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In June of 1811, in a rustic Congregational parsonage in Litchfield, Connecticut, Lyman Beecher and his wife Roxana Foote welcomed their seventh child, a daughter named Harriet. She was born into a household dense with company: Aside from serving as Litchfield’s Congregational pastor, Beecher and his wife also took on boarders, housed traveling preachers, retained two Black indentured servants, and shared a roof with a rotating cast of extended family. The sprawling Beecher clan consisted, almost to a person, of vivid, eccentric characters.
Lyman Beecher was a product of the Second Great Awakening who devoted himself eagerly to the causes of temperance, ending dueling, and the bracing, soul-stripping repentance that was thought to lead to true conversion in the period’s Puritan-inflected Calvinist milieu. Yet with respect to the most urgent ethical and political matter of his day—human chattel slavery in America—Beecher’s zeal was conspicuously muted: Over time, the minister shifted from advocating a policy of “colonization,” that is, exiling free Black people to a colony in West Africa; to serving as a kind of mediator between colonizationist and abolitionist thinkers in his New England circles; to eventually, perhaps, entertaining (mostly private) conservative abolitionist sympathies himself.
In 1834, Beecher’s conflicted feelings regarding slavery and his habit of never quite matching the hour happened to align aspiciously for Harriet, by then 22. At the time, Beecher was serving as the president of Lane Seminary in Cincinnati, Ohio, though his administrative efforts appear to have been primarily focused on raising funds. Students led by the abolitionist Theodore Weld organized nine evenings of public lectures, testimonies, and conversations about slavery, concluding with a vote: colonization, or abolitionism?
Abolitionism won, antislavery activism exploded at Lane, and the school’s trustees panicked. Harriet, who possibly witnessed, and certainly heard accounts of, the debates from her family, was intrigued. Though she shared her father’s intense Christian faith, Harriet’s experience of the religion was decidedly less strident and formulaic than Beecher’s, and much more spiritual, searching, and sacramental: For her, the unfortunate fact of human wickedness need not be taken as a reason to abandon attempts at progress. (Like her mother, Harriet eventually became an Episcopalian.) She was moved by innocent suffering, and she believed it could be stopped, at least in certain forms. During the uproar over antislavery activism at Lane, Harriet accompanied her father and the then–newly widowed biblical-languages professor Calvin Stowe to a meeting of clergy held at the home of Reverend John Rankin, who told a story about:
A Kentucky slave mother having been harshly treated by her mistress, [who] took her child in her arms and in the night started for Canada … The river was frozen over and a thaw had come so the water was running over the ice, which was just ready to break up. She waded across …
The image of a Black woman escaping slavery, babe in arms, braving a threat terrifying to the the well-heeled white men who spent so much time debating her fate, would surface some years later in Harriet’s most celebrated novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. By the time the book was published, in March of 1852, Harriet had been writing professionally for several years, supplementing the meager income Calvin, now her husband, earned teaching. As for many working mothers, then and now, Harriet’s time was divided between caring for her children—she would eventually bear seven—and her work; over her lifetime she produced more than two dozen novels, short stories, memoirs, articles, and essays. “If you see my name coming out everywhere, you may be sure of one thing, that I do it for the pay,” she wrote a friend in 1838.
But also for love. Harriet’s antislavery writing, she said, was unique to her role as a woman and a mother. “You have spoken of my article as unladylike,” she wrote to one New York Observer editor who had attacked her character over one of her essays, but “there are some occasions when a true woman must and will be unladylike. If a ruffian attacks her children, she will defend them even at a risk of appearing unladylike & you may be sure that whenever a poisoned dagger is lifted to stab the nobly unfortunate in the back that some woman’s hand will always be found between its point & his heart.” For Harriet, who had lost her beloved 18-month-old son Charley to a cholera epidemic in 1849, the torture of slavery, symbolized for her by the woman fleeing slavery with her sweet baby borne up close against her in the half-frozen river, was something no soul touched by love could countenance. She put her womanhood up as collateral in the public eye to fight it.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin was an unqualified literary and financial success, but perhaps more important for Harriet, the novel advanced three of her most earnestly held goals: It widely popularized the cause of abolition, spread her vision of a spiritual and merciful Christianity, and secured her place in the American literary canon. By age 46, Harriet had talent and credibility to share, and she lent a healthy dose of each to a fledgling magazine with abolitionist leanings: The Atlantic. She helped inaugurate the American institution’s maiden issue with “The Mourning Veil,” a melancholy, mesmerizing reflection on a mother’s growth through grief for her beloved dead child.
“Olivia became known in the abodes of sorrow,” Harriet wrote of her bereaved protagonist, a character who, not unlike her author, gains a new sort of strength behind her black mourning veil, “and a deep power seemed given her to console the suffering and distressed. A deeper power of love sprung up within her; and love, though born of sorrow, ever brings peace with it. Many were the hearts that reposed on her; many the wandering that she reclaimed, the wavering that she upheld, the desolate that she comforted.”
