Lives of Girls Who Became Famous | Page 4

on intemperance had stirred the
whole country.
Though he loved Boston, his heart often turned toward the great West,
and he longed to help save her young men. When, therefore, he was
asked to go to Ohio and become the president of Lane Theological
Seminary at Cincinnati, he accepted. Singularly dependent upon his
family, Catharine and Harriet must needs go with him to the new home.
The journey was a toilsome one, over the corduroy roads and across the
mountains by stagecoach. Finally they were settled in a pleasant house
on Walnut Hills, one of the suburbs of the city, and the sisters opened
another school.
Four years later, in 1836, Harriet, now twenty-five, married the
professor of biblical criticism and Oriental literature in the seminary,
Calvin E. Stowe, a learned and able man.
Meantime the question of slavery had been agitating the minds of

Christian people. Cincinnati being near the border-line of Kentucky,
was naturally the battle-ground of ideas. Slaves fled into the free State
and were helped into Canada by means of the "Underground Railroad,"
which was in reality only a friendly house about every ten miles, where
the colored people could be secreted during the day, and then carried in
wagons to the next "station" in the night.
Lane Seminary became a hot-bed of discussion. Many of the Southern
students freed their slaves, or helped to establish schools for colored
children in Cincinnati, and were disinherited by their fathers in
consequence. Dr. Bailey, a Christian man who attempted to carry on a
fair discussion of the question in his paper, had his presses broken
twice and thrown into the river. The feeling became so intense, that the
houses of free colored people were burned, some killed, and the
seminary was in danger from the mob. The members of Professor
Stowe's family slept with firearms, ready to defend their lives. Finally
the trustees of the college forbade all slavery discussion by the students,
and as a result, nearly the whole body left the institution.
Dr. Beecher, meantime, was absent at the East, having raised a large
sum of money for the seminary, and came back only to find his labor
almost hopeless. For several years, however, he and his children stayed
and worked on. Mrs. Stowe opened her house to colored children,
whom she taught with her own. One bright boy in her school was
claimed by an estate in Kentucky, arrested, and was to be sold at
auction. The half-crazed mother appealed to Mrs. Stowe, who raised
the needed money among her friends, and thus saved the lad.
Finally, worn out with the "irrepressible conflict," the Beecher family,
with the Stowes, came North in 1850, Mr. Stowe accepting a
professorship at Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine. A few boarders
were taken into the family to eke out the limited salary, and Mrs. Stowe
earned a little from a sketch written now and then for the newspapers.
She had even obtained a prize of fifty dollars for a New England story.
Her six brothers had fulfilled their mother's dying wish, and were all in
the ministry. She was now forty years old, a devoted mother, with an
infant; a hard-working teacher, with her hands full to overflowing. It

seemed improbable that she would ever do other than this quiet,
unceasing labor. Most women would have said, "I can do no more than
I am doing. My way is hedged up to any outside work."
But Mrs. Stowe's heart burned for those in bondage. The Fugitive Slave
Law was hunting colored people and sending them back into servitude
and death. The people of the North seemed indifferent. Could she not
arouse them by something she could write?
One Sunday, as she sat at the communion table in the little Brunswick
church, the pattern of Uncle Tom formed itself in her mind, and, almost
overcome by her feelings, she hastened home and wrote out the chapter
on his death. When she had finished, she read it to her two sons, ten
and twelve, who burst out sobbing, "Oh! mamma, slavery is the most
cursed thing in the world."
After two or three more chapters were ready, she wrote to Dr. Bailey,
who had moved his paper from Cincinnati to Washington, offering the
manuscript for the columns of the National Era, and it was accepted.
Now the matter must be prepared each week. She visited Boston, and at
the Anti-Slavery rooms borrowed several books to aid in furnishing
facts. And then the story wrote itself out of her full heart and brain.
When it neared completion, Mr. Jewett of Boston, through the
influence of his wife, offered to become the publisher, but feared if the
serial were much longer, it would be a failure. She wrote him that she
could not stop till it