This book tells the story of Harriet Beecher Stowe (author of Uncle Tom's Cabin), her brother Charles, and a small group of Yankee reformers who lived in Reconstruction Florida.

The Reverend Lyman Beecher was once called “the father of more brains than any other man in America.” Among his eleven living children were a celebrity novelist, a college president, the most well-known preacher in America, a suffragist, a radical abolitionist, a pioneer in women’s education, and the founder of home economics. Rejecting many of their father’s Puritan beliefs, the deeply religious Beechers nevertheless embraced his quest to exert moral influence. They disagreed over issues of slavery, women’s rights, and religion and found themselves at the center of race riots, denominational splits, college protests, a civil war, and one of the most public sex scandals in American history. They were nonetheless unified in their “Beecherism”—a phrase used to describe their sense of self-importance in reforming the nation. Obbie Tyler Todd’s masterful work is the first biography of the Beechers in more than forty years and the first chronological portrait of one of the most influential families in nineteenth-century America.

The author of Hawthorne in Concord “brings [Stowe] to life in all her glory, in a book at once so dramatic and so subtle that it rivals the best fiction” (Debby Applegate, author of The Most Famous Man in America). Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin forced an ambivalent North to confront the atrocities of slavery, yet it was just one of many accomplishments of the Beechers, the most eminent American family of the nineteenth century. Historian Philip McFarland follows the Beecher clan to the boomtown of Cincinnati, where Harriet’s glimpses of slavery across the Kentucky border moved her to pen Uncle Tom’s Cabin. We meet Harriet’s loves: her father Lyman, her husband Calvin, and her brother Henry, the most famous preacher of his time. As McFarland leads us through Harriet’s ever-changing world, he traces the arc of her literary career from her hard-scrabble beginnings to her ascendancy as the most renowned author of her day. Through the portrait of a defining American family, Loves of Harriet Beecher Stowe opens into an unforgettable rendering of mid-nineteenth century America in the midst of unprecedented social and demographic explosions. To this day, Uncle Tom’s Cabin reverberates as a crucial document in Western culture. “Often dismissed even by her admirers as a pious faculty wife who just happened to write the book of the century, Harriet Beecher Stowe emerges in Philip McFarland’s biography in all her complexity and genius.” —Charles Calhoun, author of Longfellow: A Rediscovered Life and The Gilded Age

The family history of the Beechers during the 18th and 19th centuries.