Harriet Beecher Stowe's Eighteen Years in Cincinnati

Harriet Beecher was twenty-one years old when she arrived in Cincinnati in eighteen thirty-two. Her father, Lyman Beecher, had accepted the presidency of Lane Theological Seminary. She expected to stay a few years. She stayed eighteen.

Cincinnati in those years was a border city in the most literal sense. The Ohio River was a ten-minute walk from the Beecher house on Walnut Hills. Freedom was here; slavery was visible across the water in Kentucky. Freedom seekers passed through the city constantly, and some of them passed through the Beecher household. Harriet met them. She listened to what they had survived. Later she said she based the characters in her novel on people she had known, not composites, not abstractions.

In eighteen thirty-four, Lane Seminary hosted a series of debates that lasted eighteen days. Students, many of them from the South, argued publicly and passionately for immediate abolition. The debates attracted national attention and frightened the seminary's board, which moved to suppress further discussion. The students who left rather than comply transferred to Oberlin College, which became a center of the abolitionist movement. Harriet watched all of this from within the household. She also crossed the river herself, visiting Kentucky at least once to see what slavery looked like on its own ground.

She married Calvin Stowe in eighteen thirty-six. She had seven children. She wrote when she could, which was seldom, and published sketches and stories in local papers. The material she was accumulating, without quite knowing how she would use it, was something she thought of as personal testimony. She left Cincinnati for Brunswick, Maine, in eighteen fifty. Two years later, Uncle Tom's Cabin was published in book form. It sold three hundred thousand copies in its first year.

Her house on Gilbert Avenue was preserved and is open to visitors. The view toward Kentucky has changed. The river is still there.