Introduction
Harriet Beecher Stowe had a considerable role in shaping was her own public image. She was careful to do nothing that would set her apart, in word or deed, from her natural power base: the women. After the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Stowe did much to cultivate an outward posture of true womanhood. One of the most polished examples of this retired and womanly species of self-promotion was the famous letter she wrote to Eliza Cabot Follen in response to her request for some information about the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
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The phenomenal success of Uncle Tom’s Cabin made Stowe’s voice the most powerful on behalf of the slave, by the canons of true womanhood she was prohibited from speaking in public. During her triumphal tour of the British Isles in 1853, she was met by huge crowds in city after city, but at the large soirees held in her honor she would sit in silence while her husband or brother made a speech. Denied both voice and vote, women in the British Isles collected over half a million signatures and attached them to an “Affectionate and Christian Address” to their sisters in the United States of America urging upon them the duty, as wives, mothers, and sisters, of ending the abomination of slavery.
The following year the impending passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act moved Stowe to political action. Stephen Douglas, the senator from Illinois, in an attempt to ensure that the transcontinental railroad would run through his state, introduced in January of 1854 a bill effectively repealing the Missouri Compromise of 1820.
In an attempt to defeat the bill, Stowe used money collected on her British tour to organize a petition campaign. She also published in the Independent an “Appeal to the Women of the Free States”. Clearly modeled on the example of the British women’s “Affectionate and Christian Address” and published on the eve of the Senate vote on the Nebraska bill, Stowe’s “Appeal” urged women to action: “Women of the free States! the question is not, shall we remonstrate with slavery on its own soil? but are we willing to receive slavery into the free States and territories of the Union?” She urged women to petition, to organize lectures, and to pray, citing the example of the British women’s organization to outlaw the slave trade. “Seventy thousand families refused the use of sugar, as a testimony to their abhorrence of the manner in which it was produced”.
In spite of Stowe’s “Appeal” and the inundation of Congress with petitions, including several Stowe helped organize, the Kansas-Nebraska Act passed on May 26, 1854. The bloody struggles that ensued were the first battles of the Civil War, as settlers in Kansas fought among themselves to determine whether the territory should be free or slave. Antislavery voices called for emigrants from the free states to settle in Kansas and declare it free soil. The “Emigrant Aid Society” was formed and sent settlers to establish antislavery communities, including a significant one in Lawrence, Kansas. But every time an election was held in Kansas, “Border Ruffians” poured in from Missouri and put proslavery men in power. Henry Ward Beecher’s Plymouth Church sent boxes of Sharpe’s rifles, known as “Beecher’s Bibles,” to help the antislavery settlers protect themselves from proslavery forces. The sectional warfare that prevailed in Kansas between 1854 and 1858 was most intense between December 1855 and September 1856 — the period during which Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote her second antislavery novel: Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp.
In addition to using fiction to dramatize the national crisis, beginning in 1853 Stowe was a columnist for the Independent, a religious, antislavery weekly, where she was usually featured on the front page. She continued her columns through the beginning of the Civil War, during which she was a strong advocate for immediate emancipation. In “What Is to Be Done With Them?” Stowe also joined her voice to those who were urging President Lincoln to act. In July of 1862, unbeknownst to the public, Lincoln met with his cabinet and proposed to free the slaves. His Emancipation Proclamation would be kept secret for several more months as he waited for a Union victory before unveiling it. In the meantime, pressure mounted to push the president in this direction. On August 20, 1862, Horace Greeley’s “The Prayer of Twenty Millions” editorial in the influential New York Tribune urged emancipation. 24 Lincoln held fast. He responded to Greeley’s editorial by announcing.
Summary
Like her view of racial difference, Stowe’s view of woman’s sphere was rooted in a popular ideology that woman’s place was in the home. Being a Beecher, she used that ideology in a national, political context as Catharine Beecher had done in her Treatise on Domestic Economy, which was reprinted nearly every year from 1841 to 1856. When it was reprinted in enlarged form in 1869 under the title The American Woman’s Home it bore the names of both Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, but in fact Stowe had written only several chapters on home decoration. Stowe’s writing on the home is more accurately and fully represented by the domestic columns she wrote for the Atlantic Monthly. Four of these columns compose the bulk of the section on Domestic Culture and Politics.
Works Cited
Jane Tompkins, “Sentimental Power: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Politics of Literary History”, in Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1850 ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 145.
Lyman Beecher to George Foote, January 24, 1819, Foote Collection, Harriet Beecher Stowe Center Library (formerly Stowe-Day Memorial Library), Hartford, Conn. The biographical material in this introduction is adapted from Joan D. Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).