Part 13

From the Litchfield Academy, Harriet was sent to the celebrated Female Seminary established by her sister Catharine at Hartford, Conn. She here began the study of Latin and, "at the end of the first year, made a translation of Ovid in verse which was read at the final exhibition of the school." It was her ambition to be a poet and she began a play called 'Cleon,' filling "blank book after blank book with this drama." Mrs. Fields prints six pages of this poem and the specimens have more than enough merit to convince one that the author might have attained distinction as a poet. Her energetic sister Catharine however put an end to this innocent diversion, saying that she must not waste her time writing poetry but discipline her mind upon Butler's Analogy. To enforce compliance, Harriet was assigned to teach the Analogy to a class of girls as old as herself, "being compelled to master each chapter just ahead of the class." This occupation, with Latin, French and Italian, sufficiently protected her from the dissipation of writing poetry.

Harriet remained in the Hartford school, as pupil and teacher, from her thirteenth to her twenty-third year. In her spiritual history, this was an important period. It may seem that her soul had hitherto not been neglected but as yet youth and a sunny nature had kept her from any agonies of Christian experience. Now her time had come. No one under the care of the stern Puritan, Catharine Beecher, would be suffered to forget her eternal interests. Both of Mrs. Stowe's biographers feel the necessity of making us acquainted with this masterful lady, "whose strong, vigorous mind and tremendous personality," says Mr. Stowe, "indelibly stamped themselves on the sensitive, dreamy, poetic nature of her younger sister."

It was Catharine's distinction to have written, it is claimed, the best refutation of Edwards on the Will ever published. She was undoubtedly the most acute and vigorous intellect in the Beecher family. Like all the members of her remarkable family, she was intensely religious and, at the period when Harriet passed to her care, gloomily religious. It could not have been otherwise. She had been engaged to marry Prof. Alexander Fisher, of Yale College, a young man of great promise. Unhappily, he was drowned at sea, and she believed his soul was eternally lost. It is futile to ask why Yale College should have entrusted a professorship to a man whom the Lord would send to perdition, or why Miss Beecher should have loved such an abandoned character; it is enough to say that she loved him and that she believed his soul to be lost; and was it her fault that she could not be a cheerful companion to a young girl of thirteen?

As we have seen, Harriet must not fritter away her time writing plays; she must study Butler's Analogy. She must also read Baxter's Saints Rest, than which, says Mrs. Stowe, "no book ever affected me more powerfully. As I walked the pavements I wished that they might sink beneath me if only I might find myself in heaven." In this mental condition she went to her home in Litchfield to spend her vacation. One dewy fresh Sunday morning of that period stood by itself in her memory. "I knew," she says, "it was sacramental Sunday, and thought with sadness that when all the good people should take the bread and wine I should be left out. I tried hard to think of my sins and count them up; but what with the birds, the daisies, and the brooks that rippled by the way, it was impossible." The sermon of Dr. Beecher was unusually sweet and tender and when he appealed to his hearers to trust themselves to Jesus, their faithful friend, she says, "I longed to cry out I will. Then the awful thought came over me that I had never had any conviction of my sins and consequently could not come to him." Happily the inspiration came to her that if she needed conviction of sin and Jesus were such a friend, he would give it to her; she would trust him for the whole, and she went home illumined with joy.

When her father returned, she fell into his arms saying, "Father, I have given myself to Jesus and he has taken me." "Is it so?" said he. "Then has a new flower blossomed in the kingdom this day." This is very sweet and beautiful and it shows that Dr. Beecher had a tender heart under his Calvinistic theology. "If she could have been let alone," says her son, "and taught to 'look up and not down, forward and not back, out and not in,' this religious experience might have gone on as sweetly and naturally as the opening of a flower in the gentle rays of the sun. But unfortunately this was not possible at a time when self-examination was carried to an extreme that was calculated to drive a nervous and sensitive child well-nigh distracted. First, even her sister Catharine was afraid that there might be something wrong in the case of a lamb that had come into the fold without being first chased all over the lot by the shepherd: great stress being laid on what was called being under conviction. Then also the pastor of the First Church in Hartford, a bosom friend of Dr. Beecher, looked with melancholy and suspicious eyes on this unusual and doubtful path to heaven."

Briefly stated, these two spiritual guides put Harriet through a process which brought her to a sense of sin that must have filled their hearts with joy. She reached the stage when she wrote to her brother Edward: "My whole life is one continued struggle; I do nothing right. I am beset behind and before, and my sins take away all my happiness."

Unfortunately for her, it was at this stage of Harriet's religious experience that Dr. Beecher was called to Boston to stem the rising tide of Unitarianism, with its easy notions about conviction of sin and other cardinal elements of a true faith. To be thrown into the fervors of a crusade was just the experience which Harriet's heated brain did not need. Her life at this period was divided between Hartford and Boston, but her heart went with Dr. Beecher to his great enterprise in Boston, or, as Mrs. Fields says, "This period in Boston was the time when Harriet felt she drew nearer to her father than at any other period of her life."

It will not be necessary to go farther into this controversy than to show what a cauldron it was for the family of Dr. Beecher. In his autobiography, Dr. Beecher says, "From the time Unitarianism began to show itself in this country, it was as fire in my bones." After his call to Boston, he writes again, "My mind had been heating, heating, heating. Now I had a chance to strike." The situation that confronted him in Boston rather inflamed than subdued his spirit. Let Mrs. Stowe tell the story herself. "Calvinism or orthodoxy," she says, "was the despised and persecuted form of faith. It was the dethroned royal family wandering like a permitted mendicant in the city where it once held high court, and Unitarianism reigned in its stead. All the literary men of Massachusetts were Unitarians. All the trustees and professors of Harvard College were Unitarians. All the elite of wealth and fashion crowded Unitarian churches. The judges on the bench were Unitarian, giving decisions by which the peculiar features of church organization, so carefully ordained by the Pilgrim Fathers, had been nullified. The dominant majority entered at once into possession of churches and church property, leaving the orthodox minority to go out into schoolhouses and town halls, and build their churches as best they could."

We can hardly suppose that Harriet had read the decision of the court, or that she deemed it necessary; she knew it was wrong by instinct, and the iron entered her soul. The facts appear to have been as follows: The old parishes in New England included a given territory like a school district or a voting precinct. Members of a given parish, if they were communicants, formed themselves into a "church" which was the church of that parish. The court decided that this church always remained the church of that parish. Members might withdraw, but they withdrew as individuals. They could not withdraw the church, not even if they constituted a majority.

The correctness of this decision does not concern us here; it is enough that Dr. Beecher thought it wrong and that Harriet thought it wrong. "The effect of all this," she says, "upon my father's mind was to keep him at a white heat of enthusiasm. His family prayers at this period, departing from the customary forms of unexcited hours, became often upheavings of passionate emotion, such as I shall never forget. 'Come, Lord Jesus,' he would say, 'here where the bones of the fathers rest, here where the crown has been torn from thy brow, come and recall thy wandering children. Behold thy flock scattered upon the mountain--these sheep, what have they done! Gather them, gather them, O good shepherd, for their feet stumble upon the dark mountains.'"

The fierce heat of this period was too much for a tender plant like Harriet. For her state of mind, even Catharine thought the Boston home life was not entirely suitable. It would be better for her in Hartford. "Harriet will have young society here which she cannot have at home, and I think cheerful and amusing friends will do much for her." Catharine had received a letter from Harriet which, she says, "made me feel uneasy," as well it might. Harriet had written her sister: "I don't know as I am fit for anything, and I have thought that I could wish to die young and let the remembrance of me and my faults perish in the grave.... Sometimes I could not sleep, and have groaned and cried till midnight, while in the daytime I tried to appear cheerful, and succeeded so well that papa reproved me for laughing so much." Life was too serious to permit even an affectation of gaiety. "The atmosphere of that period," says Mrs. Field, "and the terrible arguments of her father and of her sister Catharine were sometimes more than she could endure." Her brother Edward was helpful and comforting. She thanks him for helping her solve some of her problems, but the situation was critical: "I feared that if you left me thus I might return to the same dark, desolate state in which I had been all summer. I felt that my immortal interest, my happiness for both worlds, was depending on the turn my feelings might take."

Dr. Beecher was too much absorbed with his mission to observe what was going on in his own family, unless there chanced to be an unexpected outburst of gaiety. "Every leisure hour was beset by people who came with earnest intention to express to him those various phases of weary, restless wandering desire proper to an earnest people whose traditional faith has been broken up.... Inquirers were constantly coming with every imaginable theological problem ... he was to be seen all day talking with whoever would talk ... till an hour or two before the time (of service), when he would rush up to his study; ... just as the last stroke of the bell was dying away, he would emerge from the study with his coat very much awry, come down stairs like a hurricane, stand impatiently protesting while female hands that ever lay in wait adjusted his cravat and settled his collar ... and hooking wife or daughter like a satchel on his arm, away he would start on such a race through the streets as left neither brain nor breath till the church was gained." Such, very much abbreviated, is Mrs. Stowe's portrait of her father at this period. It is a good example of her power of delineation; but what a life was this for a half distracted girl like Harriet! Much better for her would have been the old serene, peaceful, quiet life of Litchfield.

She had several kinds of religious trouble. It troubled her that in the book of Job, God should seem "to have stripped a dependent creature of all that renders life desirable, and then to have answered his complaints from the whirlwind, and, instead of showing mercy and pity, to have overwhelmed him with a display of his power and justice." It troubled her that when she allowed herself to take a milder view of deity, "I feel," she says, "less fear of God and, in view of sin, I feel only a sensation of grief." This was an alarming decline. It troubled her again that she loved literature, whereas she ought only to care for religion. She writes to Edward: "You speak of your predilections for literature being a snare to you. I have found it so myself." Evidently, as she has before said, she was beset behind and before. What was perhaps worst of all, the heavens seemed closed to her. Calvinism was pure agnosticism; and she had been educated a Calvinist. There was no 'imminent God,' in all and through all, for Calvinism; that came in with Transcendentalism, a form of thought which never seems to have touched Mrs. Stowe. She seems always to have felt, as at this period she writes Edward, that "still, after all, God is a being afar off." Nevertheless, there was Christ, but Christ at this period was also afar off: "I feel that I love God,--that is that I love Christ,--that I find happiness in it, and yet it is not that kind of comfort which would arise from free communication of my wants and sorrows to a friend. I sometimes wish that the Savior were visibly present in this world, that I might go to him for a solution of some of my difficulties."

It will be seen from this passage that Harriet's storm-tossed soul was settling down upon Christ as the nearest approach to God one could gain in the darkness, and with this she taught herself to be content. "So, after four years of struggling and suffering," writes her son, "she returns to the place where she started from as a child of thirteen. It has been like watching a ship with straining masts and storm-beaten sails, buffeted by the waves, making for the harbor, and coming at last to quiet anchorage." One cannot help reflecting how different would have been her experience in the household of Dr. Channing; but Dr. Beecher would sooner have trusted her in a den of wolves.

Harriet was seventeen years old when, mentally, she reached her quiet anchorage but, physically as might be expected, it was with a constitution undermined and with health broken. "She had not grown to be a strong woman," says Mrs. Fields; "the apparently healthy and hearty child had been suffered to think and feel, to study and starve (as we say), starve for relaxation, until she became a woman of much suffering and many inadequacies of physical life." A year or two later Harriet herself writes, "This inner world of mine has become worn out and untenable," and again, "About half my time I am scarcely alive.... I have everything but good health.... Thought, intense emotional thought, has been my disease."

At the end of six restless and stormy years, in 1832, Dr. Beecher resigned his Boston pastorate to accept the presidency of Lane Theological Seminary at Cincinnati, Ohio, Catharine and Harriet accompanying the family with the purpose of establishing a high grade school for young women. The plan was successfully carried out, and the "Western Female Institute" marked a new stage in education west of the Alleghenies. One of Harriet's early achievements at Cincinnati was the publication of a text-book in geography, her first attempt at authorship. She made her entry into the field of imaginative literature by gaining a prize of $50 for a story printed in The Western Magazine.

Her connection with the "Western Female Institute" was brief, and the prosecution of a literary career was postponed, by her marriage in 1836, with Prof. Calvin E. Stowe; or, as she announces this momentous event: "about half an hour more and your old friend, schoolmate, sister, etc., will cease to be Hattie Beecher and change to nobody knows who."

The married life of Mrs. Stowe covered a period of fifty years and was a conspicuously happy one. Prof. Stowe, who seemed so much like a myth to the general public, was a man of great learning and keen intelligence, unimaginative as he says himself, but richly endowed with "a certain broad humor and drollery." His son tells us that he was "an inimitable mimic and story-teller. No small proportion of Mrs. Stowe's success as a literary woman is to be attributed to him." The Sam Lawson stories are said to be a little more his than hers, being "told as they came from Mr. Stowe's lips with little or no alteration." For her scholarly husband, Mrs. Stowe had the highest appreciation and the prettiest way of expressing it: "If you were not already my dearly loved husband," she writes him, "I should certainly fall in love with you." Prof. Stowe could also write a love-letter: "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." If a man's wife is to have her biography written, he will not be sorry that he has sent her some effusive love-letters.

Fourteen years of Mrs. Stowe's beautiful married life were spent in Cincinnati, with many vicissitudes of ill-health, some poverty, and the birth of six children, three sons and three daughters. One can get some idea both of the happiness and the hardship of that life from her letters. In 1843, seven years after marriage, she writes, "Our straits for money this year are unparalleled even in our annals. Even our bright and cheery neighbor Allen begins to look blue, and says $600 is the very most we can hope to collect of our salary, once $1,200." Again she writes, "I am already half sick from confinement to the house and overwork. If I should sew every day for a month to come I should not be able to accomplish half of what is to be done." There were trials enough during this period, but her severest affliction came in its last year, in the loss of an infant son by cholera. That was in 1849, when Cincinnati was devastated; when during the months of June, July and August more than nine thousand persons died of cholera within three miles of her house, and among them she says, "My Charley, my beautiful, loving, gladsome baby, so loving, so sweet, so full of life and hope and strength."

In these years, Mrs. Stowe's life was too full of domestic care to permit many excursions into the field of literature. In 1842, a collection of sketches was published by the Harpers under the title of the "Mayflower." Occasionally she contributed a bright little story to a monthly or an annual. An amusing account is given of the writing of one of these stories, by a lady who volunteered to serve as amanuensis while Mrs. Stowe dictated, and at the same time supervised a new girl in the kitchen: "You may now write," said Mrs. Stowe, "'Her lover wept with her, nor dared he again touch the point so sacredly guarded--(Mina, roll that crust a little thinner). He spoke in soothing tones.--(Mina, poke the coals).'"

These literary efforts, produced under difficulties, inspired Prof. Stowe with great confidence in her genius. He wrote her in 1842, "My dear, you must be a literary woman. It is so written in the book of fate." Again he writes, "God has written it in his book that you must be a literary woman, and who are we that we should contend against God! You must therefore make all your calculations to spend the rest of your life with your pen." Nevertheless the next eight years pass as the last six have passed without apparently bringing the dream of a literary career nearer fulfilment. With a few strokes of the pen, Mrs. Stowe draws a picture of her life at this period: "I was married when I was twenty-five years old to a man rich in Greek and Hebrew and, alas, rich in nothing else.... During long years of struggling with poverty and sickness, and a hot, debilitating climate, my children grew up around me. The nursery and the kitchen were my principal fields of labor. Some of my friends, pitying my trials, copied and sent a number of little sketches from my pen to certain liberally paying annuals, with my name. With the first money that I earned in this way I bought a feather bed! for as I had married into poverty and without a dowry, and as my husband had only a large library of books and a good deal of learning, the bed and pillows were thought the most profitable investment. After this I thought that I had discovered the philosopher's stone. So when a new carpet or mattress was going to be needed, or when at the close of the year it began to be evident that my family accounts, like poor Dora's, 'wouldn't add up,' then I used to say to my faithful friend and factotum Anna, who shared all my joys and sorrows, 'Now, if you will keep the babies and attend to things in the house for a day, I'll write a piece and then we'll be out of the scrape.' So I became an author,--very modest I do assure you."

The hardships and privations of Mrs. Stowe's residence in Cincinnati were more than compensated to her by the opportunity it afforded for intimate acquaintance with the negro character and personal observation of the institution of slavery. Only the breadth of the Ohio river separated her from Kentucky, a slave State. While yet a teacher in the Female Institute, she spent a vacation upon a Kentucky estate, afterward graphically described in 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' as Col. Shelby's plantation. A companion upon this visit said, "Harriet did not seem to notice anything in particular that happened.... Afterwards, in reading 'Uncle Tom,' I recognized scene after scene of that visit portrayed with the most minute fidelity." A dozen years before there were any similar demonstrations in Boston, she witnessed in 1838, proslavery riots in Cincinnati when Birney's Abolition press was wrecked and when Henry Ward Beecher, then a young Cincinnati editor, went armed to and from his office. She had had in her service a slave girl whose master was searching the city for her, and whose rescue had been effected by Prof. Stowe and Henry Ward Beecher who, "both armed, drove the fugitive, in a covered wagon, by night, by unfrequented roads, twelve miles back into the country, and left her in safety." This incident was the basis of "the fugitive's escape from Tom Loker and Marks in 'Uncle Tom's Cabin.'"

Lane Theological Seminary, in which Prof. Stowe held a chair, had, it is said, "become a hot-bed of abolition." Partly for protection, a colony of negroes had settled about the seminary, and these families, says Mrs. Stowe, "became my favorite resort in cases of emergency. If anyone wishes to have a black face look handsome, let them be left as I have been, in feeble health, in oppressive hot weather, with a sick baby in arms, and two other ones in the nursery, and not a servant in the whole house to do a turn." "Time would fail me," writes Mrs. Stowe, "to tell you all that I learned incidentally of the slave system in the history of various slaves who came into my family, and of the underground railroad which, I may say, ran through our house."

A New England education alone would not have given Mrs. Stowe the material to write the story of "Uncle Tom." A youth passed on a Southern plantation would have made her callous and indifferent, as it did so many tender-hearted women. A New England woman of genius, educated in New England traditions, was providentially transferred to the heated border line between freedom and slavery and, during eighteen years, made to hear a thousand authentic incidents of the patriarchal system from the victims themselves. Then "Uncle Tom's Cabin" could be written. Perhaps one other element of preparation ought to be mentioned since Mrs. Stowe laid stress upon it herself. The woman who should write "Uncle Tom's Cabin" needed to be a mother who had known what it is to have a child snatched from her arms irrevocably and without a moment's notice. It was at her baby's "dying bed and at his grave that I learned," she says, "what a poor slave mother may feel when her child is torn away from her. In those depths of sorrow which seemed to me immeasurable, it was my only prayer to God that such anguish might not be suffered in vain.... I allude to this because I have often felt that much that is in that book ('Uncle Tom') had its roots in the awful scenes and bitter sorrows of that summer."

In 1850, this western life, with its mixture of sweet and bitter waters, came to an end. The climate of Cincinnati was unfavorable to the health of both Mr. and Mrs. Stowe, and Mr. Stowe accepted a professorship in Bowdoin College, at the small salary of $1,000 a year, declining at the same time an offer from New York city of $2,300. Why he accepted the smaller salary is not said. Certainly it assured him his old felicity, his Master's blessing upon the poor. The situation, however, was better than it seems, as Mrs. Stowe had written enough to have confidence in her pen, and she purposed to make the family income at least $1,700 by her writings. She accomplished much more than that as we shall presently see.

From the car window, as one passes through Brunswick, Maine, he can see the house in which Mrs. Stowe passed the three following very happy years, in which her seventh child was born, a son who lived to be her biographer, and in which she wrote "Uncle Tom's Cabin." It will be remembered that the year 1850 was made memorable by the enactment of the Fugitive Slave Law. How the attempted execution of this law affected Mrs. Stowe can be anticipated. "To me," she says, "it is incredible, amazing, mournful. I feel as if I should be willing to sink with it, were all this sin and misery to sink in the sea.... I sobbed, aloud in one pew and Mrs. Judge Reeves in another."

In this mood, Mrs. Stowe received a letter from Mrs. Edward Beecher saying, "Hattie, if I could use a pen as you can, I would write something to make this nation feel what an accursed thing slavery is." Her children remember that at the reading of this letter, Mrs. Stowe rose from her chair, crushing the letter in her hand, and said, "I will write something,--I will if I live." The fulfilment of this vow was "Uncle Tom's Cabin."

This story was begun in The National Era, on June 5, 1851; it was announced to run through three months and it occupied ten. "I could not control the story," said Mrs. Stowe; "it wrote itself." Again, she said, "I the author of 'Uncle Tom's Cabin!' No, indeed. The Lord himself wrote it, and I was but the humblest instrument in his hand." It has been said that "'Uncle Tom's Cabin' made the crack of the slave-driver's whip and the cries of the tortured blacks ring in every household in the land, till human hearts could bear it no longer," and that it "made the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law an impossibility."