Uncle Sam's emancipation Earthly care, a heavenly discipline ; and other sketches |
Account of Mrs. Beecher Stowe
and her Family. |
 | Uncle Sam's emancipation |  |
Account of Mrs. Beecher Stowe
and her Family.
BY AN ALABAMA MAN.
The family to which Mrs. Stowe belongs, is
more widely and favourably known than almost
any other in the United States. It consists of
the following persons:
1. Rev. Lyman Beecher, the father, Doctor of
Divinity, ex-President of Lane Theological Seminary,
and late pastor of a Presbyterian Church
at Cincinnati, Ohio.
2. Rev. William Beecher, pastor at Chilicothe,
Ohio.
3. Rev. Edward Beecher, pastor at Boston,
Massachusetts.
4. Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, pastor at Brooklyn,
Long Island.
5. Rev. Charles Beecher, pastor at Newark,
New Jersey.
6. Rev. Thomas Beecher, pastor at Williamsburg,
New Jersey.
7. Rev. George Beecher, deceased several
years since. His death was caused by the accidental
discharge of a gun. At the time he
was one of the most eminent men in the Western
Church.
8. Mr. James Beecher, engaged in commercial
business at Boston.
9. Miss Catharine Beecher.
10. Mrs. Harriet B. Stowe.
11. Mrs. Perkins.
12. Mrs. Hooker.
Twelve! the apostolic number. And of the
twelve, seven apostles of the pulpit, and two of
the pen, after the manner of the nineteenth century.
Of the other three, one has been swept
into commerce by the strong current setting that
way in America; and the other two, wives of
lawyers of respectable standing, and mothers of
families, have been absorbed by the care and
affections of domestic life. They are said to be
no way inferior, in point of natural endowments,
to the nine who have chosen to play their parts
in life before a larger public. Indeed, persons
to assign superiority to any one of them. With
the shades of difference which always obtain
between individual characters, they bear a striking
resemblance to each other, not only physically,
but intellectually and morally. All of them are
about the common size—the doctor being a trifle
below it, and some of the sons a trifle above it—
neither stout nor slight, but compactly and ruggedly
built. Their movements and gestures have
much of the abruptness and want of grace common
in Yankee land, where the opera and dancing
school are considered as institutions of Satan.
Their features are large and irregular, and though
not free from a certain manly beauty in the men,
are scarcely redeemed from homeliness in the
women by the expression of intelligence and wit
which lights them up, and fairly sparkles in their
bluish gray eyes.
All of them have the energy of character,
restless activity, strong convictions, tenacity of
purpose, deep sympathies, and spirit of self-sacrifice,
which are such invaluable qualities in the
character of propagandists. It would be impossible
for the theologians among them to be members
Father and sons, they have been in the thickest
of the battles fought in the church and by it;
and always have moved together in solid column.
To them questions of scholastic theology are
mummeries, dry and attractionless; they are practical,
living in the real present, dealing with questions
which palpitate with vitality. Temperance,
foreign and home-missions, the influence of commerce
on public morality, the conversion of young
men, the establishment of theological seminaries,
education, colonization, abolition, the political
obligations of Christians; on matters such as
these do the Beechers expend their energies.
Nor do they disdain taking an active part in public
affairs; one of them was appointed at New
York City to address Kossuth on his arrival.
What is remarkable is that, though they have
come in violent collision with many of the abuses
of American society, their motives have never
been seriously attacked. This exemption from
the ordinary lot of reformers is owing not only
to their consistent disinterestedness, but to a certain
Yankee prudence, which prevents their advancing
without being sure of battalions behind
acquired for eccentricity. As public speakers
they are far above mediocrity; not graceful, but
eloquent, with a lively scorn of the mean and
perception of the comic, which overflow in pungent
wit and withering satire; and sometimes, in
the heat of extemporaneous speaking, in biting
sarcasm. Their style of oratory would often
seem, to a staid, church-going Englishman, to
contrast too strongly with the usual decorum of
the pulpit.
Nine of the Deechers are authors. They are
known to the reading and religious public of the
United States, by reviews, essays, sermons, orations,
debates, and discourses on a great variety
of subjects, chiefly of local or momentary interest.
All of these productions are marked by
vigorous thought; very few by that artistic excellence,
that conformity to the laws of the ideal,
which alone confer a lasting value on the creations
of the brain. Many of them are controversial,
or wear an aggressive air which is unmistakable.
Those which are of durable interest, and of a
high order of literary merit, are six temperance
sermons by Dr. Beecher; a volume of practical
an imaginative work by Charles Beecher, with an
introduction by Mrs. Stowe; some article on
Biblical literature, by Edward Beecher; “Truth
stranger than Fiction,” and other tales, by Miss
Catharine Beecher; “Domestic Economy,” by
the same; “Twelve Lectures to Young Men,” by
Henry Ward Beecher; “An Introduction to the
Works of Charlotte Elizabeth,” by Mrs. Stowe,
being a collection of stories originally published
in the newspapers; and “Uncle Tom's Cabin.”
I am sorry not to be able to place in this category
many letters, essays, and addresses on Education,
and particularly those from the pen of Catharine
Beecher. Before Mrs. Stowe's last book, her
celebrity was hardly equal to her maiden sister's.
Catharine had a wider reputation as an authoress,
and her indefatigable activity in the cause of
education had won for her very general esteem.
I may add in this connection that it is to her the
United States are indebted for the only extensively
useful association for preparing and sending
capable female teachers to the west. She
had the energy and the tact to organize and put
it in successful operation.
Such is the family, in the bosom of which Mrs.
Stowe's character has been formed. We cannot
dismiss it without pausing before the venerable
figure of the father, to whom the honour of determining
the bent of the children properly belongs.
Dr. Lyman Beecher is now seventy-eight
years old. Born before the American Revolution,
he has been, until recently, actively and
ably discharging duties which would be onerous
to most men in the prime of life. He was the
son of a New England blacksmith, and was
brought up to the trade of his father. He had
arrived at mature age when he quitted the anvil,
and began his collegiate studies at Yale College,
New Haven. Ten years later, we find him pastor
of the church at Litchfield, and rising into fame
as a pulpit orator. His six sermons on temperance
extended his reputation through the United
States; I might say through Europe, for they
ran rapidly through several editions in England,
and were translated into several languages on the
Continent. Being now favourably known, he was
called to the pastoral charge of the most influential
Presbyterian Church at Boston, where he remained
until 1832. In that year, a project long
Church, whose active and enlightened piety and
liberal tendencies had gained for it the name of
New School, was put into execution; the Lane
Theological and Literary Seminary was founded.
Its object being to prepare young men for the
gospel ministry, such facilities for manual labour
were offered by it, as to make it feasible for any
young man of industry to defray, by his own
exertions, a large part of the expenses of his
own education. Dr. Beecher had long been regarded
as the only man competent to direct an
institution which, it was fondly hoped, would demonstrate
the practicability of educating mind
and body at the same time, infuse new energy
into the work of domestic and foreign missions,
and revolutionize the Presbyterian church. A
large corps of learned and able professors was
selected to aid him. The Doctor removed to his
new home in the immediate neighbourhood of
Cincinnati, and remained there until 1850, and
with what success in his chief object we shall
hereafter see.
A certain eccentricity of manner and character,
and sharpness of repartee, have given rise to
Beecher. Some of them paint the man.
His lively sense of the comic elements in everything,
breaks out on the most unlikely occasions.
One dark night, as he was driving home with his
wife and Mrs. Stowe in the carriage, the whole
party was upset over a bank about fifteen feet
high. They had no sooner extricated themselves
from the wreck, than Mrs. Beecher and Mrs.
Stowe, who were unhurt, returned thanks for their
providential escape. “Speak for yourselves,”
said the doctor, who was feeling his bruises, “I
have got a good many hard bumps, any how.”
In many matters he is what Miss Olivia would
have called “shiftless.” None of the Goldsmith
family were more so. No appeal to him for
charity, or a contribution to a good cause, ever
goes unresponded to, so long as he has any money
in his pockets. As the family income is not unlimited,
this generosity is sometimes productive
of inconvenience. One day his wife had given
him from the common purse twenty-five or thirty
dollars in bills, with particular instructions to buy
a coat, of which he stood in need. He went
down to the city to make the purchase, but stopping
missions, the box was handed round, and in went
his little roll of bills. He forgot his coat in his
anxiety for the Sandwich Islanders.
Well do I remember the first time I heard him
preach. It was seventeen years ago. From early
childhood I had been taught to reverence the name
of the great divine and orator, and I had long
promised myself the pleasure of listening to him.
My first Sunday morning in Cincinnati found me
sitting with his congregation. The pastor was
not as punctual as the flock. Several minutes
had elapsed after the regular hour for beginning
the service, when one of the doors opened, and I
saw a hale looking old gentleman enter. As he
pulled off his hat, half a dozen papers covered
with notes of sermons fluttered down to the floor.
The hat appeared to contain a good many more.
Stooping down and picking them up deliberately, he
came scuttling down, along the aisle, with a step
so quick and resolute as rather to alarm certain
prejudices I had on the score of clerical solemnity.
Had I met him on a parade ground, I
should have singled him out as some general in
undress, spite of the decided stoop contracted in
the back of the head; the keen, sagacious eyes,
the firm, hard lines of the brow and wrinkled
visage, and the passion and power latent about
the mouth, with its long and scornful under-lip,
bespoke a character more likely to attack than to
defend, to do than to suffer. His manner did not
change my first impression. The ceremonies preliminary
to the sermon were dispatched in rather
a summary way. A petition in the long prayer
was expressed so pithily I have never forgotten
it. I forget now what reprehensible intrigue our
rulers were busy in at the time, but the doctor,
after praying for the adoption of various useful
measures, alluded to their conduct in the following
terms: “And, O Lord! grant we may not
despise our rulers; and grant that they may not
act so, that we can't help it.” It may be doubted
whether any English Bishop has ever uttered a
similar prayer for King and Parliament. To deliver
his sermon, the preacher stood bolt upright,
stiff as a musket. At first, he twitched off and
replaced his spectacles a dozen times in as many
minutes with a nervous motion, gesturing meanwhile
with frequent pump handle strokes of his
language began to glow with animation, his simple
style became figurative and graphic, and flashes
of irony lighted up the dark groundwork of his
Puritanical reasoning. Smiles and tears chased
each other over the faces of many in the audience.
His peroration was one of great beauty and power.
I have heard him hundreds of times since, and he
has never failed to justify his claim to the title of
“the old man eloquent.”
Harriet Beecher was born in Litchfield, about
the year 1812. After the removal of the family
to Boston, she enjoyed the best educational advantages
of that city. With the view of preparing
herself for the business of instruction, she
acquired all the ordinary accomplishments of
ladies, and much of the learning usually reserved
for the stronger sex. At an early age she began
to aid her eldest sister, Catharine, in the management
of a flourishing female school, which had
been built up by the latter. When their father
went West, the sisters accompanied him, and
opened a similar establishment in Cincinnati.
This city is situated on the northern bank of
the Ohio. The range of hills which hugs the
from it in a semi-circle, broken by a valley and
several ravines, leaving a basin several square
miles in surface. This is the site of the busy
manufacturing and commercial town which, in
1832, contained less than forty thousand inhabitants,
and at present contains more than one hundred
and twenty thousand — a rapid increase,
which must be attributed, in a great measure, to
the extensive trade it carries on with the slave
States. The high hill, whose point, now crowned
with an observatory, overhangs the city on the
east, stretches away to the east and north in a
long sweep of table-land. On this is situated
Lane Seminary—Mrs. Stowe's home for eighteen
long years. Near the Seminary buildings, and
on the public road, are certain comfortable brick
residences, situated in yards green with tufted
grass, and half concealed from view by accacias,
locusts, rose-bushes, and vines of honeysuckle
and clematis. These were occupied by Dr.
Beecher, and the Professors. There are other
residences more pretending in appearance, occupied
by bankers, merchants and men of fortune.
The little village thus formed is called Walnut
of Cincinnati.
For several years after her removal to this
place, Harriet Beecher continued to teach in connection
with her sister. She did so until her
marriage with the Rev. Calvin E. Stowe, Professor
of Biblical Literature in the Seminary of
which her father was President. This gentleman
was already one of the most distinguished ecclesiastical
savans in America. After graduating
with honour at Bowdoin College, Maine, and
taking his theological degree at Andover, he had
been appointed Professor, at Dartmouth College,
New Hampshire, whence he had been called to
Lane Seminary. Mrs. Stowe's married life has
been of that equable and sober happiness so common
in the families of Yankee clergymen. It
has been blessed with a numerous offspring, of
whom five are still living. Mrs. Stowe has known
the fatigues of watching over the sick bed, and
her heart has felt that grief which eclipses all
others—that of a bereaved mother. Much of her
time has been devoted to the education of her
children, while the ordinary household cares have
devolved on a friend or distant relative, who has
leisure in contributing occasional pieces, tales and
novelettes to the magazines and newspapers. Her
writings were of a high moral tone, and deservedly
popular. Only a small portion of them are comprised
in the volume—“The Mayflower”—already
mentioned. This part of Mrs. Stowe's life spent
in literary pleasures, family joys and cares, and
the society of the pious and intelligent, would
have been of as unalloyed happiness as mortals
can expect, had it not been darkened at every instant
by the baleful shadow of slavery.
The “peculiar institution” was destined to
thwart the grand project in life of Mrs. Stowe's
husband and father. When they relinquished
their excellent positions in the East in order to
build up the great Presbyterian Seminary for the
Ohio and Mississippi valley, they did so with
every prospect of success. Never did a literary
institution start under finer auspices. The number
and reputation of the professors had drawn
together several hundred students from all parts
of the United States; not sickly cellar-plants of
boys sent by wealthy parents, but hardy and intelligent
young men, most of whom, fired by the
winning their way through privations and toil, to
education and ministerial orders. They were the
stuff out of which foreign missionaries and revival
preachers are made. Some of them were known
to the public as lecturers: Theodore D. Weld
was an oratorical celebrity. For a year all went
well. Lane Seminary was the pride and hope of
the church. Alas for the hopes of Messrs.
Beecher and Stowe! this prosperity was of short
duration.
The French Revolution of 1830, the agitation
in England for reform, and against colonial slavery,
the fine and imprisonment by American courts of
justice, of citizens who had dared to attack the
slave trade carried on under the federal flag, had
begun to direct the attention of a few American
philanthropists to the evils of slavery. Some
years before, a society had been formed for the
purpose of colonizing free blacks on the coast of
Africa. It had been patronized by intelligent
slaveholders, who feared the contact of free
blacks with their human chattels; and by feeble
or ignorant persons in the North, whose consciences
impelled them to act on slavery in some
question led them to accept the plan favoured by
slaveholders. However useful to Africa the emigration
to its shores of intelligent, moral, and
enterprising blacks may be, it is now universally
admitted that colonization, as a means of extinguishing
slavery, is a drivelling absurdity. These
were the views of the Abolition Convention,
which met at Philadelphia in 1833, and set on
foot the agitation which has since convulsed the
Union.
The President of that Convention, Mr. Arthur
Tappan, was one of the most liberal donors of
Lane Seminary. He forwarded its address to the
students; and in a few weeks afterwards the
whole subject was up for discussion amongst them.
At first there was little interest. But soon the
fire began to burn. Many of the students had
travelled or taught school in the slave States; a
goodly number were sons of slaveholders, and
some were owners of slaves. They had seen
slavery, and had facts to relate, many of which
made the blood run chill with horror. Those
spread out on the pages of “Uncle Tom's Cabin,”
reader, and which your swelling heart and overflowing
cold in comparison. The discussion was soon
ended, for all were of accord; but the meetings
for the relation of facts were continued night
after night and week after week. What was at
first sensibility grew into enthusiasm; the feeble
flame had become a conflagration. The slave
owners among the students gave liberty to their
slaves; the idea of going on foreign missions
was scouted at, because there were heathens at
home; some left their studies and collected the
coloured population of Cincinnati into churches,
and preached to them; others gathered the young
men into evening schools, and the children into
day schools, and devoted themselves to teaching
them; others organized benevolent societies for
aiding them, and orphan asylums for the destitute
and abandoned children; and others again,
left all to aid fugitive slaves on their way to Canada,
or to lecture on the evils of slavery. The
fanatacism was sublime; every student felt himself
a Peter the hermit, and acted as if the abolition
of slavery depended on his individual exertions.
At first the discussion had been encouraged by
it swallowing up everything like regular study,
they thought it high time to stop. It was too
late; the current was too strong to be arrested.
The commercial interests of Cincinnati took the
alarm—manufacturers feared the loss of their
Southern trade. Public sentiment exacted the
suppression of the discussion and excitement.
Slaveholders came over from Kentucky, and urged
the mob on to violence. For several weeks there
was imminent danger that Lane Seminary, and
the houses of Drs. Beecher and Stowe, would be
burnt or pulled down by a drunken rabble. These
must have been weeks of mortal anxiety for Harriet
Beecher. The board of trustees now interfered,
and allayed the excitement of the mob by
forbidding all further discussion of slavery in the
Seminary. To this the students responded by
withdrawing en masse. Where hundreds had
been, there was left a mere handful. Lane Seminary
was deserted. For seventeen years after
this, Dr. Beecher and Professor Stowe remained
there, endeavouring in vain to revive its prosperity.
In 1850 they returned to the Eastern
States, the great project of their life defeated.
Professor Stowe accepted an appointment to the
chair of Biblical literature in the Theological
Seminary at Andover, Massachusetts, an institution
which stands, to say the least, as high as any
in the United States.
These events caused a painful reaction in the
feelings of the Beechers. Repulsed alike by the
fanaticism they had witnessed among the foes,
and the brutal violence among the friends of slavery,
they thought their time for action had not
come, and gave no public expression of their abhorrence
of slavery. They waited for the storm
to subside, and the angel of truth to mirror his
form in tranquil waters. For a long time they
resisted all attempts to make them bow the knee
to slavery, or to avow themselves abolitionists.
It is to this period Mrs. Stowe alludes, when she
says, in the closing chapter of her book: “For
many years of her life the author avoided all
reading upon, or allusion to, the subject of slavery,
considering it as too painful to be inquired
into, and one which advancing light and civilization
would live down.” The terrible and dramatic
scenes which occurred in Cincinnati, between 1835
of a lady to mingling actively in the melee.
That city was the chief battle-ground of freedom
and slavery. Every month there was something
to attract attention to the strife; either a press
destroyed, or a house mobbed, or a free negro
kidnapped, or a trial for freedom before the
courts, or the confectionary of an English abolitionist
riddled, or a public discussion, or an
escape of slaves, or an armed attack on the
negro quarter, or a negro school-house razed to
the ground, or a slave in prison, and killing his
wife and children to prevent their being sold to
the South. The abolition press, established there
in 1835 by James G. Birney, whom, on account
of his mildness, Miss Martineau called “the gentleman
of the abolition cause,” and continued by
Dr. Bailey, the moderate and able editor of the
National Era, of Washington city, in which Uncle
Tom's Cabin first appeared in weekly numbers,
was destroyed five times. On one occasion, the
Mayor dismissed at midnight the rioters, who had
also pulled down the houses of some colored people,
with the following pithy speech: “Well, boys,
let's go home; we've done enough.” One of these
enlisted deeply the sympathies of Mrs. Stowe.
In 1840, the slave catchers, backed by the riffraff
of the population, and urged on by certain
politicians and merchants, attacked the quarters
in which the negroes reside. Some of the houses
were battered down by cannon. For several days
the city was abandoned to violence and crime.
The negro quarters were pillaged and sacked;
negroes who attempted to defend their property
were killed, and their mutilated bodies cast into
the streets; women were violated by ruffians, and
some afterwards died of the injuries received;
houses were burnt, and men, women, and children
were abducted in the confusion, and hurried into
slavery. From the brow of the hill on which she
lived, Mrs. Stowe could hear the cries of the victims,
the shouts of the mob, and the reports of
the guns and cannon, and could see the flames of
the conflagration. To more than one of the
trembling fugitives she gave shelter, and wept
bitter tears with them. After the fury of the
mob was spent, many of the coloured people
gathered together the little left them of worldly
goods, and started for Canada. Hundreds passed
were in little wagons; some were trudging along
on foot after the household stuff; some led their
children by the hand; and there were even mothers
who walked on, suckling their infant, and
weeping for the dead or kidnapped husband they
had left behind.
This road, which ran through Walnut Hills,
and within a few feet of Mrs. Stowe's door, was
one of the favourite routes of “the under-ground
railroad,” so often alluded to in Uncle Tom's
Cabin. This name was given to a line of Quakers
and other abolitionists, who, living at intervals of
10, 15 or 20 miles between the Ohio river and
the Northern lakes, had formed themselves into a
sort of association to aid fugitive slaves in their
escape to Canada. Any fugitive was taken by
night on horseback, or in covered wagons, from
station to station, until he stood on free soil, and
found the fold of the lion banner floating over
him, and the artillery of the British empire between
him and slavery. The first station north
of Cincinnati was a few miles up Mill Creek, at
the house of the pious and honest-hearted John
Vanzandt, who figures in chapter nine of Uncle
must have often been roused from her sleep by
the quick rattle of the covered wagons, and the
confused galloping of the horses of constables
and slave-catchers in hot pursuit. “Honest
John” was always ready to turn out with his team,
and the hunters of men were not often adroit
enough to come up with him. He sleeps now in
the obscure grave of a martyr. The “gigantic
frame,” of which the novelist speaks, was worn
down at last by want of sleep, exposure, and
anxiety and his spirits were depressed by the
persecutions which were accumulated on him.
Several slave owners, who had lost their property
by his means sued him in the United States
Courts for damages; and judgment after judgment
stripped him of his farm, and all his property.
During her long residence on the frontier of
the slave States, Mrs. Stowe made several visits
to them. It was then, no doubt, she made the
observations which have enabled her to paint noble,
generous, and humane slaveholders, in the
characters of Wilson, the manufacturer, Mrs.
Shelby and her son George, St. Clair and his
daughter Eva, the benevolent purchaser at the
and Emeline, and Symes, who helped Eliza and
her boy up the river bank. Mrs. Stowe has observed
slavery in every phase; she has seen
masters and slaves at home, New Orleans markets,
fugitives, free coloured people, pro-slavery politicians
and priests, abolitionists, and colonizationists.
She and her family have suffered from it; seventeen
years of her life have been clouded by it.
For that long period she stifled the strongest emotions
of her heart. No one but her intimate
friends knew their strength. She has given them
expression at last. Uncle Tom's Cabin is the agonizing
cry of feelings pent up for years in the
heart of a true woman.
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