Harriet Beecher Stowe

Harriet Beecher, the daughter and sister of Christian ministers, was born in Connecticut in 1811 and educated at Hartford Female Seminary. She eventually became a teacher in Hartford. She moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, with her family at the age of 21, and married Calvin Stowe, a professor of theology, at the age of 25, raising with him a family of seven children. Beecher Stowe moved with her husband to Maine in the early 1850s (he had taken a teaching position at Bowdoin College), and there, sparked by the controversial passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, she drafted Uncle Tom’s Cabin and had it published serially, initially in the paper The National Era.