Harriet Beecher Stowe, 1811-1896.

Harriet Beecher Stowe was born on June 14, 1811 at Litchfield, Connecticut. The first twelve years of her life were spent in the intellectual atmosphere of Litchfield, which was a famous resort of ministers, judges, lawyers and professional men of superior attainments.

When about twelve, she went to Hartford, where her sister Catherine had opened a school. While there she was known as an absent-minded and moody young lady, odd in her manner and habits, but a fine scholar, excelling especially in the writing of compositions. In 1832, her father assumed the presidency of Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati, Ohio, she followed her family. On the fifth of January, 1836, she married Professor Calvin E. Stowe, a man of learning and distinction. In Cincinnati, she came into contact with fugitive slaves.


Uncle Tom's Cabin
Today the novel is often labeled condescending, but its characters still have the power to move our hearts. Though “Uncle Tom” has become a synonym for a fawning black yes-man, Stowe's Tom is actually American literature's first black hero

Stowe was catapulted to international fame with the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1851. . Following publication of the book, she became a celebrity, speaking against slavery both in America and Europe. She wrote A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1853) extensively documenting the realities on which the book was based, to refute critics who tried to argue that it was inauthentic; and published a second anti-slavery novel, Dred in1856.

The following excerpt is taken from the last chapter of Uncle Tom's Cabin, which very much resembles a sermon. She urges white Northerners to welcome escaped slaves and treat them with respect:

On the shores of our free states are emerging the poor, shattered, broken remnants of families,--men and women, escaped, by miraculous providences, from the surges of slavery,--feeble in knowledge, and, in many cases, infirm in moral constitution, from a system which confounds and confuses every principle of Christianity and morality. They come to seek a refuge among you; they come to seek education, knowledge, Christianity. What do you owe to these poor, unfortunates, O Christians? Does not every American Christian owe to the African race some effort at reparation for the wrongs that the American nation has brought upon them? Shall the doors of churches and school-houses be shut down upon them? Shall states arise and shake them out? Shall the Church of Christ hear in silence the taunt that is thrown at them, and shrink away from the helpless hand that they stretch out, and shrink away from the courage the cruelty that would chase them from our borders? If it must be so, it will be a mournful spectacle. If it must be so, the country will have reason to tremble, when it remembers that fate of nations is in the hand of the One who is very pitiful, and of tender compassion.

Thereafter, Stowe became one of America's best-paid and most famous writers. Born into a distinguished New England family, Stowe began her career writing stories for a Cincinnati literary club. Stowe was fortunate to have begun her career before writing had become sufficiently remunerative in the United States to allow men to dominate the profession. First published in weekly installments from June 5, 1851 to April 1, 1852 in the journal National Era, Stowe's novel created such a controversy that when she was introduced to President Abraham Lincoln in 1862, he is said to have greeted her with the words: "So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war!"


Photograph courtesy of the Ohio Historical Society
This house was once the residence of Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896), the influential antislavery author who wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin. In 1832, Harriet Beecher moved from Litchfield, Connecticut, to Cincinnati with her sister and father, a Congregationalist minister who accepted an offer to teach at the Lane Seminary. Harriet and her sister lived with their father in this house, which was provided by the Seminary, and soon after settling in established the Western Female Institute. In 1833, while teaching at the Western Female Institute, the two sisters published Geography for Children. The following year Harriet Beecher won a prize for "New England Sketch," published in the Western Monthly Magazine. Marrying Calvin Ellis Stowe, a fellow teacher at the Western Female Institute, in 1835, Harriet Beecher Stowe moved out of her father's house and into a nearby home in the Walnut Hills area. In the following years, however, Stowe would be a frequent visitor to this house where she and her family would meet with like-minded antislavery activists.

Harriet - Lyman - Henry

Sometime after 1860, Lyman Beecher left Boston to live in Brooklyn with his son, Henry Ward Beecher, popular pastor of Plymouth Congregational Church. Though the younger Beecher's ministry of love and redemption contrasted strongly with his father's strict Calvinist philosophy, both he and his sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe, carried on their father's opposition to slavery. Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, rendered her tragic subject in a style that combined heartfelt conviction with endless documentary detail, and the book made her the best-known author of her generation. This image was made around 1861, when Henry Ward Beecher, as editor of the national magazine The Independent, began to call for ever more radical action from Lincoln to end slavery and bring the war to a close. Brady's photograph of two famous siblings and their renowned father record a distinguished American family and three important intellectual leaders.

Harriet Beecher Stowe : Three Novels : Uncle Tom's Cabin Or, Life Among the Lowly; The Minister's Wooing; Oldtown Folks
Uncle Tom's Cabin is probably the most influential work of fiction in American history. This Christian epic turned millions of Americans against slavery, bringing the "peculiar institution" immeasurably closer to its destruction. In The Minister's Wooing and Oldtown Folks, Stowe examines the interplay of religion, domesticity, and women's roles and choices in the shaping of American culture.




The American Woman's Home by Catharine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
Originally published in 1869, was one of the late nineteenth century's most important handbooks of domestic advice. This book represents their attempt to direct women's acquisition and use of a dizzying variety of new household consumer goods available in the post-Civil War economic boom

American Civil War Women
Women Soldiers
Womens Subject Civil War Titles
Civil War Exhibits
Civil War Timeline
State Battle Maps
Documents of the War
Civil War Cooking
Kids Zone Causes of the War
Young Reader Civil War Books
Civil War Store

American Civil War Book Titles

A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin:
Presenting the Original Facts and Documents upon Which the Story is Founded. Together with Corroborative Statements Verifying the Truth of the Work. Upon publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin, Stowe was attacked immediately by pro-slavery writers. Her work was dismissed as fiction

To 'Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women's Lives and Labors after the Civil War
Thousands of former slaves flocked to southern cities in search of work, they found the demands placed on them as wage-earners disturbingly similar to those they had faced as slaves: seven-day workweeks, endless labor, and poor treatment

Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War
When Confederate men marched off to battle, southern women struggled with the new responsibilities of directing farms and plantations, providing for families, and supervising increasingly restive slaves

She Went to the Field:
Women Soldiers of the Civil War

several substantiated cases of female soldiers during the American Civil War, including Sarah Rosetta Wakeman (aka Private Wakeman, Union); Sarah Emma Edmonds (aka Private Thompson, Union); Loreta Janeta Velazquez (aka Lieutenant Buford, Confederate); and Jennie Hodgers (aka Private Cashier, Union).

Sanctified Trial: The Diary of Eliza Rhea Anderson Fain, a Confederate Woman in East Tennessee
The Diary of Eliza Rhea Anderson Fain

Behind the Scenes: Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House
This is a memior written by a woman who started life as a slave, then managed to buy her freedom, and later set up a successful living as a seamstress, eventually going to work for Mary Todd Lincoln in the White House

A Very Violent Rebel: The Civil War Diary of Ellen Renshaw House
The Siege of Knoxville (November 1863) is covered and Sutherland's footnotes make for good history

Harriet Tubman: Imagining a Life: A Biography
Travel with Tubman along the treacherous route of the Underground Railroad. Hear of her friendships with Frederick Douglass, John Brown, and other abolitionists.

The War-Time Journal of a Georgia Girl, 1864-1865
Eliza Andrews' diary is more cogent than any novel about the Civil War. General Sherman laid a track, and ELiza had to follow his footsteps through Georgia. Her insights into war and the havoc it wrought in the South are accompanied by her own editorial comments forty-four years later

When Will This Cruel War Be Over?
A Confederate girl in Virginia, in 1864, Emma Simpson writes about the hardships of growing up during a turbulent time

A Girl's Life in Virginia Before the War
First published in 1895. An engrossing eyewitness account of antebellum plantation life as it really was

Record of the Actual Experiences of the Wife of a Confederate Officer
The author tells of her many travels across the war-torn South, capture behind enemy lines, encounter with Belle Boyd, friendship with General J. E. B. Stuart, and the devastation suffered by the citizens of Richmond in the last days of the Confederacy.

Civil War History Documentary DVD Movie Titles

The Civil War - A Film by Ken Burns
Here is the saga of celebrated generals and ordinary soldiers, a heroic and transcendent president and a country that had to divide itself in two in order to become one

Uncle Toms Cabin
DVD also features a detailed and informative essay by historian David Pierce, an extensive collection of stills, promotional materials, and music cue sheets, and details of cuts made to the film, including two deleted scenes that are among the best moments the film has to offer

Women And The Civil War
The many contributions of women in both the North and South are presented in this program describing their roles on and near the momentous battles of the American Civil War

American Experience - Abraham and Mary Lincoln: A House Divided
Abraham Lincoln's legacy as the Great Emancipator reshaped the nation while his tragic death left Mary reclusive and forgotten.

The Last Confederate: The Story of Robert Adams
Great historically correct movie of a noble confederate and his undying love of a Yankee girl.

American Experience: The Massachusetts 54th Colored Infantry
After Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, the governor of Massachusetts was authorized to raise the first northern black regiment,  the Massachusetts 54th colored infantry.

Gettysburg / Gods and Generals
The tide of the war changes during three fierce days of combat at Gettysburg [Disc 1] the gripping saga of the tactics command errors and sacrifices behind the bloodiest battle ever fought on U.S. soil. Gods and Generals [Disc 2] reveals the spirited allegiances and fierce combat of earlier Civil War struggles

Horses of Gettysburg
Civil War Minutes

Filmed in high definition with charging horses, battlefield panoramas and no "talking heads," this cinematic documentary tells the story of the estimated 72,000 horses and mules that fought at the Battle of Gettysburg and uncovers the strategies employed to ensure that the millions of animals in service with the North and South remained healthy and well-trained for action.

Harriet Beecher Stowe
by Suzanne M. Coil
Impact Books
Impact Biographies
Grade 7-12. Coil's admiring biography of Harriet Beecher Stowe creates a portrait of the celebrated author as a dutiful daughter; a committed abolitionist; a loving wife devoted to an often brilliant but ineffectual husband; and a compulsive, prolific writer who wrote everything from gothic romances to articles on the evils of alcohol in order to support her family. Adding a personal touch to the book are excerpts from Stowe's letters and works, many of which focus on the small hassles of daily life and the frustrations of trying to write. Readers will be most interested in how Stowe came to pen Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Coil does not disappoint them. She thoroughly documents the writing of the novel, its reception in the South (which prompted Stowe to write A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin to verify what she'd written in the novel), and the worldwide response to the book. The biography will be a useful addition to any collection, but it will be particularly helpful to students needing information about the years leading up to the Civil War, the work of the abolitionists, and the novel that "moved the world."


Uncle Tom's Cabin
by Harriet Beecher Stowe
An international bestseller that sold more than 300,000 copies when it first appeared in 1852, Uncle Tom's Cabin was dismissed by some as abolitionist propaganda; yet Tolstoy deemed it a great work of literature "flowing from love of God and man." Today, however, Harriet Beecher Stowe's stirring indictment of slavery is often confused with garish dramatizations that flourished for decades after the Civil War: productions that relied heavily on melodramatic simplifications of character totally alien to the original. Thus "Uncle Tom" has become a pejorative term for a subservient black, whereas Uncle Tom in the book is a man who, under the most inhumane of circumstances, never loses his human dignity. "Uncle Tom's Cabin" is the most powerful and most enduring work of art ever written about American slavery," said Alfred Kazin.

Synopsis : Eliza Harris, a slave whose child is to be sold, escapes her beloved home on the Shelby plantation in Kentucky and heads North, eludes the hired slave catchers and is aided by the underground railroad. Another slave, Uncle Tom, is sent "down the river" for sale and ultimately endures a martyr's death under the whips of Simon Legree's overseers. Originally published in 1852, this is a classic must-read in American Literature.