Choose one of the 19th century historical figures of the American Research Paper

Choose one of the 19th century historical figures of the American Civil War - Research Paper Example Harriet Beecher Stowe stated clearly that she believed that the horrors that were experienced during the American Civil War were defined by a type of justice that was afflicted upon those who had owned slaves the same kind of terrible conditions that slaves had suffered under their master’s ownership. The condition of legalized slavery was intolerable to Stowe who wrote about her point of view on the subject in her book Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The work was used to ignite a passion for the abolitionist movement, a source for relating to the inhumane treatment that was experienced by those who were subjected to the slavery of the South. Stowe came out of obscurity to write a story that could provide a framework for the slavery experience, a tale that expressed to the Caucasian public a point of view that had not been considered by many. Through the power of her beliefs about the wrong of slavery, Stowe participated in motivating the public into action against the terrible cond itions that had allowed one culture to put another into ownership and slavery. Stowe was born on June 11, 1811 and died on July 1 1896 having written her seminal work, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and published it after she turned 40 in the year 1851. She was born Harriet Elizabeth Beecher and was the daughter of a famous minister, Lyman Beecher with her sister being growing to be a famous educator, Catherine Beecher. She married Calvin Stowe in 1836 and bore seven children, one of which died at a very young age from cholera (Claire Parfait, The Publishing History of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 7-8). Stowe was originally a teacher, writing her first book which was a text book, Primary Geography for Children, in 1833. She became part of a writing group, Semi-Colon, in Cincinnati and used the forum to submit her writings in order to improve her skills. In 1834 her work began to appear in a Cincinnatti weekly paper called Chronicle. She also wrote for the Western Monthly and The Evangelist, a religious magazine out of New York. While she wrote because she loved the experience of writing, she made a small income that supplemented that of her husbands. When in 1837 her husband’s salary was cut due to a financial crisis, she began to work to increase her income through devoting herself to becoming a professional writer (Parfait, The Publishing History, 9).