Exactly how much she did for abolition in that half-century of agitation and reform can not be measured accurately. She planted the seed and encouraged others. As famous and as much abused as Garrison, as popular a speaker as Phillips, she antedated them both. She was a veritable pioneer in the great movement that culminated in Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. CHAPTER XI HARRIET BEECHER STOWE 1811-1896 The Beechers came to America in 1638 and were leaders in the New Haven colony. Almost two centuries later the most celebrated member of this family was born in the old parsonage in the beautiful Connecticut hilltown of Litchfield. The father of this little girl, Lyman Beecher, was preaching earnest sermons, on the munificent salary of five hundred a year. To add to their income the mother, a beautiful and gifted woman, opened a school, though she had eight children of her own to care for. All of them grew up to be distinguished, especially the two youngest, Harriet and Henry Ward, who were inseparable companions. Harriet had a remarkable memory and read all the books she could find. But most of her father’s library was sermons and church pamphlets, appeals and replies and theological discussions; so you can imagine her delight when at the bottom of a garret barrel of musty sermons and essays she discovered _The Arabian Nights_, and delicious fragments of _The Tempest_ and _Don Quixote_. Her father had said his children were not to read novels, but made an exception of _Ivanhoe_. The delighted Harriet and her brother George read it through seven times in six months, until indeed they could recite many scenes by heart. The Beecher children were wide-awake, bright, happy youngsters, a big family of them, partly educated by running wild on the long breezy hills. Until she was eleven Harriet went to a “dame school” and to the Litchfield Academy, showing her future bent by thoroughly enjoying, instead of dreading, the task of composition writing. Sir Walter Scott helped form her style. She read and re-read her few books until words and sentences were fixed in her mind. At one of the school exhibitions when compositions were read, Doctor Beecher, listening idly, suddenly brightened and looked up. “Who wrote that?” he asked. “Your daughter, sir,” replied the teacher. “That,” said Harriet years later, when she knew something of fame, “was the proudest moment of my life.”