July, 1896. She was the third daughter of Rev. Dr. Lyman Beecher. When she was a mere child Mrs. Beecher died, yet she never ceased to influence the lives of her children. Mrs. Stowe wrote: “Although my mother's bodily presence disappeared from our circle, I think that her memory and example had more influence in moulding her family than the living presence of many mothers.” After her death, Mrs. Stowe was placed under the care of her grandmother at Guilford, Conn. Here she listened, with untiring interest, to the ballads of Sir Walter Scott and the poems of Robert Burns. The “Arabian Nights,” also, was to her a dream of delight — an enchanted palace, through which her imagination ran wild. After her father's second marriage, her education was continued at the Litchfield academy under the charge of Sarah Pierce and John Brace. Of Mr. Brace and his methods of instruction Mrs. Stowe ever spoke with the greatest enthusiasm. “Mr. Brace exceeded all teachers that I ever knew in the faculty of teaching composition,” she wrote. “Much of the inspiration and training of my early days consisted not in the things I was supposed to be studying, but in hearing, while seated unnoticed at my desk, the conversation of Mr. Brace with the older classes.” Nor, indeed, were the influences in her home less stimulating to the intellect. Dr. Beecher, like the majority of the Calvinistic divines of his day, had his system of theology vast and comprehensive enough to embrace the fate of men and angels, and to fathom the counsels of the Infinite. His mind was kept in a state of intense and joyous intellectual activity by constantly elaborating, expounding, and defending this system. Consequently his children grew up in an atmosphere surcharged with mental and moral enthusiasm. There was no trace of morbid melancholy or ascetic gloom in Dr. Beecher. He was sound in body, sound in mind, and the religious influence which he exerted on the minds of his children was healthy and cheerful. Under such circumstances it is not surprising to find a bright and thoughtful child of twelve years writing a school composition on the profound theme “Can the Immortality of the Soul be proved from the Light of Nature?” The writer took the negative side of the question, and argued with such power and originality that Dr. Beecher, when it was read in his presence, not knowing the author, asked with emphasis, “Who wrote that?” “Your daughter, sir,” quickly answered Mr. Brace. Said Mrs. Stowe, speaking of this event: “It was the proudest moment of my life. There was no mistaking father's face when he was pleased, and to have interested him was past all juvenile triumphs.”
Dr. Beecher read with enthusiasm, and encouraged his children to read, both Byron and Scott. When nine or ten years of age, Mrs. Stowe was deeply impressed by reading Byron's “Corsair.” “I shall never forget how it electrified and thrilled me,” she wrote. “I went home absorbed and wondering about Byron, and after that listened to everything that father and mother said at table about him.” Byron's death made an enduring, but at the same time solemn and painful, impression on her mind. She was eleven years old at the time, and usually did not understand her fathers sermons, but the one that he preached on this occasion she remembered perfectly, and it had had a deep and lasting influence on her life. At the time of the Missouri agitation Dr. Beecher's sermons and prayers were burdened with the anguish of his soul for the cause of the slave. His passionate appeals drew tears down the hardest faces of he old farmers who listened to them. Night and morning, in family devotions, he appealed to leaven for “poor, oppressed, bleeding Africa, that the time of deliverance might come.” The effect of such sermons and prayers on the mind of an imaginative and sensitive child can be easily conceived. They tended to make her, what she had seen from earliest childhood, the enemy of all slavery. In 1824, when thirteen years of age, Mrs. Stowe went to Hartford to attend the school that had been established there by her eldest sister, Catherine. Here she studied Latin, read Ovid and Virgil, and wrote metrical translations of the former, which displayed a very respectable knowledge of Latin, a good command of English, with considerable skill in versification. At the age of fourteen she taught with success a class in “Butler's Analogy,” and gained a good reading knowledge of French and Italian. As scholar and teacher she remained with her sister in Hartford till the autumn of 1832, when both removed with their father to Cincinnati, Ohio, where Dr. Beecher assumed the presidency of Lane theological seminary and the pastorate of the 3d Presbyterian church. At this time Mrs. Stowe compiled an elementary geography for a western publisher, which was extensively used, and again engaged in teaching with her sister in Cincinnati. She wrote lectures for her classes in history, and, as a member of a literary club, called the Semi-Colon, humorous sketches and poems.
In January, 1836, she married Mr. Stowe. During her residence in Cincinnati she frequently visited the slave states, and acquired the minute knowledge of southern life that was so conspicuously displayed in her subsequent writings. Fugitive slaves were frequently sheltered in her house, and assisted by her husband and brothers to escape to Canada. During the riots in 1836, when James G. Birney's press was destroyed and free negroes were hunted like wild beasts through the streets of Cincinnati, only the distance from the city and the depths of mud saved Lane seminary and the Yankee Abolitionists at Walnut Hills from a like fate. Many a night Mrs. Stowe sank into uneasy slumber, expecting to be roused by the howlings of an angry mob, led by the agents of exasperated and desperate slave-holders. In 1849 Mrs. Stowe published “The Mayflower, or Short Sketches of the Descendants of the Pilgrims” (New York; new ed., with additions, Boston, 1855), being a collection of papers which she had from time to time contributed to various periodicals. In 1850 she removed with her husband and family to Brunswick, Me., where the former had just been called to a professorship in Bowdoin. It was at the height of the excitement caused by the passage of the fugitive-slave law. It seemed to her as if slavery were about to extend itself over the free states. She conversed with many benevolent, tender-hearted, Christian men and women, who were blind and deaf to all arguments against it, and she concluded that it was because they did not realize
