Imagine you lived in Cincinnati just nine years before the Civil War began and you attended a literary society named … don’t judge! … The Semi-Colon Club.
Among the group were famed journalists, university founders, future Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase, and Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman physician in the US. The think tank allowed women not only to speak to men, but it also encouraged the ladies to share revolutionary ideas. It was jam-packed with abolitionists.
If you were a member of The Semi-Colon Club in March 1852, you would be rushing to the local bookstore and passing the fiction racks filled with copies of Moby-Dick, The House of Seven Gables, and A Tale of Two Cities.
You’d go to the counter and ask for the new book, the one written by your friend and fellow group member Harriet Beecher Stowe. You’d ask for a copy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Harriet Beecher Stowe Wants to Serve God
From adolescence, Harriet wanted to be used by God. “I do not mean to live in vain,” she wrote to her brother Edward. “[God] has given me talents, and I will lay them at His feet, well satisfied. All my powers He can enlarge. He made my mind, and He can teach me to cultivate and exert its faculties.”
As a young adult, her family and friends shaped her spiritual and academic life. Growing up in a home that valued Christian teaching as well as academic rigor, six of her seven brothers became ministers like her father, and her sister Catharine opened a seminary for women. Harriet attended the seminary and later Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati.
After her marriage to theology professor Calvin Stowe when she was twenty-four, Harriet’s spiritual quest was to find time to write in between caring for her seven children (only three of whom lived long lives).
She began writing short articles, including anti-slavery pieces for an abolitionist newspaper under a pseudonym. After the Fugitive Slave Act was enacted and slaves were being dragged southward through Ohio by bounty hunters, Harriet mustered courage and, at age forty-one, crafted her most influential book on a topic both unpopular and socially volatile.
Harriet Beecher Stowe Served God Throughout Her Life
Biographer Nancy Koester wrote:
“Stowe believed strongly in Jesus, and her Christian faith was central to her life and work. She knew moments of glory and dark nights of the soul, long periods of plodding and flashes of inspiration. Over the course of her lifetime, her spiritual quest changed. But it never ended, and it never failed to shape her life.”
Despite vitriolic backlash against the book and Harriet, Uncle Tom’s Cabin became the best-seller of the nineteenth century, second in sales only to the Bible. The names “Uncle Tom” and “Simon Legree” immediately saturated the discourse of Northerners and Southerners alike and are still used as idioms in modern American speech.
Harriet’s name also became a household word representing social justice and courage—and still is.
Want to Learn More?
You can read Project Gutenberg’s copy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin here.
You can check out the book Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Spiritual Life by Nancy Koester (Eerdmans, 2014) from the library or purchase a copy from an online or retail bookstore.
You can read what the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center says about her amazing family here.
