NARRATOR : The earnest seeker and hopeful discoverer of this new world always haunts the outskirts of his or her time. Our history is written in the lives of such individuals.
The publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a phenomenon in publishing. This enormously successful book told simple stories of slavery in sentimental fashion. Even though the author intruded her own opinions freely, the tale was remarkably free from the acrimonious debate going on between abolitionists and states-righters. The surprise was that this little book sold out edition after edition, was quickly translated into twenty languages, the London stage held as many as three dramatized versions of it at once—and Harriet Beecher Stowe, who the year before had been an unknown housewife with seven children was this year’s toast of Europe and America.
Overnight, Harriet’s fame overshadowed those of her brothers and sister, even that of her father. At 78, Lyman Beecher had almost outlived his audience, though he was just beginning to prepare his sermons, and the long awaited Autobiography of Lyman Beecher. Unfortunately, he was no longer organized enough to accomplish much without help. The family decided that Charles Beecher should help him put his papers in order.
Meanwhile, Edward Beecher, the brilliant scholar and the theologian of the family, had just brought out his startling new doctrine in which he reconciles free will and original sin, an argument that he first broached privately to his brother Charles thirty years before. The book, The Conflict of Ages, marks the high point of his career.
Edward Beecher had been at the Salem Street Church in Boston since 1844, and since 1849 had been editor of The Congregationalist. The Conflict of Ages was published in 1853, just one year after Harriet’s book.
Nearly a hundred pages are devoted to historical analysis, in which Edward Beecher shows the dialectic of theological ideas of different ages, culminating in his own doctrine of the pre-existence of souls. This idea had been suggested at various times in the past, perhaps most clearly by Origen. Edward describes a series of religious experiences, beginning with the description in Jonathan Edwards’ Personal Narrative of the experience of human depravity before God.

EDWARDS : The very thought of any joy arising in me, on any consideration of my own amiableness, performances, or experiences, or any goodness of heart or life, is nauseous and detestable to me.

NARRATOR : But Edwards did not satisfy the new ideas of honor and right. The Unitarianism of John Adams, and especially of William Ellery Channing, came into being as a response to those ideas.
A third experience arose in Universalists, who reconciled depravity and justice by rejecting the idea of eternal punishment; thus God was made to be honorable.
A fourth experience was the New School of Calvinism, a theology of revivals. Samuel Hopkins represented this view; Hopkinsian theory rejected the idea that Adam’s sin cast a shadow on the human race, and also rejected innate sinfulness before knowledge and voluntary action was possible—in other words, infant depravity was denied.
Would there be no end of reactions and counter-reactions? That fear, says Edward Beecher, is the fifth experience. Its defining quality was the eclipse of the glory of God, by accepting both total depravity and also honor and right.

EDWARD : For a time, the system of this world rose before my mind, in the same manner, as far as I can judge, as it did before the minds of Channing and Foster. I can, therefore, more fully appreciate their expression of their trials and emotions. But I was entirely unable to find relief as they did. The depravity of man neither Christian experience, the Bible, nor history, would permit me to deny. Hence, for a time, all was dark as night.
The transition in my own case was if, when I had been groping in some vast cathedral, in the gloom of midnight, vainly striving to comprehend its parts and relations, suddenly before the vast arched window of the nave a glorious sun had suddenly burst forth, filling the whole structure with its radiance, and showing in perfect harmony the proportions and beauties of its parts.

NARRATOR : This was the sixth experience, that Edward hoped would reunite Christians everywhere—the acknowledgment of the pre-existence of souls. Orthodoxy could be preserved, and God could also be just. Critics were quick to point out that the idea was not new—it came from Indian philosophy, Origen, Julius Muller, Pythagoras, Empedocles, Fludd. Edward Beecher didn’t claim originality, he merely aimed to reconcile orthodoxy and radical politics, just as earlier in his career, he had tried to reconcile the Baptists and other Protestants with a clarification of semantics.
The Conflict of Ages made quite a stir in religious circles—the book went through five printings and seven editions in two years. It raised a great debate.
When Charles took over the writing of Lyman; Beecher’s Autobiography, he sensed a common Beecher problem that they all would have to answer—how could they maintain the vitality that had motivated Lyman Beecher when their father was gone? He had believed without question in an eternal afterlife. Every other Beecher had rebelled in one way or another.

CHARLES : The work on his autobiography is deeply affecting. It is really one of the most solemn things I have attended to.
Is eternal punishment a reality? Father thought so. He never doubted. Strike that idea out of his mind, and his whole career would be changed, his whole influence on us modified. Yet Isabella and Mary, I fear, reject father’s belief on this point, and Hatty’s mind is I fear shaken—do you believe in it? Do you really believe that the wicked will exist forever, and continue forever in sin? Do you believe this? How can we affect our children as Father did us, if we have not the same concern for them, the same sense of their awful danger? I confess that I have no real communion with God, nor do I have life to struggle for any. Though my soul is cold as death, I feel a kind of settled resolution not to waste my life.
I know that there is no way of recapturing the early unity of the family. I have been deeply touched for Catharine in reading over her early letters. I wish you could read them. All before and after her engagement with Fisher, and his death. All her deep and painful struggles in religious matters for years. How she has suffered! How she has been tried! And yet the character she shows is a very interesting one—I mean in her letters.
Now I know she has peculiarities that repel some from her. And yet it seems sad to me to see her cast out as it were from the family circle by Mary and Hatty and you—not that she is really cast out—but something virtually pretty near it. Yet she is sincere and kind, and benevolent. That is, she seems to have been so, both by natural impulse and on principle. Cannot she be made to feel more of the warm sympathy of fraternal affection in her loneliness?

NARRATOR : With Lyman Beecher’s increasing confusion, Catharine felt the lack of his intellectual prodding —but she still had much to do to round out her vision of women’s culture based on domesticity, and to re-establish morality without the religious dogmas of Calvinism. Harriet was instrumental in bringing her back into the family.

HARRIET : Please read Catharine’s True Remedy for the Wrongs of Women. I beg you will not let another day pass without reading it as an act of justice to yourselves and to the public. Until I read it, I had no proper appreciation of her character and motives of action for this eight or ten years past. I considered her strange, nervous, visionary and to a certain extent unstable. I see now that she has been busy for eight years about one thing: a thing first conceived upon a sickbed when she was so sick and frail that most women would have felt that all they could hope for was to lie still and be nursed for the rest of their lives, then she conceived this plan of educating our country by means of its women and this she has steadily pursued in weariness and painfulness, in journeying in peril of life and health, in watching and prayer.
Her work has been so spread out from Maine to Georgia and from Massachusetts to Iowa that we could not see that it formed a great whole, and have supposed that she was constantly attempting and constantly failing. She has earned and spent nearly $5,000 in the last few years, and she has worked as yet almost against even her own family, for hitherto you know that we have not had full confidence in her plans, but the time has come when in my judgment there is ground and full ground for such confidence and when to neglect them any longer would be unwise and inexcusable. Not everything she has done has succeeded, yet the movement as a whole is a sublime specimen of that force of character which God gives to an individual now and then when s/he has a purpose to carry by them and which may almost be regarded as an inspiration.
Furthermore, this thing has got to go, and it will go either in your hands and under your influence or it will go by the aid of such men as Horace Mann, Horace Greeley and all that modern reform party who all stand waiting for the moment when Catharine will come on their side. While you, Henry, and you, father, have been lukewarm and full of other things, the reformers meet with Catharine with the warmest of zeal with offers of time, money, influence, everything. They are noble men, noble minded, noble hearted, energetic, and yet I would rather they came into the movement as accessories than as leaders.

CATHARINE : I have been mortified and astonished to see men of piety and men I thought clear headed as befogged as I found them all over the country. When worldly men such as Horace Greeley take such high Gospel ground and our leading ministers take such low worldly ground, how will the problem work out? Although I will say that Henry’s pieces on that Fugitive Slave Law, which I hope is yet to be whipped off to the ends of the Universe, suit me exactly.

NARRATOR : Harriet shared this view of Catharine’ s about the American clergy. In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, she singled out the Reverend Joel Parker as justifying slavery because it had, in his words, ‘‘no evils but such as are inseparable from any other relations in social and domestic life.’’
Ever since 1837, when a mob killed Elijah Lovejoy, Edward Beecher had blamed Parker, leader of the Colonization Society, for the fatal rabble-rousing, and had named Parker in his book, Narrative of the Riot at Alton. Harriet also had named him in early editions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Edward helped gather materials to refute Parker’s disavowals.

HARRIET : Edward is exhuming all sorts of Parker’s inconvenient declarations and arranging them in most uncomfortable proximities, and is up to his chin in documents which he reads and makes more of with that grave thoughtful smile peculiar to him.

NARRATOR : When Parker threatened a lawsuit, Harriet stood her ground.

HARRIET : I grant I am a woman, but withal a woman well reputed.

NARRATOR : Henry Ward Beecher and Calvin Stowe negotiated a settlement, and Harriet withdrew the quotation from later editions. But her indictment of the American clergy is clear in Uncle Tom, and she was not hesitant to state publicly that the clergy was not worthy of being the nation’s moral arbiters, and that they violated rather than upheld natural human virtues, in particular toward women and blacks.
Edward’s book, The Conflict of Ages, was a shock to some because he had always been known as the conservative Beecher, the orthodox one. Yet the book proved Edward right in thinking that his was the characteristic religious experience of his time. By telling his personal truth, he touched depths in a lot of people. Nevertheless, hardly anyone went along with his solution.
Other Beechers were publishing notable books about the same time that Harriet and Edward were—Catharine’s The True Remedy for the Wrongs of Women had just come out in 1851, as well as Charles Beecher’s The Duty of Disobedience to Wicked Laws—a diatribe against the Fugitive Slave Laws, that lost Charles his position. And Henry Ward Beecher was now well established as the most popular preacher of the day.
Reaction to Edward’s theological bombshell The Conflict of Ages came from every side. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Emerson and others remarked on it.
E.A. Park and Leonard Bacon complained that Edward Beecher attacked his friends and praised his enemies. The Old School reviewer, Charles Hodge, greeted the book as if from an ally, while David Lord, another Old School Calvinist, scoffed at it entirely. H.B. Smith predicted that, rather than heal divisions, it would create them.
On the other side, the Universalist Hosea Ballou felt that Edward Beecher had indeed laid bare the conflict that had given rise to Universalism. Jacob Blain, a ‘‘destructionist,’’ felt that Edward had torn down the old house and had not provided a new one—which he felt was the right thing to do.
The Unitarians, too, in general approved. George Ellis, editor of the Christian Examiner, declared that, despite some deficiencies, it was ‘‘the most important contribution which has been made for years to our religious literature.’’ Hiram Parker wrote a counter-book, The Harmony of Ages, but it was an amateur job compared to Edward Beecher’s book. Another counter-book, The Conflict of Ages Ended, by Henry Weller, was sent to Beecher as it appeared in installments in the Swedenborgian journal The Crisis; actually, this book was written to extend Edward’s ideas, not to refute them. It provoked another Swedenborgian critique from the elder Henry James, called The Nature of Evil, a major work in its own right.
Catharine Beecher had a more personal reaction to Edward’s book. He had been very close to her through her spiritual crisis, and had tutored her while she developed her Mental and Moral Philosophy. She first published her religious views in 1836, in Letters on the Difficulties of Religion—a popular book, in which she says—

CATHARINE : I am sure God does not require anything of us but what we have full ability to perform.

NARRATOR : It is said that she was only the third person—after her mother, Roxana Foote, and Lyman Beecher’s second wife Harriet Porter—that moved Lyman Beecher’s faith toward toleration.
She saw that, whereas she had softened and secularized Calvinism, Edward Beecher’s The Conflict of Ages would undermine the doctrines of Calvinism itself. He posited a pre-existent state of sin that the Creator wasn’t responsible for. But Catharine wasn’t satisfied with this formulation.

CATHARINE : I reply How do you get this? If you say by a Revelation from God, I say before I can confide in his/her teachings I must have proof that all this horrible misery and wrong resulting from the wrong construction or nature of mind is not attributable to the Creator of All Things. His/her mere word is nothing from the Author of a system which is all ruined and worse than good for nothing. S/he must clear his/her character before s/he can offer me a Revelation!

NARRATOR : When she published her Religious Training of Children, Catharine denied the doctrine of original sin altogether.

CATHARINE : The infant mind is the creation of God and we impeach his/her wisdom of goodness when we deny that it is rightly constructed. Sin arises not from depraved nature but from depraved action, and there is no sin previous to voluntary transgression.

NARRATOR : These ideas of Catharine’s would find their way into Harriet’s novels—The Minister’s Wooing, and Old Town Folks. There is no doubt that Catharine’s ideas influenced her brothers as well, for they were in doctrine closer to her than to the more rigid Calvinism of their father, Lyman Beecher.
As Harriet suddenly became famous, Catharine undertook to renegotiate Harriet’s royalties with John P. Jewett, publisher of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, from ten percent royalties to fifty percent of profits, as originally proposed—and then rejected by the cautious Calvin Stowe. Though other Beechers looked on in dismay, Harriet appreciated the efforts. The two sisters shared the unique problem of being a Beecher without having a minister’s platform to speak from.
Harriet had several times worked with Catharine in her schools. Catharine edited and arranged with Harper ¿ Brothers for publication of Harriet’s first book, The Mayflower, Sketches of the Descendants of the Pilgrims. In an introduction to those stories, Catharine wrote:

CATHARINE : Mrs. Stowe’s fiction has the ability to improve the manners by an acquaintance with the refinements of polished society, to increase a knowledge of the world by vivid pictures of people and things, to cultivate the taste by exhibitions of the beautiful, correct, and pure, to elevate the sentiments, to expand the generous and benevolent sympathies, and to cherish religious principles and pious aspirations.

NARRATOR : Now that Harriet Beecher Stowe was in the forefront of the anti-slavery movement, she found herself in odd company. William Lloyd Garrison had been outspoken and dogmatic, yet his paper The Liberator had great circulation. Harriet wrote a letter to the editor.

HARRIET : In regard to you, your paper, and in some measure your party, I am in an honest embarrassment. I sympathize with you fully in many of your positions. Others I consider erroneous, hurtful to liberty and the progress of humanity. Nevertheless, I believe you and those who support them to be honest and conscientious in your course and opinions. What I fear is that your paper will take from poor Uncle Tom his Bible, and give him nothing in its place.

GARRISON : I do not understand why the imputation is thrown upon The Liberator as tending to rob Uncle Tom of his Bible. All Christendom professes to believe in the inspiration of the volume, and at the same time all Christendom is by the ears as to its real teachings. Surely you would not have me disloyal to my conscience.

HARRIET : My objection is to the mode in which these things are handled in The Liberator in general tone and spirit. If your paper circulated only among those of disciplined and cultivated minds, skilled to separate truth from falsehood, I should feel less regret. But your name and benevolent labors have given your paper a circulation among the poor and lowly.

NARRATOR : In 1854, Stephen A. Douglas’s idea of squatter’s sovereignty displaced the Missouri Compromise—and Bleeding Kansas resulted, with pro-slavery bands of armed men from Missouri who went across the border, seized the legislature, and put in their own men by terrorism, thus officially carrying Kansas for slavery. Henry Ward Beecher and Edward Everett Hale, the son-in-law of Henry’s sister Mary, were among those gathering support for the stream of anti-slavery colonists from the North. When someone suggested that they send Bibles, Henry Beecher said:

HENRY : Sharpe’s rifles are a greater moral agency than the Bible there.

NARRATOR : Many of the rifles arrived in Kansas in crates marked ‘‘Bibles.’’ After that, all the rifles sent to Kansas became known as Beecher’s Bibles.
When the Hungarian patriot Louis Kossuth came to America amid great fervor, he spoke at Henry Ward Beecher’s Plymouth Church. And on the publication of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, fellow phrenologist Henry Ward Beecher called on Whitman. Both of them were city walkers, conversant with the shops, galleries, museums, piers. Whitman had originally intended his book to be accompanied with lectures, as ‘‘two co-expressions.’’ But unlike Beecher, Whitman had no crowds around him, except in the pages of his book.
William Beecher, by one year the eldest Beecher son, obtained a post in Toledo, Ohio, then a town of 1,800 people, in 1844, but he and a deacon battled each other at every turn. William was forced to sue for his salary—he won, but of course, being a Beecher, he had to resign.
His next post was to build a church out of nothing in Euclid, Ohio, at a tiny salary. After three years, he gave up. His last church was in North Brookfield, Massachusetts, where he was also postmaster.
After his book publication, Edward Beecher resigned from The Congregationalist in 1853, and then from his pastorate at the Salem Street Church.
Two years later, he published a very narrow book, The Papal Conspiracy Exposed, and went to Galesburg, Illinois, where he founded a new church. He also taught as a lecturer at Knox College. The Beecher house became a station on the Underground Railway, helped by a railroad conductor who lived just over his back fence. Edward also was enlisted into the women’s movement, accepting the presidency of a women’s suffrage convention in Springfield.
Harriet had written several chapters of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Edward’s study while visiting him and Katy. She also used the Alton Riot as the model for her second anti-slavery novel, Dred. Clayton is Edward Beecher, Father Dickinson is Elijah Lovejoy.
Critic James Russell Lowell commented on Mrs. Stowe’s anti-slavery novels.

LOWELL : It has always seemed to us that the anti-slavery element in the two former novels by Mrs. Stowe stood in the way of a full appreciation of her remarkable genius, at least in her own country. It was so easy to account for the unexampled popularity of Uncle Tom by attributing it to a cheap sympathy with sentimental philanthropy! As people began to recover from the first enchantment, they began also to resent it and to complain that a dose of that insane Garrison-root which takes the reason prisoner had been palmed upon them without their knowing it, and that their ordinary water-gruel of fiction, thinned with sentiment and thickened with moral, had been hocussed with the bewildering hasheesh of Abolition.
The secret of Mrs. Stowe’s power lay in that same genius by which the great successes in creative literature have always been achieved—the genius that instinctively goes right to the organic elements of human nature, whether under a white skin or a black, and which disregards as trivial the conventional and factitious notions which make so large a part both of our thinking and feeling. The creative faculty of Mrs. Stowe, like that of Cervantes and of Fielding, overpowered the narrow specialty of her design, and expanded a local and temporary theme with the cosmopolitanism of genius.

NARRATOR : And in a personal letter, he writes:

LOWELL : My dear Mrs. Stowe, I certainly did mean to write you about your story, but only to cry bravissima! with the rest of the world. You are one of the few persons lucky enough to be born with eyes in your head, that is, with something behind the eyes which makes them of value.
May I, a critic by profession, say the whole truth to a woman of genius? Yes?
In the first place, pay no regard to the advice of anybody. In the second place, pay a great deal to mine! My advice is to follow your own instincts—to stick to nature, and to avoid what people commonly call the Ideal. Don’t I feel it every day in this weary editorial mill of mine, that there are ten thousand people who can write Ideal things for one who can see, and feel, and reproduce nature and character? Let your moral take care of itself, and remember that an author’s writing-desk is something infinitely higher than a pulpit.