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The serial Harriet Beecher Stowe gave, The Minister's Wooing, itself participated in the mythification of New England so central to the Atlantic Monthly's mission. However Stowe would live to see herself and other women writers left behind by the cultural hierarchy she participated in establishing. If she knocked down the male clerical authorities in The Minister's Wooing, her support of the Atlantic Monthly helped to elevate a new priesthood of cultural authorities. The Atlantic's first editor, James Russell Lowell, born “within the sound of the college bell at Cambridge,” was a professor at Harvard. On the appointed evening Harriet and Calvin Stowe appeared at the Revere House, Harriet wore a plain silk dress with a garland of artificial grape leaves in her hair. They had high expectations of the conversation. Although many invitations had gone out, only one other woman came; this was Harriet Prescott.

Thomas Perkins's death was the first since George Beecher's premature one in 1843 to strike within Harriet Beecher Stowe's generation. Perkins's death shook her security. The family was beginning to break up. Under the influence of her second season in Mandarin she opened a correspondence with George Eliot. Stowe poured out her heart in long, searching, reflective meditations on her past, her literary career, and their common interests as literary women. In October, all of her plans were jeopardized when she got word that Calvin Stowe had been stricken suddenly by paralysis. Her elegy to her New England childhood, Poganuc People, published in 1878, marked the end of the literary career she had begun forty-four years earlier. Like her best work, it had its origins in the oral tradition of the parlor. On July 1896, surrounded by a large group of family, including her children, she died, two weeks after her eighty-fifth birthday.

In June 1853, Harriet Beecher Stowe, exhausted from a triumphant publicity tour in England for her antislavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, crossed the English Channel for a few weeks of leisure travel on the Continent. One of her first stops was Geneva, which afforded her the chance to reflect on Calvin and his legacy in Western culture. Gazing on the view of Mont Blanc from the city, she wrote: "Calvinism, in its essential features, will never cease from the earth, because the great fundamental facts of nature are Calvinistic, and men with strong minds and wills always discover it." It was a striking statement, given her otherwise tortured relationship to her New England Puritan heritage, but it signaled a theme she would later develop in her fiction in ways that anticipated the arguments of Max Weber a half century later in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. This chapter will explore this incident and its ramifications.

In the same month in which Harriet Beecher Stowe read the Nation's review of Oldtown Folks, she began designing a public defense of a wronged woman, a woman whose very silence was now being used against her. In England, Lady Byron revealed to her the sordid sexual history of her estrangement from Lord Byron. In the aftermath of the Nation's attack on Anna Dickinson, Rebecca Harding Davis, herself, and Oldtown Folks, Stowe determined to tell the tale. Three months later “The True Story of Lady Byron's Life” was spread across the pages of the sedate Atlantic Monthly. Those who had enjoined women to keep silent would see just how loud a noise she could make. Stowe's story of marital betrayal and incest reverberated powerfully within the political culture of the American woman's movement, and particularly the wing led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, who had made marriage, divorce, and sexuality prominent topics of debate.

Harriet Beecher Stowe woke up one morning to find herself being received by the Lord Mayor of London—and all the nobility of England. The literary success of Uncle Tom's Cabin made Harriet Beecher Stowe's the single most powerful voice on behalf of the slave. Her preparation for this political role had been virtually nil. She had never been a member of an anti-slavery society, much less an officer in one. The only organizations she had ever been a part of were her sister's schools and the free and easy Semi-Colon Club—both of which were family projects. Added to her lack of experience was a singular contradiction: although hers was the most powerful voice on behalf of the slave, by the canons of 19th-century womanhood she could not speak in public. With varying degrees of grace and success, Stowe applied herself between 1853 and 1854 to fulfilling the expectations of her new role as antislavery activist.

A two-part series written by Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote for the New-York Evangelist, the following winter at Catharine Beecher's urging, demonstrates the extent to which she had taken up the Beecher family causes, with all their associated provincialisms and nativistic assumptions. This series was a plea for Protestant education in the West to counter the well organized efforts of the Jesuits and the Roman Catholic nuns. At the same time, Stowe's understanding of the Bible as a literary as well as a religious resource provided the groundwork for a national literature. In true Protestant style, she viewed the Bible as a book of the people. In an essay in the New-York Evangelist she went even further, characterizing the Bible in a homely way that made it the apotheosis of parlor literature. A sketch entitled “Immediate Emancipation,” published in January 1845, also shows her moving in with deftness on the dialect, moral principles, and plot that would bring her international fame.

The widely publicized predictions of William Miller increased the millennial expectation. It was, to take the title of a millennialist newspaper, one of the Signs of the Times. Miller's preaching fell on fertile soil and released energies that mushroomed out of control. For George Beecher, who veered between strenuous attempts at spiritual perfection and plunges into fits of depression, it was to prove too much to bear. The difficult path he trod was both example and warning to his sister Harriet Beecher Stowe, who was drawn into the vortex of perfectionist striving. Miller's predictions were publicized widely in the Boston area while Harriet Beecher Stowe was in the East arranging for the publication of The Mayflower. Harriet had written letters of religious import before, but never one of such personal intensity. The pieces Harriet wrote for the New-York Evangelist during this period reveal her preoccupation with perfection and final judgment.

Florida in 1867 was a frontier country. Harriet Beecher Stowe immediately set to work creating a home in the wilderness. Calvin Stowe told James Fields that Harriet had found “the Paradise described in the last chapters of Revelation, banning the alligators.” Northerners had begun to discover this paradise, and Stowe meant to secure her piece of it. Stowe hoped that the Florida air would thaw out her romance, still unwritten. With the exception of the interrupted Pearl of Orr's Island, this would have the longest gestation of any of her books. She had a clear view of its subject back in February 1864, at which time she was planning to have it ready for serialization the following year. She revealed some of her awe of the creative process in her response to receiving from Fields the contract for this book, which would eventually be published under the title Oldtown Folks.

Memories of Charley Stowe's death may have been intensified by the presence of her wet nurse. “Irish Catharine” gets little mention in Harriet Beecher Stowe's letters and is sent away as soon as her function is past, yet in the absence of Calvin Stowe, father, and sisters, Harriet was inevitably thrown on the companionship of her help. It is suggestive that “lonesome” is the one word of Catharine Beecher's that made its way from her speech into Harriet's letters, first self-consciously, then without remark. It would not have been surprising if, as they sat by the stove in the darkened house, they shared heart secrets. Harriet's removal from the West and her painful tendering of Charley from this world to the next marked an epoch in her consciousness. She had piloted one of her children through the breakers of life, and at the age of eighteen months he was safely on the other side of the river.

Harriet Beecher Stowe had used the first check from Uncle Tom's Cabin to renovate an old stone structure in Andover for use as the Stowe family residence. The “Stone Cabin” stood between Andover Theological Seminary and Phillips Andover Academy. It had been used in former times as a carpentry shop for the manual-labor students at the seminary; in more recent years it had been converted to a gymnasium. Harriet transformed this shell into a domestic space that satisfied her taste for light and beauty. The centerpiece was a long parlor that ran the width of the house. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, a child of eight when the Stowes came to Andover remember this. Harriet's European education extended her notion of both “woman” and “artist.” The pressure of writing Uncle Tom's Cabin, followed closely by the Key and then her English trip, had kept Harriet busy for two and a half years. Now she turned her attention to her children.

The complexities of Harriet Beecher Stowe's response to slavery and “the negro problem”—embroiled with racial prejudice for even ardent abolitionists—may be laid in part to these entangled domestic relations. During the formative period of the 1830s her consciousness was divided between that of republican defender of free speech and that of middle-class, white, household mistress. That she was herself trying to escape being a “mere household drudge” and “domestic slave” intensified the contradictions; she turned to her writing to make money that would enable her to hire household help—and she was dependent on household help to relieve her of duties so that she was free to write. The political economy of the household was intimately connected with the political economy of slavery. Both were patriarchal institutions that subordinated the labor of one group of people to the leisure and well-being of another. As a woman, Stowe's own labor was a commodity in this exchange.

Women turned to Harriet Beecher Stowe for relief from a particular kind of religious scruple that they would not have been able to express to their ministers. Stowe answered this mother's cry in a book she thought of as a series of “household sermons.” Once again Stowe ministered to troubled women by understanding and accepting their feelings—and telling them that God does the same. Her image of God was based on her own understanding of a mother's love. Mothers stood as the type of “disinterested benevolence.” As in Uncle Tom's Cabin, the radicalism of Stowe's Christianity came not from the boldness of her ideas but from her insistence that Christians must live out the practical consequences of their beliefs. The Minister's Wooing was in an important sense an undoing of theology, an antisystem that worked by putting ideas in practice and so exploding neat systems.

As “Cato's daughter,” Harriet Beecher Stowe's reliance on male institutions of power to which she had always had some access kept her from affirming a more radical consciousness of her sex. Stowe cited page after page of pro-slavery resolutions passed by clerical bodies, such as the resolution of the Georgia Annual Conference of the Methodist Church “that slavery as it exists, in these United States is not a moral evil,” she concluded. Now it was up to Joel Parker and Irenaeus Prime to demonstrate that their churches had denounced the heresy of slavery. The editor of the New York Observer was not foolish enough to print Stowe's reply to his challenge, and so her anti-slavery battery found another avenue to her audience. The documents that she and her brothers assembled were ultimately published in A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin.

In 1863 Calvin Stowe now sixty-one, retired from Andover and Harriet Beecher Stowe was fifty-two. For the next sixteen years she was the sole breadwinner, the head of the household, and a very determined professional writer. Her first step in arranging her life around this new reality was to impress her twin daughters, Hatty Stowe and Eliza Stowe, into household service. However the womanhood to which she bent their reluctant hands bore little resemblance to the independent life she herself had achieved. With the genius of the popular writer, Stowe accurately predicted that the horrors of war would create a reaction toward the comfort of home things. Her House and Home Papers were intimately connected to the transformation in American life that the war helped to bring about. Her first number, “Ravages of a Carpet,” told of the seemingly innocent introduction of a new carpet into the modest home of Christopher Crowfield.

This chapter discusses the strategies which Harriet Beecher Stowe mobilized from her religious background in order to further the abolitionist cause. In Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) revivalist and camp-meeting religion informs character and action. Dred (1856) focuses on the struggles between self-serving American pro-slavery clergy, heroic abolitionist ministers, and prophetic African-American Christianity, dramatized in the context of the role reversals of a camp-meeting. The Christian Slave (1855), a dramatized reading or ‘closet drama’, written for Mary Webb, one of the first African American dramatic performers, developed the role reversal topos of abolitionist closet drama (as did Herman Melville's Benito Cereno) for abolitionist purposes.

Unlike the male-dominated marriages of the 18th century, Calvin Stowe and Harriet Beecher Stowe's union was a “companionate marriage” —increasingly the middle-class norm. The marital concept of intellectual companionship, prevalent in the advice literature of the period, was strongly enforced by the teaching of Sarah Pierce at the Litchfield school. The gains for women in the new, companionate ideal were clear, but there were costs as well. Companionate marriages gave rise to more conflict, for the expectations and roles were less defined. A greater stress on their marriage than their contrasting temperaments was the strain of closely spaced childbearing. In both the difficulties and joys of young motherhood Harriet was supported by her help, Anna Smith, a recently arrived English immigrant whom Harriet treated more as a sister than a domestic servant.

Harriet Beecher Stowe's religious conversion of 1843 was paralleled in 1846 by a secular conversion to the water cure. Both were informed by the millennial hope of a perfect world, and both placed a baptism and a crisis at the heart of the cure. “Wash and Be Healed,” proclaimed the banner of the Water-Cure Journal, unabashedly appealing to millennial hopes. Hydropathy promised to do for the body what religious conversion had done for the soul. Appealing to the reformist striving of the age, hydropathy's goals were framed in specific, this worldly terms, that siphoned off religious energies into secular channels; in this respect the water cure was a harbinger of late-Victorian culture. Hydropathy taught that hygienic living was the best prevention of illness, and that through self-care one could enjoy good health and freedom from drugs and doctors. Hydropathy had strong links with homeopathy, which advocated the use of miniscule doses of medicine.