Harriet Beecher Stowe to Frederick Douglass, July 9, 1851
HARRIET BEECHER STOWE1This is the first known communication between two of the most famous antislavery writers of the nineteenth century. Harriet Elizabeth Beecher Stowe (1811–96), the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and a member of the outspoken Beecher family, began writing early in life and pioneered the use of slang and regional dialects in her works. Although Uncle Tom’s Cabin remains the most famous of Stowe’s writings, she published a number of others widely read in the nineteenth century, including a second novel on slavery, Dred (1855). Stowe never spoke publicly on behalf of abolition, but her name was one of those most closely associated with the cause because of the overwhelming international popularity of these novels. She and Douglass continued to correspond after this letter, meeting for the first time in 1853. Although he criticized her for advocating colonization and for failing to donate proceeds from Uncle Tom’s Cabin to the antislavery cause, to which she responded with a less than enlightened attitude, she defended him against Garrison. Catherine Gilbertson, Harriet Beecher Stowe (New York, 1937); Joan D. Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life (New York, 1994); Forrest Wilson, Crusader in Crinoline: The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe (Philadelphia, 1941); Stowe, Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe; Stowe, Life and Letters. TO FREDERICK DOUGLASS
[Brunswick, Me. 9 July 1851].
Frederick Douglass Esq
SIR—
You may perhaps have noticed in your editorial readings a series of articles that I am furnishing for the Era under the title of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Life among the lowly.”2Gamaliel Bailey’s National Era published Uncle Tom’s Cabin in weekly installments beginning 5 June 1851. The novel completed its serial run in the 1 April 1852 edition of the newspaper. Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, 208–09. In the course of my story, the scene will fall upon a cotton plantation. I am very desirous hear to gain information from one who has been an actual labourer on one—& it occurs to me that in the circle of your acquaintance there might be one who would be able to
communicate to me some such information as I desire. I have before me an able paper written by a southern planter in which the details & modus operandi are given from his point of sight.
I am anxious to have some more from another standpoint. I wish to be able to make a picture that shall be graphic & true to nature in its details. Such a person as Henry Bibb, if in this country might give me just the kind of information I desire[.] You may possibly know of some other person. I will subjoin to this letter a list of questions which in that case, you will do me a favor by enclosing to the individual—with a request that he will at earliest convenience answer them.3The list of questions included in the letter has not been located, and it is unclear whether Douglass or anyone else answered Stowe’s inquiries. E. Bruce Kirkham, The Building of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Knoxville, Tenn., 1977), 99–100.
For some few weeks past, I have received your paper thro the mail4Harriet Beecher Stowe subscribed to Douglass’s newspaper and began receiving it in 1847. & have read it with great interest—& desire to return my acknowledgements for it. It will be a pleasure to me at some time, when less occupied to contribute something to its columns.
I have noticed with regret, your sentiments on two subjects,—the church—& African colonization—& with the more regret, because I think you have a considerable share of reason for your feelings on both these subjects—but I would willingly if I could modify your view on both points
In the first place you say the church is “pro slavery”.5Douglass’s association with Garrisonian abolitionism reinforced his own disillusionment with most Christian denominations. During his tour of Great Britain in 1845–1847, Douglass’s speeches regularly condemned established churches for failing to take an unqualified stand against slavery. Martin, Mind of Frederick Douglass, 48–49, 100–101. As an organisation There is a sense in which this may be true. The American church of all denominations taken as a body—comprise the best & most conscientious people in the country. I do not say it comprises none but these—or that none such are found out of it—but only that if a census were taken of the purest & most high principled men & women of our country the majority of them would be found to be professors of religion in some of the various Christian denominations.
This fact has given to the church great weight in this country. The general & predominant spirit of intelligence & probity & piety of its majority has given it that degree of weight—that it has the power to decide the great moral questions of the day.
Whatever it unitedly & decidedly sets itself against as a moral evil it can put down.
In this sense the church is responsible for the sin of slavery. Albert Dr Barnes6Albert Barnes (1798–1870), a Presbyterian minister and author, was a central figure in the events leading to the 1837 division between the old and new schools of Presbyterianism. After studying law, Barnes spent four years at the Princeton Theological Seminary and received appointment as pastor at a church in Morristown, New Jersey. In 1830 he became the minister of the First Church in Philadelphia, where he was active in movements for temperance, Sunday schools, and the abolition of slavery, and a strong advocate for New School Presbyterianism. A sermon he delivered in 1829 sparked a debate within the church that helped to fuel the theological division within Presbyterianism that lasted thirty-three years. During his career Barnes published eleven books, including Scriptural Views of Slavery (1846) and The Church and Slavery (1857), which argued that the Bible condemned slavery. C. Bruce Staiger, “Abolitionism and the Presbyterian Schism of 1837–1838,” MVHR, 36:391–414 (December 1949); NCAB, 7:360; DAB, 1:627–29. has beautifully & briefly expressed this on the last page of his work on slavery when he say, “Not all the force out of the church could sustain slavery an hour, if it were not sustained IN it”.7Stowe misquotes Barnes, who wrote, “There is no power out of the church that could sustain slavery an hour if it were not sustained in it.” Albert Barnes, An Inquiry into the Scriptural Views of Slavery (Philadelphia, 1855), 383.
It thus appears that the church has the power to put an end to this evil—& does not do it. In this sense she may be said to be pro slavery. But the church has the same power over intemperance & sabbath breaking—& sin
of all kind—no doubt if the moral power of the church were brought up to the N Testament point it is sufficient to put an end to all these too
But I would ask you would you consider it a fair representation of the christian church in this country to say it is pro intemperence—pro sabbath breaking & pro every thing which it might put down if it was in a higher state of moral feeling?
If you should make a list of all the abolitionists of the country I think you would find a majority of them in the church—certainly some of the most influential & efficient ones are ministers.
I am a ministers daughter—a ministers wife & I have had six brothers in the ministry—(one is in Heaven)8Harriet Beecher Stowe’s father, Lyman Beecher (1775–1863), was a Presbyterian minister and later president of Lane Theological Seminary in Ohio. Her husband, Calvin Ellis Stowe (1802–86), was a minister and professor at Lane and Andover Theological Seminaries in Massachusetts and Bowdoin College in Maine. Stowe’s six brothers also served in the ministry at some point in their lives. The eldest, William Henry Beecher (1802–89), apprenticed as a cabinetmaker, eventually studied at Andover and Lane seminaries, and entered the ministry in Boston before finally settling in Rhode Island. Edward Beecher (1803–95) studied at Yale University and Andover, settling in Boston, where he accepted a pastor’s position at the age of twenty-three. Henry Ward Beecher (1813–87), who studied at Amherst College and Lane Seminary, was the most prominent of Stowe’s siblings, well known for his powerful antislavery sermons. Next in line, brother Charles Beecher (1815–1900), graduated from Bowdoin College, studied at Lane, and became a Presbyterian minister at the age of thirty-one. Thomas K. Beecher (1824–1900) graduated from Illinois College in 1843, studied at Lane, and organized a New England Congregational church in New York in 1852. James Beecher (1828–86) attended Dartmouth College and Andover Theological Seminary before serving as a missionary in China from 1848 to 1853. James served as an army chaplain during the Civil War before settling down as a pastor in upstate New York. A younger brother, Frederick, died in 1820 at age two. Lyman Beecher Stowe, Saints, Sinners and Beechers (1934; Freeport, N.Y., 1970), 57–59, 138–41, 144–47, 244–45, 253, 273–75, 336–37, 354–59, 384–85; Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, 17–30.—& I certainly ought to know something of the feelings of ministers. I was a child in 1821, when the Missouri question was agitated9Stowe refers to the Missouri Compromise of 1820, a sectional conflict that developed over the division of western territory between free and slave states. Southern planters viewed western expansion as the answer to the rapid exhaustion of overplanted eastern lands. Many northerners resented this domination of rich farm land by large tobacco, cotton, and sugar producers, and complained that plantation agriculture made the value of western lands rise beyond the point that independent family farmers could afford. From 1819 through 1821 the controversy escalated when Missouri applied for entrance to the Union as a slave state. A compromise measure admitted Maine as a free state, enabled Missouri to enter as a slave state, and drew a boundary that prohibited slavery north of latitude 36° 30’ in the remaining Louisiana Purchase territory. Don E. Fehrenbacher, The South and Three Sectional Crises (Baton Rouge, La., 1980), 15–16; Glover Moore, The Missouri Controversy, 1819–1821 (1953; Gloucester, Mass., 1967), 258–59. & one of the strongest & deepest impressions on my mind were my fathers sermons & prayers—& the anguish of his soul for the poor slave at that time. I remember his preaching drawing tears down the hardest faces of the old farmers. I remember his prayers night & morning in the family for “poor oppressed bleeding Africa” that the time of her deliverance in the family might come—prayers offered with strong cryings & tears, & which indelibly impressed my heart & made me what I am from my soul the enemy of all slavery.10Although Lyman Beecher considered slavery to be a sin, he did not spend much time on that issue in the majority of his sermons at any time during his career because the issue caused too much conflict within churches. He said little on the subject until the 1830s, when he quietly supported colonization. Vincent Harding, A Certain Magnificence: Lyman Beecher and the Transformation of American Protestantism, 1775–1863 (Brooklyn, N.Y., 1991), 295–96, 338–40. Every brother I have has been in his sphere a leading anti slavery man—one of them was to the last hour of his life the bosom friend & counsellor of Lovejoy11A proslavery mob killed Elijah P. Lovejoy (1802–37), editor of an antislavery newspaper in Alton, Illinois, on 7 November 1837 during an attack on the building housing his printing operations. Stowe’s brother, Edward Beecher, was a close friend and associate of the martyred editor. His friend’s murder led Beecher to take a more active stance on the slavery issue. Immediately following the tragedy, he wrote a tract that combined a vivid account of the events at Alton with Beecher’s own theological interpretation of the events. Edward Beecher, Narrative of Riots at Alton (1838; New York, 1965), vii–xii; xx–xxi; Dillon, Elijah P. Lovejoy; Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, 108–09; Merrill and Ruchames, Garrison Papers, 2:329n.—& all have been known & read of all men. As for myself & husband12Calvin Stowe met Harriet Beecher during the 1830s when he was a professor of theology under Lyman Beecher at Lane Seminary in Ohio. The two were married in 1836, following the death of Stowe’s first wife. Throughout their marriage, Stowe remained a strong supporter of Harriet’s literary career. Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, 93–94, 96–99, 167–68. we have lived on the border of a slave state,—& we have never for years shrunk from the fugitive—we have helped them with home & clothing & all we had to give. I have received the children of liberated slaves into a family school & taught them with my own children13In the early 1830s Stowe taught at the Western Female Institute in Cincinnati, an academy she established with her eldest sister, Catherine Beecher. N 0 record of the attendance of black students at the institute has been located. Gilbertson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, 92–93; Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, 68, 74; Stowe, Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe, 64–65.—& it has been the influence that we found in the church & by the altar that has made us all do this. Gather up all the sermons that have been published on this offensive & unchristian Law & you will find that those in its favour against it are numerically more than those in its favour—& yet some of the strongest opponents have not published their sermons—out of thirteen ministers who meet with my husband weekly for discussion of moral subjects14Probably a group of Congregational ministers, such as Calvin Stowe, affiliated with Bowdoin College or from its immediate vicinity in Brunswick, Maine. Hedwick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, 153, 207–08. only three are found who will acknowledge or obey this law in any shape.
After all my brother, the strength & hope of your oppressed race does lie in the church. In hearts united to Him of whom it is said He shall spare the souls of the needy—& precious shall their blood be in his sight. Every thing is against you—but Jesus Christ is for you—& He has not forgotten his church misguided & erring tho it be. I have looked all the field over
with despairing eyes. I see no hope except in Him. This movement must & will become a purely religious one—the light will spread in churches—the tone of feeling will rise—christians north & south will give up all connection with & take up their testimony against it—& thus the work will be done.
ALf: Acquisitions, Stowe-Day Foundation, CtHSD. PLf: Harriet Beecher Stowe, Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Compiled from Her Letters and Journals by Her Son, Charles Edward Stowe, ed. Charles Edward Stowe (Boston, 1890), 149–53; Harriet Beecher Stowe, Life and Letters of Harriet Beecher Stowe, ed. Annie Fields (1897; Detroit, 1970), 133–36.