Harriet Beecher Stowe and Ambolitionist Movement?

Question

How did Harriet contribute to the abolitionist movement?
Please post resources , all the help is appreciated this is for a school paper.

Answer 1

A little book called "Uncle Tom's Cabin."

Amazing site on everything surrounding the book:
http://www.iath.virginia.edu/utc/sitemap.html

Here are a few articles on the book's importance:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncle_Tom's_Cabin

The Complete Text, at the University of Virginia:
http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/StoCabi.html

Answer 2

She was the writer of Uncle Tom's Cabin and brought to light the inhumanity against the slaves, African Americans robbed of their home, land and family, dragged across the seas by savage and inhumane Europeans.
This issue still needs to be addressed today - the African Americans need an apology and compensation, just like the Jews

Answer 3

Writing Uncle Tom's Cabin helped publicize the plight of slaves.

Here's a link to the HBS center:

www.harrietbeecherstowecenter.org

Answer 4

Harriet Elizabeth Beecher Stowe (June 14, 1811 – July 1, 1896) was an American Congregationalist, abolitionist and writer of 30 books; the most famous being Uncle Tom's Cabin which describes life in slavery, and which was first published in serial form from 1851 to 1852 in an abolitionist organ, the National Era, edited by Gamaliel Bailey. Although Stowe herself had never been to the American South and never saw a plantation, she wrote A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, a non-fiction work to document the veracity of her depiction of the lives of slaves in the original novel. She also wrote the preface to editions of Josiah Henson's autobiography, the slave on whom her main character is often considered to be based. Her second novel was Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp: another anti-slavery novel.

Uncle Tom's Cabin reached millions as a novel and in various dramatic forms never authorized by Stowe, and became influential as well in Europe, especially Britain. It made the political issues of the 1850s regarding slavery tangible to millions, energizing anti-slavery forces in the North. It angered and embittered the South. The impact was summed up by Abraham Lincoln when he met Stowe, "So you're the little lady who wrote the book that started this great war."

She also helped in the underground rail road.

At first, the pro-slavery forces ignored the book. Some southerners even felt that the work was a defense of slavery. But when it became apparent that the work was having a profound effect on the American public opinion, pro-slavery forces unmercifully attacked Stowe and her work.

Drawing on her personal experience with slavery, the antislavery movement, and the underground railroad, Stowe gave slavery a human face. In Cincinnati, she had learned of the humanity of the slave. Negroes were her servants and her students; hunted fugitives applied to her, some of whom she ransomed by her own efforts. Every day she heard new stories of the hunger for freedom, of the ruthless separation of man and wife and mother and child, and of the heroic sufferings of those who ran away from the fearful doom of those "sold down South." At the same time, she had befriended slaveholders in neighboring Kentucky and came to learn of the slaveholder's concerns.

She portrayed slaves and slaveholders alike as both saints and sinners, virtuous and villainous. Tom, the title character was portrayed as a staunch Christian, an honest slave who would never cheat his master or anyone else. Aunt Chloe, Tom's wife, mother of a couple of boisterous boys, and proud cook of the plantation home, was also a committed Christian. The light-skinned George Harris invented a machine which made his master famous. Yet, perhaps the most memorable of the slaves were the slave mothers who tried to protect their children from the evils of slavery, often by risking their lives in the run to freedom with their children so that they could be raised as free men and free women. St. Claire, Tom's benevolent second master and the angelic Eva portrayed the slaveholder at his best, while the sadistic Simon Legree portrayed the slaveholder at his worst.

Emphasizing emotional suffering over physical suffering, Stowe penned a psychological drama and imbued each page with her religious conviction, that all men were created equal in God's sight. By portraying some slave men as being light-skinned enough to pass as white men and who as slaves are expected to react to tyranny with meek forbearance as if they were women, Stowe exposed the emasculating influence of slavery to white men. As a mother who had grieved for her own children, Stowe created an emotional bond between white mothers and slave mothers who lost their children to the auction block.

She described many of the psychological terrors of slavery: escape and pursuit of fugitive slaves; separation of husbands and wives, parents and children, brothers and sisters; compulsion of almost white women into prostitution; and repeated rapes of slave women by their masters.

She showed how slavery corrupts both the slave and the slaveholder. A manufacturers grows rich from the invention of his slave, while the slave remains in bondage. The slaveholder has no incentive to produce anything of value because all of his needs and wants will be provided for by his slave, and the slave has no incentive to produce to his highest ability for his work will only serve to enrich another and to forge his chains stronger. In another case, a master rapes a slave woman, corrupting the slave woman, victimizing his wife and destroying the bond of love between him and his wife with his infidelity.

By describing the innocence of children, Stowe explains that prejudice had to be taught and learned by both the slaveholder and the slave. By elucidating the power of the slaveholder to deny that slave marriages are marriages, Stowe shows that the slaves don't even have the power to build responsible family units.