“So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war.”
Whether Abraham Lincoln greeted Harriet Beecher Stowe with those words during her 1862 visit to the White House is uncertain, but if so, they were accurate. Stowe was little—she stood less than five feet tall—and the novel she had written 10 years earlier had dumped gasoline on the smoldering issue of slavery.
A bronze memorial commemorating the 1862 meeting of Lincoln and Stowe located on Columbus Boulevard and State Street in Hartford, Conn. (Jay Gao/Shutterstock)
Serialized first in a magazine and then published as a book in 1852, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” did more than any other novel in American history to influence public events. This story of slavery caught fire, selling over 300,000 copies in the United States and more than a million in Great Britain. In the North, the abolitionist cause gained tens of thousands of fervent supporters. In the South, slave owners and newspapers raged against what they perceived as the injustices and inaccuracies of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” and in certain places the book was banned outright.
Stowe had written her novel in hopes of encouraging people from all parts of the country to join together and abolish slavery. Assailed by a barrage of criticism that she had perverted the facts surrounding slavery, in 1853 she issued “A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” which was a collection of letters, histories, legal cases, and other evidence demonstrating the cruelty and injustice of the “peculiar institution.”
"A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin," 1853, by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Cincinnati & Hamilton County Public Library. (Public Domain)
Most of us today are familiar with the general scope of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and the controversy it roused. Far fewer people know that nearly 20 years later Stowe would cause another upheaval, though on a lesser scale, and would again write a follow-up book to support her cause—a cause that honored truth and friendship.
Hints of Things to Come
"Harriet Beecher Stowe," 1853, by Alanson Fisher. Oil on canvas. National Portrait Gallery, Washington. (Public Domain)
Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896) grew up in a family accustomed to controversy. Her father, Lyman Beecher, was a noted Presbyterian minister, and several of his 11 children embraced the causes of abolition and social reform. Beecher saw to the education of his daughters as well as his sons, and Harriet read freely from his extensive library. Like many of her day, she particularly admired the verse of the popular Lord Byron (1788–1824), a celebrity, a sort of rock star in his day, and a man who would deeply affect Stowe’s life decades after his death.
After working as a teacher and on her way to becoming a writer, Harriet married Calvin Stowe, professor and biblical scholar, and a widower formerly married to one of Harriet’s close friends. Together they had seven children. Even as the couple struggled financially, Calvin encouraged his wife in her writing, and with the publication of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” their money troubles vanished. Stowe continued writing until old age took its toll, and eventually published more than 30 books.
In 1853, on a trip to England promoting her bestseller, Stowe met and befriended Anne Isabella Milbanke (1792–1860), the much-maligned and long-separated wife of Lord Byron, and the mother of his only legitimate child.
A Call to Battle
Portrait of Anne Isabella, Lady Byron, 1812, by Charles Hayter. (Public Domain)
In her youth, like so many others, Stowe had heard the innuendo and gossip about Lady Byron, her chilly temperament and her abandonment of her husband, and how his consequent despair resulted in his reckless living abroad, gambling, drinking, and pursuing other women. Many years later, she would write: “It is within the writer’s recollection, how, in the obscure mountain town where she spent her early days, Lord Byron’s separation from his wife was for a season the all-engrossing topic.”
Pity for Byron gave way to horror when in 1856 Stowe again visited her friend Lady Byron and learned of the poet’s violent temper, his reckless drinking and womanizing, and most shocking of all, the story of his intimate relations with his half-sister Augusta and the child produced by that passion.
Others as well knew these sordid details of Byron’s secret life, and Stowe would have left Lady Byron’s secrets untold, as she herself publicly noted, until in 1869 she stumbled across the recently published memoirs of Countess Teresa Guiccioli, Byron’s last mistress. Guiccioli’s reminiscences savaged Lady Byron, blaming her cold manner and religious zealotry for the poet’s tempestuous behavior and early death.
In defense of her deceased friend’s impugned honor, Stowe took up her pen.
The Battle Begins
Portrait of British poet Lord Byron (1788–1824), 1813, by Thomas Phillips. Oil on canvas. Newstead Abbey, Nottinghamshire, England. (Public Domain)
In September 1869, The Atlantic Monthly published Stowe’s “The True Story of Lady Byron’s Life.” In this long article, Stowe first appraises Lord Byron as the public knew him: “a human being endowed with every natural charm, gift, and grace, who by the one false step of an unsuitable marriage wrecked his whole life.”
She then relates that the countess’s slanderous portrait of Lady Byron had sparked this rebuttal. She cites Byron’s poetry at length, recollects discussions around him from her own childhood, details the courtship that led to the marriage of Byron and Anne, and writes of his life as a rake.
Then comes this bombshell: “He fell into the depths of a secret adulterous intrigue with a blood relation, so near in consanguinity that discovery must have been utter ruin and expulsion from civilized society.”
That charge of incest set off an explosion rarely seen in the field of literature.
Counterattacks
The outrage that followed Stowe’s “True Story” makes today’s cancel culture seem but a whisper in the wind. Thousands of Atlantic Monthly readers canceled their subscriptions, nearly sinking the magazine, and opprobrium poured in from all sides. Many of Stowe’s detractors were shocked that such a revelation regarding sexual impropriety had appeared in print. Admirers of Byron also responded with vituperation, buttressing the accepted view that Lady Byron had ruined the marriage, and contending that she had then lied to Stowe about Byron’s past and that Stowe herself was nothing more than a hack.
In her biography “Harriet Beecher Stowe,” Suzanne Coil tells us that a congressman apologized to Britain—“nothing from her pen is considered reliable by the American public”—and the House of Commons debated whether she should be barred for life from the British Isles.
One of the few who came to Stowe’s defense was her Hartford neighbor, Mark Twain. He wrote six editorials about the “Byron scandal,” backing both Stowe and Lady Byron. Of Lord Byron, he observed that he was “a bad man, so bad perhaps, as a man with a great intellect, a passionate animal nature, intense egotism and selfishness, and little or no moral principle to restrain or govern either of those, could be.”
A photograph of Mark Twain, 1902, reading a newspaper. Library of Congress. (Public Domain)
And Harriet Stowe’s response? As she had done with “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” she followed up these smears with a book, “Lady Byron Vindicated,” a history of the scandal from 1815—the year of the Byrons’ marriage—up to her own time. This vindication failed to sway the public, and though it attracted the attention of suffragettes and feminists, it was largely a failure.
Honor and Friendship
"Lady Byron Vindicated: A History of the Byron Controversy," 1870, by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Library of Congress. (Public Domain)
Some writers contend with justification that by protesting the defamation of Lady Byron, Stowe intended as well to push for women’s rights, that she may have hoped to advance that cause as she had abolition. In “Vindication,” we find plenty of material to support that view. Here is just one sample, taken from “Chapter III. The Résumé of the Conspiracy”:
“The lesson to woman in this pathetic piece of special pleading is, that man may sink himself below the brute, may wallow in filth like the swine, may turn his home into a hell, beat and torture his children, forsake the marriage-bed for foul rivals; yet all this does not dissolve the marriage-vow on her part, nor free his bounden serf from her obligation to honour his memory.”
On the other hand, Stowe was not among the most ardent feminists of her time. Moreover, she was well aware of the hornet’s nest that her public revelations about Byron might stir up. Had she wished to write advocating for the rights of women, she could as easily have devised a much less controversial approach.
Instead of speculating as to Stowe’s motives behind “The True Story of Lady Byron’s Life,” perhaps we should simply read her own explanation, which we find in the first paragraphs of “Vindication”:
“And, first, why have I made this disclosure at all?
“To this I answer briefly, Because I considered it my duty to make it.
“I made it in defence of a beloved, revered friend, whose memory stood forth in the eyes of the civilised world charged with most repulsive crimes, of which I certainly knew her innocent.”
In short, Harriet Beecher Stowe risked her own reputation to protect the reputation of a dead friend. Her courage and self-sacrifice in that regard should serve as an example for the rest of us.
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Jeff Minick has four children and a growing platoon of grandchildren. For 20 years, he taught history, literature, and Latin to seminars of homeschooling students in Asheville, N.C. He is the author of two novels, “Amanda Bell” and “Dust On Their Wings,” and two works of nonfiction, “Learning As I Go” and “Movies Make The Man.” Today, he lives and writes in Front Royal, Va.
