the issue of March 18.
After Uncle Tom's Cabin Mrs. Stowe's relationship
with the National Era was not close. She sent a few short
contributions, including a moral tale, a comment on prohibi
tion, and a plea to the Presbyterian church to take a strong
antislavery stand.Further contact was restricted to re
prints of her writings and to editorial accounts of the tri
umphal progress of Uncle Tom's Cabin. For over a year the
paper was filled with praise for her work and replies to her
detractors.
Mrs. Stowe reaped incalculable advantage from her con
nection with the National Era. Within two years it trans
formed her mild interest in freedom for the blacks into a
burning passion for justice and liberty for all men. It was
as essential to her as the Fugitive Slave Act itself, as
much a part of her leap to fame as her forty years of ob
scurity. Bailey's confidence in her ability to complete a
serial novel was fully justified by the increased vigor and
depth of her writing. In Godey’s Lady's Book and the other
carefully noncommittal magazines of her apprenticeship, anti
slavery fiction was impossible. The National Era was the
78 Ibid*» May 27, 1852.
142
perfect encouragement to her expanded efforts, for it never
shocked her, as the Literator did. By taking her mind from
petty personal problems it allowed her repressed sense of
subordination to identify itself with the most widely appeal
ing issue of the day. The added circumstance that the Era
had no standard of literary style to embarrass its contrib
utors into literary attitudinizing was not the least of its
services, since it allowed her to write freely for a definite
public of sympathetic souls.
CHAPTER V
THE AFTERMATH OF UNCLE TOM’S CABIN
I. SOME ATTACKS UPON THE BOOK
Success made Mrs. Stowe a celebrity, justified her
life, gave her a career. For the moment, however, it also
created the new problem of facing public criticism.
As the sales records demonstrated, the simple reading
public, through their laughter and tears, established Uncle
i . .
Tom1 s Cabin as a classic, for all the suffering, self-pitying
souls of God’s earth found themselves justified by it. As
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote, MThere was never such a
literary coup-de-main as this."2 To repeat the volumes of
praise received by the booh is not necessary, others having
performed that work with gusto, but it is enlightening to
look into the opposition. Adulation was not the only forma
tive influence upon Mrs. Stowe’s later writing, for the cru
sader must have an enemy as well as an aim. Typified by the
objections of the London Times, a particular irritant to the
Stowes, opposition to the novel was strongly stated from the
Including one libel suit, settled out of court. The
correspondence on the charges was printed in the National Era,
June 24, October 14, 21 and 28, 1852.
2 Samuel Longfellow, Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,
II, 249.
144
beginning, by abolitionists,3 supporters of slavery, lovers
of art, and mere perverse objectors to best sellers.4
Without attempting a complete study of this contempo
rary adverse criticism, one can soon discover that it pro
ceeded from three sources. First, and least numerous of all,
were stylists who cavilled at the artistic deficiencies of
the book, its faulty characterization, passages in bad rhetori
cal taste, and lapses from standard English usage. Second,
and most numerous, were the advocates either of slavery or
abolition who pointed out factual errors in the book; and that
many were discovered should surprise no one who has considered
the author’s limited firsthand knowledge of Negro slavery.
Third, and by all odds the most annoying to the author, were
those critics who cast reflections upon her motives, who at
tempted to disentangle the riddle of her personality, or who
tried to formulate rationally her unexpressed presuppositions
about human nature.
Adverse comment of the first two types need not be
treated at length. Some of the facts upon which it rested
have already been alluded to in the last chapter, and enough
others will come to light in the pages that follow to spare
3 The Liberator. March 22, 1852, and July 9, 1852.
f Frank Luther Mott gives a fine account (A History of
American Magazines. II, 142-144) of the excitement as re
flected in the magazines.
H5
elaborate marshalling of evidence. Practically all that
need be said on the subject, indeed enough for a full treat
ment, is assembled in a dignified and gentlemanly work by
Reverend E. J. Stearns, A.M., called in part Notes on Uncle
Tom’s Cabin, a little book of 314 well considered, if by no
means impartial pages, raising detailed questions of.fact
and also making pertinent literary criticism.
In reviewing the last type of adverse comment, diffi
culty arises in drawing the line between the justified specu
lation of such a critic as Mr. Stearns and the inexcusable
scurrility of others. When Stearns calls Mrs. Stowe ignorant,
or self-willed, or anti-Christian, he is as polite as a var
sity debater and as benign as an uncle. But when the South
Carolina poet William J. Grayson denounces her, there is more
than a question of propriety in lines like these:
A moral scavenger, with greedy eye . . .
On fields where vice eludes the light of day,
She hunts up crimes as beagles hunt their prey;
Gleans every dirty nook— the felon’s jail
And hangman’s mem'ry, for detraction’s tale,
Snuffs up pollution with a pious air,
Collects a rumor here, a slander there;
With hatred’s ardor gathers Newgate spoils,
And trades for gold the garbage of her toils.*
Mrs. Stowe was the recipient of much more violent abuse
than this. According to the National Era of May 12, 1853,
Richmond papers had described her as a coarse, ugly,
5 William J. Grayson, ’ ’ The Hireling and the Slave,”
as quoted in Vernon Louis Parrington, Main Currents in
American Thoughts - II, 107.
146
ill-natured, ill-mannered old woman; the New York National
Democrat had called her a hypocrite because she had declined
to contribute to a cause which it knew was worthy; Bennett*s
Herald had lampooned her violently; and many papers had de
nounced her as a libeller of her country and charged her with
visiting England to be feasted, flattered, and given alms.^
More of the same sort of abuse was so common and, as Mrs.
Stowe knew, so unjustified first and last that it was inev
itable she should rise to a heated defense of her personality
and motives.
Of all such personal attacks, one of the most delight
ful as well as the most inept must be that of an anonymous
and poetical "Indy in New York,” The Patent Key to Uncle Tom's
Cabin; or, Mrs. Stowe in England, printed at New York in
1853. This extraordinarily inept poem, inspired by Mrs.
Stowe's two books and her trip to Europe, tempts quotation
at length, since it combines practically all of the respectable
prejudices against Mrs. Stowe:
While some will find, in "Uncle Tom,"
A subject good to build upon;
But show an "Uncle Tom," and then,
I will believe that one has been;
A case like "Uncle Tom’s"— might be—
But when a thing like that I see,
Or appertaining thereunto,
Then I’ll believe as many do,
6 National Era. May 12, 1853.
14?
That owning and protecting slave
Is greatest sin this side of grave.7
That the lady was grimly determined never to be forced to
any such admission is clear from a later quatrain;
If subjeet— "Uncle Tom" I mean—
They think a great and mighty theme—
Just stay at home— our land’s bereft!
There’s not an "Uncle Tom" here left?8
(Chivalry requires the confession that the italics and all
marks of punctuation in the quoted passages are the Lady’s.)
Having thus disclosed Mrs. Stowe’s utter ignorance of
the southern slaves, the rhyming lady proceeded to the minor
suspicions'forced upon her by Uncle Tom’s Cabin. She con
sidered it sacrilege to question a classification of humanity
instituted by our Almighty Father. She had her doubts of
Mrs. Stowe *s motives. She questioned the patriotism of a
woman who could attack the institutions of her native land
but felt free to hobnob with foreigners. She went so far as
to suspect, in italics, a mercenary purpose. Finally, she
was aware~of a basic impropriety in a woman’s speaking out so
boldly in public, no longer, as she should be, the tender
vine clinging tremblingly to the sturdy oak for support.
Thus the anonymous poetical "Lady in New York" expressed her
doubts of the perfect breeding of the publicly crusading lady
7 Anonymous, The Patent Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or,
Mrs. Stowe in England. p. 12.
8 Ibid., p. 16.
148
from New England.
II. GROUNDS FOR THE ATTACKS
In spite of the ineptitude with which it was phrased,
the problem of Mrs. Stowe’s personality stated in the anony
mous Lady’s Patent Key was, as it remains, a real one. The
data of the problem, however, need more eareful consideration
than the Lady’s in New York. The imputation of conscious
dishonesty or knavish deception was entirely unjustified.
An impartial observer can discover in Mrs. Stowe no greater
fault than overambition: oblivious to the source and scope
of her hatred of tyranny, she tried to save the South before
learning to save herself, to direct the blind forces of so
ciety before recognizing her own blindness. Without realizing
the value of her novel as self-expression, she plunged into
the dangerous career of social reformer.
Her self-assurance, shown repeatedly in Uncle Tom’s
Cabin, is evinced with special clarity in the account of
Eliza’s refuge with Senator Bird, one of her first adventures
north of the Ohio River. The Senator, to the disgust of his
midget wife, an emotional dynamo and Noble ?foman, had recently
committed himself in favor of the Fugitive Slave Act. The
contrast between husband and wife reveals Mrs. Stowe’s
thoughts about the relative moral standards of man and woman;
her description of Mrs. Bird anticipates that of other mothers
149
in her later novels:
There are in this world blessed souls, whose sorrows all
spring up into joy for others; whose earthly hopes, laid
in the grave with many tears, are the seed from which
spring healing flowers and balm for the desolate and
distressed. Among such was the delicate woman who sits
there by the lamp, dropping slow tears, while she pre
pared the memorials of her own lost one for the outcast
wanderer.9
The misguided legislator was soon convinced that his
wife was shrewder and more Christian than he. "Could I ever
% ■
have loved you," she asked, "had I not known you better than
you know yourself?"10 In reply, the Senator, rising to his
wife’s moral code, violated his oath of allegiance and broke
the very law he had helped to pass. Traitor and criminal?
By no means: rather patriot and saint. Had not his wife re
vealed the higher justice? "It’s a shameful, wicked, abom
inable law, and I’ll break it, for one, the first time I get
a chance.”11
Throughout Uncle Tom*s Cabin Mrs. Stowe thus counseled
disregard of the lavra that bound her. Simultaneously, she
looked with favor upon new enactments to bind other people,
particularly legislation to protect black women from the un
welcome attention of their white masters. She spoke sharply
9 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, p. 106.
10 Ibid*> P* 1°5.
11 IPia*« P. 97.
150
and strongly, in the spirit of a crusader combining service
to an ideal with hatred of opposition. Because of her com
plicated motives in writing, many passages in Uncle Tom1s
Cabin hit more than a single target. In "respectable society,”
she once broadly charged, "men have learned the art of sin
ning expertly and genteelly";12 but she was surprised to
learn that in certain quarters of respectable society there
was resentment.
On another occasion, as Tom was looking over his pro
spective masters, though he saw an abundance of men, he saw
none that he would be pleased to have control him:
great, burly, gruff men; little, chirping, dried men;
long-favored, lank, hard men; and every variety of
stubbed-looking, commonplace men . . .13
Only these, self-seeking and unconsciously cruel, or, worse,
Simon Legree. Readers recognized in such passages not alone
a description of the South, but of the world as well. Only
in Uncle Tom, in Eva, in Quakers, in mothers, did the author
find worthy examples of humanity, and her bitter comments
upon the world of fashion and respectability were bound to
cause a reaction of bitter comments upon herself.
In the last paragraph of her novel, she further iso
lated herself by explicitly attacking the Christian churches
12 Ibid., p. 382.
13 Ibid., p. 391.
151
for "making a common capital of sin"-^ in tolerating and pro
tecting slavery. This final outburst, more than a threat or
an insult, was a new call to battle, not the battle between
the churches and the devil, but a new one of Mrs. Stowe
against both churches and devil. Uncle Tom had expressed
for her the true moral of her life: "What a thing ’tis to
be a Christian.By using the slavery issue as a test
case, she was now free to demonstrate in her own works true
Christianity in contrast to the shams passing under the name.
That is, she could develop belligerently one of the two
earliest themes of the sketches she had written before aboli
tion had cast its spell over her.
Meanwhile, with her motives publicly questioned by
unsympathetic critics, a personal controversy was upon her
to which she responded in what"many of her friends have con
sidered the unwise Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Starting as a
twenty-five page appendix to the novel, this argument in her
own defense grew before publication into an entire volume.
Unwise the book may have been, to those who consider only
chattel slavery; Mrs. Stowe was not fighting solely for the
(
Negro, however, but for her ego.
U Ibid., p. 529.
15 Ibid., p. 497.
152
III* A ggj. TO UNCLE TOM'S CABIN. 1853
In this sizable volume, the fulfillment of a promise
to present the ’ ’ original facts and documents” upon which her
novel was based, what was immediately apparent to friends
and foes alike was the limitation of her original data. One
visit to Kentucky, a diligent perusal of the Era and propa
ganda tracts, accounts of her brother Edward’s experiences
with Elijah P. Lovejoy at Alton, Illinois, and a study of
some incomplete works on the laws governing slavery— these
were all she had known to build upon. As she frankly ex
plained,1^ writing without expectation of the excited debates
her novel was to cause, she had relied upon what are flatter
ingly called secondary sources, which had, according to their
custom, been less adequate than they appeared.
Her surprise is clear in her record of reading in the
New York Courier and Enquirer (November 5) an article showing
that in Louisiana, where Tom was supposed to have been whipped
to death and a young slave-girl publicly sold from her mother,
both incidents could never have occurred openly, since they
were acts which the laws of the state declared criminal and
punished as such. On one other point dear to Mrs. Stowe’s
heart, the writer of this article took issue with her, proving
that the privation of religious instruction, as she had
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, p.
70.
153
described it, was "utterly unfounded in fact,"-1 *? and citing
the first African churches of Louisville and Augusta, with
memberships of 1,500 and 1,300 respectively, as specimens of
churches entirely of, by, and for the slaves. "A larger pro
portion of the slave population are in communion with some
Christian church than of the white population in any part of
the country,”!® the author of the article concluded.
A very considerable portion of every southern congregation,
either in city or country, is sure to consist of blacks;
whereas, of our northern churches, not a colored person
is to be seen in one out of fifty . . .19
Though she might protest against his accusation that
”a ridiculously extravagant spirit of generalization pervades
this fiction from beginning to end,”20 Mrs. Stowe could not
fail to realize the gaps in her information which the author
of this article revealed. Answer him directly she could not,
for the facts were his; reply to him she could, for her cor
roborative evidence, supplied to her by hundreds of corre
spondents, revealed to her the horror of the dispersion of
black families and the human tragedy of black slavery as she
had only guessed them.
17 Ibid., p. 67.
Loc. cit.
^ 1°°• cit.
20 Ibid., p. 68.
154
Knowing subservience at first hand, she was on her
true ground when she wrote, echoing the ringing challenge of
Theodore Weld, that "the deadly sin of slavery is its denial
of humanity to man."21 Genuinely impressive was the righteous
indignation of her outcry against the assumption that the
slave was an inferior, subhuman animal for whose treatment
different standards of kindness apply than for the masters.
From this point of view, she could continue the argument
begun in her novel: if the Negro is a man, what possible ex
cuse can there be for denying him liberty and equality?
Righteous indignation, though always one of her best
moves, led her away from her professed subject, Negro slavery.
According to her custom, she threw about accusations and
sarcastic comments with a recklessness that aroused new oppo
sition to even her soundest arguments. The last quarter of
the Key renews the attack upon all the churches of America,
the Quakers excepted, for their noncommittal or frankly fa
vorable attitude towards slavery; and it was quite natural
that, regarding the churches as the only means of securing
abolition, she should have felt profoundly unhappy as she
forecast the future. None the less, to her opponents her
comments appeared mere petulance in the face of the Biblical
sanctions of slavery. In admitting that the Apostles had
21 Ibid., p. 125.
155
not been concerned with abolition she gave the impression,
as she frequently did throughout her future life, of moulding
her Christianity to fit her private desires, then of accusing
everyone but herself of being out of step.
Such passages are not digressions, and the personal
basis for her intrusion into churchly controversy is apparent
to anyone familiar with her family history. Next to herself,
her God filled the center of her field of consciousness; and
she herself suspected that religion, even in Uncle Tom* s
Cabin, was more nearly her central interest them Negro slavery.
In a preface to one of the French editions of-La Case
de L’Oncle Tom, she clearly stated this suspicion. The pur
pose of her novel, she wrote for her foreign readers, was a
universal one: to illustrate how the living Christ continues
a brother to the poor and despised of the earth, strengthening
the soul of man and bestowing upon even the illiterate an
inner peace that can withstand death itself. Like an evange
list she exhorted her readers to remember these Christian
truths, and like an evangelist of her father*s school she
was not beyond cracking the whips of the Lord*s omnipotence
and His righteous wrath.
Yoici la menace qu’elle [the Lord’s voice'] adresse a tous
les oppresseurs du pauvre: "Ce que vous avez fait a l'un
des plus pet^ts de ceux-ci qui sont mes freres-, vous me
l’avez fait a moi-meiae. "22
22 Harriet Beecher Stowe, introduction to La Case de
L* Oncle Tom, p. xx.
156
On this level of prophetic threat, there was impres
siveness that was only too glaringly absent from the narrower
applications of Christianity that Mrs. Stowe propounded so
acrimoniously in both Uncle Tom*8 Cabin and its direct sequel,
the substantiating Key. In those parts of the controversy
that were primarily personal, the Key revealed her developing
personality more clearly than the novel had done. The second
book even shows some of her little peculiarities, in the
unique way that was to become more marked in such later books
as the Vindication of Lady Byron. It is a characteristic
slip for her to refer to Patrick Henry, in 1773, as "echoing"23
the sentiments of Augustine St. Clare; and it is equally like
her to say:
Mesmerists have found that the negroes are singularly
susceptible to all that class of influences which produce
catalepsy, mesmeric sleep, and partial clairvoyant phe
nomena. 24
Also in the true spirit of her broadening interests are her
generous and more realistic admissions that "human nature is
no worse at the South than at the North,"25 and that proto
types of Simon Legree might be found "in the low districts
and dens of New York" or even in "the purest districts of
23 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Key to Uncle Tom*s Cabin, p.
36.
24- Ibid., p. 28.
25 ibid., p. 3A.
New England. ’ 157
She was indeed becoming a personality. The world was
growing more complicated and varied than she had imagined
possible; and so while, in the Key, weaving in and out and
around her subject, she showed now and again her ignorance
and her unbalanced emotionalism, she exhibited also a grow
ing knowledge of Negro slavery and an added appreciation of :
the complications of life. It should have become obvious to
readers of the Key that in her next, inevitable antislavery
novel she would come better prepared with facts than she had
been in her serial for the National Era.
IV. DEED, 1856
If the writing of Uncle Tom*s Cabin was like an un
avoidable explosion and the writing of the Key to Uncle Tom* s
Cabin like an unavoidable argument, the next book in the
series, Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp, took form in
a much calmer mood. A second antislavery novel was obviously
Mrs. Stowe*s duty to her public, to her publishers, and to
the cause which her first novel had supported. Though she
had no hope of immediate emancipation for the slaves,she
26 Ibid-> pp. 39-40.
2? Harriet Beecher Stowe, Dred: A Tale of the Great
Dismal Swamp, II, 212. Note also her reference to the "Uto
pian Dream" in her preface to Uncle Tom*s Cabin, 1878, p. xxxi.
Cf. the explicit statement of Florine Thayer McCray, The Life-
Work of the Author of Uncle Tom*s Cabin, p. 102: "Mrs. Stowe
never expected to see the slaves free."
158
did her best. "Her whole mind was wrought up in the story,”
she told one of her publishers, ”and she would pace the floor
late at night dictating to her amanuensis."2* * Though freedom
might be farther away than ever, after the subsiding enthusi
asm of the fugitive slave days, there was still opportunity
for antislavery fiction.
To the author, the initial reception of the book was
more than satisfactory. After three years of the golden pub
licity of controversy, the. new novel enjoyed a better early
sale than its predecessor. Soon Mrs. Stowe was able to ask
significantly, as the royalties began to pour in upon her,
"After that who cares what the critics say?"29
The question might still be asked, now that time has
thrust Dred into the stacks of forgotten novels from which
Uncle Torn*s Cabin has been preserved. Stylistically no better
than the other, Dred lacked the essential breath of life. It
was too largely what it purported to be, a book about the
black slaves, a much less inspiring subject to Mrs. Stowe
than the little wisp of a New England woman whose cause she
had championed so ardently in her first novel. In spite of
some powerful passages, in Dred she did not get deeply into
28 j. Derby, Fifty Years among Authors, Books and
Publishers, pp. 520-521.
29 Annie Fields, Life and Letters of Harriet Beecher
Stowe, p. 222.
159
character, as she had done unconsciously before. Instead of
her disappointed youth she was provided with only the facts
about slavery that she had accumulated in the meantime, with
memories of Sir Walter Scott, and with details imitated from
her own work. She was not helped either, one suspects, by
writing the novel as a unit, without the thrill of monthly
or weekly installments to keep her emotionally alive: among
all her novels, Dred was the only one not planned as a mag
azine serial.
As a result of this spiritual relaxation, Dred was a
comparatively tame book, without much interest after December
18, 1865; and the whole world has agreed that, whatever its
merits, it is a poor second to Uncle Tom*s Cabin. In merely
reading Dred one cannot feel this discrepancy, because the
story runs briskly among the groups of characters, with enough
variety to hold the attention. In recollection, however, the
scenes from Dred fade, while the outstanding episodes of
Uncle Tom* s Cabin remain clearly in the mind. There is a
legendary force to Mrs. Stowe’s first novel that, though it
may not be literary craftsmanship in the narrow sense, shows
exceptional imaginative power. In an aesthetic valuation,
forty years of suffering were worth more to Mrs. Stowe than
the two years of writing that went into Dred.
Even in the narrower sense of literary craftsmanship,
the comparative failure of Dred can be understood. For one
160
reason, the different kinds of material in the book were
poorly pieced together. In spite of the documentary evidence
submitted in the appendix, the romantic paraphernalia were
used unabashed; and Dred himself, the prophetic leader of his
race, was, except for the detail of pigmentation, a hero from
Scottish history, a wild chieftan fleeing for safety to an
inaccessible stronghold from which he sallied forth to con
found the oppressors of his people. His conversation, a
melange of Biblical passages, was a continuous declamation;
and at the sound of his voice, invisibly carried through the
night air, even the heartless slave-owning class trembled,
conscious of its sins.
For a time, as the story developed, hints were offered
that Mrs. Stowe was going to counsel the slaves to arise and
slay the tyrants, as John Brown was later to attempt and as
Professor Stowe had once urged in a moment of excitement;3°
but timely reflection led her to compromise with freedom and
bloodshed through a saintly death for her hero. His dying,
as noble as his living, suggested the inadequacy of force in
solving a problem that she continued to regard as primarily
a religious one.
Around an utterly fantastic core of swamp-girdled
retreats and mysterious sorties, she centered a more realistic
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sunny Memories of Foreign
Lands, I, lxv.
161
discussion of the subject that was still among her main in
terests, what she referred to as "the degenerate Christianity
of the slave, states. To her there was constant wonder in
the loyalty of the southern clergy to their own social insti
tutions. They must all be fools, or knaves, she was sure,
and through her pages she conducted a melancholy parade of
reverend gentlemen defending slavery or protesting that
nothing could be done to abolish it. The nonconformist
Dickson, single exception to the worldliness and wickedness
of his brethren, was rewarded for his outspokenness with in
sults and violence. Naturally enough, the northern clergymen
were also taken to task for their stubborn and shameful ac
quiescence in the Constitution of the United States.
Accompanying these discussions of the religious sit
uation, Mrs. Stowe attempted a complete picture of the eco
nomic life of the South. As she had never been in the
Carolinas, the scene of her story, and would be a hardly wel
come visitor at the moment, she was compelled to depend upon
stories in the Era, republished court records, and information
volunteered by others sharing her views. Despite such diffi
culties, she succeeded in introducing a wide variety of rec
ognizable types: the prosperous, kindly plantation owner;
the poorer owner, more kindly still, forced by necessity to
31 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Dred, II, 22
162
dispose of his human property; the vicious, drunken, lustful
debauchee to whom she was pleased to refer as the flower of
southern chivalry, "adept in every form of vice”;32 the poor
white, a coarse, animal creature spiritually debased by com
petition with unpaid labor.33
Conventional as these characters were, the whites in
Dred exhibited more diversity than the blaeks, for the former
had the choice of being good or bad, whereas the latter had
apparently all been created good. Her tendency towards
idealizing the Negroes was, if anything, less held in check
here than in Uncle Tom* s Cabin, about which- Dickens had re
gretted, in writing to her, ”If I might suggest a fault in
what has so charmed me, it would be that you go too far and
seek to prove too much. The wrongs and atrocities of slavery
are, God knows! case enough.This sensible counsel towards
moderation fell upon deaf ears. As a result, except for little
Tomtit, the male prototype of Topsy, the Negroes of Dred were
either passively suffering or actively avenging wrongs with
a lack of differentiation that produced a fatal monotony in
the design.
The sociology and theology of Dred were strung upon the
32 ibid., I, 46.
33 Ibid-» I> 120.
34 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom1s Cabin, p. xviii.
163
unsubstantial cord of a love story. The action of the novel
is spasmodic, less successfully managed than in Uncle Tom1s
Cabin because of its triviality in comparison with the great
causes associated with it. Mrs. Stowe, in all her writing,
never treated personal love between young people with under-
i .
standing or deep interest. In her first novel she had avoided
the theme, and in her second the love affair between a ’ 'prin
cess of little flirts,’ ’35 Hina Gordon, and the idealistic
master of four hundred slaves, Edward Clayton, meant so little
to her that she disposed of her heroine, with two hundred
pages left to tell of the story, so that her young hero could
devote his undivided attention to the colored race. Nina’s
beautiful death would have been more appealing if Eva’s death
had not been so much more impressive and if poor Sue Cripps,
wife of a brutal poor white, had not, in this very book, died
with equal pathos.
Throughout Dred the hard-pressed author overworked her
memories of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Old Tiff, or Uncle Tiff, is
almost Uncle Tom, and Harry, a superior young slave, is almost
Eliza’s husband. The old ideas also reappear, for Mrs. Stowe
was never to cease believing that Negroes, half-blacks in
cluded, could easily pass for white in the South, and that
young southern white men were physical weaklings.
35 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Dred, I, 22.
164
Ineptly as the story was arranged, Dred showed Mrs.
Stowe*s moral courage in facing the discouraging task of
abolition. Between the indifference of the North and the en
trenchment of the South, she saw no hope for emancipation, the
efforts of a few individuals counting for nothing against the
opposition of the organized churches and states. Realizing
the impossibility of her own ideal, the gradual education of
the slaves to prepare them for the responsibilities of free
dom, she could only recommend that they flee from their bondage
to the North or, preferably, to Canada or Liberia, where they
could add the joy of freedom to the consolations of Chris
tianity*
It is remarkable that of all the gifts she wanted for
the Negroes (the social and moral virtues of enlightened New
Englanders) the one that they would first receive, emancipa
tion, was that of which she most despaired. Had she received
that Divine assistance with Dred which was hers on an earlier
occasion, she might have foreseen the attack on Eort Sumter,
and the Battle of Bull Run; but she wrote Dred entirely by
herself, and though she sometimes thought it a better book,
that has proved to be a miscalculation*
V. FREDERICK DOUGLASS’ ESTIMATE OF MRS. STOWE
If Mrs. Stowe had thought highly enough of William H.
Seward to include him among the leading patriots and statesmen
165
whose biographies she sketched shortly after the conclusion
of the War between the States, she might have encountered,
even if belatedly, his classic statement of prewar days: "It
is an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring
forces." But to one who has reflected upon either her tem
perament or her historical sense, there is no surprise in her
faulty perspective. The conception of rivalry between north
ern capitalism and southern agriculture was meaningless to
her. That a Massachusetts man, Josiah Q,uincy, "an example of
stalwart and antiquated Federalism,"^ to quote Parrington*s
suggestive phrase, had foreseen secession in the year of her
birth, meant nothing to her. She was determined to detect
in the Civil War a renewal of hostilities between the faithful
angels and the followers of Satan; and in her vision she al
lowed no economic facts to adulterate her sentiment. Such
national scandals as the living conditions of the New England
wage-slaves, obvious as they were to writers below the Mason-
Dixon line, were no concern of hers. That her own view was
common, if not penetrating, is shown by the following refer
ence to Bayard Taylor, written by a scholar of southern sym
pathies:
The second article had to do with slavery ... It is
equally obvious that Taylor, like practically all of his
literary friends, was so blinded by the moral smoke screen
36 Farrington, op. cit., II, 279*
166
of the Abolitionists that he failed entirely to see what
was behind it— the conquest of the agrarian South by an
industrial East that was demanding an ever expanding
market for its surplus.37
That Mrs. Stowe, like Bayard Taylor, should have failed
to estimate the situation truly is less surprising than that
others, since her own day, have been content to accept her
at her own evaluation. She was an extremely interesting
symptom of the disorder which she is too frequently regarded
as having brought to a head.
Nor was her connection with the abolition of Negro
slavery, in the more limited sphere of conscious propaganda,
\
as useful as it has seemed to those who ignore the one hun
dred and fifty years of effort that preceded Uncle Tom1s
Cabin. Her service in the movement for Negro emancipation
cannot be estimated more clearly than by Frederick Douglass,
the great Negro orator who was for over a score of years his
people*s most successful organizer. A man of unusual criti
cal insight, Douglass has described from the viewpoint of the
participants the long agitation for freedom, the work of the
underground railway, and the careful propaganda of the aboli
tionists. Though he wrote of Mrs. Stowe with the gratitude
shared by all members of his race, he made perfectly clear
the incidental connection between her work and the cause to
37 Richard Croom Beatty, Bayard Taylor: Laureate of
the Gilded Age, p. 93.
167
which so many of his friends devoted their lives.
Douglass’ heroes were Garrison, John Brown, and
Lincoln. Garrison may have been a fanatic and Brown a ruf
fian, but they were the men of action who brought results
while the careful parliamentary tactics of Theodore Weld and
John Quincy Adams seemed to stumble and lose progress.
Garrison was a hero to Douglass because he had been dragged
through the streets of Boston with a halter about his neck;
Brown, because he had dared meet force with force, sacrificing
his life when slavery rode the crest of power; and Lincoln,
because, although a later and less enthusiastic adherent, he
had masterfully accomplished legal manumission.
Of the women workers in the cause of freedom Douglass .
estimated most highly Lucretia Mott; Lydia Maria Child, co
editor with her husband of the National Anti-Slavery Standard;
the Grixnke sisters, Sarah and Angelina (later the wife of
Theodore Weld), converted Quakers who had emancipated their
slaves in 1828; and Abby Kelley, who had been ”more than once
mobbed in the old Town Hall in the city of Providence, and
pelted with bad eggs.”38 All of these he ranked as more per
sistent workers than Mrs. Stowe, to whom the power was given,
”in such unstinted measure,” to appeal to the ’ ’ popular heart.”39
38 Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick
Douglass. p. 573.
39 jjoc. cit.
. 168
Uncle Tom* s Cabin. as well be understood, suited the
requirements of the bour of publication, and be did not allow
its author’s disappointing dealings witb him later, in rais
ing money for him in England, to destroy the gratitude owed
for her book.4-0 He was unable to discover, however, that
either she or it had made any permanent contribution to his
cause: dissatisfaction continued to spread, violence grew,
and the agitation against slavery was sustained, by the reg
ulars, with continually increasing intensity and fear.
Mrs. Stowe was not one of these regulars. Once the
facts are considered, either as shown in Mrs. Stowe’s early
works or in the history of the movement for freedom, the in
cidental nature of her contribution is clear. She may have
done much for the cause, if one concludes that Douglass was
mistaken, but-~she was by no means the type of constant worker.
How true this distinction is, may be illustrated by a signif
icant reference made by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, a younger
writer. Miss Phelps was so under the spell of Mrs. Stowe
and Uncle Tom’s Cabin that she called it "the greatest of
American novels, ”4-1 and the author ’ ’ the greatest American
woman” yet she realized that Mrs. Child was more truly an
4° Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglass. p. 182.
4-1 Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Chapters from a Life, p.
2 3 1.
42 IkM* > P* 131.
169
abolitionist writer. In her charming autobiography, Chapters
from a Life. Miss Phelps describes a visit that she made,
with Annie Fields, to see Mrs. Child:
At that time this distinguished abolitionist was occupy
ing lodgings so plain, in a quarter of Boston so much
less than fashionable, that I felt a certain awe upon
me, as if I were visiting a martyr in prison ... It is
well known that Mrs. Child sacrificed the prospect of a
brilliant literary future to her convictions in the move
ment for freeing the American slaves.43
Mrs. Stowe was never to be a martyr in the prison of
literary neglect. Instead of requiring a sacrifice from her,
abolition brought wealth, fame, and self-assurance. Slavery
was the tool by which she found herself. She never lost her
interest in it, but after Dred (1856) it ceased to occupy the
central position in her literary work. With the black slave
still yearning for his freedom, Mrs. Stowe*s energy turned
into other channels.
43 ibid., p. 182.
CHAPTER 71
THE MIDDLE TEARS
I. SUMY MEMORIES OF FOREIGN LANDS, 1854
Some writers’ souls respond to the slightest outward
stimulus. The placing of the comma, one is asked to believe,
might make a day memorable for Oscar Wilde, and the removal
of it, another. Henry James attributed a lifelong influence
to the taste of English muffin, and Marcel Proust could re
build an epoch of his life from a remembered glimpse of a
duchess* red shoes. These are sensitive creatures whose
scrupulous niceties Mrs. Stowe could never have appreciated.
Her'own development resulted from broader causes, less
t
delicate stimuli. Impatient with artistic trivialities, she
made her contribution to larger social movements. With her
first novel she had superbly performed a task that needed no
repetition, and had she gracefully retired from the literary
scene her reputation as a writer might well have grown to a
great legend. The necessity of money prevented such a re
tirement, for the expenses of the Stowes kept pace with their
increased income. A dissatisfaction no less psychological
than economic helped to keep her at her literary tasks, for
although she was now a personality in her own right, neither
the world nor her~position in it satisfied the demands of her
nature. She still had a mission to perform: what it might
171
be she had not yet discovered.
Meanwhile, she was happy in the enjoyment of her well
earned public acclaim. She combined her writing with more
recreation than she had ever been privileged to enjoy. In
travel she discovered the ideal avocational activity. Be
tween 1853 and I860, in addition to the solid work of writing
the Key. Dred, and The Minister's Wooing, she made three trips
to Europe. The Old World, cradle of that civilization which
reached perfection in New England, exerted as strong and as
strongly mixed attractions for her as for many another eager
Yankee. That she enjoyed herself is obvious from her books,
letters, and papers for periodicals.
In England particularly, which she first visited in
1853,. she was overjoyed by the demonstrations in her honor
and by the respect with which she was heard. So satisfactory
was this first memorable trip abroad that she perpetuated
her feelings and thoughts in a two-volume work, Sunny Memories
of Foreign Lands (1854-), consisting of her letters home, a
preface by her husband, and several chapters supplied by her
brother Charles, another member-of her party.
Wherever she went, in Great Britain particularly,
antislavery enthusiasts crowded about her; celebrities as
sembled at dinners and receptions held for her. Macaulay,
Dickens, Sir William Hamilton, Lady Byron, and Mrs. Jameson
were a few of those she met and commented upon freely in her
172
letters. Mrs. Dickens seems to have impressed her more than
Mr. Dickens, hut Gladstone, that "excellent and highly con
scientious man,” overshadowed them both", with his stately
figure and his "thoughtful, serious cast of countenance.
But much as writers and statesmen aroused her inter
est, she found her greatest pleasure in meeting the aristoc
racy. With gusto she enrolled in her letters the splendid
titles of Duke and Duchess, Lord and Lady, Marquis and Mar
chioness. She described life in the slave states for them,
and she innocently spread misinformation about the lack of
poverty in Boston, as she discovered when she returned. With
some of them, she exhibited a deep interest in reforming
movements, such as prohibition for Scotland; but one of her
greatest delights was a concert, concerning which she wrote
to her husband, "Well, the Hons, and Right Hons, all were
there. I sat by Lord Carlisle."2
A certain incident^ of the trip shows clearly how lack
ing she was in the consciousness of social relations and prob
lems. She was surprised when the London Times informed her,
and the world, that the brown silk dress she had ordered was
being made in a sweatshop. She replied that she had never
1 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sunny Memories of Foreign
Lands. II, 89.
2 Annie Fields, Life and Letters of Harriet Beecher
Stowe. p. 200.
3 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sunny Memories of Foreign
Lands. II, 83.
173
imagined there were sweatshops, that the pleasant respectable
woman who had come for the fitting, she had thought, was also
making the dress. Correspondence reached her begging her to
attack wage as she had chattel-slavery; but it was one of the
many crusades she declined. With the slaveholders already on
her hands, and the Pope and the devil not far away, she con
tented herself with a survey of the benevolent society already
working for the good of dressmakers and milliners.
Organized charities were one of her special delights,
as Christian elements improving "our half-Christianized
times,but she seems to have forgotten that the aristocracy
she so delighted in was maintained upon the foundation of
injustice denounced in her famous novel. The English workers,
being legally free, recognized publicly as God’s children,
had achieved the final position she was working toward for
the lower classes.
After leaving England, she was given more opportunity
to rest and to recover some of the strength sapped out of her
by her hospitable British hosts. She was rather critical of
what she found on the mainland, sunny as her memories were.
According to her own account she was dissatisfied even with
the collection at the Louvre, looking in vain for any picture
"great and glorious enough to seize and control my whole
K Ibid., I, 247.
174
being."'* But according to her brother she returned from her
survey of the museum with flushed cheeks, eyes that seemed
to swim and the statement, "I have been satisfied, for the
first time. "6 Catholic cathedrals distressed her Christian
soul with their "horrible and loathesome idolatry" and their
poor worshippers "kneeling, with clasped hands and bowed
heads, praying with an earnestness which was sorrowful to
see.Even the Swiss Alps threatened to fail her, so many
of them were simply stones, until she found Mount Blanc; and
patriotism led her to prefer Niagara to it.
In this exacting mood she rode about the continent,
meditating on philanthropy and Calvinism, eagerly comparing
her impressions of the galleries with the dicta in her guide
books, and writing voluminous letters chronicling the adven
ture of her inner and outer lives.
No wonder she had a good time. Upon her return home,
she brought with her a new tolerance for.others, a special
love for England, "kind, strong Old England— the Mother of us
All,"** and a realization that the Erench are not incapable of
religious feeling. Worried as she was by her admiration for
5 IMd., I, 160. -
^ Ibid.. II, 148. The italics are Mrs. Stowe’s.
7 Ibid., II, 228, 332.
8 Ibid., II, 432.
175
chivalry and feudalism as perhaps inconsistent with the
spirit of Christ, she had been so often charmed by the beau
ties of a new world.that her criticism of the Puritans as
lacking in aesthetic appreciation took on a new meaning, and
a stronger, for her.
Now she knew at least some of the implications of
beauty, and often as her scorn of exactness, of the "cool
critic’ *^ as she said, might lead her astray, she could not
remain ignorant of the fact that there was more to architec
ture than Exeter Hall, the comfortable home of all the phi
lanthropies, foreign and domestic.
II. LATER TRIPS ABROAD
Mrs. Stowe’s second visit to Europe, an event of I856,
was less formal and exhausting than her first grand tour*
With her pleasure trip she combined the satisfying business
of securing British copyright for Dred; and the enormous sale
of the book, in England as in America, she interpreted (in
truly Puritan style) as a token of the favor of God, who was
bestowing upon her more of this world’s goods than she had
dared ask in her prayers. For her regular journalistic work,
she sent series of public letters, like Sunny Memories, to
her magazine, the Independent.
9 . I, 54.
With her international royalties safe and her reputa
tion in the ascendant, she lightheartedly renewed her old
acquaintances among the aristocracy and formed some new at
tachments. From the Duchess of Sutherland she received
gratifying news: the Queen herself was eagerly reading Dred
and, as later communications revealed, she ranked it above
Uncle Tom*s Cabin, was provoked when Nina died, and felt
angry that nothing dreadful happened to Tom Gordon.1® It
was on this trip that Mrs. Stowe enjoyed three happy days
at the home of Charles Kingsley, where she was astonished to
learn that the literary divine was a zealous Anglican. When
she visited Ruskin, it was the Englishman’s turn to be as
tonished, in the first place because she preferred ”going in
a boat on the river” to examining the notable manuscripts at
Durham, and in the second place because there was no river,
but only a trickle about as big as ”a not very large town
drain.
There were no major literary results of this second
European jaunt, but upon her third and last visit abroad
(1859), during the final happy stage, which was passed in
Italy, she not only wrote lengthy public letters for the
Independent but also began a historical novel, Agnes of
i
Annie Fields, op. cit., p. 227.
11 John Ruskin, Letters of John Ruskin to Charles
Eliot Norton, I, 54*
177.
Sorrento. These were indeed happy days, during which she
lived gloriously on the success of Uncle Tom*s Cabin and
Dred. Of her new friends, the most important to her was
Mrs. Fields, wife of the prominent Boston publisher and
later her most capable biographer.
During these active, productive years the only per
sonal sorrow to disturb her sense of wholesome achievement
was the death, in 1857, of her eldest son Henry. The boy,
a freshman at Dartmouth College, died suddenly of drowning,
and to the natural bereavement of a mother was added the
ancient fear: of damnation; for Henry had not been formally
saved. **I may not be what the world calls a Christian,” he
had written, ”but I will live such a life as every true man
ought to live.”12 Alas! might his virtuous behavior be per
haps not enough? Was his death not similar to Professor
Fisher*s, about which Catherine had never reassured herself
completely? Might he not, as had been taught by her father,
be damned?
Through this crisis of doubt she returned to her
earlier self, to the girlhood fears that success had banished.
She composed a complete account of her affliction for the
Duchess of Sutherland and another for her daughters in Paris.
To her sister Catherine she confessed that the old temptations
3-2 Annie Fields, eg. cit., p. 240.
178
of tlie devil assailed her; and her soul hung in the balance
as she feared that her trust in God had been misplaced.
But when at length she had recovered her faith in
Jesus, she was greatly pleased by her husband’s visions, in
'which Henry’s presence returned, accompanied by the vibrations
of a mysterious guitar. More comforting still was the final
explanation agreed upon between them that the guitar, since
Henry was no musician, must have been struck by Eliza, the
Professor’s first wife.
The direct literary results of the vacation travels of
this period, the book Sunny Memories and her private and pub
lic correspondence, are revelatory rather than intrinsically
valuable. Not only are they thinner intellectually than
Margaret Fuller’s European letters from the forties, but they
suffer when compared with the account of a so much less famous
woman as Marion Harland, whose Loiterings in Pleasant Paths
(1880) records with comparative wit and vigor the experiences
of a similarly domestic personality in the Old World. The
public took Mrs. Stowe’s book quite well, and such ah aeute
reader as Longfellow found in it "touches of her genius’ ’ and
"deep poetic feeling.”13 a twentieth-century reader, hard
put to discover the former, would more likely apply to these
letters the words written by Catherine Gilbertson about some
3-3 Samuel Longfellow, Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
II, 274-.
179
of Harriet’s earlier epistles, that they "leave us with a
peculiarly middle-class, evangelical taste in our mouths."-^
As a traveler, Mrs. Stowe labored under the double
handicap of her inexperience and her lack of caution. Henry
- James, that restless, analyst who painstakingly wooed his im
pressions by stages, could never have stomached her high
handedness. She was American, beyond doubt, an American
Puritan with a moral sense like that of one of his characters
in The Golden Bowl, a moral sense that worked like steam and
sent her up like a rocket. American also were her incapacity
for self-criticism .and her addiction to the "clumsy terms of
excess" which he deprecated. She was, in fact, the typical
American tourist in the Old World.
How justly Mrs. Stowe would have resented such insin
uations! If she had never written Uncle Tom’s Cabin she
might have escaped all such unkindly analysis of her charac
ter. Her other books, charming as two or three of them are,
would never have made her a subject of serious interest or
controversy. They would never have caused her motives to be
impugned or investigated, for they would have established
her somewhere between Susan Warner and Sarah Orne Jewett.
She might easily have remained the family woman of her ideals,
had not the unpremeditated turmoil of the slavery question
M Catherine Gilbertson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, p. 5S.
180
forced her famous book and her personality to bear so heavy
a burden.
III. THE CIVIL WAR YEARS
Mrs. Stowe is supposed to have been hailed, by no less
august a personage than Abraham Lincoln, as the little woman
who caused the Civil War.^5 However that may be, her work
in the war itself was limited largely to experiencing patri
otic fervor. "All that women can do," she had said during
the Kansas troubles, "is to keep their husbands awake nights,
with their sighing and groaning.n1^
In the big war, as in the little one that had pre
ceded it, Mrs. Stowe’s was the passive part of sighing and
groaning. She lacked the heroism and adventure of women like
Mrs. Fanny Ricketts, who dared the enemy and served as nurse
to her captive husband.1? She did not act like Mrs. Mary A.
Brady, who gave her life to hospital work, or like Miss
Margaret Brekinridge, who not only knit socks and wrote poems
for the soldiers, but also worked in the hospitals and died
of exhaustion. Mrs. Stowe had none of the adventures of
15 Annie Fields, 0£. cit., p. 269; Lyman Beecher Stowe,
Saints, Sinners and Beechers. p. 205.
- LO John Raymond Howard, Remembrance of Things Past, p.
72.
17 Frank Moore, Women of the War, p. 19.
181
Anna Stheredge, cook and nurse, or of Miss Pauline Cushman,
actress and Union spy, or of Bridget Divers,''known as Irish
Biddy, maid of all work for the First-Michigan Cavalry, who
had at least two horses killed under her in battle.
The possibilities for such participation in the war
were almost unlimited. The last shot had hardly been fired
before Women of the War; Their Heroism and Self-Sacrifice
was ready with its accounts of the women mentioned above and
many like them. As the author, Frank Moore, said, there were
not only spectacular women, many nurses, but humble and un
known laborers by the hundreds.1® For everyone who wanted
there was as much work to be done as there was will to do it,
Mrs. Stowe*s cooperation in this enterprise was largely
indirect. Her second son, Frederick William, was among the
earliest volunteers. The awesome solemnity of the great pub
lic gatherings thrilled her, and with the rest of the people
she was inspirited by the airs of the military bands "in
which the soldiers joined with hearty voices.’ *19 she responded
wholeheartedly to the appeal of cheering people, of waving
handkerchiefs, of fine looking army chaplains, and especially
to the delirium of a great religious festival at the capital
city at which over a thousand redeemed slaves prayed and sang
Ibid., pp. iv-v.
19 Annie Fields, o£. cit., p. 260.
182
hymns.
Such public excitement was in itself almost too stren
uous for her, but it was pleasant, whereas her private life,
continuing in the flurry of nervousness that had become
habitual, was filled with trouble. Life was further compli
cated by several changes in residence, first from Andover to
Hartford, Connecticut, when her husband retired from teach
ing, and later within the city of Hartford, when after two
years the house built to her own specifications proved un
acceptable as a residence because of the intrusion of indus
try into the neighborhood. The wedding of her daughter re
duced her, as she phrased it, to "sheer imbecility,"20 while
by other domestic exigencies she was kept flustered, worried,
and discontented.
As her specific war services she wrote essays for the
Independent and the Atlantic on the prosecution of the cam
paign, patriotic poems about the war to end war,21 as well as
a stirring "Appeal to the Women of England."22 the
20 Ibid-» P* 298.
21 r p wo are reprinted in the anthology, Chimes of Free
dom and Union. They-are neither better nor worse than those
of the other poets, Holmes, Whittier, Mrs. Sigourney, Miss
Lareom, Tilton, etc.
22 on its favorable reception by the English masses,
see Frank J. Klingberg, "Harriet Beecher Stowe and Social Re
form in England," in American Historical Review, 43:552.
isy
desolate hearths and ruined homesteads of which she spoke,
she was sustained by the knowledge that she was assisting at
"the throes and ravings of the exorcism"2^ of slavery, and
the conclusion of the war left her spiritually satisfied if
physically depleted. As though to emphasize the final as
cendency of the North, she moved, as soon as practical, that
is in 1867, to Florida, where she could examine at first
hand the work of reconstruction and help to guide the freed-
men towards virtue.
Upon one principle she finally agreed with Garrison,
who had declared, in elosing the books of the Anti-Slavery
Society, that slavery was ended. The emancipation proclama
tion fully satisfied her moral sense, and she was willing to
allow as long a time as necessary for the full absorption of
the Negro into political life. She looked forward calmly to
an indefinite period during which her brother Henry and
others of "moral influence" were to win over the "really good
men”2^ of the South. 1?hat to do with the ex-slaves in the
meantime, in the new economic life of the South, was a' prob
lem she considered in articles for the North American Review
and other magazines, though she realized that a solution was
beyond her powers. Brooding over the moral aspects of the
23 Annie Fields, op. oit., pp. 267, 271.
24 Ibid.t p. 275.
184
situation, she could do nothing better in her book Men of
Our Times than to fight again through the Civil War, still
temperamentally in the midst of the combat.
XV. MEN OF OUR TIMES. 1868
Although she wrote it hastily, and almost unwillingly,
for the money it would bring, Mrs. Stowe thought well of
this now forgotten book. She overestimated its merits, for
most of its eighteen biographical sketches are colorless,
far below her usual standard of readability. Men of Our
Times is a thoroughly provincial book, marred by the preju
dices of an unhappy war. Mrs. Stowe was as one-sided as she
was earnest in expounding the careers of the "leading patriots
of the day,” as the subtitle designated them, the Union
leaders who had demolished the ”so-styled Southern aristoc
racy. ”25 These patriots included Lincoln, Grant, Garrison,
Simmer, Chase, Governor Wilson of Massachusetts, Greeley,
Farragut, Governor Andrew of Connecticut, Colfax (Speaker of
the House), Stanton, Frederick Douglass, Generals Sheridan,
Sherman, and Howard, William A. Buckingham (another governor
of Connecticut), Wendell Phillips, and Henry Ward Beecher.
25 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Men of Our Times, p. 121.
Mrs. Florine Thayer McCray states in The Life-Work of the
Author of Uncle Tom*s Cabin, o. 369. that 40,000 conies were
sold.
185
Of these sketches, only the last has intrinsic impor
tance. Next to the longest in the hook, it is based upon
intimate knowledge for which the publisher paid her an extra
thousand dollars,2^ and it has been praised by a biographer
as the best documentary approach to the subject.27 Mrs.
Stowe was particularly well equipped to appreciate Henry Ward
Beecher, for he was making the same effort as she was to ad
just his mature views to his childhood doctrines. Retaining
his love for his father as a man, he was~persuasively substi
tuting a creed of hope and love for the threats and fears of
Calvinism.
Mrs. Stowe interpreted her brother with understanding
as well as with sisterly devotion. She exulted in his major
triumphs and loved even his foibles. His opposition to to-
baceo and gin echoed her own; and she regarded his invention
of a circular study table with a hole in the middle as an es
pecially happy manifestation of the enquiring mind.
After her brother, she particularly praised Grant,
whose statesmanship impressed her as deeply as his military
skill, and Sumner, the New England Brahmin whose advocacy of
legal abolition contrasted favorably in her mind with the
fanatical agitation of Garrison.
26 McCray, op. cit., p. 369.
27 John Henry Barrows, Henry Ward Beecher, the
Shakespeare of the Pulpit. p. viii.
186
Naturally, all of the eighteen subjects of her sketches
were praised, since they were the Leading Patriots of the Lay,
but a clear difference distinguishes the adulation accorded
some from the merely perfunctory approval of others. Abraham
Lincoln, though honored in the opening and longest sketch,
was not one of her favorites, and there was a scarcely con
cealed uneasiness in her troubled -reference to his ”queer
stories.”2* * in one hundred pages about Lincoln, this coldly
polite biographer made no reference to Nancy Hanks, to his
wife, or to his children. He was to her purely the figure
of law courts and legislatures, who best deserved having a
complete and charitable veil drawn over his private life and
character.
Horace Greeley was another of the patriots of whom she
could not thoroughly approve, but her sketch of him is filled
with color borrowed from his own Recollections that had re-
i .
cently appeared in the New York Ledger. Patronizing through
out, she reached her height in stating that the Tribune’s
success was due more to its business management than to
Greeley’s editorial strength, and in admitting that ”if he
gave mistaken counsels at any time, his mistakes were the
unavoidable results of his mental organization.”29 Her
2* * Harriet Beecher Stowe, Men of Our Times, p. 370.
29 Ibid.< P. 309.
187
description of the journalist in practically his own words,
**he tends to he fat, is shambling and bowed over in carrying
himself,**3° is one of the liveliest touches to Men of Our
Times.
With this collection of biographical sketches, Mrs.
Stowe bade farewell to the questions of slavery and rebellion
that had inspired a series of books beginning with Uncle Tom* s
Cabin and including the Key to that work, Dred, and this final
volume. The thinness of her last comments indicated how
thoroughly she had expressed herself. That the enslavement
of a race was a sin against God and a crime against man had
once needed to be proclaimed, one may grant, with vigor, even
with excitement or hysterical emphasis. That she was well
equipped to condemn such a practice is undeniable. If such
was the purpose for which life had prepared her, she had per
formed it, in some two thousand pages of print, with commend
able completeness. Emancipation, which had already vindicated
her cause, had robbed her of this literary material; her later
fields of conquest lay elsewhere.
V. A CLASSIFICATION OF MRS. STOWE’S LATER WRITINGS
Dred (I856) was Mrs. Stowe's last effective word on
slavery. Withdrawing her major interests from abolitionist
3° Ibid., p. 294
fiction, she was compelled to find new subjects for the ex
ploitation of her popularity. As a money-making career she
now specialized in that of a magazine writer, and, with her
children growing up, writing became a steady grind to which
she gave her major attention. As the succeeding chapters of
this study will show, her productivity increased amazingly,
in the true spirit of "God-fearing New England, which ab
horred a holiday as much as nature abhors a vacuum."31 on
July 1, 1852, hardly more than three months after the book
publication of Uncle Tom1s Cabin, the Independent announced
her as one of its star correspondents. During the following
decade she sold this magazine one serial, The Pearl of Orr1s
Island, and many articles and poems, a large number of which
were never reprinted. Meanwhile, after 1857, she had become
a regular contributor to the new Atlantic Monthly, selling
it serial stories, articles, and short stories for years.
After I865 Our Young Folks used her sketches for children,
and after 1870 the Christian Union absorbed most of her en
ergy, with several serials and numerous miscellaneous essays.
In addition, she served one year as associate editor of
Hearth and Home. To the New York Ledger she sold a series
of twelve travel sketches, "A Winter in Italy,” which appeared
between August 12 and October 28, I865. Her name was also
31 Harriet Beecher Stowe,. Poganuc People, p. 85
189
connected, as contributor or editorial associate, with such
diversified publications as Western Home, Old and New,
Youths Companion, the Continent, and Revolution— this last
devoted to woman1s rights.
With these varied contacts, Mrs. Stowe remained wor
ried and distracted. As she grew older she needed, though
she did not get, more rest than in the past; she would have
written less than she did, had not need and extravagance
forced her into such commercial work as Men of Our Times.
She lost money in Florida trying to grow cotton32 and or
anges; 33 liar Hartford home, "Oakwold,’ ’ proved a miniature
Abbotsford for expense;34 and in dozens of ways, much to her
husband’s distraction, she spent, lost, and gave away the
generous profits from her writings.35 To keep ahead of ex
penses, quite as much as to provide self-expression, she com
posed articles at breakneck speed. Within ten or eleven years
of the publication of Dred she wrote ten or eleven books, in
cluding three of her most substantial novels. She seemed to
be trying to compensate for her lost youth, with unslackened
32 Charles Edward Stowe and Lyman Beecher Stowe,
Harriet Beecher Stowe: The Story of Her Life. p. 217.
^ Ibid.. p. 239.
34 ibid., p. 212.
35 Lyman Beecher Stowe, Saints, Sinners and Beechers,
p. 219.
190
energy; and within the ten years preceding 1878 she pub
lished fourteen more books. Eventually then, at sixty-seven
years, she was forced to take the rest she had so long needed,'
a rest that proved to be permanent retirement. Her public
hated to see her go, and as late as 1883 the rumor was spread
that she was planning another novel, to be called Orange
Blossoms, a rumor which she denied definitely, almost
brusquely.36
Because of her extraordinary activity, the two dec
ades, or something less, ending in 1878, were the most com
plicated of Mrs. Stowe’s mental life. The chaos of this
period is revealed by the varied works of these last pro
ductive years, which have been reserved for detailed descrip
tion and appraisal in the next two chapters. Eighteenth-
century New England, modern New York, Florida, Aaron Burr,
Savanarola, Byron and the Bible, poems, stories, and arti
cles, books for men, for women and for children— she wrote
on a miscellany of subjects. The greatest of masters, se
renely calm in the possession of inexhaustible creative
power, might have found difficulty in preserving his magical
spell over such varied materials.
The candid critic is tempted to let each book give
its own evidence independent of the others. Here they are,
36 Continent, 4:383, 798 (1883).
191
he would like to say, each in its own habit and complexion;
they fill shelves, but to tell what they meant to their
author would require more shelves than they. To regard this
output as a mere conglomerate might, indeed, be the less ac
curate estimate in the long run, but for the time it would
certainly be the less difficult. That these works have no
conscious unity among them is obvious; yet they may result
from some unperceived principle of development that can be
inferred without violence to the facts of perception. That
they were all produced by one person, sane, healthy, and
practical, rather supports the view that they form a struc
ture which, if only they were better books, would be aes
thetically clear.
As thus examined, the works of Mrs. Stowe divide grad
ually into two amorphous groups— shapes which go far to jus
tify the Miltonic exaggeration of shapeless shapes— one
dealing with life in New England, the other with modern life
in the reconstruction period. The one group, a continuation
of the early local color sketches, includes primarily five
books: The Minister1s Wooing, The Pearl of Orr*s Island,
Oldtown Folks, Sam Lawson1s Oldtown Fireside Stories, and
Poganuc People. To these should be added, as pendants in
contrast, Agnes of Sorrento and Palmetto Leaves, both of
which describe civilizations alien to that which, in spite
of the sorrow she had suffered from it, held her greatest
192
loyalty.
The second amorphous group, dealing with social life,
her mature continuation of the early moral sketches, includes
the three volumes of essays beginning with House and Home
Papers, the three remaining novels, and the treatise The
American Woman*s Home. With this group belong also the
books on religion, which are in effect studies in the prac
tical applications of religion in reconstruction America.
The book on Byron, because of the important influence of
Byron upon Mrs. Stowe's entire life, deserves individual
analysis, apart from either of these groups. The children's
stories, also unaccounted for in this twofold division, can
be disregarded without serious consequences, exeept as they
add a touch of fantasy not exhibited elsewhere in her works:
for the most part they contain the same ideas as her books
for adults, with much the same expression.
With these classifications accepted, there is at
least a provisional outline of a life work, the framework of
an interesting career. The three centers of interest in her
writing follow the chronological and social development of
the United States: the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
century in the Hew England states, the years of antislavery
agitation and civil war, the troubled decades of postwar
commercialism.
Whatever her subject, she treated it to show humanity's
193
need for a higher moral sense. A keen observer of human
weaknesses, she gently ridiculed them or vigorously abused
them in proportion to their sinfulness, exactly as she had
done with Augustine St. Clare and Simon Legree. A great ad
mirer of virtue, she continued to praise it wholeheartedly
wherever she observed it. The reader of these later books
cannot escape observing that in making her appraisals of
right and wrong she maintained something less than- Olympian
serenity. No sarcasm is intended in the statement that she
considered the kind of person she was as the genuine salt of
the earth. Her moral sense, which was so very strong that
it dominated her writing on all subjects, made no allowance
for a possible margin of error.
What was the ideal human type that, consciously and
by implication, she eulogized? The succeeding chapters will
explain in detail. In a few words, the .greatest people on
earth were Christian mothers who directed their families in
the spirit of love. In this concept is shown Mrs. Stowe*s
development of the lessons her youth had taught her. Like
her sister Catherine, the ideal woman was an educator; but
there was this difference, too, that she was a kindly matron.
Like her father Lyman Beecher, the ideal woman was a preacher
of the word, but with this distinction: she taught the love
of Jesus instead of the fear of hell. Of all the people Mrs.
Stowe had known in life, the nearest approximations to
194
perfection were Roxana Beecher and Mrs. Stowe herself. The
true Christrdovers, among whom she numbered herself, included
only those men like Henry Ward Beecher, "my two years* junior
and nearest companion out of seven brothers and three sis
ters. "37 she loved him for his virtuous soul and for the
enemies he made: "I feel the world really does hate him to
a degree that makes it safe to hope he is about right."38
She felt the same about herself, for she was ever a
determined fighter against abuses. That her analysis of
humanity’s need was rejected by her contemporaries was per
haps the result of their inadequacy as much as of hers; yet
the incompleteness of her survey of American life ruined her
strictly didactic books, which have been completely forgotten
since she wrote them. Her modified Puritanism, however, gave
her treatments of New England both strength and importance.
As a legislator for mankind she failed, but as a theorizer
upon her own people she won her soundest successes.
37 Annie Fields, 0£. cit., pp. 362, 364.
38 Ibid., pp. 328, 364.
CHAPTER YII
THE COMPLETELY DIDACTIC BOOKS
I. GENERAL TRAITS OP THESE BOOKS
In appraising the next impulse of Mrs. Stowe’s life,
her contributions to the troubled thought of the sixties and
seventies, the student is limited to a chronicle of long
drawn-out failure. To most critics, or perhaps to all, her
ten volumes on modern life are terra incognita. The detailed
examination that they are to be given in the present chapter
may seem superfluous to the person hopefully seeking lost
i
N
literary treasures, but it is an unavoidable duty. Ten such
volumes as these cannot be neglected by anyone who wants to
know the full scope of Mrs. Stowe’s writing. In bulk alone
they form a considerable portion of her output, and their
significance is at least proportionate to their extent. To
disregard them, as critics have done, is totally to disfigure
their author.
Didacticism showed in Mrs. Stowe’s writings from her
earliest attempts at stories and essays. Throughout her
active life she retained her father's faith that the millenium
was near and that she, like him, was one of those specially
commissioned to prepare for it. She was also predisposed to
her ministry, though she was but a woman, through the family
196
legend that the first Beecher to settle in America was one
Hannah: nor would it have deterred her, had she learned the
truth, to know that Mistress Hannah had come only as helpmate
to her husband John, for John had succumbed during the first
winter, and Hannah, plying her trade of midwife, had been
/ •
left the sole support of herself and her son Isaac. To be a
midwife of ideas was a pleasing prospect to Mrs. Stowe. It
would be a broadening of the family tradition as instituted
by Hannah Beecher.
In addition to carrying on, with modern improvements,
the family religious crusade, the work she contemplated
would win favor in her eyes as an extension of her brother
Henry Ward’s ethical labors. She would have subscribed with
out quibble to the description given by the amusing author of
Saints, Sinners and Beechers: ’ ’ Henry’s aim was to raise men
to their highest potentialities, to give them lives rich and
full, both here and hereafter”; ' * ' for she would have appre
ciated the scope of his ambitions, the epic quality of here
and hereafter.
To speculate upon exact causes for Mrs. Stowe’s
didacticism is probably unnecessary: so many can be turned up
that discrimination becomes impossible. Didacticism was in
^ Lyman Beecher Stowe, Saints, Sinners, and Beechers,
p. 252.
197
the air, and few of our great or polite writers, from Emerson
and Whitman to Longfellow and Mrs. Sigourney,.attempted to
avoid it. Yet, in defense of American sensibilities, it may
be well to point out that one of the great influences upon
Mrs. Stowe was that exerted by Mr. Richard Lovell Edgeworth
(who was not an American) through the moral tales of his
gifted daughter Maria. Harriet’s mother Roxana imbued her
children with a liking for Mrs. Edgeworth’s juvenile tale,
Frank, the subject of one of Harriet’s few recollections of
her mother; and the appetite for didactic fiction thus
encouraged spread unchecked. From Edgeworthstown to Litchfield
the line is almost direct. The Christian Union was merely the
principal later market for her moral writings, as the
Evangelist had been the earliest.
From such influences developed the habits of the mature
woman. The demand for self-respect and inner harmony must be
considered the principal reason— aside from the ever-present
desire for money, which decided that she write, but not neces
sarily what— for the series of books dealing with social
trends. In writing them she tried to prove that she had
grown up. While she was unconsciously trying to work out a
better interpretation of life than the abandoned Calvinism
of Lyman Beecher and .Jonathan Edwards she was consciously
setting herself the task of legislating for her contemporaries.
Wandering over the expanses of human relationships, she
198
did not give herself a chance to succeed, for she was
hampered by her ignorance of the contemporary social and
intellectual drift. After the war it was still true that,
as the Beards have said, "New England’s dominant ideas were
now as far from the mystic assumptions of Cotton Mather as
the steam-driven spinning mill from the one-spindle wheel
of Priscilla."2 To Mrs. Stowe, a later Priscilla, the
follies of her people, as well as their achievements, were
an entire library of closed books. The migration westward,
the development of transportation and communication, at the
one extreme, failed to stir her imagination. She did not
understand the publics that listened enraptured to Emerson
or Whitman or Mark Twain, and her own writing was addressed
to a more decorous and less credulous folk than that which
flocked to Barnum’s collections of trained fleas, midgets,
ventriloquists, living statues, and Eejee Mermaids. Her
taste in amusements, that of New England church-goers, did
not include the theater, aesthetic dancing, horse racing, or
getting drunk. In politics, though she finally found her
hero in President Grant, she could not cooperate with the
abolitionists or approve of Lincoln.
In brief, although her life spanned nearly the entire
2 Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard, The Rise of
American Civilization, I, 631*
199
century from the tempestuous teens to the nonsensical nine
ties, the only thought-provoking movement that moved her deeply
was spiritualism. Whether it appealed to her intellectually
is questionable, for with her husband's visions and her
father's record of seeing the spirit of his dead wife, the
personal impulse towards investigating spiritual phenomena
was irresistible. She conversed with mediums, experimented
for herself, and then, testing her results by the yard-scale
of Biblical revelation, abandoned the search. It was very
rare, she came to realize, for Christian people to have such
peculiarities. The spiritualistic angels who rolled the
stones from before the tombs of the dead were never the
3
unquestionable emissaries that she demanded. For a Christian
what need are revelations beyond those of the sacred Book?
To have Christ, she concluded, ending her skirmish with
experimental science, was best of all. The facts continued to
puzzle, more than to stimulate her. She possessed something
better, a truly reverent attitude towards God.
II. TWO RELIGIOUS TRACTS
With a father, a husband, and seven brothers in the
ministry, any woman might be expected to think a great deal
about religion, whatever she might say before her men folks.
3 Annie Fields, Life and Letters of Harriet Beecher
Stowe, p. 308.
200
For Mrs. Stowe, to think was to speak. With her faith that
all problems were religious, she never felt that talk about
religion was a digression from the subject at hand. Simi
larly, when she wrote her two special religious treatises,
Woman in Sacred History (1873)^ and Footsteps of the Master
(1877), she never felt that turning from God was a departure
from her professed subject. There was nothing classically
exclusive about her writing; she left herself free to circle
the world in forty words, whenever the spirit inspired her.
Her faith in the Dpfety was, the evidence indicates,
the most constant of her preoccupations. Not only was Uncle
Tom1s Cabin, to quote her son’s words, ”a work of religion—
the fundamental principles of the gospel applied to the burn-
5
ing question of negro slavery,” but even more strikingly in
her earlier sketches does her absorption in this subject
appear. As a matter of fact, her earliest triumph as a
school-girl writer was won with a composition entitled "Can
the Immortality of the Soul be Proved by the Light of Nature?”
Her answer, at the age of twelve, was a clear no:
^ Harriet Beecher Stowe, Woman in Sacred History.
Mrs. McCray describes it as ”a superb volume which, in its
plainest binding, sold for six dollars,” It was issued in
several forms, with poems and more chromos added, and sold
in all about 50,000 copies. Florine Thayer McCray, The Life-
Work of the Author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, pp. 416-417*
5 Charles Edward Stowe, Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe,
p. 154*
201
Never till the blessed light of the G-ospel dawned on the
borders of the pit and the heralds of the Cross pro
claimed "Peace on earth and good will to men,” was it
that bewildered and misled man was enabled to trace his
celestial origin and glorious destiny.&
Holding undeviatingly to this childhood conviction that
God is best, she devoted many pages to puzzling over precisely
what attributes might be demanded of the finest type of God.
Her religious thinking was her special pride; her reflections
upon ■ GOdhood were her greatest comfort.
Granting that there was more of the conventional or
traditional in her beliefs than she realized, one need not
attempt to answer categorically the question, Was she a
Puritan? By the nineteenth century, the Yankees having suc
ceeded them, there were no true Puritans, but Lyman Beecher
must have been as near an approach to the classic models as
was humanly possible. His education at conservative Yale
University encouraged this strain of religious idealism,
whereas in his daughter the Yankee trait of financial
shrewdness is much better developed.
In other respects also, Mrs. Stowe is not entirely true
to type. As a recent authority on the Puritans has said, they
were intellectual, not sentimental, about their religion, since
it was to them "a very complex, subtle and highly intellectual
f i
Ibid., p. 20. The entire composition is reprinted
here, pp. 15-21.
202
7
affair.” Harriet knew all the arguments, but like her most
famous brother she mistrusted them. From her Aunt Harriet
Foote, a high-church Episcopalian, she had learned .at an
early age some of the distinctions which were to disturb her
for many years. Eventually she broke with her father’s
Calvinistic church and became an Episcopalian, like her aunt.
A parallel between her outlook and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s
will show more clearly what the problem is. Austin Warren has
stated it simply in a passage worth quoting:
Hawthorne takes his stand with Bunyan, not with Channing
and Theodore Parker and Emerson. Does this mean that he
was a Puritan? The much raised and variously answered
question cannot be answered Yes or No, but certainly the,
blend must contain a predominance of Yes. A theologian
Hawthorne was not, and but scantly read in theology. He
had not studied Edwards or Hopkins or Bellany or Emmons;
though he read the lathers, it was surely not to follow
their arguments but to learn.New England history and
assimilate its atmosphere. But Milton he knew, and
Mather, and over Bunyan he had pored from his childhood
to his maturest years. A man who has read the Magnalia
and Paradise Lost and Pilgrim’s Progress may not be able
to dissert learnedly on the doctrines of divine decrees,
particular election, total depravity, and the final
perseverance of the saints, may not know whether he is
a Supralapsarian or a Sublapsarian; but he will have
discerned the Puritan mind. Let him add Wlgglesworth’s
Day of Doom and the ’ Westminster Catechism, and he will
be on his way to knowledge.®
Mrs. Stowe was incalculably nearer the ideal of
Puritanism than Hawthorne was. She was much more of a
7 Perry Miller and Thomas H. Johnson, The Puritans.
p. 4.
^ Austin Warren, editor, Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Representative Selections, p. xxiv.
203
theologian than he; and all of the older writers listed by-
Austin Warren were well known to her. Bellamy she mentions
frequently, and Hopkins was the hero of her novel The
Minister’s Wooing. From the age of twelve, as has been
shown, she could dissert learnedly on abstruse doctrines;
and at a later age she could have easily explained whether
she was a supralapsarian, a sublapsarian, or an infralap-
sarian— because she had determined to be none of them. She
knew her Puritanism, that is, thoroughly, and she rejected
much of it determinedly, denouncing ’ ’ metaphysical analysis”
and searching the Scriptures for gloriously beautiful and
o
indistinct images.7
Yet for all this determination, she did not get as far
from her sources as Hawthorne did. She was less skeptical
than he, for she failed to consider the newer viewpoint of
Channing and Theodore Parker and Emerson. At basis she was
as completely fundamentalist as her father and husband, her
departure from them being mostly a bodily shrinking from the
logical consequences of her views. No matter how old she
might grow, she would remain, in her soul, the same sweet,
old-fashioned girl who had lisped her baby acquiescence. Her
views were so fundamentally bound by eighteenth-century
Calvinism that, labor as she would, she could never wholly
^ Harriet Beecher Stowe, Religious Studies, p. 230.
204
escape from her father’s harsh and uncongenial conclusions.
For example, she believed implicitly in witchcraft,
on precisely Cotton Mather’s grounds. "A witch was the dark
shadow of a prophetess,” she wrote in Woman in Sacred History.
"A prophetess was a holy woman drawing near to the spiritual
world by means of faith and prayer, and thus inspired by God
with knowledge beyond the ordinary powers of mortals.No
doubt she numbered herself among the prophetesses, for each
of them was a poetess and they were uniformly "married women
and mothers of families, and not like the vestal virgins of
antiquity, set apart from the usual family duties of women.
Since the prophetess must be accepted on Biblical authority,
which she never questioned, what pious Christian could doubt
the Witch of Endor and the other wizards and witches of sacred
history? "A witch, on the contrary," she explained carrying
on the contrast, "was one who sought knowledge of the future,
not from the one supreme God, but through all those magical
charms, incantations and ceremonies by which the spirits of
12
the dead were sought for interference in the affairs of men."
This gentle deprecation of witchcraft is her mild
substitute for Cotton Mather’s multitude of vigorous, vicious
10 Harriet Beecher Stowe. Woman in Sacred History,
p. 165.
11 Ibid., P. 93.
12 Ibid., p. 165.
205
devils. "The guilt and folly of seeking” these extra Biblical
assurances, she continued directly, "consisted in the fact
that there was another and a legitimate supply for that erav-
13
ing of the human heart." ^ In thus charitably interpreting
witchcraft as a pathetic mistake instead of as a vicious
crime, she found exactly the idea she wanted to remind her
of a serious problem, spiritualism, which, by this time, she
had come to mistrust as offering the same delusions and
dangers as witchcraft of old.
In this manner she approached the other problems of
faith, never doubting the holy records but conveniently sub
stituting for praise or blame some activity of the present.
The virgin birth interested her profoundly, and she
envied Mary for having produced a child without male sexual
cooperation.^ Jesus was entirely Mary's own, she explained
in her Footsteps of the Master and she enjoyed a monopoly
over him that no other mother has ever had. As the union of
the feminine and the divine, he had an understanding of women
that other men cannot approach; and moreover, he is under
stood better by women, pure women, than by crude masculine
creatures. "We can see no image by which to represent the
Master," she concluded her cogitations, "but one of those
^ Ibid., p. 165.
^ Harriet Beecher Stowe, Religious Studies, pp. 31-32.
206
loving, saintly mothers, who in leading along their little
flock, follow nearest in the footsteps of Jesus.Such
undisguised confessions reveal the direction in which Mrs.
Stowed religious thought led her: to a place where she could
exalt herself, as a perfect mother, to the highest ranks of
the earthly and heavenly hierarchies.
In this mood of exaltation she could hardly avoid
another idea pleasant to her self-esteem: that through
progressive revelations Christian womanhood, had, in the
nineteenth century, reached an unparalleled height, attain-
{
ing, as she wrote in Woman in Sacred History, "that pure
ideal of a sacred woman springing from the bosom of the family,
16
at once wife, mother, poetess, leader, inspirer, prophetess."^
And well it would be for the world, she could proceed, if this
Biblical model were honored more dutifully by wavering manhood.
Heathen women, unopposed, could restore idolatry throughout
the world: consider the Delilahs with their bad power, and the
pitiful weakness of mere men in their hands.
Only one serious question arose to disturb this rosy
view, Mary*s modest retirement. "It is remarkable,” said
Mrs. Stowe, convinced also that it was as deplorable as it was
remarkable, "that Mary was never in any one instance associated
15 Ibid., p. 78.
16 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Woman' in Sacred History, p. 28.
207
17
in public work with. Jesus." Thus she phrased one of the
paradoxes of her own life, that she who professed to believe
in the domestic sphere of woman, had been for years before
the public. There was only one explanation: "the delicacy
of woman may cause her to shrink from the bustle of public
triumph, but when truth and holiness are brought to public
scorn she is there to defend, to suffer, to die."I8
Personal disclosures like these are the most important
part of Mrs. Stowe’s writings on religion, for they show the
definitely personal motives that led her to enjoy expressing
herself on religion.
III. BOOKS ON HOUSEKEEPING
Mrs. Stowe never suspected, her readers may be sure,
that one of her difficulties in theological writing was her
working hypothesis that, her faith notwithstanding, heaven
was of less immediate importance to her than earth. Only
worldlings are as concerned with money-making as she was.
While waiting for her heavenly reward, she had no fear of
accepting earth’s material benefits. Her calm assurance of
righteousness knew none of the doubts of Jonathan Edwards or
Lyman Beecher. In her own mind she was always righteous, if
17 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Religious Studies, p. 38.
18 Ibid., p. 39.
208
not always right, for she was a Christian mother.
What might have been her most revealing book was the
direct outgrowth of this assurance. Its title, briefly
rendered as The American Womans Home, included the following
additional information: "Principles of Domestic Science; being
a guide to the formation and maintenance of economical, health
ful, beautiful, and Christian homes." It was published in
1869, under her name and Catherine’s, but other work had
prevented her from contributing much beyond her name.
The .American Woman’s Home, since it is jointly attrib
uted to Mrs. Stowe, no doubt has use as a commentary on her
thought; but the expression, alas, is not her own, and the
commentary must be considered as from the hand of a sympa
thetic but not always like-minded friend. Much of it is
merely a revision of Catherine’s many-versioned treatise on
domestic economy. The exposition of the Christian Family, of
Scientific Domestic Ventilation, of Healthful Drinks, doubt
less met with Harriet’s thorough approval, and the chapter on
the Care of Servants seems particularly in keeping with her
ideas. Nevertheless, its intrinsic interest notwithstanding,
the pleasure of examining the work in detail must be foregone.
The omission is the less serious since her independent
treatment in fiction and essay shows her mature convictions on
most of these subjects. From her serial novels and magazine
articles may be retrieved in scattered comments the principles
209
that might, under happier circumstances, have been organized
in a major treatise. They will be found, virtually unaltered
for tender intelligences, adumbrated in stories for children,
Queer Little People and Little Pussy Willow, reprinted from
Our Young Folks. The difficulty is not in locating Mrs.
Stowe's ideas when searching, but in escaping them when they
are digressions.
For man and beast she invoked the same immutable
morality. In the animal stories of Queer Little People (1867)
virtue and vice remain human, whether in the homely sketches
of family pets or in the allegories that comprise the two
halves of the volume. The morals of the allegories are
standard: don't steal, proved by the story of a squirrel;
don't yield to evil temptations, proved by the story of a
robin that fell from its nest; don't be a meddler, proved by
the story of a magpie. A narrative involving Miss Katydid
and Miss Cricket is supposed to show the folly of drawing a
color line. On the whole, the sketches are tame, with none
of the vital satire of the best animal fables. •
Little Pussy Willow, a less harrov/ing Pollyanna, is an
extended fable (123 pages) expounding the difference between
the wholesome life of a country child and the pampered exist
ence of a vain daughter of wealth. The philosophy of the
story, which must have done a great deal of good, was vari
ously stated: "It is not so much what people have that makes
them happy, as what they think and feel about what they have”
or, "Now the greatest trouble about girls and women is, not
that they think too much of outside beauty, but that they do
not think enough of inside beauty”; or, "Now remember to be
IQ
a good girl, and live to help other people.” Overflowing
with such counsel, Mrs. Stowe also introduced into the story,
incidental to doing good rather than to carrying on the nar
rative, which limped through them, detailed descriptions of
bread making, interior decorating, and healthful clothing.
She could appropriately have called her tale the American
Little Woman’s Home.
The same advice, with much the same expression, was
the raison d’etre, as she might have said, for no less than
three novels intended for adult readers.
IY. TWO DOMESTIC NOVELS
My Wife and I _ , the first of two novels including also
We and Our Neighbors, was closely adapted to the needs and
tastes of the subscribers to the Christian Union, in which
both were serialized. More will be said later about this
publication, but its flavor can be sampled through these
serials themselves.
■ * • 9 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Little Pussy Willow, pp. 9,
62, 123.
211
Considering the amount and quality of Mrs. Stowe*s
writing to this time (1870), the reader will find the styl
istic incompetency of M^r Wife and I surprising to contemplate.
The hook is as flat and weak as the poorest sketches she had
written, a quarter of a century before, for the Evangelist
and the Lady * s Book. Mrs. Stowe hardly needed to write down
to any audience, however humble; and after its initial suc
cess, My Wife and I, like her other domestic novels, was soon
forgotten. Whoever reads it today must approach it with
charity.
Specifically, Wife and I recounts the rise of the
narrator, Harry Henderson, from poverty to affluence and
domestic happiness. Knowing himself unworthy of following
his father*s calling, the ministry, Harry devoted himself to
serious journalism in New York City, where he prospered,
married, and set up housekeeping. The narrative interest is
slight, and the description of the great city lacks
verisimilitude.
It is obvious how like a lady this Harry Henderson is,
obvious how thoroughly his ideas are Mrs. Stowe’s. Don’t
smoke or drink, he warns his readers; don’t take lightly the
advice of elders; don’t be worldly; don’t marry for money;
don’t let college undermine your Christianity; don’t become
an aesthete, a reader of Rossetti or Swinburne; don't be
vain about clothing; don’t take a fashionable honeymoon trip;
212
don’t live in a rented house. To these principal command
ments, others are added with painstakingly thorough
development.
In brief, My Wife and I is a bundle of tracts dis
guised as a serial story. Much of its advice is obviously
sound, much of it as obviously trivial. In part an appeal
for greater privileges for young women, it confuses that
issue by its sarcastic portraits of two types of feminist
leaders, Mrs. Cerulian {also spelled Cerulean) and Miss
Audacia Bangereyes (also spelled Dangyereyes), both based
upon types recognized in the contemporary feminists, Mrs.
Stanton and Victoria Woodhull. To each, Mrs. Stowe does
less than justice, presenting Audacia as a shameless hussy
and Mrs. Cerulian as a dupe.
Her characters show the same confusion. The strong-
minded girls have indistinct ambitions to do something with
their lives, to get out into the world and be spared the
necessity of waiting for some man to ask them in marriage.
Cousin Caroline is one of this type, and she determines to
gain a medical education; sister-in-law Ida is another, and
she retires from society to act as her father’s secretary
and to pursue vague "professional studies."20 Through these
instances Mrs. Stowe clearly advocated more education for
20 Harriet Beecher Stowe, My Wife and I, p. 222.
women, and co-education. That is about as far as her plans
went. She was worried about the world, which was not vir
tuous, into which these newly educated women would be pro
jected, and she did not know whether the finer clay of woman
would overcome evil or succumb to its insidious influence.
Humanity needs, said Harry Henderson for her, a loving and
redeeming power by which it can be led back to virtue; but.
on the other hand, as his father-in-law pointed out, good
women are not fit to govern the world, because they do not,
21
and should not, know the rottenness of life.
In We and Our neighbors, or the Records of an
Unfashionable Street. Mrs. Stowe fulfilled after five years
a promise to continue the story of Harry and Iva Henderson’s
married life. So many loose ends were left dangling at the
end of this second book that one judges that the author had
hopes of further extending the saga. Like My; Wife and I it
has little ingenuity of plot, less vividness of character
ization, and even a paucity of moralizing.
To the rules of conduct advanced in My Wife and I _ the
sequel adds only these: don’t destroy faith in prayer; don't
withdraw selfishly from life; don’t marry in haste; don’t
parody hymns or concoct puns out of Holy writ; don’t ignore
bodily hygiene; don't nag the servants; and don't use Gothic
21 Ibid., p. 261.
214
type on Christmas cards. Mrs. Stowe still believed that the
i
function of women in social life was to ennoble men, and she
propounded the physiological theory that girls were not so
strongly tempted as men to depart from virtue; though she
was well aware of the particular temptations inherent in
dazzling feminine beauty. After all, though they seem few
when distributed over 430 pages, here are enough rules of
conduct— more than Aristotle’s or Kant’s— to direct any life.
Yet Mrs. Stowe’s gloomy viewpoint persisted: "Don’t it seem
strange," said Eva to Harry, "how the minute one actually
tries to do some real Christian work everything goes against
one?"22
The story itself, designed to show how to be happy,
shows more distinctly how easy it is to be unhappy. Marriage
is its theme; and the one happy marriage in the book is that
of Eva and Harry. In contrast, no fewer than six miserable
women are paraded across the scene as warnings. There is
still Aunt Maria, whose unbearable tyranny is directly traced
to her disappointing marriage. There is Mrs. Betsy, one of
the neighbors, united to a seoundrel who wasted her fortune,
neglected her person and broke her heart. There is Mary, the
servant, who had married an idle, handsome, worthless, good-
for-nothing fellow; and there is Mary’s daughter Maggie#10,
22 Harriet Beecher Stowe, We and Our Neighbors, p. 257.
215
even more unfortunate, is tricked by a false wedding and sold
into prostitution. Of less importance in the story, but sig
nificantly mentioned, are little Polly’s mother, married to a
drunkard who refuses to accept ministerial consolation, and
also, in a higher social realm, Mrs. Harry Endicott, whose
husband becomes involved in a scandal with pretty Mrs. Seymour.
These should be warnings enough against matrimony, but
Mrs. Stowe blandly constructs her story around promoting mar
riages for two more of the Van Arsdel girls, Angelica and
Alice.
In addition to the romantic, the other strain in this
book concerns the entertainments given by Harry and Eva, jolly
social gatherings in which ideas about religion are exchanged
between the above mentioned young men and women, neighbors on
the street, and selected friends from the higher professions.
Their conversations do not lead anywhere, except to the altar,
but they must have been reassuring to readers of the Christian
Union. for they all go to show that "there never was a time
when faith in Christianity was so deep and all-pervading, and
23
when it was working in so many minds as a disturbing force.*' ^
To We and Our Heighbors has been reserved an honor too
rarely bestowed upon Mrs. Stowe’s social novels, that of being
reviewed at its appearance by a first-rate critic. Young
^ Ibid., p. 439.
216
Henry James, already embarked upon his long career as liter
ary oraftsman, carefully examined the curious work, mystified
by its formlessness and vulgarity. "It would be rather awk
ward to attempt to tell what Mrs. Stowe’s novel is about,"
he confessed.2^ The speech of the first families of New York,
as he saw it reproduced by Mrs. Stowe, struck him as a com
bination of rural Yankee dialect, Negro jargon, and para
graphs from the Home Journal. "None of Mrs. Stowe’s ladies
and gentlemen open their mouths without uttering some amazing
vulgarism,he continued, content to remark that in addition
to Eva, with her interest.in the humanitarian questions of the
day, "there are a great many other people, of whose identity
we have no very confident impression, inasmuch as they never
do anything but talk— and that.chiefly about plumbing, car-
petlaying, and other cognate topics."
v* PIHK AND WHITE TYRANNY, 1871
Of a piece with these two novels, and with Little Pussy
Willow and The American Woman * s Home, is yet a third story,
an independently conceived effort to set the world right wnich
t
Henry James, review of We and Our Neighbors in the
New York Nation, 21:61, 1875.
25 Loc. cit.
L°°« oit. John Erskine, Leading American Novelists,
p. 321, detects the influence of Elsie Yenner on this story.
217
might have proved still more enlightening to the young critic.
Though described on the title page as a society novel.
Pink and White Tyranny is also described, in the author’s pref
ace, as ’ ’ not to be a novel,” but ”a little commonplace his
tory,” ”a story with a moral,” a ’ ’ sketch” and a ’ ’ parable.”
The latter description is the true one, and the moral, told
succinctly like the legend under a cartoon, is that no family
should ever be led into divorce. "When once marriage is made
and consummated, it should be as fixed a fact as the laws of
nature,” is the way Mrs. Stowe phrases her proposition; or,
in the words used by one of the characters to describe the
hero’s unhappy marriage:
He is to be pitied, but his work is before him. This
woman, such as she is, with all her faults, he has taken
for better or for worse; and all true friends and good
people, both his and hers, should help both sides to
make the best of it.2?
It is fortunate for the reader that she revealed her thesis
so definitely, for, like many didactic stories, the plot
points towards a conclusion quite different from the one
stated.
The parties to the unfortunate marriage are John
Seymour, thirty-three-year-old lawyer and industrialist, a
28
’ ’ generous, just, manly, religious young fellow,” ° and Lillie
2? Harriet Beecher Stowe, Pink and White Tyranny,
pp. 45, 280, 320.
28 Ibid., p. 2.
218
Ellis, a "shopworn, flirt,a "selfish, heartless little
30
creature." How, you ask, came John to be entangled with
the lying, vulgar Lillie? The answer is through beauty, that
dangerous snare which inferior women use without mitigation
or remorse. Billowy clothes, tightly laced corsets and art
fully rouged cheeks are too much for the sober, religious
fellow, and he is swept into marriage with the sly minx who
cares for nothing but his money.
Here then would seem to be the true theme of the story,
a warning against hasty marriages with strangers who may be
incompatible. Or the theme might have been, as it in part is,
a satire against the type of woman Lillie was: a selfish flirt
who had lived the life of a petted creature, who liked French
novels, who smoked cigarettes and lacked religious sense, wno
wanted to serve wine at the dinner table and had no motherly
instinct. But it was not Mrs. Stowe’s custom to let her story
decide its own meaning. Having determined to attack divorce,
she maintains that purpose, though the attack is by indirec
tion and likely to be entirely overlooked unless emphasized by
special notes.
Throughout Pink and White Tyranny she is worried by the
French influence on American life.3! She patronizes rather
29 Ibid., p. 7.
30 Ibid., p. 27.
91 Ibid., pp. 93, 107, 204, 237.
219
than hates Frenchmen, since they are descended directly from
the father- of lies, as she patronizes rather than hates the
Americans who imitate them. When John finds that his wife
has been fibbing about her age, avowing only twenty years
instead of the true twenty-seven, Mrs. Stowe remarks that "a
Frenchman would simply have smiled in amusement on the detec
tion of the pretty feminine ruse,” and that "only an English
man or an American can understand the dreadful pain of that
discovery to John."22
Poor little pink and white Lillie, more to be pitied
than blamed, is on the whole a warning against French frivol
ity rather than the more horrible vices. "France, unfortun-
33
ately, is becoming the great society-teacher of the world,
our author generalizes, and inasmuch as "the Celtic races
have a certain sympathy with deception,it is easy enough
to see that if no just-, generous, manly, religious young
Anglo-Saxon fellow ever looked longingly upon such as she,
he would never be tempted to divorce her. The moral ought to
be that every "good solid chip of the old Anglo-Saxon block"-^
should avoid ladies who possess "the doubtful talent of
22 Ibid., pp. 95-96.
33 Ibid* > P* 93*
34 Ibid., p. 96.
25 Ibid., p. 107.
220
reading French with facility.
But Lillie, it is told, would read George Sand, and
probably those other sinful writers, Balzac, Dumas, and Renan,
and cared absolutely nothing for Richard Baxter, Lecky, or
Froude. So what could John expect? As Oliver Wendell Holmes
wrote of Lillie to the author: ”1 got to hate her so, I wished
37
she would die, and thought she would.n^' Dear Dr. Holmes, is
that a Christian mood? One can fancy Mrs. Stowe’s expostulat
ing. ’ ’ But you have a woman’s heart and could not give up the
poor sinner,”^® his letter continued.
One may wonder exactly what Dr. Holmes had in mind, for
Mrs. Stowe does give up the poor girl to death. Her story
picks its way gingerly past swamps and quagmires of opinions,
proceeding through a series of family crises (who will do the
laundry? who will teach Sunday school? who will keep accounts?)
to the grand climax of a former lover returned with hate in
his heart and a lust for revenge. After harrowing revelations
the tale reaches the goal of an early death for Lillie and a
calm if saddened widowerhood for John. He grieves more deeply
than he should, for Lillie was merely one of those ’ ’ French
Ibid.> P»
37 John T. Morse, Life and Letters of Oliver Wendell
Holmes, II, 231.
3^ Loc. cit.
221
flurfcs of the pastery" denounced by the old Puritan Nathaniel
Ward, the simple cobbler of Aggawam, women with neither grace
nor virtue, and with nothing in the forepart of their heads
"but a few squirrels' brains to help them frisk from one ill-
favored fashion to another.
Though it is indeed representative of a long Puritan
tradition, make no mistake about Pink and White Tyranny.
As either novel or social document, it is thin. The sympa
thetic reader who has not looked into it or the Harry
Henderson stories may harbor the prejudice that their failure
is due to their didacticism. That would be a charitable
judgment, but a mistaken one. Though didactic fiotion, un
less it be political, is not highly esteemed in an age which
looks skeptically upon Richardson, Hawthorne, and George
Eliot, there are classic examples of artistic success in the
type. Pilgrim's Progress, one of these, was Mrs. Stowe's
favorite work of fiction, and she was not ignorant either of
Gulliver's Travels or Rasselas. In all.these, different as,
they are from each,other, more teaching is found than in most
novels, and the success of The Magic Mountain is conclusive
evidence that the resources of didacticism had not all been
exhausted by her time.
^ Nathaniel Ward, The Simple Cobbler of Aggawam, as
reprinted in Trent and Wells, Colonial Prose and Poetry.
pp. 260-261.
222
Artistic didactic fiction, though rare, is not
impossible. The author may use allegory, satire, an impres
sive style. A multitude of devices lie at his disposal, pro
vided only he choose among them appropriately. Mrs. Stowefs
difficulty was her failure to analyze this problem.• She could
express moods or describe symptoms of uneasiness, but how
could she teach without mastering her program? Hawthorne1 s
statement in the preface to The House of the Seven Gables
contains exactly the reminder that Mrs. Stowe needed:
When romancers do really teach anything, or produce
any effective operation, it is usually through a far
more subtle process than the ostensible one.£°
With her dislike for logical subtlety, Mrs. Stowe never
stopped to consider the problem Hawthorne faced.
71. ESSAYS ON DOMESTIC LIFE
If as a social novelist Mrs. Stowe was at her weakest,
as a social essayist the improvement was more in manner than
in matter. Without needing to alter her ideas, which were on
the whole more suitable to essay than story, she adopted for
her House and Home Papers a style well recognized as accept
able to the better magazines in which editorial attention was
given to the niceties of expression.^ Not so unforcedly
4-° Warren, 0£. cit., p. 27.
^ A letter (number 5) in the Fields Collection,
Huntington Library, mentions her price for these Atlantic
articles as two hundred dollars each.
223
cultured as that of George William Curtis or so frank as that
of Ik Marvel, her one time editorial associate on Hearth and
Home., her essay style emphasized the same vivacity of manner
that had opened to these writers, among other markets,
Putnam1s Magazine and The Southern Literary Messenger.
That Marvel understood exactly what a writer in this
genre was expected to turn out is shown by his dedicatory
letter in Pudge Doings, dated October 20, 1654, a full decade
before the first of Mrs. Stowe’s collections:
I purposed only a short series of sketches [he wrote in
part], in the course of which I hoped to setv forth some
of the harms and hazards of living too fast— whether on
the Avenue or in Paris; and some of the advantages of an
old-fashioned country rearing. It seemed to me that
there was an American disposition to trust in Counts and
Coal-stocks, in genealogies and idle gentlemen, which
might come to work harm; and which would safely bear the
touch of a little good-natured raillery. . . . The whole
affair touches upon .matters of money and of morals.*1 ' 2
In every respect Marvel might have been describing the yet
unwritten essays of Mrs. Stowe. The hazards of life, the
advantages of conservatism, the use of mild raillery, and
above all matters of money and morals fell within the scope
of her designs.
A most congenial opportunity was afforded her in these
articles, written for the Atlantic and collected as House and
Home Papers, Little Poxes, and The Chimney-Corner. The type
42
Ik Marvel, Pudge Doings, I, v-vi.
224
was well understood, the narrow limits of its satire recog
nized, and its underlying sentimentalism assumed. Taking for
43
her motto "No work of art can compare with a perfect home,"
she ranged freely within the general subject of homemaking,
restrained only by the conventions of the type.
Remember the difference between a house and a home,
she counseled her readers, anticipating the heap o'living
hypothesis of a later authority. Don't try to have a stylish
parlor, she warned. The most beautiful furnishings are always
the cheapest, she reminded them in one article, and was in
spired to continue the subject in the following. She advised
against too expensive a carpet, since by spending less on the
floor covering money might be saved for "engravings, chromo
lithographs, or photographs of some really good works of art."^
In the course of his monthly ramblings Christopher
Crowfield, the literary character created to express these
ideas, frequently returned to the subjects nearest Mrs.
Stowe's heart. On more than one occasion he came out un
equivocally for woman suffrage, thus expressing one of her
attitudes towards that puzzling proposal. He wrote caus
tically about French morals and manners; he showed a high
^ Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Chimney-Corner, p. 55.
^ Harriet Beecher Stowe, House and Home Papers, p. 110.
The italics are hers.
225
regard for the manners and morals of New England. But among
all the subjects connected with the home, his greatest atten
tion was centered on the servant problem, as he described it,
AC
’ ’ woman’s natural, God-given employment of domestic service.
Christopher CrowfieId, and indeed Harriet Beecher Stowe,
felt abiding sorrow from the neglect suffered by this divinely
bestowed calling. The daughters of Erin, upon whom the work
had recently fallen, were far from equal to its responsibili
ties; and their mistresses were as woefully lacking as they
in knowledge of homekeeping. Both servants and employers
were tolerantly reprimanded by Christopher, and in consider
ing the problem he was for a fleeting'moment roused into his
most profound social philosophy: "The staff of power has
passed from the hands of gentility into those of labor.
The manner of these homey, housey articles is, unfor
tunately, mildly infectious: they parade a strained lightness
that at times becomes pathetic. Their merit is a solid moral
ity, for they are household sermons; and they must have pleased
the author into thinking that they would do a great deal of
good in reminding readers of the Atlantic Monthly to avoid
extravagance and folly in their homes. But how successful
could they be? In little Foxes Crowfield talked about seven
^ Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Chimney-Corner, p. 22.
The italics are hers.
Ibid., p. 87
226
of "the little pet sins of us educated good Christians,
and it is remarkable how much can be written about them, for
the purpose of improving family life, without analysis of
their causes. Unaware of psychology, Mrs. Stowe was content
to urge people not to be self-willed, not to be discourteous,
and so on, assuming that if educated good Christians willed
to drop them these vices would disappear. It is no wonder
that, having completed his last article and read it to Mrs.
Crowfield and their daughter Jenny, the proud author observed
that the two females of his family, despite their approval of
his sentiments, continued their vain occupations. Nor was
Christopher surprised or grieved, for he had not expected any
reformation in his readers. His efforts had not been serious.
In this kind of writing, failure was inevitable. ”If
we have patience with cheapness and thinness,” Sarah Orne
Jewett once wrote, "as Christians must, we must know that it
is cheapness and not make believe about it.” Mrs. Stowe
could never approach the sufficiency of which Miss Jewett
wrote in her next sentence:
To work in silence and with all one’s heart, that is
the writer’s lot; he is the only artist who must be a
solitary, and yet needs the widest outlook upon the
world.”* 5
^ Harriet Beecher Stowe, Little Foxes, p. 133.
Sarah Orne Jewett, Letters of Sarah Orne Jewett,
Annie lields, editor, p. 250.
VII. THE MEANING OF THESE WORKS
227
In these didactic books, both domestic and religious,
Mrs. Stowe played the part of groping humanity’s guide, phil
osopher, and friend. As a friend she was successful, but as
guide and philosopher she failed more obviously than as the
impassioned crusader for emancipation. With or without her,
emancipation was on its way, whereas humanity has continued
to grope, both in the home and the church, in spite of her
moralizing. Her religious thinking, satisfactory at buttress
ing her own hopes, ran dead against the stony wall of public
indifference. Her discussions of family life missed the basic
problems of a changing social situation.
Her preaching left her unsatisfied, because people would
not listen and because she knew better than to expect them to
listen. "And dear Mrs. Stowe," Miss Jewett wrote their common
friend, Mrs. Fields, "with her new suggestion for my happiness,
standing ready like a switchman at the division by the rails.
How sweet her letters are, though."^ Sweetness without light
was the most that her didacticism offered.
There was, to be sure, a certain value to the Stowes in
these social novels and moral essays. They kept money pouring
into the family coffers, and they were acceptable to many
^ Ibid., p. AO.
readers, in spite of the scanty; nourishment they provided
Mrs. Stowe’s potential artistry. Her principal gain from
them was deeper than she perhaps realized: her examination
of the troubled, unmalleable world in which she lived inten
sified her appreciation of the vanished New England of her •
early girlhood and her father’s youth. Whenever she turned
aside from post-war problems, she reexplored the golden age
of her dreams, the subject upon which her best qualities
could be much better displayed. To satisfy her editors, she
alternated stories of the present and the past, and her eye
grew brighter, keener, as she recreated the glorious days of
old. In writing of New England her wit was at its best, and
much of the power of Uncle Tom’s Cabin revived. The stories
she had to tell were clothed in a more colorful vocabulary
and more carefully fitted sentences, f/ithout rejecting
didacticism, she more successfully avoided its pitfalls.
CHAPTER VIII
BOOKS ABOUT NEW ENGLAND
I. GENERAL TRAITS OF THESE BOOKS
In that very personal expression of her opinions, her
elementary textbook on geography, Mrs. Stowe shows how com
pletely New England was to her the center of the universe and
the test of moral excellence. With the whole world to choose
from, the first locality studied is New England, the first
state mentioned is Connecticut, and the first college
mentioned is Yale.
At the earliest opportunity, the story of the Pilgrims
on the Mayflower is told, and the moral to be drawn from it
is repeated periodically for the children of America:
The descendants of the Pilgrim Fathers in New England
have been distinguished for their reverence for the
Bible, for their good schools, and for their industri
ous habits. This is the reason why no people in the
world have been more prosperous in every kind of busi
ness than those in New England; for God always makes
those most prosperous who are most obedient to his
laws in the Bible.
The rest of the world has been created to set off New England
brilliance. Holland is a place "where the Pilgrim Fathers
2
first went before they landed in New England"; the Quakers
Harriet Beecher Stowe, First Geography for Children,
p. 42.
2 > pp- &» 1;L9»
230
are admirable because they are "as careful as the New England
people to have good schools"and the westerners of the
frontiers drew their virtues, such as they have, from their
Puritan forebears.
In all of this Mrs. Stowe is, of course, not only
sincere but unconscious of prejudice. If region can be bred
in the bone, two hundred years of New England Beechers had
bequeathed to her the spirit of that rocky and inhospitable
shore. She had been brought up to have faith in New England,
to see no virtues apart from it, and to regard it as the home
of the latest chosen people. In family chronicles, in her
father's gorgeously colorful recollections, in her husband's
witty anecdotes, she found not only an authentic background
for fiction, but definite plots as well, restraining frame
work from which she could not stray as lamentably as in her
attempts to intuit the psychology of New York's best people.
On these terms, given by nature, she could not fail.
Just as among her first apprentice sketches the most success
ful are those about New England, so her later novels of New
England have a liveliness unmatched elsewhere in her writings.
They approach permanent literary importance and find an honor
able place among the half dozen most stimulating fictional
representations of the section.
^ IMd., p. 54.
231
Even so, the reader must not expect too much. Although
she was one of the most interesting interpreters of New
England, Mrs. Stowe was by no means the most accurate or com
plete. As one can see from her work on slavery or religion,
disinterested objectivity was no part of her principles, and
in her further defense it must be understood that she at
tempted no panoramic view. Her major novels were all laid in
a comparatively restricted area between Maine and Connecticut,
and within the comparatively restricted period between the
close of the Revolution and her girlhood. The people she
chose to write about lived secluded lives, their minds intent
upon salvation and the holy past, unconcerned with the west
ward expansion undertaken by the companions and followers of
Daniel Boone.
Her characters were farmers, school teachers with their
charges, dressmakers, clergymen, the latter three classes in
truth, thought unacknowledged by her, dependents upon the rich
merchants and industrialists. In her concern with those she
knew, she underemphasized such occupations as privateering',
rum running, and slave trading, selecting from the rich
tapestry of life in accordance with her experience and, per
haps more decidedly, with the determination of drawing a moral
and picturing an ideal. Literal truth, as always with her—
and any reader, to endure her work, must reconcile himself to
this— was so subordinate in her mind to doing good that her
232
view of New Englanders, their past and their potentialities,
was colored by her preconceptions.
Though the later analysis of her New England novels
will show how selective she was, a clear example can be given
briefly in referring to a little sketch called The First
Christinas of New England.^ After describing the approach of
the Mayflower and the Cape Cod country as the newcomers saw
it, she gives an imaginative account of how the holy day was
spent. According to her, not only Christmas, but the entire
period, was filled mainly with hymn-singing, preaching, and
pious conversations, in comparison with which the labors of
constructing new homes and protecting them from the dispos
sessed Indians were thrust into the background. Her Puritans
are entirely too other-worldly to fit Governor Bradford's
account of a Pilgrim Christmas. As he describes the day, it
was spent, like all others, in godly labor, except by malin
gerers, who were not adverse to shirking their responsibili-
ties or fooling the authorities.
Though no one can now be expected to take Mrs. Stowed
New England at its face value, one must remember that the
responsibility for her misconceptions is not hers. The ma
jority of her lapses are due to the comparative scarcity of
^ Harriet Beecher Stowe, Writings. XIV, 294-320.
5 William T. Davis, editor, Bradford's History of
Plymouth Plantation, pp. 126-127.
233
objective history during her childhood. But though the modern
historian may employ economic terms convincingly, Mrs. Stowe
approached the New England fathers in terms that they them
selves would understand more clearly. She was not interested
in their finances, but in their souls, in the spiritual in
heritance the eighteenth century received from the seven
teenth. Like herself, they were crusaders for the Lord
against whom only the devil’s servants would utter detractions.
In Cotton Mather (1663-1728) she found the old master
best suited to be the pattern of her conceptions. From her
girlhood she loved him; his temperament was unfailingly
pleasant to her. His "crooked and diseased mind," to quote
Farrington's phrase, she described as that of "a delightful
7
old New England grandmother," to which her own reverberated
gently and gratefully. Lacking his psychological abnormality,
she shared with him, to the degree possible in a Victorian
lady, his gifts of distortion and fantasy.
One needs to read very little of Mather's The Wonders
of the Invisible World before discovering the basis of Mrs.
Stowe’s fondness for the author, for he offers the same basic
^ Vernon Louis Farrington, Main Currents in American
Thought, I, 109; Ferry Miller and Thomas H. Johnson, The
Puritans, p. 46, call him "a case for a psychiatrist.**
? Harriet Beecher Stowe, Oldtown Folks, p. 229.
234
conception of the New England people as hers. They are, or
at least were, the salt of the earth. "New England was a true
Utopia," he summarizes, to the obvious satisfaction of Mrs.
Stowe, who attempted time and again in her own writings to
demonstrate the same thesis.
A common credulity and a common love of New England
are the bonds which held Mrs. Stowe's affection to Cotton
Mather. She shared his enthusiasm for the past and his faith
in the future; and if the present seemed to both of them
worldly, there remained always the compensating close fellow
ship between choice spirits. The same problems that he faced
seemed problems to her. It is remarkable how she could polish
the surface of seventeenth century nonconformity with the vo
cabulary of nineteenth century fundamentalism, and equally
remarkable that she could set aside, without so much as a
qualm, whatever of her pattern's ideas displeased her.
The New England described by Cotton Mather is richer
and more weird than any revealed by Mrs. Stowe: a society in
9
which "remarkable providences" were by no means rare, a
society in which broomsticks danced in the chimneys, bricks
and stones were thrown by invisible hands, kettles dashed
® Cotton Mather, The Wonders of the Invisible World,
p. 12.
9 Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana, II, 342.
235
madly into the fire, knives plunged themselves into children’s
backs, and towns were punished for underpaying their clergy--
men. Not only was Cotton Mather’s New England more fantastic
than any Mrs. Stowe revealed in her stories, but it was also
more sinful. Debauched men and unclean women figure promi
nently in his Magnalia; and there is a section of potential
Scarlet Letters, called ”An History of some criminals exe
cuted in New England for Capital Crimes,” in which fornica
tion and infanticide are the usual themes, subjects upon which
Mrs. Stowe put a decided taboo. She was never, that is, the
novelist of all of New England.
II. THE MASTERWORK: OLDTOWN FOLKS, 1869
Mrs. Stowe wrote four full-length novels about New
England life, in addition to a number of sketches, most of
them collected in the Mayflower and in Oldtown Fireside
Stories, 1872. Her first important volume, the same Mayflower,
and her last important one, Foganuc People, 1878, were New
England to the core; her most important volume, Oldtown Folks,
exhaled-the very spirit of the region; and two other success
ful novels, The Minister’s Wooing and The Pearl of Orr’s
Island, owed their success largely to the flavor of New
England. Upon these six books, in the last analysis, Mrs.
Stowe’s reputation as a writer must rest, rather than upon
the gorgeous, unpredictable success of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In
236
them, she writes as an American, minor Maria Edgeworth.
Characteristically enough, she threw most of her
stories out of perspective hy dating them a few years before
her birth, so that they are neither strictly historical nor
realistic but occur in an idealized wonderland midway between
her own experience and the visions of Cotton Mather.
By far the most comprehensive of these New England
10
novels, her own favorite among them, and indeed the best
book she ever wrote, is Oldtown Folks, in which she combined
her husband’s memories of his youth with her own dreams.
Among all hers, it is the book to be read with the maximum of
quiet enjoyment. In it there is less of obvious falsifica
tion than in her other works, and though it would not bear
the test of rigorous formal analysis any more successfully
than they, it is less tempting to the adversely critical mind.
By disarming criticism, Oldtown Folks turns the attention from
artistic improprieties to human relationships.
That it gives a too rosy description of New England
life at the end of the eighteenth century is undeniable, but'
the description, imaginatively convincing, is also at least
plausible historically. We Americans were an industrious,
religious, prosperous people then, tolerably unaffected and
appreciative of culture. Within our limitations, some of us
Annie Fields, Life and Letters of Harriet Beecher
Stowe, p. 312.
237
possessed the virtues that we like to consider belonged to
all of us without limitation. British visitors recognized
us for what we wished to be, several of them (as quoted in
Allan Nevins* American Social History as Recorded by British
Travellers) strikingly substantiating Mrs. Stowe’s fictional
record of the time.H
No tourist, however sympathetic, could see everything
with equal understanding. Neither could Mrs. Stowe. Her .
husband, whose recollections supplied most of the solid ma
terial,^-2 was of great assistance, and the eventual omissions
from Oldtown Folks served as a rude but effective substitute
for the,artistic selection of more self-conscious craftsmen.
As a result of this compensatory give and take, Oldtown Folks
is both, in its social setting, the most realistic of Mrs.
Stowe’s fiction and, in the persuasiveness of its illusion,
the most romantic.
The story, as told by Horace Holyoke, relates the
events of his youth in Massachusetts. This visionary lad,
his visions patterned after Calvin Stowe’s, having been left
an orphan in early childhood, was reared in his grandparents’
family, in the normal regime of schooling, farming,
Allan Nevins, editor, American Social History as
Recorded by British Travellers, pp. 12, 13, H, 1*0, yj.
- * - 2 Charles S. Stowe and Lyman Beecher Stowe, Harriet
Beecher Stowe: The Story of Her Life, p. 257.
238
churchgoing. But into the town and the family wandered two •
other orphans, waifs, the boy Harry and his magnetic sister
Tina, with whom the plot has most to do. Though Mrs. Stowe
treated Tina as the principal character, she felt as patron
izing towards the beautiful, fascinating temptress as ever
George Eliot to one of her physically attractive and mentally
uninteresting young creatures. In reaction, Mrs. Stowe fi
nally married the girl to the narrator Horace, after a fool
ish marriage with a Byronic intriguer which chastened her by
a decade of suffering and humiliation. Enabled by this thread
of her story to introduce descriptions of the Boston gentry,
she was allowed to throw greater glamor over the Oldtown
people, only an easy three hours’ carriage ride from Boston
but a whole age removed into primitive, pastoral, idyllic
life.
?fltioever wants to learn from fiction what the immediate
descendants of the Puritans were, before the coming of trans
cendentalism and the factory system, need look no further
than Oldtown Folks. They are shown, to some degree inten
tionally, in their self-righteousness, their hard-heartedness,
their emotional starvation, and their simple snobbery. They
are exhibited with their admixture of blood-curdling religion
and practical charity. The merriment of their life is re
vealed, their peaceful sleeping during the long Sunday wastes
of sermon and prayers, and the pranks of the children at
239
church., followed by the inescapable scoldings about which
nobody much cared.
From Mrs. Stowe’s descriptions, one might imagine these
emaciated Puritans as superlative hypocrites, money-grabbers
on a disgustingly small scale, parochial and sadistic, but he
will find them not entirely inhuman. As Mrs. Stowe says,
there was much romping and loud laughter, dancing was common,
and life and love continued unabated above and beyond the
melancholy theories to which the people were officially
committed.
Aside from a few references to the wild mountain
scenery of Massachusetts (highest point, 3,535 feet) the
descriptions of the country, with its beautiful yellow days
leading into the harsh winter, are finely colored and sympa
thetic of the soil. G-ood as they are, Mrs. Stowe excelled
them in her account of how the people were living during the
administrations of President Washington and his immediate
successors. As no British tourist or city visitor can, she
takes one into their houses, with their giant kitchen fire
places and their musty parlors, and lets him see them eating
their beans and salt pork, taking their snuff, and drinking
their cider. She initiates her readers into the mysteries of
the week-end bath, the vigorous washings that used to make
Saturday nights a terror to children of good families.
Nor was Mrs. Stowe oblivious to some of the limitations
240
of this life, desirable as she considered it to be. She
liked the dominance given to the preacher in town, for he
was the leading aristocrat, followed by the other learned
men; but she disliked the strong old-fashioned doctrine of
President Jonathan Edwards and of Wigglesworth’s "Day of
Doom,” which she regarded as being monarchical and un-
American. There were certain improvements in the original
model that she had worked out for herself, though she found
them also in the Church of England. What pleased her most
was the people’s habit of arranging their views to suit their
practices: the doctrines may have been hard, but the lives
were merry.
Only one embarrassing feature of their beliefs does
she skip over gingerly: their superstitions. Aside from the
mild visions of Horace, in some of which Tina’s mother comes
and guides him, and the ghost that appears to old Crab Smith,
there is absolute silence about the rich vein of popular lore
that, having produced the hangings and witchburnings of pre
vious generations, left its trail curling through the lives
of all.
III. THE FINAL WORD: PQGANWC PEOPLE. 1878
The true successor to Oldtown Folks is not Sam Lawson’s
Oldtown Fireside Stories. 1872, dialect sketches illustrating
the virtues and limitations of the local colorist writers, but
241
Poganuc People, written many years later. Sam Lawson1s anec
dotes are, as might be expected from that accomplished racon
teur (he had been created as the grand chorus of Oldtown Polks)
full of color, and they afford such treats as a description
of huckleberrying on a hot New England day; yet the sketches
are no more than that, too limited in scope for a sequel to
the full-bodied chronicle of Horace Holyoke’s youth.
Poganuc People, on the contrary, is by design a com
panion to Oldtown Folks, for it is a fictionalized account of
Mrs. Stowe’s childhood, just as the other was a fictionalized
account of her husband’s. As the first readers recognized,
the Poganuc of the book is Litchfield, the minister Lyman
13
Beecher, and Dolly Cushman is Harriet Beecher. So many
changes have been introduced, however, that only in spirit
can the little heroine be a representation of Harriet, who
did not, as Dolly did in the story, marry a young man from
Oxford University and settle down to the life of a Boston
matron. And curiously enough, another alteration consisted
of imagining Dolly the youngest child in the family, thus
eliminating all reference to Henry ?/ard and making Dolly a
solitary little girl. The scene which the biographers have
loved to reprint, the ransacking of barrels of theological
tracts in the attic, followed by the discovery of the Arabian
^ Ibid., p. 266.
24-2
Nights, appears in full detail in the sixteenth chapter.
Weary as the author of Foganuo People obviously was by
1878, some of the scenes are charming, for real human interest
attaches to the spirit of the old days when people so like and
unlike ourselves muddled their curious ways through life.
Those readers who feel that atmosphere is not a complete sub
stitute for art in the story should remember that for Mrs.
Stowe art was vanity, and in her vocabulary work of art, as
she reminded them, was only "a hackneyed modern expression."1^-
Unlike Oldtown Folks, Poganuc People stresses the
gentler aspects of the old New England life. In the earlier
book such phrases as "crushed spirits" and "sinking and deso
late souls" were common. Much was said there of "morbid
horror and repulsion," "the ferocity of outraged sensibilities,"
and "tones of menace and denunciation."1' * In the later book,
such strong expressions give way to milder descriptions of
"the dreadful insignificance of being only a little girl in a
16
great family of grown-up people." Even the weather is milder
in Poganuc People, and the descriptions of Litchfield in summer
evoke the spirit of the best of New England.
In many of its details this biographical fantasy holds
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Poganuc People, p. 24-1.
^ Harriet Beecher Stowe, Oldtown Folks, pp. 26, 33,
46, 93.
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Poganuc People, p. 17.
243
special interest to anyone who has followed Mrs. Stowe’s
career as writer from its beginnings. As in most of her
novels, clergymen and their teachings are prominent, and as
3 - n Footsteps of the Master, she repeats her later conviction
that good wcmen are better preachers than even the best theo
logians. In another of her novels she had put this idea into
a speech made by a young lover to his sweetheart:
Mary, you are a living gospel. ... I can't understand
all the hang of predestination, and moral ability, and
natural ability, and God's efficiency, and man's agency,
which Dr. Hopkins [the minister] is so engaged.about;
but I can understand you,— you can do me good.**7
An incident illustrating this view is treated at length in
Poganuc People. Zeph Higgins, a self-willed, hard-hearted
misfit, had rejected his minister's consolations. Though he
was a challenge to the church, the preacher declined to
struggle for his soul, since only God could speak to such a
stubborn heart as Zeph*s. It was little Dolly, however,
through whom God chose to speak; she succeeded where her
father had failed, and the hard-hearted sinner, reborn in
grace through her, became Uncle Zeph, beloved by the whole
town. Through this story Mrs. Stowe, at the mature age of
sixty-seven, declared the advantages of her religion of love
over her father's religion of law.
The entire treatment of Dr. Cushman, Dolly's father in
^ Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Minister's Wooing, pp. 37-3S.
2 U
Poganuc People, is an interesting blend of affection and re
proof. Many years ago, as Mrs. Stowe well knew, her own
father had written of her at the age of seven: "Harriet is a
genius. I would give a hundred dollars if she was a boy.”-^
She was now replying in kind, that her father was a genius,
but that she would have preferred him to have shown womanly
kindliness.
Such passages were the concluding skirmishes of a long
campaign, not against her father personally, but against
Jonathan Edwards, the great theological rival of her favorite ]
Cotton Mather. On Edwards himself she had already wreaked
what must have appealed to her as full, though tolerant re
venge. Two of her villains, in Qldtown Polks and The Minister*s
Wooing, are specifically described as Edwards’ grandsons, the
inevitable wicked fruits of false doctrines. To these serious
warnings against Edwards she added the device of reduotio ad
absurdum. in the person of a follower who, though preaching un
mitigated depravity, was privately "an artless, simple-hearted,
gentle-mannered man” who "wore two holes in the floor opposite
his table in the spot where year after year his feet were
placed in study."
This mellow understanding of human weakness which trans
lates it into comedy was the essence of those portions of
Lyman Beecher Stowe, Saints, Sinners and Beechers.
p. 154.
245
Poganuc People in which she permitted herself innocent quips
at dogmatism. In one place, after the Doctor had "just fin
ished four sermons which completely cleared up and reconciled
all the difficulties between free agency and the divine
decrees," she commented:
Having thus wound up the sun and the moon, and arranged
the courses of the stars in celestial regions, the
Doctor was as alert and light-hearted as any boy, in
his preparations for the day’s enterprise.1”
To an affectionate daughter, all such personal weaknesses
were pardonable, even lovable. Yet in the story little Dolly
was irresistibly tempted to disobey her father by slipping
away to enjoy the forbidden Episcopalian Christmas celebra
tion. It was not, she explained, what he thought it:
a device by appeals to the senses— by scenic effects,
illuminations and music— to draw people off to an un
spiritual and superficial form of religion.20
The joy expressed in Poganuc People is the joy of freedom.
IV. TWO OTHER NEW ENGLAND NOVEIS
Of Mrs. Stowe’s two other New England novels, serials
from the Independent and the Atlantic Monthly, the minor work,
The Pearl of Qrr’s Island (1862), is now the more agreeable
reading. In its day, however, The Minister’s Wooing (1858)
19
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Poganuc People, p. 223.
20 ibid., p. 54.
246
was the more famous. It had the publicity advantages of
Lowell's editorial endorsement, of subsequent controversy
over doctrinal and historical accuracy, and of the use of the
Beecher archives, to which members of the family have referred
at length. Such circumstances have given the book prominence
other than strictly literary, especially since its intrinsic
merits as a chronicle of Mew England were more fully revealed
in its successor, Qldtown Folks.
The Pearl of Orr's Island, however, stands somewhat
apart from Mrs. Stowe's other novels, since she exploited in
it alone the achievements of New England sailors. The open
ing pages charmingly suggest the maritime atmosphere, and Miss
Jewett has spoken admiringly of them in an autobiographical
preface to Beephaven, expressing gratitude for the book's
revelation of "those who dwelt along the wooded seacoast and
by the decaying, shipless harbors" of her native state. To a
degree this charm persists, though the remainder of the story
does not fulfill the promise of the first chapters. As Miss
Jewett wrote to Mrs. Fields, "Alas, that she couldn't finish
it in the same noble key of simplicity and harmony."21 Midway
in her story Mrs. Stowe lost the mood for it, when she was
forced to suspend writing on it by the press of other
engagement s.
21 Sarah Orne Jewett, Letters of Sarah Orne Jewett, p.
47.
247
Basically, the plot of The Pearl of Orr's Island, is
no more complicated than most of Mrs. Stowers ingenuous
fables: the love of a gentle, matronly child for a headstrong
youth, concluding with the death of the girl and the sobering
of the young man. The complications sire the youth's struggle
against pride, and the thoughtless rivalry of an inveterate
flirt; but the native nobility of all three principals is
sufficient guarantee of the happy solution. With this story
is combined a series of asides on death, Christianity, and
education.
This last problem is more intimately connected with the
story than might at first be suspected, for Moses, the young
hero, was a problem child. Not only was he a waif and an
orphan, washed upon the Maine coast by a storm; he was the son
of rich parents, who were Catholic, southern, and, in part,
Spanish, a combination of handicaps for which the only hope
was rigorous education in a New England sea-captain's God
fearing family. The task required all the force of Mara’s
love and all the "innocent hypocrisy" and "gentle vindictive-
22
ness" which Mrs. Stowe specifies as two of her chief saintly
and womanly virtues.
To make the treatment effective, the emphasis of Mara's
death is required; and so Mrs. Stowe leaves him, master of his
22 Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Pearl of Orr's Island,
pp. 229, 246.
2 48
own ship, a neophyte in prayer, and the husband of the little
flirt next door, now also chastened and sobered into nobility.
The moral is clear, that the American chosen people, by their
harsh visages and their tender hearts, were able as a group
to mould the ’ ’ real wild ass’s colt”2^ into the man he needed
to be.
A simple tale? The Minister’s Wooing, except for the
more important characters involved, is hardly less simple:
a conventional situation, the love of three men for a girl,
developed and resolved without surprises. Of the heroine,
Mary Scudder, a small town jewel, it need but be said that
like Mara she was a model of Christian girlhood, honorable
and unselfish. The desirous males included Dr. Samuel Hopkins,
a divine well known in his day, Colonel Aaron Burr, well known
in ours, and young James, a lad entirely fictional, the lucky
suitor. Thus there are really three wooings in the story, and
the plot is not difficult to foresee.
Here it is: Objected to-by the girl’s mother, James
went to sea and was apparently drowned in a shipwreck, with
his salvation in doubt because of his incomplete acceptance
of Christianity. Colonel Burr, arriving in town on a visit,
could not resist the temptation to flirt with gentle Mary.
The Puritan maiden finally gave him an edifying lecture and,
23 ^id., p. 192.
249
simultaneously, his walking-papers, thus leaving the way clear
for the minister.
The Doctor is a fairly concrete character, for Mrs.
Stowe knew preachers from A to Z. The learned, good man,
utterly without imagination or what is commonly understood as
romance, lived in a world of high idealism and Biblical cita
tion. His wooing proper consisted in asking Mary's mother,
who would have been a much better match for him, whether the
girl would accept him. When the offer was brought to Mary,
she had no need to feign surprise, for she had worshipped the
Doctor as a father without thinking of him as a husband. Re
signed to God's will, however, after her sufferings over her
sweetheart's supposed death, she resolved to marry the minis
ter, to gratify her mother and him. "When we renounce self
in anything," she confided to James's mother, anticipating
Christopher Crowfield, "we have reason to hope for God's
blessing; and so I feel assured of a peaceful life in the
2 L
course I have taken."
With no higher hopes than these, she was rudely
awakened from her dream of future quiet service by the return
of James, full of love, Christian now through his parting
conversations with her, and incidentally rich. Duty, of
course, was to carry her through marriage with the minister;
^ Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Minister's Wooing, p. 45S.
250
but Miss Prissy Diamond, the village dressmaker and know-it-
all, taking matters into her own hands, revealed to the good
man where his fiancee's heart lay, and the necessary sacri
fice became his instead of Mary's.
James and Mary were united: "The fair poetic maiden,
the seeress, the saint, has passed into that appointed shrine
for woman, more holy than cloister, more saintly and pure
than church or altar--a Christian home.1 1 ^ Eventually, a
sentence informs the readers, good Doctor Hopkins married a
"woman of fair countenance" who presented him with sons and
daughters.
The minister whose futile, undignified courtship was
thus circumstantially disclosed was the historic, and cele
brated, Dr. Samuel Hopkins, whose biography had been written
lately by Dr. Park, president of the seminary at Andover in
which Dr. Stowe was teaching. Disturbed by the theological,
geographical and biographical inaccuracies in her story, as
it appeared serially in the Atlantic, Dr. Park urged the
author to correct her errors before allowing publication in
27
book form, a well-meant suggestion which she refused to
Ibid., p. 567. The italics are Mrs. Stowe’s.
26 iMi- > p* 569.
Florine Thayer McCray, - The Life-Work of the Author
of Uncle Tom's Cabin, p. 2Sl, quotes Dr. Park's statement.
Calvin Stowe also unsuccessfully urged changes in the theo
logical references; Stowe,and Stowe, op. cit., p. 250.
251
consider.
Mrs. McCray, her first biographer, believed that it
was the introduction of Aaron Burr which forced Mrs. Stowe to
disregard chronology, wrenching her hero's disappointment in
love from his early twenties "to his declining years, thereby
imputing to him the eccentricity (a very rare thing with New
Og
England divines) of having lived to middle age a bachelor."
Yet how could Mrs. Stowe be expected to regret such a slip
when, in the same story, she had violated the history of her
own family in restoring her sister Catherine’s lover from the
depths of the briny deep?
In comparison with Qldtown Folks (1869), The Minister’s
Wooing (1853) suffers from thinness of detail; and yet Qldtown
Folks was at publication inevitably criticized adversely for
its similarities to its forerunner. Thus Mrs. McCray complains
of "a poverty of invention"2^ in Qldtown Folks, specifying, in
addition to repetitions within the book itself, the reincarna
tion of Mrs. Stowe's typical minister (attributed by her to
Lyman Beecher) and her typical schoolmaster (John P. Brace)
under the thin disguise of new names. Mrs. McCray also re
gretted the reappearance of Mrs. Marvyn as Esther Avery, and
the awkward entrance of a cousin of Aaron Burr to imitate
28
McCray, op. cit.. p. 283.
29 Ifria.» P- 377.
252
that gentleman’s fascinating villainies. Such objections,
well founded as they are, need never bother the reader who
takes a friendly hint to postpone indefinitely his reading
of The Minister’s Wooing in favor of a glance at its twin
romance.
The curious may also find an interest in a little
story for children, ’ ’ The Minister’s Watermelons,” in which
William Somers, an academy boy, tells how he fell in love
with his fellow student Lucy Sewell and, under the domination
of an older boy, Elliot Yinton, stole her father’s melons and
confessed his fault. The psychological relationship is a
repetition of that in Qldtown Folks between Horace, Tina, and
the Byronic Ellery Davenport.
Y. AG-HES OF SORRENTO, 1863, AN IMSIMPATHETIC CONTRAST
William Dean Howells, in literary reminiscences written
near the beginning of the present century, expressed some
opinions about Hew England novelists, incidentally including
Mrs. Stowe, that suggest some of the limitations of her fic-
tion. With Tolstoi, Flaubert, and Turgenev in mind, he lim
ited the novel to ”a picture in which the truth of life is
suffered to do its unsermonized office for conduct.”^ On
this level, the entire art of the New England group was
3° William Dean Howells, Literary Friends and Acquaint
ance , . p. 118.
253
disqualified as pure fiction. The intense ethicism of the
Hew England writers, in his phrase, was an imperfection of
their art, for they were all willing to sacrifice beauty and
truth to their ideals of right living. Of this ethicism,
Howells pointed out, Mrs. Stowe had her full share. Uncle
Tom1s Cabin was ennobled by it, he thought; but it was still
not a novel, for it appealed to the conscience of its readers,
not the taste.
These reflections are especially worth bearing in mind
as one approaches Agnes of Sorrento, a work in which the limi
tations of her New England ethicism are doubly apparent. As
might be expected by anyone who knew the anti-Catholic preju
dice shown in some of her early work, Mrs. Stowe was near her
weakest in her Italian romance. Exotic Italy, which tested
the intellectual penetration of George Eliot and the imagina
tive penetration of Hawthorne, hurled Mrs. Stowe to defeat.
With no great cause to inspire the book and no inbred tradi
tions to give it body, Agnes of Sorrento is the most provin
cial of her novels.
The book, though originating in the delight Mrs. Stowe
felt in Italy upon her memorable third European visit, is
filled with her inbred deprecation of Catholic customs and
Catholic doctrines. Her earlier conception of the Italians as
254
31
degraded by their chureh and their despots had not been
obliterated by contact with them. At best, "our enlightened
Protestantism"-^2 enabled her to be charitable: "Let us not,
from the height of our day," she urged in her novel, "sneer
at the homely rounds of the ladder by which the first multi-
33
tudes of the Lord’s flock climbed heavenward.
Consequently she never sneered, but she did patronize.
She sorrowed at the thought of those good women, the Catholic
sisters, "unwittingly deprived of any power of making compari
sons, or ever having Christ’s sweetest parable of the heavenly
34
kingdom enacted in homes of their own.” She regretted the
absence of Christian earnestness throughout the greater part
of Italian life. "In fact,” she generalized, "the climate
of Southern Italy and its gorgeous scenery are more favorable
to voluptuous ecstasy than to the severe and grave warfare of
3 5
the true Christian soldier.The uppers of the boot, she
suspected, were of no better material than the toe.
Her story takes its name from the heroine, who was
courted by three suitors: first (the candidate advanced by
31 Harriet Beecher Stowe, First Geography for Children,
p. 128.
3% Harriet Beecher Stowe, Agnes of Sorrento, pp. 150-151.
33 Ibid., p. 112.
34 ibid., p. 34.
35 ibid., p. 186.
her grandmother), a simple clod, Antonio by name; second, her
father confessor Francesco; driven near insanity by his
guilty passion; and third, a young cavalier, Prince Agostino
Sarelli, eventually the lucky man. The love story, a mere
exeuse, was as far removed as usual from the author’s main
interest, for the corruption in the Catholic church fascin
ated her, and she found herself writing a tract.
The task she set herself was one from which her de
ficiencies in qualification would have discouraged a less
hardy soul. To support her she had only her superficial
knowledge of the locality, which she warmly loved, and her
inner conviction that she understood the human soul. On the
whole, she agreed, ’ ’ the Northern mind of Europe is entirely
unfitted to read arid appreciate the psychological religious
36
phenomena of Southern races"; but there was one exception,
"the temperament which in our modern days has been called
the mediistie,"^ part of her equipment as seer.
Her technique in discussing Catholicism was the same
as in discussing slavery: with no concern for the traditions
or special conditioning of the institution, she asked herself
what the possible types of misconduct were, sure that if they
could exist they did. From this consideration she built what
36 IkM* > P-
37 '
Log. eit.
256
she considered a truthful image of the institution at its
worst. For the other side of her picture she assumed, as far
as permitted by her knowledge of human frailty, that the
ideals of the institution were occasionally achieved. From
this contrast of opposites she derived a story which was
strongly melodramatic.
In Agnes of Sorrento it was defective imagination
rather than defective thinking that rendered the story com
monplace: she had failed to dig deeply enough into Italian
soil to find the- golden ore that glitters through Qldtown
Folks. Consistent with her habit, she introduced her young
man Agostino as a dissolute Byronist like Ellery Davenport
and Aaron Burr, seeking to seduce the fairest, purest of
maidens by flattery and jewelry; but by the ninth chapter
she thought better of him, altering his past and transforming
him into a victim of oppression. Eventually she reconciled
herself to him, for his "blind sense of personal injury" had
been converted into a "fixed principle of moral indignation
38
and opposition."'
Equally lacking in consistent development is the
character of II Padre Francesco, alternately enlightened and
superstitious, progressive and reactionary. Mrs. Stowe was
on the whole rather too casual with her characters. She did
38 Ifria*, P. 349.
257
not follow them as closely as trained readers demand, saying
about one of them, Antonio as it happened, "We may have intro
duced him to the reader before, who likely enough has for
gotten by this time our portraiture; so we shall say again. . .
39
. ." Evidently she was not herself sure whether she had
mentioned Antonio; the matter was of slight importance to her,
and she expected'her readers to have no greater interest in
him than she had. The women fared better. The heroine,
Agnes, was consistently made the mouthpiece of the author's
religion of love, and two older women were allowed to utter
many homely truths, in the manner of New England crones
freely speaking their minds.
VI. PALMETTO-LEAVES, 1873, A SYMPATHETIC CONTRAST
It is pleasant indeed to turn from this Italian romance
to the humbler pages of Palmetto-Leaves. a book of sketches
about Florida which shows a more successful escape. In
Mandarin, where she had settled in the late sixties, she
found the joy of a foreign country without the bewilderment
of violent change. Her primary purpose in moving south, she
characteristically stated as a desire to improve the Negroes
by providing Episcopalianism for their "immature minds."^0
39 I*>id. • P« 227.
Fields, 0£. cit., p. 304.
258
Her Husband held services for the colored folks, and she was
herself highly pleased by the piety and industry of the
Negroes around her, seeing them "very happy in their lowly
lot" and, pleasing her equally, "growing richer and richer."^1
But all such benevolent reform became, as time passed,
incidental. In her deep, almost pathetic attachment to the
calm South, her Joy in her Florida winter home was produced
less by any help she might give than by that she was receiv
ing. Primarily, she was happy in a new way because she was
being withdrawn from the troubles of active life; and as one
contemplates this happiness he is tempted to subscribe to the
easy generalization that the North is'fit only for frenzied
activity and the South for civilized living.
Although Mrs. Stowe was herself no more than a partial
exemplification of this doubtful truth, her Florida home was
in a striking way the nearest her life ever approached to a
center of quiet. Her old mistrust of man and nature strength
ened as the years went by. "I feel, the more I think of it,
sure that the world that hates Christ is Just as real in our
L 2
times as it was in his," she wrote in 1870. At Mandarin,
her "calm isle of Patmos," the world was not. There she could
write her three hours a day when she was able, -or spend a
41 ifria.> P« 381.
42 Ibid., P. 328.
winter reading lives of Christ and thanking God that she was
one of the elect. She felt herself protected from "these
sensational days," as she wrote Holmes in 1$79, in which
"heaven and earth seem to be racked for a thrill."^ She
never doubted the favor of her Lord, and it was only an ex
tension of her faith that led to her declaration that she
had not written Uncle Tom's Cabin. "I did not write it,"
she told one of her neighbors. "God wrote it. I merely did
his dictation."'^1 '
Upon occasion she withdrew voluntarily from this haven
of rest, as for a speaking tour in the fall and winter of
1&72-1873, and she was drawn unwillingly from it at other
times, as by the charge of adultery brought against her
brother by Theodore Tilton. Though her faith in Henry Ward
never wavered, the strain of the protracted trial and the
distasteful notoriety damaged her health, it has been thought,
permanently.
To her mind, the proceedings against Henry Ward were a
clear case of the world against Christ, and she felt more
difficulty in explaining Henry Ward's previous popularity with
the world than the action taken by Satan's cohorts to humble
him. Untroubled by what she termed his prima donna personality,
43 Ibid.. p. 373.
Ibid., p. 377.
45 Ibid., p. 365.
260
she regarded him as a part of herself, similarly blessed with
her in possessing all the virtues. Her faith remained un
shaken , but a legal trial with expenses of one hundred and
eighteen thousand dollars, as she designated the sum to George
46
Iliot, was one type of the Lord’s chastening that she had
never courted. The hung-jury verdict that publicly cleared
her brother satisfied her entirely, and when her scorn for
Tilton had changed to pity, she was sure that she had passed
the crisis. Patmos was again calm; the Satanic skirmishers
had been evicted from the holy domain of God's country.
Only slightly less personal than her letters from these
years are the sketches for the Christian Union published in
1873 as Palmetto-Leaves. They show how within half a decade
she had adapted herself to the physical life of the Old South,
and how remarkably she had identified her interests with those
of Florida, ’ ’ Your Northern snowstorms . . . hold back our
47
springs” was one of her complaints against her erstwhile
fellow-Yanks; and she shuddered at an invitation to revisit
/ g
Cincinnati.^ The accusation that the state of Florida con
sisted of nine-tenths water and one-tenth swamp deeply hurt
her. The malarial fevers, she responded, were mild compared
46 IkM- > P* 365.
^ Harriet Beecher Stowe, Palmetto-Leaves. p. 113.
^ John B. Peaslee, Thoughts and Experiences, pp. 304-
305.
261
with those of New York and New England; and for the deadly
moccasin snake she found no stronger adjective than unsavory.
She liked almost everything in Florida: walking in the
woods, boating on the bayous, playing croquet at tourist re
sorts. She liked the flowers, the mocking-birds, the Negroes.
During nine months of the year, the climate was perfect, and
nature, like "an indulgent old grandmother,"^ favored the
children with real oranges, not the "things" called oranges
in the New York markets.
This perpetual song of joy fills with pleasure the
pages of the book. Like a . missionary in the field Mrs. Stowe
sent her glowing reports North. Incidentally,-she was collect
ing money for her private charity, the church and school at
Mandarin, but she was filled with zeal for the whole Jackson-
ville-St. Johns River region. Practical woman that she was,
she answered questions about the price of board, which ranged
from eight to thirty-five dollars a week, and about the price
of good land, which was available at from one to five dollars
an acre. She gave definite instructions about clothes, sum
marized the techniques of producing oranges and preserving
figs, and described the flora of the region in copious detail.
Above all, though, it was the climate that she expatiated
upon, eloquently testifying to its value for the aged as well
LQ
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Falmetto-Leaves, p. 29.
262
as for invalids and children.
In adjusting herself to this new life, she showed
greater powers of adaptation than could have "been suspected
in an old Yankee. She learned not to expect all of the
exactitudes of New England, patiently taking cognizance of
what could or could not be demanded. Hard experience taught
her the difference between a Negress brought up in the fields
and one educated as a house servant, and instead of complain
ing that Negroes were lazy, she was amazed at the work they
could accomplish under a hot sun that would have been, so she
thought, a white man's death. She regarded them as already
the best labor in the South, and when carefully looked over,
as she italicized the phrase, she found them as productive as
any laborers that could be hired in the North.The recon
structed state of Florida, as she finally saw it, was a nearer
approach to God's country than New England, outside of Cotton
Mather's pages, had ever revealed itself to her.
Whatever she may have intended to do for the Negroes,
when she settled among them, it is clear that she reaped the
benefits of her move in improved health and peace. She had
discovered that the South, if properly colonized by
Episcopalians, could be kept as free from debauchery and de
basing vice as the North; and it offered the added inducement
50 Ibid., p. 315.
263
to true godliness of a mild and tolerant climate. Ears. Stowe
had long believed that the harsh weather of New England ex
plained the harsh theology of New Englanders.51 The facts of
nature stood between them and their God; New England was only
partially the Utopia that she and Cotton Mather had proclaimed
it. Florida made her see this light, broadening her moral
sympathies, just as Europe had broadened her aesthetic
sympathies.
Increasing age, unfortunately, and decreasing mental
activity, obscured this true moral of geography. It was too
late for reliving her life or for desiring it. Her immigra-
i
tion into God’s country of the soul had been too long delayed
by her diggings into the stony wastes of New England. Mrs.
Stowe was at last a woman new born into grace. In Palmetto-
Leaves the reader may see how completely she had passed the
crisis of life. Quite idyllic, however one looks at it, was
her escape from New England, the domain of a justly stern and
angry God, into the mildness of Florida, the creation of His
love and pity. Here she found peace by the wonderful expedi
ents of growing old and moving to a warm, quiet place. In
spite of all her struggles, the universe had accepted her: the
South was the triumph of her life, the fulfillment of her
dreams.
51 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Qldtown Folks, pp. 26, 317,
379; "Nature herself is a high Calvinist, old jade."
CHAPTER IX
MRS* STOWE IN THE MAGAZINES
I. A NETWORK GE NAMES
Mrs. Stowe’s collected Writings, in the handsome uni
form binding provided by Houghton Mifflin and Company, may be
compared to the exhibitions of wild animals seen in museums
of natural history. Selected specimens, carefully stuffed
and curried, stand stiffly in display cases embellished with
equally careful selections from the flora and minor fauna of
their environment. The educational value of such displays is
undoubted; yet they are a far cry from the life once lived by
the selected stuffed animals.
One degree nearer their source, Mrs. Stowe’s miscel
laneous first editions are like creatures in a zoological
garden, perhaps less carefully selected, certainly less pains
takingly embellished with ornamental backgrounds. What such a
display loses in cleanliness it more than gains through the
animals’being alive, for they can still move and utter sounds
to show.something of the life within them. In the same way
her first editions— poorly printed as some of them are, il
lustrated with gaudy pictures entirely incongruous with the
standards of today— show in their variety and their peculiari
ties something of the spirit that was theirs originally.
In the magazine files, covered with the dust of years
265
and undisturbed by editorial ablutions, one finds the nearest
possible approach to the living beast in his jungle. Here
are the literary achievements of Mrs. Stowe in as nearly the
original state of their being as can be found. The background
has been preserved as it appeared to her original readers--for
it was to the magazines that she made her first appeal, and it
was through their columns, after Uncle Tom’s Cabin, that her
name was most regularly kept before her public.
Hence the magazines, for her more than for most writers,
are the primary sources of study. When one recalls further
how much of what she wrote for them was never transferred
either to the books comprising her list of first editions or
to the handsome collected Writings. their significance is in
escapable. These fugitive pieces, even if they added nothing
important to the substance of -the collected Writings, would be
important as the cement holding the bricks in place; but of
eourse they do add, here and there, either a new idea or a new
expression that cannot be disregarded.
Most important, the magazines show, more clearly,, the
continuity of her career. An amazing network of names con
nects one magazine with another, revealing the links between
one of her enterprises and the next.
Consider, for example, her connections with religious
publications. First of all there were the Cincinnati Journal,
with Henry Ward Beecher as.the editor pro tern. , and the New York
266
Evangelist, with Joshua Leavitt and George Cheever among the
editors. When Mrs. Stowe left the Evangelist for the
Independent. one of the,editors of the Independent was Joshua
Leavitt, and the two star contributors were George Cheever
and Henry Ward Beecher. The latter served also, from time to
time, either in name or fact, as editor of the Independent.
When Mrs. Stowe left the Independent for the Christian Union,
the editor and chief mainstay of the latter magazine was
Henry Ward Beecher, and Cheever remained as an occasional
contributor.
In her secular writing, the Western Monthly Magazine
began a broader development, and yet even here Miss Gould and
Mrs. Hentz turned up very soon in Godey's Lady' s Book and of
course in the gift annuals, where Mrs. Sigourney and Miss
Sedgwick (important names in the reprints of the Cincinnati
Chronicle) held full sway. The Lady’s Book also printed small
quantities of Longfellow and Holmes, later to be so important
in the Atlantic.
The National Era, Mrs. Stowe's first abolitionist con
tact, preserved some of the old names, as well as adding im
portant new ones, like Whittier and Lowell. When the Atlantic
began, Lowell was at its head, and the name of iVhittier ap
peared with hers, with others even more eminent. Whittier
also made the move, with her, from the National Era to the
Independent. An Atlantic contributor, Edward Everett Hale,
bought her work for his own. journal, Old and New, and his
name also reappeared in the columns of the Christian Union, a
curious evangelical setting for his calm unitarianism.
The story of these interlocking names would be endless.
The Cary sisters, Alice and Phoebe, from Cincinnati, followed
her through the annuals, the Lady’s Book, the National Era,
the Independent and the Christian Union. James T. Fields, a
contributor with her to several annuals and the Lady * s Book,
took her to his Qur Young Folks— and incidentally to her bi
ographer and devoted friend, his wife. Lucy Larcom, one of
the editors of his magazine, had already crossed her path in
the National Era, while other contributors to Our Young Folks
were also, like herself, writing for the Atlantic, under the
same publisher.
Certain major figures, such as Whitman and Twain, she
touched hardly at all; but her writings appeared in the same
magazines with Poe and with Henry James, each as foreign to
her as Whitman or Twain. The survey of her career provides a
wonderful panorama, an amazing network, almost at the center
of the literary and subliterary life of America. "With her
two styles— the one vividly fresh and encouraged by James Hall
and James Russell Lowell, the other humbly sentimental and
encouraged by her family tradition— she spread widely. Her
appeal to two publics speaks well for her skill as a literary
craftsman. One might say that what was fresh about her writing
26 8
stemmed from Cincinnati and the West, while the more stodgy
parts are in the tradition of the conservative New England
group.
Along with these literary names, the Beechers appear
everywhere. E. D. Mansfield, editor of the Cincinnati
Chronicle, had teen a member of Lyman Beecher’s congregation
in Litchfield, and regarded him as the greatest American
preacher. John B. Ford, the publisher of the Christian Union,
was a member of Henry Ward Beecher's congregation in Brooklyn,
and regarded him as the greatest American preacher. Catherine
was not only Harriet's early collaborator, but followed her
through the annuals, the magazines devoted to the position of
women, and even, at an advanced age, into the Christian Union/
In all the church publications, from the Cincinnati Journal
on, her brothers and husband played their minor or major
parts— and she led Calvin Stowe into the Atlantic, even into
G-odey's with a solemn article on the Thanksgiving holiday.
This endless chain of Mrs. Stowe’s associates is full
of meaning. In its scope it defines her true literary en
vironment; and, with some links observed in detail, it throws
light upon her week-by-week work. To study the magazines for
which she did most, in her later years following Uncle Tom's
Cabin, is to show her as she was. The Independent, Hearth
and Home and the Christian Union are the most significant,
each in its own way, of this essential aspect of her work.
II. THE INDEPENDENT
269
In 1852, when Mrs. Stowe joined the staff, the
Independent was a four-page weekly newspaper or magazine like
the Evangelist, in policy as well as appearance. The
Independent described itself as "conducted by pastors of
Congregational churches,” with Leonard Bacon, Joseph P.
Thomson and Joshua Leavitt as editors, and Henry Ward Beecher
(for the liberals) and G-eorge B. Cheever (for the conserva
tives) as signed contributors, more properly contributing
editors. On July 1, 1852, Mrs. Stowe's name was added to
these last two, as a third special correspondent, a position
she held for ten years. During the remainder of 1852 and
1853i she sent the Independent nothing essential, only the
story "How to Make Friends with Mammon" later reprinted in
The May Flower of 1855, some verse, the letters of the Stowe-
Parker libel controversy, - * * and some chapters from the Key to
2
Uncle Tom's Cabin, printed in advance of the book. During
this period, the magazine carried many stories about her and
the progress of Uncle Tom's Cabin, but for over a year, in
cluding the whole of 1853, she sent nothing, although her name
was carried as a contributor.
1 Independent, October 7, 1852.
2 Ibid., December 23, 1852.
270
In 1854— the paper had. meantime expanded to eight
pages— she was more active. One of her pieces was "An Appeal
.to the Women of the Free States,” a plea that they work for
3
the abolition of slavery. The others were a series of ten
articles called ’ ’ Shadows on the Hebrew Mountains, lay ser
mons on piety, faith and resignation, with such morals as
’ ’ Give up the temptations of the world” and "afflictions are
for man's good— but not necessarily good in themselves.” The
Shadows, which have never been reprinted, are in the style
which she had already begun in the Evangelist and later dis
played fully in Footsteps of the Master.
Throughout 1855, her writing for the Independent was
limited to seven minor articles. The most significant, called
"Books,” was an advertisement for the Plymouth Hymn-Book,
edited by Henry Ward Beecher, a few hundred words of general
5
praise. Her lack of ingenuity is shown when this little re
view is contrasted with the 15,000 words written on the same
6
subject by Henry Ward, a lively defense of the book, spread
over four issues, against the Evangelist,!^ • charge of
latitudinarianism.
^ Ibid., February 23, 1854.
^ Ibid., various dates, January 5 to December 7, 1854.
5 Ibid., November 1, 1855.
6 Ibid., November 22 to December 13, 1855.
271
Aside from this review, Mrs. Stowe sent a ’ ’ Letter from
Boston,” for the issue of January A, 1855, and a "Letter from
Andover," for January 25, which is about the weather. These
were followed by "Snow Siege" and "Spring Breathings," also
on the weather, and by "Meditations from our Garden Seat" and
"Thoughts from my Garden Seat," essays on birds, gardening,
7
flowers, and weeds.
In the following year, she sent "Our Friends in
- g
Heaven," "Mothers of the Men in Kansas," which compared
poorly with Cheever’s article on the subject, and "Anti
c s
Slavery Literature."- ^ In this last article she reviev/ed some
publications of the Anti-Slavery Society, including books by
Nell and Parsons for which she also wrote introductions. "A
few years ago there was no anti-slavery literature," she said,
a statement which can mean only that for her there was none.
This review also speaks favorably, in the manner of a commer
cial announcement, of anti-slavery fiction: she was hard at
word upon Dred.
During 1857 she sent four "Letters from Europe" in the
general vein of the earlier Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands,
7
Ibid., February 22, June 14, August 9, September 6,
1855.
8 l^id., June 19, 1856.
9 Ibid., February 21, 1856.
272
one dated from Rome, the other three from Paris.^ Like most
of her public letters, these mingled comment with description.
Their general tone, already familiar from the Sunny Memories,
can be gathered from a single sentence: "Our liberty is built
on our religion, and the same religion would give Prance the
same liberty. By "our liberty" she meant English and
American; and by "our religion" she meant protestantism. Her
other articles for 1857 were three lay sermons, "How Jesus
Loved Mary and Her Sister," "Things that Cannot be Shaken,"
and "Who shall roll away the Stone?"— this last, the most
interesting of the three, repeated her demand for an unques-
12
tionable angel, not the doubtful shades of spiritualism.
In 1858 there was more verse, some stories like "Our
Charley," reprinted in the Writings, four unreprinted essays
in defence of revivals, one against the Jesuits, one calling
attention to the achievements of Hegroes, a suggestion for
indoor decoration, and an appeal to the churches to come out
13
strongly against slavery. ^ These have more force and vi
tality than most of her writings for the Independent, and
they furnish a good cross-section of her interests at the time.
Ibid., January 22 to April 23, 1857.
Ibid., January 29, 1857.
^ Ibid., September 3, 1857.
13 Several of these were reprinted in England as
pamphlets.
273
The spring of 1859 finds only two articles on "The
Higher Christian Life,” but in December of that year begins
a series of well-written letters from Europe. Twenty-three
in all, they ran from December 1, 1859, to August 23, i860.
They are fully equal to the Sunny Memories, and it is probable
that they would have been worked over into a book, had not the
Civil War kept the interests of the readers nearer home. Some
of the" twenty-three have individual titles, such as ”How the
People like the Pope," and others, more gossipy, are desig
nated as merely letters from Mrs. Stowe. The material of
these letters is the basis for her later inferior series in
the Hew York Ledger, 1865.
On her return to this country, Mrs. Stowe sent the
Independent six more articles during i860, including a friendly
note on the visit of British royalty,^ one of her now rare
moral tales,^ two more articles urging the churches to take a
16 17
stronger stand, an attack upon President Buchanan, and an
editorial on Lincoln’s election. The Independent rejoiced
greatly at Lincoln’s election and Mrs. Stowe was merely
14 nThe princ©,« » Independent, October 18, I860.
15 »»The Deacon’s Dilemma," Independent, November 22,
I860.
^ Independent, November 1, December 13, 1860.
17 Ibid., December 20, 1860.
21k
repeating the sentiments of the editors in saying:
We are aware that the Republican Party are far from being
up to the full measure of what ought to be thought and
felt on the slavery question. But they are for stopping
the evil--and in this case to arrest is to cure . . .
Meanwhile, the friends of anti-slavery principle should
not relas labor.1°
Horace Greeley, who was also at this time a regular writer
for the Independent, wrote for the same issue "The Union on
Trial," a thoughtful weighing of the ominous situation.
In 1861 Mrs. Stowe began her serial story, The Pearl
of Qrr*s Island, suspended after seventeen chapters, and re
sumed only after a lapse of seven months. For shorter
articles, requiring less concentration, she wrote "Getting
19
Ready for a Gale," one week after Fort Sumter had been bom
barded, and several denunciations of her old enemy the London
20
Times and defences of the good will of the English people.
The following year she wound up her connection with the
Independent in a series of six articles combining Biblical
stories with an appeal for immediate emancipation of the
21
Negroes. Throughout them she necessarily took issue with
President Lincoln over his desire to save the Union at
18 n^hat Hath God Wrought2" Independent , November 15,
I860.
^ Independent, April 25, 1861.
^ Ibid., June 13, June 20, August 1, September 5, 1861.
2I Ibid., July 31 to September 11, 1861.
275
whatever cost. The abolition of slavery, she kept insisting,
was the first duty of a Christian commonwealth.
Mrs. Stowe’s association with the Independent during
the decade between 1852 and 1862 was not an especially pro
pitious one, although it did produce, in some of her travel
letters and later political editorials, articles that should
have been included in the main body of her collected Writings.
Aside from these she wrote too often as if fumbling for a
subject, probably because her main interests were so often
with Bred, The Minister’s Wooing, Agnes of Sorrento, or other
writing she was doing outside the paper. In comparison with
the gay Star Papers by her brother, she sounded uneasy.
Pate was against her too, for during such crises as
the Dred Scott excitement and John Brown's raid, she was in
Europe, unable to express quickly enough the indignation that
she felt. George Cheever, who handled such serious political
topics, wrote with great energy and great ability, and her
own letters in the same troubled times, however pleasant, lost
fire in comparison with his excellent editorials.
The unfortunate suspension of her serial story, The
Pearl of Orr’s Island, likewise marred her relationship with
the Independent. In announcing her inability to continue on
April 4, 1861, she came nearer to stating a conscious false
hood than at any other time in her life, for she gave as a
reason the necessity of revisiting Maine for further
276
observation "to give the story the finish and completeness I
wish." For this white lie she made full atonement in "A Card”
of November 21-, 1861, announcing the resumption of the story
in the following issue. Here she again fibbed a bit in asking
"Who could write on stories, that had a son to send to battle?"
and "Who could write fiction when fact was so imperious?"
Finally, however, she gave the true reason— overwork.
Mr. Theodore Tilton, her explanation showed, had
wheedled her into promising a serial, although she was al
ready committed to the Atlantic and Cornhill for Agnes of
Sorrento. Overpowered by his personal charm, she had promised
more than she could fulfill. The Atlantic and Cornhill came
first, and the Independent as soon as she could find time for
it. The delay did no good to The Pearl of Orr* s Island— it is
the explanation of the often-noted discrepancy between the two
halves of the story— but it taught her that there were limits
to her strength and creative ability. She was never caught
again, except for an occasional week’s delay from illness, and
she resumed her character of utter dependability and commer
cial honor.
One special service that the Independent performed for
Mrs. Stowe was to act as her press agent. Her name on its
front page week after week, whether she was writing for the
issue or not, had the effect of a reiterated advertisement;
and beyond this the magazine generously reviewed her books.
277
When The Minister’s Wooing was attacked, the Independent used
2 2
an editorial "Theology and Morality in the Minister's Wooing,"
admitting that she had made errors hut denying that she had
gone over to Unitarianism. On the same page it printed an
other article on the same subject, as well as a letter from a
correspondent on another page. All of this was an incitement
to the readers of the Independent to become also readers of
the novel.
Nowadays one would be critical of such log-rolling, but
Mrs. Stowe's circle never suspected themselves to be guilty of
such a vicious practice. When Catherine, many years previously,
had written to Mrs. Sigourney that she wanted to increase her
influence, she had meant that she wanted to know more and
bigger markets for her essays. "To make myself known, and as
23
popular as I can, with all classes of readers" would mean,
to a modern commercial writer, to find the most profitable
mass markets; but to Catherine, and to all the Beechers, it
meant "increasing the sphere of influence." Henry Ward
Beecher felt the same in writing for Bonner's trashy Ledger,
but he let his momentary enthusiasm carry him further than
Mrs. Stowe would ever have done when he wrote: "I have got
22 Ibid., February 9, I860.
23 Mae Elizabeth Harveson, Catherine Esther Beecher,
Pioneer Educator, p. 77.
278
so used to the Ledger that I seem to fit into its eolumns more
naturally than anywhere else.” ^
III. HEARTH AM) HOME
When the weekly domestic magazine Hearth and Home was
established, beginning with the issue of December 26, 1868,
the editors were Donald G - . Mitchell and Harriet Beecher Stowe.
This was the first time in her career, and the last, that Mrs.
Stowe took upon herself the public responsibility for prepar
ing a magazine regularly. Her duties were slighter than her
title of associate editor suggested, for they were limited to
supplying a weekly column, with Mitchell shouldering the main
labors. Even this routine work was beyond her, however, for
her last column appeared on October 30, 1869, and her name
disappeared from the editorial acknowledgments on November
20, 1869. The strain of regular weekly assignments was too
much for her strength, although she cannot be accused of
laziness, since in the years 1868-1869 four of her books were
published, The Chimney-Corner. Men of Our Time, Oldtown Folks
and The American Woman * s Home. Busy as she kept herself, Mrs.
Stowe was always a trifle temperamental, as well as subject
to fits of illness. That she missed only four issues before
her resignation is more remarkable than that she preferred
24 The New York Ledger, December 18, 1869, p. 4
279
giving up the work to continuing the steady journalistic
grind.
The contributions themselves show, in their skipping
from topic to topic, and in their occasional emptiness, what
her difficulties were. Since none of her forty papers for
Hearth and Home has ever been reprinted, a glance at them, in
their original order, is a rewarding glimpse into her workshop.
The first issue contained her "Greeting,” one of her
clearest statements on the position of women. With the lib
erals she maintained that women should have the right to vote,
to engage in business, or to make themselves useful as they
wished; but with the conservatives she maintained also that
these rights of voting and trading were far inferior to
woman*s greatest vocation, that of wife and mother. Thus she
offered a benevolent, if distant encouragement to the movement
for feminine freedom, while leaving herself free to oppose any
specific step taken on its behalf.
For her second offering she retreated to "Rights of
Dumb Animals," a less controversial crusade.
The following week she began a series of articles on
commercial writing, a topic which lasted her for four weeks,
giving way, February 6, 1869, to "How to Treat Babies."
February 13, 1869, was a filler, answers to corres
pondence received through the magazine. She followed this
with praise of some beautiful chromo-lithographs. Then she
280
took a week’s vacation.
In March she discussed, week by week, gardening, com
mercial writing again, how to buy a beautiful carpet (as in
Christopher Crowfield’s ’ ’ The Ravages of a Carpet”), and how
to beautify living rooms with flower pots made from tin cans.
For the month of April her column was acceptably filled
by travel letters frcm Florida. These are in the spirit of
the later Palmetto-Leaves, her never ending enthusiasm showing
that she was already one of the best publicity agents Florida
was ever to have. The May articles were also entirely on her
travels, which were summed up in her first two June articles,
’ ’ From the St. John’s, South, to the St. John’s, North,” and
’ ’ Homeward from Canada.”
For the last weeks of June she discussed, in two in
stallments, ’ ’ What Shall Young Girls Read?” In the first of
these she recommended the Pictorial History of England and
Ivanhoe. The second went on to The Talisman, Miss Strickland’s
Q,ueens of England, and the histories of Froude and Macaulay.
On July 3 she printed a sympathetic and informative
article on ”The Colored Labor of the South," a calm evaluation
of progress since emancipation. After this she took another
week’s leave, and followed it on July 17 with a pointless
discussion of "Country and City.”
Beginning on July 24, 1869, the magazine provided her
with illustrated covers depicting, week by week, "Four Scenes
281
in the Life of a Country Boy,” really choice period pieces.
The titles alone, ' ’ Leaving Home,””The Temptation and the Fall,"
"Further On," and "At Last,” practically tell the story. The
pitiful yokel, having become a forger, is led off to prison
by a detective— -the climax of a series of scenes not quite in
the spirit of Hogarth.
On August 21, 1869, she discussed "The Handy Man"
around the house, and the following week returned, more vi
tally, to women's rights, in "What is and What is not the
Point in the Woman Question." In a word, the point is money;
and justice still holds, as in Revolutionary days, that taxa
tion without representation is tyranny. Another week's leave
of absence followed.
September found the associate editor on her travels
again, with four articles, starting September 11, 1869, in
spired by various places in New England. On October 9, 1869,
she changed the subject to ask "Who Earned that Money?" an
swering that the wife, by saving, was also a true earner.
The article for October 16, 1869, considered "Our Early Rose
Potatoes," and that for October 30, called simply "Hartford,"
told the world that she was home.
Once home, she lacked either ambition or energy to con-
i
tinue further with Hearth and Home. The Byron controversy was
already upon her, and she was saving her energies for publica
tion, within the years 1870-1871, of Lady Byron Vindicated.
282
Little Pussy Willow, My Wife and I, and Pink and 'White Tyranny.
Mrs. Stowe’s associate editorship of Hearth and Home,
though merely an episode in her busy life, shows her difficul
ties in finding vital subjects for weekly discourses. She had
the habit of repeating herself and the equally fatal one of
using up her good leads too fast. With straight religious
discourse not permitted in Hearth and Home, she had little to
say that had not already appeared in the Atlantic and else
where. Travel was her greatest source of copy: fourteen of
her forty articles in this series are about travel, eight of
them concerning Florida. Six of the others are on homemaking
problems (the special field covered by the magazine), three on
feminism, one on kindness to animals, and eight on miscellan
eous subjects. The only new vein uncovered is a series of
seven articles on writing and reading, a significant addition
to her meager comments on these subjects in her letters and
the collected Writings.
In her own manner of writing, no distinctions appear
between these Hearth and Home articles and the earlier ones
for the Independent or the later ones for the Christian Union.
They are hasty sketches, far removed from the more carefully
edited longer essays for the Atlantic Monthly, written with
out assistance either in the finding of subjects or the pol
ishing of phrases to deal with them.
IV. THE CHRISTIAN UNION
283
Of all the journalistic connections of the Beechers,
tile Christian Union was the happiest personally. This maga
zine— which later developed into the Outlook, enjoying a long
and successful career— was published by the firm of John Bruce
Ford and Company, a name which has already frequently appeared
in these pages as the principal publisher of Mrs. Stowe’s
later books.
The firm itself was established out of love for Henry
Ward Beecher. Both Mr. Ford and his younger partner, John
Raymond Howard, who has told the story in his Remembrance of
Things Past, were idolizers at the Beecher shrine, and the
firm was founded to exploit their idol's talents. As Howard
25
tells the story, the first act of Ford and Company was to
advance Beecher f10,000 for a life of Christ. While waiting
for the manuscript, which was long delayed, it occupied itself,
like the canny association of businessmen that it was, with
publishing such successful books as The Trotting Horse in
America and Horace Greeley's Recollections of a Busy Life.
Soon followed the weekly reprints of Beecher's sermons, later
a regular feature of the Christian Union itself.
All was optimism around Ford and Company's offices, for
25 John Raymond Howard, Remembrance of Things Past,
pp. 215-218.
284
the firm was prosperous from the start, and when the Christian
Union was finally reorganized in 1870, witi^ Beecher himself as
editor, its pages breathed a calm assurance that all was well
with the world. Failure was to come almost as suddenly, a few
years later, with Beecher’s spectacular fall from public
favor,but meanwhile there was a huge subscription list of
over two hundred thousand names, and an accompanying era of
happy feeling.
In his "Salutory" for the new magazine, dated January
1, 1870, Beecher explained the title and policy of the paper.
It was to be a family journal, that is of general, not spe
cifically religious interest, but none the less of "distinctly
Christian influence.” It was to be devoted to "oneness of
Christian sympathy," though not to "oneness of Church . . .
that phantom, a Universal Corporate Unity of Christians.” In
other words, Beecher was determined to avoid all doctrinal
controversy in an attempt to shed his own views upon as wide
a segment of the magazine buying public as possible. He
worked energetically on the Christian Union, supplying weekly
chats and editorials as well as his sermons, and even during
the days of the Tilton trial he kept a brave face in talking
of himself and his troubles.
In the second issue he began introducing the members
26 Ifcia- , P* 306
285
of his family to the magazine’s clientele. Catherine was
first, with an article against woman suffrage that stirred up
controversy for some time. She also announced a campaign for
funds to establish a woman's university, emphasizing a strong
department of domestic science, with herself and Mrs. Stowe
as President and Associate President. Shortly afterward the
magazine began advertising a book on the subject of domestic
science written by the same two ladies.
On May 7, 1870, Calvin Stowe began a series of articles
on the New Testament, a series which later broadened its scope
and became one of the regular features. In the same issue
Mrs. Stowe also appeared with "Who Ought to Come to Florida?”
her familiar type of press-agentry for the delightful South
which her regular readers had encountered before. Meanwhile
Mrs. Henry Ward Beecher had already opened her department on
”The Household” and she was followed, from time to time, by
Thomas K. and other Beechers who cared to write for publication.
In this happy family gathering, Mrs. Stowe seems to have
felt as thoroughly at home as Henry Ward himself. For his mag
azine she wrote three serial novels, M£ Wife and I, We and Our
Neighbors, and Poganuc People; three series of shorter articles
that became Woman in Sacred History, Footsteps of the Master,
an& Balmetto-Leaves; a good share of Sam Lawson's Oldtown Fire
side Stories, as well as a large number of miscellaneous arti
cles, over fifty of which were never reprinted. From 1870 to
286
her retirement the Christian Union received most of her atten
tion, her happy association with it reflecting or perhaps
accounting for the mellowness of her later works.
Among her miscellaneous unreprinted articles, it is
doubtful if any add appreciably to her reputation, but a few
do increase the scope of her interests. Two articles on fallen
27
women ' belong in this category, as do also two on ‘ ’ The Indians
of St. Augustine,” April 18 and 25, 1877, a lively reportorial
account of the education of Indians lately brought to Florida
from the West.
On subjects not entirely new, yet not entirely old, one
of the most successful was an obituary notice on Horace Greeley,
her old associate from the Independent. mixed praise and reser
vation much more personal than the stereotyped account in Men
of Qur Time.2**Other obituary notices give evidence of the
passing of the years.
Of her old subjects, spiritualism continued to disturb
her. Four articles from September 3 to October 1, 1870, dealt
with this subject, reaching the conclusion that Christianity
is more essential to salvation than spiritualism, but that if
departed spirits seek to make us Christian they may possibly
be genuine. This idea was repeated a month later; but a
2^ Christian Union, June 4 and April 30, 1870
28 Ibid.. December 11, 1872.
287
review of Robert Dale Owen’s The Debatable Land, January 24,
1872, took a negative viewpoint, rejecting spiritualism firmly
in favor of Bible revelation.
The familiar lay sermons continue. "Our Lord’s Bible,"
July 13, 1870, urges Christians to study the basic book of'
their faith. "The Traveler’s Talisman," August 20, 1870,
praises faith and prayer. "Transplanting— a Parable," August
21, 1872, repeats her idea of earthly sorrow as heavenly dis
cipline. "I believe in the Resurrection of the Body,"
October 30, 1872, reexpresses that article of her faith.
"Does God Answer Prayer?" November 13, 1872, is only one of
her several assurances that He does. "A Heroic Squash,"
three years later, is a parable to show "the power of moral
endurance."
It is unnecessary to continue the catalogue. She kept
her activity and her old interests to the end. She still
wrote her travel sketches, from North and South, and she still
waxed enthusiastic over chromo-lithographs such as those given
by the Christian Union as premiums with subscriptions: she was
convinced they could "hardly be distinguished from the orig-
29
inals." She showed herself to be a kindly, alert old lady,
greatly concerned with parents who failed to teach their
30
children not to put "Pins in Pussy’s Toes,"^ and encouraged
29 "Faces on the Wall,” Christian Union, December 6, 1871
■*° Christian Union. August 14, 1871.
288
by the superior morality shown by the Sari of Beaconsfield in
Lothair, which she thought, in its improvement over Vivian
Grey.to‘be a clear indication of the improved moral standards
31
of British society generally. She never heard of Oscar
Wilde, or her optimism might have suffered a momentary shock.
She continued to write a little about the Negroes and
a little about prohibition, but without rancor, as now she was
inclined to take a hopeful view of the world. As she said, in
the last letter to the Christian Union from Florida: "We are
as quiet as a mill-pond . . . Come down, ye weary, heavy-laden
. . . where everybody is good-naturedJSuch was the lovely
ending of her literary career. The sweet and gentle Our Folks
at Poganuo. as it was called in the magazine, ran from
November 28, 1877, to June 12, 1878; and her name was not in
cluded among the prospective contributors for 1879.
V. OTHER MAGAZINES
Of all the magazines for which Mrs. Stowe wrote regu
larly, the Atlantic Monthly got from her the best work. The
primary explanation is very likely that it demanded the best.
However that may be, when Houghton Mifflin and Company pub
lished her Writings, they salvaged every scrap from the
31 Ibid., July 9, 1870.
32 Ibid., February 7, 1877
289
Atlantic, from the innocuous "Mourning Veil” of the first
issue to the explosive ”True Story of Lady Byron” and the
subsequent Fireside Stories. The result is, that in the fore
going chapters about her books, her writing for the Atlantic
has already been surveyed. Unfortunately, the anonymous
editors of the Writings were not as industrious as they should
have been in searching the files of other magazines, so that
the important impressions to be gained from these other papers
can still be gathered only from the original files.
There can be no question that, on the whole, her
Atlantic work is a sample of her best efforts. The magazine
was so much less provincial than the Evangelist. Hearth and
Home, or the Christian Union, that what she wrote for it is
best adapted, on the whole, to give a favorable impression—
though not a complete or an adequate impression— of her work.
A monthly instead of a weekly, it permitted longer install
ments that were longer and less choppy. It considered itself
seriously as a mouthpiece for American culture and conse
quently demanded good style as well as good sense. The edi
tors worked over manuscripts conscientiously, preparing them
for an eternity within covers as well as for a month on the
study table. In the Atlantic, Mrs. Stowe had the assistance
of Lowell, Howells, and others in preparing her stories for
posterity; and one of them, Qldtown Folks, has at least a fair
chance of reaching its goal.
290
Of the other magazines which bought her output, Edward
Everett Hale’s Old and Hew likewise had serious aims, but it
lasted only four years. It was a curious mixture of the
scholarly and the simple, combining erudite articles on
American political literature or Chinese transcendentalism
with Mrs. Stowe’s Pink and White Tyranny. Why it failed to
win readers can be guessed from two poems in the single issue
of December, 1870, one by Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney beginning
’ ’ Little birds sit on the telegraph wires,” the other by
'William Morris beginning ’ ’ Dead, lonely night, and all streets
quiet now." The two horses of popular moralizing and exotic
aestheticism were too difficult a team for Old and Hew to
manage.
Tourgee’s Qur Continent, which was also both interest
ing and short-lived, was a popular literary magazine with
special emphasis on the South. To it Mrs. Stowe made a single
contribution, "The Captain’s Story," in which she tried her
hand at southern local color. The Revolution was also a
spirited publication, not so inflammatory as it might seem
from the title, a magazine for woman’s rights conducted by
Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Although it
announced Mrs. Stowe among its contributors, it ran attacks
on her conservatism as well as minor contributions from her
pen. Other contacts, such as that with the important North
American Review, for which she wrote a single article, are
291
likewise too slight to be of ascertainable significance.
All in all, however, the story of her association
with magazines, covering a full half century from 1833 to
1882, is the most intimately personal story of her literary
life. Magazines were not only her daily sustenance, but
they were the only literary school she ever attended. They
may have led her from the path of true artistry, but they
made her the figure she became. Without their constant
repetition of her name, in their tables of contents and their
editorial discussions, she could not have been the Mrs. Stovtre
that everybody came to know and most people to admire. Never
their hack, in the sense of a conscienceless purveyor of
whatever was wanted, she was none the less their creature,
for they made her in an image more theirs than any that her
parents had foreseen for her.
CHAPTER X
MRS. STOWE AS A LITERARY ARTIST
I. HER ATTITUDE TOWARD FICTION
Now that Harriet Beecher Stowe, the woman of flesh and
blood, has been dead these forty years and more, since what
she did for American literature is so much the most important
question about her, this last chapter of extended discussion
has been reserved for a survey of her qualities as a writer.
Readers and critics alike have reached a conclusions about
her merits. As The Cambridge History of American Literature
will prove in less than six pages, her place is fixed, subject
to no more rapid or violent change than the positions of Mrs.
Behn, Mrs. Radcliffe, or Mrs. Southworth. Uncle Tom1s Cabin
still floats upon its reputation. Though sophisticates may
place the death of Eva among the funniest scenes in fiction,1
Uncle Tom1s Cabin is monumental in its solidity. It has the
vividness and vitality of folklore. On the level of conscious
art, Qldtown Folks is likewise safe from the years, because of
Calvin and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s insight into the American
past and their sly wit in expressing it. Inspired by her hus
band’s recollections, which form the basis of the story, Mrs.
1 This is the view of Stark Young, "Uncle Tom’s Measure,
The New Republic. 76:212-213, 1933.
293
Stowe delved deeply into human character and discovered a world
"removed from the region of the earthly and the commonplace to
2
that of the spiritual and the mysterious.”
Oldtown Folks is a book that repays careful study; but
aside from it and Uncle Tom's Cabin her voluminous writings
hold little appeal for the general reader or the aesthetic
critic. For the historian of culture, some of her other work,
like the New England sketches in The Mayflower, are full of
meaning in their proper contexts; and Lady Byron Yindicated is
an important document. Unfortunately, the necessity of hasty
composition to meet assignments for periodicals rarely gave
Mrs. Stowe a chance to do her best writing. As George Sand
said, in her eulogy of Uncle Tom's Cabin, although Mrs. Stowe
was a saint, she was perhaps not a man of letters.-*
Mrs. Stowe was, of course, never primarily concerned
with being a novelist. From the beginning of her writing she
had accepted James Hall's defense of fiction as useful and
moral, but she never ceased to regret the dilution of morality
and usefulness necessary in stories. Yet since editors de- .
manded novels of her, she would do her best to make them, as
she said of her favorite Oldtown Folks, "more . . . than a
2 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Oldtown Folks. p. 97.
3 E. Lucas, Literature anti-esclavagiste au Dix-
neuvieme Siecle; Etude sur Madame Beecher Stowe et son Influ
ence en France, passim, shows that this is the common French
view.
294
story.In the preface that she wrote for an omnibus col
lection, she granted that "the propensity of the human mind
to fiction is one of those irrepressible forces against which
5
it. has always proved vain to contend."*^ The thought saddened
her, and she recollected that in her youth a favorite subject
for school compositions had been "On the Disadvantages of
Novel-Heading." Like Susan Warner, the author of The Wide,
'Wide World, she had been taught that most novels were frivo-
6
lous, and some dangerous. This distrust of fiction was not
doubt of the aesthetic adequacy of the type, as expressed by
Thomas Hill G-reen; it was the ethical objection to the use
less and the trivial.
The answer to these objections was to combine the use
ful with the fictional, as Mrs. Edgeworth, Walter Scott, and
Mrs. Sigourney had done. "Since the world must read fiction,"
she continued in her preface to A Library of Famous Fiction,
7
"let us have the best in an attractive household form," that
is, in a carefully bowdlerized version where it could at
least avoid vulgarity. "Swift’s genius commands our
4 * Annie Fields, Life and Letters of Harriet Beecher
Stowe, p. 312.
5 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Library of Famous Fiction,
p. vii.
6 Anna B. Warner, Susan Warner: "Elizabeth Wetherell,"
pp. 158, 165.
? Harriet Beecher Stowe, Library of Famous Fiction,
p. viii.
295
admiration,” she confessed., "but his words should never be
introduced into the home-circle save in such revised and
8
cleanly editions as the present one.” In her collection,
to balance the commercially desirable tales, she included
that gem of gems, The Pilgrim’s Progress, perhaps the only
9
story of which she unreservedly approved.
In her own novels, her compromise between teaching and
entertaining was a reasonable one, but it held some of them
on a level of undramatic discussion that later readers have
rejected.
II. HER VIEWS OH BYRON: LADY BYRON VINDICATED, 1870
Mrs. Stowe was not endowed with an avid appetite for
literary subtleties, and as a reader she was not minutely
critical or appreciative. The bulk of her reading was not
meager, but it is significant that only one writer of mere
literature moved her to extensive composition. The famous
Byron controversy of which she was an instigator began with
the publication of "The True. Story of Lady Byron" in the
Atlantic of September, 1869.10 This article, probably the
® Ibid., p. x.
9 For unfamiliar passages praising Bunyan, see her
articles in Hearth and Home, January 23, 1869, and Christian
Union, January 1, 1^73.
Reprinted in Lady Byron Vindicated, pp. 413-450.
296
most discussed of the nineteenth century, reduced the circu
lation of the Atlantic from 50,000 to 35,000, so great was
the opposition that it aroused. Nevertheless the Nation
justly called it at the time "one of the greatest successes
ever achieved in any country.Mrs. Stowe later apologized
for its "feebleness” of execution as due to "exhausted
health,” but such a critical judge as Henry Adams praised it,
in 1869, as the most effective writing she had ever done.^
Certainly it was more effective, because more pointed and
better unified, than the book, Lady Byron Vindicated, which
grew out of it. In the article, Mrs. Stowe had the one de
cisive fact of Byron’s incest; in the book, she had no added
facts, but much incidental discussion that drew the attention
of readers from her professed subjects, the Byrons, to herself.
It was not as a poet that Byron became the object of
so much of her literary attention, for she had never before
referred to him except briefly, as her custom was in mention
ing writers. When his mistress, the Countess Guiccioli, had
published her recollections, Mrs. Stowe was shocked by their
success; she saw the situation as one of "mistress versus
13
wife,” which demanded a clear and immediate reply. Mrs.
Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines,
II, p. 505.
- * - 2 Henry Adams, Letters, p. 168.
H Harriet Beecher Stowe, Lady Byron Vindicated, p. 4-13.
297
Stowe, who had become a friend of Lady Byron during her
visits in England, warmly defended the memory of "the most
remarkable woman that England had produced in the century.
She ended her original article with an appeal to the American
conscience:
Reverence for pure womanhood is, we think, a national
characteristic of the American; and, so far as this
country is concerned, we feel that the public should
have this refutation of the slanders of the Countess
Guiccioli’s book.l?
In response to the attacks upon her article for the
Atlantic, Mrs. Stowe replied in Lady Byron Vindicated, broad
ening her generalizations and adding to the objects of attack.
As she saw herself, she was crusading under handicaps to pro
tect the memory of a noble wife against sneers and insults;
but her unsympathetic readers thought that she was gratui
tously attacking Byron, Moore, Mrs. Leigh, Christopher North,
and the whole manhood of Great Britain. The essential truth
of her story looked, as she told it, like lurid falsehood.
Dickens was no doubt only one of those who privately wished
1 &
her in the pillory, as the anonymous pamphleteer, ”Outis,”
was only one of those who publicly consigned her to the
17
lunatic asylum.
^ » P« 450.
15 Loc. cit.
16 M. A. De Wolfe Howe, Memories of a Hostess, p. 191.
17 “Gutis,” The True Story of Mrs. Stowe.
How unjust her opponents were, her own conscience duly
advised her, and moreover she had evidence to prove her charge.
In Lady Byron1s words, "Mrs. Stowe, he was guilty of incest
with his sister.’" ¥ainly might she quote this assertion, and
vainly repeat the answer which she had intended as reassuring:
18
"My dear friend, I have heard that." Long before this
point in her narrative she had lost her case with her readers
through unskillful argumentation. The rest of the sordid
details, instead of substantiating her claims, more deeply
prejudiced her readers against her. In the controversy that
followed, as Samuel C. Chew’s excellent resum.6 shows, the
reliability of her facts was less debated than the incredi-
19
bility of her character. When Bayard Taylor asked his friend
8teaman what he thought of Lady Byron Vindicated, Stedman re
plied, in a letter only recently published, that Lady Byron was
"a jealous virtuous prude" and Mrs. Stowe "a gossiping green
20
old granny." How could her hysterically written diatribe be,
reasonable souls were bound to ask, the product of the duty
and self-sacrifice that she proclaimed it?
Without realizing the ugly interpretations that would
be put upon her motives, Mrs. Stowe further irritated some
^ Harriet Beecher Stowe, Lady Byron Vindicated, p. 235.
• * • 9 Samuel C. Chew, Byron in England, pp. 278-283.
20 Richard Croom Beatty, Bayard Taylor, Laureate of the
Gilded Age, p. 266.
299
readers by giving free rein to her pride in having associated
with British nobility, while at the same time she antagonized
others by casting wholesale slurs upon English literary taste.
To these irritants she added, with literary maladroitness, an
alluring portrait of Byron as a glamorous victim of moral
21
insanity, and a repellent portrait of lady Byron as the for
bidding wife with no faults, in Byron’s phrase, the greatest
fault of all. Her attitude toward Byron’s poetry was not
found so objectionable as her interpretation of his conduct,
since her frequent quotations from those poems having auto
biographical hints were accompanied by words in.praise of
Op
his talent. The admiration she admitted for his work did
not extend to Don Juan, J though she read it carefully.
Incidentally, she uncovered rich treasure in her dis
covery of ’ ’ the unhappy influences of his childhood and youth,
and those early theologies which led him to regard himself as
one of the reprobate.”^ As evidence she quoted approvingly
from a letter written by Lady Byron to Crabb Robinson:
He was a believer in the inspiration of the Bible, and
had the gloomiest Calvinistic tenets. To that unhappy
view of the relation of the creature to the Creator I
2^ Harriet Beecher Stowe, Lady Byron Vindicated, p. 374.
22 Ibid., p. 398.
23 Ibid., pp. 11, 63.
2l* Ibid*» P* 394-
300
have always ascribed the miseries of his life. . . .
Judge, then, how I must hate the creed that made him
see God as an Avenger, and not as a Father.’ My own
impressions were just the reverse, but could have but
little weight.
Thus Lady Byron, and Mrs. Stowe with her, approached as near
to solution of the Byron mystery as any later scholar or
psychologist.
Mrs. Stowe’s interest in Byron had begun in the im
pressionable years of girlhood. When she read ’ ’ The Corsair”
at the age of thirteen she was, as she has said, astonished
and electrified.2^ Then, as to the end, she was a genuine
Byronist, perhaps the last of the genuine Byronists to get
from his poetry exactly the effects he wished from his femi
nine readers. At thirteen, her enthusiasm is understandable,
and when she heard, soon after, that Byron was dead, she
acted almost as Tennyson acted at the same news. As though
the world were coming to an end, she went alone into a field,
weeping and praying. She never forgot her father’s private
discussions of the poet or his funeral sermon lamenting his
wasted moral power. Lyman Beecher often said, in his evan
gelical fervor, that he wished he might have talked to Byron,
to straighten him out and make him the harp for Christ that
he might have been.2?
25 Ibid., p. 394.
2^ Fields, op. pit., p. 38
27 Ibid., p. 39.
301
During her formative years in Cincinnati, Byron was
aimost as important a subject for the local newspapers as the
cholera epidemics. Not only did frequent short notices ap
pear about his works, but the Chronicle on one occasion de
voted the entire front page to reprinting a critical article
28
from a London review. When these failed it ran short social
notes on his family, like this one from October 6, 1832:
Lady Noel Byron and her daughter Augusta Ada Noel Byron
are living in retirement at Brighton. Miss Byron is in
her seventeenth year, and is said to possess personal
beauty and accomplishments. She will inherit a very
large fortune.
Throughout the first half of her life, Mrs. Stowe was
kept continually reminded of what a great, bad man Byron had
been. Her colleague Whittier, writing in the National Ira,
July 15, 1847, stated that ”in Byron we see Power, uncontrolled
by Principle, Genius divorced from Goodness”— which was not
only the same moral estimate of the poet as James Hall’s in the
YYestern Monthly Magazine. but the same as her father's in his .
obituary sermon.
In many ways, Lady Byron Vindicated is built upon Mrs.
Stowe’s life-long interest in Byron’s unhappy career as well
as upon her later friendship with his widow. Her book did not
succeed in persuading the public that her interpretation of his
life was true. When the furor of the moment was forgotten, her
Cincinnati Chronicle. November 3, 1832.
302
principal accomplishments, according to Samuel Chew, who has
investigated the affair with consummate skill, were two: she
aroused a great deal of abuse against herself, and she helped
29
to increase the interest in his poetry.
III. YOUTHFUL ROMANTICISM: CORIHNE
Less spectacular in its effects than Byronism, but
equally pervasive in the long run, was the influence upon Mrs.
Stowe of that other romanticist and liberal, Ivlme. de Stael,
whose romance, Corinne; or, Italy, she discovered independently
30
in 1833. , That this novel should have found its way to
Cincinnati and into the Beecher household, was less remarkable
(for it had circled the globe in the quarter century of its
published existence) than that it should have awakened such
impassioned thought in Harriet Beecher as her letters from the
period show. Corinne; or, Italy may appear to modern readers
either a high-flown exemplification of the principle that true
love is not-smooth or a diluted guidebook to southern Surope,
both of which, considered unhistorically, it is: but to
Harriet Beecher, in her early twenties, it was a storehouse
of wisdom and an ideal of personal perfection. It was, more
over, the work of one of the famous personalities of its day,
Chew, op. cit., pp. 283, 279.
30 Fields, op. cit., p. 82.
3©3
from whom Byron was supposed to have borrowed, without
acknowledgment, his famous apostrophe to the ocean, "Roll on
. . ." etc.
In both book and author, with whose biography she be
came acquainted at this time, there was much to disturb and
repel the young woman. Byron paid the romance the compliment
of describing it as more dangerous to virtue than any of his
writings, more insidious because it disguised vice under a
veneer of pious aspiration. It was the veneer that attracted
young Harriet. Earnestly as she might regret the heroine’s
inconstancy of heart and lack of steadfast patriotism, above
31
all "the difference of their countries and creeds," there
was much more to attract her enthusiastic love. Mme. de
Stael’s valiant advocacy of extending women’s privileges
stamped her as a kindred soul, and even such minor details as
an affectionate reference to The Arabian Nights, one of the
few exciting books of Harriet’s girlhood, awakened the reali
zation of a basic sympathy between writer and reader.
Above all else, the character of the heroine Corinne
was filled with alluring possibilities. Beautiful, talented,
rich, Corinne possessed the passion of Juliet and the dignity
of a vestal virgin. Divine inspiration was enthroned in her
eyes, and her talents were so extraordinary that ordinary rules
31 Mme. de Stael, Corinne; or, Italy, translated by
Isabel Hill, p. 142.
for judging women failed to apply to her. Like Harriet,
Corinne appreciated everything that was grand and noble,
hated the selfishness of the human race, longed fiercely to
*
be loved, and suffered in the prison of small town life.
Both had known the loss in childhood of their mothers. Thus
alike in their early suffering, Harriet foresaw that she
also, like Corinne, might hope to attain later fame and
profundity.
At the crucial moment of first reading, in 1833, there
was immediate comfort to be found in the aphorisms liberally
sprinkled through the book and hope in the question, "Ought
not every woman, like every man, to follow the bent of her
32
own talents?" There was also to be a permanent residue of
principle left in Harriet’s mind by the observations and gen
eralizations of Mae. de Stael: "A woman’s feeling for a man
any way inferior to herself is pity rather than love."33
"?/hen genius is united with true feeling, our talents multi-
3 L
ply our woes."- ^ "Let us admire together all that can elevate
our minds; we shall thus, at least, secure some happy moments.
These, and many others, might have served the young
32 Ibid. > P* 241.
33 Ibid*, p. 255*
34 Ibid.. p. 277.
35 Ibid., p. 55.
305
woman as well as any principles she was ever to invent for
herself. Like Byron, Mme. de Stael presented the problem of
genius and immorality, with the added problem of national
differences. It is not to be wondered that Harriet formally
resisted the Frenchwoman’s guidance, or that she was unable
to disregard it. **1 have felt an intense sympathy with many
36
parts of that book, with many parts of her character,” she
wrote at her first reading. It provided an'exotic pattern of
womanhood and compelled her to think about it. For years the
image of Corinne reappeared before her: the inspired proph
etess raised, by purely feminine traits, above the blurred
half-virtue of the world. An Americanized Corinne, maternal
and matured, remained an ideal for womanhood secondary only
to the pure motherhood of Roxana Beecher.
IV. HER FAVORITE WRITERS FROM THE PAST
More conscious and less complicated than her attraction
to either Byron or Mme. de Stael was Mrs. Stowe’s admiration
for Sir Walter Scott, her favorite poet, whose Lay of the Last
Minstrel she could— and did— recite complete from memory.3?
Hor did her devotion to Scott stop with his poetry. When she
was a girl her father had excepted Scott’s prose stories from
36 Fields, 0£. oit., p. 82.
37
Lyman Beecher Stowe, Saints, Sinners and Beechers,
p. 229.
. 306
bis general principle that novels are trash,, and in one sum
mer the family had read Ivanhoe seven times.38 This childhood
pleasure in the Waverley novels she renewed with her own
children, at one.time (1850) reading them all in historical
sequence to enliven the routine of history lessons.
The first poetry she had ever read was Scott’s ballads,
which impressed her much more than Burns' poems, to which she
39
was soon after introduced.77 She liked to contrast Scott with
Byron, in order to praise him-for his higher morality. "He
never makes young ladies feel that they would like to marry
corsairs, pirates, or sentimental villains of any description,"^
she wrote in Sunny Memories; a judgment which she repeated in a
later essay for children, "Sir Walter Scott and his Dogs," in
which he is mentioned as "one of the greatest geniuses of the
world,and Byron as "the great rival poet to Scott. . . .
not so good or so wise a man by many degrees, but very cele
brated in his day."^2
38 Harriet Beecher Stowe, "Answers to Correspondence,"
Hearth and Home, February 13, 1869.
39 Fields, op. cit., p. 183.
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sunny Memories, I, 143.
^ Harriet Beecher Stowe, "Sir Walter Scott and his
Dogs," Queer Little People, p. 173. See also "Literary Epi
demics," Evangelist, July 28, 1842.
^2 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Queer Little People, p. 173.
See also Poganuc People, pp. 131-132.
307
On her first visit to Europe, she immortalized her
approval of Sir Walter in the opening pages of Sunny Memories.
Throughout Scotland she viewed the visible relies of his life,
and she was chagrined to find that he who had enchanted for
her every foot of Scottish ground was not held in the same
/ 3
high esteem by all his fellow countrymen. Though not even
he could quite meet her qualifications of the perfect
Christian gentleman, she had only two minor objections to the
moral quality of his work: that he was militaristic^ (she was
to be less pacifistic herself in a few years) and that he
/ 5
could not do justice to Puritanism. In spite of these flaws,
a surprisingly small number for an American-Republican moral
ist to discover in an aristocratic British storyteller, she
loved him whole-heartedly; she was immeasurably fonder of his
work than of Shakespeare’s.
"Shakespeare, Madam, is obscene," a Cincinnati littera
teur had declared to Mrs. Trollope, "and thank God, we are
46
sufficiently advanced to have found it out." Mrs. Stowe’s
visit to Stratford was the duty call demanded by a great
^ Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sunny Memories, I, 58, 69.
44 Ibid., I, 143.
^ Loo* cit.
. ^ Reprinted by Allan Nevins, editor, American Social
History as Recorded by British Travellers. p. l6l.
308
reputation, for like her fellow-townsman she suspected
Shakespeare’s obscenity. Her imperfect acquaintance with the
legends and works of the bard is shown in her misquotations
47
of celebrated lines and in her mistake over his son Hamnet's
name.^ Although professing the conventional admiration for
him, she squirmed under the coarseness of his plays, doubted
the accuracy of his history, and looked disapprovingly upon
his frivolity. On the whole, however, she was repelled most
by the weirdness of his writing,^ and she softened to him
only when thinking of Queen Elizabeth, ’ ’ this most repulsive
and disagreeable woman,the "belligerent old Gorgon”^
whose gross taste disgraced her entire court and period.
Like Shakespeare, Milton, that old favorite of her
father, failed to impress her deeply. According to her son,
she liked ’ Wordsworth, Longfellow, and Whittier; she quoted
the obvious passages from them all, as also from Tennyson,
who seems, from her references and quotations, to have held
/ 7
Harriet Beecher Stowe, ’ ’ Where the bee sucks there
lurk I,” Sunny Memories. II, 104; ’ ’ Age cannot wither, custom
cannot stale,’ ’ Sunny Memories. I, 150.
Harriet Beecher Stowe, ’ ’ Hamet,” Sunny Memories. I,
211; also ’ ’ Holingshed's Chronicles,” Sunny Memories, I, 94.
^9 Ibid., I, 195; see also I, 152.
50 Ibid., I, 221.
51 Ibid.> 220*
309
a place of equal esteem with her. In Woman in Sacred History,
she reprinted approvingly selections from Willis, Mrs. Hemans,
and The Catholic World; and in this same book she ventured
to quote from Crashaw, from Carlyle, and from Rossetti, to
whom on another occasion she referred disparagingly,^2 as well
as to write out a complete synopsis of Faust in two paragraphs
53
divided equally betv/een the two parts of that work.
A complete list of all Mrs. St owe * s literary references
would be long. Aside from her theological browsings, her ex
cursions into general literature were more numerous than one
would imagine; and Constance Rourke is undoubtedly mistaken
when she says of Mrs. Stowe: "She was never a reader; she was
indeed profoundly uninterested in literature."^ Quite to
the contrary, in her early childhood when, as her brother
wrote her aunt, "Harriet reads everything she can lay hands
55
on,” she commenced the habit. Sixty-five years later, as
she wrote to George Rliot, she was still reading eagerly,
looking forward to the next installment of the Harper*s serial,
Daniel Deronda.
52 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Wife and I, p. 149.
53 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Woman in Sacred History,
p. 304.
54 Constance M. Rourke, Trumpets of Jubilee, p. 123.
55 Charles Beecher, editor, Autobiography, Correspond
ence. etc., of Lyman Beecher, D. D., I, 463.
310
Her reading did not lack quantity so much as depth of
understanding. She had, it appears, the weakest intellectual
background of any of the women writing at the time. Even
Susan Warner, who was no mental giant and obviously Mrs.
Stowe's inferior in shrewdness and emotional power, had more
knowledge and greater interest. At twelve years of age, the
future author of The Wide, Wide World was reading Hume as well
as Bunyan, and soon afterward she was not only enthusiastic
about Walter Scott, but also profoundly in love with
Shakespeare.56 She was not only, at twenty, a confirmed de
votee of Marla Edgeworth, whose Moral Tales she had read "a
57
hundred times,” but a few years later she was also engrossed
in Jane Eyre and wondering how much she was like her. The
same story of broadening interests and fresh enthusiasms is
told in the lives of Miss Sedgwick or Sirs. Prentiss, only
Harriet Beecher Stowe, so much more successful than any of
them, being content to live within a narrowly self-centered
intellectual setting. After a while, one takes this limita
tion for granted, ceasing to be surprised at anything, even
her perfectly serious description of Socrates as a Greek
58
combination of Dr. Paley and Dr. Eranklin.
56 Warner, op. cit., pp. 93-94.
57 Ifria-« P. 194.
56 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sunny Memories, I, 217.
311
Her references to books are numerous, but seldom de
tailed. It is certain, However, that she was extremely fond
of Richardson, being willing to break appointments to plunge
once more into the enchanting pages of Sir Charles Qrandison 7—
a book which she further mentions, in The Minister*s Wooing,
as inevitable in the library of the well-taught young woman of
the late eighteenth century, along with the Spectator, Robinson
Crusoe, the Bible, and the writings of Jonathan Edwards.60
Miss Edgeworth was another favorite.
People like these she understood; but aside from them
her scholarly judgment, like her taste, was hardly impeccable.
It was only at maturity that she dipped into Chaucer: "I read
Chaucer a great deal yesterday, and am charmed at the rever-
ential Christian spirit in which he viewed all things.0
English literature, whether of the fourteenth century of later,
was not her special field.
V. HER RELATIONSHIP TO HER LITERARY CONTEMPORARIES
If Mrs. Stowe*s taste for the great writers of the past
was, as one might venture to say, conventional in its
59 Rourke, o£. cit.. p. 111. See also "Literary
‘ Epidemics," Evangelist, July 28, 1842.
60 Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Minister*s Wooing, p. 29.
6^ Fields, op. cit., p. 169.
312
limitations, her taste for her contemporaries was no less un
enterprising. She was surprised, on her first visit to
England, at the respect she found for Emerson, Hawthorne, and
Prescott, none of whom she had discovered. Hawthorne she at
first viewed with skepticism, and it was only after she had
overcome her distrust of his strange viewpoint that she could
unqualifiedly endorse him as a "wonderful fellow"^2 and "our
most exquisite writer."^ One doubts that she ever reconciled
herself to Emerson, her father's early feuds with the
^ *
Unitarians predisposing her against anything which smacked
of transcendentalism.
For Holmes and Whittier, on the other hand, she had
from the first personal and hence literary liking. They had
both been associated with the Atlantic from its earliest days,
and Whittier had also been a contributing editor to the
National Era and the Independent. With the good Doctor she
carried on an extended and vivacious exchange of letters,
over thirty pages of which, on his side, can be found in the
memoir of his life. He praised her work, but no more highly
than he did that of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps; he discussed
religion with her, no more seriously than with his obscure
62 Ibid., p. 317.
63 Ibid., p. 342. See also Mrs. Stowe's articles in
Hearth and Home, January 16 and 23, 1869.
313
fundamentalist correspondents; he compared himself, modestly,
with her. There must have been much sincerity in his jovial
flatteries. Her letters always touched him, he declared, and
his frank and personal answers afford in themselves the best
of evidence that he enjoyed writing them.
It was an agreeable friendship, not too close, and it
wore well in spite of his painful references to Cotton Mather’s
’ ’ witchcraft ravings” or descriptions of Holy Writ as "simply
64
legends." He never offered serious criticism of her books,
being content to call them keen or to indicate the spell they
cast over him. "I have not been a great moral reformer like
6s
yourself," ' was one of the comments that must have pleased
her, though the suspicion of Holmes’s self-satisfaction is
not entirely absent from it. "Who knows the New England man
and woman as you do? Who writes to their needs and to their
f i f i
hearts as you have written and write?"00 are questions to
which she must have been delighted, in reading her mail towards
the end of September, 1871, to furnish the correct answer.
Personally she was also greatly attached to Mrs.
Browning, whom she met in Italy; what she thought of Robert,
or he of her, remains a matter for surmising. In later years
^ John T. Morse, Jr., Life and Letters of Oliver
ffendell Holmes, II, 249, 253.
65 Ibia*1 II» 232.
66 Loc. cit.
314
she came to know George Eliot, who liked her, although she was
puzzled when Harriet insisted that the pedant Casaubon in
67
Middlemareh was drawn from Mr. Lewes. Nor would G. Eliott
Aft
(as Mrs. Stowe referred to her in a letter to Mr. Fields)
have been entirely pleased at another compliment paid her by
Mrs. Stowe. ”A Dog’s Mission,” one of Harriet’s moral tales
for children, is by imitation a tribute to Silas Marner. In
this parable a hard-hearted old maid, Zarviah Avery by name,
is restored to natural sympathy by the intrusion into her life
of a stray dog. Gradually her circle of tolerance extends
from dogs to children; and at the end of the tale she is
reconciled to her brother (whom she had driven from her house
in his childhood) and, like Silas Marner, to the entire human
race. This dilution of George Eliot’s benevolence is not
entirely successful.
Among the prominent literary men of her time, Lowell
was the most important to her. As editor of the Atlantic t he
was able to adopt the tone of personal interest that she es
teemed so highly. His love of the old New England was strong
69
as hers; and ’ ’ the famous Puritan conscience” was, as Henry
6? Fields, op. cit. . p. 334.
^8 Letter in Fields Collection (number 74) in the
Huntington.Library.
Henry James, ”James Russell Lowell,” Atlantic,re
printed in Essays in London and Elsewhere, p. 57.
315
James pointed out in his judicious obituary notice, an in
tegral part of his nature. The Minister1 s T/ooing was, accord
ing to his words, or at least according to the impression he
tried to give through them, an imperishable masterpiece.
Whittier was much sounder in writing of the story, to Lowell
as it happened, that it opened with fine promise, but that
it was thin, lacking the fullness of detail necessary to let
the reader know in what part of the world he was supposed to
70
find himself, in what age and in what climate.
To give an impression of Mrs. Stowe as interested
vitally or exclusively in her literary co-workers would be to
fail markedly at indicating either the scope or kind of her
4
acquaintanceships. She seems less than most professional
writers to have associated or been concerned-with her’col
leagues. Living little in the world of books, she wrote few
book reviews; and while her reading, considered as a whole,
was wide if not deep, neither her reading nor her literary
friendships greatly influenced her character.
If literary people were not a chief influence upon her
life, as though she felt them somewhat foreign.to her, there
was also a perceptible shade of condescension in their atti
tude towards her. She v/as in the New England group without
really being accepted by it, a rejection partly the result of
Samuel T. Picard, Life and Letters of John Greenleaf
Whittier, II, 419.
316
her sex and partly of her principles. How she was denied
their full confidence is indicated in a letter Charles Eliot
Norton wrote Arthur Hugh Clough about the forthcoming new
magazine, the Atlantic. After mentioning among the contrib
utors Motley, Holmes, Emerson and Lowell, Mr. Norton men
tioned the projected policy, a most unusual one, of printing
most articles anonymously, using authors' names only when
the names were worth more than the articles. In the first
issue, he said, there were to be two such articles: one of
71
them was Mrs. Stowe's.
Norton's comment was not inspired by personal preju
dice. The publishers of the Atlantic were glad to have Mrs.
Stowe's contributions, recognizing that she was a big attrac
tion; yet it is mere fact that they needed her for a certain
kind of sentiment valuable mainly to their less intellectual
readers who would be entirely stumped by, say, Motley and
Emerson. Norton's own kindly view of Mrs. Stowe is clearly
observable in another letter of his, dated at Rome, March 15,
1657. He had heard her telling stories, he wrote, and telling
them well; and he had been disgusted by some compatriots from
the South, who had found the abolitionist's presence dis-
72
tasteful.
Charles Eliot Norton, Letters of Charles Eliot
Norton. I, 186.
72 Ibid*» I» l6^*
317
A more spectacular example of the distinction which the
eminent gentlemen drew between themselves and Mrs. Stowe is
afforded by the records of an Atlantic dinner of 1859, to
which, after considerable trepidation, the women contributors
had been invited. Only two ladies appeared, Miss Harriet
Prescott and Mrs. Stowe., who had qualified her acceptance
with the condition that no wine was to be served during the
dinner! As Lowell wrote to Hmerson, this proviso tied a
witches-knot;73 and the manner in which the gentlemen hood
winked the prohibitionist, by serving themselves wine in
water glasses, is told with richly genteel humor by Thomas
Wentworth Higginson, one of the unregenerate participants
7 L
in the ruse.
After a cold, wineless start, the party livened a bit,
as Lowell tried to convince Mrs. Stowe that Tom Jones was the
best novel every written and Holmes tried to convince
Professor Stowe that swearing had originated in the free use
of language in the pulpit. Both of the Stowes were heard to
observe later that they had been disappointed in the dinner,
for while the company was undoubtedly distinguished, ’ ’ the
conversation was not quite what they had been led to expect.”75
73 James Russell Lowell, Hew Letters of James Russell
Lowell, p. 97.
7U Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Cheerful Yesterdays,
pp. 176-180.
75 Loc. cit.
318
The gap, of course, could never be bridged.
Another incident occurred at this party which is not
without its informative value. Before the gathering around
the dining table, the two lady guests had been left to them
selves for about three quarters of an hour. "What did you
two. talk about?” Higginson asked young Miss Prescott, who
replied, considerably amused, that they had not talked.
Higginson’s later comment is typical of others:
There could hardly be a better illustration of that
curious mixture of mauvaise honte and indifference
which often marred the outward manners of that re
markable woman. Imagine any kindly or gracious person
of middle age making no effort to relieve the shyness
of a young girl stranded with herself during three
quarters of an hour of enforced seclusion!’5
Imagine it you may, but he could not: and there were many such
unimaginable peculiarities that the New England writers found
in their successful feminine ally.
But Mrs. Stowe was not always so cold toward her
juniors as Miss Prescott may have believed. As a charitable
Christian, a famous writer like her would inevitably be
approached by beginners, and Mrs. Stowe, there is every
reason to believe, did not neglect the opportunities of help
ing those who met with her approval.
She was the patron of Henry Mills Alden. When the
young man was a student at Andover, while Professor Stowe was
76 Tfrid.> P« 178
319
a member of the faculty, she had sent without Alden’s knowl
edge a manuscript of his to Lowell at the Atlantic: its ac
ceptance marked the beginning of a career that was to lead to
the editorship of Harper * s Magazine and a prominent position
77
in the American literary world. Either she or her husband
must have been impressed by Alden’s treatment of the Elusinian
Mysteries, but it is certain that she also admired his char
acter and a picturesque past which included lineal descent
from John Alden and Priscilla Mulleins, routine labor re
lieved by instructing Sunday-school classes, a college educa
tion under President Mark Hopkins of Williams, and conscien
tious study at Andover Theological Seminary. That this ad
mirable young man could also write would be merely an added
grace. If he had wanted to walk to the North Pole, what
right-thinking friend could have been so niggardly as to
refuse assistance?
VI. LIMITATIONS OF HER CRAFTSMANSHIP
That Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Mrs. Stowe's first novel,
should have the strongest construction, as well as the richest
content, of any of her novels, shows her inability to profit
from the experience of writing. With artists, as the zeal for
life decreases the enthusiasm for artifice grows. In Mrs.
77 Joseph Henry Harper, The House of Harper, p. 218.
320
Stowe’s program, however, there was no provision for artistic
growth or technical refinement. When she was successful,
well and good. When she failed, her readers were charitable.
Nothing she ever wrote shows more clearly the limita
tions of her conception of the art than the seven articles on
7<>
reading and writing for Hearth and Home. Bravely she
started, in the first of these, called "Can I Write?” to give
practical advice to beginners. The first attempts should be
on a small scale, she advised, recalling her own introduction
to the writing business. "Writing, to be profitable, must be
directed toward a particular magazine or editor. A suitable
subject for a young woman would be "How to quiet a fretful
baby."
A week later, she proceeded to the question, "How
Shall I Learn to Write?” First, by having something to say,
she decided, and, second, by practicing expression. Much can
be learned from the careful study of Hawthorne’s American Note
books. This excellent advice was followed by a pertinent view
of "Faults of Inexperienced Writers.” Here she commented
soundly on the vices of indefiniteness, unreasonably big words,
and unconscious imitation.
These two articles, a promising introduction, proved to
contain the sum total of her rhetorical teaching, for by the
^ Hearth and Home, January 9 to June 26, 1S69
321
following week, in "How may I know that I may Make a Writer?"
she could make only the commercial test. If you have a genius
for writing, she said, people will he glad to pay you. "Writ
ing— Commercially," a month and a half later restated this
view. Writing is worth, she repeated, whatever it will bring.
Shrewd as these comments are, from the commercial angle
that was her natural perspective, the food they offer literary
art is skimpy. Say what you think editors want, in language
that readers understand, would fairly summarize her advice.
Do what I did and you may become what I am. As to studying
Hawthorne, an idea which sounded good to her in 1869, it was
the one bit of her advice not based upon her own development,
and it is the one bit she had not followed in her youth. She
had gone instead to Byron and Walter Scott, then to the Lady * s
Book and the Religious Souvenir.
From Sarah Orne Jewett, her most distinguished disciple
as a Hew England local colorist, Mrs. Stowe might have learned
salutary lessons about the literary art in its twin aspects of
reading and writing. Younger to be sure, Miss Jewett differed
from her not so much in years as in maturity: she was a strik
ingly successful exponent of the cultural criticism Mathew
Arnold found necessary for both Great Britain and the United
States. An avid reader, Miss Jewett shared many of the stand
ard enthusiasms of the time, including the delight in
Longfellow, Scott, Tennyson and Lowell which marked nearly
322
the extreme limits of Mrs. Stowe's explorations; but beyond
them she had found the golden treasures of Zola, Swedenborg,
Balzac, Daniel, Rousseau's Confessions, Henry lames, Voltaire's
letters, Flaubert, Dorothy Wordsworth's journal.79
Not only had Miss Jewett read widely, but to good pur
pose, for her comments on her diverse favorites were charac
teristically pertinent and sensitive. As one of "those who
8 o
know the good things with delight" she had a standard of
comparison for her own work, and the possibility of systematic
improvement and refinement. Modest as she was, she was well
entitled to her pride in the fine economy, of which she wrote
to Mrs. Fields, by which she nibbled around her stories like
a mouse, reducing them to their ultimate possibilities of
brevity without destroying their essence. Let the skeptic
read The Country of the Pointed Firs for confirmation; or let
him, more briefly, examine the extraordinarily acute advice
in Miss Jewett’s letter (1908) to her own young admirer and
disciple, Willa Gather.
With the same love that Mrs. Stowe felt for New England,
sharing her knowledge of the ways of dressmakers and household
pets, Miss Jewett excelled her in observation of human beings
79 in Miss Jewett's Letters all of these writers are
mentioned. Mrs. Sigourney read.almost as widely; see the many
literary references in her Post Meridian, a collection of
essays on old-age.
Sarah Orne Jewett, Letters of Sarah Orne Jewett,
p. 249.
323
and care in expression. She could he sympathetic, even
Si
"selfless," and she could have instructed Mrs. Stowe in
prescribing for the needs of men’s bodies and souls. From
her father’s private instructions in medicine she carried
over the habits of skilled diagnosis and careful statement.
Lack of observation was, it seems apparent, one of
Mrs. Stowe’s basic defects as writer and thinker. Mot only
was she impervious to those rhythmic effects that Stevenson
has called the technical elements of style— few novelists of
her period were interested in such minute graces— but she was
also indifferent to those larger constructive principles ex
pounded by Coleridge, Be Quineey, and others.
It is a further indication of her lack of literary sus
ceptibility, that her own writing shows so few formal like
nesses to her prime favorites. Unresponsive to Byron’s
satirical wit or to Scott’s admirable objectivity, she re
produced only the former’s melodrama and the latter*s circum
stantiality. Except for Bred, where the whole treatment
recalls Sir Walter, there are few passages in the other books
that are like him. In such a historical novel as Agnes of
Sorrento one would expect to find more traces of him than
appear. The hero, after he recovers from his fit of Byronism,
is a manly fellow after Sir Walter’s heart; and the description
^ ibid., p. 11.
324
of his mountain fastness (for he has became a Rob Roy) es
pecially recalls Scott, with its winding steps and its "damp
82
mouldering passages.” Nevertheless the influence of Scott
appears here no more than in almost any historical novel of
the nineteenth century. As much influence as Mrs. Stowe’s
stories show was hardly avoidable.
As her truest admirers have pointed out, Mrs. Stowe
was not adept at writing. "A woman like Mrs. Stowe,” Miss
Jewett wrote charitably, ”cannot bring herself to that cold
selfishness of the moment for one’s work’s sake.”^ The
pioneer biographer, Mrs. McCray, well aware of the imperfec
tions of her idol’s writings, was sorrowfully convinced that
despite their genius they were not stylistic triumphs. ’ ’ How
marvellous a figure in literary history would Harriet Beecher
Stowe have been,” she lamented, "could she also have been
cited as a model of writing, like Thackeray, Irving, or Lydia
Maria Child.’ Mrs. Fields points to the same fact, without
85
invoking the same names.
Mrs. Stowe’s lifetime of writing led to no sure styl
istic improvement over her childhood prize-winning composition
Harriet Beecher Stowe., Agnes of Sorrento, p. 338.
Jewett, op. oit., p. 47.
^ Florine Thayer McCray, The Life-Work of the Author
of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, p. 327.
^5 Pie Ids, o | > . cit., p. 299.
325
on natural morality. Throughout her life she had merely, as
she once described her method of work, plunged boldly into the
discussion of abstruse subjects. Her editor, James T. Fields,
who described her habits as "peculiarly her own," commented
in astonishment on her powers of concentration:
orooas, so to speak, over her writings, and it makes
very little difference to her whether there is a crowd
of people about her or whether she is alone during the
composition of her books. °
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the feminist leader, offers another
example of Mrs. Stowe’s ability to isolate herself in a world
of her own. Calling upon her, Mrs. Stanton found her in her
sanctum, writing Lady Byron Vindicated, while her sister
Catherine, in the same room, was also writing. Without any
disturbance, the Beecher women dropped their literary work,
while Catherine explained to Mrs. Stanton her objections to
woman suffrage.^
Mrs. Stowe’s assertions of almost trance-like absorp
tion in her work are borne out by the evidence. After it was
printed, she revised nothing; and before it was printed, she
seldom rewrote for exactness. Her comment on Qldtown Folks,
written when her publisher was impatiently requesting the
promised copy, is almost unique in her correspondence:
^6 James T. Fields, Yesterdays with Authors, p. 15;
the italics are Mr. Fields’s.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Eighty Years and More,
p. 264.
326
Instead of rushing on, I have often turned back and
written over with care, that nothing that I wanted to
say might be omitted; it has cost me a good deal of
labor to elaborate this first part, namely, to build
my theatre and to introduce my actors. My labor has
all, however, been given to the literary part.88
Such efforts, extraordinary for her, produced her
literary masterpiece. At her ordinary level, she used a
vigorous expository prose for her essays, well adapted to
the standards of her markets. In her novels and stories she
often wrote with equal effectiveness, but she seldom cared
to polish her prose. As a result, the unevenness of her
writing was noticeable from Uncle Tom’s Cabin to the end of
her career. Most of her readers did not consciously object
to stylistic lapses, but Mrs. Nathaniel Hawthorne who com
plained, as early as 1854, that Mrs. Stowe wrote slang, sug
gested that both she and the author of The Wide, Wide World
needed "a strict diet of the old English prose-writers before
80
they are allowed to use the pen any more.” 7
William Dean Howells, recalling his struggles with her
manuscript when he was working on the Atlantic, wrote with
gentle frankness of her carelessness:
Her syntax was such a snare to her that it sometimes
needed the combined skill of all the proof-readers and
88 Annie Fields, op. cit., p. 313. In a similar vein,
a letter in the Field Collection (number 7) Huntington Library,
mentions a "critical revision” of her poems.
89 Julian Hawthorne, Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife,
II, 57.
327
the assistant editor to extricate her. Of course, nothing
was ever written into her work, hut in changes of diction,
in correction of solecisms, in transposition of phrases,
the text was largely rewritten on the margins of her
proofs. The soul of her art was present, hut the form
was so often absent, that when it was clothed on anew,
it would have been hard to say whose cut the garment was
of in many places.
Gritics who expand upon the superior style of Oldtown
Folks and other contributions to the Atlantic should bear in
mind the improved polish imparted by the combined labors of
91
the magazine staff. The under proofreader; the head reader;
Howells; the printer; the head reader again; Howells once
more; and finally the head reader, for a last revision: these
were the intermediaries between the author and the fastidious
readers of the Atlantic. F o r the article on Lady Byron,
Mrs. Stowe called upon Dr. Holmes as literary consultant, in
93
addition to this battery of assistants.' Such time-consuming
labors of stylistic refinement were obviously dispensed with
in the bulk of her writings.
As the result of her attitude toward her works, her
comments upon them are few indeed. "We write only as we are
9° William Dean Howells, Literary Friends and Acquaint
ance. ^ , p. 138.
Mott, op. cit., III, 19, tells similar stories of
editorial strictness at this time. Several letters in the
Fields Collection concern suitable copyreaders to correct her
style.
Howells, op. cit., p. 139*
93 Morse, op. cit.. II, 179.
32 8
driven, and never know exactly where we are going to land,"^
reads a sentence of confession from The Minister's Wooing.
"When the mind is full of one thing, why go about to write
on another?she asked, in the single comment on writing
in Falmetto-Leaves. She discovered only one principle about
herself as a fictionist, that sometimes she could succeed
better than at others. At any time she would have preferred
96
to write instructive essays like Footsteps of the Master.
In this point of view, it must be granted, there was
common sense, for she told a story awkwardly, finding it
difficult to combine the things she wanted to say with an
artificially imposed plot. It was wise of her to consider
her books from a utilitarian standpoint. As a professional
writer she did her work honestly and efficiently; but the
conception of devotedness to the art of the right word was
foreign to her. Thus her undoubted talent for writing was
too often hidden, though never buried.
9 L
Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Minister*s Wooing, p. 27.
95
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Falmetto-Leaves, p. 161.
^ Fields, 0£. cit. . p. 372.
CHAPTER XE
THE LAST OF EARTH
I. FINAL YEARS OF MRS. STOWE'S LIFE
When Beechers die, they die like ordinary mortals,
whether calmly or mysteriously, of old age or by their own
hands, without portents or disasters. The grave covers them,
and the world rolls on.
Of all the family, only Henry Ward, bustling energet
ically to the last minute, arose to the full possibilities
of a dramatic departure from this world. Without premonition
or foreboding, he was reduced to helplessness by a paralytic
stroke. The doctor called. "Can you raise your hand?" he
asked the patient. *?I can raise it high enough to hit you,"
was the response. These were to be the great preacher's
last words.-1 -
During the few days that he lingered, the newspapers
carried hourly accounts of the progress of his disease, for
his death was the biggest news story of the year 1887. The
populace thronged to the funeral, the most sensational since
the death of Grant. The preachers delivered eloquent eulo
gies, in which they hailed him as the Shakespeare of the pul
pit. The man had died, at the age of seventy-four, with
^ Anonymous, Life of Henry Ward Beecher, p. 67
spectacular suddenness, without any preceding diminution of
energy or influence. With no further delay, the first bi
ographies were sold in the streets, and the Beecher legend
continued. Almost before the mourners had departed from the
cemetery, the great man was unofficially canonized. It was
a grand dramatic exit.
Less grand and dramatic, the death of his sister
Harriet was no less appropriate. To have been cut off at
the apex of her career, she should have died in 1852, imme
diately after the publication of Uncle Tom* s Cabin. That
would have been more effective publicity, but not more appro
priate, than the actual occurrence, a long senility ending
in 1896. Her decline was so gradual that it covered years.
One can hardly say when life ended and death began, for the
last of earth was the first of heaven. In 1852 she might
have gone like her brother, with raised fist, and the world
would have applauded. Long before 1896, she had been taught,
and had forgotten, greater wisdom.
These last years need no long recounting. Hers was
not the ideal old age she had described in **The Mourning-Veil,
her contribution to the first issue of the Atlantic:
God sometimes gives to good men a guileless and holy sec
ond childhood, in which the soul becomes childlike, not
childish, and the faculties in full fruit and ripeness
are mellow without sign of decay.2
2 Harriet Beecher Stowe, ”The Mourning Veil," in
Writings. XIV, 20?.
331
Though she was surrounded by love and material plenty until
her death, her intellect collapsed years before. A mind
gradually disintegrating reaches, after the sunset loveli
ness to which she referred, a stark reality with neither
beauty nor significance.
At the end, she was merely pathetic. Mark-Twain has
described her, wandering'about Hartford— for after 1884 in
firmity, first her husband*s then her own, had prevented the
annual winter tours to Florida. Sometimes he saw her under
the care of her strapping Irishwoman, sometimes sneaking about
alone, entering the neighbors* houses, drumming to herself
on their pianos or frightening them with sudden war whoops.-*
Perhaps she had endowed herself with the boyishness she had
longed for in childhood and was belatedly playing on the
Warners, the Clemenses, and the rest of the Hartford literary
colony the boyish tricks tradition had prohibited. But per
haps she was unconscious of this unseemly behavior; certainly
there are no war whoops in the letters, which, in response
to her lifelong habit of voluminous correspondence, continue
to be numerous to the last decade of her life.
Before her complete mental collapse, Mrs. Stowe was
enabled, and for the first time, to live the restful life
that was the only life congenial to her nervous temperament.
3 Mark Twain, Autobiography. II, 243.
332
In her old age, wherever she lived, she carried with her the
inner peace of her calm isle of Patmos. With no more serial
stories to be written for younger generations and no new
moral revelations to guide -them, she was content to leave to
them the work of the world, pridefully quoting from her
childhood favorite: "My sword I give to him that shall suc
ceed me in my pilgrimage and my courage and skill to him that
can get it."^ Couched in these terms, her abdication was
not without its intimation of challenge: the sword was a
weapon to be borne by the young and strong, but her brave
soul— let the young try to equal that!
Whatever her reservations may have been, the old cru
sader, belated discoverer of a Nature that was not Calvinistic,
escaped the harsh melancholy which, she recalled, Doctor
Cotton Mather had attributed to aged New Englanders. She
was spared that, and in solitary communion with her God she
relinquished her once militant faith in the continued prog
ress of humanity. No longer scolding it or improving it,
she would calmly view the human race, freed from her immature -
concern for either its momentary problems or its ultimate
destiny.
She was not a new woman, surprising as her transforma
tion appears, for this blessed autumn mood was not entirely
* * Charles Edward Stowe, Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe,
insert following title page.
333
the creation of her last years. The privilege of indulging
it continually, which was new, was in itself enough to alter
her character amazingly. She became purely ’ ’ home body,”
purely what Nature had intended and Life so cruelly prevented.
Lucy Lareom, who met the older woman in 1862, had encountered
her in a peaceful moment which looks forward to the mood of
the last years. ”It was as beautiful as a page from one of
her own story books,”5 Miss Larcom noted, referring to the
lunch hour. The old stone house at Andover, the golden
August day, the thoughtful table arrangements, seen through
the hero-worshipping eyes of the yet unrecognized poetess,
reached a quiet perfection that remained one of the pleas
antest recollections of her life.
A less sentimental observer, William Dean Howells,
has also testified to Mrs. Stowe’s charm. ’ ’ Mrs. Stowe was
a gracious person," he wrote in his reminiscences of his
Boston days. He did not know her well, but enough to realize
that "there was something very simple, very motherly in her,
and something divinely sincere.’ ’ ^
As an old lady she exhaled continually a modest spir
itual dignity far more impressive than the insistence of her .
5 Daniel Dulany Addison, Lucy Larcom. Life, Letters
and Diary, p. 146. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps tells similar
stories, Chapters from a Life, pp. 134-137«
^ William Dean Howells, Literary Friends and Acquaint
ances. p. 140.
younger, active years. "What are queer old women for,” Miss
Heritable had asked in Oldtown Folks, ”if young folks may
not have a good laugh out of them now and then?”?. Had she
retained her vigor to the end, she might have been the queer
old woman of her foreboding soul; but as her. life turned, one
is less tempted to laugh the older she grows. ”1 think gen
erally we take ourselves altogether too seriously,"® Miss
Mehitable had offered in explanation of her question. Well
must Mrs. Stowe have understood, reflecting upon herself and
the companion whose memories she was transforming into fic
tion, the full implications of taking oneself too seriously.
In their different ways, both she and her husband had been
warnings of the dangers in that tendency. To what owed she
her escape? Decline of her powers, the merciful poetry of
senility, had finally shrunk her ambitions within manageable
limits. Gone were the foolish years when, like her Tina, she
had been "saucy enough to physic a hornbug," and when the
world for which she, had labored had, again like her Tina,
"minded not a whit."9
The Professor, as his years advanced, developed a more
crotchety disposition and a more grotesque exterior. To
? Harriet Beecher Stowe, Oldtown Folks, p. 70.
® Loc. cit.
9 ^id., p. 341.
335
Susy Clemens he was Santa Claus: with his portly frame, his
lumbering walk, his glorious white bushy whiskers, and his
pink little nose— later it withered into a misformed mass—
his physical likeness to the children*s Christmas friend
needed only a red cotton suit to be made perfect.
Though absent-minded and careless of externals, Calvin
Stowe was not the simple soul he may have appeared to ob
servers. Jonathan Edwards still affected his melancholy
thoughts, and he was moreover so poorly adjusted to the de
tails of living that a broken window pane could send him into
a pout of indefinite duration.^ He was withal a dignified,
wholly worthy man who fulfilled with tact and affection the
functions of a position roughly analogous to the British
Prince Consort's. He could not have known, in taking as his
second wife President Beecher's quiet little daughter, that
she was to become one of the female leaders of the age, but
he was less sensitive to his own eclipse than to his wife's
genius.
His celebrated wife, though she had never been ac
claimed a beauty, was a sweet-looking old lady. Sober and
demure a photograph from her seventy-third year shows her,
with a rather melancholy look around the eyes that was perhaps
10 Twain, 0£. cit.. II, 243.
- H Constance M. Rourke, Trumpets of Jubilee, p. 130.
336
the temporary result of the strain of being photographed.
The curly grey hair, restrained from too wanton movement by
a band of ribbon, had a youthful liveliness, a touch of co
quetry in deliberate contrast to the solemn stiffness of her
satin shirt and her velvet coat collar. In spite of its de
pressing formality, the image shows the lovely assurance of
the honored woman.
As an active force, her life ended many years before
her death. On her last public appearance she had been the
guest at a formal reception arranged by her publishers to
honor her seventieth birthday. At this farewell, tributes
had been read composed by her admirers and by those she loved,
among others Whittier and Holmes, and her beloved Henry Ward
had come to hear her final comments upon the success of Negro
emancipation.
In her private life too she bade the world farewell,
sorting through her papers, destroying some and passing the
selected remainder on to her son Charles Edward. They would
be her biography, and she often hoped that the two of them
might manage a collaborative work, which she would call Peb
bles from the Shores of a Past Life,12 n&e the book she and
the other children had arranged from her fathers conversa
tions and carefully preserved journals and correspondence.
12 Charles Edward Stowe, 0£. cit., p. 512
337
"The desire to leave behind me some recollections of my
life, has been cherished by me, for many years past; but
failing strength and increasing infirmities," she wrote from
Hartford, September 30, 1889, "have prevented its accomplish
ment. "13 she was through.
She could not escape knowing how absent-minded she was
becoming, but in her enjoyment of the peace of her new life
she barely cared. The Professor’s last, lingering, pathetic
illness taxed her strength, never her love. "I think we
have never enjoyed each other's society more than this win
ter, she wrote in a personal letter of 1885. In his im
patient longing for the end, she comforted him with her pres
ence and a calm assurance of his approaching liberation.
"Cheer up!" she told him, "your turn will come soon."15
After his death in August, 1886, she was to suffer one more
blow, Henry Ward’s death in the following year; but by this
date her brain had softened into indifference.
In her senility, especially after her return to
Hartford in 1884, a kind of wisdom of the sage possessed her.
She spoke as one new-inspired by modesty. In the note she
ibid., inserted pages following title page.
Annie Fields, Life and Letters of Harriet Beecher
Stowe, p. 388.
15 Ibia.. P. 393.
33 8
composed as foreword to her son's biography of her she was
still hoping that the book might do good in leading its
readers to "a firmer trust in God and a deeper sense of his
fatherly goodness";16 yet accompanying the revival of this
old crusading ambition was the new realization of personal
inadequacy: "It is perhaps much more accurate as to detail
and impression than is possible withvany autobiography writ
ten late in life."17 The task, she might have been saying,
was gladly resigned by one who had learned its unimportance.
During these years she seemed to live in a self-
contained world from which she returned with difficulty to the
life about her. "My sun has set," she wrote in a last letter:
The time of work for me is over. I have written all my
words and thought all my thoughts, and now I rest me in
the flickering light of the dying embers, in a rest so
profound that the voice of an old friend arouses me but
momentarily, and I drop back into repose.IS
Though her life was to continue almost a decade after her
friend Mrs. McCray published the first biography, she had al
ready become so much the legend, so little the living force,
that Mrs. McCray referred to her exclusively in the past
tense, as to one dead and gone.
In her retirement, the years preceding complete oblivion
3-6 Charles Edward Stowe, loc. cit.
3-7 Loc. cit.
3-6 Annie Fields, o£. cit., p. 392.
339
may well have been the happiest of her troubled life. She
was completely free, beyond the wildest dreams of her girl
hood, to rebuild her life and the world as she should have
wished to know them. Relieved of her concern with the trivi
alities of existence— teaching, scribbling, directing serv
ants, preparing food, making money— she could weave uncontra
dicted fancies about the godlike soul of man or the maternal
soul of Jesus. She was permitted, in these years of leisure,
to prepare for becoming the Savior*s spouse.
Her mind, she said, wandered like a running brook,
doubtlessly in old familiar channels. * * I - am going to my
Father's,** she remembered from her favorite Pilgrim*s Prog
ress , **and though with great difficulty I am got hither, yet
now I do not repent me of all the troubles I have been at,
to arrive where I am. "19
Thus must the age-chastened novelist have looked back
through the years of her senility over the lives of her fam
ily, weaving into her reminiscences the fantasies of her own
creation. She was already arrived at the threshold of the
heavenly democracy. As she passed over, old Uncle Tom might
bow before her, singing in his musical tenor the mysterious
chants of his race. Little Tina, daughter of her blood,
would spring from Horace Holyoke's caress— or would it be
19 Charles Edward Stowe, 0£. cit., inserted pages fol
lowing title page.
340
from Calvin*s— to distinguish life from dreams no longer
troubled her— while Dred, and Rob Roy, and good Sir Walter
himself would welcome the new star to the heavenly galaxy.
Her own mother, and Lady Byron, and that dear editor of the
Atlantic Monthly, who had all preceded her, would already have
presented her credentials to the fellow spirits.
May her soul rest in heavenly peace!
II. CONCLUSIONS
The prolonged survey of Mrs. Stowe’s literary achieve
ments has reached its end. The author hopes that the facts
uncovered in the preceding chapters have already justified
themselves to the reader, and that an image of Mrs. Stowe
the writer has emerged along the way. In partial recapitula
tion, he now suggests a few of the new ideas that he has him
self gained from his work. They are not listed here with the
purpose of telling the whole story, but only to point out
some of the impressions that, remaining vividly in mind, seem
to him to be of the greatest importance.
In the first place, the writer is convinced that a true
conception of Mrs. Stowe as a writer depends upon an intimate
knowledge of her work as a whole, the uncollected articles no
less than the-best known books. That no one except himself
has found time or energy for this extensive reading does not
quite mean that he is the only person in the world with this
341
true conception (for Mrs. Stowe led no double life); but it
does mean that all the standard summaries of her work, with
out exception, need modification and correction. For minor
examples: her publications began a year earlier than the
records have shown, and her early writings cover a wider
scope than has ever been known.
In the second place, the present writer is convinced
that a true appreciation of her accomplishments, as well as
her failures, can be gained only by realizing that she was
primarily, almost exclusively, a writer for magazines. Her
view of her work was a practical, professional one. She al
ways wrote with a definite, limited public in mind, personi
fied in the particular editor, whether it was Mrs. Sigourney,
Mrs. Hale, Judge Hall or James Russell Lowell. Her aims were
immediate publication and payment, not the abstract reward
of literary immortality. The effect of this union with mag
azines has been shown, both upon the style and content of
her writings; its importance can hardly be exaggerated.
Third, the writer has found it valuable to keep re
minding himself that Mrs. Stowe wrote upon two distinct levels,
that of the masses and that of the classes. Of her popular
works for the masses, the outstanding is Uncle Tom*s Cabin,
of her more carefully composed, Oldtown Folks. That her mar
kets overlapped is not to be wondered, but it is impossible
to compare fairly the various things she did without bearing
34-2
this essential distinction in mind.
Fourth, the writer has come to feel— in spite of his
sympathy, almost love, for Mrs. Stowe— that her work is much
more important as a symptom than as a monument. She was the
most successful and the greatest .American woman writer of
her time; but this is not high praise. Though she left a
mark which will he long in becoming effaced, her work is
most significant as a mixture of the purposes and problems
of American commercial writers of her day. It is sufficiently
bound by the time-spirit to make a series of important docu
ments illustrating what our people were, but it is not suf
ficiently free from the time-spirit to reach, to any appre
ciable degree, the heights of the permanently great. She is
no rival, that is, to Emerson, to Thoreau, to Whitman, or to
a dozen others.
Fifth, the present survey has shown the writer that
his subject’s literary career was a unit from beginning to
end. The lessons she learned in her early days of profes
sional writing, growing naturally from her primary education
and her sojourn in the Middle West, remain with her, after
her great success with Uncle Tom’ s Cabin, to the end of her
active life. Her work, he feels, is the prolonged shadow
of the Western Monthly Magazine, the Evangelist, the Lady*s
Book, and her other earliest markets. Looking back upon them,
the critic need feel less doubt than heretofore of approaching
343
very near, if not quite to, the heart of her varied later
work.
In the sixth place, the writer feels that his work has ‘
dissipated the mystery of Uncle Tom* s Cabin itself. Its
world-wide success it owed, as every best seller does, partly
to luck; but its power was the understandable result of her
earlier life, literary as well as personal. In its content,
it was the autobiography of her early years; in its style,
the heritage of her early-scattered writings. Only in two
later, works, Oldtown Folks and Lady Byron Vindicated, did
Mrs. Stowe plunge again so deeply into her own spiritual prob
lems; and they are, probably for that reason, the most reward
ing of her later works to the general reader. Aside from its
personal emotion, Uncle Tomfs Cabin is a repetition of her
familiar subjects, educational, domestic and religious, in
tier other books.
Finally, the present writer sees in Mrs. Stowe’s works
a combination of three strains, easily distinguishable from
one another, which give it flavor. The first of these was a
strict morality in part derived from the unimaginative teach
ings of her sister Catherine and in part evolved for herself
in opposition to the harsh extreme of Calvinism. Mrs. Stowe
was always a Beecher, but like her brother Henry Ward she was
a Beecher with a difference from the earlier generation of
her sister and father.
3U
The second element in her literary work was the sen
timentality of Miss Sedgwick, Mrs. Sigourney and Mrs. Hale.
In so much of her work she was one with them, that the care
ful identification of their tradition demanded the careful
attention it received in the study itself.
With these two elements of conservative sectarianism
and emotionalized moralizing, Mrs. Stowe fortunately combined
the fresher, freer good spirits of the new life of the middle
western frontier. It was characteristic of her to need per
spective for her writing. From Cincinnati she looked east
ward, fashioning her best early sketches through the romantic
haze hanging above her lost native land. Back in New England,
she began in Uncle Tom* s Cabin to see the picturesque possi
bilities of Ohio and the Kentucky shore she had left. Had
she never moved West, or returned Bast, she must have been an
entirely different writer from the inspired author of Uncle
Tom's Cabin and the richly observant one of Oldtown Folks.
Had she never found her aims energetically stated for her by
James Hall., it is impossible to imagine what other program
she would have worked out. As it was, though a New England
writer, she was animated also by the expanding spirit of the
frontier, to which a good deal of the freshness and freedom
of her best work must be attributed.
Such are some of the conclusions of the present writer.
They throw, he believes, a new light upon Mrs. Stowe's work.
345
They provide, he is sure, the basis for considering her place
in literature with much more thoroughness and accuracy than
has been possible before.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
I. PRIMARY SOURCES
A. BOOKS BY MRS. STOWS
A New England Sketch. Lowell: Alfred Gilman, 1834. 52 pp.
The Mayflower: or, Sketches of Scenes and Characters among
- the Descendants of the Puritans. New York: Harper and
Brothers, 1843. 324 pp.
Uncle Tom*s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly. 2 vols.;
Boston: John P. Jewett and Company, 18.52.
A Key to Uncle Tom1 s Cabin. Boston: John P. -Jewett and
Company, 1853. 262 pp., double column.
Uncle Sam*s Emancipation . . . and Other Sketches.
Philadelphia: Willis P. Hazard, 18,53. 124 pp.
Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands. Boston: Phillips, Sampson,
and Company, 18,54. 2 vols.
The Christian Slave. Boston: Phillips, Sampson, and Company,
1^551 57 pp.
First Geography for Children. Boston: Phillips, Sampson,
and Company, i’ 8’ 55. 224 pp. -
The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings. Boston: Phillips,
Sampson, and Company, 18,55. 471 pp.
•Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp. 2 vols.; Boston:
Phillips, Sampson, and Company, 1,8,56.
The Minister* s Wooing. New York: Derby and Jackson, 1859.
578 pp.
Agnes of Sorrento. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1862.
412 pp.
The Pearl of Orr’s Island: A Story of the Coast of Maine.
Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1862.
House and Home Papers. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 186.5.
333 pp.
348
Little Foxes, Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1866. 287 pp.
Queer Little People. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1867.
183 pp.
The Chimney-Corner. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1868.
3.11 pp.
Men of Our Times; or Leading Patriots of the Day. Hartford:
Hartford Publishing Company, 1868. 373 pp.
Oldtown Folks. Boston: Fields, Osgood, and Company, 1869.
608 pp.
Lady Byron Vindicated. Boston: Fields, Osgood, and Company,
1870.“ 482 pp.
Little Pussy Willow. Boston: Fields, Osgood, and Company,
1570. 161 pp.
My Wife and I: or, Harry Hendersons History. New York: J.
B. Ford and Company, 1871. 474 pp.
Pink and White Tyranny. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1871.
331 pp.
Sam Lawson * s Oldtown Fireside Stories. Boston: J. R. Osgood
and Company, 1872*1 2l6 pp.
Palmetto-Leaves. Boston: J. R. Osgood and Company, 1873.
321 pp.
Woman in Sacred History. New York: J. B. Ford and Company,
1873. Pages unnumbered.
We and Our Neighbors: Records of an Unfashionable Street.
New York: J. B. Ford and Company',' 1873 . 480 pp.
Footsteps of the Master. New York: J. B. Ford and Company,
1877. 30eTpp. :
Poganuc People: Their Loves and Lives. New York: Fords,
Howard, and Hulbert, 1878. 373 pp.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin. New edition, with added introductory mat
ter; Boston: Houghton, Osgood, and Company, 1878. 329 pp.
The Writings of Harriet Beecher Stowe. The Riverside edition;
Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1896. 16 . vols.
349
B. BOOKS PARTLY BY MR3> STOWE OR CONTAINING
CONTRIBUTIONS BY HER
i
Beecher, Charles, The Incarnation; or, Pictures of the'Virgin
and Her Son. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1849. 227
pp. Introduction and a poem by Mrs. Stowe.
Beecher, Charles, editor, Autobiography, Correspondence, Etc.,
of Lyman Beecher, P.P. 2 vols.; New York: Harper and
Brothers, 1864. Chapters by Mrs. Stowe.
Chimes of Freedom and‘ Union ... by Various Authors.
Boston: Benjamin B. Russell, l^oll 64 pp. Two poems by
Mrs. Stowe.
Fields, Annie. Life and Letters of Harriet Beecher Stowe.
Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, i'8'97" . 4C)6""pp.
The most comprehensive collection of Mrs. Stowe's letters.
Henson, Josiah, Truth is Stranger than Fiction. Boston:
B. B. Russell and Company,' 1879. 33& pp. Preface by
Mrs. Stowe.
Parsons, C. G'., Inside View of Slavery: or a Tour Among the
Planters. ’ Boston: John P. Jewett and Company, 1855.
3lS pp. Introductory note by Mrs. Stowe.
Peaslee, John B., Thoughts and Experiences in and out of
School. Cincinnati: Printed for the Author, 19,00.
39^ PP. Note from Mrs. Stowe.
Stenhouse, Mrs. T. B. H., Tell it All: The Story of a Life's
Experiences in Mormonism. Hartford: A. P. Worthington,
and Company, 18747 623pp. Introduction by Mrs. Stowe.
Stowe, Charles Edward, Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Boston:
Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1890. 530 pp. Many let
ters by Mrs. Stowe.
Stowe, Harriet Beecher, editor, A Library of Famous Fiction.
New York: J. B. Ford and Company, 1&73. IO65 pp.
General introduction by Mrs. Stowe,
Stowe, Harriet Beecher, La Case de L'Oncle Tom, translated
into French by M. L. Pilatte. 2 vols.; Paris: Michel
Levy, n.d. Special introduction by Mrs. Stowe.
350
Stowe, Harriet Beecher, and Catherine E. Beecher, The American
Woman's Home: or, Principles of Domestic Science. New
York: J. B. Eord and Company, 1869. 500 pp.
The New Housekeeper's Manual. New Ybrk: J. B. Ford'
and Company, 1874.591 pp.
Stowe, Harriet Beecher, and others, Our Famous Women.
Hartford: A. D. Iforthington and Company, 1884. 717 PP.
Articles by Mrs. Stowe on Catherine Beecher and on Mrs.
A. D. T. Whitney.
> of One by Half a Dozen of the Other: An Every
Day Novel. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1872. 245 PP.
Tonna, Charlotte Elizabeth, The Works of Charlotte Elizabeth.
3 vols.; New York: M. W. Dodd, 1844-1845. Introduction
by Mrs. Stowe.
C. UNCOLLECTED STORIES, ARTICLES, AND LETTERS
BY MSS. STOWE
’ 'Among the Berkshire Hills," Hearth and Home, September 18,
1869.
"The Andover Portfolio: Maine, Awake," National Era, July 20,
1854.
"Answers to our Correspondence," Hearth and Home, February
13, 1869.
"Anti-Slavery Literature," Independent, February 21, 1856.
"An Appeal to the Women of the Free States," Independent,
February 23, 1854.
"At Sea," Christian Union, 14:510, 1876.
"Atonement— a Historical Reverie,” Evangelist, December 28,
1848.
"Aunt Katy," Christian Union, June 25, 1870.
"Bird Flights Southward," Christian Union, January 21, 1874.
351
"A Bird’s-Eye View of tlie West,” Christian Union, November
12, 1873.
"Books,” Independent, November 1, 1855.
"A Brilliant Success,” Independent, September 30, 1858.
’ ’ Bring up your Child in the Way he should go,” The Cincinnati
Journal, June 2, 1836.
’ ’ Business Men’s Prayer Meetings,” Independent, April 8, 1858.
’ ’ Can I Write?” Hearth and Home, January 9> 1869.
”The Captain’s Story," Our Continent, 2:789-793, 1882.
”A Card," Independent, November 21, 1861.
"The Cheapness of Beauty," Hearth and Home, March 20, 1869.
"Christmas Day North and South,” Christian Union, December
18, 1872.
"The Church and the Slave Trade," Independent, November 1,
1860.
"The Colored Labor of the South,” Hearth and Home, July 3,
1869
Correspondence of the Parker-Stowe libel suit. National Era,
October 21, 28, 1852; also in part in the Independent,
October ,7, 1852.
"Country and City,” Hearth and Home, July 17, 1869.
”A Country Sunday,” Hearth and Home, September 25, 1869.
’ ’ Croquet, Butterflies, Birds, Sunshine and Moonlight in
Florida,” Christian Union, 13J244, 1876.
"The Dancing School," Evangelist, April 6, 13, 1843.
"Deacon Enos," The Gift for 1840, pp. 144-187. Reprinted
under title "Love versus Law."
"The Deacon’s Dilemma," Independent, November 22, I860.
"The Death of Another Veteran," Christian Union, January 7,
1874.
352
"The Debatable Land," Christian Union, January 24, 1872.
"De Ranee and Fenelon— a Contrast," Evangelist, July 7, 1842.
"Does God Answer Prayer?" Christian Union, November 13, 1872.
"Don’t you Like Flowers?" National Bra, August 24, 1854.
"The Drunkard Reclaimed," Evangelist, November 30, December-
7, 1839.
"The Duty of Being Happy," Christian Union, 12:130-131, 1875.
"The Education of Freedmen," North American Review, 128:605-
615, 1879.
"Eliza. From My Aunt Mary’s Bureau," Godey’s Lady’s Book,
20: 24-26, 1840.
European Letters, 1859-1860, Independent, December 1, 1859
to August 23, 1860. Twenty-three in all, printed in
issues of December 1, 8, 15, 22, 29, 1859, and January
5, 12, 19, February 16, April 5, 12, 19, 26, May 3, 10,
June 21, 28, July 5, 12, 19, 26, August 23, i860.
"Faces on the Wall," Christian Union, December 6, 1871.
"A False Position," Independent, October 7, 1858.
"Faults of Inexperienced Writers," Hearth and .Home, January
23, 1869.
"The Fisherman Caught," verse translated from Goethe, Lady’s
Book, 23:11, 1841.
"Florida Again," Hearth and Home, May 15, 1869.
"The Florida Hegira," Christian Union, December 2, 1874.
"Four Scenes in the Life of a Country Boy," Hearth and Home,
July 24, 31, August 7, 14, 1869.
"The Freeman’s Dream: A Parable," National Era, August lj
1850.
"From the St. John’s, South, to the St. John’s, North,"
Hearth and Home, July 5, 1869.
"Fruits of the Revival," Independent, July 8, 1858.
353
’ ♦Getting Ready for a Gale,” Independent, April 25, 1861.
"Getting Used to it,” Independent, December 13, I860.
"Greeting," Hearth and Home, December 26, 1868.
"Growing Things," Hearth and Home, March 6, 1869.
"The Handy Man," Hearth and Home, August 21, 1869.
"The Happy Valley," Christian Union, August 7, 1872.
"Hartford," Hearth and Home, October 30, 1869.
"Hedged In," Christian Union, April 30, 1870.
"Heinrich Stilling," Evangelist, February 6, 1851.
"A Heroic Squash," Christian Union, 12:229-230, 1875.
"The Higher Christian Life," Independent, March 17, May 19,
1859.
"Home Gardens," Independent, February 11, 1858.
"Homeward from Canada," Hearth and Home, June 12, 1869.
"Horace Greeley," Christian Union, December 11, 1872.
v
"Hot Weather Observations," Christian Union, September 11,
1872.
"Hot Weather Religion," Christian Union, 14:33, 1876.
"The Hour and the Man,” Independent, September 12, 1861.
"How may I know that I can make a writer?” Hearth and Home,
January 30, 1869.
"How shall I learn to write?" Hearth and Home, January 16,
1869.
"How to Treat Babies," Hearth and Home, February 6, I869.
"I believe in the Resurrection of the Body," Christian Union
October 30, 1872.
"Immediate Emancipation," Evangelist, January 2, 1845; re
printed under the title "Uncle Sam’s Emancipation."
354
"Independence,” National Ira, January 30, 1851,
"The Indians at St. Augustine,” Christian Union, April 18,
25, 1877.
"The Interior or Hidden Life," Evangelist, April 17, June 19,
1845.
"Is there a good time coming?" Christian Union, 12:106-107,
1875.
"Is there Anything in it?” Christian Union, May 14, 1870.
"Isabelle and her Sister Kate, and their Cousin," Western
Monthly Magazine, 2:72-75, 1834.
"Jesus," Evangelist, February 19, 1846.
i
"The Journey North," Hearth and Home, May 22, 1869.
"Jubilee Days," Christian Union, July 10, 1872.
"Lenten Meditation," Christian Union, 11:171-172, 1875.
"Letter from Andover," Independent, January 25, 1855.
"Letter from Andover," denouncing the London Times, Independent,
June 13, 1861.
"Letter from Andover," urging the English to aid liberty,
Independent, June 20, 1861.
"Letter from a Verandah," Christian Union, 12:465-466, 1875.
"Letter from Boston," Independent, January 4, 1855.
"Letter from Florida," Christian. Union, February 7, 1877.
"Letter from Florida: Out of the Fire," Christian Union,
13:211-212, 1876.
"A Letter from Mrs. Stowe," from Boston, National Era,
February 15, 1855.
"Letter from Mrs. Stowe," from the continent, National Era,
September 8, 1853.
Letter on Holmes, The Critic, New Series, 2:106, August 30,
1884.
355
Letter to Daniel Reaves Goodloe, from Andover, 1853. Pub
lications of the Southern History Association, 2:124-127,
Jggy.----------------:
Letter to Dr, Joel Parker, National Era, June 24, 1852.
"Letter to Lord Shaftesbury," Independent, August 1, 1861.
"Letters from Europe," Independent, January 22, 29, February
5, April 23, 1857.
"Life at the White Mountains," Christian Union, September 4,
1872.
"Literary Epidemics— No. 1," Evangelist, July 28, 1842.
"Literary Epidemics— No. 2,” Evangelist. July 13, 1843.
"A Look behind the Yeil," Christian Union, November 5, 1870.
"Lord, if thou hadst been there’" Evangelist, September 11,
1845. Reprinted in England as a pamphlet, Worldly Con
formity, the Cause and the Cure," and in The May Flower
as "The Elder’s Feast."
"Mark Meridan," The Lady’s Book, 22:242-244, 1841.
"Meditations from our Garden Seat," Independent, August 9,
1855.
"Modern Uses of Language," Western Monthly Magazine, 1:121-
125, 1833.
"Mothers of the Men in Kansas," Independent, June 19, 1856.
"My Neighbors’ Hens," Christian Union, July 16, 1870.
"A New Palmetto-Leaf," Christian Union, May 6, 1874.
"The New School Assembly," National Era, May 27, 1852.
"News from the South," Hearth and Home, April 3, 1869.
"Now Jesus Loved Mary and her Sister," Independent, September
24, 1857.
"Now we see through a glass darkly," Evangelist, June 8, 1843.
"Old Testament Pictures— No. 1,” Evangelist, November 14, 1844.
356
"Olympiana," The Lady*a Book, 18:241-243, 1839.
"On the Ministrations of Departed Spirits in this World,"
Evangelist, January 25, 1849. Reprinted in The May
Flower as "The Ministrations of our Departed Friends."
"One More Ascended," Christian Union, 12:318-319, 1875.
"The Only Daughter," The Lady’s Book, 18:115-122, 1839.
"Our Early Rose Potatoes," Hearth and Home, October 16, 1869.
/ i •
"Our Friends in Heaven," Independent, January 3, 1856.
"Our Lord’s Bible," Christian Union, July 13, 1870.
"A Parable," Evangelist, February 24, 1842.
"Pins in Pussy’s Toes," Christian Union, August 14, 1872.
"The President's Message," Independent, December 20, 1860.
"The Prince," Independent, October 18, i860.
"Reading for Girls, Again," Hearth and Home, June 26, 1869.
"The Recent Revival," Independent, July 15, 1858.
"Religious Crises," Independent, March 25, 1858.
"The Revival," Independent, March 11, 1858.
"Rights of Dumb Animals," Hearth and Home, January 2, 1869.
"St. Michael and All Angels," Christian Union, October 22,
1870.
"Saratoga," Christian Union, August 14, 1872.
"Saturday Afternoon," Hearth and Home, October 2, 1869.
"The Scientists and Prayer," Christian Union, November 27,
1872.
"Seashore and Mountain," Hearth and Home, September 11, 1869.
"The Second Coming— A Vision," Christian Union, Old Series,
No. 51, 3 December 25, 1869.
357
"The Secret of Peace," Christian Union, 13:113, 1376.
I — — — •— — “ -
’ ’ Shadows on the Hebrew Mountains, " Independent, 1354. Ten
articles: January 5, 19, 26; February 2, 23; March 6;
October 26; November 23; December 7.
"A Sign of our Times,” Christian Union, 13:92-93, 1876.
’ ’ Signs of the Times,” Christian Union, July 9, 1870.
Six pleas for immediate emancipation, 1862. Independent,
July 31; August 7, 21, 28; September 4, li'.
’ ’ The Snow Siege,” Independent, February 26, 1855.
’ ’ Southern Christmas and New Year,” Christian Union, 13:44.
1876.
’ ’ Spiritualism,” four articles, Christian Union, September
3, 10, 24; October 1, 1870.
"Spring Breathings,” Independent, June 14, 1855.
’ ’ Spring in Amherst,” Christian Union, 13:447-448, 1876.
"Stephen, the first Martyr," Christian Union, 14:288-289,
1876.
"Story of a Grain of Mustard Seed," Christian Union, July 24,
1872.
"A Suggestion on a Difficult Subject," Christian Union,
June 4, 1870.
"Sunday in the White Mountains," Christian Union, 12:209-211,
1875.
"The Talisman," Christian Union, 12:63-64, 1875.
"Things that cannot be shaken," Independent, November 12,
1875.
"Thoughts from my Garden Seat," Independent, September 6,
1855.
"Touching Florida," Christian Union, 12:154, 1875.
"Transplanting— A Parable," Christian Union, August 21, 1872.
358
«The Traveler’s Talisman,” Christian Union, August 20, 1870.
“Travelling Manners,” Hearth and Home, May 1, 1869.
“Uncle Enoch,” Evangelist, May 30, 1835.
“Under the Orange Trees," Hearth and Home, April 10, 17, 24,
1869.
"The Unfaithful Steward," Evangelist, April 7, 1842,
"The Valley of Humiliation," Independent. September 5, 186l.
"Waiting by the River," Christian Union. January 1, 1873.
"Western Pictures," Hearth and Home, February 20, 1869.
"What Hath God Wrought!" Independent, November 15, I860.
"What is and What is not the Point in the Woman Question,"
Hearth and Home, August 28, 1869.
"What shall we Raise in Florida?" Hearth and Home, May 8,
1869.
"What Shall the Girls Read?" Hearth and Home, June 19, I869.
"What will the American People do?" Evangelist, January 29,
February 5, I864,
"White Mountain Days," Christian Union, September 18, 1872.
"Who Earned that Money?” Hearth and Home, October 9, I869.
"Who Ought to Come to Florida?" Christian Union, May 7, 1870.
"Who shall roll away the stone?" Independent, September 3.
1857.
"The Widow’s Mite,” Christian Union, October 15, 1873.
"A Winter in Italy," New York Ledger, twelve articles, weekly
from August 12 to October 28, 1865.
"A Work of Faith," Christian Union. 13:5U, 1876.
"Writing— Commercially," Hearth and Home, March 13, I869.
"The Yankee Girl," Token and Atlantic Souvenir for 1842,
pp. 63-81.
II. SECONDARY SOURCES
359
A. BOOKS AND ARTICLES MAINLY ABOUT MRS. STOWS,
AND BOOKS CONTAINING SIGNIFICANT CHAPTERS ABOUT HER
Aiken, George L., Uncle Tom’s Cabin. IVol. II, pp. 603-693.
Montrose J. Moses, Editor, Representative Plays by
American Dramatists. New York: 1. P. Dutton and Company,
n.d.
Anonymous, Critiques on Uncle Tom’s Cabin, from the Standard
Newspaper. London: Spottiswoods and Shaw, 1852. 47 pp.
_______ , The Patent Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or. Mrs.
Stowe in England. By a Lady in New York. New York: n.
p., 1853. 45 PP.
_______ , Slavery in the Southern States. By a Carolinian.
Cambridge: John Bartlett, 1852. 53 pp.
Bradford, Gamaliel, ’ ’ Harriet Beecher Stowe," Portraits of
American 'Women. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1919.
Pp. 101-130.
Brougham, John, Dred; or. The Dismal Swamp, a play in five
acts. In Modern Standard Drama. Vol. XIX, No. 145.
New York: Samuel French, n.d. 43 pp.
Chew, Samuel C., Byron in England: His Fame and After-Fame.
New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1924. 415 pp.
Cummings, I. E., Tom. New York: Arrow Editions, 1935. 37 pp.
Drake, Samuel Adams, Our World’s Great Benefactors. Revised
and enlarged edition; Philadelphia: H. J. Smith and
Company, 1890. 702 pp.
Dunbar, Paul Lawrence, "Harriet Beecher Stowe," A sonnet,
Century Magazine, . 57:61, 1898.
Erskine, John, Leading American Novelists. Biographies of
Leading Americans Series. New York: Henry Holt and
Company, 1910. 378 pp.
Fields, Annie, "Days with Mrs. Stowe," Authors and Friends.
Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, i#96. pp. 159-226.
360
Gilbertson, Catherine, Harriet Beecher Stowe. New York: D.
Appleton-Century Company, 1937. 330 pp.
James, Henry, review of We and Our Neighbors, The Nation
(New York) 21:61, 1875.
Johnson, Merle DeVore, American First Editions. New York:
R. R. Bowker Company, 1936. 527 pp.
Klingberg, Frank J,, "Harriet Beecher Stowe and Social Reform
in England," American Historical Review, 43:54-2-552, 1938.
Koch, Felix J., "Where did Eliza cross the Ohio?" Publications
of the Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society,
24:533-590, 1915.
Leisy, Ernest Erwin, f The New England Religious Background in
Mrs. Stowe’s Novels," Unpublished Master’s thesis, the
University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, 1919. 43 pp.
Lucas, E., La Litt6rature anti-esclavagiste au Dix-neuvieme
Siecle; Etude sur Madame Beecher Stowe et son Influence
en France. Paris: E. de Boccard, 1930. 28l pp.
McCray, Florine Thayer, The Life-Work of the Author of Uncle
Tom*s Cabin. New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1889. 440 pp.
Maxfield, E. K., "Goody-goody Literature and Mrs. Stowe,"
American Speech, 4:189-202, 1928-1929.
"Outis," The True Story of Mrs. Stowe. London: Mann Nephews,
n.d.
Reed, John C., The Brothers’ War. Boston: Little, Brown, and
Company, 19O5. 456 pp.
Rourke, Constance M., Trumpets of Jubilee. New York: Harcourt,
Brace and Company, 1927. 445 pp.
Sanborn, F. B., "Mrs. Stowe and her Uncle Tom," Bibliotheca
Sacra, 6.8:674-683, 1911.
Senior, Nassau W., American Slavery: a reprint of an article
on Uncle Tom’s Cabin, of which a portion was inserted in
the 206th number of the Edinburgh Review. London: T.
Fellowes, n.d. 164 pp.
Stearns, E. J., Notes on Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Philadelphia:
Lippincott, Grambo and Company, 1853. 314 pp.
361
Stowe, Charles Edward, and Lyman Beecher Stowe, Harriet
Beecher Stowe: The Story of her Life. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin Company, 1911. 313 pp.
Stowe, Lyman Beecher, Saints, Sinners and Beechers.
Indianapolis: The Bob'bs-MerrilL Company, 1934. 450 pp.
. Van Doren, Carl, "Harriet Beecher Stowe," Cambridge History
of American Literature. vol. Ill, pp. 69-73.
^ Warner, Charles Dudley," The Story of -Uncle Tom’s Cabin,"
The Writings of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Riverside
edition, vol. I, pp. xxxi-lii.
Weed. George L., "The True Story of Eliza," Independent,
55:224-226, 1903.
Williams, S. W., editor, Queenly Women, Crowned and Uncrowned.
Cincinnati: Cranston and Stowe,1885” 436 pp.
Woodward, A., A Review of Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or an Essay on
Slavery. Cincinnati: Applegate and Company, 1853.
216 pp.
Young, Stark, "Uncle Tom’s Measure," The New Republic,
76:212-213, 1933.
B. OTHER BOOKS, MAGAZINES, AND ARTICLES
INCIDENTALLY VALUABLE IN SURVEYING MRS. STOWE’S WRITINGS
Abbott, Lyman, Henry Ward Beecher. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin
and Company, 1903. 457 PP.
Adams, Henry,- Letters of Henry Adams, edited by W. C. Eord.
Boston: Houghton, Mifflin Company, 1930. 552 pp.
Addison, Daniel Dulany, Lucy Larcom, Life. Letters, and
Diary. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and. Company, 1894.
295 pp.
Aldrich, Mrs. Thomas Bailey, Crowding Memories. Boston:
Houghton Mifflins . - Company, 1920. 295.pp.
The Atlantic Monthly. 1857-1373.
362
Barnes, Gilbert Hobbs, The Antislavery Impulse 1830-1844.
New York: D. Appleton-Century Company, 1933. 298 pp.
Barnes, Gilbert H., and Dwight L. Dumond, editors, Letters
of Theodore Dwight Weld, Angelina Grimke Weld, and Sarah
Grimke, 1822-1844. New York: D. Appleton-Century
Company, 1934. 2 vols.
Barrows, John Henry, Henry Ward Beecher, the Shakespeare of
the Pulpit. New York: Funk and Wagnalls Company, 1893.
541 pp.
Beard, Charles A., and Mary R. Beard, The Rise of American
Civilization. 2 vols.; New York: The Macmillan Company,
1927.
Beatty, Richmond Croom, Bayard Taylor: Laureate of the
Gilded Age. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1936.
379 PP.
Beecher, Catharine E., Educational Reminiscences and Sug
gestions. New York: J. B. Ford and Company, 1874»
276 pp.
_______ , An Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism, with Reference
to the Duty of American Females. Philadelphia: Harry
Perkins7""lo37. 152 pp.
, The Moral Instructor. Cincinnati: Truman and Smith,
1838. 194 pp.
_______ , The True Remedy for the Wrongs of Women. Boston:
Phillips, Sampson, and Company, 1851. 26'3 pp.
Beecher, Lyman, A Plea for the West. Cincinnati: Truman and
Smith, 1835. 172 pp.
Blanchard, J., and Ni L. Rice, A Debate on Slavery . . . 1845.
Cincinnati: William H. Moore and Company, 1846. 482 pp.
Boynton, Percy Holmes, Literature and American Life. Boston:
Ginn and Company, 1936. 933 pp.
Bremer, Fredrika, The Homes of the New World; Impressions of
America. 2 vols.; New York: Harper and Brothers, 1853.
Canby, Henry Seidel, The Short Story in English. New York:
Henry Holt and Company, 1909. 385"""pp.
The Cincinnati Chronicle and Literary Gazette, 1832-1840.
The Cincinnati Journal and Western Luminary, 1836.
Davis, William T., editor, Bradford’s History of Plymouth
Plantation. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1908.
437 PP.
Derby, James C., fifty Years among Authors, Books, and
Publishers. New York: G. W. Carleton and Company, I884.
739 pp.'
De Stael, Madame, Corinne; or, Italy, translated by Isabel
Hill. New York: A. C. Armstrong and Son, n.d. 396 pp.
Dewey, Mary E., editor, Life and Letters of Catharine M.
Sedgwick. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1871. 446 pp.
Douglass, Frederick, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass.
Hartford: Park Publishing Company, 18’ 83. "618 pp.
'Edgeworth, Maria, Popular Tales. London: Macmillan and
Company, 1895. 508 pp.
Faxon, Frederick Winthrop, Literary Annuals and Gift-Books.
Boston: The Boston Book Company, 1912. 140 pp.
Fields, James T., Yesterdays with Authors. Boston: James
R. Osgood and Company, 1871. 352 pp.
Finley, Ruth E., The Lady of Godey’s, Sarah Josepha Hale.
Philadelphia: J. ,B. Lippincott Company, 1931. 318 pp.
Gaines, Francis P., The Southern Plantation: A Study in the
Development and Accuracy of a Tradition. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1924. 243 pp.
Godey*s Lady’s Book, 1837-1847.
Goodrich, Samuel G., Recollections of a Lifetime. New York:
2 vols.; New York: Miller, Orton and Mulligan, 1857.
Grimke, Angelina E., Letters to Catherine E. Beecher. Boston
I. Knapp, 1838. 130 pp.
Griswold, Rufus Wilmot, The Female Poets of America. New
York: James Miller, 1877. 4§7 pp.
Hale, Edward Everett, Memories of a . Hundred Years, 2 vols.;
New York: The Macmillan Company, 1904.
Hale, Edward Everett, Jr., Life and Letters of Edward Everett
Hale. 2 vols'.; Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1917.
Hale, Sarah Josepha, Northwood: or. Life North and South.
Revised edition; New York: H. Long and Brother, 1^52.
4.08 pp.
______Woman’s Record; or, Sketches of All Distinguished
Women. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1852. 904 pp.
Hall, James, Legends of the West. Second edition; Philadelphia
Key and Biddle, 18J3. 2FTl?p.
Harland, Marion, "Elizabeth Prentiss," Our Famous Women, pp.
539-559. "
_______ , Loiterings in Pleasant Paths. New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons, T880. 435 pp.
Harper, Joseph Henry, The House of Harper: A Century of
Publishing in Franklin Square. Njew York: Harper and
Brothers, 1912^ 689 pp.
Harveson, Mae Elizabeth, Catharine Esther Beecher, Pioneer
Educator. Philadelphia; University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1932. 295 pp. I
Hawthorne, Julian, Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife. 2 .vols.;
Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1897•
Hearth and Home, 1869.
Hibben,rBaxton, Henry: Ward Beecher; an American Portrait.
New York: George H. Do^an Company, 1927. 390 pp.
Hicks, Granville, The Great Tradition. New York: The
Macmillan Company, 1933. 317 PP.
Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, Cheerful Yesterdays. Boston:
Houghton, Mifflin and Company,' i'89^T 374 PP*
Hildreth, Richard, The Slave; or Memoirs of Archy Moore.
Second edition, 2 vols.; Boston: Whipple and Damrell,
1840.
Howard, John Raymond, Remembrance of Things Past. New York:
Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1925. 416 pp.
Howe, M. A. DeWolfe, Memories of a Hostess. Boston: The
Atlantic Monthly Press, 1922. 312 pp.
Howells, William Dean, Literary Friends and Acquaintance..
New York: Harper and Brothers, 1901. 288 pp”
The Illinois Monthly Magazinet 1830-1832.
The Independent, 1852-1865.
James, Henry, "James Russell Lowell,” Essays in London.
New York: Harper and Brothers, 1893.' Pp. 44-80.
, "Mr. and Mrs. James T. Fields," Atlantic Monthly,
116721-31, 1915.
_______ , A Small Boy and Others. London: Macmillan and
Company, 1913. 436-pp.
Jewett, Sarah Orne, Letters of Sarah Orne Jewett, edited by
Annie Fields. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1911.
259 pp.
Leonard, William Ellery, Byron and Byronism in America.
Boston: Privately printed, 1905. 129 pp.
Longfellow, Samuel, Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. 3 vols.
Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1899.
Lowell, James Russell, New Letters of James Russell Lowell,
edited by M. A. DeWolfe>Howe. New”York’ : Harper and
Brothers, 1932. 364 pp.
Mansfield, Edward Deering, Personal Memories, Social, Polit
ical and Literary. Cincinnati: Robert Clarke and Company,
1379. 343 pp.
Marvel, Ik, Fudge Doings. 2.vols.; New York: Charles Scrbner,
1855.
Mather, Cotton, Magnalia Christi Americana: or, The Ecclesi
astical History of New England. 2 vols.; Hartford: S.
Andrus and Son, 1853.
_______ , The Wonders of the Invisible World. Library of
Old Authors Series. London: J. R. Smith, 1862. 291 pp.
366
Miller, Perry, and Thomas H. Johnson,' The Puritans. New
York: The American Book Company, 1938. 846 pp.
Moore, Frank, Women of the War; Their Heroism and Self-
Sacrifice. Hartford: S. S. Scranton and Company, 1866.
,596 pp.
Morse, John T., Jr., Life and Letters of Oliver Wendell
Holmes. 2 vols.; Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company,
1896.
Mott, Frank Luther, A History of American Magazines.
3 vols.; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1938.
The National Ira, 1847-1860.
Nevins, Allan, editor, American Social History as Recorded
by British Travellers. New York: Henry Holt and Company,
1923. 577 PP.
New York Evangelist, 1830-1851.
New York Ledger, 1865.
Nichols, Roy Franklin,1 Franklin Pierce: Young Hickory of the
Granite Hills. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1931. 615 pp.
Northup, Solomon, and David Wilson, Twelve Years, a Slave.
Auburn: Derby and Miller, 1853. 336 pp.
Norton, Charle,s Eliot, Letters of Charles Eliot Norton.
2 vols.; Boston: Houghton, Mifflin Company, 1913.
Old and New, 1870-1871.
Our Young Folks, I865-I87O.
Parker, Dorothy, Sunset Gun. New York: Liveright Publishing
Corporation, 1928. 75 pp.
Parrington, Yernon Louis, Main Currents in American Thought.
3 vols.; New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1927-
1930.
Pattee, Fred Lewis, The First Century of American Literature.
New York: D. Appleton-Century Company, 1935. 613 pp.
Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart, Chapters from a Life, Boston:
Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 189'6.~ 27$ pp.
Picard, Samuel T., Life and Letters of John Greenleaf Whittier.
2 vols.; Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1895.
Prentiss, Elizabeth. Stepping Heavenward. Racine: Whitman
Publishing Company, n.d. 254 pp.
Prentiss, George L., Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss.
New York: Anson D. F. Randolph and Company, 1$82. 573 pp.
Quinn, Arthur Hobson, American Fiction, an Historical and
Critical Survey. New York: D. Appleton-Century Company,
193S: £05 pp.
Repplier, Agnes, Points of View. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin
and Company, 1891. 239 pp.
Rusk, Ralph Leslie, The Literature of the Middle Western
Frontier. 2 vols.; New York: Columbia University Press.
I925T
Ruskin, John, Letters of John Ruskln to Charles Eliot Norton.
2 vols.; Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1904.
Scott, Walter, The Bride of Lammermoor. Oxford: Henry Frowde,
1909. 419 PP.
Sedgwick, Catharine Maria, A New England Tale, and
Miscellanies. New York: J. C. Derby, 1854. 388 pp.
, Redwood; a Tale. 2 vols.; New York: E. Bliss and
E. White, 1824. ! ,
Sigourney, Lydia H., Letters of Life. New York: D, Appleton
and Company, 1866. 414,pp.
, Post Meridian. New York: D. Appleton and Company,
1254. 239pp.
______Sketch of Connecticut, Forty Years Since. Hartford:
Oliver D. Cooke and Sons, 1824. 27$ pp.
_______ , Sketches. Philadelphia: Key and Biddle, 1834.
216pp.
Spiller, Robert E., editor, The Roots of National Culture.
Vol. I, American Literature, a Period Anthology Series.
New York: The Macmillan Company, 1933. 75$ pp.
368
Stanford, P. Thomas, The Tragedy of the Negro in America.
Boston: Privately printed, 1898. 230 pp.
Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, Eighty Years and More. New York:
European Publishing Company, 1898. 474 pp.
Thompson, Ralph, American Literary Annuals and G-ift Books.
182.5-1865. New York: The H. W. Wilson Company, 1936.
183pp.
Tonna, Charlotte Elizabeth, The Siege of Derry, or. Suffer
ings of the Protestants. New York: John S. Taylor and
Company, 1841. 292 pp.
Trent, William Peterfield, and others, editors, The Cambridge
History of American Literature. 4 vols.; New York: G. P.
Putnam*s Sons, 1917-1921.
Trent, William Peterfield, and Benjamin W. Wells, editors,
Colonial Prose and Poetry. 3 vols.; New York: Thomas Y.
Crowell Company, 1901-1903.
Turner, Lorenzo Dow, Anti-Slavery Sentiment in American
Literature Prior to 186.5'. Washington: The Association
for the Study of Negro Life and History, 1929. 188 pp.
. "Anti-Slavery Sentiment in American Literature
Prior to 186.5," Abstracts of Theses. Humanistic S'eries.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1928. Vol. V,
pp. 499-502.
Twain, Mark, Mark Twain * s Autobiography. 2 vols.; New York:
Harper and Brothers, 1924.
Walters, Raymond, Stephen Foster: Youth * s Golden Gleam.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1936. 160 pp.
Warner, Anna B., Susan Warner: "Elizabeth Wetherell."
New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1909. 509 PP.
Warner, Susan, The. Wide. Wide World. New York: A. L. Burt,
n.d., 592 pp.
Warren, Austin, editor, Nathaniel Hawthorne: Representative
Selections. American Writers Series. New York: American
Book Company, 1934. 368 pp.
Washington, Booker T., Frederick Douglass. Philadelphia:
George W. Jacobs and Company, 1907. 3 6.5 pp.
>69
Weld, Theodore Dwight, American Slavery as it is: Testimony
of a Thousand Witnesses, New York: American Anti-
slavery Society, 1$39. 224 pp.
Welsh, Sister Mary Michael, Catharine Maria Sedgwick; Her
Position in the Literature and Thought of Her Time up
to 1860. Washington: The Catholic University of America,
1937. 168 pp.
Western Monthly Magazine, 1833-1836.
Wright, Lyle H., American ffiction, 1774-1850. San Marino:
Huntington Library, 1939. 246 pp.

Linked assets