Harriet Elizabeth Beecher Stowe (1811–96) was an American abolitionist and novelist. She was the most widely known American woman writer of the 19th century. She won fame with her anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly (1852,) which strengthened the abolitionist cause with its descriptions of the sufferings caused by slavery. Harriet’s brother was the Congregationalist clergyman and writer Henry Ward Beecher.
Born in Litchfield, Connecticut, Stowe was the daughter of the Presbyterian minister and temperance movement leader Lyman Beecher. Her brother Henry Ward Beecher was a Congregational clergyman and a prominent advocate of social reform. Her sister Catharine Beecher was an educationalist.
Harriet lived for many years in Cincinnati, Ohio, across the Ohio River from Kentucky. Ohio did not permit slavery, but Kentucky did, and so Cincinnati was a popular destination for runaway slaves. Stowe saw many slaves rushing across the frozen river in the winter, which was part of the inspiration to write her anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) following the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act.
It reached millions as a novel and a play and became influential in the United States and the United Kingdom. It mobilized anti-slavery forces in the American North while inciting widespread anger in the South. When she was introduced to President Abraham Lincoln in 1862, he purportedly exclaimed, “So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.”
Stowe’s Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856) was also a slave novel, but its reception was less enthusiastic than that of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In her later works, Stowe questioned the cultural bases of capitalism and consumerism by revisiting the early 1850s’ virtues of humility, charity, self-discipline, and social usefulness.
Stowe wrote more than 20 books that included novels, three travel memoirs, and collections of articles and letters. Later in life, she spoke and wrote of the need to protect the women’s rights movement from those who advocated free love and free divorce.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Harriet Beecher Stowe
O, with what freshness,
what solemnity and beauty,
is each new day born;
as if to say to insensate man,
‘Behold!
thou hast one more chance!
Strive for immortal glory!
—Harriet Beecher Stowe
One would like to be grand and heroic, if one could; but if not, why try at all? One wants to be very something, very great, very heroic; or if not that, then at least very stylish and very fashionable. It is this everlasting mediocrity that bores me.
—Harriet Beecher Stowe
Topics: Mediocrity
To be really great in little things, to be truly noble and heroic in the insipid details of everyday life, is a virtue so rare as to be worthy of canonization.
—Harriet Beecher Stowe
Topics: Excellence, Greatness & Great Things
When winds are raging o’er the upper ocean
And billows wild contend with angry roar,
‘Tis said, far down beneath the wild commotion
That peaceful stillness reigneth evermore.
Far, far beneath, the noise of tempests dieth
And silver waves chime ever peacefully,
And no rude storm, how fierce soe’er it flyeth
Disturbs the Sabbath of that deeper sea.
—Harriet Beecher Stowe
Topics: Serenity
Sublime is the dominion of the mind over the body, that for a time can make flesh and nerve impregnable, and string the sinews like steel, so that the weak become so mighty.
—Harriet Beecher Stowe
Topics: Mind
Now, if the principle of toleration were once admitted into classical education—if it were admitted that the great object is to read and enjoy a language, and the stress of the teaching were placed on the few things absolutely essential to this result, if the tortoise were allowed time to creep, and the bird permitted to fly, and the fish to swim, towards the enchanted and divine sources of Helicon—all might in their own way arrive there, and rejoice in its flowers, its beauty, and its coolness.
—Harriet Beecher Stowe
Topics: Education
The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and for deeds left undone.
—Harriet Beecher Stowe
By what strange law of mind is it that an idea long overlooked, and trodden under foot as a useless stone, suddenly sparkles out in new light as a discovered diamond?
—Harriet Beecher Stowe
Topics: Ideas
A little reflection will enable any person to detect in himself that setness in trifles which is the result of the unwatched instinct of self-will and to establish over himself a jealous guardianship.
—Harriet Beecher Stowe
Topics: Conservatives, Reflection
The obstinacy of cleverness and reason is nothing to the obstinacy of folly and inanity.
—Harriet Beecher Stowe
Everyone confesses in the abstract that exertion which brings out all the powers of body and mind is the best thing for us all; but practically most people do all they can to get rid of it, and as a general rule nobody does much more than circumstances drive them to do.
—Harriet Beecher Stowe
Topics: Effort
Sweet souls around us watch us still,
Press nearer to our side;
Into our thoughts, into our prayers,
With gentle helpings glide.
—Harriet Beecher Stowe
Topics: Prayer
In the gates of eternity the black hand and the white hold each other with an equal clasp.
—Harriet Beecher Stowe
Topics: Equality
The burning of rebellious thoughts in the little breast, of internal hatred and opposition, could not long go on without slight whiffs of external smoke, such as mark the course of subterranean fire.
—Harriet Beecher Stowe
Topics: Protest
Women are the real architects of society.
—Harriet Beecher Stowe
Topics: Women
Most mothers are instinctive philosophers.
—Harriet Beecher Stowe
Topics: Mothers Day, Mothers, Mother
If you destroy delicacy and a sense of shame in a young girl you deprave her very fast.
—Harriet Beecher Stowe
Your little child is your only true democrat.
—Harriet Beecher Stowe
Topics: Children, Democracy
Midnight,—strange mystic hour,—when the veil between the frail present and the eternal future grows thin.
—Harriet Beecher Stowe
Nobody had ever instructed him that a slave-ship, with a procession of expectant sharks in its wake, is a missionary institution, by which closely-packed heathen are brought over to enjoy the light of the Gospel.
—Harriet Beecher Stowe
Topics: Slavery
The longest day must have its close—the gloomiest night will wear on to a morning. An eternal, inexorable lapse of moments is ever hurrying the day of the evil to an eternal night, and the night of the just to an eternal day.
—Harriet Beecher Stowe
Topics: Time Management, Time
Love needs new leaves every summer of life, as much as your elm tree, and new branches to grow broader and wider, and new flowers to cover the ground.
—Harriet Beecher Stowe
Topics: Love
The beautiful must ever rest in the arms of the sublime.—The gentle need the strong to sustain it, as much as the rock-flowers need rocks to grow on, or the ivy the rugged wall which it embraces.
—Harriet Beecher Stowe
So long as the law considers all these human beings, with beating hearts and living affections, only as so many things belonging to the master—so long as the failure, or misfortune, or imprudence, or death of the kindest owner, may cause them any day to exchange a life of kind protection and indulgence for one of hopeless misery and toil—so long it is impossible to make anything beautiful or desirable in the best-regulated administration of slavery.
—Harriet Beecher Stowe
Topics: Slavery
In all ranks of life the human heart yearns for the beautiful; and the beautiful things that God makes are his gift to all alike.
—Harriet Beecher Stowe
Topics: Desires, Beauty, Desire
The past, the present and the future are really one: they are today.
—Harriet Beecher Stowe
Topics: The Present
Whipping and abuse are like laudanum; you have to double the dose as the sensibilities decline.
—Harriet Beecher Stowe
Topics: Punishment
Home is a place not only of strong affections, but of entire unreserved; it is life’s undress rehearsal, its backroom, its dressing room, from which we go forth to more careful and guarded intercourse, leaving behind us much debris of cast-off and everyday clothing.
—Harriet Beecher Stowe
Topics: Home
When you get into a tight place, and everything goes against you till it seems as if you could n’t hold on a minute longer, never give up then, for that ‘s just the place and time that the tide ‘ll turn. Never trust to prayer without using every means in your power, and never use the means without trusting in prayer.
—Harriet Beecher Stowe
Topics: Resolve, Endurance, Virtues, Give, Perseverance, Persistence
Even in this world they will have their judgment day; and their names, which went down in the dust like a gallant banner trodden in the mire, shall rise again all glorious in the sight of nations.
—Harriet Beecher Stowe
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
Frederick Douglass American Abolitionist
Lydia Maria Child American Abolitionist
Wendell Phillips American Abolitionist
Noah Webster American Lexicographer
Henry Ward Beecher American Protestant Clergyman
Charlotte Perkins Gilman American Feminist, Writer
Thomas Wentworth Higginson American Reformer, Editor
Lyman Beecher American Presbyterian Clergyman
J. P. Morgan American Financier, Philanthropist
Margaret Mitchell American Novelist