Harriet Beecher Stowe - Essay Example

Harriet Beecher Stowe Harriet Beecher Stowe was one of the most famous female abolitionists and authors of the 19th century. Her writings fueled the anti-slavery movements before the Civil War. She used religion and family to connect with her white readers and relate the African American community to them. Stowe later housed fugitives on the Underground Railroad while living with her husband in Brunswick, Maine. She wrote and expressed her opinions at a time when women were repressed. She had no rights to vote or hold office but she made her opinions known and began the public debate on slavery and abolition. Her upbringing contributed to her anti-slavery feelings. Her father was a preacher and he encouraged his children to take action to better society. She was the middle child and had 11 siblings. Six of her brothers became ministers and her older sister pioneered education for women in the early nineteenth century. Stowe had a very self-righteous upbringing from her parents and this encouraged her to take a stand for social justice. Harriet grew up in Connecticut but in 1832 she moved to Cincinnati to be with her father while he taught at the Lane Theological Seminary. Cincinnati was a hotbed of abolitionist activity due to it’s location. The city had just endured the Riots of 1829. The Ohio River provided a thriving shipping and trade industry. Immigrants, as well as African Americans, flocked to the city for job opportunities. Competition for jobs led to tensions between African Americans and Irish and German immigrants. Harriet met individuals harmed by these riots and this was said to have influenced her anti-slavery feelings. By 1839, Harriet found herself married with three children. She took on household help by way of a young African American girl from Kentucky. Living in Ohio, the girl was supposed to be free having been abandoned at a young age. Harriet heard her former master had come to Cincinnati looking for her. Harriet’s husband and her brother smuggled the girl out of the city and took her deep into the countryside to wait out the search. Her and her husband were aware of the punishment involved with fugitive slaves but chose to stand by their beliefs and actively ensure a young girl’s freedom from slavery. As a mother she felt the pain of the female slaves whose children were then born into slavery. This point of view would connect with mothers across America and help them relate to the woes of the mothers in slavery. As a mother herself, she felt the pain of these women and the love and anguish in her characters came from these feelings. She recalled to one of her children in a letter years after Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published, “I remember many a night weeping over you as you lay sleeping beside me, and I thought of the slave mothers whose babes were torn from them”. This was another tactic she used to relate the general public to the plight of African Americans. The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 infuriated Harriet Beecher Stowe. The Compromise of 1850 ended the slave trade, but did not officially end slavery and the fugitive slave law followed that. Since 1793 it was illegal to help runaway slaves but the new law required that every person help slave-catchers or they could be fined and jailed. Any fugitive slave caught would be tried in front of an appointed commissioner. If he was released the commissioner got $5. If he was sent back down South the commissioner would get $10. It was a system of bribery that enticed these judges to send more slaves down South. Stowe recognized how unjust the system had become/ She also felt that other leaders of faith were against the Compromise. In a letter to Fredrick Douglass she wrote, “Gather up all the sermons that have been published on this offensive and unchristian Fugitive Slave Law, and you will find that those against it are numerically more than those in its favor, and yet some of the strongest opponents have not published their sermons”. Harriet was strong-willed and stood by her beliefs. She believed others should do the same. An anti-slavery newspaper, “The Philanthropist”, was being printed in Cincinnati in the early 1830s. Founder J.G. Birney was threatened at the newspaper headquarters by a mob. Harriet hoped he would stand by his beliefs and not give in to the mob threats. “I hope that he will stand his ground and assert his rights. The office is fire-proof, and inclosed by high walls. I wish he would man it with armed men and see what can be done. If I were a man I would go, for one, and take good care of at least one window”. This was the beginning of Harriet’s literary commitment to the abolitionist cause. Her opinions even reached the White House. Right after the Civil War began she met with Abraham Lincoln and he allegedly said to her, “So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war”. Other writers of the time such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Walt Whitman commented on the anti-slavery issue in America but none were able to convey their points to the public like Stowe did. “She channeled [it] into a realistic human narrative with a crystal-clear social point:slavery was evil, and so were the political and economic institutions that supported it”. Much of the population at this time was uneducated. Theoretical abolitionist writings were something the general public could not comprehend. Her informal style of writing reached a larger audience and encouraged everyday people to address the controversial topic of slavery. “The atmosphere of human warmth and domesticity that Stowe evokes here encourages an emotional recognition, on the part of her mostly white readership, that commonplace familial and marital ties do indeed matter to African Americans”. Her father, Lyman Beecher, was a preacher and president of Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati, Ohio. He was a presbyterian minister who held staunch views on education and society. During his presidency students petitioned for an anti-slavery society and Lyman approved the group. Lyman was not as strong of a believe in abolitionism as Harriet though. While away from the seminary students were told to disband as antislavery was still a controversial topic, Lyman encouraged students to wait for legislation to change before discussing abolition. The expansion of the print culture (newspapers, books, pamphlets) coincided with abolitionist and anti-slavery movements. But most of these abolitionist pamphlets contained abstract arguments that the general reader could not understand or identify with. Stowe’s writings took on a more narrative form. Many Americans at this time were uneducated and other scholarly abolitionist writings were difficult to comprehend. Stowe composed narratives and plays with African Americans characters and immersed white Americans in the African American religious culture so they could relate. She paid attention to abolitionist literature including the papers of Frederick Douglass. “I have received your paper through the mail, and have read it with great interest, and desire to return my acknowledgments for it”. She even wanted to contribute to his columns and did not shy away from the connotations of this action. In her discourse with Frederick Douglass she defends her religious beliefs and explains how they have encouraged her fight against slavery. Referring to her and her husband, “We have [lived] on the border of slave state, and we have never shrunk from the fugitives, and we have helped them with all we have to give….it has been the influence that we found in the church and by the altar that has made us do all this”. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was wildly popular, selling more copies than the Bible the year it was released, but also had it’s critics in the South. Many claimed it was false. She received hate mail from Southerners, including a slave’s severed ear that was mailed to her. Southern authors composed 30 rebuttal books. Aunt Phillis’s Cabin, by Mary Henderson Eastman, argued that slavery was a “benevolent institution that protected blacks”. Harriet and her husband moved to Maine and assisted fugitives on the Underground Railroad. Bibliography GATTA, JOHN. "Harriet's Houses." Sewanee Review 123.3 (2015): 493-502. Academic Search Complete. Web. 20 Sept. 2015. Holzer, Harold, and Craig Symonds, eds. The New York Times Complete Civil War, 1861-1865. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, 2010. Reynolds, David. Mightier than the Sword: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Battle for America. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2011. Stowe, Harriet Beecher, and Charles Edward Stowe. Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Detroit: Gale Research, 1967. Kindle edition. Read More