Harriet Stowe

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thirteen. Harriet was brilliant and bookish, and idolized the poetry of Lord Byron.
When her father became president of Lane Theological Seminary in Ohio, she moved with him and met Calvin Stowe -- a professor and clergyman who fervently opposed slavery. He was nine years her senior and the widower of a dear friend of hers, Eliza Tyler. Their subsequent marriage in 1836 was born of the common grief they shared. In later years, Mark Twain’s daughter Susy Clemens saw Calvin Stowe merrily reported to her father, “Santa Clause has got loose.”(Husbands and Wives, William J. Petersen, Tyndale House Publishers, 1989, page 111).
The work of the Underground Railroad deeply touched both Calvin and Harriet. They sheltered fugitive slaves in their home until they moved to Maine when he accepted a position at Bowdoin College in 1850. Throughout the years their loving commitment grew solidly. Harriet wrote to her husband of many years, "If you were not already my dearly ...

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three of her grown children continued financially dependent on her.
As a mother who grieved for lost children, Harriet Beecher Stowe felt a bond with slave mothers who lost their children to the auction block. She lost four her seven children. Samuel Charles, "Charley" died at eighteen months from cholera and an older son, Henry, drowned while a student at Dartmouth College. Years later, her son Frederick who was an alcoholic from the age of sixteen, died. He never recovered from the wounds he sustained at Gettysburg in the Civil War, nor could he cope with his mother's success. He simply disappeared in San Francisco after the War despite Harriet’s grandiose schemes to rescue him. ...

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