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Lincoln, Stowe, and the “Little Woman/Great War” Story: the Making, and Breaking, of a Great American Anecdote

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Lincoln, Stowe, and the “Little Woman/Great War” Story: the Making, and Breaking, of a Great American Anecdote Lincoln, Stowe, and the “Little Woman/Great War” Story: The Making, and Breaking, of a Great American Anecdote DANIEL R. VOLLARO In her introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Harriet Beecher Stowe, Cindy Weinstein begins, as so many others have, with one of the most popular anecdotes in American literary history: “Harriet Beecher Stowe’s most famous introduction took place on or around Thanksgiving Day, 1862, when she was introduced to President Abra- ham Lincoln, who allegedly greeted her with these memorable words, ‘So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war!’”1 Weinstein’s evocation of Lincoln is not surprising; of all the biographical details currently in circulation about Stowe, this anecdote certainly ranks among the most well known, and one finds some ver- sion of Lincoln’s greeting employed in hundreds of articles, books, reviews, and Web summaries. Despite its popularity, however, the quotation is entirely apocryphal, emerging from within Stowe family tradition without any textual support or verification from the author herself. Most of Stowe’s biographers have included some version of the quote, almost always scrupulously attributing it to its apocryphal origins.2 Many twentieth-century literary scholars, critics, and histo- rians who reference the incident were not as careful as Weinstein to 1. The Cambridge Companion to Harriet Beecher Stowe, ed. Cindy Weinstein (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 1. 2. In her 1937 biography Harriet Beecher Stowe (New York: Appleton-Century), 273, Catherine Gilbertson attributed the quotation to “family legend.” Similarly, Forrest Wilson says it originated from a “family story” (Crusader in Crinoline: The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe (Philadelphia, Pa.: Lippincott, 1941), 484. Johanna Johnston’s account in Runaway to Heaven (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1963), 357, ushers the reader into Lincoln’s parlor along with Stowe and emotes: “the rest would be legend forever after, to Harriet and all her family.” After opening her preface to her Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), vii, with the quotation, Joan Hedrick writes that Lincoln “is said to have greeted” Stowe. Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, Vol. 30, No. 1, 2009 © 2009 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois JALA 30_1 text.indd 18 1/6/09 4:01:04 PM Daniel R. Vollaro 19 qualify the quotation with phrases like “allegedly said” or “is reported to have said.”3 The quote is a rarity in Lincoln biographies, however, and many of the Lincoln biographers and historians who have used it have been sloppy about noting its apocryphal origins. On the In- ternet, where historical summaries are often disconnected from their sources entirely, Lincoln’s alleged words are rapidly hardening into unqualified historical fact. How did an apocryphal story emerge as the main evidence for Stowe’s cultural legacy before the Civil War? That question is sel- dom asked by scholars, who treat the quotation more as a treasured Stowe family heirloom than a problem text, footnoting it and then moving on. But despite its popularity, Lincoln’s greeting drifts in the same strata of pseudo-historical flotsam that increasingly de- fines that which is considered “historical” in the digital age. The story persists not because of its historicity, but because it resonates with the dominant frequency of Lincoln-as-cultural-icon in American society and because it confirms American cultural expectations of nineteenth-century literature as generally sympathetic to the goals of abolitionism. The Lincoln-Stowe “relationship” in the twentieth century is a mutually beneficial negotiation between two cultural icons: the linkage to Stowe extends Lincoln’s influence further into the culture, into the realm of the literary; Stowe, by her association with Lincoln, is elevated to the pantheon of abolitionist writers that includes such writers as Frederick Douglass, Lydia Maria Child, and Henry David Thoreau. What are the origins of this apocryphal anecdote? If there was no his- torically significant meeting between these two abolitionist icons, why, despite its questionable origins, did this anecdote gain such purchase in the American imagination? The answer lies in the literary, histori- cal, and biographical discourse on both Stowe and Lincoln. Literary scholarship and Stowe biography have paved the widest path for this quote in American culture, so many of the sources I reference here 3. My survey of the last fifty years of journal articles on Stowe reveals many in- stances of unqualified attribution of the quotation to Lincoln. The following is a se- lected list of references that do not note the apocryphal nature of the quotation: Grace Seiler, “Harriet Beecher Stowe,” College English 11 (December 1949): 127–37; Joseph R. Roppolo, “Harriet Beecher Stowe and New Orleans: A Study in Hate,” New England Quarterly 30 (September 1957): 346–62; Thomas P. Riggio, “Uncle Tom Reconstructed: A Neglected Chapter in the History of a Book,” American Quarterly 28 (Spring 1976): 56–70; Theodore R. Hovet, “Modernization and the American Fall into Slavery in Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” New England Quarterly 54 (December 1981): 499–518; and James M. Cox, “Harriet Beecher Stowe: From Sectionalism to Regionalism,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 38 (March 1984): 444–66. JALA 30_1 text.indd 19 1/6/09 4:01:04 PM 20 Lincoln, Stowe, and the “Little Woman/Great War” Story come from this area of study. For reasons that should be obvious, Stowe scholars have been more consistently interested in the Lincoln-Stowe connection than Lincoln scholars. I Lincoln’s famous greeting was reportedly uttered to Stowe during a meeting on December 2, 1862.4 But the quotation did not begin to ap- pear in print until thirty-four years later, in 1896, the year Stowe died.5 That year, the Atlantic Monthly published a piece by Annie Fields, wife of the popular magazine’s publisher James Fields and a biographer of Stowe, who wrote, “It was left for others to speak of her interview with President Lincoln. Her daughter was told that when the President heard her name he seized her hand saying, ‘Is this the little woman who made the great war?’”6 Fields’s attribution of the quotation to its secondhand source is prudent, as the details of Stowe’s trip to Wash- ington have always been difficult to reconstruct, even when eyewit- nesses to the event were still living. Stowe wrote almost nothing about her visit with Lincoln, though she shared one possible reminiscence of their dialogue in an article she wrote for The Watchman and Reflector, recalling that Lincoln had told her, “Whichever way it ends, I have the impression that I sha’n’t last long after it’s over.”7 Otherwise, Stowe’s writing offers no insights into what transpired between them. Lincoln made no known record of the encounter either, which left Stowe’s relatives to reconstruct the historic meeting in their writings, and they left a deeply conflicted portrait of the event. Three of Stowe’s relatives claimed to have been present at the meeting with Lincoln, but only 4. Barbara Anne White, The Beecher Sisters (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003), 92. 5. The quotation was apparently not yet widely circulated in the mid-1890s. Other notable sketches and reminiscences published in 1896, such as Richard Burton’s bio- graphical piece “The Author of ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin,’” Century 52 (September 1896): 698–715, and Charles Dudley Warner’s “The Story of Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” Atlantic Monthly 78 (September 1896): 311–22, make no mention of it. The anecdote is also ab- sent from the first of two biographies published by Charles Stowe—The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1889. 6. Annie Fields, Atlantic Monthly: A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics 78 (August 1896): 148. This passage would appear verbatim in the biography she published a year later, making Fields the first Stowe biographer to print Lincoln’s greeting. The Life and Letters of Harriet Beecher Stowe (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1897), 269. 7. Quoted in Abraham Lincoln: A Press Portrait, ed. Herbert Mitgang (Athens: Uni- versity of Georgia Press, 1989), 378. The article contains no other details of the 1862 meeting. JALA 30_1 text.indd 20 1/6/09 4:01:04 PM Daniel R. Vollaro 21 one—Harriet’s son Charles—recorded some version of the president’s famous words to Stowe, and his status as an eyewitness is question- able. The quotation also now exists in several versions, which raises questions about its original form. Stowe and several members of her family apparently did travel to the capital in late November 1862, but the impetus for the visit remains unclear. Annie Fields reports that Stowe sent her a “hurried note” announcing that she was going to “see the heads of departments myself, and to satisfy myself that I may refer to the Emancipation Proclamation as a reality and a substance not to fizzle out at the little end of the horn.”8 In the first of two biographies he published about his mother, son Charles recalled that Harriet had been “invited to visit Washington, to be present at a great thanksgiving dinner provided for the thousands of fugitive slaves”9; in a revised version published twenty-two years later, he added a political justification to the trip that seems to echo Fields’s explanation of her reasons.10 Stowe biographer Joan Hedrick suggests that Mrs. Lincoln had invited Stowe to tea at the White House.11 The letter that Harriet wrote to her husband Calvin while in Washington is entirely devoted to her reunion with their son Fred, an army lieutenant stationed near the capital. It mentions no details of the meeting with Lincoln.
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