Calvin Ellis Stowe

In 1829, he became editor of the Boston Recorder, the oldest religious newspaper in the United States. He published a translation from the Latin, with notes, of Lowth's Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews.[4]

In 1830, he was appointed professor of Greek at Dartmouth College.[4] He was a popular professor and Dartmouth awarded him an honorary master's degree for his continued scholarship.[8] Two years later, he was appointed professor of Biblical Literature at the Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati.[4][9] He was also the librarian, responsible for building what grew to a collection of 10,000 volumes by 1837, some of which were acquired during a book-buying trip to Europe in May 1836.[10] Based upon a study of American academic libraries published in 1840, the Lane had the largest academic library west of the Alleghenies at that time.[8]

Lyman Beecher was the president of the seminary; Stowe was mocked in the press for being Beecher's "satellite".[11] He taught religion at Bowdoin from 1850 to 1852 and at Andover Theological Seminary from 1852 to 1864.[4]

While in Cincinnati, Stowe became an important advocate for the development of public schools. He believed that students required good elementary education for successful secondary education,[10] with particular attention to schools in what was then the Western United States (between the Appalachians and the Mississippi).[8] Without neglecting his professional duties, he devoted himself heart and soul to this work. In May 1836, he sailed for England, primarily to purchase a library for Lane seminary, but he received at the same time an official appointment from the Ohio State Legislature to visit as agent the public schools of Europe, particularly those of Prussia. On his return he published his Report on Elementary Education in Europe,[4][10] which urged Ohio to adopt a state-backed educational system like that of German states. The Legislature ordered a copy of the book for each of the state's school districts.[12]

He was co-founder with Alexander Hamilton McGuffey in the establishment of the College of Teachers there in 1833.[10]

Stowe contributed to religious periodicals over his career.[3] His first book, published while he was Professor of Biblical Literature at the Lane Seminary, was Introduction to the criticism and interpretation of the Bible : designed for the use of theological students, Bible classes, and high schools.[13] After Harriet's novel became famous, Stowe wrote his own best-selling book, Origin and History of the Books of the Bible, both Canonical and Apocryphal (Hartford, 1867).[4] He also published The Religious Element in Education, a lecture (1844); and The Right Interpretation of the Sacred Scriptures, inaugural address (Andover, 1853).[4]

While in Cincinnati, the Stowes provided shelter for northward-bound freedom seekers on the Underground Railroad and Harriet's brothers and Stowe helped them on their journey to Canada. Cincinnati riots of 1836 sent angry mobs, led by the agents of exasperated and desperate slave-holders, to hunt down free blacks in the streets of Cincinnati.[14]

As references in William Lloyd Garrison's radical abolitionist paper, The Liberator, document, although Stowe privately decried slavery, he was no abolitionist. He believed slavery was sanctioned by the Bible and that, through Christian education, slavery would gradually fade away. He was, instead, an advocate of colonization of free Blacks in Liberia as a "solution" to slavery. It was only after his wife Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin was published in 1852 that Stowe began, haltingly, to change his stance regarding slavery, first as a signatory to a petition of New England clergy in opposition to the Kansas–Nebraska Act, issued in 1854.