On June 14, 1811, Harriet Elisabeth Beecher was born in Litchfield, Connecticut. Five years later, Roxana Foote Beecher, her mother, passed away. Her father, Presbyterian clergyman Lyman Beecher, had 13 children in total over three marriages, 11 of whom lived to adulthood. His seven surviving sons all went on to become ministers. Henry Ward Beecher continued his father's abolitionist work, and according to lore, he delivered weapons in containers labeled "Bibles" to anti-slavery pioneers in Kansas and Nebraska. The women of the Beecher family were likewise inspired to occupy powerful positions and fight for justice. Eldest child Catharine Beecher co-founded the Hartford Female Seminary, while youngest daughter Isabella Beecher Hooker was a prominent suffragist.

The Lane Debates on Slavery also had an impact on Harriet. The series of arguments between supporters of colonization and abolition held over the course of 18 days in February 1834, won handily by Theodore Weld and other abolitionists, was the largest event to ever occur at Lane. Most of the arguments were attended by Elisabeth. Any further discussion of the subject was forbidden by her father and the trustees because they feared greater violence from anti-abolitionist whites. The upshot was a major flight of the Lane students, who transferred to the new Oberlin Collegiate Institute coupled with a sympathetic trustee and a professor when its trustees decided, by a contentious vote, to welcome students regardless of "race" and to permit debates of any issue.

Harriet Beecher's father relocated to Cincinnati in 1832 to take over as president of Lane Theological Seminary. The Ohio city allegedly introduced Harriet Beecher Stowe to Black freemen and former slaves, according to Joan D. Hedrick's biography Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life. She also became a member of the Semi-Colon Club, a literary organization. When Calvin Ellis Stowe left Lane to work at Bowdoin College, she finally moved to Brunswick, Maine, where he was a professor. By that time, Stowe had written two books: Primary Geography for Children and New England Sketches, a collection of short stories. She also contributed "sketches," or little descriptive stories intended to demonstrate a political point, to journals that supported temperance and abolition.

The editor of the anti-slavery newspaper The National Era, Gamaliel Bailey, offered her $100 as a thank-you for the favorable reception to her parable The Freeman's Dream: A Parable and to urge her to keep sending articles to the paper. The campaign against slavery moved north once the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was passed, obliging authorities in free states to apprehend fugitive slaves. Additionally, it inspired Stowe to improve. In a letter to Bailey, Beecher Stowe stated, "I am currently employed upon a novel which will be a considerably longer one than any I have yet written, including a series of sketches which illustrate the lights and shadows of the 'patriarchal institution' [of slavery], written either from observation, incidents which have occurred in the sphere of my personal knowledge, or in the knowledge of my friends.” For material, she scoured the written accounts relayed by escaped enslaved people.

Despite having written more than 30 books during her lifetime (1811–1896), Harriet Beecher Stowe's best-selling anti–slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin is what made her famous around the world and cemented her legacy. Stowe volunteered to write a piece that would "create a word picture of slavery" in 1851 to the editor of the abolitionist newspaper The National Era. Uncle Tom's Cabin ended up having more than 40 installments, when Stowe had only intended to write three or four.

The National Era paid Stowe $300 for 43 chapters, according to Henry Louis Gate Jr.'s preface to the annotated version of Uncle Tom's Cabin. The serial truly took off after Stowe agreed to work with John P. Jewett and Co. to print a two-volume bound book edition before the serial was finished. The book, which was published on March 20, 1852, sold 10,000 copies in the United States in its first week and 300,000 copies in its first year.

In the first year, 1.5 million books in the UK were quickly gone off the shelves. 10 cents from each sale went to Stowe. The London Times said that she had already accumulated $10,000 in royalties. “We believe [that this is] the largest sum of money ever received by any author, either American or European, from the sales of a single work in so short a period of time,” the Times wrote.

Although Stowe had condemned Lincoln for what she perceived to be his slow progress toward emancipation and readiness to seek a compromise in order to stop the secession of southern states, Stowe visited the president at the White House in 1862, at the start of the Civil War. Lincoln reportedly welcomed her by saying, "So this is the small woman who brought on this enormous Civil War," although several academics have discounted the statement as Stowe family lore.

Their different notebooks only provide general notes about their talk. While Stowe questioned him, Lincoln may have joked with her about his fondness of open fireplaces ("I always had one at home," he reportedly quipped). "Mr. Lincoln, I would like to know what you think about emancipation," she began. Harriet Beecher Stowe meets with President Lincoln in Washington, D.C., and later describes the visit as "funny." Stowe's 1852 book, Uncle Tom's Cabin, became the second best-selling book of the 19th century, behind only the Holy Bible, and it helped galvanize the abolitionist movement and provided a continuing moral impetus for the North during the Civil War.

Since 1688, fugitive slaves from the British North American colonies had been drawn to Spanish Florida. The Spanish liberated the slaves in Florida if they converted to Roman Catholicism; males of legal age had to serve in the military. Near St. Many moved to Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose, the first free black community in North America. The Stowe were able to buy a winter residence in Mandarin, Florida, in 1867 thanks to the income generated by Uncle Tom's Cabin and the end of the Civil War. For a well-known abolitionist to purchase 30 acres in a former slave state so soon after the war may have sounded odd—and dangerous. In spite of this, six years after the acquisition, she complained to a local media that "in all this time I have not had even an inclination from any native Floridian."

“The white population of Florida at the time was divided into different groups in terms of social origin,” says Foster. “The oldest group in Florida would have been the Menorcans, associated with the seafood industry and primarily St. Augustine. A different group would have been ‘cracker’ Florida. These are frontier and country people drifting in from Georgia primarily. This, of course, would be a main theme of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ famous novels. Lastly, there would be ‘planter’ Florida in the region east and west of Tallahassee. These were people replicating the Old South in terms of slavery.”

In the posh 19th century neighborhood of Nook Farm in what was then the most affluent town in eastern United States, Hartford, Connecticut, both Harriet Beecher Stowe and Mark Twain built their dream homes – literally next door to each other. The two houses have been restored and serve as magical museums of their literary times. Each house offers frequent tours, but on weekends it is possible to enjoy a 90-minute joint tour of the beautiful homes.

Beginning in 1864, the Stowe made a villa in Hartford, Connecticut's Nook Farm area their home. Mark Twain and other notable residents lived nearby. Few fences surrounded the houses in Nook Farm, and in nice weather, doors were left open. In his book, Twain spoke about Stowe's later years, when it seems likely that she suffered from dementia:

“Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe who was a near neighbor of ours in Hartford, with no fence between. In those days she made as much use of our grounds as of her own in pleasant weather. Her mind had decayed, and she was a pathetic figure. She wandered about all day long in the care of a muscular Irishwoman, assigned to her as a guardian.”

Harriet Beecher and her husband raised seven children while continuing a successful and prolific writing career, they taught them that a personal commitment was necessary for their spiritual salvation, but he also taught them to think for themselves and to ask questions. The Beecher children grew into adults who shared their father’s love of God, yet they came to describe God in more loving and forgiving terms. The pain of a mother loosing her child is something I related to a slave mother's child being taken away from slavery. This is what helped inspire me to write Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Like their father, though, the Beecher believed the best way of serving was action to make a better world but four of them tragically passed away while she was still alive. Henry, their son, perished in a swimming mishap in 1857. Their daughter Georgiana passed away from septicemia in 1890, and their son Frederick vanished while traveling to California in 1870. Samuel, the second-youngest son, passed away from cholera as an infant in 1849. Several of Stowe's writings were influenced by these losses.