Harriet Elizabeth Beecher Stowe by Alanson Fisher (National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution)
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, published in 1852, helped to propel the nation into the Civil War. Abraham Lincoln supposedly said to Stowe when he met her in the White House, “So you're the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war!” Despite having written the nation’s most influential antislavery novel, and despite this probably apocryphal statement from Lincoln, Stowe has generally been thought of as having little engagement with the Civil War. One historian has even said that Stowe averted her gaze during the war, satisfying herself with writing domestic essays. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Stowe was an antislavery militant. After the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, she increasingly called for a violent response to slavery. She was delighted when John Brown attacked the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry in 1859, and she celebrated him as one of the country’s greatest patriots. With the outbreak of the Civil War, she regularly called on Abraham Lincoln to pursue the conflict as an antislavery war, not just one to preserve the Union. She even met with him in December 1862 to make sure that he would sign the Emancipation Proclamation. She then worked to enlist British support for the Union and reveled in Lincoln’s decision to allow Black men to fight in the Union army.
Author and scholar Robert S. Levine addresses key moments in Stowe’s career from 1852 to 1870, focusing on the Civil War period with a discussion of her letters, novels, and essays, including her fascinating piece on the Black activist Sojourner Truth, which Stowe published in the Atlantic at the height of the war. He also recounts the sad story of Frederick Stowe, Harriet’s son, who was seriously wounded at the Battle of Gettysburg and became a central figure in her efforts to promote Reconstruction in Florida. Levine provides a new picture of Stowe as a vigorous exponent of interracial democracy long after the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
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