Harriet beecher stowe family

When Harriet Beecher Stowe died in her Hartford home in 1896, she was eulogized and remembered as the most influential writer of the century. The most famous of the Beecher daughters, Stowe was the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, one of the most popular and important novels in American history. Her impact was so great that when she met President Abraham Lincoln, legend has it that he addressed her as “the little lady who started this big war.”

Harriet was one of eleven siblings born to Lyman Beecher, a prominent Congregational minister from Litchfield. Their father’s intellect and dynamic religious energy had an effect on all of his children, and many of them, including Harriet, her sister Catharine Beecher and half-sister Isabella Beecher Hooker, proved in their adult years that his influence and intelligence had been passed on to the next generation.

As a young woman, Harriet Beecher was both a student and an employee of the Hartford Female Seminary, started by her sister Catharine. The school’s emphasis on a full education meant schoolwork on par with tha


HARRIET BEECHER STOWE (1811 – 1896)

The seventh child of the famous

After finishing her education at her sister's school in

The 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, a law enabling the capture and re-enslavement of escaped slaves, provoked cries of protest from abolitionists. Condemning slavery as a moral and spiritual wrong, Harriet Beecher Stowe's father and brothers preached against the act from their pulpits, and Harriet endeavored to write a parable which, like those in the Bible, would inspire its readers to turn from sin. In 1851 to 1852 she published Uncle Tom's Cabin in installments in the abolitionist newspaper the National Era; later in 1852 the story appeared as a complete volume. An instant bestseller, Uncle Tom's Cabin told of the faithful slave Tom whose cruel master beats him to death and of George and Eliza Harris who flee their bondage in .

Harriet Beecher Stowe became an immediate celebrity in the wake of Uncle Tom's publication, inspiring the awe of abolitionists and the ire of those who defended the South's "peculiar institution." Translated

March is Women’s History Month and today is International Women’s Day. To celebrate both events we are hosting an #ArchivesHerstory party! Today’s post comes from Michael J. Hancock in the National Archives History Office.

Harriet Beecher Stowe was an abolitionist, author, and figure in the woman suffrage movement. Her magnum opus, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), was a depiction of life for African American slaves in the mid-19th century that energized antislavery forces in the North and provoked widespread anger in the South.

She wrote more than 20 books and was influential both for her writing and her public stance on social issues of the day, including women’s right to vote.

After Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, which punished anyone who offered food or temporary shelter to runaway slaves, and following the loss of her 18-month-old son, Samuel, Stowe was inspired to write about the abomination of human bondage.

She used the personal accounts of former slaves to write her antislavery novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin: or Life Among the Lowly. When it

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