Stowe’s antislavery passions intensified when she moved from Connecticut to Cincinnati, where her father had been appointed president of the new Lane Theological Seminary. There, she witnessed slave catchers, enabled by the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act—requiring Northerners to aid in capturing and returning enslaved people to their enslavers—actively hunting escapees who’d made it across the Ohio River. She was appalled when a pro-slavery mob sacked the premises of an abolitionist newspaper and vandalized the homes of free Black people in the city. A year later, Elijah P. Lovejoy, another antislavery editor and a friend of the Beechers, was murdered by a riotous mob in Alton, Illinois.
In her novel’s “concluding remarks,” Stowe discloses that for many years she considered the subject of enslavement “too painful to be inquired into.” In fact, the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act impelled her. She was appalled by the cowed complicity she witnessed among her neighbors and friends.
But a more personal loss pervades her novel, too. When her son Charley died of cholera at 18 months in 1849, she wrote: “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.” There-after, she decided she would work to show slavery “in living dramatic reality.”
Uncle Tom's Cabin is a deeply researched book. Its fictional plotlines draw directly from narratives of escapees, as well as from Henry’s accounts of his encounters in slave states; from reporting in the abolitionist press; and from interviews with Black people Stowe employed as domestic servants and those she met in academic and religious circles. She credits the inspiration for Tom’s character to the experience of her cook, a free Black woman, whose enslaved husband in Kentucky “was such a Christian I could not get him to run away,” even when his enslaver sent him on errands to Ohio. The character of Tom’s wife, Chloe, is modeled on Stowe’s housekeeper, Aunt Frankie, whom she admired for her resourcefulness and good humor.
The Stowe family’s own antislavery acts, including transporting runaways in the dark of night, find their way into the novel’s account of the flight of one enslaved person, Eliza; Eliza’s tale is also inspired by the experiences of the abolitionist John Rankin, who gave sanctuary to a woman and her 2-year-old who had crossed the Ohio River on planks and ice floes.
