Tess and Brock stay close to home while studying Harriet Beecher Stowe, the 19th-century author famous for writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Susanna Aston tells the harrowing story of how Stowe harbored fugitive slave John Andrew Jackson, and how one decision can change the course of history.
Tess and Brock stay close to home while studying Harriet Beecher Stowe, the 19th-century author famous for writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Susanna Aston tells the harrowing story of how Stowe harbored fugitive slave John Andrew Jackson, and how one decision can change the course of history.
Mentioned:
The house:
Tess Chakkalakal is the creator, executive producer and host of Dead Writers. Brock Clarke is our writer and co-host.
Lisa Bartfai is the managing producer and executive editor. Our music is composed by Cedric Wilson, who also mixes the show. Ella Jones is our web editorial intern, and Mark Hoffman created our logo. A special thanks to our reader Brian Purnell.
This episode was produced with the generous support of our sponsors Bath Savings and listeners like you.
TESS CHAKKALAKAL Literary houses are, like, the Disney Land of literature.
BROCK CLARKE I get the attraction of writers’ houses. It’s a thing you do when you’re extraordinarily bored. Is that thing you experience, though, when going to writers’ houses? Like, do you have the-the version—
TESS Do you know I-what my experience is, like “God, some of these writers were rich!”
BROCK This is Dead Writers, a show about great American authors and where they lived.
TESS I’m Tess Chakkalakal.
BROCK And I’m Brock Clarke.
TESS A decade ago, I became obsessed with saving Harriet Beecher Stowe’s house in Maine. And I did save it. And I’m still obsessed with literary houses—not just Stowe’s.
BROCK I wrote a novel called An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England, because I couldn’t figure out why anyone goes to writers’ homes, let alone tries to save them.
TESS You’d think I’d hate Brock.
BROCK But you’re my colleague. You can’t hate me.
TESS It’s true. That would be awkward.
BROCK So instead of hating each other, we made this show.
[CIVIL WAR ERA MUSIC]
TESS The American Civil War starts with a knock at the door at 63 Federal Street in 1850. That's at least if you agree with Abraham Lincoln. Not exactly what most history textbooks say, but that's what President Lincoln thought when he met the anti-slavery writer Harriet Beecher Stowe in Washington DC in 1862. And legend has it that he said, “So you are the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war.” The book he's referring to is Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe's bestselling, anti-slavery novel from 1852 about the life and death of a fictional slave she called Uncle Tom. It sold 300,000 copies in its first week on bookshelves. Everybody in the U.S. and Europe was reading this novel. It's never gone out of print and was adapted for the stage and screen a bazillion times. My favorite version is the one starring Avery Brooks, Samuel L. Jackson, and Phyllicia Rashad from 1987.
[AUDIO CLIP FROM THE 1987 FILM ADAPTATION OF UNCLE TOM’S CABIN]
TESS It's this commitment to his owners that made Uncle Tom a 19th century hero and traitor to modern readers. Even though few people have read Stowe’s novel today, most people think they know who Uncle Tom was. The character continues to evoke strong emotions
[AUDIO RECORDING OF EMMANUEL JONES] “In the black community, we have an expression when we talk about a person of color that goes back historically to the days of slavery and that person betraying his own community. That term that we used is called ‘Uncle Tom.’”
TESS That was Democratic Senator Emmanuel Jones from Georgia railing against Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in 2023. It's hard to imagine another novel being credited with having such a huge political impact. Maybe only the Bible and Mao's Little Red Book compare. As a professor of American literature, I think a lot about the books that changed American history. Over the years, I've also become fascinated with literary houses, or writers' homes, or whatever you want to refer to them as. The actual spaces where books like Uncle Tom's Cabin were written, the places where the magic happened. This interest has grown during my time at Bowdoin. A lot of the 19th century writers that I work on went to college here and at some point lived in Brunswick, Maine where I live today. My casual interest tipped over into obsession a few years back, starting with the Harriet Beecher Stowe house here in town. It's not the most famous of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s old houses. She didn't live here very long, but it's the house where she wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin. And that's huge for me, but not for everyone. Remember Brock from the start of the show? He has a different take on literary houses.
BROCK It's funny even to think that I know something about them. I know basically what I feel like I needed to know about them.
TESS And that was that they should all be burnt down.
BROCK Of course. My character thought so, or the people who were trying to frame my character thought so.
TESS Because you hate them, because of the way that they look in their arrangement?
BROCK Often, I can't quite tell what people are in them for. There's a kind of sense of— so for me, often—is the book not just enough? It's the only thing that matters. And so when people go—so do people go to writer's houses because they really love the book, and they want to see what's behind it? Or is going to the writer's house as a kind of substitute for the book? Is it kind of a weird, nerdy-book nerdiness? Or is it a, “Well, it's raining for the 10th day in Maine, so therefore I have to go do something, so I'm going to go to this thing, which makes me feel—”
TESS Artsy.
BROCK Virtuous. Yeah. Yeah. I'm being a dick about this. I realize it. But—
Tess No, I mean, I think it's a good question. I don't think I would've thought about writer's houses, or literary houses, or whatever they're called, if I hadn't gotten a job at Bowdoin College, and I happened to have written my dissertation on Uncle Tom's Cabin. And there was this house where she actually wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin, and it kind of changed everything. I was going to say it changed my life, but it didn't really change my life.
BROCK But you could hear me, you see me smirking about that. What did it change?
TESS Well, it kind of changed the way I thought about literature and teaching. I wasn't just teaching from the book anymore. I actually thought, well, what if we kind of take students to the house, and we get students to imagine Stowe writing in the house, and then we have to imagine Stowe herself as a writer. And, you know, when I was in graduate school, nobody ever thought about the author, because thinking about the author was about all these big, dumb jargon words, intentionality, and the writer was dead and post-structuralism and blah, blah, blah. So this was the opposite of all that. This was, we are going to come to the novel through the place where she lived and then kind of experience the novel that way. We're still reading the novel, but we're reading it at the house and the place where she wrote it.
BROCK But it's sort of antithetical to what I go to for literature in literature, which is a sense of mystery and fun and not—but then again, it's also the thing you do sometimes when you're extraordinarily bored. So that way I get the attraction of writers’ houses: it’s the thing you do when you're extraordinarily bored.
TESS With Brock's words ringing in my head that I go over to the Harriet Beecher Stowe House on Federal Street to figure out what it is that is so special about this house. It's a large house on top of a hill white with crooked light, green shutters. Not that different from the other grand, Victorian houses that line Federal Street and Brunswick, Maine. I'm actually there pretty much every day. It's where I go to write, but, today, I'm meeting Kathy Belcher for tea at the Stowe house. Cathi might be the only one who has spent as much time there obsessing about Stowe as I have the last few years. And her way to the house started in a rather obscure way.
CATHI BELCHER Well, it was, I think it was divine intervention, actually, because I was at a point in my life where I was having—it was big challenges and changes for me, and I was at a point where I had to reinvent myself. I was getting divorced, and I happened to see an ad, or it was actually an article that popped up on Facebook about—they were looking for a guide at the Stowe House.
TESS What article? You mean—
CATHI BELCHER It was the article that had popped up on Facebook that originally told me. So when I was interviewed the first time, I got the same question: how did you hear about it? And I talked about the article, and everybody looked at each other and said, we don't know anything about that article, and I could never find it again either. So I said, well, I think I'm supposed to be here.
TESS This mysterious Facebook post led Cathi to become the house's first guide and overseer in 2016 when Bowdoin College, that currently owns the house, opened it to the public.
TESS Is chamomile okay for you?
CATHI BELCHER That sounds good.
TESS There's also Wild Sweet Orange.
KATHY BELCHER Chamomile’s fine.
TESS Yeah. Okay.
CATHI BELCHER I used to sit in this room and just feel her presence in so many ways as I was getting to know so much about her. And I like to think that if I had lived across the street when she was here, that we would've been really good friends. She and I had so much in common it turned out
TESS Cathi is telling me all this as we're having tea in Stowe's kitchen. It's something she used to do on a monthly basis for the public. Tea with Harriet was an event where anyone who wanted could sit in Harriet Beecher Stowe's parlor and listen to Cathi talk about an aspect of the author's life. But this morning it's just Cathi and me in the house.
CATHI BELCHER Yeah, we were both artists and writers. We both had lots of children, and we homeschooled them. We both lost an infant son. So I think we could have related in that way. And, you know, I always like to say that we both married very academic husbands who were really difficult to live with.
TESS So, wow, that's a lot of stuff you have in common.
TESS No one knew what to expect when the house opened to the public.
CATHI BELCHER But that first summer, I mean, it surprised all of us. First of all, it was the beginning of tourist season in Maine, so we got a lot of people for the summer. But we got a tremendous amount of local people who had known—either they grew up here or they had known this house through its many incarnations. It was a private residence; it was a gift shop; it was a hotel or an inn, I guess; and a restaurant. Then it sat vacant for many years and started deteriorating. So local people had followed the whole history and the progress and the controversy of whether the house would be saved, whether it would be torn down. And so they came in in droves that first summer.
TESS Cathi didn't just do her Tea with Harriet sessions at the Stowe House, she also did guided tours around the house and hosted book clubs, like the Social Justice Book Club, and put on a bunch of different kinds of events.
TESS So that was, like—made the house a kind of gathering place.
CATHI BELCHER It did, and I love to tell stories and read letters.
TESS Her letters.
CATHI BELCHER Her letters and her children's letters.
TESS And then what would your guests do with that information?
CATHI BELCHER They would just keep coming back because they wanted more. You know, it made it real. Harriet was only here for two years. They were two very important years, but, somehow, the stories and learning about her as an actual person that you could relate to just made it become real to people.
TESS The house has been closed to the public since 2019 when Covid hit, and it hasn't reopened, but people still keep showing up. I see them from my office window. Every week there are at least ten tourists looking in through the windows trying to get a peek at Stowe’s house. There are signs outside for them to read, but they want to come in. It has a certain draw. I am in special collections on the third floor of Bowdoin’s library where precious old papers and books are stored.
MARIEKE VAN DER STEENHOVEN You're going to have to wash your hands.
TESS Yes! Obviously!
TESS Strict protocol in handling them is in place. Librarian Marieke Van Der Steenhoven takes me into a mungy room on the third floor. On the table, there’s a huge oversized vanilla file,
MARIEKE VAN DER STEENHOVEN Clean!
TESS What are we looking at here?
MARIEKE VAN DER STEENHOVEN What are we looking at right here? Well, we have a couple of issues of The National Era.
TESS Which is the newspaper where Stowe—
MARIEKE VAN DER STEENHOVEN First published Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
TESS Wow. It's a very big newspaper.
MARIEKE VAN DER STEENHOVEN It is a big newspaper. One of the things that I really love about my job is the physicality of everything, right? So I've pulled this out, I have to pull this out because we're talking about Uncle Tom's Cabin in the collections. And so, of course, we pulled The National Era, and you can see in column form here.
TESS And this is the first column that Uncle Tom's Cabin appears on. This is volume five, number 25. I mean, it's actually not that much bigger than the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, right?
MARIEKE VAN DER STEENHOVEN Yeah. I can get my,—oh, no. I didn't bring my Sunday Times. But yeah, no, it is not—
TESS Just thinner paper.
MARIEKE VAN DER STEENHOVEN It's thinner paper. What you're seeing is also the evidence of age, which is—
TESS The print is so small. You had really good eyes back in the 19th century!
MARIEKE VAN DER STEENHOVEN Or the use of magnifying glasses—
TESS Magnifying glasses
MARIEKE VAN DER STEENHOVEN Things like that.
TESS Part of Marieke's job is to make sure the books, magazines, and other objects that the library has gets into the hands, the clean hands, of students and professors and other people who are interested, and because Bowdoin is just a few blocks from Harriet's house, and because her husband, Calvin Stowe, was a professor at the college, Bowdoin has a growing collection of things that relate to the Stowes.
TESS So what kind of joy does building a collection like this give you, Marieke? Why collecting these old newspapers papers is important for anything. Why not just recycle them?
MARIEKE VAN DER STEENHOVEN Right? Because isn't everything digitized and online?
TESS Exactly. I mean, we've heard that a bazillion times.
MARIEKE VAN DER STEENHOVEN Yeah…Oh, this is such a big, fantastic question. I mean, I think that materiality matters. I think that there is something that happens when you touch this paper, and exactly what happened when we opened this folder, right? You start to notice, “Wow, this is big. Well, actually, maybe compared to what I know it's not that big, but it seems big. What's big about it? Oh, it's the little letters.” All of those observations that you're sort of just spit firing out are important, and that comes from the touch and the physicality.
TESS So it seems like Marieke and I are pretty much on the same page. The book and the house go together. But I wonder what Brock would think.
BROCK I feel like for me, the thing that makes me skeptical about writers' houses is it seems to try to solve something about the book, which is full of mystery, by going to a place that's tangible. I like it best when things mess up that project, that sense. So for instance, the Stowe house in Cincinnati, where I lived for a decade, it's across the street from this sprawling Marathon station. And the house itself, at least when I was there, was often—the grounds were weed choked. I really liked that a whole lot, because whatever sanctity is involved with a house—the gas station where people buying their Funyuns and their Fritos, and they're filling up, and there's the whiff of gasoline everywhere—made the whole thing a lot more interesting.
TESS I think that makes sense. And I think that that's actually now explaining to me why the Stowe house in Maine is different from all those other Stowe houses. Because she had a lot of houses, weirdly, you know. She was, like, stocking them up.
BROCK Yeah, considering she was itinerant. Yeah, and being dragged around—
TESS Florida, Cincinnati, Hartford. She had these houses, and the house in Maine is the only one she didn't own that's been preserved, as much as it's been preserved. And it's where she wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin, which is what made her famous and rich so she could buy all those other houses. And the really big deal is that she harbored a fugitive slave there. So there are these illicit details. The big one is that she harbored a fugitive slave, and that was against the law. And Susanna Ashton tells the story of how she did it, and that makes that house interesting.
BROCK So doesn't it just make it interesting, whether there's the house or no house? Isn't it interesting just to read about these things? So my question is—?
TESS You don’t need any proof?
BROCK How is there proof in the house? There's not a fugitive slave in the house. You don't see—I mean, so what's the actual proof? It feels like it's a kind of weird facsimile, but we already have the book.
TESS And we have the letters.
BROCK We have the letters. We have endless biographies of her, right? I actually say “endless”; I've not read any of them. But I'm just imagining, right?
TESS Yeah, a bunch of biographies.
BROCK So we have all those things. So we know about the underground, the fact that she harbored slaves, escaping slaves. The poem just helps us visualize that. But I think, don't we already kind of visualize it? Aren't we already compelled? Because we read about it both in fictional form and then nonfictional form?
TESS But the way I see it, there wouldn't be any fiction or nonfiction to read if it wasn't for the house, because it was in the house that she had an encounter that would change her life forever. Some might say the course of American history.
TESS It was late one evening in December of 1850, and Harriet heard a knock on the door. She was alone with her kids. Her husband Calvin was still in Ohio working. She opened the door for the first time, saw John Andrew Jackson, fugitive slave from South Carolina on his way to Freedom.
BRIAN PURNELL [Reading from John Andrew Jackson’s biography] I may mention that during my flight from Salem to Canada, I met with a very sincere friend and helper who gave me a refuge during the night and set me on my way. Her name was Mrs. Beecher Stowe. She took me in and fed me and gave me some clothes and $5. She also inspected my back, which is covered with scars, which I shall carry with me to the grave.”
TESS The Fugitive Slave Act became law a year earlier, and it changed everything. Harriet was outraged. When the Fugitive Slave Act passed. All fugitives who had made it North were in more danger because white folks were bound by law to turn them in. The fugitive slave law brought slavery home to people who thought they didn't have anything to do with slavery. There was no longer any state in the U.S. where slavery wasn't present. There was no such thing as a free state anymore. Remember when I was talking to Brock about Susanna Ashton? She's a professor in the English department at Clemson University and has just written a book about John Andrew Jackson's life and escape. So I call Susanna to find out how she tracked John Andrew Jackson's movements around Brunswick that December at the house of a local minister called the Reverend Upham, a few blocks up the road to Harriet's door.
SUSANA ASHTON He knocks on the door and she opens the door and she lets him in.
TESS And so, back then, I guess they didn't have iPhones, so nobody warned her in advance that he was coming, so she just opened the door.
SUSANA ASHTON Yeah, it literally would have come out of the blue. She just opened the door, and he said, you know, I’ve come from the Uphams. They’ve sent me here. And she doesn’t hesitate. She let’s him in!
TESS Had she done something like that before? I mean, I just wonder why the Uphams thought that this woman living by herself in this big old house with four kids would be up for this!
SUSANA ASHTON Stowe was very close friends with the Upham family. The Upham family had a bunch of adopted children. Harriet Beecher Stowe had a bunch of kids. They were very beloved neighbors and friends very quickly. And Stowe was having tea, or was over at the Upham house, and was having some sort of chatty, little argument with the Reverend Upham, only a week or two prior to this incident, and they had been discussing the Fugitive Slave Act. And Reverend Upham, who was very liberal in many of his social and political concerns, nonetheless, did feel that the Fugitive Slave Act was the law of the land. And as much as he despaired of it, and didn’t like it, and thought it was an ill-conceived and, perhaps, immoral idea, nonetheless, was ready to uphold it. So, she argued and argued, and they went in circles about it. But that’s where it stood, and she left. And sure enough, a couple of days later, or a week or two later—the time frame is a little unclear—Jackson knocks at the Uphams’ door.
TESS Here was Harriet's chance to act on her anti-slavery principles.
SUSANA ASHTON Jackson brought something home to her, literally and figuratively, in an absolutely powerful, life changing way is what I think is really crucial here. And the physicality of it too and that house, and the role of that house in this story, because, although Stowe had certainly been anti-slavery and had been concerned about the Fugitive Slave Act and had published short stories and works in a low-key way in various magazines about anti-slavery themes. Her family had been involved in the movement. Absolutely she had been committed to the cause, but she’d never taken such an active step before. There’s something very different about the abstractions of arguing at the tea table in a safe home of a friend to then opening the door when your husband is away and you only have young children in the house, and bringing someone into your life in that way and breaking the law. That’s a very different commitment.
TESS She broke the law and put herself in danger when she brought John Andrew Jackson into safety that night. We know this happened because Harriet wrote about it in a letter, and John recounted it in his memoir. It was probably the only time Harriet helped a freedom seeker on their way North, but it left a big impact on her.
TESS Back at the house, Cathi shows me the space where Stowe hid John Andrew Jackson.
CATHI BELCHER And this room right over here is especially important because it was a little room off the kitchen. It's not any bigger than a walk-in closet really. It was a storage space house. And she put him up in there. And during the time I was here, I had it set up with blankets and quilts and coverlets from the era on the floor as if Johnny Andrew Jackson was going to spend the night. And I actually spent a night in the room, sleeping on the floor just to feel what that was like and imagine him being in there.
TESS And it is truly an act of the imagination since nothing of John Andrew Jackson's or Harriet's is left in the house. But the house seems to be a good place for imagining, imagining and creating. It's something that I hear from several people who have spent time there. As a professor, I sometimes take my students to Harriet's house and I want to know what they thought about it. So I decide to call up one of my former students, Ayaz, who now lives in New York, to ask what they remember about it.
AYAZ MURATOGLU I think my strongest memory is a series of compounded memories of in the middle of main winter when it's like 11 degrees outside, 7:00 PM on a Tuesday, and I need to go to the house for writing hours. And I've just finished dinner, and I still have work left to do, and I kind of don't want to go. And I bundle up really intensely and walk through the wind and then arrive at the house.
TESS That's awesome.
AYAZ MURATOGLU And everyone's there. And it's warm.
TESS And it's warm and cozy
AYAZ MURATOGLU And cozy. And we have lights that we, these weird little lamps that we bought at Goodwill with our club budget, and we all just sit and write for an hour and then share.
TESS In sophomore year, Ayaz started the Stowe Writers Collective with some friends. They would take the solitary activity of writing and do it together next to each other in this particular space.
AYAZ MURATOGLU I think there was something that was exciting about how Stowe had spent such little time in Maine or something. There was something really magical about thinking of her as a mother without a writing desk, with all these kids around her all the time, with her husband working, and somehow she found the time to write. And that house was in Brunswick where all that happened, and it was preserved in some kind of way. I think that was particularly exciting for me. The same kind of feeling you get in when you're looking through old letters of your grandparents or in an archive, the excitement that you get when you're touching the thing or you're in the physical presence of the space where something happened, I think that was what it was for me.
TESS Do you remember anything that you wrote when you were in the house?
[AYAZ MURATOGLU LAUGHS]
AYAZ MURATOGLU I wrote a lot about poetry. I wrote—
TESS Did you keep any of that that you could read to us or that you have handy? No, probably not.
AYAZ MURATOGLU Yeah. Oh, I think I wrote this poem. It's called “Sunday Evening”. [READING] “The kitchen table has lost its footing again. Over dinner, the plates laced with olive oil and honey. The chiseled oak bears its scars bravely, not unlike glacial striations carved like fingernail scratches into smooth rocks. Rectangles are the perfect shape for what they do. The boy shuffles…”
TESS During the time that members of the Stowe Writers Collective spent in the house, the story of Uncle Tom's cabin fell into the background. The house became more about writing between classes surrounded by friends and strangers. So a literary house doesn't have to be a place where we go to worship a long, dead capital “W” Writer. This is the house where John Andrew Jackson found refuge for a night stop on his journey to freedom. Meeting him here inspired Stowe to write Uncle Tom's cabin. No wonder Lincoln thought that it was her book, and not his decision to blow up Fort Sumter, that started the Civil War, which doesn't seem too far off from Brock's arsonist approach to literary houses. Brock's protagonist, after all, never meant to burn down writers' houses. Just like Stowe didn't mean to start a big war. Lo and behold, they did.
TESS You have listened to Dead Writers with me, Tess Chakkalakal.
BROCK And me, Brock Clarke. Our managing producer and editor is Lisa Bartfai.
TESS Cedric Wilson has created our theme music and mixed the show.
BROCK Ella Jones is our web editorial intern. Thanks for listening.
TESS And a very special thanks to our generous sponsors, Bath Savings, and listeners like you.
BROCK You can find more information about the writers, their books, and their houses at our website on MainePublic.org. Thanks for listening.