What Is Harriet Beecher Stoowe's Legacy

Harriet Beecher Stowe: Life and Legacy

It is a common phenomenon that the trigger to an enormous event can be the smallest of insignificant things- a small snowfall can trigger a devastating avalanche. This is true even outside the realm of nature, and is in fact easily seen, especially with regard to literature. One book, even if not immediately popular, can eventually create an event of epic proportions. A prime example can be seen in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a novel first serialized in an anti-slavery newspaper. The themes, stories, and heartbreaking examples that Stowe sprinkled liberally throughout the novel served to widen the divide in the United States that would eventually lead to war. One of the most influential

authors of all time, Harriet Beecher Stowe was profoundly influenced both by her own life, and the turbulent times around her. She reflected both of these elements in her most famous novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which was intended to end slavery, and therefore created a divided opinion among critics.
Raised as the sixth child among eleven, Stowe’s upbringing instilled in her a hatred of slavery, and the conviction and means to act on it.

Her father, Lyman Beecher, was a Methodist minister, who taught his children the idea of a strong conviction and a personal commitment to an idea. He was a respected anti-slavery speaker who taught religion at Sarah Pierce's Litchfield Female Academy in Connecticut-- Harriet would eventually attend the academy (“Harriet Beecher Stowe”). Beecher trained his children to debate skillfully and reason thoroughly; his ardent opposition to slavery, as well as the culture of the North, led Harriet to be fully aware of and skilled at anti-slavery debates. During her formative years, until she was twenty-one, she was raised in an fully anti-slavery atmosphere, partly due to her geographical location and partly due to her father’s views-- and it was during these years that she came to understand her obligation to end slavery and gained the tools to do

so.
After these formative years, Stowe moved with her family to Cincinnati, where her father had been offered a job as president of Lane Seminary. It was here that she met and married Calvin Stowe, a theology professor (“Harriet Beecher Stowe”). The move from the far north to a border state gave Stowe the opportunity to personally interact with slaves, and to experience firsthand stories of the cruelties of slavery. When she published A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a book detailing her sources and justification for the events in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, it was primarily based on the interactions she had with the slaves she met during this time. It was also at this time that she experienced what she later credited as one of the reasons she wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin: her eighteenth month old son died, giving her a new appreciation of the distress and depth of feeling that slave mothers undergo.
While Stowe was quietly living in Cincinnati, the nation was almost to the breaking point: the issue of slavery, which had been a source of contention since the founding of the nation, was fast eclipsing all other issues in the national mind. Most northern states had adopted an attitude of indifference-- they would pretend to ignore the issue as long as it did not directly affect them. With the passage of the Compromise of 1850, however, everything changed. The Compromise contained the Fugitive Slave Act, which required slaves who had escaped to free Northern states to be returned to their owners. Northerners felt that this forced them to participate in slavery, but the South had threatened secession if they did not receive concessions. This seeming infringement on the previous system of feigned ignorance outraged the North, and made them much more militant and vocal in their defiance of slavery (“The Fugitive Slave Law”). This law prepared the nation for the conflict that would become the Civil War, with Southern states growing more defensive of their peculiar institution, and Northerners growing more impatient with slavery and their forced participation.
It was into this violent struggle that Harriet Beecher Stowe cast her novel intended to change the world.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly was published in 1852, chronicling the experiences of Uncle Tom, a virtuous slave who descends further and further south until he is brutally killed by a lawless plantation owner who sees slaves as property. The most important purpose of the novel was to awaken the seemingly indifferent Northerners to the horrors of slavery, and the means was largely emotional. Stowe drew on her own experiences with the death of her child and the stories she had heard from escaped slaves to create a compelling, emotional journey that was calculated to leave the reader ready to abolish slavery that

instant.
Although Uncle Tom’s Cabin was intended to make a dramatic end to slavery, the reception it received among critics was mixed. Some thought she had perfectly achieved her goal- a review in The National Era commended the novel as “a noble effort-- it [was] a splendid success (SOURCE). This was borne out by the fact that over 300,000 copies of the novel were sold; it became almost the Bible of the anti-slavery cause. However, some Southerners were not convinced, seeing her work as “vastly overrated... written for an occasion, and...clumsily constructed and inartificial. [Stowe] allows her feelings to overpower her judgement” (Graham's Magazine). The primary complaint against the very evocative novel was a lack of reality: slave owners felt that Stowe exaggerated the treatment of slaves, and presented Legree as a commonality. The Southern critics felt that Stowe had allowed her focus on abolition to eclipse the truth of the matter, while Northern reviewers praised her ability to present an unbiased picture of slavery. This correlates well with the common Southern justification for slavery, the idea that they were providing a better, more civilized home for the heathen slaves, and that slavery was better for the dependants than living on their own would be. Uncle Tom’s Cabin threatened that Southern justification, which was precisely what it was intended to do. Stowe, although she maintained that all of her stories were true to life, was primarily trying to change the view of the nation, and that was better accomplished by emotion and sentiment than facts. In this light, Uncle Tom’s Cabin accomplished exactly what it was intended to.