HARRIET BEECHER STOWE,

AUTHOR OF THE MOST POPULAR AMERICAN NOVEL.

EW names are more indelibly written upon our country's history than that of Harriet Beecher Stowe. "No book," says George William Curtis, "was ever more a historical event than 'Uncle Tom's Cabin.' . . . It is the great happiness of Mrs. Stowe not only to have written many delightful books, but to have written one book which will always be famous not only as the most vivid picture of an extinct evil system, but as one of the most powerful influences in overthrowing it. . . . . If all whom she has charmed and quickened should unite to sing her praises, the birds of summer would be outdone."

Harriet Beecher Stowe was the sixth child of Reverend Lyman Beecher, the great head of that great family which has left so deep an impress upon the heart and mind of the American people. She was born in Litchfield, Connecticut, in June, 1811,-just two years before her next younger brother, Henry Ward Beecher. Her father was pastor of the Congregational Church in Litchfield, and her girlhood was passed there and at Hartford, where she attended the excellent seminary kept by her elder sister, Catharine E. Beecher. In 1832 her father accepted a call to the presidency of Lane Theological Seminary, at Cincinnati, and moved thither with his family. Catharine Beecher went also, and established there a new school, under the name of the Western Female Institute, in which Harriet assisted.

In 1833 Mrs. Stowe first had the subject of slavery brought to her personal notice by taking a trip across the river from Cincinnati into Kentucky in company with Miss Dutton, one of the associate teachers in the Western Institute. They visited the estate that afterward figured as that of Mr. Shelby, in "Uncle Tom's Cabin," and here the young authoress first came into personal contact with the slaves of the South. In speaking, many years afterward, of this visit, Miss Dutton said: "Harriet did not seem to notice anything in particular that happened, but sat much of the time as though abstracted in thought. When the negroes did funny things, and cut up capers, she did not seem to pay the

slightest attention to them. Afterward, however, in reading Uncle Tom,' I recognized scene after scene of that visit portrayed with the most minute. fidelity, and knew at once where the material for that portion of the story had been gathered."

Harriet Beecher's life in Cincinnati was such as to bring out all that was best and noblest in her character. Where her father's family was, she could not lack good society, for all that was best intellectually and socially always gath

ered naturally around that centre. Among the professors in Lane Seminary was Calvin E. Stowe, whose wife, a dear friend of Miss Beecher, died soon. after Dr. Beecher's removal to Cincinnati. In 1836 Professor Stowe and Harriet Beecher were married. They were admirably suited to each other. Professor Stowe was a typical man of letters,-a learned, amiable, unpractical philosopher, whose philosophy was like that described by Shakespeare as "an excellent horse in the stable, but an arrant jade on a journey." Her practical

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ability and cheerful, inspiring courage were the unfailing support of her husband. Soon after their marriage he sailed for Europe to purchase books for Lane Seminary, and in a characteristic letter given to him at parting, not to be opened until he was at sea, she charges him, "Set your face like a flint against the cultivation of indigo,' as Elizabeth calls it, in any way or shape. Seriously, dear one, you must give more way to hope than to memory. You are going to a new scene now, and one that I hope will be full of enjoyment to you. I want you to take the good of it."

In 1839 Mrs. Stowe received into her family as a servant a colored girl from Kentucky. By the laws of Ohio she was free, having been brought into the State and left there by her mistress. In spite of this, Professor Stowe received word, after she had lived with them some months, that the girl's master was in the city looking for her, and that if she were not careful she would be seized and taken back into slavery. Finding that this could be accomplished by boldness, perjury, and the connivance of some unscrupulous justice of the peace, Professor Stowe determined to remove the girl to some place of security where she might remain until the search for her should be given up. Accordingly, he and his brother-in-law, Henry Ward Beecher, both armed, drove the fugitive, in a covered wagon, at night, by unfrequented roads, twelve miles back into the country, and left her in safety with the family of old John Van Zandt, the fugitive's friend.

It is from this incident of real life and personal experience that Mrs. Stowe conceived the thrilling episode of Eliza's escape from Tom Loker and Marks, in "Uncle Tom's Cabin."

In the spring of 1832 Mrs. Stowe visited Hartford, taking her six-year-old daughter Hatty with her. In writing from there to her husband she confides some of her literary plans and aspirations to him, and he answers :—

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My dear, you must be a literary woman. It is so written in the book of fate. Make all your calculations accordingly. Get up a good stock of health, and brush up your mind. Drop the E out of your name. It only encumbers it and interferes with the flow and euphony. Write yourself fully and always Harriet Beecher Stowe, which is a name euphonious, flowing, and full of meaning. Then, my word for it, your husband will lift up his head in the gates, and your children will rise up and call you blessed."

The letter closes with a characteristic appeal :

The fact is I can

"And now, my dear wife, I want you to come home as quick as you can. not live without you, and if we were not so prodigious poor I would come for you at once. There is no woman like you in this wide world. Who else has so much talent, with so little self-conceit; so much reputation, with so little affectation; so much literature with so little nonsense, so much enterprise with so little extravagance, so much tongue with so little scold, so much sweetness with so little softness, so much of so many things and so little of so many other things?"

That Professor Stowe's devoted admiration for his wife was reciprocated, and that a most perfect sympathy of feeling existed between the husband and wife, is shown by a line in one of Mrs. Stowe's letters from Hartford, in which she says: "I was telling Belle yesterday that I did not know till I came away how much I was dependent upon you for information. There are a thousand favorite subjects on which I could talk with you better than with any one else. If you were not already my dearly loved husband I should certainly fall in love with you."

The years from 1845 to 1850 were a time of severe trial to Mrs. Stowe. She and her husband both suffered from ill health, and the family was separated. Professor Stowe was struggling with poverty, and endeavoring at the same time to lift the Theological Seminary out of financial difficulties. In 1849, while Professor Stowe was ill at a water-cure establishment in Vermont, their youngest child died of cholera, which was then raging in Cincinnati. In 1850 it was decided to remove to Brunswick, Maine, the seat of Bowdoin College, where Professor Stowe was offered a position; and in April Mrs. Stowe, with three of her five children, started on the long and toilsome journey, leaving her husband with the other two to follow a few months later. Their household goods were shipped at the same time, and Mrs. Stowe, under the pressure of poverty and in delicate health, undertook all the labor and responsibility of establishing their new home. Early in the summer her husband joined her, and in July her son Charles was born. In a letter written about this time she says:

"Sarah, when I look back, I wonder at myself, not that I forget any one thing that I should remember, but that I have remembered anything. From the time that I left Cincinnati with my children to come forth to a country that I knew not of, almost to the present time, it seemed as if I could scarcely breathe, I was so pressed with care. My head dizzy with the whirl of railroads and steamboats; then ten days' sojourn in Boston, and a constant toil and hurry in buying my furniture and equipments; then landing in Brunswick in the midst of a drizzly, inexorable northeast storm, and beginning the work of getting in order a deserted, dreary, damp old house. . . .

"Then comes a letter from my husband saying he is sick abed, and all but dead; don't ever expect to see his family again; wants to know how I shall manage in case I am left a widow; knows we shall get in debt and never get out; wonders at my courage, thinks I am very sanguine, wants me to be prudent, as there won't be much to live on in case of his death, etc.. etc., etc. I read the letter and poke it into the stove, and proceed.". . .

Few women under such circumstances would think of undertaking literary work; yet it was in the midst of these events that the great work of Mrs. Stowe's life began to take definite shape in her mind.

The

year 1850 is memorable in the history of the conflict with slavery. It was the year of Clay's compromise measures, as they were called, which sought to satisfy the North by the admission of California as a free State, and to propitiate the South by the notorious "Fugitive Slave Law." The slave power was at its height, and seemed to hold all things under its feet; yet in truth it

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had entered upon the last stage of its existence, and the forces were fast gathering for its final overthrow.

EFFECTS OF THE FUGITIVE SLAVE LAW.

After the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, letter after letter was received by Mrs. Stowe, in Brunswick, from Mrs. Edward Beecher and other friends, describing the heart-rending scenes which were the inevitable results of the enforcement of this terrible law. Cities were more available for capturing escaped slaves than the country, and Boston, which claimed the "cradle of liberty," Faneuil Hall, opened her doors to the slave-hunters. The sorrow and anguish caused thereby no pen could describe. Families of colored people were broken up. Some hid in garrets and cellars. Some fled to the wharves and embarked in ships and sailed for Europe. Others went to Canada. One poor fellow, who was doing good business as a crockery merchant, and supporting his family well, when he got notice that his master, whom he had left many years before, was after him, set out for Canada in midwinter on foot, as he did not dare to take a public conveyance. He froze both feet on the journey, and they had to be amputated. Mrs. Edward Beecher, in a letter to Mrs. Stowe's son, writing of this period, says:

"I had been nourishing an anti-slavery spirit since Lovejoy was murdered for publishing in his paper articles against slavery and intemperance, when our home was in Illinois. These terrible things which were going on in Boston were well calculated to rouse up this spirit. What can I do? I thought. Not much myself, but I know one who can. So I wrote several letters to your mother, telling her of various heart-rending events caused by the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law. I remember distinctly saying in one of them, 'Now, Hattie, if I could use a pen as you can, I would write something that would make this whole nation feel what an accursed thing slavery is.'

"When we lived in Boston your mother often visited us. . . Several numbers of Uncle Tom's Cabin' were written in your Uncle Edward's study at these times and read to us from manuscripts."

scene in the little

A member of Mrs. Stowe's family well remembers the parlor in Brunswick when the letter alluded to was received. Mrs. Stowe herself read it aloud to the assembled family, and when she came to the passage, "I would write something that would make this whole nation feel what an accursed thing slavery is," Mrs. Stowe rose from her chair, crushing the letter in her hand, and with an expression on her face that stamped itself on the mind of her child, said: "I will write something. I will, if I live."

This was the origin of "Uncle Tom's Cabin." Professor Cairnes and others said truly, "The Fugitive Slave Law has been to the slave power a questionable gain. Among its first fruits was 'Uncle Tom's Cabin.''

It was in the month of February after these words were written that Mrs. Stowe was seated at the communion service in the college church at Brunswick. Suddenly, like the unrolling of a picture, the scene of the death of Uncle Tom