STOWI-:. 11AKIJIKT I'.KKCHKK. 



717 



leading antislavery man. As for myself and hus- 

 baiul. we have for tin- last seventeen years lived mi 

 the border of a slave State, and we have never 

 shrunk from the fugitives, and we have helped 

 them with all we had to give. I have received the 

 children of liberated slaves into a family school, 

 and taught them with my own children, and it has 

 been the influence that we found in the Church and 

 by the altar that has made us do all this." During 

 these years some of the incidents which she related 

 in " Uiicle Tom " took place under her own eye. 

 Uncle Tom himself had his prototype in a slave 

 who was known to her Josiah Henson who was 

 permitted to come and go freely from Kentucky to 

 Ohio on his master's business, but who refused to 

 avail himself of his extraordinary opportunities for 

 escape because his word was pledged against such 

 attempt. The master's word was also pledged to 

 give him his freedom in due time; but this pledge 

 was not kept, and when death overtook him the 

 faithful servant was sold "down river." 



The Hon. James G. Birney was a representative 

 of that fine class of men who, born and reared in 

 slave States, had yet always abhorred the institu- 

 tion of slavery, and had looked with hopeful long- 

 ing for its overthrow by constitutional means. Mr. 

 Birney in 1835 removed to Cincin- 

 nati, and there opened the printing 

 office for an antislavery publication 

 which he had not been able to es- 

 tablish in Kentucky. Mrs. Stowe 

 immediately became his friend and 

 helper in various ways. His journal 

 was entitled "The Philanthropist." 

 and the associate editor was Dr. 

 Gamaliel Bailey, who afterward re- 

 moved to Washington and estab- 

 lished an antislavery journal in which 

 Mrs. Stowe's great story first ap- 

 peared. During the ri<>ts in which 

 Mr. Birney's press was destroyed Lane 

 Seminary was threatened. Many of 

 its students were from the South, and 

 the debates between them and the 

 distinctly antislavery element at- 

 tracted by Dr. Beecher's natural 

 clientele, became so angry and con- 

 tinuous that little work could be done 

 in regular study. The Board of Trus- 

 tees, in the absence of Dr. Beecher. 

 forbade all discussion of the subject 

 of slavery, and the antislavery stu- 

 dents immediately withdrew in a 

 body. This broke up the seminary 

 organization for the time, although it revived some- 

 what in the following seventeen years, during 

 which Dr. Beecher and Prof. Stowe labored for 

 it. These were years of great privation to their 

 families. In 1849 Mrs. Stowe lost a child from 

 cholera. 



In 1850 Prof. Stowe accepted the professorship 

 of Natural and Revealed Religion in Bowdoin 

 College, Brunswick. Me. He remained at Lane 

 Seminary until a successor could be obtained, while 

 Mrs. Stowe, with the family, went to Brunswick to 

 prepare the new home. Of this experience she 

 wrote to her sister: "From the time that I left 

 Cincinnati with my children to come forth to a 

 country that I knew not of, almost to the pre:-ent 

 time if has seemed as if I could scarcely breathe. I 

 was so pressed with care. My head dizzy with the 

 whirl of railroads and steamboats, then ten days' 

 sojourn in Boston, and a constant toil and hurry in 

 buying my furniture and equipments, and then 

 landing in Brunswick in the midst of a drizzly, in- 

 exorable northeast storm, and beginning the work 

 of getting in order a deserted, dreary, damp old 



h<>mr. T!n-n came Mr. 

 July H and my little Charlie. During 

 I have employed my leisure h" 11 l.in^ 



up engagement s with IP iiior-. I 



written inoiv than anybody ,,r 1 my.self woul.; 

 thought. I have taught an hour a day in our 

 school, and I have read two li- 

 the childr 



In this year, 1*.">0. the eomp: ;hat 



included the fugitive-slave law and the 

 of California as a free Stale \\. 

 and signed by President Fillmore. T!.' 

 mises really sati.-lied nobody. The fu. 

 law stirred the Northern mind to its depth.-. I 

 daily in Boston were people wrought to the h:. 

 pitch of excitement, and colored Wide: 

 Canada. Up to this time Mrs. S; owe had written 

 nothing on the subject of slavery. She .-aid there 

 " was a sort of general impression upon her mind 

 that the subject was so dark and painful, so in\ 

 in difficulty and obscurity, so utterly beyond human 

 hope or help, that it was of no use to read, or think, 

 or distress one's self about it." Slavery seemed to 

 be advancing from a tolerated institution to a pro- 

 tected one. All Mrs. Stowe's memories of what .-he 

 had seen and known rose to haunt her mind, and jit 



THE HOUSE IX WHICH "UNCLE TOM'S CABIN'' WAS WRITTEN, BRUNSWICK. 

 MAINE. 



this time she received a letter from a sister-in-law 

 which contained this passage : " If I could use the 

 pen as you can I would write something that would 

 make this whole nation feel what an accursed thing 

 slavery is." She read the letter aloud to the family, 

 and when she came to the passage just quoted she 

 exclaimed in a tone that her children never forgot : 

 "I will write something. I will if I live.'' From 

 this moment the purpose burned in her soul and 

 blended itself with her devotions. She was one day 

 reading an account of the crossing of the Ohio river 

 on an ice floe by a slave woman and her child, when 

 the "something" that was to be written began to 

 take the form of a novel. The first portion written 

 was the scene in which Uncle Tom died. She was 

 attending communion service when the incidents 

 rose so vividly to her imagination that she was com- 

 pelled to leave the church lest her sobbing should 

 attract attention. She sat down at once and wrote 

 with a torrent of feeling and expression. As her 

 husband was away from home, when she had finished 

 she called her two little sons and read the manuscript 

 to them. They cried as if their hearts would break. 



