Ashton, for her part, is generally careful in assigning credit to John Andrew Jackson, who—she is clear—was not a source for Tom himself. Rather, she argues that his passing presence in Stowe’s house was what inspired the writer to put pen to paper. Jackson had made slavery real—and urgent—to the Maine housewife.
Stowe was not the first resident of Brunswick to whom Jackson had turned for refuge; instead, he had first traveled to the home of an abolitionist mathematics professor, who directed Jackson to go to the home of his neighbor, the Reverend Thomas Upham, who in turn sent him on to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s house, a block away. Stowe, a harried young mother with a houseful of children and servants, was at home without her husband, who was finishing up his job at a Cincinnati seminary. She had recently debated the Fugitive Slave Act with the Reverend Upham over tea; when she asked him whether “he would obey the law supposing a fugitive came to him,” he had “hemmed & hawed,” she recalled in a letter to her sister. Now, confronted with an actual fugitive slave, Upham had “overcome his fussy civic scruples,” Ashton noted, giving Jackson a dollar and directing him to Stowe’s for sanctuary.
Safe at Stowe’s house, Jackson delighted her children with stories and songs, leading his hostess to write to her sister of the “mysterious power of pleasing children” that “these negroes posses[s].” Yet her casual racism aside, Stowe was deeply moved by Jackson’s brief stay. According to his memoir, he told her his life’s story, to which she listened “with great interest.” At one point, he took off his shirt so she could inspect the scars he bore from years of whippings. Stowe neglected to mention this particular interaction to her sister; it was, in fact, a striking breach of decorum for the personally conservative wife of an absent theologian. It was, Ashton writes, “an intimate and harrowing moment.”
Just weeks later, Stowe began to write her novel. The timing is crucial to Ashton’s argument. She observes Jackson’s influence in two ways. First, more narrowly, Ashton notes striking parallels between Stowe’s description of her own conversation with the Reverend Upham and a conversation in the novel between Senator Bird of Ohio and his wife, in which the man responds condescendingly to his wife’s shock at the cruelty of the Fugitive Slave Act. Just moments later, the character Eliza—the enslaved woman who had escaped over the frozen Ohio River—shows up at the senator’s door, freezing and desperate. Like the Reverend Upham confronted with a fleeing Jackson, Senator Bird instantly forgets his hesitancy and concocts a plan to secure her safe passage north. “Your heart is better than your head,” Mrs. Bird tells her husband.
