Harriet beecher stowe why uncle toms cabin

In , Harriet and her family experienced the devastating effects of cholera; Harriet and Calvin's 6th child, Samuel Charles, was a victim of the cholera epidemic. Harriet was completely distraught at having lost her son. Since medical intervention at the time was sparse, Harriet simply had to watch as cholera took over her son's body and his life. In a letter to Calvin, Harriet wrote that losing Charles made her understand what slave women felt when their children were taken from them at the auction block.

She was educated at female academies, including the Hartford Female Seminary, which her older sister Catherine had founded and ran. Stowe herself started teaching there in , but in , when her father became president of Lane Theological Seminary, in Cincinnati, she went along. It was a fateful decision, personally and professionally. Cincinnati was in the Upper South, close to the culture of slavery, and she began to hear stories that would provide templates for her most influential work.

Stowe and his wife, Eliza, became great friends with the Beechers. Eliza died in , and two years later Calvin and Harriet married. Both welcomed the intrusions. The novel that resulted appeared in forty-one weekly installments in a Washington-based anti-slavery newspaper from June, , to March, , when it was published as a book in two volumes. They moved away from sermons that followed a strict trajectory and that discussed doctrine in a routine way.

Instead, they relied on narrative. Telling stories from the pulpit made the message of the Gospels more accessible to congregations by using drawn-from-life vignettes, a staple of church services today.

What was needed was a story with characters, fully realized, in whom readers would develop a stake. An enslaved woman, Eliza Harris, escapes north with her young son and joins her husband, George. Though out of the South, the Harrises must contend with the Fugitive Slave Law, which required Northerners to help return escaped slaves to their masters.

Along the way, they meet friend and foe, in scenes meant to show the human capacity for empathy and for evil. On the trip down, he saves the life of young Eva, prompting her father, Augustine St. Clare, to buy him. While Eva is dying, St. Clare promises to free Tom but is killed before he can, and Tom falls into the hands of the villainous Simon Legree, with fatal consequences.

Stowe took pains not to demonize all Southerners, or beatify all Northerners. In her view, no one was corrupt by nature; the system of slavery spoiled everything and everyone it touched.

But her story was effective because it directly assaulted Southern pretensions. Pro-slavery Southerners had been propagating a narrative of their own: slavery was a benevolent institution in which mentally inferior slaves were watched over by owners who treated them as part of their family. The Romans had had slaves, they argued, and the South was a new Rome. The historian Steven Deyle has estimated that more than a million slaves were shipped from the Upper South to the Lower South between and President Abraham Lincoln had issued a preliminary Emancipation Proclamation back in September after the Battle of Antietam, stating he would use his war powers as president to free the enslaved men and women in most Union-occupied areas of the Confederate states on January 1, Stowe had an audience with the president to make sure he kept that promise.

Harriet Beecher was the daughter of the famous New England clergyman and social reformer Lyman Beecher and his pious wife, Roxana. She had many siblings and read voraciously as a child, including classics that fired her imagination. Raised in a religious household, Harriet adopted the Puritan religious tradition and outlook of New England.

However, she and her family began to question the Calvinist doctrinal orthodoxy of predestination in favor of a more personal theology. Coming of age during the Second Great Awakening, she witnessed the emotional preaching of ministers from new denominations and their democratic appeal to the marginalized.

She began to believe in a benevolent God, the value of good works, a communal religion, and even spiritualist visions of angels and saints. Beecher married Calvin Stowe, a professor at Lane Seminary, in and supplemented his meager salary by writing short stories and essays.

Stowe and her husband were involved in those three reform movements, and those movements influenced her writing.

Harriet Beecher Stowe and her husband were supporters of the Underground Railroad and housed fugitive enslaved persons in their home as they escaped north. This portrait of her is from about Some women who became writers during the American Renaissance of the mid-nineteenth century were well-known transcendentalists, such as Margaret Fuller, whereas others wrote novels for a mass audience.

The American Renaissance was facilitated by the technological improvements of the early industrial revolution. The printing revolution greatly increased the number of books, newspapers, and magazines available to the most literate nation at the time, and the transportation revolution made their wide distribution possible.

The novels of the American Renaissance aimed to promote virtuous character and appeal to the moral sentiments of the reader — hence, the sentimental novel. Moving in moderate abolitionist circles, Stowe engaged with the national debate caused by the Mexican-American War and the expansion of slavery in the western territories acquired from Mexico.

She was particularly opposed to the Compromise of , which preserved the Union and staved off contention over slavery in the new territories by allowing, through the new Fugitive Slave Act, recovery of runaway slaves and the punishment of anyone who aided them. Stowe had many sources to help her compose her novel portraying the horrors of slavery in the South.

She had also visited the slave state of Kentucky and saw slavery on plantations firsthand. She even helped at least one enslaved person escape to freedom on the Underground Railroad and spoke with conductors in the network.

Moreover, many escaped enslaved persons published narratives detailing their experience of the cruelties of slavery. They are victimized by a brutal system of violent whippings and the sexual exploitation of enslaved women. The enslaved men and women want to enjoy their liberty as humans and come close to violent rebellion to win it.

Masters, overseers, and slave catchers in the story are corrupted by slavery and drink, rather than being directly demonized, because Stowe wanted to appeal to southerners to change their minds about slavery. The sentimental novel presents difficult topics honestly while avoiding being lurid. Washington later noted that the book stirred the hearts of northerners against slavery.

The book sold 15, copies within the first month, 50, through May, and , by the end of June.