When Litchfield native Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote "Uncle Tom's Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly," she could not have imagined she was writing a book that for generations would rack up sales second only to the Holy Bible.

Is it rude, then, to point out that by the standards of her day, Stowe pulled her punches? One of the most influential books of its time — of all time — ends with former slaves leaving the country, a political solution supported in part by Southern slave-owners worried about the presence of too many formerly enslaved people walking around free.

One of the book's characters, mixed-race George Harris, says:


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Both Stowe's book and the colonization of freed slaves was cussed and discussed in North and South. For many abolitionists of the mid-1800s, Stowe wrote a last chapter that remains "problematic," says a Connecticut author who wrote a Pulitzer-winning biography of Stowe in 1994. Rather than end the book with the enfranchisement of the African Americans whose lives she'd so painstakingly chronicled, Stowe sent them away.

"My sense is that Stowe was not particularly attentive to the abolitionist camps until the great success of [the book], at which point she tried rapidly to get up to speed," said Joan Hedrick, author of "Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life," and Trinity College's Charles A. Dana professor of history.

During antebellum days, abolitionists may have agreed that slavery was wrong, but there was no universal agreement as to what should happen once slavery was abolished. Some abolitionists proposed that people who'd been enslaved be accorded all the rights given to (white male) Americans. Others believed they should be sent to Africa. The language was "back" to Africa, but the vast majority of former Africans came from families that had been held against their will in the U.S. for generations. Culturally, they had as much to do with Africa as did the Caucasians who proposed sending them there.

The reasoning behind colonization was complicated. The American Colonization Society, organized in 1817, brought together two disparate groups: abolitionists who believed former slaves could not possibly assimilate into (white) American culture, and slave owners who feared revolt. The idea of colonization appealed to the more tepid-minded abolitionists.

Hartford's colonization chapter organized in October 1819, at the State Capitol. The founding president, John T. Peters, gave an inaugural address in which he said that establishing a home on the west coast of Africa would "restore, by their own consent, the free people of Colour in America, to the bosoms of their own kindred and people and to the luxuriant soil of their own country; to give them freedom, and the lights of science and the Gospel; to dispel the gloom of paganism, and the grossest idolatry, from the benighted regions of Africa, by unfurling the banner of the cross."

He wrote more, but you get the idea. The Christianized freed slaves could go to Africa and preach the gospel to their pagan brothers and sisters, and white America — which had financially benefited from a slave economy — would be free from any responsibility for cleaning up the mess.

But for many white abolitionists and most African Americans in Connecticut, colonization was just another form of segregation. Protesting against colonization efforts in Middletown, the African American minister, Amos Beman, wrote in 1831:


Nevertheless, Connecticut money was funneled to the national colonization office, which allowed the society to purchase land near where the future slaves had been kidnapped in the first place, the west coast of Africa. They named the land Liberia, and in 1822 began what they intended to be a vast resettlement program for freed slaves; it ended up being a fairly puny effort.

By sending former slaves to other shores, Stowe may have been doing no more than exhibiting family loyalty. Colonization was popular among poor, hard-working ministers like Stowe's father, the Rev. Lyman Beecher. As colonization societies were gaining in popularity in the 1830s, Beecher was watching his Cincinnati school implode over debates about slavery — known as the Lane Debates — when some of Beecher's more radical students decried both slavery and colonization. Some of those students had moved in with African American families who lived near the school, and they'd been radicalized by intimate exposure to the lives of their hosts.

Beecher's failure to convince his students to follow his lead wounded him deeply. Stowe would have paid attention to her father's disappointment. Her younger half-sister, Isabella Beecher Hooker, certainly did, and later wrote how painful it was to watch her father's tears over what he considered his students' betrayal.

As presses began to run 24 hours a day to keep up with the demand for her book, Stowe quickly sought to catch up on the abolition movement. She educated herself in part, said Hedrick, by corresponding with fiery abolitionist editor William Lloyd Garrison, who in an 1832 anti-colonization pamphlet wrote, "The popularity of the Society is not attributable to its merits, but exclusively to its congeniality with those unchristian prejudices which have so long been cherished against a sable complexion."

Hindsight is a beautiful thing. Stowe wasn't writing a political tract. She was writing an emotional response to slavery. She intended to ignite and excite the general public, and she accomplished that to a stunning degree. Plus, her brand of colonization — if one can call it that — might have intended something quite a bit more radical: former slaves making that decision for themselves.

In the chapter, "A Freeman's Defense," George Harris makes what Hedrick calls "a Patrick Henry speech" in which he says that because he cannot be free in the United States, he has no country.

"Thus fleeing to Canada, as he is doing, is a repatriation in the name of freedom," Hedrick said. "The ending of the book when the former slaves go to Liberia can be seen as a similar embrace of another nation in a radical defiance of the slave law of the U.S. There is a big difference between white people deciding to send the slaves back to Africa to solve the 'race problem' that would exist post slavery (the colonization stance), and slaves themselves choosing emancipation and repatriation."

In the end, Stowe, who was something less than a "whole-souled abolitionist," accomplished what no radical editor, no fiery speeches could do: She forced slavery into the genteel parlors and inattentive churches and once there — for or against — the topic could no longer be denied.

Susan Campbell's biography, "Tempest-Tossed: The Spirit of Isabella Beecher Hooker," will be published in April by Wesleyan University Press.