Harriet Beecher Stowe - A Life

Uncle Tom's Cabin: or, Life among the lowly
By Harriet Beecher Stowe, with an introduction by Ann Douglas
Penguin Classics. 629 pages. £5.99

Harriet Beecher Stowe: a life
By Joan D. Hedrick
Oxford University Press. 507 pages. £11.99 (paperback)

We sometimes pray that our hearts will be broken with those things that break the heart of God. This month sees the 100th anniversary of the death of Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin - a novel which witnesses to the power that can be released if that prayer is answered.
Stowe is said to have commented that it was written with her heart's blood. Reading it one can understand why. It was written out of passionate fury at the inhumanity of slavery in the southern States, and even greater indignation at the collusion of the free states in this trade. This book probably did more than anything else to stir up public opinion against slavery. President Lincoln is said to have greeted her with: 'So you are the little lady who made this big war!'

The family clan

The Beecher clan was 'the first family' of the religious and reforming scene in 19th-century America. Harriet's father, Lyman Beecher (1775-1863), was possibly the best-known preacher of his day. Most of his sons followed him into the ministry, the best-known being Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887), the most popular preacher of his time. Two of Harriet's sisters were well-known educational reformers. The whole family were characterised by intense activity, energy, zeal and readiness to throw themselves unstintingly behind a righteous cause.
By 1850 it was clear that the cause of the day was slavery. The number of slaves in the south had increased from about 700,000 in 1790 to over 3,000,000. Many owners relied on natural increase to supply labour, hence the widespread practice of forcing slave women to bear children, only to remove them. As the powerful black abolitionist Frederick Douglas wrote: 'We have men-stealers for ministers, women-whippers for missionaries and cradle-plunderers for church members.' Most slaves were denied both education to enable them to read the Bible, and the opportunity for Christian family life; many were treated like beasts.
Some tried to escape to the 'free' states, but in 1850 the noxious Fugitive Bill was passed, by which those in the 'free' states were required (on pain of fine or imprisonment) to return fugitive slaves to their owners in the 'slave' states. This led to appalling atrocities, but generally the clergy refrained from advocating resistance to the law.

Accursed thing

Until this time (1850) Harriet had been one of the least-known members of her family. Married to Calvin Stowe, a brilliant but impecunious Professor of Biblical Languages, she was fully occupied with her seven children and trying to make ends meet. As she wrote to one of her friends: 'I am a mere drudge with few ideas beyond babies and housekeeping . . .'. Her talent at writing, however, had already been evidenced in short pieces for the press. One of her relatives wrote to her after the passing of the Fugitive Act: 'If I could use a pen as you can, I would write something that will make this whole nation feel what an accursed thing slavery is.'
It is said that on reading these words, Harriet rose to her feet, crumpled the letter in one hand, and vowed: 'I will write something . . . I will if I live.' She was spurred on by white hot anger at the atrocious suffering caused by slavery, and by the hypocrisy of Christians who colluded with the slave system. More particularly she empathised with slave women forcibly separated from their children: her own heartbreak at the death of one of her children enabling her to identify in some degree with their pain.
Righteous indignation and genuine empathy were joined with boundless creativity, an amazing ability to interpose comedy with tragedy, and most of all a powerful evangelical intensity. Slavery as a system, she believed, literally damned many to a lost eternity, searing the consciences of owners and dealers; denying slaves the opportunity of Christian family life, and imposing sufferings so great as to alienate many from God.
Uncle Tom's Cabin appeared in serial form during 1851 and 1852. When the finished work was printed in March 1952, it rapidly became a best-seller, and Harriet became one of the best-known women of the day. More important, her novel drove the slavery issue to the top of the agenda. She communicated the urgency of the issue more effectively than any political leader.

Later disrepute

Tolstoy said this work was 'one of the greatest productions of the human mind'. But Uncle Tom's Cabin later toppled into critical disrepute. The most obvious reason was its having been turned out in haste as a polemic. It was not carefully crafted and polished as a work of art. Stowe herself said she 'no more thought of style or literary excellence than the mother who rushes into the street and cries for help to save her children from a burning house, thinks of the teaching of the rhetorician or the elocutionist'.
Other reasons for its vilification included its perceived religiosity and racism. It is a profoundly Christian book, and as Ann Douglas says in her introduction to the Penguin edition 'constrictedly secular minds' cannot easily cope with it. Stowe depicted her slave characters in terms later seen as 'stereotypical' yet, as Douglas again comments, 'Stowe's religion protects her from racism'. Every human being, black or white, slave or free, is seen as an individual with a never-dying soul and therefore of infinite significance.
The book is a tribute to the awesome sufferings of a great multitude of human beings, many of them sincere Christians. It is a reminder of the truth that those who are last will be first. It is a pointer to the identification of Christ with the lowly: he humbled himself to become a slave, was brutally flogged and cruelly killed, even as Uncle Tom was. It is no accident that it was while celebrating the Lord's Supper that Stowe had her vision of a black slave being flogged and killed, which she used as a climactic point of her work. Reading this book evokes indignation and grief for the suffering of those caught up in the American slave system.
But we are as hypocritical as those Stowe condemned if we close our eyes to the fact that there are still slaves in the world today, that children are viciously abused, that women and children are still sexually exploited, and that once again Christians need to be willing to feel that burning anger which will motivate us to act on behalf of the powerless. Stowe concludes with these searing words: ' Not surer is the eternal law by which the millstone sinks in the ocean, than that stronger law, by which injustice and cruelty shall bring on nations the wrath of Almighty God!'.

Women's history

The Penguin edition of the work is commended, not least because of the introduction by Ann Douglas. The brief biographical sketch included will satisfy many readers, but for those wishing to study Stowe in depth, we note the publication of Joan Hedrick's massive work, which won the 1995 Pulitzer prize for biography. She has drawn on previously-unused primary sources to provide the first major biography of Stowe in over 50 years.
Hedrick's strength lies in her grasp of women's history and her knowledge of 19th-century American literature. She treats each of Stowe's major works in detail. She writes from a self-consciously feminist perspective, thus careful attention is paid to the everyday realities of life for women sometimes overlooked but so valuable in building up a picture of what life was really like. The moments of religious ecstasy or literary success were the exception. Much of Stowe's life was made up by the 'tide-mud of the real'.
However, Hedrick's obsession with gender is sometimes irritating. Moreover, comparing this work with Harriet Beecher Stowe: her life and letters (1898) and the biography by Forrest Wilson (Crusader in Crinoline, 1941), it is clear that Hedrick's feminist preoccupation shifts the balance of the story: the lengthy sections on Stowe's time at the Hartford Female Seminary and at the Battleboro water cure are interesting but disproportionately long.
For the political side of the story, Wilson is clearer - for a straight narrative account of her life, the 1898 work, albeit totally uncritical, is at least, first hand. The letters included in the 1898 work are unselfconscious in their Christian content. Hedrick, quoting the same letters, will sometimes omit the spiritual sections which seem 'over the top' to the 20th-century mind. While Hedrick obviously tries to let Stowe speak for herself, she is more successful in her empathy with Stowe as a woman than in her understanding of her as a Christian.

Theological aspects

In broad terms the repudiation of Old School Calvinism by Harriet and others of the Beecher family is dealt with, but so much more could usefully have been said about the theological context. Hedrick's own hostility to the 'patriarchical' and 'male' system of Calvinist theology enables her to empathise with Harriet's rejection of the system, but also tends to colour her discussion. Calvinism as such is caricatured as fatalistic, unfeeling, abstruse and pastorally disastrous: a major villain being Jonathan Edwards. (This reviewer found that hard to take, as at age 11 it was part of Edwards's great work on love (Charity and its fruits) that was instrumental in her conversion.) It could be fascinating to have an analysis of the development of Harriet Beecher Stowe's theology from an expert in American theology. George M. Marsden includes an excellent discussion of Henry Ward Beecher's theology in Fundamentalism and American culture, and quotes Jonathan Blanchard on Harriet who, he said, was 'sneering the doctrine of human depravity . . . out of good society . . . while she was holding up the worn garments of her Puritan ancestors till her readers see nothing but the holes in their coats!'
It would seem that Harriet's very strength became her weakness. The power of Uncle Tom's Cabin lay in her ability to feel with the afflicted, and to constrain her readers to weep with her. Her strength of feeling, her sensibility, later caused her to recoil against a theological system which she could not 'feel' was compatible with the love of God.
But as soon as feelings determine our theology we are doomed, as Paul Carter said of Henry Ward Beecher, to preach 'charity at the cost of clarity'. The early liberals were essentially part of the Romantic movement - the heart, not the head, was to determine truth. Ultimately, the 'new theology' was incompatible with biblical Christianity, and we enter the age of the titanic struggles between 'modernists' and 'fundamentalists' . . . but that is another story!
Suffice to say that the earlier titanic struggle of north against south (partly triggered by Uncle Tom's Cabin), which claimed 600,000 lives and more than one million casualties, did finally result in Emancipation for the slaves. And so on the 100th anniversary of her death, it is for this that we should remember Harriet Beecher Stowe.