Stay tuned for additional posts answering questions posed by the participants of the Harriet Beecher Stowe House Community Connection Facebook group. CLICK HERE to join the group and submit your own questions to our volunteer team! Today's question is answered by docent Nicholas Andreadis. Question: How did Harriet and her father get along since they seem to be on opposite sides on how to accomplish abolition? In the nineteenth century no issue was more divisive within American families than slavery; what should be done about the institution and more specifically who should fight for it or against it. Side-stepped by the framers of the Constitution, it fell to American families to resolve the great questions. This was certainly a topic in the hearts and minds of the Beecher family; no more so than Harriet and her father, Lyman. It was natural that Harriet would first look to her father (along with her sister Catharine and her Aunt Harriet) for guidance and perspective. Like many important men of the 1820s, Lyman Beecher supported the American Colonization Society’s program of helping free Blacks emigrate to West Africa. Colonization proved over time to be an ineffectual method for calming the turbulent waters of slavery. Milton Rugoff tells us that William Lloyd Garrison, editor of the anti-slavery newspaper The Liberator, became a member of Beecher’s congregation in Boston. Garrison, he writes, was soon urging Beecher toward the abolitionist stance. But Beecher was not moved easily and like many ministers of the time he argued that even the Bible had at times vacillated on the issue of slavery. He allowed that slavery was evil but appealed to God’s righteousness to destroy the institution. One might conclude that Lyman “walked the fence” between what was morally right and what was pragmatic. His stances during the Lane Debates provide further evidence for this. He oscillated between support for the students and submission to the wishes of the school’s trustees. Harriet by nature and disposition was a quiet, introspective thinker and she brought these characteristics to her evolving attitude regarding slavery. She developed her own philosophical, moral and spiritual touchstones ultimately becoming a fierce abolitionist.
Harriet recalls from her childhood overhearing discussion among her elders over the great debate of that time, the Missouri Compromise. Only later would she realize that no compromise would settle the greatest issue facing America in the Nineteenth century. She was a witness to the famous Lane Debates organized in 1834 by the firebrand, Theodore Weld. And certainly, she was influenced by her brother Edward’s Narrative of Riots at Alton (Illinois) describing the brutal killing of abolitionist minister and editor Reverend Elijah Lovejoy. She was later Influenced by Angelina Grimke and began to view abolition and women’s rights as linked issues. It was the death of her son Charley to cholera in 1849 and the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act that drove her to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Harriet carefully listened to the arguments within her community and the experiences of free and fugitive slaves choosing the written word to express her contempt for slavery, often doing so anonymously to avoid drawing unpleasant attention to her father. Though later she veered away from her father on the issue of abolition and abandoned the strict principles of Calvinism, I found no evidence that she held any antipathy toward him. Rugoff offers that in her autobiography Harriet paid tribute to her father in his prime. She was to my mind and by most accounts a loyal daughter. Source material for this essay: The Beechers: An American Family in the Nineteenth Century by Milton Rugoff (1981) Harper and Rowe Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life by Joan Hedrick (1994) Oxford University press About the author: Dr. Nicholas Andreadis is a docent at the Harriet Beecher Stowe House. He was a professor and dean at Western Michigan University prior to moving to Cincinnati.
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Stay tuned for additional posts about Harriet dealing with cholera and other questions posed by the participants of the Harriet Beecher Stowe House Community Connection Facebook group. CLICK HERE to join the group and submit your own questions to our volunteer team! Today's question is answered by docent Nicholas Andreadis. Question: How did HBS deal with the cholera epidemics?
It is noteworthy that the scourge of cholera bookends Harriet Beecher Stowe’s time in Cincinnati. By the time of her arrival in autumn 1832, the illness had reached Cincinnati, probably brought by people traveling along the Ohio River. She departs for the East following the 1849 epidemic that took her beloved son Samuel Charles Stowe, affectionately known as Charley. Charley was one of three thousand people who died in Cincinnati in the epidemic of 1849. Cholera is a disease spread via contaminated water and sewage, of which Cincinnati had a generous share due to its pig processing industry. It was greatly feared because it was so lethal, its cause unknown at the time and the common belief that it was a consequence of God’s anger with his Christian flock. Cholera struck close to Harriet. She grieved over the death of her friend Eliza Stowe, comforted Calvin and as we know, later became his wife. She herself displayed the symptoms in 1845. But without question it is the loss of young Charley that shaped her private and public expressions of grief. When Charley fell ill, Harriet wrote to her husband Calvin that she had little hope of his recovery. There was no medical intervention available at the time, and all Harriet could do was watch helplessly while her eighteen-month-old child was wracked by convulsions and lost all the fluids in his body. She writes: “Today is a rather dejecting day. I don't particularly feel like talking about it because my heart can barely take all the emotion of today. I am overwhelmed with confusion and sadness. Today my eighteen month old son died of Cholera. As I sat cradling him in my arms for the last minutes, the last breath of his short life, I could see the life being sucked right out of his small, frail body. His eyes were glassy and his skin was as dry as the dust on my boots. It felt as if the life was being sucked out of me the longer I sat there staring into his blank expression. He seemed so disconnected; So helpless. That was one of the hardest things I have ever done. No way to help, all I could do was sit there and accept that my child was breathing his last breaths. I referred to him as my sunshine child. At only one year and six months he lit up my day like the sun fills the sky with light and gives everyone a feeling of warmth. I will never forget my baby boy. Having experienced losing someone so close to me I can sympathize with all the poor, powerless slaves at the unjust auctions. You will always be in my heart Samuel Charles Stowe.” She later wrote that there were circumstances of such bitterness in the manner of Charley's death that she didn't think she could ever be reconciled for it unless his death allowed her to do some great good to others. Losing Charley made her understand what a slave woman felt when her child was taken away at the auction block. Harriet poured her grief onto the pages of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Her description of the evil of slavery are vividly displayed in a prose style that touched the hearts of many Americans, particularly those in the North. As Joan Hedrick writes, “Harriet Beecher Stowe had a profound effect on nineteenth-century culture and politics, not because her ideas were original, but because they were common.” Note: The source material for most of the information contained within this brief essay is Harriet Beecher Stowe: A life by Joan Hedrick published 1994 by Oxford University press About the author: Dr. Nicholas Andreadis is a docent at the Harriet Beecher Stowe House. He was a professor and dean at Western Michigan University prior to moving to Cincinnati. |
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