Complete Works of Harriet Beecher Stowe

by Harriet Beecher Stowe

  At the moment when this brief memorial was receiving a final revision before going to the press, the news reached me of the unloosing of the last threads of consciousness which bound Mrs. Stowe to this world.

  The sweetness and patience of her waiting years can only be perfectly told by the daughters who hung over her. She knew her condition, but there was never a word of complaint, and so long as her husband lived she performed the office of nurse and attendant upon his lightest wishes as if she felt herself strong. Her near friends were sometimes invited to dine or to have supper with her at that period, but they could see even then how prostrated she became after the slightest mental effort. It was upon occasion of such a visit that she told me, with a twinkle of the eye, that “Mr. Stowe was sometimes inclined to be a little fretful during the long period of his illness, and said to her one day that he believed the Lord had forgotten him.” “Oh, no, He hasn’t,” she answered; “cheer up! your turn will come soon.”

  She was always fond of music, especially of the one kind she had known best; and the singing of hymns never failed to soothe her at the last; therefore when the little group stood round her open grave on a lovely July day and sang quite simply the hymns she loved, it seemed in its simplicity and broken harmony a fitting farewell to the faded body she had already left so far behind.

  A great spirit has performed its mission and has been released. The world moves on unconscious; but the world’s children have been blessed by her coming, and they who know and understand should praise God reverently in her going. “As a teil tree, and as an oak, whose substance is in them, when they cast their leaves: so the holy seed shall be the substance thereof.” In the words of the prophet we can almost hear her glad cry: —

  “My sword shall be bathed in heaven.”

  HARRIET BEECHER STOWE; JOHN BROWN: THE CONFLICT PRECIPITATED by Newell Dwight Hillis

  About 1850, as the result of the long agitation of the editors and orators, preachers and poets, the people of this country entered upon a heated mood, when excitement dwelt like fire in the intellect and conscience. For thinking men, it was becoming clear that civil war was inevitable, and that commercial relations between North and South would soon be broken off. But the North had goods to sell, and the South had money with which to buy; so the word was passed that every one must keep silence about slavery, lest discussion bring on a financial panic. It was the era of imprisoned moral sense. In the ocean, some waves are tidal waves, and on land sometimes the soil is heaved by an earthquake; at this time God began to heave the conscience of the people as the full moon heaves the sea. And although we now see that God was behind the movement, foolish men then tried to stay these moral forces. Northern merchants and politicians cried, “Peace!” and the Southern successors of Calhoun lifted the old club, the threat of secession; but the agitation went on all over the North. Toombs, the Southern senator, tried sheer bombast, and said he would call the roll of his slaves at the foot of Bunker Hill monument. Timid men in the North began to cry: “Conciliate, conciliate!” But there can be warfare, and only warfare between darkness and light, between sickness and health, between wrong and right. At length Phillips and Greeley took up the cry: “Let the South go!” But the answer was: “Shall a strong man who has hold of a mad dog let the beast go into a crowd of little children?” Compromise did something for a time, as a safety valve, relieving men’s pent-up feelings. But God had His own counsels. Plainly, “every drop of blood shed by the lash was to be paid for by blood shed by the sword,” for “the judgments of God are true and righteous altogether.”

  During those heated days of 1850, when the men of light and leading began to see their way clearly, the masses were still timid, hesitant and vacillating in their judgments on slavery. Scholars and thinking men had already been reached by poets, authors and editors, while the preachers and lecturers had driven their message home to the conviction of the ruling classes. Later on was to come the revival of 1857 that should stir the conscience, but preparatory to that movement it was necessary to inform the intellect and rouse the affections of the millions. Then it was that God raised up an author to touch the heart of the people.

  Wonderful the power of the novel in social reform! The novels of “Oliver Twist,” and “Dombey and Son,” were what roused the English people to a realization of the woes and wrongs of chimney sweeps, of children in the factories and mines of Great Britain. It was a novel, “All Sorts and Conditions of Men,” that later built People’s Palace in the Whitechapel district of London. And it was a novel, named “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” that created the atmosphere of sympathy in which the flowers of self-sacrifice and heroism unfolded.

  The authoress was the daughter of Lyman Beecher, who had seven sons and four daughters, each one of whom was either a preacher or reformer in some field. His daughter, Harriet, married Prof. Calvin E. Stowe, of Lane Seminary in Cincinnati, where, on the border between the free soil of Ohio and the slave soil of Kentucky, people were in a state of constant excitement and upheaval. The old Blue Grass State exhibited slavery in its very best condition and also in its worst form. The harrowing tales and incidents that were afterwards worked up into literary form by the gifted authoress were all matters of observation, conversation and experience. One of the earliest incidents of the Stowes’ life in Cincinnati was an experience of Professor Stowe with one of the Beecher boys. While travelling in Kentucky, the two young men witnessed the flight of a negro woman, who was running away with her little child, whom they helped across the Ohio River, to be sent on by the Underground Railway to Oberlin, on the shore of Lake Erie. And the similar incident, Eliza’s flight across the ice, her son Charles writes in his recent story of her life, “was an actual occurrence. She had known and had often talked with the very man who helped Eliza up the bank of the river.”

  Later during their Cincinnati residence, Mrs. Stowe conducted a small private school and made a practice of allowing a few coloured children to attend it. One evening the mother of one of these coloured children came to the Stowes’ house in a frenzy of terror, saying that her little girl had been seized and carried to the river, to be sold as a slave in Kentucky. Mrs. Stowe raised the money to ransom the beautiful child.

  It was during this period that the Kentucky editor, Bailey, moved across the river and began to publish a paper in Cincinnati. One night the editor knocked at the door of the Stowe home, seeking refuge from a mob that had smashed in his doors and windows, looted his printing-office, and flung his type into the river.

  On another occasion a Kentuckian named Van Zandt freed his slaves and carried them across the river into Ohio. His old friends counted him a traitor, and charges were trumped up that he had used his new home in Ohio as an underground station for the receiving of runaway slaves. Professor Stowe was asked to assist in Van Zandt’s defense. When other lawyers were afraid of the mob spirit, a young attorney named Salmon P. Chase volunteered his services without pay. As the courts were then entirely under the influence of the Fugitive Slave law, young Chase lost his case; but that no dramatic note might be wanting, this young attorney later became chief justice of the United States Supreme Court and wrote a decision that reversed the former action. All these and many other facts and events went into Mrs. Stowe’s mind as raw silk, and came out tapestry and brocade. The fuel of events fed the flames of enthusiasm. It was a great age, when men had to speak. The time was ripe, the soil was ready, God gave the good seed of liberty, and the sower went forth to sow.

  Mrs. Stowe tells us how she came to write the last chapter of the book, the death of “Uncle Tom.” She had a coloured woman in her family whose husband was a slave, living in Kentucky. This black man had invented a simple tool, was a good salesman, and was permitted to travel from town to town, and even to cross the river into the Ohio, under no bond save his solemn pledge to his master not to run away. Mrs. Stowe wrote the letters for her servant, to this black man in Covington, Ky. One day, while visiting his wife, in the Stowe home, he said that he
would rather cut off his right hand than break the word he had given to his master. What white man could boast a more delicate sense of truth? How keen and delicate the conscience! What weight of manhood in a slave! What reserves of morality! What latent heroism! The slave’s story captured the imagination of the authoress, and kindled her mind into a creative mood.

  Out of the incident Mrs. Stowe evolved the character of “Uncle Tom.” One Sunday morning, as she sat at the communion table, the picture of Tom’s death rose and passed before her mind. “At the same time,” writes her son, “the words of Jesus were sounding in her ears: ‘Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these My brethren, ye have done it unto Me.’ It seemed as if the crucified but now risen and glorified Christ were speaking to her through the poor black man, cut and bleeding under the blows of the slave whip.” Long afterwards some one asked Mrs. Stowe how she came to write the death of Uncle Tom, and she answered that she did not write it, that God gave it to her in a vision, that she saw the overseer flog him to death, and heard his dying words, and merely wrote down the vision as she saw it. At the time, she had no idea of writing more: it was a year later when she began the tale of which this incident became the crisis.

  For nearly two years the story ran in the National Era, published in Washington. The book was completed on March 20, 1852, and in spite of Mrs. Stowe’s despondency and apprehension of failure, it sold 3,000 copies the first day, 10,000 in a week, and 300,000 in a year. Save “Pilgrim’s Progress” alone, perhaps no book ever had a wider circulation, the Bible, of course, and “The Imitation of Christ,” by à Kempis, always excepted. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was translated into German, French, Italian and Spanish, and later appeared in almost every known language. Written for the people at large, the book struck a chord of universal human nature, and aroused the learned as well as the simple. Soon letters began to pour in from the most distinguished men in foreign countries. Charles Dickens wrote that he had read “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” with the deepest interest and sympathy. Lord Carlisle sent a message of “deep and solemn thanks to Almighty God, who has enabled you to write this book.” Charles Kingsley expressed the judgment that the story would take away the reproach of slavery from the great and growing nation. Men like Shaftesbury, Arthur Helps, women like George Sand and Frederika Bremer added their tribute of praise. Eighteen different publishing houses in England were issuing the book at one time, and a million and a half copies were sold in Great Britain.

  Even Heinrich Heine, the poet, the cynic, who carried more power of sarcasm and irony than any man of his generation, was so moved by the book that he seems to have returned to the reading of the Bible, and to Christ the Consoler, in the hour when night and death were falling. “Astonishing! That after I have whirled about all my life, over all the dance floors of philosophy, and yielded myself to all the orgies of the intellect, and paid my addresses to all possible systems, without satisfaction, like Messalina after a licentious night, I now find myself on the same standpoint where poor Uncle Tom stands — on that of the Bible. I kneel down by my black brother in the same prayer. What a humiliation! With all my sense I have come no farther than the poor ignorant negro who has just learned to spell. Poor Tom indeed seems to have seen deeper things in the holy book than I, but I, who used to make citations from Homer, now begin to quote the Bible as Uncle Tom does!” Praise can go no farther than this, that “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” has shown how the love of God can support a slave, under the lash, in the hour when he is flogged to death, and fill his heart with pity while he cries, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do!” It was this that conquered the intellect of the scholar, and broke his heart, and flooded his eyes with tears.

  Perhaps the most striking testimony to the influence of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” grew out of a suggestion of Lord Shaftesbury’s that the women of England and Europe send their signatures to a testimonial to be presented to Mrs. Stowe, for, when this testimonial came in, it filled twenty-six thick folio volumes, solidly bound in morocco, and it held the names of 562,448 women, representing every rank, from the throne of England to the wives of the humblest artisans in Wales or the peasants in Italy.

  The message of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” is so simple that he who runs may read. It was not written for literary critics, for scholars or for college graduates. George Eliot wrote her “Romola” with the historian and the philosopher and the editor of reviews ever in mind. Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” for farmers, factory men, merchants and clerks, the miscellaneous mass that make up the millions, to rouse them to the wrongs of slavery.

  In it she tried to prove two things. First, that slavery, as a system, reacted upon the loftiest natures, distorting and injuring them. Witness the Kentucky gentleman, Mr. Shelby. His wife was a patrician, the very embodiment of courtesy and good-will, affection and sympathy. Her husband was a man of honour, a representative of the bluest blood of the old Lexington families, with a heart so gentle that the sight of a young bird that had fallen out of the nest in the tree moved him to tears; but, little by little, pressed by his necessities and hardened by the spectacle of slaves bought and slaves sold, he himself sells the woman who has been a nurse to his children, and Uncle Tom who has been like a saviour to his own boys in the hour of their peril in forest and river, sends both of the slaves into the cotton plantations of Louisiana, breaking his solemn pledge to his wife and his family, in the hope that he could escape from debt, that like a millstone weighed him into the abyss.

  Then, the book tries to show how slavery develops the worst men, of the stamp of Simon Legree, the brutal overseer. Legree pours out the vials of his wrath upon the slaves about him, debauching a young octaroon to the level of his mistress, hunting his slaves with bloodhounds, killing them without trial before a jury. Power is dangerous; there is the czar spirit in every man. Slavery made a brute still more brutal — made the sensual man more sensual, and finally debased Legree to the level of the demon.

  It is a book full of pathos and tears. Remembering that the book was written for the miscellaneous millions, to rouse the nation at large to moral indignation, it is doubtful whether any book was ever more perfectly adapted to the end aimed at. Literary artists have criticized “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” and contrasted it with “Henry Esmond,” “Vanity Fair” and “Adam Bede.” But if Thackeray, Dickens and George Eliot achieved unique success in creating books that should reach their set, one thing is certain, — the boys, who afterwards became the soldiers of the Civil War, read “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” with dim eyes and indignant hearts, because the book found their judgment and their conscience, and lifted them to the point where they were made ready in the day of God’s power, to fight the battle for freedom.

  When all the school children had read the death of little Eva and of Uncle Tom, and all the farmers and working men — the dwellers in city and country, from seaboard to mountains and prairie — had followed the career of these slaves to the end, and the people of the North were fully awake to the horror of the slave traffic, the multitudes began to look with questioning eyes into each other’s faces, asking, “What can be done? What is the next step?” And then it was that a fanatic entered the scene.

  His name was John Brown, descended from Peter Brown, a Pilgrim of the Mayflower. He had been cattle-drover, tanner and wool-merchant. When about forty years of age he was living in Springfield, Massachusetts. One night, in 1849, a runaway slave knocked at his door and told Brown the story of his flight, of the weeks he had spent hiding in the swamps, of his escape to the fastnesses of the mountains, of his life in the forest, and how he finally reached New York and Springfield. It was a story of starvation, hunger, cold, blows and piercing anguish. Long after the children had gone to bed at midnight, while the slave was sleeping in a blanket beside the fire, John Brown sat musing over the national infamy. All the next day and night the conference continued with this runaway, who was also a negro preacher. The following night John Brown assembled h
is sons. He closed the door and told his family his decision. He was a tall man, over six feet, straight and lithe, slightly gray, with thin lips and smooth face. The Bible was almost the only book in the house, and no sound was so familiar as the voice of prayer. Brown was lifted into the prophetic mood. He told his family that he had decided to give himself, and to consecrate them, to righting the wrongs of the slaves; that he had heard a voice calling him to the work of the deliverer; that he would be killed, and that they must expect also to die the martyr’s death, and that henceforth they must expect only crusts, wounds, bitter enmity, and finally martyrdom. A little later and Brown had moved the younger children of his family to North Elba, in the Adirondack woods, that the slaves on the underground route might be able to hide in the forest, in the event of the pursuers overtaking them. Brown then began to travel along Mason and Dixon’s line from the city of Washington through to Topeka, Kan. From time to time he would cross the line, take charge of a little group of slaves, and hiding by day and travelling by night, carry them from one underground station to another. It was said that he had personally conducted runaway slaves along every route for a thousand miles from East to West, between the Atlantic and the Missouri River.

  One of the friends of Brown’s childhood was the Hon. James B. Grinnell, who founded the town and college in Iowa. This congressman loved to tell the story of the night when John Brown knocked at his door. Outside was a wagon, packed with slaves, whom Brown had carried across the line from Missouri. He had driven four horses at their limit of speed for a hundred miles and had no defenders, save two or three men and as many guns. “I am a dealer in wool,” said the stranger, “and my name is Captain John Brown of Kansas.” The first thing Mr. Grinnell did was to find a shelter for these slaves, with food and beds. The next thing was to hide the wagon and the horses in the thick grove near by. Early the next morning the news spread like wild-fire, and the settlers began to pour in. John Brown made a speech to the farmers and justified his act. The villagers were terrified lest the pursuers come any moment and burn their houses. The three Congregational ministers offered prayers, asked for help, and started out to raise money. When the night fell the slaves were rushed to the terminus of the railway and carried through to Chicago, being shipped in a freight car as sheep, to distinguish their woolly heads from the goats, named white men.