On Quilts & Uncle Tom - Harriet Beecher Stowe 1811-1896

Harriet Beecher Stowe 1811-1896

Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly was the most popular American book of the 19th century. First published serially in the National Era magazine (1851- 1852), it was an immediate success. Forty different publishers printed it in England alone, and it was quickly translated into 20 languages, receiving the praise of such authors as Georges Sand in France, Heinrich Heine in Germany, and Ivan Turgenev in Russia. Its passionate appeal for an end to slavery in the United States inflamed the debate that, within a decade, led to the U.S. Civil War (1861-1865).

Reasons for the success of Uncle Tom's Cabin are obvious. It reflected the idea that slavery in the United States, the nation that purportedly embodied democracy and equality for all, was an injustice of colossal proportions. Stowe herself was a perfect representative of old New England Puritan stock. Her father, brother, and husband all were well- known, learned Protestant clergymen and reformers. Stowe conceived the idea of the novel -- in a vision of an old, ragged slave being beaten -- as she participated in a church service. Later, she said that the novel was inspired and "written by God." Her motive was the religious passion to reform life by making it more godly. The Romantic period had ushered in an era of feeling: The virtues of family and love reigned supreme.

Stowe's novel attacked slavery precisely because it violated domestic values. Uncle Tom, the slave and central character, is a true Christian martyr who labors to convert his kind master, St. Clare, prays for St. Clare's soul as he dies, and is killed defending slave women. Slavery is depicted as evil not for political or philosophical reasons but mainly because it divides families, destroys normal parental love, and is inherently un-Christian. The most touching scenes show an agonized slave mother unable to help her screaming child and a father sold away from his family. These were crimes against the sanctity of domestic love.

Stowe's novel was not originally intended as an attack on the South; in fact, Stowe had visited the South, liked southerners, and portrayed them kindly. Southern slave owners are good masters and treat Tom well. St. Clare personally abhors slavery and intends to free all of his slaves. The evil master Simon Legree, on the other hand, is a northerner and the villain. Ironically, the novel was meant to reconcile the North and South, which were drifting toward the Civil War a decade away. Ultimately, though, the book was used by abolitionists and others as a polemic against the South.

Harriet Beecher Stowe
The Minister's Wooing, Derby and Jackson, 1859

The Quilting

Harriet Beecher Stowe tells of Mary and her intended preacher husband and an 1859 New England tradition for brides-to-be...

The quilting was in those days considered the most solemn and important recognition of a betrothal. And for the benefit of those not to the manner born, a little preliminary instruction may be necessary.

The good wives of New England, impressed with that thrifty orthodoxy of economy which forbids to waste the merest trifle, had a habit of saving every scrap clipped out in the fashioning of household garments, and these they cut into fanciful patterns and constructed of them rainbow shapes and quaint traceries, the arrangement of which became one of their few fine arts. Many a maiden, as she sorted and arranged fluttering bits of green, yellow, red, and blue, felt rising in her breast a passion for somewhat vague and unknown, which came out at length in a new pattern of patchwork. Collections of these tiny fragments were always ready to fill an hour when there was nothing else to do; and as the maiden chattered with her beau, her busy flying needle stitched together those pretty bits, which, little in themselves, were destined, by gradual unions and accretions, to bring about at last substantial beauty, warmth, and comfort,—emblems thus of that household life which is to be brought to stability and beauty by reverent economy in husbanding and tact in arranging the little useful and agreeable morsels of daily existence.

When a wedding was forthcoming, there was a solemn review of the stores of beauty and utility thus provided, and the patchwork-spread best worthy of such distinction was chosen for the quilting. Thereto, duly summoned, trooped all intimate female friends of the bride, old and young; and the quilt being spread on a frame, and wadded with cotton, each vied with the others in the delicacy of the quilting she could put upon it. For the quilting also was a fine art, and had its delicacies and nice points, — which grave elderly matrons discussed with judicious care. The quilting generally began at an early hour in the afternoon, and ended at dark with a great supper and general jubilee, at which that ignorant and incapable sex which could not quilt was allowed to appear and put in claims for consideration of another nature...

By two o'clock a goodly company began to assemble... Good Mrs. Jones, broad, expansive, and solid, having vegetated tranquilly on in the cabbage-garden of the virtues since three years ago, when she graced our teaparty, was now as well preserved as ever, and brought some fresh butter, a tin pail of cream, and a loaf of cake made after a new Philadelphia receipt.

The quilt-pattern was gloriously drawn in oakleaves, done in indigo; and soon all the company, young and old, were passing busy fingers over it and conversation went on briskly.

At the quilting, Madame de Frontignac would have her seat, and soon won the respect of the party by the dexterity with which she used her needle; though, when it was whispered that she learned to quilt among the nuns, some of the elderly ladies exhibited a slight uneasiness, as being rather doubtful whether they might not be encouraging Papistical opinions by allowing her an equal share in the work of getting up their minister's bed-quilt...

This speech was founded on a tradition, current in those times, that no young lady was fit to be married til she could construct a boiled Indian pudding of such consistency that it could be thrown up chimney and come down on the ground, outside, without breaking...

"Girls a'n't what they used to be in my day," remarked an elderly lady. "I remember my mother told me when she was thirteen she could knit a long cotton stocking in a day."

"I haven't much faith in these stories of old times, — have you, girls?" said Cerinthy, appealing to the younger members at the frame.

"At any rate," said Mrs. Twitchel, "our minister's wife will be a pattern; I don't know anybody that goes beyond her either in spinning or fine stitching."

Mary sat as placid and disengaged as the new moon, and listened to the chatter of old and young with the easy quietness of a young heart that has early outlived life, and looks on everything in the world from some gentle, restful eminence far on towards a better home. She smiled at everybody's word, had a quick eye for everybody's wants, and was ready with thimble, scissors, or thread, whenever any one needed them...

The husbands, brothers, and lovers had come in, and the scene was redolent of gayety. When Mary made her appearance, there was a moment's pause, till she was conducted to the side of the Doctor; when, raising his hand, he invoked a grace upon the loaded board.

Unrestrained gayeties followed. Groups of young men and maidens chatted together, and all the gallantries of the times were enacted. Serious matrons commented on the cake, and told each other high and particular secrets in the culinary art, which they drew from remote family-archives. One might have learned in that instructive assembly how best to keep moths out of blankets,— how to make fritters of Indian corn undistinguishable from oysters, — how to bring up babies by hand, — how to mend a cracked teapot, — how to take out grease from a brocade, — how to reconcile absolute decrees with free will, how to make five yards of cloth answer the purpose of six,— and how to put down the Democratic party. All were busy, earnest, and certain,—just as a swarm of men and women, old and young, are in 1859.

Vain, transitory splendors! Even this evening, so glorious, so heart-cheering, so fruitful in instruction and amusement, could not last forever. Gradually the company broke up; the matrons mounted soberly on horseback behind their spouses...

Biography of Harriet Beecher Stowe 1811-1896

By Debra Michals, PhD 2017 womanshistory.org

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Abolitionist author, Harriet Beecher Stowe rose to fame in 1851 with the publication of her best-selling book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which highlighted the evils of slavery, angered the slaveholding South, and inspired pro-slavery copy-cat works in defense of the institution of slavery.

Stowe was born on June 14, 1811 in Litchfield, Connecticut, the seventh child of famed Congregational minister Lyman Beecher and Roxana Foote Beecher. Her famous siblings include elder sister Catherine (11 years her senior), and Henry Ward Beecher, the famous preacher and reformer. Stowe’s mother died when she was five years old and while her father remarried, her sister Catherine became the most pronounced influence on young Harriet’s life. At age eight, she began her education at the Litchfield Female Academy. Later, in 1824, she attended Catherine Beecher’s Hartford Female Seminary, which exposed young women to many of the same courses available in men’s academies. Stowe’s proclivity for writing was evident in the essays she produced for school.  Stowe became a teacher, working from 1829 to 1832 at the Hartford Female Seminary.

In 1832, when Stowe’s father Lyman accepted the position of president of the esteemed Lane Seminary in Cincinnati, Ohio, she went with him. There, she met some of the great minds and reformers of the day, including noted abolitionists. Smitten with the landscape of the West, she published her first book, Primary Geography, in 1833, which celebrated the diverse cultures and vistas she encountered. In 1836, she met and married Calvin Stowe, a professor at the Lane Seminary. He encouraged her writing, they had seven children, and weathered financial and other problems during their decades-long union. Stowe would write countless articles, some were published in the renowned women’s magazine of the times, Godey’s Lady’s Book. She also wrote 30 books, covering a wide range of topics from homemaking to religion in nonfiction, as well as several novels.

The turning point in Stowe’s personal and literary life came in 1849, when her son died in a cholera epidemic that claimed nearly 3000 lives in her region. She later said that the loss of her child inspired great empathy for enslaved mothers who had their children sold away from them. The passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which legally compelled Northerners to return runaway slaves, infuriated Stowe and many in the North. This was when Stowe penned what would become her most famous work, the novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Originally serialized in the National Era, Stowe saw her tale as a call to arms for Northerners to defy the Fugitive Slave Act. The vivid characters and great empathy inspired by the book was further aided by Stowe’s strong Christianity.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin was released as a book in March 1852, selling 300,000 copies in the US in the first year. It was later performed on stage and translated into dozens of languages. When some claimed her portrait of slavery was inaccurate, Stowe published Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a book of primary source historical documents that backed up her account, including the narratives of notable former slaves Frederick Douglass and Josiah Henderson. Southern pro-slavery advocates countered with books of their own, such as Mary Henderson Eastman’s Aunt Phillis’s Cabin; Or, Southern Life as It Is. This work and others like it attempted to portray slavery as a benevolent institution, but never received the acclaim or widespread readership of Stowe’s.

Stowe used her fame to petition to end slavery. She toured nationally and internationally, speaking about her book and donating some of what she earned to help the antislavery cause. She also wrote extensively on behalf of abolition, most notably her “Appeal to Women of the Free States of America, on the Present Crisis on Our Country,” which she hoped would help raise public outcry to defeat the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act.

During the Civil War, Stowe became one of the most visible professional writers. For years, popular folklore claimed that President Abraham Lincoln, upon meeting Stowe in 1862, said, “So you’re the woman who wrote the book that started this great war.” That quote, published in a 1911 biography of Stowe by her son Charles, has been called into question, as Stowe herself and two others present at the meeting make no reference to it in their accounts (and Charles was only a boy at the time of the meeting).

In 1873, Stowe and her family moved to Hartford, Connecticut, where she remained until her death in 1896, summering in Florida. She helped breathe new life into the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, and was involved with efforts to launch the Hartford Art School, later part of the University of Hartford.

Bibliography

Books:

Adams, John R. Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Biography. Garden City: Doubleday, 1999.

Boydston, Jeanne. Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015.

Cott, Nancy F., ed. Root of Bitterness: Documents of the Social History of American Women. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1996.

Gordon, Beverly. Bazaars and Fair Ladies: The History of the American Fundraising Fair. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1998.

Gossett, Thomas F. Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American Culture. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1985.

Hedrick, Joan D. Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Keller, Katherine J. Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Politics of Slavery. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019.

Reynolds, David S. Mightier than the Sword: Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Battle for America. New York: W.W. Norton, 2011.

Sklar, Kathryn Kish, and James Brewer Stewart. Women’s Rights and Transatlantic Antislavery in the Era of Emancipation. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.

Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom's Cabin. 1852 (various reprint editions).

Stowe, Harriet Beecher. The Minister's Wooing. Boston: Phillips, Sampson, 1859.

Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp. Boston: Phillips, Sampson, 1856.

Articles:

Ammons, Elizabeth. "Heroines in Uncle Tom's Cabin: The Reformed Southern Lady, the Christian Woman, and the Black Slave Woman." American Quarterly, vol. 33, no. 5, 1981, pp. 603-624.

Crane, Gregg. "The Refrain of ‘Uncle Tom's Cabin’." New Literary History, vol. 37, no. 4, 2006, pp. 725-742.

Foster, Frances Smith. "Resisting Incidents: Re-reading Uncle Tom's Cabin through Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl." Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 22, no. 2, 1997, pp. 447-462.

Hedrick, Joan D. "Harriet Beecher Stowe and the ‘Woman Question’." New England Quarterly, vol. 66, no. 4, 1993, pp. 553-570.

MacKethan, Lucinda. "Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Slave Narratives and the Growth of the Abolitionist Novel." American Literature, vol. 53, no. 4, 1981, pp. 555-572.

Morrison, Toni. "Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Gothic Imagination." Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, vol. 13, no. 3, 1971, pp. 23-31.

Tompkins, Jane. "Sentimental Power: Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Politics of Literary History." American Quarterly, vol. 41, no. 4, 1989, pp. 579-601.

Yellin, Jean Fagan. "Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Black Abolitionists." The Massachusetts Review, vol. 16, no. 3, 1975, pp. 636-646.

Notes on Recent Publications & Scholarship:

David S. Reynolds’s Mightier than the Sword (2011) offers a compelling exploration of the political and social impact of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Reynolds argues that Stowe's novel played a critical role in shaping the national consciousness around slavery and abolition, particularly in the years leading up to the Civil War.

Katherine J. Keller’s Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Politics of Slavery (2019) adds a modern academic take on Stowe’s political engagements, particularly focusing on her post-Uncle Tom's Cabin career and her influence on the antislavery movement.