Mrs. H. B. Stowe
and Uncle Tom's Cabin

IF Mrs. Stowe should ever tell the world just how "Uncle Tom" came to be written, and then just how it was written, she would give us a story almost as interesting as a chapter of the work itself. A "little bird" once whispered in my ears the outline of the story. On a certain day, thirty-two years ago, in the month of June, Mrs. Stowe enjoyed the agreeable experience of receiving a letter with an unexpected check for money in it. Few things in life are more pleasing than this. How neatly the little document lies enclosed in the folds of the sheet, and how pleasantly it comes fluttering home to the elated recipient! It is minutely inspected, for a strange check is a revelation. Every bank has its own style, and every great house adds its peculiar mark. What character in the signature! The filling up is in a clerkly hand, acquired at school; but the hand that put its magic scrawl at the bottom was, it may be, toughened in the rude school of the world, where it had many a fight before it proved the victor.

The check which Mrs. Stowe received in June, 1851, came from the editor of a newspaper published in the city of Washington, and tradition reports it to have been of the value of one hundred dollars. The letter in which it was enclosed asked her to write as much of a story as she could afford for the money. The reader is probably aware that, thirty-one years ago, a hundred dollars accompanying such a request was about equivalent to a thousand at the present time. It was really a respectable sum of money. We have heard that it looked very large indeed to the modest lady who then received it. She was the wife of a Professor of Divinity in Bowdoin College, and she was living at Brunswick the seat of that institution, a village about thirty miles to the northeast of Portland in Maine.

Even now Maine is a land of careful economy; but at that time the salaries of learned professors ranged from six hundred dollars a year to fifteen hundred; and few indeed were the lucky men who received the larger sum. This mother added something to the family income by teaching daily a class of eight young ladies. Besides this, she did with her own hands all the work of the household, except the roughest part, which was performed, after a fashion, by a girl fresh from Ireland who could not speak the English language. And here was a hundred dollar check in the house! It was bewildering. Editors in Washington do not send checks to remote villages in Maine except for cause. What had Mrs. Stowe done that the editor of the National Era, a paper of limited circulation, should distinguish her thus?

She had published a volume of sketches and stories called the "Mayflower," which first saw the light in 1849, two years before. She had been a writer from her childhood. During her young-lady years she had been a member in Cincinnati of a literary society called the "Semicolon Club," for which she had written a great number of tales and sketches of character. These pieces were the delight of the club; but a certain degree of literary talent is so common among New England girls, that few persons seem to have perceived in them the promise of a splendid career. Mrs. Stowe afterwards contributed to periodicals, and at last, the best of her writings having been published in the "Mayflower," she enjoyed a certain celebrity on both sides of the ocean.

The volume was republished immediately in London, where it found appreciation. There are many things in this collection of stories that show true genius, i. e., a genuine power of exhibiting human life and character. It was the talent displayed in the " Mayflower" that prompted Dr. Bailey to send his well-timed check to the village of Brunswick.

The National Era was an anti-slavery paper, chiefly noted on account of the place whence it was issued. It attacked slavery at the capital of the United States, in the District of Columbia, where slaves were lawfully held, and in close proximity to States in which slavery was the ruling interest. It had little influence at the capital, where indeed a good many of the people were scarcely aware of its existence. The paper seemed protected by its insignificance, and it is interesting now to remember the almost contemptuous indifference with which it was regarded by the ruling spirits at Washington.

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Mrs. Stowe, as it chanced, knew something about slavery and Southern life. While living in and near Cincinnati she occasionally visited her pupils at their homes in Kentucky, and her husband had frequently harbored fugitives in his house and assisted them on their way to Canada. She had heard the stories of these fugitives from their own lips. The Ohio River, close to which she lived, was part of the boundary line between North and South, and slavery was discussed in all that region with the peculiar heat and intensity which distinguish border warfare. In this beat and intensity Mrs. Stowe did not appear to share in the least. It has been frequently observed that persons who have the faculty of absorbing and reproducing human life and character do not appear to be more interested in watching them than others. Charles Dickens, for example, would look upon a scene with apparent indifference, make no record of it at the time, and yet long after describe it with the exactness and particularity of a photograph.

Mrs. Stowe was a quietly observant person on the banks of the Ohio, not a flaming Abolitionist, not a fiery partisan ; having a real and strong regard for the good qualities of the Southern people; fully comprehending their inherited difficulties, and having for them a charitable sympathy. But in her own quiet way she gradually absorbed a knowledge of the whole system of life in the Southern States; its good and its evil, its tragedy and its comedy. She appears to have done this without particular effort, and even without knowing that she had done it.

Nor is it probable that, when she sat down to write something for her hundred dollar check, and called it "Uncle Tom's Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly," she had any lofty anticipations concerning her work. It is altogether likely—judging from the way great things are usually done—that her principal care was to give the editor a good hundred dollars' worth for his money. She expected to finish the story in three or four numbers. But the subject fascinated and overpowered her, and she was drawn on, week after week, cheered now and then by another check, by the warm appreciation of the editor, and by occasional approving letters from distant readers.

Few literary tasks have ever been executed in circumstances so little favorable to composition. She was at the head of a household, with narrow means, with young children clamorous for their mother's aid, with the inexorable Monday wash to superintend, the Saturday's baking to do, the semi-weekly batch of bread to make, her class of young ladies to instruct, company to entertain, garments to cut out, buttons to sew on, and all the endless tasks of a wife and mother. Sometimes, on baking-day, she would light the fire in the big brick oven, and thinking to gain a few minutes for writing, would fly to her task and become so absorbed by it as to forget everything in the world except the scene she was describing. She would return to her oven to find it as cold as it was at midnight; not a spark of fire left, and the bread risen and running over the trough. But she kept on for about eighteen months and finished the work.

It is not true that she had to seek for a publisher, although her publisher did think she ought to have stopped at the end of the first volume and thus make it a more salable work. Its success is freshly remembered. Mrs. Stowe realized her wild dream of being able to buy from the profits of the work "a new silk dress." Within two years two million copies of the work had been sold, and it has been translated into every cultivated language. If the sacred rights of authors and artists were duly protected by international law, she would have been enriched by this one work. Many other persons have been enriched by it, but not she, the gentle and great woman who created it. It is a pleasure, however, to know, as I was assured the other day by the publisher, that " Uncle Tom" still has an average sale of about four thousand copies a year.

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Source: Daughters of Genius: A Series of Sketches of authors, artists, reformers, and heroines, queens, princesses, and women of society, women eccentric and peculiar. James Parton, Hubbard Brothers, Publishers, Philadelphia: 1886.