Harriet’s family and friends had been involved in antislavery activities in Cincinnati, where there was fierce debate (and some violence) not only between pro- and antislavery activists but also among antislavery factions. At least one of Harriet’s brothers was a radical abolitionist, while other Beechers, her father among them, were “colonizationists,” favoring a “gradual” approach to freeing slaves, who would then be returned to African colonies. Harriet seems to have agreed, at least partly, with the latter view, but she became more radical at the beginning of the 1850s. In part, this may have been because of her child’s death and her anxious attachment to the baby born a year later. The inhumanity of a system that separated parents from their children without recourse must have struck her as never before through this event in her personal life. At about the same time, Congress passed a Fugitive Slave Law, requiring that people who had escaped from slavery into the free states of the North be returned to captivity. This latest federal compromise with the slaveholding states of the South, along with Harriet’s personal loss, seems to have energized her creatively, and when the editor of the antislavery periodical The National Era invited her to write something for his journal, she began to send him installments of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
The story, which turned out to be much longer than Harriet had expected, was published in book form in 1852 and immediately became a bestseller. As its popularity soared, it inspired songs, dramatizations, prints, and paintings. Harriet was soon threatened with a lawsuit by a Philadelphia clergyman whose defense of slavery she had quoted, accurately enough, in the book. The suit was never brought, but the uproar it caused in the press prompted Harriet, helped by family and friends, to collect damning evidence from court records, newspaper accounts, and other sources to support her published allegations about slavery. What she discovered was more horrifying than she had anticipated, refuting the claims of Southern critics that the fictional incidents in Uncle Tom’s Cabin were based on invention or exaggeration. Harriet selected and published the results of her research in 1853, in the 259-page book A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Harriet continued to write for publication until 1878. Her non-fiction (or semi-fictional) works, including sketches and essays with fictional narrators, mostly written for various periodicals, were eventually collected in book form as Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands (1854); Household Papers and Stories (1865–67, 1896); Little Foxes (1866); Palmetto Leaves (1873); Women in Sacred History (1874); and Footsteps of the Master (1877).
Her long fiction after Uncle Tom’s Cabin is uneven in quality. Both Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856, written during the violent period following passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act) and The Pearl of Orr’s Island (1862) start strongly but weaken toward the end, while Agnes of Sorrento (1862), set in a romanticized Italy, is relatively shapeless and shallow. Oldtown Folks (1869), which Harriet hoped would be her masterpiece, suffered from domestic distractions she endured while attempting to finish it, including the necessity to find adequate care for her son Fred, a struggling alcoholic. My Wife and I and Pink and White Tyranny, both published as magazine serials in 1871, are fictional criticisms of contemporary figures and ideas in the women’s rights movement. Her last work, Poganuk People (1878), written when Harriet was in her late sixties, is more successful, probably because in writing it she felt not only less pressure to make a specific political or moral statement but also less pressure to complete the work in a specific length of time.
Harriet’s most controversial publication came in 1869, with “The True Story of Lady Byron’s Life,” published in Atlantic Monthly, in which she revealed the scandalous “secret” (actually fairly well known in private circles) of the famous English poet’s brief marriage and notorious separation from his wife. The uproar caused by this article prompted her to write Lady Byron Vindicated (1870), which she hoped would support the Atlantic article (as A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin had done for her famous and controversial novel) but which was itself vilified and ridiculed.
After 1878, Harriet virtually retired from writing except for letters. Her husband died in 1886, her daughter Georgiana the next year. Of her six children who had lived to adulthood, only her twin daughters, Hattie and Eliza, and her youngest child, called Charley like the dead infant, survived her. They were with her when she died in 1896 at 85.
Harriet Beecher Stowe was a writer from youth to old age, encouraged by her family and sustained by the conviction that she could accomplish social and moral good in this way, just as her father, husband, and brothers could by preaching and teaching. More than a century after her death, she is remembered almost solely for Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the novel that forced white readers to identify and sympathize with the Africans and African Americans enslaved in the Southern United States. Today, it is difficult to realize the electrifying power of this book when it first appeared. It is easy to find fault with the overwhelming sentimentality of Little Eva’s death scene, which affected nineteenth-century readers much differently than it does us; with the condescending characterization of some of the slaves; and especially with the sweet Christian passivity of Uncle Tom himself, whose behavior is the antithesis of what our own age finds admirable. Still, Uncle Tom’s Cabin remains arguably the most important work of fiction ever published in the United States: a bold moral statement by a woman in a day when women were expected to be silent, and an unabashed portrait of American life in a day when American literature was still in the process of defining itself. Above all, it was a book that swayed its millions of readers into opposition to the monstrous institution of slavery, whose roots were buried in the earliest days of the nation and whose consequences extend into our own time.
