A day like today: Harriet Beecher Stowe
Once, Abraham Lincoln, in the midst of the conflict between South slavers and anti-slavers of the North, told a frail-looking woman, "So you are the little woman who caused this war!?"
That woman was Harriet Beecher Stowe, housewife, Puritan religious, who had started the denunciation of the barbarities of slavery. To achieve this, he had written the story of several black families, with a central character called Uncle Tom.
In these stories all the horrors of slavery were clamorously denounced; but also in those pages, a Puritan religious feeling flooded the environment and tied the slaves. Slaves were subjected and humiliated, never haughty, never determined to fight for their rights and encouraged their hopes, always, in the reading of religious texts.
This attitude of the slaves before the white despots, made that years later, the groups of struggle for the black power in the United States repudiated the novel, since they appeared as incapable to love themselves and fight the oppression. Even the expression 'Uncle Tom' became an insult to refer to those who did not have the guts to fight racism and injustice.
But beyond the ideological limitations of this work, in his time was the trigger for the north to become aware of the conditions of slaves in the south and the struggle for human dignity began.
Harriet Beecher Stowe, the Puritan housewife who launched herself into writing and who, in her own way, waged a war and accelerated Black freedom, was dying on a day like today, July 1, 1896 and although her name is almost anonymous, despite his spirit of resignation, his voice of denunciation continues to resonate at all times.
