Complete Works of Harriet Beecher Stowe

by Harriet Beecher Stowe

  A certain eccentricity of manner and character, and sharpness of repartee, have given rise to hundreds of amusing anecdotes respecting Dr. Beecher. Some of them paint the man.

  His lively sense of the comic elements in everything, breaks out on the most unlikely occasions. One dark night, as he was driving home with his wife and Mrs. Stowe in the carriage, the whole party was upset over a bank about fifteen feet high. They had no sooner extricated themselves from the wreck, than Mrs. Beecher and Mrs. Stowe, who were unhurt, returned thanks for their providential escape. “Speak for yourselves,” said the doctor, who was feeling his bruises, “I have got a good many hard bumps, any how.”

  In many matters he is what Miss Olivia would have called “shiftless.” None of the Goldsmith family were more so. No appeal to him for charity, or a contribution to a good cause, ever goes unresponded to, so long as he has any money in his pockets. As the family income is not unlimited, this generosity is sometimes productive of inconvenience. One day his wife had given him from the common purse twenty-five or thirty dollars in bills, with particular instructions to buy a coat, of which he stood in need. He went down to the city to make the purchase, but stopping ping on the way to a meeting in behalf of foreign missions, the box was handed round, and in went his little roll of bills. He forgot his coat in his anxiety for the Sandwich Islanders.

  Well do I remember the first time I heard him preach. It was seventeen years ago. From early childhood I had been taught to reverence the name of the great divine and orator, and I had long promised myself the pleasure of listening to him. My first Sunday morning in Cincinnati found me sitting with his congregation. The pastor was not as punctual as the flock. Several minutes had elapsed after the regular hour for beginning the service, when one of the doors opened, and I saw a hale looking old gentleman enter. As he pulled off his hat, half a dozen papers covered with notes of sermons fluttered down to the floor. The hat appeared to contain a good many more. Stopping down and picking them up deliberately, he came scuttling down, along the aisle, with a step so quick and resolute as rather to alarm certain prejudices I had on the score of clerical solemnity. Had I met him on a parade ground, I should have singled him out as some general in undress, spite of the decided stoop contracted in study; the iron-gray hair brushed stiffly towards the back of the head; the keen, sagacious eyes, the firm, hard lines of the brow and wrinkled visage, and the passion and power latent about the mouth, with its long and scornful under-lip, bespoke a character more likely to attack than to defend, to do than to suffer. His manner did not change my first impression. The ceremonies preliminary to the sermon were dispatched in rather a summary way. A petition in the long prayer was expressed so pithily I have never forgotten it. I forget now what reprehensible intrigue our rulers were busy in at the time, but the doctor, after praying for the adoption of various useful measures, alluded to their conduct in the following terms: “And, O Lord! grant we may not despise our rulers; and grant that they may not act so, that we can’t help it.” It may be doubted whether any English Bishop has ever uttered a similar prayer for King and Parliament. To deliver his sermon, the preacher stood bolt upright, stiff as a musket. At first, he twitched off and replaced his spectacles a dozen times in as many minutes with a nervous motion, gesturing mean-while with frequent pump handle strokes of his right arm; but as he went on, his unaffected language began to glow with animation, his simple style became figurative and graphic, and flashes of irony lighted up the dark groundwork of his Puritanical reasoning. Smiles and tears chased each other over the faces of many in the audience. His peroration was one of great beauty and power. I have heard him hundreds of times since, and he has never failed to justify his claim to the title of “the old man eloquent.”

  Harriet Beecher was born in Litchfield, about the year 1812. After the removal of the family to Boston, she enjoyed the best educational advantages of that city. With the view of preparing herself for the business of instruction, she acquired all the ordinary accomplishments of ladies, and much of the learning usually reserved for the stronger sex. At an early age she began to aid her eldest sister, Catharine, in the management of a flourishing female school, which had been built up by the latter. When their father went West, the sisters accompanied him, and opened a similar establishment in Cincinnati.

  This city is situated on the northern bank of the Ohio. The range of hills which hugs the river for hundreds of miles above, here recedes from it in a semi-circle, broken by a valley and several ravines, leaving a basin several square miles in surface. This is the site of the busy manufacturing and commercial town which, in 1832, contained less than forty thousand inhabitants, and at present contains more than one hundred and twenty thousand-a rapid increase, which must be attributed, in a great measure, to the extensive trade it carries on with the slave States. The high hill, whose point, now crowned with an observatory, overhangs the city on the east, stretches away to the east and north in a long sweep of table-land. On this is situated Lane Seminary-Mrs. Stowe’s home for eighteen long years. Near the Seminary buildings, and on the public road, are certain comfortable brick residences, situated in yards green with tufted grass, and half concealed from view by accacias, locusts, rose-bushes, and vines of honeysuckle and clematis. These were occupied by Dr. Beecher, and the Professors. There are other residences more pretending in appearance, occupied by bankers, merchants and men of fortune. The little village thus formed is called Walnut Hills, and is one of the prettiest in the environs of Cincinnati.

  For several years after her removal to this place, Harriet Beecher continued to teach in connection with her sister. She did so until her marriage with the Rev. Calvin E. Stowe, Professor of Biblical Literature in the Seminary of which her father was President. This gentleman was already one of the most distinguished ecclesiastical savans in America. After graduating with honour at Bowdoin College, Maine, and taking his theological degree at Andover, he had been appointed Professor, at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, whence he had been called to Lane Seminary. Mrs. Stowe’s married life has been of that equable and sober happiness so common in the families of Yankee clergymen. It has been blessed with a numerous offspring, of whom five are still living. Mrs. Stowe has known the fatigues of watching over the sick bed, and her heart has felt that grief which eclipses all others-that of a bereaved mother. Much of her time has been devoted to the education of her children, while the ordinary household cares have devolved on a friend or distant relative, who has always resided with her. She employed her leisure in contributing occasional pieces, tales and novelettes to the magazines and newspapers. Her writings were of a high moral tone, and deservedly popular. Only a small portion of them are comprised in the volume-”The Mayflower”-already mentioned. This part of Mrs. Stowe’s life spent in literary pleasures, family joys and cares, and the society of the pious and intelligent, would have been of as unalloyed happiness as mortals can expect, had it not been darkened at every instant by the baleful shadow of slavery.

  The “peculiar institution” was destined to thwart the grand project in life of Mrs. Stowe’s husband and father. When they relinquished their excellent positions in the East in order to build up the great Presbyterian Seminary for the Ohio and Mississippi valley, they did so with every prospect of success. Never did a literary institution start under finer auspices. The number and reputation of the professors had drawn together several hundred students from all parts of the United States; not sickly cellar-plants of boys sent by wealthy parents, but hardy and intelligent young men, most of whom, fired by the ambition of converting the world to Christ, were winning their way through privations and toil, to education and ministerial orders. They were the stuff out of which foreign missionaries and revival preachers are made. Some of them were known to the public as lecturers: Theodore D. Weld was an oratorical celebrity. For a year all went well. Lane Seminary was the pride and hope of the church. Alas for the hopes of Messrs. Beecher and Stowe! this prosperity was of short duration.

  T
he French Revolution of 1830, the agitation in England for reform, and against colonial slavery, the fine and imprisonment by American courts of justice, of citizens who had dared to attack the slave trade carried on under the federal flag, had begun to direct the attention of a few American philanthropists to the evils of slavery. Some years before, a society had been formed for the purpose of colonizing free blacks on the coast of Africa. It had been patronized by intelligent slaveholders, who feared the contact of free blacks with their human chattels; and by feeble or ignorant persons in the North, whose consciences impelled them to act on slavery in some way, and whose prudence or ignorance of the question led them to accept the plan favoured by slaveholders. However useful to Africa the emigration to its shores of intelligent, moral, and enterprising blacks may be, it is now universally admitted that colonization, as a means of extinguishing slavery, is a drivelling absurdity. These were the views of the Abolition Convention, which met at Philadelphia in 1833, and set on foot the agitation which has since convulsed the Union.

  The President of that Convention, Mr. Arthur Tappan, was one of the most liberal donors of Lane Seminary. He forwarded its address to the students; and in a few weeks afterwards the whole subject was up for discussion amongst them. At first there was little interest. But soon the fire began to burn. Many of the students had travelled or taught school in the slave States; a goodly number were sons of slaveholders, and some were owners of slaves. They had seen slavery, and had facts to relate, many of which made the blood run chill with horror. Those spread out on the pages of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” reader, and which your swelling heart and overflowing flowing eyes would not let you read aloud, are cold in comparison. The discussion was soon ended, for all were of accord; but the meetings for the relation of facts were continued night after night and week after week. What was at first sensibility grew into enthusiasm; the feeble flame had become a conflagration. The slave owners among the students gave liberty to their slaves; the idea of going on foreign missions was scouted at, because there were heathens at home; some left their studies and collected the coloured population of Cincinnati into churches, and preached to them; others gathered the young men into evening schools, and the children into day schools, and devoted themselves to teaching them; others organized benevolent societies for aiding them, and orphan asylums for the destitute and abandoned children; and others again, left all to aid fugitive slaves on their way to Canada, or to lecture on the evils of slavery. The fanatacism was sublime; every student felt himself a Peter the hermit, and acted as if the abolition of slavery depended on his individual exertions.

  At first the discussion had been encouraged by the President and Professors; but when they saw it swallowing up everything like regular study, they thought it high time to stop. It was too late; the current was too strong to be arrested. The commercial interests of Cincinnati took the alarm-manufacturers feared the loss of their Southern trade. Public sentiment exacted the suppression of the discussion and excitement. Slaveholders came over from Kentucky, and urged the mob on to violence. For several weeks there was imminent danger that Lane Seminary, and the houses of Drs. Beecher and Stowe, would be burnt or pulled down by a drunken rabble. These must have been weeks of mortal anxiety for Harriet Beecher. The board of trustees now interfered, and allayed the excitement of the mob by forbidding all further discussion of slavery in the Seminary. To this the students responded by withdrawing en masse. Where hundreds had been, there was left a mere handful. Lane Seminary was deserted. For seventeen years after this, Dr. Beecher and Professor Stowe remained there, endeavouring in vain to revive its prosperity. In 1850 they returned to the Eastern States, the great project of their life defeated. After a short stay at Bowdoin College, Maine, Professor Stowe accepted an appointment to the chair of Biblical literature in the Theological Seminary at Andover, Massachusetts, an institution which stands, to say the least, as high as any in the United States.

  These events caused a painful reaction in the feelings of the Beechers. Repulsed alike by the fanaticism they had witnessed among the foes, and the brutal violence among the friends of slavery, they thought their time for action had not come, and gave no public expression of their abhorrence of slavery. They waited for the storm to subside, and the angel of truth to mirror his form in tranquil waters. For a long time they resisted all attempts to make them bow the knee to slavery, or to avow themselves abolitionists. It is to this period Mrs. Stowe alludes, when she says, in the closing chapter of her book: “For many years of her life the author avoided all reading upon, or allusion to, the subject of slavery, considering it as too painful to be inquired into, and one which advancing light and civilization would live down.” The terrible and dramatic scenes which occurred in Cincinnati, between 1835 and 1847, were calculated to increase the repugnance of a lady to mingling actively in the melee. That city was the chief battle-ground of freedom and slavery. Every month there was something to attract attention to the strife; either a press destroyed, or a house mobbed, or a free negro kidnapped, or a trial for freedom before the courts, or the confectionary of an English abolitionist riddled, or a public discussion, or an escape of slaves, or an armed attack on the negro quarter, or a negro school-house razed to the ground, or a slave in prison, and killing his wife and children to prevent their being sold to the South. The abolition press, established there in 1835 by James G. Birney, whom, on account of his mildness, Miss Martineau called “the gentleman of the abolition cause,” and continued by Dr. Bailey, the moderate and able editor of the National Era, of Washington city, in which Uncle Tom’s Cabin first appeared in weekly numbers, was destroyed five times. On one occasion, the Mayor dismissed at midnight the rioters, who had also pulled down the houses of some colored people, with the following pithy speech: “Well, boys, let’s go home; we’ve done enough.” One of these mobs deserves particular notice, as its victims enlisted deeply the sympathies of Mrs. Stowe. In 1840, the slave catchers, backed by the riff-raff of the population, and urged on by certain politicians and merchants, attacked the quarters in which the negroes reside. Some of the houses were battered down by cannon. For several days the city was abandoned to violence and crime. The negro quarters were pillaged and sacked; negroes who attempted to defend their property were killed, and their mutilated bodies cast into the streets; women were violated by ruffians, and some afterwards died of the injuries received; houses were burnt, and men, women, and children were abducted in the confusion, and hurried into slavery. From the brow of the hill on which she lived, Mrs. Stowe, could hear the cries of the victims, the shouts of the mob, and the reports of the guns and cannon, and could see the flames of the conflagration. To more than one of the trembling fugitives she gave shelter, and wept bitter tears with them. After the fury of the mob was spent, many of the coloured people gathered together the little left them of worldly goods, and started for Canada. Hundreds passed in front of Mrs. Stowe’s house. Some of them were in little wagons; some were trudging along on foot after the household stuff; some led their children by the hand; and there were even mothers who walked on, suckling their infants, and weeping for the dead or kidnapped husband they had left behind.

  This road, which ran through Walnut Hills, and within a few feet of Mrs. Stowe’s door, was one of the favourite routes of “the under-ground railroad,” so often alluded to in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. This name was given to a line of Quakers and other abolitionists; who, living at intervals of 10, 15 or 20 miles between the Ohio river and the Northern lakes, had formed themselves into a sort of association to aid fugitive slaves in their escape to Canada. Any fugitive was taken by night on horseback, or in covered wagons, from station to station, until he stood on free soil, and found the fold of the lion banner floating over him, and the artillery of the British empire between him and slavery. The first station north of Cincinnati was a few miles up Mill Creek, at the house of the pious and honest-hearted John Vanzandt, who figures in chapter nine of Uncle

  Tom’s Cabin, as John Van Trompe. Mr
s. Stowe must have often been roused from her sleep by the quick rattle of the covered wagons, and the confused galloping of the horses of constables and slave-catchers in hot pursuit. “Honest John” was always ready to turn out with his team, and the hunters of men were not often adroit enough to come up with him. He sleeps now in the obscure grave of a martyr. The “gigantic frame,” of which the novelist speaks, was worn down at last by want of sleep, exposure, and anxiety; and his spirits were depressed by the persecutions which were accumulated on him. Several slave owners, who had lost their property by his means, sued him in the United States Courts for damages; and judgment after judgment stripped him of his farm, and all his property.

  During her long residence on the frontier of the slave States, Mrs. Stowe made several visits to them. It was then, no doubt, she made the observations which have enabled her to paint noble, generous, and humane slaveholders, in the characters of Wilson, the manufacturer, Mrs. Shelby and her son George, St. Clair and his daughter Eva, the benevolent purchaser at the New Orleans auction sale, the mistress of Susan and Emeline, and Symes, who helped Eliza and her by up the river bank. Mrs. Stowe has observed slavery in every phase; she has seen masters and slaves at home, New Orleans markets, fugitives, free coloured people, pro-slavery politicians and priests, abolitionists, and colonizationists. She and her family have suffered from it; seventeen years of her life have been clouded by it. For that long period she stifled the strongest emotions of her heart. No one but her intimate friends knew their strength. She has given them expression at last. Uncle Tom’s Cabin is the agonizing cry of feelings pent up for years in the heart of a true woman.