Harriet Beecher Stowe Contributions

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Harriet Beecher Stowe was born on June 14, 1811, in Litchfield, Connecticut. She was one of 13 intellectually promising children born to Lyman Beecher, a leading Congregationalist minister, and Roxana Foote Beecher. Harriet attended Sarah Pierce’s academy where she had excelled as a child. Her school was one of the earliest schools to encourage young girls to study academic subjects.
In 1831, Harriet and her family moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, to be with her father at the Lane Theological Seminary. While she was there, she joined the Semi-colon club; which was a literary salon and social club that her sisters also took part in. During her time at the social club she had met Calvin Ellis Stowe who was a Biblical Scholar and they later married in January of 1836. The couple had seven children together; it was hard for her to manage being a wife and struggled to keep their marriage intact. In order to support the family, she started publishing short stories and started homeschooling their children, this is where most of the income came from. The family moved to Maine, Brunswick. Harriet’s husband encouraged her to pursue her career as a writer.
Harriet’s career as a writer started after she married Stowe. She was a strong believer in abolition and after moving to Cincinnati, she was very intrigued by the slavery debates. To pursue her career as a writer; she began to observe how slaves were treated in the south. Based on the observation, Harriet wrote a novel called Uncle Tom’s cabin, which was based on true story. It talked about a person named Josiah Henson. Through the character of Henson, she expressed her feelings through the novel about slavery. Uncle Tom’s cabin went on to become one of the famous novels in the world. The book captured stowe 's emotional impact on slavery involving children, which captured the nation’s attention. She was brave enough to bring out the issue of slavery in the novel. The time when the novel was published; it was very hard for women to talk in public, yet she was brave enough to bring out her own feelings about the issue of slavery. After her great work in the novel, President Abraham Lincoln appreciated her work in the novel. Uncle tom’s cabin went on to became the best seller in the United States and across the world and was translated into many languages. By writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin it made Harriet Beecher an International Celebrity. As the years passed by she continued to write and played a vital role in social and political causes. From 1853-1863, the stowe 's family lived in Massachusetts where Calvin worked. During this time, Harriet did social work to help the slaves establish a school and also continued her career as a writer. She wrote articles in the newspapers and novels. When the Civil war began, Harriet felt that President Abraham Lincoln was slow to emancipate slaves and told him to urge to make the decision faster. Harriet’s son Frederick also had enlisted in the civil war after leaving Harvard Medical school. Consequently, Frederick was severely wounded by the shell fragment at Gettysburg. After the retirement of her husband in 1864; Harriet moved back to Hartford, Connecticut. While living in Hartford, Harriet wrote some of her best novels such as The American Woman 's Home. While the civil war was going on Harriet and Calvin spent most of their time at her brother Charles house in Florida. Charles had opened a school for the
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One of the origins of the Civil War was based on the issue of slavery. Before the Civil War, a lot of debates and disagreements were going on between the North and the South. The Northern States did not want the expansion of slavery, and they desired to eliminate it. The Southern States wanted to encourage it since slaves were important parts of power and the plantation. By populating the book with characters both sympathetic and crooked, it allowed readers to relate even more and therefore she was able to get her message across. The book emotionally stirred the hearts of the Northerners, who wanted to end the slavery, and angered the slave promoting

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