| Because Uncle Tom's Cabin is written so emotionally, most readers assume that Stowe is an evangelical Southerner. They are surprised to discover that Stowe's roots are deep in Yankee soil. She was born in 1811 in Litchfield, Connecticut, into a minister's family, and when she was four, her mother died, and she was reared by an elder sister, Catharine. Catharine founded a school in Hartford, and Stowe received her education there; afterward, she became a teacher at the school. |
| When Stowe was twenty-one, her father became president of a theological seminary in Cincinnati, Ohio, and she and Catharine moved to Ohio with him. Catharine set up one of the first colleges for women, Western Female Institute, and Stowe began teaching once more. |
| Her interests broadened as she talked to the people of Ohio. Cincinnati is just across the river from Kentucky, then a slave state, and there, Stowe heard many tales of slavery and runaway slaves. There also, she met and married Calvin Stowe, a minister and one of the professors at the seminary. After the marriage, Calvin encouraged his new bride to continue writing; she had begun winning prizes two years earlier and was grateful for her husband's attitude, which wasn't wholly unselfish. The newlyweds were very poor and, in this way, Stowe could supplement the family income. |
| Stowe lived eighteen years in Ohio, unconsciously collecting data and impressions about slavery. Then in 1850, Calvin accepted a professorship in Maine and so Stowe moved her family there. The following year, she began writing about a vision she had had of a ragged old slave being beaten. She submitted a selection of her writing to the National Era, and they agreed to publish it as a serial. It was an immediate success, and in 1852, it was issued in book form as Uncle Tom's Cabin. Ironically, the firebrand abolitionists did not think that |
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