The seminary, a new institution, and Mr. Beecher, its first president, were located together at Walnut Hills, about two miles out of the city; and while the father was occupied in his pioneer work the two daughters started a school for girls, with the double promise of Catherine's Hartford experience and the type of people among whom they were settling. But Harriet was not to be a schoolmistress for long. In 1833 she was the winner of a fifty-dollar prize in a short-story competition conducted by the _Western Monthly_, and in 1836 she married the Reverend Calvin E. Stowe, her father's colleague in Lane Seminary. How she persisted to combine authorship and maternity in the next sixteen years is a marvel; none the less so because since the days of Anne Bradstreet an occasional woman has succeeded. In 1842 her husband wrote to her: "My dear, you must be a literary woman. It is so written in the book of fate. Get a good stock of health and brush up your mind." In the next year her first volume, a book of selected stories, was published by Harpers; but by 1848 she was the mother of six children, the oldest only eleven, and no more books had appeared. Nevertheless she was not to sink under the tide of home drudgery. She had visited in the South, witnessing the more kindly aspects of slavery, and in her own town she had seen the pursuit of fugitives, the conscientious defiance of law by devoted abolitionists, the violence of proslavery mobs, and had feared for the life of her brother, who was reported to have suffered death with his friend Lovejoy, when the latter was shot in Alton by a band of Missourians. In these exciting times it came to her more and more insistently that her writing must be turned to good account. Lane Seminary was a seat of antislavery doctrine and was very likely saved from destruction by its fortunate remoteness from the town. But "Uncle Tom" was not to be written from here. In 1850, impelled by ill-health, Professor Stowe accepted a call to Bowdoin College, in which he had been a student. With three children she preceded him, and for the two months before the birth of her seventh child, in Brunswick, she carried the entire responsibility of choosing, equipping, and settling in their new home. In the meanwhile the family bank account was disturbingly low, and she was attempting to write. And in the meanwhile, too, Webster's "Seventh of March Speech" on compromise with the slavery forces had stirred the North as nothing before and carried the country one step nearer to the Civil War. In the winter that followed Mrs. Stowe came to her great resolve to write something that would arouse the whole nation; and at a communion service in February of 1851 there appeared to her, as in a vision, the scene of the death of Uncle Tom.