The Minister's Wooing

Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) was born in Litchfield, Connecticut, daughter of the Reverend Lyman Beecher. In 1832, her family moved to Cincinnati, where Harriet married Calvin Ellis Stowe, a professor at the seminary, in 1836.

Cincinnati, a border town, was alive with abolitionist conflict, and Mrs. Stowe took an active part in community life. She came into contact with fugitive slaves and learned from friends and personal visits what life was like for Black people in the South.

In 1850, the Fugitive Slave Law was passed. That same year, Harriet’s sister-in-law urged the author to put her feelings about the evils of slavery into words. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was first published serially during 1851-52 in The National Era, and in book form in 1852. In one year, more than 300,000 copies of the novel were sold.

Mrs. Stowe continued to write, publishing eleven other novels and numerous articles before her death at the age of eighty-five in Hartford, Connecticut.

Susan K. Harris is Joyce and Elizabeth Hall Distinguished Professor of American Literature at the University of Kansas.

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