Stowe’s other novels, including Oldtown Folks and The Pearl of Orr’s Island contain another picture, one of the domestic lives of the northeastern region that Stowe grew up in and was familiar with. We can find, by studying all of her works, a more complete portrait of her as a writer, and we can possibly understand more about Uncle Tom’s Cabin when we read all of Stowe’s writing.
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Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896)
Born in Litchfield, Connecticut, far from the plantations of the South, Harriet Beecher Stowe nevertheless found the cause of the emancipation of the slaves an important one. When her father assumed the presidency of Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati, Ohio, she followed her family. There she met her husband and remained an active member of her community. In Cincinnati, she came into contact with fugitive slaves. Like Frederick Douglas, she used her gift of storytelling and writing as a way of bringing about change to American society. She wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin with the encouragement of her sister-in-law who was deeply affected by the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law.
The following excerpt is taken from the last chapter of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which very much resembles a sermon. She urges white Northerners to welcome escaped slaves and treat them with respect:
On the shores of our free states are emerging the poor, shattered, broken remnants of families,–men and women, escaped, by miraculous providences, from the surges of slavery,–feeble in knowledge, and, in many cases, infirm in moral constitution, from a system which confounds and confuses every principle of Christianity and morality. They come to seek a refuge among you; they come to seek education, knowledge, Christianity.
What do you owe to these poor, unfortunates, O Christians? Does not every American Christian owe to the African race some effort at reparation for the wrongs that the American nation has brought upon them? Shall the doors of churches and school-houses be shut down upon them? Shall states arise and shake them out? Shall the Church of Christ hear in silence the taunt that is thrown at them, and shrink away from the helpless hand that they stretch out, and shrink away from the courage the cruelty that would chase them from our borders? If it must be so, it will be a mournful spectacle. If it must be so, the country will have reason to tremble, when it remembers that fate of nations is in the hand of the One who is very pitiful, and of tender compassion.