Frederick Stowe in the shadow of Uncle Tom’s Cabin - January ‘99 America’s Civil War Feature

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Frederick Stowe in the shadow of Uncle Tom's Cabin

By James Tackach

The fame of novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe followed her son throughout the Civil War.

“So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war!” President Abraham Lincoln reportedly said to Harriet Beecher Stowe when he met her at a White House reception on December 2, 1862. Lincoln’s hyperbole held a degree of truth. Stowe’s blockbuster novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, serialized in The National Era in 1851 and 1852 and published in book form shortly thereafter, had so highlighted the issue of slavery that, a decade later, America’s young men were willing to slaughter each other in unimaginable numbers to preserve or destroy that peculiar institution.

Ironically, one of the casualties of the war that Uncle Tom’s Cabin helped to ignite was Frederick William Stowe, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s fourth child. A veteran of some of the Army of the Potomac’s bloodiest engagements, Frederick Stowe became an official war casualty at Gettysburg when he was hit in the head by a shell, fired during the artillery barrage before Pickett’s Charge.

But the war alone was not responsible for the ruination of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s son. Frederick Stowe was already a casualty long before the Confederate guns began firing upon Fort Sumter–to some degree a casualty of his mother’s fame. Mrs. Stowe’s writings might have helped free America’s slaves, but her literary fame and the demands it placed upon her complicated Frederick’s upbringing, perhaps creating problems that worsened as a result of his wartime service.

Harriet Beecher Stowe and her husband, Calvin, were New Englanders. Harriet had moved to Ohio in 1832 with her father, Lyman Beecher, who had taken a teaching post at Lane Seminary. Calvin Stowe and his first wife, Eliza, had also left the East for Ohio so that he could teach at the seminary. Seventeen months after Eliza died in a cholera epidemic that swept through Cincinnati during the summer of 1834, Calvin married Harriet. Twin girls, Hatty and Eliza, were born to the couple in September 1836, and Henry Ellis Stowe was born 16 months later. Frederick William Stowe was born in Walnut Hills, Ohio, near Cincinnati, on May 6, 1840.

Harriet Stowe was bedridden for two months after the birth of her fourth child, so Frederick was sent to live with a wet nurse in Cincinnati–the first of many separations from his mother that Frederick endured during the first 15 years of his life. Calvin, too, was often away from home, lecturing and raising funds to keep the ever-troubled Lane Seminary financially solvent.

The Stowe family suffered through numerous personal and family tragedies. In the summer of 1843, when Frederick was 3, Harriet’s brother George shocked the family by committing suicide. During the next three years, Harriet suffered two miscarriages and became ill with cholera. Tragedy struck again two years later, when the Stowes’ third son, Samuel Charles, born in January 1848, died of cholera at the age of 18 months.

Less than a year after the boy’s death, the Stowe household was again disrupted. Calvin accepted a teaching position at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, and in April 1850 Harriet and her three older children–the twins and Henry Ellis–headed east to set up household there. In Maine, Harriet began writing the novel that would make her famous, completing weekly installments of Uncle Tom’s Cabin for The National Era from June 5, 1851, through April 1, 1852. The novel made Harriet an overnight celebrity. Public speaking engagements followed, and in the spring of 1853 she sailed to Great Britain to spread the anti-slavery doctrine there.

While Harriet was writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin and carrying its message across the United States and abroad, Calvin Stowe was struggling with his own career. He taught for a semester at Bowdoin, then returned to Lane Seminary in Ohio for a term. At the same time, Calvin was offered an attractive position at Andover Theological Seminary in Andover, Mass., which he decided to accept. For a period of two years he became a traveling professor, teaching at three schools and commuting incredible distances to honor the commitments he had made to each institution.

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