The Holbrook news., 1911-07-07
NoLJF W a9zlNyytHcyIt lx;x NFERE fZ1Nc1 TIQ/55 cARLT"NHS bNF17ZEW


 birth of Harriet Beecher Stowe
 will be widely celebrated. A new
 life of the little woman who made the great war;" as Lincoln called her, Is about to come from the press, written by her son, Charles Edward Stowe, and her grandson, Lyman Bee cher Stowe.
 Among the. most interesting of the facts 1t brings out is that it never occurred to the little woman" that there was anything about Uncle Toms Cabin" in the least likely to precipitate a war. She wrote the book with the kindliest feelings to- ward the south, and her aim was to be not only just but generous.
 To begin with, Mrs. Stowe was not of the extreme abolitionist type. It was her firm belief that the better clement in the south hated slavery. and that this element was much larger than was commonly supposed. Then, too. while she loathed the system with all her heart she was willing to be- heve that 1t took more often than not the kindly patriarchal form.
 She gave Uncle Tom three masters, and two of them were kind. She made one of her plantation owners detest slavery and free his slaves She want cd to make the north understand that the best southerners would cooperate with them in a reasonable attempt to do away with the evil.
 Never was a little lady moro sur prised to find herself execrated. Her feeling had been when she first wrote tho book that it would displease the abofitionists and bring sympathetic re- 9ponse from the south-that is, if anybody ever read 1t at all, which she had doubted.
 When the book appeared the world turned topsy-turvy for her. Garrison, with whom she never quite agreed, wrote her that she was no longer abused-she had drawn 1t all on her seh- People in the south who had not read the book, or who had read 1t with their minds made up beforehand, thought her some sort of a monster. A cousin who lived in Georgia did not dare put the name of Mrs. Stowe on the envelope when she wrote to her.
 Mrs. Stowe found herself, in short, put in class of agitators with whom she had never belonged, and the poor little dove of peace she had sent out came back with its feathers rufied be- yond recognition.
 The question of slavery. came into her life at an early peried. It is not true that she knew nothing of the peculiar institution" at first hand. She lived long in Cincinnati and met there many southerners, and 1t was on plantations where she visited that she got the color for the book she was to write many years after.
 She was hardly more than a girl when she visited the Kentucky planta- ton which became afterward the home of Uncle Tom and Eliza, and about the same time she met ropsy. Topsy came to Cincinnati in the company of a wealthy Louisiana family which had liberated its slaves and 1t was in try ing to teach her religion that the famous conversation occurred: "Do you know who made you?" Nobody as knows on; 'spect I growed."
 In 1S36 Cincinnati became the hot bed of anti-slavery talk. MT. Theodore Weld of Lane Theological seminary led the movement. He had spent much of his life in the midst of slavery and was dedicating the remainder of his life to its overthrow. His ablest as- sistant, the editor of an abolitionist paper, was Dr. Birney, a slave owner from Alabama, who had freed his slaves, and come away to fight the system
 It was natural that with these friends Mrs Stowe should have had kindly feelings toward the south, should have thought that it was rapid ly widening to the horror of slavery, and that the majority of its citizens were anxiously trying to put an end to it. As far as the "cause" was con cerned her associations were with anti-slavery southerners rather than the northern abolitionists.
 Henry Ward Beecher edited in Gin cinnati a small daily paper, his sister. now Mrs. Stowe. helping him. She records an incident of the agitation in Cincinnati that shows the fighting blood of the young man who was to become the great preacher.
 Dr. Birney's abolitionist paper was wrecked by a mob, and she writes: Many respectable citizens are in- cIined to wink at the outrage in con- alteration of Its moving in the line of their prejudices." Henry Ward Beecher did not wink. He feared an