Little Lady, Great War: Inside the Setting of Uncle Tom’s Cabin

May 28, 2025

History

Literature

Nesha Ruther

Writer at Bond & Grace

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“So this is the little lady who caused the great war!”—Abraham Lincoln

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On a sunny May afternoon, I make the 15-minute walk from my apartment to a local Cincinnati landmark. It’s a building I have passed dozens of times, but have never entered. Set apart from the road on a slight hill, it is a modest, yellow house with cheerful green shutters, a white door, and roses lining the walkway. Today it is a museum and historical site, but once it was the family home of Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It is where the author was married, had her first two children, and began to develop the political and religious ideology that would form the bedrock of her iconic abolitionist text.

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The Harriet Beecher Stowe House in Cincinnati, Ohio

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The building was originally built in 1832 in the neighborhood of Walnut Hills as part of Lane Theological Seminary, a Presbyterian college that operated from 1829 to 1932. The only surviving part of the campus, the house served as the college President’s residence. In the first decades of the 19th century, Cincinnati, Ohio, was still very much the Western frontier, and students at the seminary were trained in practical skills as well as religious theology. Walnut Hills, the neighborhood where I live and where Lane Seminary was based, would then have been rolling countryside with cows, chickens, and views overlooking the river.

Harriet Beecher Stowe was born in Litchfield, Connecticut, in 1811. Her father was Lyman Beecher, a popular minister. Harriet was the seventh of eleven children; her father had been married once before, and when Harriet’s mother died when she was five, he married a third time. After her mother’s death, Harriet was primarily raised by her older sister Catherine, who became a prominent advocate for women’s education. Catherine would go on to start schools for girls in both Connecticut and Cincinnati, and Harriet would both attend her sister’s school and begin teaching there at the age of 16.

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Harriet's father, Lyman Beecher (left) and sister Catherine Beecher (right)

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In 1832, when Harriet was 21, her father was offered the position of President at Lane Seminary, and the family packed up and moved west. It would be in Cincinnati where Harriet was exposed to slavery as more than an abstract concept. While Ohio was a free state, Cincinnati was a border town right across the river from slave-owning Kentucky. Runaway slaves would frequently make the dangerous journey across the Ohio River to Ohio, something Harriet would incorporate into Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and enslaved people would often be sent to Cincinnati on errands. Coming from Connecticut, this new and politically fraught environment was a culture shock to young Harriet.

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The issue of slavery was also a fierce topic of debate at Lane Seminary. In 1834, students hosted a series of debates on the issue of abolition vs. colonization. Abolition argued for the end of slavery and the incorporation of African Americans into the broader American society, while colonization argued that free or emancipated African Americans should be sent by boat back to the African continent. Colonization was particularly popular among slave owners in Kentucky who feared that the freed Black population would stir up rebellion on their plantations. Lyman Beecher, who was known for combining theology with activism, encouraged his students to apply Christianity to the social issues of the time and supported the debates. Harriet, who lived with Catherine in downtown Cincinnati at the girls’ school, made the trip back to Walnut Hills to crowd into the small parlor of Lane Seminary and watch the students debate.

The debates raged for nine evenings, and by its conclusion, it was made abundantly clear that the student body overwhelmingly believed not only that colonization was un-Christian but that the immediate (rather than gradual) end of slavery was the only ethical approach. The students even collaborated with the free Black population in Cincinnati, doing social work, holding religious services, and organizing night schools. The Board of Lane Seminary was unnerved by the students’ fiery radicalism and tried to censor all anti-slavery speech and activity. In response, nearly 40 students left Lane, causing a serious dip in enrollment that the school would never fully recover from.

In 1836, Harriet married Calvin Stowe, a professor at Lane. Harriet had been close friends with Calvin and his wife, Eliza, whom she met through the seminary’s literary group, the Semi-Colon Club. When Eliza died in 1834, Harriet and Calvin connected in their shared grief. The two were married in the living room of the President’s House at Lane and would have seven children. Calvin encouraged his wife’s writing, and Harriet published articles in women’s magazines, as well as more than 30 books that ranged in topic from homemaking to religious treatises to fiction. Eventually, the pair moved to Brunswick, Maine, where Calvin got a position at Bowdoin College.

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In 1849, Harriet and Calvin lost a son to the cholera epidemic that claimed nearly 3,000 lives in the region. This shattering experience made Harriet realize the agony an enslaved mother felt upon being separated from her children, sharpening her fierce belief in abolition. She wrote, “My heart breaks at the cruelty and injustice our nation inflicts on a slave. I am tormented by the thought of the slave mothers whose babes are torn from them. I pray to God to let me do a little and to cause my cry for them to be heard.” A year later, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, which stated that Northerners had a legal obligation to return runaway slaves. One day, Harriet and her family were forced to make this decision for themselves when a runaway slave knocked on their door, having been told that the Stowes were abolitionists. Harriet wrote to her sister, “Before this law, I might have tried to send him somewhere else, as it was, all hands in the house united in making him up a bed.” The Fugitive Slave Act appalled and infuriated Harriet and inspired her to begin writing the book that would change both her life and her country forever.

For inspiration, she drew on her experiences in Cincinnati, recalling a plantation she had once visited in Kentucky as the basis for the Shelby plantation. For Uncle Tom, she drew from The Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave, Now an Inhabitant of Canada, as Narrated by Himself by the formerly enslaved Josiah Henson, who escaped from a plantation in Maryland.

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In 1851, Harriet published Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a serial in the abolitionist newspaper The National Era. The newspaper’s editor was Gamaliel Bailey, a former physician who lectured on physiology at Lane Seminary and was a family friend of the Stowes. The original plan was to write three or four installments, but in the end, she published 40. When the book was released as a novel in 1852, it sold 10,000 copies in its first week, invigorating abolitionists, moving those who had been previously ambivalent, and terrifying slave owners with its striking moral clarity. The enormous sales in the first week only continued; it sold an estimated 300,000 copies in the U.S. and more than 2 million worldwide in its first year. It would go on to be the bestselling book of the 19th century.

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It was particularly important for Harriet to document her sources because after the publication of the novel, Southern planters and pro-slavery columnists tried to discredit the novel, saying that it was exaggerated or even outright fabrication. Many slave owners, pro-slavery voices claimed, were benevolent and treated their slaves with kindness and empathy. In 1853, Harriet published A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which outlined her inspiration, particularly firsthand accounts from the formerly enslaved, such as Josiah Henson’s. The Key gave credibility to Harriet’s novel and brought attention to narratives of the formerly enslaved.

Notably, President Abraham Lincoln checked A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin out of the Library of Congress on June 16, 1862, and returned it on July 29. Those 49 days align with the period during which he was drafting the Emancipation Proclamation. When Lincoln met Harriet in 1862, shortly before the Emancipation Proclamation was publicly issued, he famously exclaimed, “So this is the little lady who caused the Great War!” He wasn’t being hyperbolic when he spoke; Harriet was a small woman at only five feet tall.

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While Harriet Beecher Stowe and Uncle Tom’s Cabin had an indelible impact on American culture and changed the hearts and minds of Northerners when it came to slavery, it is far from a perfect novel and betrays some of Harriet’s stereotypical and one-dimensional views of African Americans. Black characters in the novel are characterized as simple and wholesome individuals who would win the sympathy of white northern audiences. Moreover, they venerate whiteness and denigrate their own Blackness. In one scene, Aunt Chloe exclaims to her white mistress, “Now, Missis, do jist look at dem beautiful white hands o’ yourn, with long fingers, and all a sparkling with rings, like my white lilies when de dew’s on ’em. And look at my great black stumpin hands. Now, don’t ye think dat de Lord must have meant me to make de pie-crust, and you to stay in de parlor?”

As James Baldwin wrote in his 1949 essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” “Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a very bad novel not intended to do anything more than prove that slavery was wrong…This makes material for a pamphlet but is hardly enough for a novel.”

Still, if Harriet’s goal was to prove to white audiences that slavery was unquestionably evil, she no doubt succeeded, shaping the public opinion of the institution of slavery not only in her generation, but ours.

Walking home from the Harriet Beecher Stowe house, I am reminded that so much of Harriet’s work, while publicly lauded today, was at the time highly controversial. When she allowed the man fleeing slavery into her home, she was committing a federal crime. When she wrote and published an anti-slavery text, she was making herself a public target for vitriol and violence. To remember her bravery without making the connection to our own political and social moment, just as her father encouraged his students to apply theology to their current moment, we are not learning from her legacy, we are warping it.

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