‘Abused by a race of fiends’

“In the end, Harriet Beecher Stowe looked at the phenomenon of slavery through the clean moral categories of the Yankee reformer, and what she saw was a race of children being abused by a race of fiends.’’

— Andrew DelBanco, in Required Reading (1997). Stowe, the writer and abolitionist who wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin, was born in Litchfield, Conn. (now a rich exurb and weekend place of New York City), and died in Hartford, where Mark Twain was a neighbor. He wrote of her in her later years:

“Her mind had decayed, and she was a pathetic figure. She wandered about all the day long in the care of a muscular Irish woman. Among the colonists of our neighborhood the doors always stood open in pleasant weather. Mrs. Stowe entered them at her own free will, and as she was always softly slippered and generally full of animal spirits, she was able to deal in surprises, and she liked to do it. She would slip up behind a person who was deep in dreams and musings and fetch a war whoop that would jump that person out of his clothes. And she had other moods. Sometimes we would hear gentle music in the drawing-room and would find her there at the piano singing ancient and melancholy songs with infinitely touching effect.’’

Commercial blocks on West Street in Litchfield, Conn.

—Photo by Joe Mabel