Sto: Stockton through Stowe

See below for annotated biographies of American abolitionists and anti-slavery activists. Source: Scribner’s Dictionary of American Biography.


STOCKTON, Robert Field (August 20, 1795-October 7, 1866), naval officer.  He organized the New Jersey Colonization Society and became its first president. Taking an active part in New Jersey politics, he supported John Quincy Adams for a time.

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 9, Pt. 2, pp. 48-49:

STOCKTON, ROBERT FIELD (August 20, 1795-October 7, 1866), naval officer, was born in Princeton, New Jersey, the fourth of the nine children of Richard, 1764-1828 [q.v.] and Mary (Field) Stockton. He was of the fifth generation from Richard Stockton, an English Quaker who came to Flushing, Long Island, before 16.56 and whose son Richard moved to New Jersey in 1696. Robert's grandfather was Richard [q.v.], the Signer, and his father, "Richard the Duke," an eminent lawyer and United States senator and representative. At the age of thirteen Robert entered the College of New Jersey, where he excelled in mathematics, languages, and elocution. On October 1, 1811, he was appointed midshipman and ordered to the President, the flagship of Commodore John Rodgers [q.v.], with whom he was closely associated throughout the War of 1812 in the cruises of the flagship in the North Atlantic, in the construction of the Guerriere at Philadelphia, and in the military operations in defense of Washington and Baltimore. In these last-named operations, for his services as aide-de- camp, he was commended by Rodgers in official dispatches to the department: On December 9, 1812, he was promoted to a lieutenancy, having previously served as master's mate.

In the war with Algiers, 1815, Stockton as first lieutenant of the Spitfire participated in the capture of two Algerine warships. In 1816 he began a tour of duty in the Mediterranean that lasted four years, during which he served first on board the Washington, 74, flagship of the squadron, and later on the Erie, of which vessel he was successively second lieutenant, executive officer, and commander. Always sensitive about points of honor, he enlivened his duties in the Mediterranean by fighting two duels, one with a British officer and the other with an American midshipman. Much interested in the American Colonization Society, Stockton in 1821 conveyed on board the Alligator to the west coast of Africa Dr. Eli Ayres, agent for the society, and obtained by means of a treaty with the native kings a new site for the agency, Cape Mesurado, later Liberia. On this cruise he captured several small French slavers and, after a sharp engagement, the Portuguese letter of marque Mariana Flora. The legality of this capture was sustained by the United States Supreme Court (11 Wheaton, 1- 57), Justice Story delivering the opinion and Daniel Webster representing the captor. In 1822, while employed in suppressing piracy in the West Indies, he made prize of or chased ashore several small vessels at Sugar Key. In 1823-24, when stationed with a surveying party on the Southern coast, he was married to Harriet Maria Potter of Charleston, South Carolina, who bore him nine children-three sons and six daughters; John Potter Stockton [q.v.] was his second son. In 1827-28 he was again employed with surveying duties.

Inheriting in the latter year the family homestead "Morven" at Princeton, New Jersey, he lived there, on leave of absence or furlough from the navy, for a decade, engaged in civilian pursuits. He invested his private fortune in the Delaware & Raritan Canal, serving as its first president, and in the Camden & Amboy Railroad. In behalf of these enterprises he visited Europe and furthered them in many other ways. He imported blooded horses from England and engaged in racing, one of his horses winning a stake of $10,000. He organized the New Jersey Colonization Society and became its first president. Taking an active part in New Jersey politics, he supported John Quincy Adams for a time, but later allied himself with Andrew Jackson and became one of the General's most intimate friends.

In 1830 Stockton was promoted master-commandant and in 1838, captain. Returning to active service in the latter year, he sailed for the Mediterranean in command of the Ohio, the flagship of the squadron. He made a study of the naval architecture and establishments of England and especially interested himself in a plan for a steamship for the American navy. In 1840, while on a furlough, he took part in the Presidential election of that year, speaking in most of the New Jersey counties in behalf of William H. Harrison. In 1841 he refused the offer of President Tyler to make him secretary of the navy. After assisting in the construction of the steamer Princeton, named for his home town, he became her first commander, 1843-45. He was in command of her when, during an excursion down the Potomac, one of her guns burst, killing among others Abel P. Upshur [q.v.], secretary of state, and Thomas W. Gilmer [q.v.], secretary of the navy. A court of inquiry exonerated him of blame for the accident. He was chosen by the President to convey to the Texan government the resolution of the American government providing for annexation.

War with Mexico now being imminent, in October 1845 he was ordered to proceed to the Pacific in the Congress and reinforce the American Squadron there, an assignment of duty which was destined to mark the climax of his naval career. Ambitious, self-confident, impulsive, eager to take the initiative, he was not likely to miss an opportunity for distinction. On July 15, 1846, he arrived at Monterey, California, the war having already begun, and on the 23rd he relieved Commodore J. D. Sloat [q.v.]. On the same day he issued a dashing proclamation to the Californians, now generally regarded as an unfortunate document. Assuming command of the land operations, he enrolled the Bear Flag battalion of John C. Fremont [q.v.] as volunteers of the American army and proceeded to conquer Southern California. After taking possession of Santa Barbara he sailed for San Pedro, where he arrived on August 6. A week later, the combined forces of the navy and army entered Los Angeles and raised the American flag. On August 17 he issued a proclamation declaring California a territory of the United States, and proceeded to organize a civil and military government, assuming for himself the title of governor and commander-in-chief. He placed the Mexican coast south of San Diego under blockade and planned for himself an expedition inland from Acapulco to the city of Mexico, but was forced to abandon this ambitious design on account of the recapture of Los Angeles by the Mexicans. Early in January 1847 the combined forces of Stockton and General S. W. Kearney [q.v.], after fighting the battles of San Gabriel and Mesa, repossessed Los Angeles and ended the war on California soil. Soon thereafter Stockton was superseded. Returning overland, he arrived in Washington in October. On May 28, 1850, he resigned from the navy.

Elected to the United States Senate as a Democrat from New Jersey, Stockton served from March 4, 1851, to January 10, 1853. During his brief term he introduced a bill providing for the abolition of flogging in the navy and urged adequate harbor defenses, making speeches on both subjects. From 1853 until his death he was president of the Delaware & Raritan Canal Company. He espoused the American Party and was considered as a possible candidate for the presidency in 1856. He was delegate to the Peace Conference held in Washington early in 1861. Hopeful and buoyant, warm-hearted and generous, he possessed strong religious sentiments.

[Record of Officers, Bureau of Navigation, Washington, 1809-58; Navy Register, 1815-50; S. J. Bayard, A Sketch of the Life of Coin. Robert F. Stockton (1856); T. C. Stockton, The Stockton Family of New Jersey (1911); R. G. Cleland, A History of California; The American Period. (1922); H. H. Bancroft, History of the Pacific States, volume XVII (1886); J. H. Smith, The War with Mexico (1919); Senate Executive Document 31, 30 Congress, 2 Session; R. W. Neeser, Statistical and Chronological History of the U. S. Navy.]


STOCKTON, Thomas Hewlings (June 4, 1808-October 9, 1868), Methodist Protestant clergyman.  In the regular ministry, at Baltimore, Stockton became involved in the rising anti-slavery controversy. In 1838 he was elected editor of the church paper, but when told that it should publish nothing on the subject of slavery, he resigned and removed to Philadelphia, where he preached to non-sectarian congregations for nine years

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 9, Pt. 2, pp. 49-50:

STOCKTON, THOMAS HEWLINGS (June 4, 1808-October 9, 1868), Methodist Protestant clergyman, was one of the outstanding figures in the early history of his denomination. The son of William Smith Stockton and his first wife, Elizabeth Sophia (Hew lings), he was the eldest of a brilliant family of whom Frank R. Stockton [q.v.], his half-brother, was one of the younger members; he was born at Mount Holly, New Jersey, and his childhood was passed near Philadelphia. His career was determined by the religious interest of his father. The latter, an influential layman in the Methodist Episcopal Church, took a leading part in protesting against the arbitrary policy then prevailing among the bishops; and in 1828 he withdrew from the Methodist denomination with those reformers who later organized the Methodist Protestant Church.

This controversy, occurring during Thomas Stockton's formative years, not only turned him from the Methodist ministry, but provoked a hatred of sectarianism which influenced his entire career. At the age of nineteen he enrolled in Jefferson Medical College; but, disliking the profession of medicine, he cut short his training, and after an unproductive essay in literary work for periodicals, he entered the ministry of the newly organized Methodist Protestant Church. In 1830 he declined the editorship of the new denominational paper, the Methodist Protestant, recommending his friend Gamaliel Bailey [q.v.] instead. Two years previously he had married Anna Roe McCurdy, by whom he had eleven children (Poems, p. 300).

During the first years of his pastoral service, which were spent in northern Maryland, he discovered a capacity for pulpit oratory which was as unexpected as it was gratifying. His sermons were neither learned nor profound, but their style was graceful and literary, and they reflected the lovable spirit of the man himself. His reputation rapidly increased. when only twenty-five years of age, he was elected chaplain of the House of Representatives, an office which, except for one short interval, he filled until 1836. Once more in the regular ministry, at Baltimore, Stockton became involved in the rising anti-slavery controversy. In 1838 he was again elected editor of the church paper, but when told that it should publish nothing on the subject of slavery, he resigned and removed to Philadelphia, where he preached to non-sectarian congregations for nine years, to the end that "professors of religion shall learn to live less for self and sect, and more for 'Christ and the Church' " (Poems, p. 306), but at the end of this time he returned to the Methodist Protestant denomination. During the remainder of his career, he alternately withdrew from his denomination and returned to it, meanwhile organizing independent, non-sectarian congregations. This he did in Cincinnati, in Baltimore, and again in Philadelphia. During these years, however, he attained a national reputation. In the capacity of chaplain of the Senate, in 1863, he conducted the religious services at the dedication of the Gettysburg national cemetery, when Lincoln made his immortal address. At the time of his death, in 1868, he was considered one of the greatest pulpit orators of his day.

Nothing that Thomas Stockton said or wrote long survived his death. His collected poems, Floating Flowers from a Hidden Brook (1844), and Poems (1862), are graceful and pleasing, but not inspired. His essays and controversial works, The Bible Alliance (1850), Ecclesiastical Opposition to the Bible (1853), and The Book Above All (1871), are without the charm and spirit that made his spoken words so memorable to his hearers. His one volume of collected addresses, Sermons for the People (1854), is, as Stockton himself said, not a learned book, "for the simple reason-which I greatly regret, though not without excuse-that there is no learning in the author himself" (Sermons, Preface, p. vii). It was only as minister to his congregations that in his day he touched greatness.

[Stockton's works, esp. autobiographical notes appended to his Poems (1862); T. C. Stockton, The Stockton Family of New Jersey (1911); J. G. Wilson, Life, Character, and Death of Reverend Thomas H. Stockton (1869); Alexander Clark, Memory's Tribute to the Life, Character and Work of Thomas H. Stockton (1869); T. H. Colhouer, Sketches of the Founders of the M. P. Church (1880); A. H. Bassett, A Concise History of the M. P. Church (1882); E. J. Drinkhouse, History of Methodist Reform ... in the M. P. Church (1899); Public Ledger (Philadelphia), October 12, 1868.]

G.H.B.


STODDARD, William Osborn (September 24, 1835-August 29, 1925), author, inventor, secretary to President Lincoln. An ardent opponent of slavery, he was active in organizing in 1862 the Union League of America.

(Who's Who in America, 1924-25; New York Times, August 30, 1925; The Americana Annual (1926); The New International Year Book 1925 (1926).

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 9, Pt. 2, pp. 60-61:

STODDARD, WILLIAM OSBORN (September 24, 1835-August 29, 1925), author, inventor, secretary to President Lincoln, was born in Homer, New York, the son of Prentice Samuel Stoddard by his first wife, Sarah Ann (Osborn). He was descendant of Ralph Stoddard, who was in Groton, Connecticut, as early as 1695. William received his early education in private schools and at Homer Academy. From 1849 until 1853 he worked in his father's book and publishing shop at Syracuse. In 1858 he received the degree of A.B., cum laude, from the University of Rochester.

That same year he became affiliated with the Central Illinois Gazette at West Urbana, Illinois, his name first appearing as joint editor of this weekly paper in August 1858. At West Urbana (now Champaign), Stoddard met Abraham Lincoln, and although reared in New York as a disciple of William H. Seward, he was instantly won by Lincoln's personality. The young editor worked ceaselessly for Lincoln's election in the Illinois senatorial campaign of 1858 and he was one of the first Illinois editors to suggest him for the presidency. In the Atlantic Monthly (February 1925), he recounts his efforts in the spring of 1859 to awaken interest in Lincoln as a candidate, saying: "In all the long list of possible presidential candidates, the name of Lincoln had not been spoken of in any newspaper publication that I knew anything about." He then quotes from two articles which appeared in the Gazette advocating Lincoln's candidacy, the implication being that both were published in the spring of 1859. The first article, a personal item, did appear in the Gazette on May 4, 1859, and in this appears the assertion: "No man in the West ... stands a better chance [than Lincoln] for obtaining a high position among those to whose guidance our ship of state is to be entrusted." The second article, however, an editorial entitled "Who Shall Be President?" did not appear in the Gazette until December 7, 1859. In spite of Stoddard's belief to the contrary, he was not the first editor to put Lincoln forward as a candidate. The Olney Times (Olney, Illinois) came out in his behalf on November 19, 1858, and on December 16, 1858, the Chicago Press and Tribune published an editorial reprint from the Reading, Pennsylvania, Berks and Schuylkill Journal in which Lincoln was suggested for the presidency.

Stoddard worked vigorously for Lincoln in the campaign of 1860, and in recognition of his services, Lincoln, in 1861, appointed him as a secretary to sign land patents. In April of the same year, with Lincoln's permission, he enlisted as a private for three months' service in the United States Volunteers. Upon his discharge. he was appointed an assistant private secretary to Lincoln, with the task of sorting out for the was te basket the scores of letters received from office seekers, "blackguards," and "lunatics." Except for occasional help from department clerks, John George Nicolay, John Hay [qq.v.], and Stoddard attended to all of the clerical work at the executive office during the early part of Lincoln's administration. Stoddard relates the ''queer kind of tremor" that came over him as he copied from "Abraham Lincoln's own draft of the first Emancipation Proclamation” (Atlantic Monthly, March 1925, p. 337).

An ardent opponent of slavery, he was active in organizing in 1862 the Union League of America. In September 1864 he was appointed United States marshal of Arkansas, resigning this position in 1866 because of ill health. After 1866, he became engaged in journalistic activities and in telegraphic, manufacturing, and railway enterprises, obtaining nine patents for mechanical inventions. From 1873 to 1875 he served as a clerk in the department of docks, New York City. In all, Stoddard wrote over one hundred books, among which were: Abraham Lincoln (1884); The Lives of the Presidents (10 volumes, 1886-89); Inside the White House in War Times (1890); and The Table Talk of Lincoln (1894). His books for boys, some seventy-six in number, were perhaps his greatest literary successes. On July 25, 1870, he married Susan Eagleson Cooper of New York, by whom he had five children. He spent the later years of his life at Madison, New Jersey, where he died.

[In addition to Stoddard's writings, see E. W. Stoddard, , Ralph Stoddard of New London and Groton, Connecticut, and His Descendants (1872); General Catalog, University of Rochester (1911); Who's Who in America, 1924-25; New York Times, August 30, 1925; The Americana Annual (1926); The New International Year Book 1925 (1926). Information as to certain facts was supplied by W. O. Stoddard, Jr.]

A. L. P.


STONE, Lucy, 1818-1893, women’s rights activist, abolitionist, friend of abolitionist Abby Kelley.  Agent, American Anti-Slavery Society.  Gave lectures on slavery.  Wife of abolitionist Henry Blackwell.

(Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume V, pp. 702-703; Blackwell, 1930; Dumond, 1961, p. 281; Hays, 1961; Kerr, 1992; Million, 2003; Rodriguez, 2007, pp. 291, 338, 465; Yellin, 1994, pp. 86, 148, 247, 260, 295-296; Blackwell, Alice Stone, Lucy Stone: Pioneer of Woman’s Rights. 2001; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 9, Pt. 2, p. 80; American Reformers: An H.W. Wilson Biographical Dictionary, New York, 1985, pp. 777-780; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Volume 20, p. 863; The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, Volume II. New York: James T. White, 1892, pp. 316-317). 

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 9, Pt. 2, pp. 80-81:

STONE, LUCY (August 13, 1818-October 18, 1893), reformer and pioneer in the woman's rights movement, was born near West Brookfield, Massachusetts. Her mother was Hannah (Matthews) Stone. Her father, Francis Stone, was a descendant of Gregory Stone who emigrated from England to Massachusetts Bay in 1635. Francis Stone was a well-to-do farmer and tanner who believed that men were divinely ordained to rule over women. Hannah, his wife, meek and docile, accepted this view; but Lucy, when still very young, became resentful of woman's lot. Upon discovering that the Bible seemed to uphold male domination she wanted to die. Soon, however, she began to suspect the man-made translations of the Scriptures and decided to study Greek and Hebrew to find out whether they were correct. Though her brothers were sent to college, her father was shocked when she expressed a wish to go, and he would give her no financial aid. Therefore, she determined to educate herself, and when sixteen began to teach district school at a dollar a week, "boarding around." For several years afterward she continued to teach, except for short periods at Quaboag Seminary in Warren, Mass,, the Wesleyan Academy in Wilbraham, Massachusetts, and at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. During this time her hostility towards the existing status of women increased, for she learned that, because of her sex, she had no vote in the Congregational Church in West Brookfield of which she was a member. Finally, in 1843 she had enough money to start work at Oberlin College and registered there. For the first two years she helped eke out her expenses by teaching and by manual labor, but in her third year her father relented and came to her aid. At college she was looked upon as a dangerous radical, for she was an ardent abolitionist, was uncompromising on the qt1estion of woman's rights, and, under the influence of the brimstone sermons of Charles Grandison Finney [q.v.], became Unitarian in religion. In August 1847 she was graduated at Oberlin College.

A few weeks later she gave her first public address on woman's rights, from the pulpit of her brother, William Bowman Stone, at Gardner, Massachusetts. The following year she began to lecture regularly for the Anti-Slavery Society, but she, urged the elevation of woman whenever pretext offered. After two or three years most of her time was given to free-lance lecturing on the rights and wrongs of her sex, and she traveled over much of the country delivering her message. Possessed of rare eloquence and a singularly beautiful voice, she was, as Elizabeth Cady Stanton said, "the first person by whom the heart of the American public was deeply stirred on the woman question" (Blackwell, post, p. 94). In 1850 she headed the call for the first national Woman's Rights convention, which was held at Worcester, Massachusetts, and had much to do with arranging for the later conventions, which took place annually. She published the proceedings at her own expense. She had intended never to marry, in order that she might give all of her energies to the cause of woman's rights, but on May 1, 1855, she became the wife of Henry Brown Blackwell [q.v.], after he had offered to devote his life to the same cause. He kept his word. In connection with their marriage they drew up a joint protest against the legal disabilities of women that was given wide publicity. Lucy Stone felt that a woman's abandonment of her name upon taking a husband was symbolical of her loss of individuality, so she kept her own name after marriage, merely substituting the title Mrs. for Miss.

Following her marriage her labors for woman's rights continued and broadened. For a time the family lived in New Jersey, and there, in 1858, she let her household goods be sold for taxes and used the incident for a written protest against taxation without representation. When the Fourteenth Amendment to the federal Constitution was pending, she and her husband strove, in vain, to win suffrage for women through getting the word "male" struck from the bill. In 1866 when the American Equal Rights Association was formed she was made a member of the executive committee. In 1867, partly through her efforts, the New Jersey Woman Suffrage Association was organized, with her as president. For two months of the same year she and her husband campaigned in Kansas in behalf of amendments to the state constitution for extending suffrage to women and to negro men. In 1868, while still living in New Jersey, they helped organize the New England Woman Suffrage Association. Soon they removed to Boston to aid the woman movement in Massachusetts. Just at this time a split, over program and methods, occurred in the American Equal Rights Association, and in its place developed the National Woman Suffrage Association and the American Woman Suffrage Association. She helped form the latter, which concentrated on gaining suffrage by states. Twenty years later, upon the initiative of Alice Stone Blackwell, her daughter, the two organizations were united as the National American Woman Suffrage Association, and she was placed on the executive committee. She raised most of the money with which the Woman's Journal was founded in 1870. Two years later she and her husband assumed the editorship and were in charge of it for the remainder of their lives. Under their direction the publication became a tower of strength to the cause of woman's rights. Meanwhile she was the leading spirit in the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association, which she and her husband helped organize in 1870, and in the New England and the American associations; and she likewise gave much individual time to lecturing and drafting bills and to legislative hearings in the interest of a better status for women. She delivered her last lecture for the cause to which she devoted her life in connection with the World's Columbian Exposition at Chicago in 1893. Shortly afterward her health began to fail from an internal tumor. At her home in Boston she died, urging her daughter, Alice Stone Blackwell, to "make the world better" (Blackwell, post, p. 282). Her funeral, said a friend, was like a coronation (Ibid., p. 285). She was short of stature but well built; her cheeks were rosy throughout life; her nose was broad and tip-tilted, adding to her expression of good nature and approachableness; her eyes were bright gray; her mouth, strong and kindly; and she had an abundance of dark brown hair, which had whitened very little when she died. She possessed unusual personal magnetism, but she had not much sense of humor. Ruggedly honest in acts and words, modest, unselfish, and fearless, she was kind in her human relationship s, even to her opponents, and was very fond of children. She died at her home in Dorchester, Massachusetts.

[Some letters in Library of Congress, but most of papers in possession of daughter, Alice Stone Blackwell; A. S. Blackwell, Lucy Stone, Pioneer of Woman's Rights (copyright 1930), "Lucy Stone, New Jersey Pioneer Suffragist,'' The Civic Pilot, January 1923, and "Three Pioneer Women," in Alpha Phi Quarterly, January 1927; History of Woman Suffrage  (6 volumes, 1881-1922). ed. bv E. C. Stanton, S. B. Anthony, M. J. Gage, and I. H. Harper; J. G. Bartlett, Gregory Stone Genealogy (1918); Boston Evening Transcript, October 19, 1893; New York Tribune, October 22, 28, 1893.]

M. W.W.  


STONE, William B., abolitionist, Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, Vice-President, 1848-50.


STONE, William L., New York, American Colonization Society, Executive Committee, 1839-40.  Advocated emancipation of slaves by Congress.

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 9, Pt. 2, pp. 89-90:

STONE, WILLIAM LEETE (April 20, 1792-August 15, 1844), journalist and historian, was a descendant of John Stone and of William Leete [q.v.], both among the fir st settlers of Guilford, Conn. They second of eleven children of Reverend William Stone, a Yale Congregationalist who served three years in the Revolution "with a Hebrew Bible and the whole works of Josephus in his knapsack" (W. L. Stone, Jr., "Life," post, p. 10), and of Tamson (Graves) Stone, he was born at New Paltz, New York. His father retired to a farm on the upper Susquehanna and young Stone grew up in a frontier atmosphere, but he had a good training in Latin, Greek, and Puritan theology from his strong-willed parent. This frontier-classical schooling was apparently all the formal education he secured. In 1809 he walked forty miles in a single night to offer himself as apprentice to the editor of the Cooperstown Federalist; he was accepted and remained for three years. In 1813 he purchased the Federalist Herkimer American, having for his journeyman Thurlow Weed [q.v.]. In 1814 Stone sold this paper and bought the Northern Whig at Hudson. By his marriage, January 31, 1817, to Susannah Pritchard Wayland, daughter of Reverend Francis Wayland of Saratoga Springs and sister of Francis Wayland [q.v.], later president of Brown University, he acquired a literary adviser, and while at Hudson he edited two literary periodicals, the Lounger and the Spirit of the Forum. In 1816 he purchased the Albany Daily Advertiser, which was merged with the Albany Gazette; two years later his business failed and he became editor of the Mirror, Hartford, Connecticut, a journal formerly "vigilant and spicy" in its defense of Federalism, but under Stone's editorship harmlessly literary. Here he formed a literary club which edited a weekly magazine, The Knights of the Round Table.

His influence as an editor increased after 1821, when he became one of the proprietors of the New York Commercial Advertiser. He was one of the first to champion the cause of Greek independence; though a Federalist, he was a personal friend of DeWitt Clinton [q.v.] and zealously fought for the Erie Canal, writing on request Narrative of the Festivities Observed in Honor of the Completion of the Grand Erie Canal (1825); and as a "high Mason" he stepped forth as a mediator in the Anti-Masonic outburst following the disappearance of William Morgan [q.v.], writing Letters on Masonry and Anti-Masonry (1832), which evidently aimed at (but failed to obtain) wide circulation because of a strict impartiality designed to conciliate both sides. He ridiculed Frances Wright [q.v.] and women's rights, spoke sarcastically of extension of the suffrage, and advocated emancipation of slaves by Congress. An unwavering Federalist editor, he frankly admitted in 1829 that he had reached the top of his profession. He was director of the Institution for the Deaf and Dumb, for some time a school commissioner, and in 1843-44 superintendent of the common schools of New York City.

Throughout his life he was interested in the early history of his region. In Tales and Sketches (2 volumes, 1834) he published an account of his own pioneer experiences and of Revolutionary traditions; "Uncle Tim and Deacon Pettibone" and "Dick Moon, the Peddlar," both of which appeared in The Atlantic Club-Book (2 volumes, 1834), were rather stereotyped reporting of New England rusticity and asceticism; "The Mysterious Bridal," in Tales and Sketches, reprinted in The Mysterious Bridal and Other Tales (3 volumes, 1835), portrays a typical colonial New England Thanksgiving with such success that Chancellor Kent thought it deserved a place beside Brace-bridge Hall. Another New England sketch, "Mercy Disborough; a Tale of the Witches" (in Tales and Sketches), deals with legends of the regicides, wherein Stone's ancestor, Governor Leete of Connecticut, appears to good advantage. In 1833 appeared Matthias and His Impostures, an account of remarkable deceptions occurring in New York, and in 1836, Maria Monk and the Nunnery of the Hotel Dieu, after Stone had gone to Montreal to investigate charges made by a "silly and profligate woman." A social satire, Ups and Downs in the Life of a Distressed Gentleman (1836), and Letter to Dr. A. Brigham, on Animal Magnetism (1837) came next. Meanwhile, gathering great stores of manuscripts and books, Stone set out to write a history of the Iroquois, beginning with Life of Joseph Brant Thayendanegea (1838). This was followed by Life and Times of Red Jacket (1841). Seven chapters of the life of Sir William Johnson had been completed at the time of the author's death; the work was finished by his son, William L. Stone, Jr. [q.v.]. Three volumes, The Poetry and History of Wyoming (1841), Uncas and Miantonomoh (1842), and Border Wars of the American Revolution (1843), were by-products of his chief interest A result of still greater value was the creation in 1838 of the New York State Historical Agency for the transcribing of the documents in European archives later published by J. R. Brodhead [q.v. ]. Stone's most lasting contribution was in awakening an interest in the state archives, though in his own day his greatest influence was exerted in the field of journalism. Stone had only the one son, but adopted his sister's son, William Henry, who changed his name to William Henry Stone.

[Stone's great mass of MSS. and books was scattered, a part going to the Fort Ticonderoga Museum. The best biographical sketch is that by his son, "Life and Writings of Colonel William Leete Stone," in The Life and Times of Sa-go-ye-wat-ha, or Red Jacket (ed. of 1866), pp. 9-101. See also W. L. Stone, Jr., The Family of John Stone (1888); F. B. Dexter, Biog. Sketches Graduates Yale University, volume IV (1917), for sketch of the Reverend William Stone; journal of a trip from New York to Niagara, Buffalo Historical Society Pubs., volume XIV (1910); J. D. Hammond, The History of Political Parties in the State of New York (1842), I, 452-53; Autobiography of Thurlow Weed (1884), ed. by Harriet A. Weed; Correspondence of James Fenimore Cooper (2 volumes, 1932); New York Tribune, August 17, 1844. Laughton Osborn, The Vision of Rubeta (1838), satirizing in verse Stone's expose of the charges of Maria Monk, is an intelligent and valuable commentary and, portraying Stone as domineering and opinionated, provides a good corrective for the life by W. L. Stone, Jr.]

J.P. B.   


STORRS, George, New Hampshire, Montpelier, Vermont, Methodist clergyman, anti-slavery agent, abolitionist.  Member of the New Hampshire Conference, which founded an anti-slavery group in 1835.  Storrs was a Manager, 1835-1836, and a Vice President 1835-1837, of the American Anti-Slavery Society and a Member of the Executive Committee of the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, 1840-1841.  He was censured by the Methodist Church for his anti-slavery activities in 1836.  He was also arrested by authorities for “disturbing the peace.” 

(Dumond, 1961, pp. 187, 245, 392n19)


STORRS, Nathan, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, abolitionist, American Anti-Slavery Society, Manager, 1839-1840. 


STORRS, Richard Salter (February 6, 1787-August 11, 1873), Congregational clergyman. Although not wholly in sympathy with political abolitionism, he boldly denounced slavery, and a discourse of his, American Slavery and the Means of Its Removal, was published in 1844.

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 9, Pt. 2, pp. 100-101:

STORRS, RICHARD SALTER (February 6, 1787-August 11, 1873), Congregational clergyman, for sixty-two years pastor in Braintree, Massachusetts, was the third in family descent of a distinguished line of Congregational ministers, whose combined service extended from 1763 to 1900. His grandfather was Reverend John Storrs (1735-1799), a graduate of Yale, a tutor there, and a chaplain in the Revolution; his father, Richard Salter Storrs (1763-1819), was for nearly thirty-four years pastor in Longmeadow, Massachusetts; his son, also Richard Salter Storrs [q.v.], carried on the family tradition by a pastorate of more than fifty years at the Church of the Pilgrims, Brooklyn, New York. They were the descendants of Samuel, son of Thomas and Mary Storrs of Nottinghamshire, England, who emigrated to Barnstable, Massachusetts, in 1663. On his mother's side, also, Richard 2nd was of ministerial stock. She was Sarah Williston, daughter of Reverend Noah Williston of West Haven, Connecticut.

Richard was born in Longmeadow, but when he was four years old, his grandfather Williston requested that the child be given to him and reared as his own. The parents consented and the boy's youth was spent in West Haven under a rigorous Puritanical tutelage. Prepared by his grandfather, he entered Yale in 1802; but after a year there he was compelled by ill health to withdraw. Returning now to his father's home, Longmeadow, he engaged in outdoor work, and later taught schools in West Suffield, Connecticut, Longmeadow, and West Haven, Connecticut While in the last-named place he met Lyman Beecher [q.v.] of East Hampton, L. I., who persuaded him to go to that town and take charge of Clinton Academy. During his stay there he had the stimulating experience of living in Beecher's household. An interesting example of one phase of his work survives in A Dialogue Exhibiting Some of the Principles and Practical Consequences of Modern Infidelity (1806), which he prepared for a student exhibition; in 1932 it was reprinted in the Magazine of History (volume XLV, Extra No. 180). He reentered Yale in 1806 but soon transferred to Williams College, from which he graduated in 1807. He then studied theology with Reverend Aaron Woolworth of Bridgehampton, L. I., was licensed by the Suffolk Presbytery, supplied churches in Smithtown and Islip, and in May 1809 entered Andover Theological Seminary, graduating the following year. After six months' missionary work in Georgia as agent of the American Education Society, he was ordained and installed, July 3, 1811, as pastor of the First Congregational Church, Braintree, Massachusetts.

Thenceforth, for considerably more than half a century, he was one of the conspicuous figures of New England Congregationalism. Stanchly orthodox, he energetically opposed the Unitarian movement and was one of the first Massachusetts preachers to refuse to exchange with any clergyman suspected of being unsound in the faith. Although not wholly in sympathy with political abolitionism, he boldly denounced slavery, and a discourse of his, American Slavery and the Means of Its Removal, was published in 1844. He was among the early promoters of Sunday schools and temperance societies, and served as secretary of the American Tract Society (1820-25) and director of the American Education Society (1821-30). He was especially interested in home missionary work, was for years an official of the Massachusetts Missionary Society, and during a five-year leave of absence from his church (1831-36) he went up and down New England as a missionary agent. In 1816 he became an editorial writer for the Recorder (later the Boston Recorder), established the year before, and served for eight years; from 1850 to 1856 he was an editor of the Congregationalist. As a director of the Doctrinal Tract Society (later the Congregational Board of Publication) he prepared many works for the press. His own contributions to periodicals were numerous, and in addition to sermons, he published Memoir of the Reverend Samuel Green (1836). A typical representative of the old-school New England clergy, severe but friendly, fearless in reproof and denunciation, burning with zeal to promote the spiritual welfare of the land, he was regarded with both awe and affection by his parishioners, and held in high esteem by leading men of his time. He was married first, April 2, 1812, to Sarah Strong Woodhull, who died April 4, 1818; second, September 16, 1819, to Harriet Moore, who died July 10, 1834; and third, October 18, 1835, to Anne Stebbins, who survived him.

[Charles Storrs, The Storrs Family (1886); Calvin Durfee, Williams Biographical Annals (1871); General Catalog of the Theological Seminary, Andover, Massachusetts, 1808-1908; W. S. Pattee, A History of Old Braintree and Quincy (copyright 1879); E. A. Park, A Sermon ... at the Funeral of Reverend Richard Salter Storrs, D.D. (1874); Boston Transcript, August 12, 1873.]

H. E. S.


STORRS, Richard Salter (August 21, 1821-June 5, 1900), Congregational clergyman, he organized the great Sanitary Fair held in February 1864;

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 9, Pt. 2, pp. 101

STORRS, RICHARD SALTER (August 21, 1821-June 5, 1900), Congregational clergyman, for more than fifty years pastor of the Church of the Pilgrims, Brooklyn, New York, was the third of that name and the fourth in line of descent to gain distinction in the ministerial calling. His father was Reverend Richard Salter Storrs [q.v.] and his mother, Harriet (Moore) Storrs. Born in Braintree, Massachusetts, he prepared for college at the academy in Monson, Massachusetts, and graduated from Amherst in 1839. For the next two years he taught; first, at Monson, and later, at Williston Seminary, Easthampton, Massachusetts. Abandoning an earlier intent to qualify for the bar after a year in the law office of Rufus Choate, he entered Andover Theological Seminary in 1842 and graduated in 1845. He was immediately called to the Harvard Congregational Church, Brookline, Massachusetts, where, October 22, he was ordained. On the first day of that month he had married Mary Elwell Jenks, daughter of Reverend Francis and Sarah (Phillips) Jenks, and a niece of Wendell Phillips. He had served hardly a year in his first parish when his abilities as a preacher led to his being called to the recently organized Church of the Pilgrims, Brooklyn, New York. Here, during a pastorate that covered the entire last half of the nineteenth century, he was a leading citizen, rivaling in influence and public esteem his contemporary, Henry Ward Beecher. When in 1869 he was called to the Central Church, Boston, more than a hundred of Brooklyn's most prominent men petitioned him to remain. On the fiftieth anniversary of his pastorate, at a gathering in the Academy of Music, he was presented with a medal in recognition of his civic services. A discourse, The Church of the Pilgrims, which he delivered and published in 1886, sets forth not only the growth of that organization but also the changes that had taken place about it during the past four decades. Many of those affecting the religious, educational, and philanthropic life of the city he had furthered. He was a corporate member of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, and one of its board of trustees; he was one of the foremost advocates of the movement that resulted in the establishment of Packer Collegiate Institute; he organized the great Sanitary Fair held in February 1864; he was president of the Long Island Historical Society; and in 1889 he served as park commissioner. For the city with whose growth and enrichment he was so long associated he had a jealous affection which made him a vigorous opponent of its consolidation with New York. As an orator he had a country-wide reputation, being popular as a lyceum lecturer, and acceptable at institutions of learning. While he cannot be credited with independent scholarship, his learning was comprehensive and his memory extraordinary. His appearance was "statuesque," and his discourses, enlivened with striking imagery, flowed forth in long, melodious sentences. The diversity of their content is suggested by such titles as "Libraries of Europe," "Climate and Civilization," "John Wycliffe and the First English Bible," "The Muscovite and the Ottoman." Many of his lectures appeared in pamphlet form and some are contained in Orations and Addresses (1901). Among his publications, also, are: The Constitution of the Human Soul (1857); Conditions of Success in Preaching Without Notes (1875); The Divine Origin of Christianity Indicated by Its Historical Effects (1884): Bernard of Clairvaux, the Times, the Man and His Work (1892). Theologically, "A more orthodox minister has not maintained the faith once delivered to the saints in our time than he" (Cuyler, post, p. 1416). From 1848 to 1861 he was one of the editors of the Independent; from 1888 to 1897 president of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions; and in 1895-96, president of the American Historical Association. He was also a trustee of Amherst College. His death occurred at his home in Brooklyn, and he was survived by three of four children.

[Charles Storrs, The Storrs Family (1886); Obit. Record Graduates Amherst College ... I900 (1900); General Catalog of the Theolog. Seminary, Andover, Massachusetts, I808-I908; The Congregational Year-Book, 1901; Who's Who in America, 1899-1900; T. L. Cuyler, in the Independent, June 14, 1900; Congregationalist, June 14, 1900; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, June 6, 7, 8, 1900; Brooklyn Times, June 6, 8, 1900.]

H. E. S.  


STORY, Joseph (September 18, 1779-September 10, 1845), Supreme Court jurist.  A case which moved the country mightily at the time, 1841, was that of the United States vs. Schooner Amistad (15 Peters, 518). A cargo of negroes on the Amistad, a slave-runner, had gotten control of the ship and murdered the officers; on being brought into port by a vessel of the United States navy they were claimed as slaves by certain Spaniards; the question before the court was whether or not the negroes were entitled to their freedom. Story's decision, for the court, held that they should be freed and sent back to Africa.

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 9, Pt. 2, pp. 102-108:

STORY, JOSEPH (September 18, 1779-September 10, 1845), jurist, eldest of the eleven children of Elisha and Mehitable (Pedrick) Story, was born in Marblehead, Massachusetts. His father had seven children by an earlier marriage. Descended from another Elisha Story, who arrived in Boston from England about 1700, Joseph had forebears of some influence and position in colonial New England. Before the War of the Revolution his paternal grandfather, William Story, had held the office of registrar in the court of admiralty. His own father, who became a physician and surgeon of considerable reputation, had been associated with the Sons of Liberty and was one of the "Indians" who took part in the Boston Tea Party. His mother's father was a wealthy merchant of Marblehead and a Loyalist. Story received the best education that the times and the place afforded. He was one of the first pupils to attend the newly established academy at Marblehead. A misunderstanding with the master of the school caused him to leave the academy in the fall of 1794 with his preparation for college still incomplete. It was prophetic of the tremendous industry and power of concentration with which he was later to amaze the legal world by producing volume after volume of commentaries in rapid succession, that Story, just turned fifteen and almost alone and unaided, should not only have finished his preparatory studies, but further should have made himself sufficiently acquainted with the subjects covered by the college freshman class for the first six months, to pass the examinations and to become a regularly enrolled student in Harvard at the close of the January vacation in 1795. In his college career he was confessedly a grind: "I was most thoroughly devoted to all the college studies, and scarcely wasted a single moment in idleness. I trace back to this cause a serious injury to my health. When I entered College I was robust and muscular, but before I left I had become pale and feeble and was inclined to dyspepsia" (Miscellaneous Writings, p. 16). He was graduated from Harvard in 1798, being rated second to William Ellery Channing who led the class.

He returned to Marblehead and began the study of law in the office of Samuel Sewall, then a member of Congress and later chief justice of the supreme court of Massachusetts. Though by general acclaim he still ranks as the foremost of American legal writers, Story acquired the foundations of his legal knowledge by means and methods which would be anathema to the educators of today. As in the case of office students in all generations, he was left largely to his own devices and thrown back upon his own resources --perhaps not a handicap to one of his studious habits. For months at a time he not infrequently devoted fourteen hours a day to study. The scarcity of American reports--there were then only five or six volumes available--made it necessary for him to depend upon treatises, some of them already very old. He tells us that he read Blackstone with pleasurable comprehension, but that his next assignment, Coke on Littleton, proved so difficult that he wept bitterly over the failure of his first unsuccessful attempts to understand it. After mastering Littleton he turned to Saunders' Reports and the study of special pleading, developing such an interest in this branch of the law as to make it for several years his favorite subject. While still in Sewall's office he read through "that deep and admirable work upon one of the most intricate titles of the law, Fearne on Contingent Remainders and Executory Devises" (Ibid., p. 20). Apparently it was not until after he had begun the actual practice of law that he became acquainted with the Year Books and the early English reports that followed them.

On the appointment of Sewall to a judgeship, Story left his office and went to that of Samuel Putnam in Salem. This change probably accounts for the fact that on his admission to the bar, at the July term of the common pleas in Essex County, 1801, he opened his own office in that town. He began his career as a practising lawyer under circumstances that were neither auspicious nor pleasant. Story himself was an avowed Republican; the bench and bar of eastern Massachusetts were, practically without exception, Federalists. At first he was made to feel this political difference pointedly; was, as he says, "excluded from those intimacies which warm and cheer the intercourse of the profession" (Ibid., p. 22). However, during his second year at the bar his practice began to grow. It increased, until at the time of his appointment to the Supreme Court of the United States some ten years later, it was, if we may believe his own statement, as extensive and lucrative as that of any lawyer in the county.

His participation in politics and public affairs began early in his career. He was chosen by Marblehead to deliver the eulogy on the death of Washington (published, 1800). In 1803 he was appointed to the station of naval officer for the port of Salem, but this appointment he declined. The next year he delivered the annual Fourth of July oration in Salem (published, 1804). He was Salem's representative in the legislature of Massachusetts in 1805 and again in 1806 and 1807. A memorial, relative to the infringements of the neutral trade of the United States, and addressed to the President and Congress in behalf of the inhabitants of Salem, was drawn up by him in January 1806 (Ibid., p. 43). This same year, as chairman of the committee appointed to make a report on the matter, he was largely responsible for the act of the legislature raising the salaries of the judges of the supreme court of Massachusetts. In his time, as for a long time afterwards, there was no court of equity in Massachusetts. During the session of the legislature in 1808 he moved the appointment of a committee to take under consideration the establishment of a court of chancery. He was made chairman of the committee and drew up an exhaustive report in favor of the creation of such a court. The report was not accepted, but it is part of the history of Story and equity. Together with Chancellor Kent he will always be remembered as the founder of the system in the United States; in 1842 he drew up the rules of equity practice for the United States Supreme Court and the circuit courts; his Commentaries on Equity Jurisprudence (14th ed., 3 volumes, 1918), and his Commentaries on Equity Pleading (10th ed., 1892), are still in use.

In the fall of 1808 he was elected a member of Congress to fill the vacancy caused by the death of Jacob Crowninshield. He remained in Congress for one session only, until March 3, 1809, and declined to become a candidate for reelection. The reasons for this refusal, as he later gave them, were that a continuance in public life would be incompatible with his complete success at the bar, and that obedience to party projects required too much sacrifice of opinion and feeling. That he was unwilling to sacrifice his own opinions for the sake of his party, during even his short stay in Congress, is shown by his attitude toward the Embargo, which, he had become convinced, had failed of its object and should be abandoned. Jefferson accused him of being responsible for the repeal of the Embargo-"I ascribe all this to one pseudo-Republican, Story" (P. L. Ford, The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, IX, 1898, p. 277). In another matter also he was openly in disagreement with his party. In January 1809 he-offered a bill providing for a committee to inquire into the expediency of building up the United States navy. Such a plan was contrary to the principles of the Republican party, and the bill did not pass. On leaving Congress he was once more elected a member of the Massachusetts legislature; he was made speaker of the House of Representatives in January 18II, and again in May of the same year. After his elevation to the Supreme Court, though his interest in political affairs continued unabated, he made it a rule to take no active part in politics. The only recorded exception to this rule was his appearance at a town meeting in Salem, December 1819, where his animosity to slavery and the slave trade led him to speak strongly against the Missouri Compromise. It was this same feeling and subject which had inspired his sensational charge to the grand jury of the circuit court earlier in the year, for which he was taken to task by the newspapers of the day (Life and Letters, I, 336---48). The same hatred of slavery showed itself again some three years later (May term, 1822) in his opinion, much-discussed at the time, in the case of the alleged slave-runner La Jeune Eugenic (2 Mason, 409).

But even after he became a judge, Story was active in the field of public or semi-public usefulness. In August 1813, he delivered in Salem a eulogy at the burial of Captain James Lawrence who had been killed in the fight between the Chesapeake and the Shannon. He served as president of the Merchants' Bank of Salem from 1815 till 1835, and as vice-president of the Salem Savings Bank from 1818 till 1830. He was elected a member of the Board of Overseers of Harvard College in 1819, and in 1825 he became a fellow of the Corporation. In 1820 he drew up for the merchants of Salem a long memorial addressed to Congress askin g that certain restrictions on commerce be removed (published, 1820); in this same year he was elected a delegate from Salem to the convention called to revise the constitution of Massachusetts. During the next year he found time to prepare and deliver a scholarly address before the members of the Suffolk bar on the progress of jurisprudence. Among his Miscellaneous Writings are to be found two other addresses which in the case of any one other than Story would be considered matters of major importance: a remarkable legal argument made in 1825 before the Board of Overseers of Harvard College (against the claims of th e professors and tutors of the college that non e but resident instructors could be chosen for fellows of the corporation), and the annual oration before the society of Phi Beta Kappa at Harvard in 1826. In this same busy period he drew up the Crimes Act of 1825, usually attributed to Daniel Webster, who carried it through Congress; in 1816 he had drawn up his bill to extend the jurisdiction of the circuit courts (Life and Letters, I, 293). He was one of the organizers of the Essex Historical Society, and a member of the board of trustees of Mount Auburn Cemetery from 1831 until his death.

On November 18, 1811, shortly after he had passed his thirty-second birthday, Story was appointed an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. By his panegyrists much has been made of the fact that he was the youngest person ever to be appointed to this position. It should be remembered, however, that Madison had already tried to honor with the position three other men in succession, all of them at that time more prominent than Story-Levi Lincoln, formerly in Jefferson's cabinet, who declined; Alexander Wolcott of Connecticut, whom the Senate refused to confirm; and John Quincy Adams, then minister at St. Petersburg, who preferred to remain there. Madison then turned to Story, at the suggestion, it is said, of Ezekiel Bacon, a congressman from Massachusetts. Though the salary of $3,500 was only slightly more than half of his professional income, Story at once accepted the office, motivated, he said, by the honor, the permanence of the tenure, and especially by "the opportunity it will allow me to pursue, what of all things I admire, juridical studies" (Life and Letters, l, 201). At this time the judges of the Supreme Court exercised also a circuit court jurisdiction. Story's circuit took in Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island. The illness and infirmities of his predecessor, William Cushing, had led to a vast accumulation of cases on the docket. By an early decision (United States vs. Wonson, 1 Callison, 5) Story reversed the former practice of the circuit court of allowing appeals from the district court to the circuit court in jury cases at common law. By this ruling 130 cases were at once stricken from the docket. But the respite thus gained was of short duration. The War of 1812 gave the crippled shipping interests of Story's maritime circuit a chance to recoup their losses by turning to privateering. Soon his court was flooded with ca ses involving admiralty and prize law, subjects at that time but little understood, and depending on principles which were then neither well defined nor established. His decisions in these cases, the result of broad study on his part, first put the admiralty jurisdiction of the federal courts on a sound basis. What was perhaps the most famous of these cases, decided in 1815 (De Lovio vs. Boit, 2 Callison, 398), was long afterwards referred to by a justice of the Supreme Court in these words, "The learned and exhaustive opinion of Justice Story,  affirming the admiralty jurisdiction over policies of marine insurance has never been answered, and will always stand as a monument of his great erudition" (Insurance Company vs. Dunham, II Wallace, 35). In 1816 William Pinkney [q. v.], who was considering the request of the government to go as minister to Russia, offered Story his law practice, in Baltimore. Though this was estimated to be worth $20,000 a year, and though Congress had just refused to raise the salaries of the federal judges, Story, still far from the affluence which he later enjoyed, declined Pinkney's offer.

Many of the opinions written by Story as a justice of the Supreme Court impress us, even today, by their remarkable breadth of learning; some of them are elaborate to a degree: in some there is a marked tendency to range over the whole field in any way involved, and widely beyond the mere facts and law necessary for a judgment in the particular case. This tendency, natural to him, and unquestionably of great advantage in the writing of the commentaries, can hardly be said to enhance his reputation as a judge. Yet not a few of his opinions had important legal and constitutional results; many of them that no longer attract attention were of the most vital interest in their day. Among the latter class was (1815) his famous dissenting opinion in the case of the Nereide (9 Cranch, 388, 436), in which he, disagreeing with Marshall and the majority of the court, argued against the ruling that a neutral might lawfully put his goods on board a belligerent ship for conveyance. Unknown to the court until shortly thereafter, Lord Stowell had just decided a British case of similar nature on the basis of the very rule for which Story had contended. At about this same time Story was assigned the writing of the opinion in Green vs. Liter (8 Cranch, 229), presumably because no one of his colleagues had the necessary knowledge of the now almost obsolete old real actions adequately to discuss the principles of the writ of right on which the case was based. It has been called the "most prominent and elaborate opinion delivered by him at this time" (Life and Letters, I, 260), but it shows no great depth of historical legal learning, especially of the period when the writ of right was the supreme action in English law. One of the most important opinions in his whole career was delivered in 1816 in the case of Martin vs. Hunter's Lessee (1 Wheaton, 304), which decided that the appellate jurisdiction of the Supreme Court could rightfully be exercised over the state courts, "an opinion which has ever since been the keystone of the whole arch of Federal judicial power" (Charles Warren, The Supreme Court in United States History, 1922, volume I, 449). Another opinion, extremely important in contemporaneous (1822) international politics, was that in the case of the Santissima Trinidad (7 Wheaton, 283); this held that a prize captured by a ship which had been guilty of a violation of American neutrality, and brought into a United States port, should be given back to the original owner. The constantly increasing extent of admiralty jurisdiction claimed by the federal courts, in the development of which claim Story had played a major part, had aroused a feeling of hostility among some of the inland states, which saw, or thought they saw, some phases of their common law jurisdiction menaced in inland waters. This feeling was allayed (1825) by Story's opinion in the case of the Thomas Jefferson (10 Wheaton, 428), which held that the admiralty jurisdiction of the federal courts did not extend beyond waters affected by the ebb and flow of the tide. A case which moved the country mightily at the time, 1841, was that of the United States vs. Schooner Amistad (15 Peters, 518). A cargo of negroes on the Amistad, a slave-runner, had gotten control of the ship and murdered the officers; on being brought into port by a vessel of the United States navy they were claimed as slaves by certain Spaniards; the question before the court was whether or not the negroes were entitled to their freedom. Story's decision, for the court, held that they should be freed and sent back to Africa. Story's opinion in another case famous in its time (1844) because of its religious ramifications, Vidal vs. Philadelphia (2 Howard, 127), was so far approved by the court as a whole that he could later write to Kent that "not a single sentence was altered by my brothers, as I originally drew it" (Life and Letters, II, 469). It held valid the will of Stephen Girard who had bequeathed to Philadelphia several millions of dollars to found a college for poor white children, but on the condition that no ecclesiastic of any kind, or on any pretence or for any purpose, should ever be allowed to enter the institution. That opinion of Story which is today best known and most often read is doubtless his learned and powerful dissenting opinion in Charles River Bridge vs. Warren Bridge (11 Peters, 420,583). It was one of three dissenting opinions, all on questions of constitutional law, which he wrote during the 1837 term. The opinion of the court as a whole seemed to Story to destroy the sanctity of contracts and to be immoral. His own opinion won the approval of many, if not most, of the best lawyers in the country; Webster called it his "ablest and best written opinion" (Life and Letters, II, 269).

It has been said that in the Supreme Court Story was dominated by John Marshall. In refutation of this statement one of the latest of Story's biographers has prepared the following succinct set of facts: Story wrote opinions in 286 cases in the Supreme Court; of these 269 are reported as the opinion of the court or of a majority; three were concurring opinions and fourteen dissenting opinions; he wrote four dissenting opinions on questions of constitutional law, one being in the lifetime of Marshall; in the only case (Ogden vs. Saunders) in which Marshall was in a minority upon a question of constitutional law, Story and Duval concurred with him in the question upon which he wrote the opinion; Story wrote the opinion of the majority of the court in five cases in which Marshall dissented; in four of the cases in which he dissented in Marshall's life, the latter wrote the opinion of the majority (W. D. Lewis, ed., Great American Lawyers, III, 1907, p. 150). Marshall died in 1835. Story was generally regarded as the logical successor to his position, and Marshall before his death is said to have favored that choice (Life and Letters, II, 210). Soon after Marshall's death, Story himself had protested as only a m an alive to a probability would be likely to protest, that he had n ever for a moment imagined that he would be thought of, that he was "equally beyond hope or anxiety" (Ibid., II, 201). Today we can see that there was no likelihood of his receiving the appointment. He was out of sympathy with Jackson, personally and politically. The President, on his part, could say no good word for what he called " the school of Story and Kent"; he had already referred to Story as "the most dangerous man in America" (Ibid., II, 117). Within the year Roger B. Taney was appointed to fill Marshall's place.

In 1828 the Royall Professorship of Law at Harvard, then vacant, had been offered to Story. He declined it on the ground that he feared that an increase of duties at his age might seriously interfere with his health. But in the very next year Nathan Dane, after talking the matter over with Story, established a new professorship of law, with the understanding, and on the explicit condition, that the first occupant of the chair should be Story. He was elected to the position in June of that year, accepted it, and in September moved permanently from Salem to Cambridge. For the rest of his 'life the Law School was one of his chief interests. In a very real sense he may be regarded as its founder; along with his colleague J. H. Ashmun, who had accepted the Royall Professor s hip, and together with Tapping Reeve and James Gould [qq.v.] of the Litchfield Law School, he was one of the pioneers in law-school, as contrasted with office, instruction for those who are startin g a legal education. His opening class at th e law school numbered eighteen students; before he died his reputation and personality had brought the annual enrollment to almost 150. Through his efforts the permanent funds of the school were increased and the library was built up and expanded. His ability as a teach er seems to have been no less marked than his skill as an organizer, and this in spite of the fact that his own knowledge of the law had been acquired without benefit of teacher. But by far the most important fact in connection with Story's association with the Law School lies in another field. In 'establishing his professorship Dane h ad stipulated that a number of formal lectures in certain named branches of the law should be prepared, delivered, and revised for publication by the profess or on his foundation. This did not fit into Story's scheme of teaching, for he wrote out no formal lectures, but taught by a method of informal discussion. So in place of publishing a series of lectures, he devised the plan which resulted in his well known Commentaries.

The continuing importance and reputation of these has almost obscured the fact that they were by no means Story's only legal treatises. Much writing of the same general nature had already come from his pen. As early as 1805 he had published, with valuable notes, A Selection of Pleadings in Civil Actions. At about the same time he undertook the task of making a digest of American law similar to, and supplementary to, Comyns' Digest. Though the project was finally abandoned, three large volumes in manuscript gave evidence of his endeavor. In 1809 he brought out a new edition of Chitty's A Practical Treatise on Bills of Exchange and Promissory Notes, and in the next year one of Charles Abbott's A Treatise on the Law Relative to Merchant Ships and Seamen, with annotations and references to American decisions. This work he reedited in 1829. He was the editor of an annotated edition of Lawes's A Practical Treatise on Pleading in Assumpsit (1811). He was the writer of many of the elaborate notes in Wheaton's Reports (Life and Letters, I, 282-83). In 1828 he published in three volumes Public and General Statutes Passed by the Congress of the United States, 1789-1827.

The Commentaries themselves followed one another in quick order. Bailments appeared in 1832; On the Constitution, in three volumes, in 1833; The Conflict of Laws in 1834; Equity Jurisprudence, in two volumes, in 1836; Equity Pleading in 1838; Agency in 1839; Partnership in 1841; Bills of Exchange in 1843; Promissory Notes in 1845. That one man, with few precedents to depend upon, should have written these voluminous works on exact, technical legal subjects, within the space of a little more than twelve years, seems incredible-and even more incredible when it is considered that during the same period he performed in full his work as a law teacher and as a judge, the latter requiring attendance on the court at Washington and circuit- court duty as well. Add to all this the fact that within the same interval he published The Constitutional Class Book (1834), prepared and delivered a long discourse on Marshall (before the Suffolk bar, 1835); drafted the Bankruptcy Act of 1841, contributed nearly a score of articles on legal subjects to the Encyclopedia Americana (Life and Letters, II, 26-27), and we have an example of industry in legal scholarship that has yet to be equaled. The success of the Commentaries was widespread and immediate. Some of them (Bailments, Equity Jurisprudence) went into third editions even during the short space of his remaining years. The financial returns from his books are said to have reached the then lofty figure of $10,000 per annum. Through his decisions, and his correspondence with some of the leading British jurists, Story was well known in England before his Commentaries appeared; with the translation of some of his works, notably On the Constitution and The Conflict of Laws, into French and German, he now acquired a truly international reputation. But, unlike more modern representatives of his type, he never went abroad, and never received any honorary degrees from foreign universities. At home he had already been honored with several.

Story's predominant personal characteristic was probably his unusual power of conversation. His son says that the father, a chronic dyspeptic at thirty-two, was practically unable to take physical exercise, apparently because of lack of time and interest, and that "his real exercise was in talking'' (Life and Letters, II, 106). Poetry played a not inconsiderable part in his life. He read it habitually and wrote verse more or less throughout his life. The motto of the Salem Register was written by him and gives a good idea of his general style :

"Here shall the Press the People's right maintain,
Unawed by influence and unbribed by gain;
Here Patriot Truth her glorious precepts draw,
Pledged to Religion, Liberty, and Law."

Before 1804 he had the temerity to publish a long and youthful effusion, The Power of Solitude (1802 ?), written at a time when "his leisure moments were employed in writing love songs, full of rapturous exaggerations or sentimental laments" (Life and Letters, I, 100). Later on he repented of this act and bought up all the copies of the book that he could find. But there still remain a few copies to attest the wisdom of his efforts to destroy them. He was fond of music, drawing, and painting. His favorite novelist was Jane Austen. As a result, he tells us, of observing the intellectual attainments of the girls in the mixed classes which as a boy he attended at Marblehead Academy, he was an active champion for the higher education of women. Like many of the other leading men of eastern Massachusetts at that time he was a Unitarian. The picture of him given us by his son (Life and Letters, II, 552) is that of a man five feet eight inches tall, with a well-knit figure; active, restless, and nervous in his movements; with thick auburn hair in his youth, but bald in his later years save for a thick mass of silvery hair on the back of his head; his blue eyes were lively and his mouth was large and expressive.

Story died on September 10, 1845. He had been married first to Mary Lynde Oliver on December 9, 1804. She died in June of the next year. On August 27, 1808, he married Sarah Waldo Wetmore, daughter of Judge William Wetmore. Of the seven children of this marriage only two survived him. One of these, Louisa, married George T. Curtis [q.v.]; the other was William Wetmore Story [q.v.], the sculptor.

[W. W. Story, ed., Life and Letters of Joseph Story (2 volumes, 1851), is indispensable. Tinged with hero worship and pride of family, it is nevertheless reliable. Next in importance are The Miscellaneous Writings of Joseph Story (1852). Prefaced by a remarkable autobiographical letter written by Story in 1831, this book contains many of his addresses, and a number of book reviews of such substance as to be entitled to rank as essays. The best recent account of Story is that by William Schofield, in W. D. Lewis, ed., Great American Lawyers, III (1907). It is especially good for a discussion of the meaning and importance of some of Story's judicial opinions. On this matter the Life and Letters, and Charles Warren, The Supreme Court in U.S. History (3 volumes, 1922), should also be consulted. For Story's connection with the Harvard Law School see, in addition to the Life and Letters, Charles Warren, History of the Harvard Law School (1908), volumes I, II. Two funeral orations by men who were intimately acquainted with Story have been published: Simon Greenleaf, A Discourse Commemorative of the Life and Character of the Hon. Joseph Story (1845); Charles Sumner, The Scholar, the Jurist, the Artist, the Philanthropist (1846). See also The Centennial History of the Harvard Law School, I8I7-I9I7 (1918); Perley Derby and F. A. Gardner, compilers, Elisha Story of Boston and Some of His Descendants (1915); and obituary in Boston Daily Advertiser, September 12, 1845. Story's decisions in the Supreme Court will be found in Cranch's Reports, Wheaton's Reports, Peters' Reports, and Howard's Reports; his decisions upon his circuit are reported by Gallison, Mason. Charles Sumner, and W. W. Story, 13 volumes in all. The last editions of the Commentaries are as follows: Bailments (9th, 1878; On the Constitution (5th, 1 89 I); Conflict of Laws (8th, 1883); Equity Jurisprudence (14th, 1918); Equity Pleading (10th, 1892); Agency (9th, 1882); Partnership (7th, 1881); Bills of Exchange (4th, 1860); Promissory Notes (7th, 1878).]

G. E.W.


STOW, Baron, 1801-1869, Boston, Massachusetts, clergyman, abolitionist, Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society.  Stow was a Vice President of the American Anti-Slavery Society, 1834-1836. 

(Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume V., p. 713; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 9, Pt. 2, p. 114). 

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 9, Pt. 2, pp. 114-115:

STOW, BARON (June 16, 1801-December 27, 1869), Baptist minister, was named in honor of Baron Steuben, but the middle name was early dropped from use. The first of five children of Peter Stow, a native of Grafton, Massachusetts, and Deborah (Nettleton) Stow of Killingworth, Connecticut, he was born at Croydon, New Hampshire. About 1809 the family moved to a farm in the adjacent town, Newport, where the boy attended district school, read avidly, and was marked as a student of promise. When he was sixteen, the death of his father threatened to hold him to the farm, but his interest lay elsewhere. He united with the Baptist church at Newport, being baptized December 31, 1818, and immediately turned toward the ministry. After preparation in the academy at Newport, in September 1822 he was admitted to Columbian College, Washington, D. C. Here he made contacts with teachers and fellow students which became important for his later career. Although his health was not robust, he completed his course in a little over three years, being appointed valedictorian at his graduation, December 1825.

He had already devoted considerable time to editorial work on the Columbian, Star, the weekly journal of the Triennial Convention, and from January 28, 1826, until the summer of 1827 he was the editor of that periodical. An unfortunate episode of this editorial experience was his publication of insinuations against Luther Rice [q.v.]. Rice's counter-blast in a local Washington newspaper, the Daily National Journal, November 9, 1826, led to immediate action by the First Baptist Church (manuscript records, November 10, 1826), but the matter was cleared up commendably by a statement of regret in an agreement which both men signed.

On September 7, 1826, Stow had married Elizabeth L. Skinner of Windsor, Vermont. In the summer of 1827 he went to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where he was ordained on October 24. Here he developed the methods of religious work which characterized his entire ministry. His preaching was distinctly evangelistic, with very direct appeal to the individual. He was constant in pastoral visitation even when increasingly tasks for the larger religious community were placed upon him. With John Newton Brown [q.v.] he had an indeterminable part in the production of the New Hampshire confession of faith. The most distinguished period of his career was his pastorate of the Second or Baldwin Place Church in Boston, where he succeeded his college roommate, Dr. James D. Knowles. Installed there in November 1832, he entered upon a pastoral and preaching ministry of marked power. Changes in the northern part of the city, where the church was located, and dissatisfaction with results, felt more by Stow himself than by his parishioners, led to his resignation in May 1848. In October of that year, he began an almost equally significant pastorate at the Rowe Street Baptist Church which continued until early in 1867.

Of an especially sensitive temperament, he was frequently physically incapacitated; trips to Europe in 1840-41 and in 1859 brought physical recuperation and enrichment of his mental powers. He refused many calls to other pastorates, to secretarial positions, and to the presidencies of at least three colleges. He was actively associated with the foreign missions enterprise and was one of the leaders in its reorganization by the Northern Baptists in 1845. Although of irenic disposition-well illustrated in his Christian Brotherhood (1859), a forceful plea for Christian union-he possessed strong feelings which occasionally dominated him and led to some trying experiences. He wrote prolifically for the religious press, including two brief works on missionary history prepared especially for the Sunday School library and a devotional book, Daily Manna for Christians (1843), which was much read. With Samuel F. Smith [q.v.] he edited The Psalmist (1843), which was for several decades the hymnal most widely used by American Baptists.

[J.C. Stockbridge, A Model Pastor: A Memoir of the Life and Correspondence of Reverend Baron Stow D.D. (1871); memorial discourses in R.H. Neale, The Pastor and Preacher (1870); The Bapt. Encyclopedia (1883);  records of the First Baptist Church, Washington, D. C.; Boston Transcript, December 28, 1869.]

W. H. A.


STOWE, Calvin Ellis, 1802-1866, clergyman, husband of Harriet Beecher Stowe.  In 1853, 1856, and 1859, he visited Europe with his wife, whose Uncle Tom's Cabin, published in 1852, occasioned the enthusiastic reception which was accorded them, especially in England.

(Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume V, p. 713; Rodriguez, 2007, pp. 196, 467). 

STOWE, CALVIN ELLIS (April 26, 1802- August 22, 1886), educator, was born in Natick, Massachusetts, the son of Samuel and Hepzibah (Biglow) Stow. He added the final "e" to the family name after his graduation from college. He was a descendant of John Stowe who settled in Roxbury, Massachusetts, and took the freeman's oath in 1634. When he was six years old, his father, the jovial village baker, died, leaving his widow in poverty. At twelve, the boy was apprenticed to a paper maker. He prepared for college at Gorham Academy, Gorham, Maine, and entered the class of 1824 at Bowdoin College. Franklin Pierce [q.v.] was a classmate and William Pitt Fessenden [q.v.] was in the class above them. Graduating with valedictory honors, Stowe remained for a year as librarian and instructor. In 1825 he entered Andover Theological Seminary. During his senior year he made a translation from the German of Johann Jahn which was subsequently published as Jahn's History of the Hebrew Commonwealth (Andover 1828, London 1829); the following year he was editor of the Boston Recorder. In 1829 he revised and edited with notes Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews, a translation by G. Gregory from the Latin of Robert Lowth.

In 1831 he became professor of Greek in Dartmouth College. The following year he married Eliza, daughter of Reverend Bennet Tyler [q.v.] of Portland, Maine, and in 1833 was called to the chair of Biblical literature in Lane Theological Seminary, Cincinnati, Ohio. His wife died in 1834, and on January 6, 1836, he married Harriet Elizabeth (see Harriet Elizabeth Beecher Stowe), daughter of Lyman Beecher [q.v.]  president of the Seminary. While in Cincinnati Stowe was actively interested in the improvement of the common schools, regarding such improvement as the great need of the West. The College of Teachers in Cincinnati was founded in 1833 largely through his influence. He published in 1835 Introduction to the Criticism and Interpretation of the Bible. In 1836 the state of Ohio appointed him commissioner to investigate the public school systems of Europe, especially of Prussia. For this congenial task he was given every facility in England and on the Continent. Returning in 1837, he published his famous Report on Elementary Instruction in Europe, a copy of which the legislature put into every school district of the state. It was reprinted by the legislatures of Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and other states, in Common Schools and Teachers' Seminaries (1839), and in E. W. Knight, Reports on European Education by John Griscom, Victor Cousin, Calvin E. Stowe (1930).

In 1850 Stowe accepted a call to the chair of natural and revealed religion at Bowdoin. Two years later he went to Andover Theological Seminary as professor of sacred literature. In 1853, 1856, and 1859, he visited Europe with his wife, whose Uncle Tom's Cabin, published in 1852, occasioned the enthusiastic reception which was accorded them, especially in England. Failing health caused him to resign the Andover professorship in 1864, and Hartford, Connecticut, became the family home. In 1866 the Stowes began spending their winters at Mandarin, Fla., on the St. John's River, where they took oversight of the religious welfare of the neighborhood. In 1867 he published Origin and History of the Books of the Bible. He was at home in many languages, ancient and modern. A man of large frame and wearing a patriarchal beard, he was a child in financial and practical matters. He was a born story-teller and his tales of the characters he knew in his boyhood furnished much of the local coloring for his wife's Old Town Folks. Early in their married life, he urged his wife to enter upon a literary career, and his enthusiasm was her constant encouragement. He always carried with him pocket editions of the Greek New Testament and Dante's Divina Commedia; they were under his pillow throughout his last illness.

[New England Historical and Genealogical Reg., Apr. 1856; Vital Records of Natick (1910); Gen. Catalog of Bowdoin College (1912); Nehemiah Cleaveland, History of Bowdoin College (1882), ed. by A. S. Packard; Congregationalist, August 26, September 2, 1886; C. E. Stowe, Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe (1889); C. M. Rourke, Trumpets of Jubilee (1927); Boston Transcript, August 23, 1886. ]

V E.D.E.


STOWE, Harriet Beecher, 1811-1896, author, reformer, wrote influential, bestselling anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, published in 1852. 

(Adams, 1989; Crozier, 1969; Gerson, 1965; Rodriguez, 2007, pp. 466-468; Wagenknecht, 1965; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume V, pp. 713-715; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 9, Pt. 2, p. 115; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Volume 20, p. 906; C. E. Stowe, Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Compiled from Her Journals and Letters (1889); A. A. Fields, Life and Letters of Harriet Beecher Stowe (1897); and C. E. and L.B. Stowe, Harriet Beecher Stowe, the Story of Her Life (19II). Joseph Sabin and others, Bibliotheca Americana, volume XXIV (1933- 34); J. F. Rhodes, History of the U.S. from the Compromise of 1850, volume I (1893),  

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 9, Pt. 2, pp. 115-120:

STOWE, HARRIET ELIZABETH BEECHER (June 14, 1811-July 1, 1896), author and humanitarian, was born in the town of Litchfield, Connecticut. Her father, Lyman Beecher [q.v.], was the pastor of the Congregational Church and a stern Calvinist. A vigorous, enthusiastic man, he was accustomed to work off his surplus energies by shoveling sand from one pile to another in the cellar of his house. He was fond of music and played the violin. An upright piano, which he had brought from New Haven, was borne into the house with as much reverence, said his daughter, as if it had been "the ark of the covenant."

Roxana Foote, the minister's first wife and the mother of eight children, died when her daughter Harriet was only four. She had been a mill girl of the type made famous by Lucy Larcom and her friends. She had read Samuel Richardson's History of Sir Charles Grandison in her girlhood days and a copy of it lay on the parlor table of the Beecher home. Shy and diffident, she could never lead the services in the weekly women's prayer meetings. "She never spoke in company or before strangers without blushing," said Harriet (Fields, Life and Letters, post, p. 13). Her wish was that all of her sons should become ministers-a wish that was fulfilled with one exception by Harriet's six brothers.

The future author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, although brought up in New England, numbered among her childhood friends members of the negro race. Candace, her mother's washerwoman, and Dinah, the servant at Aunt Harriet Foote's were destined to appear again and again among the author's favorite characters. The motherly colored woman, Candace, who was so devoted to the memory of her dead mistress, left a strong impression on the mind of little Harriet. The children turned to her for comfort in their sorrow and bereavement. They stood somewhat in awe of their new stepmother, Harriet Porter, who soon came from Portland, Maine, and seemed to them extremely fine and elegant.

Harriet's education, like that of most Puritan children, was two-thirds religious. At the age of eleven she wrote a composition on the subject: "Can the Immortality of the Soul be Proved by the Light of Nature?," and chose to defend the negative. When her paper was read aloud at the school exhibition, her father praised it without knowing it was hers. "It was the proudest moment of my life," she said in after years. A contrast to her father's orthodox theology was furnished by her uncle, Samuel Foote, a seafaring man and a frequent visitor at the Beecher home, Uncle Sam, as he was called, had been to the ends of the earth and was a romantic figure in the eyes of his niece. He sometimes insisted that Turks were as good as Christians, and Catholics as good as Protestants, and he could argue so skilfully that the minister was hard put to it to defend his own view. The poetry of Byron, which Harriet read before her teens, likewise made a strong impression on her. Her father talked a great deal about the English poet, whom he admired while he also condemned him. On Byron's death, he preached a sermon which Harriet Jong remembered.

Like her elder sister Catherine, Harriet was unable to accept her father's Deity unquestioningly. A great deal of doubt and conflict accompanied her conversion at the age of fourteen. Years of morbid introspection darkened her girlhood and left their traces on her maturity. All her writings testify to a life-long preoccupation with the problem of religion. Even in her fiction the conflict between faith and doubt forms an ever-present theme. Somewhat late in life she attended the Episcopal Church with her daughters who were Episcopalians. The loss of a beloved son caused her to become interested in spiritualism, and she corresponded on the subject with Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

Up to the age of thirteen, when she was sent to Hartford to attend a school for girls, her most intimate companion had been her brother Henry Ward [q.v.]. "Harriet and Henry come next," wrote the second Mrs. Beecher, describing her step-children, "and they are always hand in hand." Hand in hand, they went to the dame school where they learned to read. The sympathy thus founded lasted all their lives. Hand in hand they waged their great battle against slavery. When Beecher was in England speaking for the cause, he awoke one morning so hoarse that he could scarcely use his voice. "I will speak to my sister three thousand miles away," he said, and called out, "Harriet." With this his voice returned and he made that day one of his most famous speeches (Annie A. Fields, Memories of a Hostess, 1922, p. 268). His sister adored him. "He is myself," she wrote to George Eliot during the Beecher trial. "I know you are the kind of woman to understand me when I say that I felt a blow at him more than at myself" (C. E. and L. B. Stowe, post, p. 291).

In October 1832 the family moved to Cincinnati, where Dr. Beecher had been called to be the head of the Lane Theological Seminary and where his daughter Catherine [q.v.] established the Western Female Institute. Her uncle Samuel Foote also joined the colony. Harriet liked her new environment and wrote cheerful letters home. Employed as a teacher in her sister's school, she still found time to try her hand at divers kinds of writing. For the first time she began to unfold the more playful and imaginative side of her nature. She wrote sketches for the Western Monthly Magazine and received a prize of fifty dollars for a story--"Prize Tale, a New England Sketch"-which appeared in the issue of April 1834, and was separately printed under that title. It was subsequently reprinted in The Mayflower (1843) as "Uncle Tim" and again reprinted in The May flower (1855) with the name of the leading character and the title changed to "Uncle Lot." Her marriage, January 6, 1836, to Calvin Ellis Stowe [q.v.], professor of Biblical literature in her father's seminary, put. an end for the time being to her career of authorship. Except for a few tales and sketches, published in The Mayflower, she produced almost nothing until 1852. These, however, convinced her husband that she must be "a literary woman" and he urged her strongly to write, and also to drop the E from her signature.

Altogether, she spent eighteen years in Cincinnati. It was a period of much poverty and hardship but rich in observation and experience which she afterwards turned to good account in her tales and novels. There six of her seven children were born and one of them was buried. She lived through the cholera epidemic of 1849, to which her baby was a sacrifice. She visited a Kentucky plantation and saw the life of the slaves in their cabins. To the impressions thus gained were added, however, those of her brother who had seen New Orleans and ascended the Red River. Her father's seminary was a hotbed of anti-slavery sentiment; one of the most extreme advocates of Abolitionism, Theodore D. Weld [q.v.], was an early student there. Mrs. Stowe and her brother Henry, then editor of a newspaper, became deeply interested in the cause. Her letters confirm her son's statement that she "was anti-slavery in her sympathies, but she was not a declared abolitionist, C. E. Stowe, post, p. 87). When the press of J. G. Birney [q.v.] was destroyed by a mob she was more concerned about the violation of private rights and mob violence than defense of abolitionism. It was not until her return to New England in 1850 during the discussion over the Fugitive Slave Law, that her anti-slavery feeling became intense.

In 1850 Stowe was called to a professorship in Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine. On her way thither Mrs. Stowe stopped in Brooklyn £or a visit with her brother who had become the popular pastor of Plymouth Church. "Henry's people," she wrote her husband, "are more than ever in love with him, and have raised his salary to $3,300 and given him a beautiful horse and carriage worth $600." To the Stowes, who were extremely poor at this time, more so in fact than they were ever to be again, this seemed like unexampled prosperity. By all accounts the family arrived in Brunswick at the nadir of their fortunes. A visit to her brother, Edward Beecher [q.v.], fanned her sentiments on slavery to white heat. Edward thundered from his Boston pulpit against the Fugitive Slave Law and his wife wrote to Mrs. Stowe, who had just borne her seventh child, "Now, Hattie, if I could just use the pen as you can, I would write something that would make this whole nation feel what an accursed thing slavery is." To this Mrs. Stowe replied, "As long as the baby sleeps with me nights, I can't do much at anything; but I will do it at last. I will write that thing if I live" (Fields, Life and Letter, post, p. 130). When she told her brother Henry that she had begun her story, he answered heartily, "That's right, Hattie ! Finish it, and I will scatter it thicker than the leaves of Vallombrosa" (C. E. and L. B. Stowe, post, p. 288).

The outcome of her endeavor was Uncle Tom's Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly, first published as a serial (June 5, 1851-April 1, 1852) in the National Era, an anti-slavery paper of Washington, D. C. She gives two accounts of the origin of this book (see Fields, Life and Letters, post, pp. 130 ff., 147, 164-65). In one instance, she states that she wrote the pages which describe the death of Uncle Tom in Brunswick and read them to her little boys. In the other, she says that she wrote the passage in Andover and read it to her husband. Both accounts agree in stating that th e first part of the book ever committed to writing was the death of Uncle Tom. She wrote this at one sitting and when her supply of writing paper gave out, finished it on some scraps of brown paper taken from a grocer's parcel. She then composed the earlier chapters and sent them to the National Era, which paid her $300 for the serial. The Boston publisher who had contracted for the book rights protested that she was making the story too long, but she replied that she did not write the book; it wrote itself. It was fin ally brought out by John P. Jewett [q.v.] on March 20, 1852, in two volumes, with a woodcut of a negro cabin as the frontispiece.

Although no one had expected the work to be popular or successful, ten thousand copies were sold in less than a week. Within a year the sales amounted to three-hundred thousand. It was generally supposed that Mrs. Stowe had made a fortune out of it, but her returns were far below what they should have been. She received a royalty of ten per cent. on the American sales but not a penny for the dramatic rights, although Uncle Tom's Cabin was one of the most popular plays ever produced on the American stage. The English circulation, which reached a million and a half, was a triumph of pirated editions. The young man who worked at Putnam's and sent the book to England received five pounds for his trouble (The Times Literary Supplement, London, July 8, 1926, p. 468).

The hero of Uncle Tom's Cabin is a colored man, a slave, who passed from the ownership of a Kentucky planter to that of a New Orleans gentleman and thence to that of a cotton planter on the Red River. In Colonel Shelby, St. Clare, and Simon Legree, the author depicted three types of Southern slave-owners. Uncle Tom's first master was drawn from a benevolent planter of the same name, whom Mrs. Stowe had known in Kentucky. St. Clare was an idealized portrait and still lives in fiction as the type of a gracious, high-bred gentleman. Simon Legree, who caused the death of Uncle Tom, was likewise destined to survive as a historic villain. The patience and piety of the humble hero and the spiritual beauty of the child Eva were drawn from cherished ideals peculiar to the author. In the death of little Eva and the martyrdom of Uncle Tom, the author reached the high notes of her pathos; but the struggle of George and Eliza for; freedom and their final achievement of it through flight to Canada was probably the most popular feature of the book. In the description of George Harris as a freeman, the style rises to eloquence.

Mrs. Stowe had not foreseen the storm of wrath which Uncle Tom was to evoke. In the South her name was hated. A cousin living in Georgia told her that she did not dare to receive letters from her with her name on the outside of the envelope, and the Southern Literary Messenger declared the book a "criminal prostitution of the high functions of the imagination," saying that the author had "placed herself without the pale of kindly treatment at the hands of Southern criticism" (December 1852, pp. 721- 31; October 1852, pp. 630-38). While Mrs. Stowe had feared the abolitionists would find the work too mild, they proved at last to be its only partisans. From all sides she was attacked and the accuracy of her facts questioned. Her reply to this criticism was A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1853). Much of the material was collected after Uncle Tom's Cabin was written, though the defense was announced as containing the facts on which the story was based (Rourke, post, p. 100). From the popular point of view, this book was a complete failure. As a defense, it was hardly more successful. It failed to disprove the charge that there were errors of fact in her earlier work, and its indictment of slavery was far less powerful. Its polemics added nothing to the pathos of her novel.

From the first there was some discussion of the literary value of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Her critics thought she owed a great deal to her subject. As a romance and a picture of American manners, however, it undoubtedly deserves high rank. Mrs. Stowe apparently had a fondness for the South. While she hated it for being on the side of slavery, she portrayed its atmosphere with fire and sympathy. She was the first American writer to take the negro seriously and to conceive a novel with a black man as the hero. Although it was written with a moral purpose, the author forgot the purpose sometimes in the joy of telling her tale. The influence of Sir Walter Scott, whom she had read in girlhood, and of Charles Dickens, her great contemporary, is clearly visible.

Mrs. Stowe had her first inkling of the fame she had acquired when she went to buy a seat for Jenny Lind's concert and found there were no more. Otto Goldschmidt, the singer's husband, hearing that the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin had been turned away, immediately sent tickets with the compliments of his wife. The English abolitionists paid her every honor. When she went to visit England soon after the appearance of the book, people thronged the docks to have a glimpse of her. Lord Shaftesbury composed an address of welcome on behalf of the women of England, a great demonstration was held at Stafford House in her honor, and the Duchess of Sutherland presented her with a gold bracelet in the form of a slave's shackle. One hundred thousand copies of her second antislavery novel, Dred, A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856), were sold in England in less than a month. She met Lord Palmerston, Charles Dickens, and other celebrities of the English world. A considerable sum was collected for her anti-slavery work in America. On the proceeds of her literary ventures, she made two subsequent visits to England and toured the Continent with her family. Among her friends were Lady Byron, George Eliot, and the Ruskins. Her friendship with Lady Byron led to Mrs. Stowe's spectacular contribution to the Byron controversy several years later, when she published in the Atlantic Monthly (September 1869) "The True Story of Lady Byron's Life." In this article she charged Lord Byron, on the alleged authority of Lady Byron, with having had a guilty love for his sister, Mrs. Leigh. For the second time, Mrs. Stowe became the focus of a public storm, and for the second time she appeared in print with a detailed argument in her own defense, renewing and elaborating in Lady Byron Vindicated (1870) the charge of incest against Byron and adding that a child had been born of the union. The feeling aroused against her in England was intense. Charles Dickens wrote to James T. Fields: "Wish Mrs. Stowe was in the pillory" (Annie A. Fields, Memories of a Hostess, p. 191). She had precipitated a bitter controversy which was to last for years. Even those who believed the story could not understand her action. She was accused of scandalmongering and a desire for notoriety (see American Mercury, April 1927). Mrs. Stowe could not be judged by ordinary standards, however. Her interest in the case was sincere and conscientious. The life of Byron had always had a strong fascination for her. Like her father, she admired his genius while she mourned his faults. Since Lyman Beecher had once preached a sermon on Byron's life and character, his daughter saw no harm in writing a book on the same subject. It was to her a public question, like that of slavery, and she handled it in the same indomitable spirit.

As a writer, Mrs. Stowe was exceedingly industrious. Already past forty when she published her first book, she continued to pour forth a steady stream of fiction. Throughout the high excitement that followed Uncle Tom, the distraction of her trips to Europe, the removals of her family from one home to the other, she kept up her literary industry. The Atlantic Monthly, the New York Independent, and the Christian Union, of which her brother Henry was the editor, contained regular contributions from her pen. For nearly thirty years, she wrote on the average almost a book a year. Following Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Dred, she turned to her New England background. In The Minister's Wooing (1859), The Pearl of Orr's Island (1862), and Oldtown Folks (1869), she pictured types and scenes familiar in her girlhood. For the last named, perhaps "the richest and raciest" of her novels, she drew largely on her husband's reminiscences, as she did also in writing Sam Lawson's Oldtown Fireside Stories (1872). In Poganuc People (1878) she described her early childhood. The originals of most of her characters were close at hand and can often be identified. Sometimes she did not even disguise the names. A comparatively recent critic declares that "the autobiographical material that fills her later work . . . is much more than autobiography; it is intimate history of New England . . . . As the historian of the human side of Calvinism she tempered dogma with affection." He adds, "She could bring her soul under discipline but not her art. . . . The creative instinct was strong in her but the critical was wholly lacking" (Parrington, post, II, 372, 375, 376). In addition to her numerous novels, she published with her sister Catherine Principles of Domestic Science (1870) and The New Housekeeper's Manual (1873); she also issued a volume entitled Religious Poems (1867), containing "Still, still with Thee, when purple morning breaketh," which became a popular hymn. An edition of her works in sixteen volumes, The writings of Harriet Beecher Stowe, appeared in 1896.

After the Civil War she bought a home in Florida, where she spent most of the years that remained to her. Her old age was not prosperous, for she was not a good business woman, and her husband was, if possible, more impractical than she. Her son and grandson tell us that she invested ten thousand dollars in a scheme for raising cotton on a Florida plantation and that all of this was lost. She had previously spent large sums on a house in Hartford which, when built, proved unsuitable for use. While writing Oldtown Folks, she was obliged to live on advances from her publishers, because her investments, amounting to thirty-four thousand dollars, were entirely unremunerative. The Christian Union, her brother's paper, cost her considerable sums. Even at the height of her prosperity, she was never free from money worries. The modest place at Mandarin where she spent her declining years was at last sold for a song.

The life-time of Mrs. Stowe almost spanned the nineteenth century. Born and bred to womanhood in Puritan New England, she spent her first maturity at a Western outpost. When her family went to Cincinnati in 1832 they traveled by stage-coach and steamboat, and hogs still ran about the dusty city streets. She lived to speed by railway through the Middle West and give readings from her stories on Lyceum platforms. On her wedding journey she had traveled through Ohio in a stage-coach. On her lecture trips she went over the same ground by express train. The World's Fair at Chicago found her, as she would have said, "still this side of spirit-land"; but that great blast of progress could no longer rouse her. She had the rare experience of waking up one morning and finding herself famous. Her brother Edward wrote to her and warned her against pride. It was not necessary. The daughter of Lyman Beecher could not be corrupted by success. She remained herself through all vicissitudes-earnest, whimsical, devoted. From her childhood, she was preoccupied and absent-minded, not hearing what was said to her and making funny blunders. This tendency increased with her advancing years. A full decade before her death, she lapsed into a dreamy state which lasted to the end. When they brought her a gold medal, she thought it was a toy.

[The standard biographies are C. E. Stowe, Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Compiled from Her Journals and Letters (1889); A. A. Fields, Life and Letters of Harriet Beecher Stowe (1897); and C. E. and L.B. Stowe, Harriet Beecher Stowe, the Story of Her Life (19II). Joseph Sabin and others, Bibliotheca Americana, volume XXIV (193 3- 34) lists her writings before 1860, including translations, and contemporary works on Uncle Tom's Cabin. J. F. Rhodes, History of the U.S. from the Compromise of 1850, volume I (1893), describes the reception of Uncle Tom's Cabin at home and abroad. See also A. A. Fields, Authors and Friends (1896); V. L. Parrington, "The Romantic Revolution in America, 1850-1860," Main Currents in American Thought, volume II (1927); C. M. Rourke, Trumpets of Jubilee (1927); L. B. Stowe, Saints, Sinners, and Beechers (1934); Boston Transcript, July 1, 1896.]

K. A.



Source: Dictionary of American Biography, Volumes I-X, Edited by Dumas Malone, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930.