Term Paper on "Harriet Beecher Stowe When President Abraham Lincoln"

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In 1823, Stowe's sister, Catherine, opened the Hartford Female Seminary with a total of seven students, including thirteen-year-old Harriet, in s single room above the White Horse harness shop in Hartford, Connecticut. During its prime, the school, which was run by and for women, boarded more than 160 students, eight teachers, two principals, and a governess, and was destined to take a significant place in the history of women's education. Harriet spent eight years at the Hartford school, and when she emerged at twenty-one years of age, her career took a different path than that of Catherine's, however it had been profoundly shaped by her older sister, who often turned her own experience into practical experiments for the benefit of others.

Catherine's school was one of only a handful of female institutions where young females could get an education that was equivalent to a young man's, for in addition to offering the same curriculum as other female academies, such as the Young Ladies Academy in Philadelphia and the Litchfield Female Academy, it also offered the traditional male curriculum, which included the English branches of study, ethics, logic, history, and the natural and mechanical sciences. Moreover, Hartford offered the young ladies instruction in Latin, French, Italian, Greek, drawing, and music, as well as college preparatory subjects that could be classified as either ornamental or useful, depending on their application.

The girls at Hartford were also involved with national events, and under Catherine's leadership organized on behalf of the Cherokee Indians, who in 1827 were ordered to vacate their lands in the state of Georgia, and throughout 1829, circulated petitions and circulars protesting the federal action. Harriet assumed the role of pastoral guide, which complimented her temperament and prepared her for a prophetic career in which she would "preach on paper" to the nation. However, she only taught two terms at Hartford, and in 1832 followed her father to Cincinnati, Ohio, where she developed as a writer and entered society with determination. She conceived the design of writing a set of letters, the first of which described "a house in the country, a gentleman and lady, as being pious, literary, and agreeable," and threw in "a number of little particular and incidental allusions to give it the air of having been really a letter." Harriet sent the letter to Samuel Foote's wife, Elizabeth, who showed it to Samuel, who in turn showed it to Mr. Green, the reader for the Semi-Colon Club, and eventually her letter turned into a series that found its way into print through the agency of James Hall's Western Literary Magazine. Her most memorable character sketch, Uncle Lot, written in November 1833, so impressed Hall that he encouraged her to submit it to the prize competition sponsored by his magazine, which earned her a $50 prize and the publication of her story.

In 1836, Harriet married Calvin Ellis Stowe, the widowed husband of Eliza Tyler Stowe, who had been one of the Semi-Colon's most beloved members. This same year, Angelina and Sarah Grimke embarked on their abolitionists careers with stunning analyses of the relationship between two patriarchal institutions, slavery and the subordination of women, and from this point on, the issues of women's rights and abolition were closely intertwined. While Elizabeth Cady Stanton and others established the first women's rights convention at Seneca Falls, at which their Declaration of Sentiments was read, Harriet had no desire to speak in public and used Henry Ward Beecher's Christian Union to publish editorials on subjects she did not want to won by name, thus early on she learned ways to speak both from women's sphere and from men's.

Between 1833 and 1834, Harriet published five stories and sketches for Hall's magazine, and also wrote for Sarah Hale's Godey's Lady's Book. Beginning in 1839 with Trials of a Housekeeper, she published at least eight stories in Godey's Lady's Book during the three following years, and during the same period began publishing short homilies on Christian themes in the New York Evangelist, a weekly devoted to news about revivals, Sunday schools and temperance societies. As Joan D. Hedrick writes in Harriet Beecher Stowe, a Life:

All the elements she would later meld into a powerful mixture in Uncle Tom's Cabin are present in her periodical publications of the 1830s and 40s: the impulse to instruct, to use fiction as a vehicle for moral and cultural reformation, to write of domestic doings and saying."

In 1843, Harper Brothers bought out Harriet's collection of stories and entitled them the Mayflower, or Sketches of Scenes and Characters among the Descendants of the Pilgrims. Harriet was now on her way to becoming one of the most noted authors in the United States.

Uncle Tom's Cabin is the culmination of Stowe's evangelistic teachings and her staunch position of anti-slavery. Harriet did not start out to write a novel. Uncle Tom began as a series of articles for the National Era, partly in response to the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, which effectively punished ($1,000 and six months in prison) any person who gave shelter, food or assistance to an escaping slave. The Law abrogated individual rights such as habeas corpus and the right of trial by jury and provided what abolitionists called bribes to commissioners by awarding them $10 for every alleged fugitive they remanded to slavery, but only $5 for every one they determined to be free. In Chicago no one could be found to serve as commissioner under the new law, and in Philadelphia the commissioner resigned rather than serve under the Fugitive Slave Law. Hendrick writes that freedmen everywhere "took up arms and entered into a solemn covenant to defend each other's liberty, emptying ammunition stores of their revolvers and prompting editorials on 'The Mob Spirit.'" Dr. Leonard Bacon declared that the fugitive slave was a "prisoner of war" and "that the escape of the slave was on his part nothing more than a legal act of hostility against a government to which he owes no allegiance."

In March 1851, Harriet wrote to Gamaliel Bailey of the National Era, that she had embarked on a story that she thought would run "through three or four numbers," and projected "a series of sketches which give the lights and shadows of the patriarchal institution." Although she confessed that the story would be much longer than any she had ever written, she had no intent of writing a sprawling novel that would run in weekly installments from June 5, 1851 to April 1, 1852, however she was keenly aware that she was entering the national debate with women's weapons. Hendrick writes:

The 'graphic sketches' that made women's letters come alive with distant people and events were to be employed in the highly political arena of sectional strife; the intimate narrative voice that melded region to region in domestic letters would now speak to a nation deeply divided; the pleasures that this national narrative voice afforded to a nation eager to see pictures of itself would lure the reader into a dark tale of freedom and bondage.

Stowe told Bailey, "I shall show the best side of the thing and something faintly approaching the worst." Her intention to study "the negro character" embroiled her in racial politics that continue today, for her generalizations about African-Americans repeatedly assume their childlike dependence, "a posture or mask that could be accounted for by the economic and psychological exigencies of the mistress-servant relationship," writes Hendrick. The complicated… READ MORE