Harriet Beecher Stowe

Who Was Harriet Beecher Stowe?

Harriet Beecher Stowe was the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) — the most politically consequential novel in American history, the book that Abraham Lincoln reportedly called the cause of the Civil War, and the work that demonstrated, more powerfully than any other, that fiction can be a form of moral witness capable of changing the course of history. Born in Litchfield, Connecticut, the daughter of the theologian Lyman Beecher and the sister of Henry Ward Beecher, she was formed in the tradition of New England Calvinist Christianity and spent her entire life in the conviction that the gospel had direct and demanding implications for the political and social arrangements of her society.

She lived for eighteen years in Cincinnati, across the Ohio River from the slave state of Kentucky, and witnessed firsthand the reality of slavery and the operation of the Underground Railroad. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which required Northern citizens to assist in the return of escaped slaves, galvanized her to write the novel that had been forming in her imagination for years. It was serialized in an abolitionist newspaper in 1851–1852 and published as a book in 1852; it sold 300,000 copies in the first year and was translated into dozens of languages.

Stowe is significant for TLA because her novel is one of the most direct instances in American literary history of the gospel producing political consequences: a woman who believed that slavery was a sin against the God who made all human beings in his image, and who used the available literary form to make that belief available to the widest possible audience.

In Their Own Words

Selected Bibliography

• Uncle Tom's Cabin — 1852 — novel
• A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin — 1853 — documentary evidence for the novel
• Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp — 1856 — novel
• The Minister's Wooing — 1859 — novel
• Oldtown Folks — 1869 — novel