Harriet Beecher Stowe outlived four of her seven children

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.