734. How Harriet Beecher Stowe Used Her Writing to Better The World

Hello everybody welcome back to another episode of the way the world works the day I want to talk about another one of our courageous heroes from the Tuttle twins guide to courageous heroes get this book if you guys don't already have it. But I want to talk about Harriet Beecher Stowe who is just such a fascinating amazing person who teaches us a lot of lessons one that words have so much power and two and you know that this is a lesson that I always talk about that I really love that that a story even a story that isn't true a fiction story like myth you know we call them myth back in the days when you think about the stories of like Hercules and the Greek gods and stuff like that. These are myths these are fictional stories, but they teach us something and that these myths these fiction they have so much power and they can actually help change the world. So let's talk about that today so who was she Harriet Beecher Stowe was born in 1811 in Connecticut and I love this is actually a through line you see with a lot of our female courageous heroes who were born long ago in a time when women weren't there wasn't a lot of emphasis placed on getting educated if you were a woman the family spent their money on getting and their time and their resources educating the sons, but Harriet Beecher Stowe and you saw this with Mercy Otis Warren as well.

Her family is going to be a place of big emphasis on education for both the boys and the girls and she is going to grow up in a in a home where learning and reading is is encouraged and also that is in a very faith based household they were very religious and because of that her family was very big on moral responsibility and moral duty and doing the right thing. And it was this this faith based lifestyle that she was raised in that taught her that you needed to speak up if something is wrong because there were consequences to not following your conscience there were consequences to not doing what you knew was right. And again for this for this to for her to come about in a time where women weren't encouraged to do a lot of this independent critical thinking it's really great that her family fostered that environment. So her family or she was going to be she was an abolitionist so what is an abolitionist we know that abolish is the root word there. So an abolitionist is somebody who wanted to abolish slavery they were people who were very anti slavery which at the time was unfortunately still allowed in the United States is going to be pre civil war this is going to be before any of that so this is still very much in place.

You know you have things like the fugitive slave act which is going to force slaves who had run away to the north where slavery was not prominent. If it wasn't really happening you're gonna or at least to the extent of the south but you're going to have this law that basically says okay if you're a northerner and you catch a slave who's run away you have to return them back to their owner. And so there's all these really egregious things that are happening and as we know slavery is not compatible with individual liberty slavery is abhorrent you cannot pretend to be, you know, in a free society when you have people coerced to do things that is against their will that you're going to need to do and so her upbringing is going to lead her to really understand that this world around her what she sees going on around her is is not okay and remember she's going to grow up in Connecticut so that's going to be she's going to be what's considered a Yankee she's going to be the north she's going to be in a place where she's probably not seeing she knows what's going on everybody knows that you know these horrors of slavery but she's she's going to be in a place where there are more thinkers who are abolitionists like her. Harriet is going to love words she's going to love writing and she's going to write for like women's publications she's going to write some books so she's very good very good with her pen and she's going to marry somebody who really encourages that and again you see this

with Mercy Otis Warren as well you see these incredible women who were born during a time when this wasn't that prevalent you're going to see them marrying men who were very encouraging of their careers of them you know doing these things and what I love about about Harriet Beecher Stowe is that she was not only she was writing you know her thoughts on on other things religion things like that but she was also writing about being a homemaker she was so diverse she was a great thinker but she also loved her role as being like a mother it was she was very well rounded and so it's really fun to see that from somebody you know so long ago and she is going to really hit a rough patch we talk about struggle a lot on this podcast and how a lot of the most important most successful the most extraordinary people all had to go through something really hard and to find meaning to that and that struggle brought them to something that again maybe even change the world and that's going to happen to Harriet and she's going to lose her baby she's going to lose a I believe it was a son and it was during the cholera outbreak cholera was horrible disease people were getting if you remember in the 1800s we didn't have the medicine that we have today we also didn't have the sanitation we have today so a lot of times you were like we didn't have the plumbing system a lot of times you were drinking water that there were also animal feces and it just it was really gross it was really gross time if you want to feel really

just blessed and grateful for the time we live in today go read about the sanitation conditions of the 1800s and you'll be like oh people need to stop saying we haven't bad because we have a lot better than other people did so cholera their outbreaks would happen frequently because again we just didn't have those conditions people didn't even know like washing hands was soap yet we didn't know that in fact the Civil War is going to be an interesting turning point where we start learning more about sanitation but I digress that's a story for another time so she's going to go through a really hard time losing her baby I can't even imagine so she's going to be just so distraught and so sorrowful and it makes her really start to think about the mothers the slave mothers who have to go through so much sorrow who have to be separated from their children left have their families broken apart she's going to really start to to feel this sadness and think you know she always thought slavery was wrong this isn't a new thing to her but just really just empathize with these mothers that are going through these horrible things in in the slave lifestyle so she takes this sorrow she takes this this empathy she's feeling she takes this sadness for her own loss and again the slave community experienced frequently because they were being split up and they were you know losing family members and it was just you know the mothers having to lose their children or even just have their children sold to a different

you know family so she's starting to feel just overwhelmed by this and she writes a book called Uncle Tom's Cabin and Uncle Tom's Cabin is going to be a fiction it's going to be a novel and it's going to humanize slaves and really show some of the horrors of the culture and what was going on on you know in these these slave households where people had slaves and it's going to portray slaves in a way that had not been done before in novel form because a lot of times slaves were either just background they weren't main characters they weren't seen as really human which is awful right it's absolutely awful because we know that every human deserves dignity we know that to end and Harriet Beecherstone knew that and she wanted the rest of the world to understand that they were humans right it's so sad that we have to even have that discussion but that's the world that they were living in them and so she writes this book where slaves are really humanized and it tells their story and people love it and people start buying the book and suddenly you know this woman who was mourning her child she starts becoming this famous author and she'd written before of course but this was just her big moment right people start buying this book

and it grows the abolitionist movement they're more abolitionist because they're seeing through this lens for the first time and they're thinking oh my goodness these are people being treated like this but just like every other person who's a courageous hero they became courageous because they came up against something in some way or another and you have to remember that just because there were people who really empathize with the book there were another big group of people that did not they were people in the south people who owned slaves who did not like what Harriet was doing who wanted to you know silence her who wanted to criticize her work and they even what they were doing and I think one even called it like Aunt Philip's Cabin like they were making their own versions of Uncle Tom's Cabin but they were making it the opposite they were once again dehumanizing slavery or trying to justify slavery and so these these like other books these competing books come out and of course they're not as popular and they can't really squash what she's saying because what she was saying was was true and she did it so well it wasn't just that she was telling the truth that she was saying you know what was right it wasn't just that it's also that she was so good at it and I think we we kind of forget that right it's because she was so good at writing if she was a bad writer and she was just writing this fiction story nobody would have read it and it probably would have been you know well but she was a great writer she was an amazing writer

and so she used her talent she used her skill for storytelling for fiction writing she used that to teach the world about why we should all we all deserve human dignity that doesn't matter what the color of our skin is people shouldn't be slaves and so it's it's crazy the power that our talents can have isn't it it's crazy that we can have these skills that when they're put to good use actually helped change the world I think it was Abraham Lincoln once even told her that like she was the woman who started the war or something and obviously we don't want to glorify war at all but it's interesting that the book had that big of an impact where it grew the abolitionist movement that much so that's a really interesting point to highlight I think so as people were you know publishing their own books that were supposed to be like challenging saying that she was wrong and blah blah blah she wrote like another one she wrote a key to Uncle Tom's cabin so she keeps writing she rebuts their arguments with words she's just this incredible wordsmith and such a beautiful writer that again she's she's really winning this this you know battle of words the other people just can't even compete with her so she didn't she didn't let any of the critics stop her at a time when already as a woman she wasn't didn't have a whole lot of power in society but she she was good she was good at what she did

that's honestly one of the other bigger lessons here I think is using your talents and using your skills for good and being such a good writer I want to read one thing she wrote that I think is so poetic so one line of hers the bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone isn't it beautiful it's you know good writers they have this this ability to make words dance on page but to also teach a lesson and you know she was known for just being such an alive person very um filled with emotion in a good way not like not in control of her motion but just like filled with emotion loved music very playful and she used her talent she used her words to help people what was going on to share that with people to create a story that resonated with people so much because it captured what it meant to be human and it did change the world maybe not on the larger scale we think of but it changed the way people thought in the country and it helped it helped bring us to a point in our society where more people were saying slavery is wrong and so that's just so incredible and it's so incredible that she did it through art right she did it through words she didn't give speeches she didn't use some political sound bite she did it by being really good at writing so I will leave it there

don't forget to pick up this book you guys there's so many great courageous heroes in this Teldwin's guide to courageous heroes and I hope for you guys to get it and to read it as a family and to talk about it more so we will leave it there as always don't forget to like and subscribe to the podcast and until next time I will talk to you later