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Week 3 -- Harriet Beecher Stowe, She Wrote for Freedom, She Wrote for Hope (1811–1896)

by Vicar Lisa

Harriet Beecher was born the seventh of 13 children in Litchfield, Connecticut. Her mother died when she was five. After his remarriage, her father, Lyman Beecher, a prominent Calvinist preacher, sent her to live at the Hartford Female Seminary under the direction of her older sister Catharine, who had founded the elite school in 1823 with another sister, Mary.

Harriet was a precocious student and enjoyed the educational opportunities given to her. By the time she left the seminary in 1827 at age sixteen, she was proficient in Latin, Greek, French, Italian, mathematics, geography, history, rhetoric and oratory, the natural and mechanical sciences, and music. In other words, Harriet was one of the few women in nineteenth-century New England to benefit from an education equivalent to that of a young man.

Despite that education, Harriet’s options were limited. She could marry and raise children, pursue missionary work, or become a teacher. Frustrated and unable to decide about the next step in her life, Harriet succumbed to depression. “I don’t know as I am fit for anything, and I have thought that I could wish to die young and let the remembrance of me and my faults perish in the grave, rather than live, as I fear I do, a trouble to everyone…”

Eventually, Harriet returned to the seminary to replace her sister Mary who was suffering from anxiety and consumption. Harriet discovered a passion for teaching composition and rhetoric. She stayed at the seminary until 1832, when Lyman accepted a position at Lane Seminary in Cincinnati and the Beechers moved west.

During her first two years in Cincinnati, Harriet once again succumbed to restlessness and indecision. She was torn between what she assumed was her expected role — a schoolteacher at Catharine’s newly launched Western Female Institute — and her passion: writing. She published her first book, Primary Geography for Children, a textbook that earned her 187 dollars, about 15 percent of her father’s annual salary. But writing was still very much a radical career choice for women at the time, and Harriet wasn’t convinced she should take the risk.

Parlor literature allowed Harriet to segue into literary life. Like parlor music, parlor literature was a centuries-old pastime. Not only did Harriet find her literary voice in the parlor, she found her husband there as well. Harriet had met both Calvin Stowe and his wife, Eliza, in the Semi-Colon Club, a Cincinnati literary society that attracted transplanted New Englanders. Two years after Eliza died of cholera, Harriet and Calvin were married.

Her husband Calvin proved to be one of her most enthusiastic advocates and an unwavering supporter of her writing career. When Harriet doubted her role as a writer, Calvin buoyed her confidence. In a response to a letter she sent him from Boston, Calvin responded, “You must be a literary woman. It is so written in the book of fate…”

One of the greatest challenges in Harriet’s life was her desire and struggle to believe that she was saved as a Christian. Although she accepted Jesus and claimed her faith as a young child, the feeling of peace she’d initially experienced didn’t last long. By the time she was a young adult, Harriet consistently grappled with her perception of the punishing God of her childhood and the gentler God she wanted to trust and love. Her brother George’s suicide in 1843 further shook her “like an earthquake,” and she prayed fervently “that Christ would ‘make his abode’ within her soul.”

Her spiritual struggles are reflected in much of her writing, including Uncle Tom’s Cabin. While the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850 enraged Harriet and was certainly a catalyst behind Uncle Tom’s Cabin, several biographers have suggested that Harriet also had personal reasons to write such a response to slavery. In 1847, she lost her young son Charley to cholera. “It was at his dying bed, and at his grave,” Harriet later wrote about Charley, “that I learnt what a poor slave mother may feel when her child is torn away from her.”

The Fugitive Slave Law passed by Congress in 1793 and 1850 (and repealed in 1864) provided for the seizure and return of runaway slaves who escaped from one state into another. As the number of kidnappings and forced re-enslavements increased, Harriet became increasingly frustrated with the negligence of the press and the public. “Must we forever keep calm and smile and smile when every sentiment of manliness and humanity is kicked and rolled in the dust and lies trampled and bleeding and make it a merit to be exceedingly cool?” she wrote to her brother, the minister Henry Ward Beecher.

Finally, in March 1851 she wrote to her editor and proposed a serial that would run in three or four segments. Harriet had no idea that the story would sprawl into a novel that would run in weekly installments in the abolitionist journal the National Era until April 1, 1852. It was published in book form in March 1852, and less than a year later, Uncle Tom’s Cabin had sold an unprecedented three hundred thousand copies. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s greatest contribution was that of an abolitionist writer. It’s said that President Lincoln himself, upon meeting the diminutive Harriet, exclaimed, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war!”

In 1857 Harriet’s son Henry, a student at Dartmouth, drowned while swimming with friends in the Connecticut River. In her grief, Harriet not only revisited her younger son Charley’s death, she also returned to the questions of salvation that had plagued her earlier in life. Harriet fretted that Henry had died unsaved. 

Her novel, The Minister’s Wooing, written in the year following Henry’s death, was Harriet’s answer to her theological wrestling. In the book, the character of Mrs. Marvyn is unable to reconcile herself to her son’s death at sea and his everlasting damnation, and it is only the consoling words of Candace, the Marvyns’ former slave, that finally offer her comfort. God “knows all about mothers’ hearts; He won’t break yours,” Candace assures the bereft mother. Thus, Harriet was finally able to transform her own image of God from that of a distant and punishing Creator to a kind, forgiving, loving God based on her own understanding of a mother’s love. Her solution to the question of salvation wasn’t complicated theology; it was simply love, as demonstrated by Christ himself and his own self-sacrifice.

6th Sunday after Pentecost, July 9, 2023 

10 a.m. Outdoor Worship (weather permitting) with Holy Communion

Announcements:

  • Next Sunday: At the end of the month, Bethany Pierce will be leaving the United States for a 2-year stint in the Peace Corps and will be stationed in Uganda. Before she leaves, we would like to take a few minutes as part of worship on July 16 to lay hands on her as we pray for the success of her mission, her safety, and that she can be as much a blessing to all whom she encounters as she has been to us here at Zion’s. At that service, we also will collect freewill offering to help support her on this journey.
  • Summer Hiatus: Sunday morning Bible Study, Friday Women's Bible Study and Centering Prayer all are on summer hiatus. Watch for schedule updates in e-formation, the newsletter, and worship bulletins.
  • First Sunday Potluck: Join us the first Sunday of each month for our potluck lunch. All are welcome. Our next potluck will be Sunday, Aug. 6.
  • Outdoor Services: We will continue Summer Outdoor Worship through August. Each Sunday, we need people willing to help set up and to help clean up after worship. We have lists of what is needed to guide you. Please let Vicar Lisa or Sharon Sorensen know if you are willing to help.
  • Garage Sale: Zion's annual garage sale will be Saturday, Aug. 5. See Julie if you would like to help.
  • Save the Date: Zion's 135th Anniversary celebration is Sept. 23-24. If you would like to be part of this committee, please see Vicar Lisa.

E-formation

Sixth Sunday after Pentecost, July 9, 2023

The word “yoke” (at least when heard) probably makes us think of eggs. But in the gospel on this coming Sunday, the yoke is the wooden neck brace that helps two oxen pull their load together. Come to worship, to find out about the yoke we are fitted into at our baptism, and at the table, be strengthened to join with Christ to carry your heavy burdens.

Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30

This beloved passage, “Come to me, and I will give you rest,” contrasts with the earlier sentence, that Christians are indeed wearing the yoke of Christ. Some Christians have found such biblical passages about the Father’s enigmatic will as fundamental to their faith.

Zechariah 9:9-12

Year A has already heard from this passage in the processional gospel for Passion/Palm Sunday, since Matthew cites this prophecy of a king arriving in Jerusalem on a donkey as fulfilled in Jesus. On this Sunday, the passage says that only the true king will bring peace. Thus, the passage is linked with Jesus’ promise of rest.

Romans 7:15-25a

Usually in Paul the Greek word translated as “you” is plural, but in this section, Paul admits to the personal daily struggle of the baptized life. Aware of this “war” within our very selves, we gladly come to the gospel’s word of rest in Christ.

 

Zion's Lutheran Church

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719-846-7785