Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe

That same year, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, which allowed runaway enslaved people to be hunted, caught and returned to their owners, even in states where slavery was outlawed. In 1850, Calvin became a professor at Bowdoin College and moved his family to Maine. In 1846, she published The Mayflower: Or, Sketches of Scenes and Characters Among the Descendants of the Pilgrims. Along the way, she gave birth to six children.

He encouraged her writing and she continued to churn out short stories and sketches. Stowe and Calvin married in January 1836. The club gave Stowe the chance to hone her writing skills and network with publishers and influential people in the literary world. Stowe’s uncle invited her to join the Semi-Colon Club, a co-ed literary group of prominent writers including teacher Calvin Ellis Stowe, the widower husband of her dear, deceased friend Eliza. This, and a visit to a Kentucky plantation, fueled her abolitionist fervor. With Ohio located just across the river from Kentucky-a state where slavery was legal-Stowe often encountered runaway enslaved people and heard their heart-wrenching stories. In Cincinnati, Stowe taught at the Western Female Institute, another school founded by Catharine, where she wrote many short stories and articles and co-authored a textbook. But it wasn’t until she moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, with Catharine and her father in 1832 that she found her true writing voice. Writing came naturally to Stowe, as it did to her father and many of her siblings. Stowe attended the school as a student and later taught there. In 1823, she founded the Hartford Female Seminary, one of few schools of the era that educated women. But it was her sister Catharine who likely influenced her the most.Ĭatharine Beecher strongly believed girls should be afforded the same educational opportunities as men, although she never supported women’s suffrage. Stowe had twelve siblings (some were half-siblings born after her father remarried), many of whom were social reformers and involved in the abolitionist movement.

Her father, Lyman Beecher, was a Presbyterian preacher and her mother, Roxana Foote Beecher, died when Stowe was just five years old. Stowe was born into a prominent family on June 14, 1811, in Litchfield, Connecticut.

Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe