Uncle Tom's Cabin-Author

Harriet Beecher Stowe was born in Connecticut in 1811. She was the seventh of nine children born to Dr. Lyman Beecher, a renowned Congregationalist minister. Six of her brothers became ministers in the Congregational church. Her sister opened a women’s school in Connecticut. Harriet’s mother died when she was four and she was educated in her sister’s school. After graduation, Harriet became a teacher. The Beecher family moved from Connecticut to Cincinnati, Ohio when Harriet was twenty-one, as her father took a position at Lane Theological Seminary.
Harriet continued to teach while in Ohio. It was there that she first witnessed slavery and abolitionism. In Cincinnati she came into contact with race riots and heard stories of runaway slaves and of those who helped them escape slavery. Ohio’s next-door neighbor, Kentucky, was a slave state. Harriet only visited Kentucky once, but she had regular contact with men and women who helped operate the Underground Railroad.
Harriet married Calvin Stowe in 1836. Stowe was a minister and taught at the theological seminary where her father was head. In 1850, Harriet and her husband moved to Maine. Calvin Stowe had taken a position at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. While living in Maine, Harriet wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin. She claimed that the passage of the Compromise of 1850, part of which included the Fugitive Salve Act, had prompted her to speak out in her own way on this issue that had so divided the country.
Harriet Beecher Stowe moved to Hartford, Connecticut after her husband died and lived there until her own death in 1896.