He influenced the Quaker poet Whittier to devote the best
years of his life to furthering the cause of abolition. Emerson and Thoreau
spoke forcibly against slavery. Lowell attacked it with his keenest poetic
shafts.
HARRIET BEECHER STOWE (1811-1896).--It was, however, left for the daughter
of an orthodox Congregational clergyman of New England to surpass every
other antislavery champion in fanning into a flame the sentiment against
enslaving human beings. Harriet Beecher, the sister of Henry Ward Beecher,
the greatest pulpit orator of anti-slavery days, was born in Litchfield,
Connecticut. When she was twenty-one, she went with her father, Lyman
Beecher, to Cincinnati. Her new home was on the borderland of slavery, and
she often saw fugitive slaves and heard their stories at first hand. In
1833 she made a visit to a slave plantation in Kentucky and obtained
additional material for her most noted work.
[Illustration: HARRIET BEECHER STOWE]
In 1836 she married Calvin E. Stowe, a colleague of her father in the Lane
Theological Seminary in Cincinnati. During the next twelve years she had
six children to rear.
In 1850 Professor Stowe and his family moved to Bowdoin College, in
Brunswick, Maine.
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