father, LYMAN BEECHER (1775-1863), was settled as a Congregational minister. In 1832 her father removed from Boston to Cincinnati, where for twenty years he was the president of a theological seminary. Here, in 1836, Harriet Beecher married the Reverend Calvin Stowe, who, like herself, had ardent antislavery sympathies. In ordinary domestic duties Mrs. Stowe had more to do than most women; but her activity was such that throughout her busiest days her mind was constantly though not systematically occupied with the reform which she did so much to further. Living for years just on the borderland of the slave States and the free, she acquired a personal familiarity with slavery shared by few Northern people; and at odd times she was constantly practising her pen. In 1850, the year of Webster's Seventh of March Speech, her husband was appointed a professor at Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine. Here, in 1851 and 1852, Mrs. Stowe wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin, the object of which was to set forth in concrete form the actual horrors of slavery. At first little noticed, this book rapidly attracted popular attention. During the next five years above half a million copies were sold in the United States alone; and it is hardly excessive to say that wherever Uncle Tom's Cabin went, public conscience was aroused.*

Tom's

Cabin.

Written carelessly, and full of crudities, Uncle Tom's Uncle Cabin, even after fifty years, remains a remarkable piece of fiction. The truth is, that almost unawares Mrs. Stowe had in her the stuff of which good novelists are made. Her plot, to be sure, is conventional and rambling; but her characters, even though little studied in detail, have a vitality which no study can achieve; we unhesi* See Rhodes, I, 278–285.

Oldtown Folks.

tatingly accept them as real. Her descriptive power, meanwhile, was such as to make equally real the backgrounds in which her action and her characters move. What is more, these backgrounds, most of which she knew from personal experience, are probably so faithful to actual nature that the local sentiment aroused as you read them may generally be accepted as true. And though Mrs. Stowe's book was written in spare moments, amid the distractions of housekeeping and of a growing family, her careless style is often strong and vivid.

Should any one doubt Mrs. Stowe's power as a writer, remembering only that in Uncle Tom's Cabin she achieved a great popular success, partly caused by the changing public opinion of her day, we need only glance at some of her later work to make sure that she had in her a power which, if circumstances had permitted its development, might have given her a distinguished place in English fiction. Her best book is probably Oldtown Folks (1869). Like all her work, this rambling story of life near Boston about the beginning of the nineteenth century is careless in detail and very uneven. As you consider it, however, you grow to feel that above almost any other book Oldtown Folks sets forth the circumstances and the temper of the native Yankee people. What is more, the careful passages-the opening chapters, for example—are admirably written. In brief, Mrs. Stowe differed from most American novelists in possessing a spark of genius. Had this genius pervaded her work, she might have been a figure of lasting literary importance.

Even as it was, she had power enough to make Uncle Tom's Cabin the most potent literary force of the antislavery days. She differed from most Abolitionists in

having observed on the spot all the tragic evils of slavery.
Until the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin, slavery had
on the whole presented itself to the North as a deplorable
abstraction. Wherever the book went, it awakened this
abstraction into life, much as powerful preaching some-
times awakens a dormant sentiment of religion. Of
course, Uncle Tom's Cabin is partisan, but it is honestly
so; there can be no doubt that Mrs. Stowe believed her
negroes as true to life as later, and rightly, she believed
the Yankees of Oldtown Folks.
Whatever you may
think of Uncle Tom's Cabin, you can never truly feel
it to have been instigated by a demagogic purpose.
Mrs. Stowe's purpose was honestly to state appalling
truth.

Uncle Tom's Cabin was published in 1852. To its unprecedented popularity may perhaps be traced the final turn of the public tide. Within ten years the conflict between the slave States and the free reached the inevitable point of civil war. The 1st of January, 1863, saw that final proclamation of emancipation which, by confiscating, as virtually contraband property, all slaves in the States which were then in arms against the Federal government, practically achieved the end for which the antislavery men had unfalteringly striven.

We can hardly speak of the Emancipation Proclamation Lincoln. without touching for a moment upon the greatest name in American history of the nineteenth century. ABRAHAM LINCOLN (1809-1865) proved himself in the LincolnDouglas campaign such a master of debate, and in his inaugural addresses and in the famous Gettysburg speech such a master of simple and powerfully eloquent English, that, aside from his great political services, any account

of American oratory or of antislavery would be incomplete without some mention of him. But Lincoln's historical importance is so great that any discussion of him would lead us far afield. And our concern now is with New England.

IX

JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER

REFERENCES

WORKS: Riverside Edition, 7 vols., Boston: Houghton, 1888; Poems, Cambridge Edition, 1 vol., Boston: Houghton, 1894.

BIOGRAPHY AND CRITICISM: *S. T. Pickard, Life and Letters of John Greenleaf Whittier, 2 vols., Boston: Houghton, 1894; W. J. Linton, Life of John Greenleaf Whittier, London: Scott, 1893 (GW); T. W. Higginson, John Greenleaf Whittier, New York: Macmillan, 1902 (EML); G. R. Carpenter, John Greenleaf Whittier, Boston: Houghton, 1903 (AML); Wendell, Stelligeri, New York: Scribner, 1893, pp. 149-201; *Stedman, Poets of America, Chapter iv.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Linton's Whittier, pp. i-viii (at end); Foley, 310-320. SELECTIONS: Duyckinck, II, 473-476; Griswold, Poets, 390-406; Hart, Contemporaries, IV, Nos. 21, 125; Stedman, 128-142; *Stedman and Hutchinson, VI, 353-389.

AMONG the antislavery leaders of Massachusetts was one who, with the passing of time, seems more and more distinguished as a man of letters. JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER (1807-1892), born at Haverhill, Massachusetts, came of sound country stock, remarkable only because for several generations the family had been Quakers. The first New England manifestations of Quakerism, in the seventeenth century, had taken an extravagantly fanatical form, which resulted in tragedies still familiar to tradition. As the Friends of New England had settled down into peaceful observance of their own principles, however, letting alone the affairs of others, they had become an inconspicuous, inoffensive body, neglected by the surrounding orthodoxy. Theologically, they believed in God, Jesus