"... I HAVE BEEN the mother of seven children, the most beautiful and most loved of whom lies buried near my Cincinnati residence. It was at his dying bed and at his grave that I learned what a poor slave mother may feel when her child is torn away from her. In those depths of sorrow which seemed to me immeasurable, it was my only prayer to God that such anguish might not be suffered in vain. There were circumstances about his death of such peculiar bitterness, of what seemed almost cruel suffering that I felt I could never be consoled for it unless this crushing of my own heart might enable me to work out some great good to others. 
I allude to this here because I have often felt that much that is in that book had its root in the awful scenes and bitter sorrow of that summer. It has left now, I trust, no trace on my mind except a deep compassion for the sorrowful, especially for mothers who are separated from their children."
Harriet Beecher Stowe to Eliza Cabot Follen
December 16, 1852.
- Portrait Gallery
Uncle Tom's mothers - from the story itself, with images from an 1853 American edition.
- From Chapter XLV - Concluding Remarks, Uncle Tom's Cabin.
"And you, mothers of America, --"
- Separation of Families
from The Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, 1853.
- Uncle Tom's Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly
The entire text, housed at University of Virginia's Electronic Text Center.
- Letter to Georgiana May, 1838.
"My children I would not change for all the ease, leisure, and pleasure that I could have without them."
- Letter to Calvin Stowe, 1845.
"...that dark side of domestic life..."
- Letters to Calvin Stowe on the illness and death of their son, Charley, 1849.
"I write as though there were no sorrow like my sorrow..."
1. From Boydston, Kelley, Margolis, The Limits of Sisterhood, p. 178.
