Harriet Beecher Stowe

 

Harriet Beecher Stowe was an American author and abolitionist who actively supported the Underground Railroad and wrote the best selling anti slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin.

My name is Harriet Beecher Stowe. I am a minister's daughter, a minister's wife,

and the mother of seven children. I have been called a meddler, a fanatic,

and a disturber of the public peace.

I will answer to all of it.

For eighteen years I lived in Cincinnati, on the north bank of the Ohio River. Across that water lay Kentucky. Across that water lay slavery. I could stand on the shore and look at a country where a man is sold at auction, where a woman is made to bear children for another man's profit, and where the law calls it property.

[Pause.]

In 1849 the cholera came through our city, and it took my Charley. He was eighteen months old. I held him while he died. And I have said since, and I say to you now — "It was at his dying bed and at his grave that I learned what a poor slave mother may feel when her child is torn away from her."

I learned it in my own body. I have never been able to unlearn it.

Then came the year 1850, and the Congress of the United States passed the Fugitive Slave Act. Understand what that law did. It did not merely permit slavery in the South — it conscripted the North. It commanded free men in free states to hunt the desperate and hand them back into bondage. My own sister-in-law wrote to me: "if I could use a pen as you can, I would write something that will make this whole nation feel what an accursed thing slavery is."

And I answered her, and I said: "I feel now that the time has come when even a woman or a child who can speak a word for freedom and humanity is bound to speak."

So I wrote what I saw. And when men asked me how I dared, I told them: "I did not write it. God wrote it. I merely did his dictation." Now they tell me, madam, do not agitate. Do not disturb the Union.

And do not imagine the guilt is Southern only. I made Simon Legree a New England man on purpose. "The people of the free States have defended, encouraged, and participated; and are more guilty for it, before God, than the South." Northern mills spun the cotton. Northern banks financed the crop. Northern churches kept their silence. We are all stained.

So what can one person do? I will tell you what I have told every reader who ever asked me. "There is one thing that every individual can do — they can see to it that they feel right."

But feeling is only the beginning, for pity is cheap and costs nothing. Having felt, you must act — refuse the law, shelter the fugitive, vote as if the Judgment were watching. Because it is. "A day of grace is yet held out to us."

There is no compromise with this evil. There is no gentle fifty-year descent from a sin like this. There is only the day you decide, and the day you do not.

Let it be buried. — and let no generation after ours ever be asked to defend it.

AI DISCLOSURE: I used AI for this assignment. I did my research on Harriet Beecher Stowe and put some of my research notes into AI. I asked AI to form a script talking as if I were Harriet Beecher Stowe about her life and how she is an abolitionist.