“I didn’t write it. God wrote it. I merely did his dictation.”
Few books in the history of humankind have been able to keep a tryst with destiny. Das Kapital is believed to be one such book. But there have been others too. Some are privileged by providence to be widely acclaimed while some others, by no means less significant, remain content by a mention in the footnotes of history.
Where should one place the book known as Uncle Tom’s Cabin? The assessment that it was an extraordinary book will meet universal approval. But how much so? It may seem an exaggeration to opine that it changed the destiny of black slaves in the USA but it will be denying the author her due if she is not credited with helping trigger the epochal American Civil War leading to their emancipation. Or close to it.
That a strait-laced daughter of a preacher married to a clergyman could have been a trigger for the bloody and bitter American Civil War is inconceivable. But that was the fate of Harriet Beecher Stowe who was born on June 14, 1811.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published in 1852. It was a heart-wrenching account of the conditions faced by enslaved African Americans based on her own observations and research. It was immediately seized upon by slavery abolitionists to strengthen their cause and at the same time was furiously and angrily denounced by leading figures in the Southern states. The book enhanced anti-slavery sentiments considerably; so much so that historians later accepted it as one of the reasons behind the American Civil War.
Early Days and Inspiration
The sixth of eleven children born to an outspoken Presbyterian preacher and a devoutly Christian mother, Harriet experienced bereavement and dislocation early in life. At 21, her family had moved to Cincinnati, Ohio. Only the Ohio river separated her from the neighbouring slave state Kentucky. It was here that she met, talked with, and empathised with runaway slaves from the South through friends and acquaintances and by frequent visits to slave colonies. She herself started offering refuge and shelter to slave fugitives. It was here that the immortal Uncle Tom’s Cabin was perceived and conceived.
Harriet claimed to have a vision of a dying slave during a communion service at Brunswick’s First Parish Church which inspired her to write his story. Two further events fuelled her inspiration to write the book. First, her marriage to Reverend Calvin Stowe, a widower who fiercely opposed slavery. Second, the death of her own 18-month old son. The tragedy helped her understand the heartbreak that slave mothers suffered when their children were wrenched from their arms and sold. She wrote: “Having experienced losing someone so close to me, I can sympathise with all the poor, powerless slaves at the unjust auctions.”
On March 9, 1850, Harriet wrote to Gamaliel Bailey, editor of the weekly anti-slavery journal The National Era, that she planned to write a story about the problem of slavery: “I feel now that the time is come when even a woman or a child who can speak a word for freedom and humanity is bound to speak… I hope every woman who can write will not be silent.”
It was in Brunswick, Maine, where she had her vision that the book was given a concrete shape. After newspaper serialisation it was published in book form in 1852 under the title “Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Or Life Among The Lowly”.
The Book
The book’s emotional portrayal of the effects of slavery on individuals captured the nation’s attention and fired a new awareness and awakening. Harriet showed that slavery touched all of society, beyond the people directly involved as masters, traders and slaves. In the New York Times Book Review, a critic wrote that Harriet had “baptized with holy fire myriads who before cared nothing for the bleeding slave.”
The book was not acclaimed for any literary merit or style. It was the honest and sincere rendering and the emotional richness of the narration that moved the readers. And what a cataclysmic and cathartic impact it cast on them! It was purgatorial both for her and the reader. Some say she did not write the book, she lived it. And her book was a living chronicle of a tragedy, a torture, a trial but also upheld the luminosity of hope and the radiance of human endurance.
It sold 300,000 copies in its first year and in that time at least 300 babies born in Boston alone were named after one of the book’s major characters, Eva.
But the fury and fire it created in South was even more fierce. Steeped in their belief that slavery was necessary for the good of the economy and that slaves were inferior people who were unable to look after themselves, they felt under attack and retaliated in full might. She was depicted as out of touch, arrogant, and guilty of slander. They also responded with numerous works of what are now called anti-Tom novels, seeking to portray Southern society and slavery in more positive terms.
After the success of the book made her internationally famous, Harriet wrote to a friend: “I am a little bit of a woman – somewhat more than forty, about as thin and dry as a pinch of snuff; never very much to look at in my best of days, and looking like a used-up article now.”
But she was far from used-up. Her first success was not to be a brief incandescence. She went on to write a score and ten books that ranged from novels and articles to collection of letters and travel memoirs, qualifying her as one of the most prolific writers and influential women of the 19th century. She also briefly edited a magazine Hearth and Home in 1868.
A high point of Harriet’s life was a meeting with President Abraham Lincoln in Washington, just after the Civil War began. Her own accounts are vague. She wrote to her husband: “I had a real funny interview with the President.” There is no official record of what was said at the meeting but there are accounts of much joviality, and according to Harriet’s son, the President greeted her with the words: “So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war!”
Views on Women
Her strong views about the women’s role in the family and society largely found articulation in her writings and portrayal of black women. “All places from where women are excluded tend towards to barbarism; but the moment she is introduced, there come in with her courtesy, cleanliness, sobriety and order.” Harriet campaigned for the expansion of married women’s rights, arguing in 1869 that: “The position of a married woman … is, in many respects, precisely similar to that of the negro slave. She can make no contract and hold no property; whatever she inherits or earns becomes at that moment the property of her husband…. Though he acquired a fortune through her, or though she earned a fortune through her talents, he is the sole master of it, and she cannot draw a penny…”
Her Conviction and Message
Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s strong Christian message reflected Harriet’s belief that slavery and the Christian doctrine were at odds; in her eyes, slavery was clearly a sin. And she believed that like all things evil and sinister and inhuman, slavery will come to an end one day.
“When you get into a tight place and everything goes against you, till it seems as though you could not hang on a minute longer, never give up then, for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn.” This telling and moving sentiment reflects best her optimism and conviction, belief in God and the goodness of humans. Hers is a saga of faith and prayer, the force and power issuing forth from them, and their final and glorious triumph.
Her Final Days
Her final days came two years after those of her husband. At the time she was staying in Hartford, Connecticut, and one of her neighbours was Mark Twain. He wrote of her:
“Her mind had decayed, and she was a pathetic figure. She wandered about all the day long in the care of a muscular Irish woman. [In] our neighborhood the doors always stood open in pleasant weather. Mrs. Stowe entered them at her own free will, and as she was always softly slippered and generally full of animal spirits, she was able to deal in surprises, and she liked to do it.
She would slip up behind a person who was deep in dreams and musings and fetch a war whoop that would jump that person out of his clothes.
And she had other moods. Sometimes we would hear gentle music in the drawing-room and would find her there at the piano singing ancient and melancholy songs with infinitely touching effect.”
She succumbed to Alzheimer’s in 1896 on July 1, just a fortnight past her 85th birthday.
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