Harriet Beecher Stowe Visits Newtown––

Historical Society Hears A Voice From Past

By Dottie Evans

So you’re the one who wrote the little book that caused the Civil War.

––Abraham Lincoln in 1862 upon meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe.

 

It was a most singular presentation when Civil War re-enactor, fifth grade teacher, and historian Jane Sabatelli of Torrington spent an evening with the Newtown Historical Society at the Booth Library on May 10.

Speaking in the first person as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ms Sabatelli was dressed from head to toe in period costume that she had made herself. Her background was a stagelike setting of artifacts, furnishings, and photographs from the mid-Victorian era.

Ms Sabatelli sat demurely in front of the audience sipping tea from a delicate china cup as she collected her thoughts and reached back nearly 200 years into the mind of her character.

 “I was born in 1811, the daughter of a fire and brimstone preacher named Lyman Beecher. My father never gave me the recognition and approval I craved,” she began.

Her monologue offered a rare insight into how a shy but very intelligent child born to a family of 11 could have grown to be the successful 19th Century author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It was a book that came to be called one of the most eloquent arguments against slavery ever written.

It was clear that growing up had not been an easy for Harriet Beecher. Not only did her father tell her he wished she had been born a boy, her parents gave her a name they had already bestowed upon an older sister, Harriet, who died in 1808. She must have struggled early on to carve out her own identity.

“My mother Roxanna died of consumption when I was 5. Our oldest sister Catherine raised us. My father was always away preaching,” Ms Sabatelli said, speaking in her character’s voice.

When she stood up, her full-hooped skirt swung to and fro. She leafed through a book of family photographs as if the images helped her recall important events in her life.

“I loved books. I must have read Ivanhoe 12 times. My family teased me by saying I had gone owling. That means daydreaming,” she explained as she picked up a couple of slim volumes lying nearby on a parlor table.

 

Early Experiences Of                      Separation And Loss

At 13, Harriet Beecher felt isolated and was afraid she did not fit well into her lively family. She could never satisfy her father and became so depressed she “wanted to die because I was a trouble to everyone.”

She was sent away to school and eventually became a teacher of French and Latin at her sister Catherine’s Female Academies –– first in Hartford, then in Cincinnati where the entire family eventually moved.

“We traveled to Cincinnati in 1832 by coach over those rough corduroy roads. Just in time for the great cholera epidemic that was raging there,” she recalled.

The next year she traveled to a Kentucky plantation. This was where she saw slavery for the first time and became aware of the issue of runaway slaves and the existence of the underground railroad as a clandestine means to move them north. It was here that the model for Uncle Tom’s Cabin, also set in Kentucky, was shaped.

She met theology professor Calvin Stowe and, in January 1836, and they married. His first wife, Eliza, who had been Harriet’s dear friend, had died in 1834 from cholera. It seemed the two became close during their shared loss.

Over the next ten years, several children were born to Harriet and Calvin Stowe. Again, with her husband traveling often, depression threatened.

“I was alone with the pressures of taking care of the home and all the children,” she said.

Her sister Catherine came to her rescue, sending her away to Brattleboro for the “water treatment,” after which she returned much rested and refreshed.

In 1849, cholera again struck. This time it took her son, Charles Edward, who was 18 months old. Even the dog, Daisy, died. Her husband, Calvin, wasn’t at home to share the burden.

“I asked him to stay away because of the sickness,” she said.

The loss of her little Charlie affected her greatly, touching her mother’s heart.

“Now she knew how it felt to lose a child, and how slave parents might feel at being separated from their children –– not knowing where they were or whether or not they were alive.”

 

A Woman Of Steady Resolve

Even after the family moved to Brunswick, Maine, Mrs Stowe could not forget what she called “the hard slavery facts” –– rape and separation, and the reality of 3.2 million slaves sold.

“In Cincinnati I had seen posters for runaway slaves. There they were trying to catch them. In Maine no one spoke about it.”

While in Kentucky she met Josiah Henson who worked on the underground railroad and helped 75,000 slaves escape. She also met Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist preacher of mixed racial parentage, and Sojourner Truth who was also an abolitionist.

As 20th Century literary critic Alfred Kazin wrote in his foreword to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, this was the period during which Harriet Beecher Stowe became obsessed with “an urgent need to persuade people through literature that slavery was wholly immoral.”

Ms Sabatelli described the dramatic moment when her character realized what she had to do.

“I was in church and I had a vision like a mighty wind of the story of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. I ran home and sat down at the kitchen table, brushing aside my husband’s notes for sermons, and I began to write. Then I ran out of white paper so I used brown wrapping paper. Then I had to move into the parlor. I just kept on writing and writing.”

It was the first installment of the now-famous story about the Kentucky plantation owned by kindly Mr Shelby, the righteous slave-holder who had gambled too much and owed a debt he could not pay. Against his will, he was forced to sell little Harry, the child of his slave Eliza, to a southern slave trader who held the notes on his farm.

Harriet Beecher Stowe sold the story in installments to the Western Monthly Magazine and eventually earned $10,000 for it. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published in book form in 1852 and has been called one of the ten most influential books in literature. England’s own Queen Victoria declared upon reading it that she had been moved to tears by the story. After the successful author traveled to England, as many as 250,000 women there signed a petition for the abolition of slavery. In the United States, a total of 3,050 preachers signed a similar petition.

The Feminist Author Moves              To Hartford

As the Civil War raged, family troubles and loss continued to haunt Harriet Beecher Stowe.

In 1863, her father Lyman Beecher, whom she called “the mighty oak,” passed away. A couple of months later her son, Fred, was wounded at the Battle of Gettysburg. Another son, Henry Ellis, who was 17 and a student at Dartmouth College, died of drowning while trying to swim across the Connecticut River. Throughout these tragedies, she kept on writing her books to pay the bills.

Her son Fred recovered from his wound but he was an alcoholic and could not manage the home she had bought for him in Florida. He disappeared during a journey west to California.

Mrs Stowe began to stand up for abused women and, in 1871, bought a modest home in Hartford next door to Mark Twain where the two writers shared a backyard.

“I loved to sneak up on him while he was sitting outside reading his paper. I’d jump out from behind a lilac bush and yell ‘Boo!’ We had a connection,” she recalled.

At age 61, Harriet Beecher Stowe began speaking out on behalf of women’s rights and she gave public readings from Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The Atlantic Monthly paid her the high tribute of asking well-known writers to send their best wishes to Harriet Beecher Stowe upon the occasion of her 70th birthday.

As Ms Sabatelli concluded her evening’s presentation, she noted that for Harriet Beecher Stowe joy in life was always tempered by sadness.

“She never forgot the children she had lost, and she always hoped Fred would come back. That might be why she wrote and spoke so eloquently against the separation of families,” she concluded.

At age 85, Harriet Beecher Stowe died in Hartford where at the end of her life, she finally found some peace and happiness.

“She especially loved tending her plants and even used ivy for curtains. It hung down across her big airy windows. You can visit her house and museum today.”