[On March 20, 1852,
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s titanic novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published
in book form for the first time. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful
of Stowe contexts, leading up to a special post on the wonderful Stowe Center
in Hartford!]
On three sides
to Stowe’s life & identity beyond (if still connected to) her
uber-successful first novel.
1)
Religion: It’s impossible to read Uncle Tom’s Cabin and miss the central
role that religious plays, not just in the lives, perspectives, and
experiences of Stowe’s characters (especially Tom himself, who comes to closely
parallel Jesus), but in her moral
arguments against slavery. But the presence and influence of religion in
Stowe’s family and relationships was even more prominent still: from her
father, the radical Calvinist minister and reformer Lyman Beecher; to her
brother, the even more progressive Congregationalist minister and reformer Henry Ward Beecher;
to her husband, the Reverend
Calvin Ellis Stowe, a professor of Biblical literature at Cincinnati’s Lane
Seminary. What links all those men is the same combination of religion and reform
that lies at the heart of UTC, making
clear that Stowe herself, despite living in an era when she could formally work
as a minister, should be seen as an integral part of this family of Christian
reformers.
2)
Education: Calvin Stowe’s links
to education went beyond his work as a professor, as he was also an early
advocate for Horace Mann’s concept of “common
schools” (part of the nation’s move toward compulsory public education in
the mid-19th century). Harriet certainly shared that educational
emphasis, as from a young age she had the opportunity to pursue an extensive
academic program at the ground-breaking Hartford
Female Seminary (run by her sister
Catherine; Sarah Payson Willis [Fanny
Fern] was a fellow student!). When she joined her father at Lane Seminary,
Harriet continued this emphasis, helping found a literary salon known as the Semi-Colon Club
and helping organize a controversial and influential 1834 series
of debates around slavery and abolition at the seminary. In all those ways,
through the lenses of gender, race, and access, Harriet both experienced and
contributed to the democratization of American education, an important
corollary to her religious reforms.
3)
Abolition: Those 1834 debates, which culminated
in a large group of students leaving Lane for the new, neighboring, and more
overtly abolitionist Oberlin Collegiate
Institute, reflect Stowe’s commitment to abolitionism long before she wrote
its most famous literary text (she was only 22 years old when she helped
organize them). So too, after her marriage just two years later, did Harriet
and Calvin’s use of their Cincinnati home as a stop on the
Underground Railroad, which in a city as divided as Cincinnati in that
period (it saw anti-abolitionist, white supremacist riots in 1829,
1836,
and 1841, making it one of
the most hostile cities in the nation for African Americans and their allies)
was a particularly dangerous and courageous action. Better remembering these
early activisms help us see UTC in a
much less isolated way, see it indeed as one prong of Stowe’s decades-long,
multi-pronged activism on behalf of enslaved African Americans.
Next
StoweStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
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