Compare And Contrast Beecher And Harriet Jacobs

Beecher Stowe vs. Jacobs

When Harriet Jacobs’ narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, was initially published, it was believed that the story was fictional. This belief may in part be due to Jacobs’ changing the character’s names, to protect the guilty, as well as the innocent. It was not until the 1980s that Jacobs’ account was determined to be an autobiography. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, was very popular when it was first published, despite being controversial. Although both women wrote literary pieces in support of the abolishment of slavery, Jacobs, a mulatto freed slave, found it more difficult to get her narrative published.

Harriet Elizabeth Beecher was born on June 14, 1811, in Litchfield, Connecticut (H.

Lyman Beecher and his first wife, Roxana Foote Beecher (C. Stowe, et al. 29). Her mother died before Miss Beecher’s sixth birthday (C. Stowe, et al. 28). In 1816, after the death of her mother, she was sent to Nutplains, Connecticut, to stay with “her mother’s family” (H. Stowe and Yellin xxxii). Miss Beecher’s father was remarried to Miss Harriet Porter, of Portland, Maine, a little over a year after the death of his first wife (C. Stowe, et al. 32). From 1819 to around 1824, Miss Beecher attended Miss Sarah Pierce’s school for young women (C. Stowe, et al. 32), in Litchfield, Connecticut (H. Stowe and Yellin xxxii). In 1824, Miss Beecher went to attend school at the Hartford Female Seminary, which had been started by Catharine Beecher, Harriet Beecher’s eldest sibling (H. Stowe and Yellin xxxii). Miss Beecher spent many of her early years studying there (H. Stowe and Yellin viii). In 1829, Miss Beecher returned to Hartford (C. Stowe, et al. 39), this time to teach (H. Stowe and Yellin xxxii). In 1832, Miss Beecher’s father, “an eminent clergyman” (H. Stowe and Yellin viii), moved his family, including 21-year-old Harriet, west to

Harriet Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin to show the American people how terrible slavery was (H. Stowe and Yellin xi). Stowe offered to provide the Washington DC National Era, the editor of which was “an old friend”, a succession of “sketches” (H. Stowe and Yellin xiv). The stories that would become Uncle Tom’s Cabin appeared in the National Era, as an ongoing column, from June 3, 1851 to April 2, 1952 (H. Stowe and Yellin xx). In March 1852, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published as a book (H. Stowe and Yellin xx). In the first week 10,000 copies were sold, and 300,000 copies were sold by the end of 1852 (H. Stowe and Yellin xx), making Uncle Tom’s Cabin the world’s first best-selling novel (H. Stowe and Yellin vii). Although well-liked in the North, the book was “excoriated & suppressed in the” southern states (H. Stowe and Yellin xxii). Both blacks and whites questioned Stowe’s “treatment of race and Christianity” (H. Stowe and Yellin xx). In 1853 (H. Stowe and Yellin xxxiii), Mrs. Stowe wrote A Key to ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ in response to her Southern critics who questioned her “factual accuracy” of the incidents that she had included in her book Uncle Tom’s Cabin (H. Stowe and Yellin xx). In the book’s Introduction, Mrs. Stowe explained that her reason for writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin was to address the “subject of slavery”; to show that the question of owning slaves was a “moral and religious” one (H. Stowe and Yellin xxii). In A Key to ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’, Mrs. Stowe listed