Harriet Beecher Stowe

Harriet Beecher Stowe is familiar to many Americans much in the same way as Jonathan Edwards. Most of us read Uncle Tom’s Cabin—or at least the Cliffs Notes—at some point in high school, just like we read “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” But if the memory of Edwards has largely evaporated from our national memory, so has that of Stowe.

There’s no small irony in the fact that the memory of both Edwards and Stowe is afflicted with the same modern cultural amnesia. Following Edwards by nearly a century, Stowe’s Christian life was largely spent wrestling with the New England theology Edwards set in motion. In the end, she hoped to cling to Jesus but renounced the theology of Edwards and of her own father.

Nancy Koester’s phenomenal new biography of Stowe, Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Spiritual Life, is a needed remedy for these ailments. Like all good biographies, Koester’s work isn’t merely about Harriet Beecher Stowe. In fact, the religion teacher at Augsburg College in Minneapolis skillfully brings her readers right into the 19th century. It’s hard for historians to explain the extraordinary religious, political, and social climate of this period to contemporary readers. But to try to understand a figure as complex and influential as Stowe requires an account that factors in all of these realities, which defined the world Stowe inhabited.

Marvelous Introduction

The book is thus a marvelous introduction to everything from the history of the Western Reserve and Ohio Valley to the nature of antebellum sectionalism and political conflict to the often-contested ground of gender roles in American culture. A few themes in particular stand out. First, Stowe emerges from Koester’s account as a profoundly human character. Though known as an author, Stowe is presented first and foremost as a woman of her time—as a wife and mother. In fact, one of the strengths of Koester’s biography is the way she explores the attention Stowe felt regarding her duties as a mother—along with the gendered expectations of 19th-century America—and what she perceived to be a God-given calling to write. Even more, Stowe understood this calling to be for a specific purpose. It was her duty, she believed, to write in such a way that would effect a change in the moral conscience of Americans, most of whom she concluded were entirely apathetic to the moral scandal of slavery in America.

This existential crisis is especially evident as Koester recounts the exchanges between Harriet and her professor/theologian husband, Calvin. For her part, Harriet expressed a feeling of inability to devote herself to writing due to her maternal duties. In one particularly pathetic moment, she lamented to Calvin, “I am but a mere drudge with few ideas beyond babies and housekeeping” (81). In an age of “mommy blogs,” I suspect that more mothers than ever can relate to this tension. Stowe’s frustration and the cultural milieu of the day make her husband’s encouragement all the more noteworthy. In one letter he urged her, “You must be a literary woman. It is so written in the book of fate.” Elsewhere he exhorted her that she must determine “to spend the rest of your life with your pen” (90).

Turning Point

While the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852 proved to be the turning point in Stowe’s career as an author and American celebrity, Koester convincingly argues that the death of her son Henry in 1857 exerted an even more profound influence on her. While the Stowe family had lost an infant child years before, the death of her unconverted college-aged son provoked Harriet’s deepest struggles to cling to orthodoxy. It is here where Koester’s biography really shines, propelling the reader to deeply identify with Stowe’s grief and desperate attempts to reconcile a sovereign and loving God with the ideals of “disinterested benevolence” that had come to epitomize New England theology. Here Koester provides what may be the central paragraph of the entire book:

All her life Stowe cared deeply for “the lowly” or oppressed. But her personal quest shifted with the death of her son Henry, who drowned in 1857. That tragic loss made the problem of separation, rather than injustice, paramount. What Harriet suffered with Henry was a double separation: that of the living from the dead, and the saved from the unsaved. She longed to overcome those separations, and thus became fascinated with spiritualism. At the same time she mined Christianity for strength to face separation and ultimately to overcome it. She found Christian hope through the communion of saints in this life and the promise of resurrection in eternity. (312)

Whereas Stowe had long wrestled with the theology of New England divinity, including that of her prominent father Lyman Beecher, Koester explains how Henry’s death became the catalyst for a clear break from orthodoxy. As she points out, Stowe found religious solace in a wide range of new sources including slave religion, hydrotherapy, and spiritualism. In a sense, then, Stowe emerges as something of a prototype, emblematic of the rapidly diversifying religious marketplace of 19th-century America.

Finally, Koester’s work is another helpful reminder that the antislavery movement in America was never monolithic. With her success Stowe found herself in the middle of often contentious debates among abolitionists, including Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison. Stowe herself often tried to mediate, attempting to play a cohesive role within the often divided anti-slavery coalition.

Great Interest

Evangelical readers in particular should take great interest in this new biography. The church remains commissioned in every age, including our own, to be about the business of proclaiming the gospel. The good news of the salvific work of the crucified and resurrected Christ for all who believe remains the core of our message. However, Stowe provides us with an example of how that gospel necessarily calls the people of God to function as a prophetic witness, speaking the truth about injustice and evil in this age. To be sure, evangelicalism’s social reform movements contain just as much warning as they do example. But what’s evident in Harriet Beecher Stowe is that her determination to leverage her writing in the effort against slavery was motivated by deeply held religious conviction.

Evil and injustice endure in our day, and will so until the end of this age. It may very well be that the next great moral voice of clarity against the injustice of our day will come from another wife and mother who, in between diapers and bottles, picks up a keyboard and changes the mind of a generation.