Harriet Beecher – Stowe
Harriet Beecher – Stowe
The famous American novelist Harriet Elizabeth Beecher-Stowe was born at Litchfield in the State of Connecticut where her father, Dr. Lyman Beecher, was a pastor. She was brought up in the religious earnestness which the New Englanders had inherited from the Puritans. To their understanding justice and kindness could not exist outside re¬ligion, and this is felt in the works of the writer.
Harriet was four years old when her mother died. The chief influence of Harriet's youth was her elder sister, Catharine, who had started a school. In 1832 the family moved to Cincinnati where Dr. Beecher accepted the presidency of a Theological Seminary. It was there that Harriet discovered her gift for writing when a local magazine gave her a prize for one of her short stories. In 1836 she married Professor Calvin Stowe, a friend of her father's, who taught in the Seminary. Mrs. Stowe, hav¬ing a family of several chil¬dren, had little time to write. Early sketches written in her spare time were stories about local characters, the descend¬ants of the Pilgrim Fathers. These sketches show the writer's deep- interest in social welfare.
Cincinnati was near the bor¬der of Virginia — the oldest slave stare. It was there that Beecher-Stowe saw the institu¬tion of slavery; there she lived through the experiences which compelled her to write on sla¬very. She remembered how her husband and brother had saved a free Negro girl, who was being pursued by her former I master, by hiding the girl in their home.
In 1850 the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850 roused general indignation in the Northern states. It inspired Beecher-Stowe to write a larger work. Early in 1851 she began the novel "Uncle Tom's Cabin". When it appeared, the book had an enormous and continuous success.
Naturally, from that time on she devoted herself to the cause of emancipation of Negro slaves. Many thought that the book had helped to bring on the Civil War.
Her second novel was "Dred, A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp". In this book the author depicts the viciousness of slavery, but this time she shows the growing revolutionary spirit among Negro slaves.
After the Civil War between the Northern and Southern states Beecher-Stowe bought a place in Mandarin, Florida, where she lived and worked for many years. Her works of the last period are realistic novels and stories about the common people of her time. Her novel "The Pearl of Orr's Island" is believed to have begun a new trend in American lite¬rature, the Regional Realists, of which Bret Harte was the classic.
"Uncle Tom's Cabin"
The purpose of the book was to show slavery as a national institution, therefore Harriet Beecher-Stowe had no intention to pass judgment on the South alone, to describe slavery as a vicious system of labour or an economic error. In the preface to her book Beecher-Stowe states that free¬dom should be a principle, and in a country where freedom has become a privilege, the nation will never be free. The author took pains to show that the crime of slavery was national and that it was as injurious and shameful to the Northern states as to the Southern. The novel "Uncle Tom's Cabin" took away from the advocates of the slave system any chance to justify the slave-holders. Once and for all it did away with the idea that a slave could be happy with a "kind" master. The story from its very beginning shows that when the "kind" master has fallen into debt, he will not stop at the prospect of selling his "property". He sells his good slave although he had intended to set him free; and the more valuable the slave, the more surely the creditors would seize him.
Thus the difference between an efficient and virtuous slave and a "wild" or good-for-nothing slave is that the former has a higher market value.
The religious Uncle Tom who has long become a member of his master's family is sold for Mr. Shelby's debts. Mr. Shelby parts with him reluctantly but that does not make Tom's life easier: he is separated from his wife and children. Tom's second "kind" master, Mr. St. Clare, dies unexpectedly, and his selfish widow sells Tom since he is one of the most valuable servants on the estate. The author shows how near Tom had come to be a friend to Eva, the master's daughter. But nothing can induce the mistress of the house that her deceased husband had promised to set Tom free. She says: "What does he want of liberty? ...Now I'm principled against emancipating in any case. Keep a Negro under the care of a master, and he does well enough and is respectable; but set them free, and they get lazy and won't work, and take to drink¬ing, and go all down to be mean, worthless fellows. ...It's no favour to set them free."Tom is sold and falls into the hands of a monster. The name of the new master is Legree. On Legree's cotton plantation Uncle Tom becomes a field-hand, and suffers all the misery and torture of Southern bondage. Tom's virtuousness and religious principles make him submissive to the worst of masters so long as exploitation and bad treatment concern him alone. But when Legree wants him to become an overseer and an instrument of cruelty for Tom's fellow-slaves, he refuses to obey. In contrast to Tom's noble at¬titude the author portrays two Negro overseers, Sambo and Quimbo, who were wild and cruel. An American proverb says: "The worst of overseers is the former slave." Legree had trained them in savageness and brutality. Beecher-Stowe does not conceal that the institution of slavery gradually deprives human beings of elementary hu¬manitarian feelings, by developing the worse inhuman nature: “Legree... governed his plantation by a sort of resolution of forces. Sambo and Quimbo cordially hated each other; the plantation hands, one and all, cordially hated them; and by playing off one against another he was pret¬ty sure, through one or the other of the three parties, to get informed of whatever was on foot in the place."
Sambo and Quimbo hate Tom fearing he might take their privileges on the plantation and they become beastly cruel to him. Gassy, a quadroon slave on the plantation, whom Legree had bought to be his mistress, warns Tom: "Here you are on a lone plantation, ten miles from any other, in the swamps; not a white person here who could testify if you were burned alive — if you were scalded, cut in inch pieces, set up for the dogs to tear, or hung up and whipped to death."
Legree hates Tom. Uncle Tom's fortitude makes him morally superior to his master. From the first Legree had felt a secret dislike for Tom: "...the native antipathy of bad to good".
When the passionate and rebellious Gassy proposes to kill the master and run away with her friend, the Negro girl Emmeline, Tom refuses to do it. He prefers to die a slave rather than to use violence; but he helps Gassy and Emmeline to hide from their master. Legree, who had been searching for the two fugitives, suspects Tom of knowing how they managed to escape his dogs and pursuers, and heiwants to break Tom's fortitude. Uncle Tom confronting his master says: fl can't tell anything, but I can die." And Tom dies a martyr.