Harriet Beecher Stowe : a life by Hedrick Joan D. 1944-

Author:Hedrick, Joan D., 1944-
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 1811-1896, Women and literature, Authors, American, Abolitionists
Publisher: New York : Oxford University Press
Published: 1994-03-13T16:00:00+00:00

Having humbly submitted to Garrison's discipline, she reproached him for his continuing feud with Frederick Douglass. She had met with Douglass and formed an impression "far more satisfactory than I had imagined," she hastened to tell Garrison. "You speak of him as an apostate," she chided him. "Where is this work of excommunication to end—Is there but one true anti slavery church & all others infidels? & who shall declare which it is?"^' In February 1854 she wrote Garrison, "I am increasingly anxious that all who hate slaver}' be united if wot, in form, at least in fact. —Unity in difference. Our field lies in the church as yet. I differ from you as to what may be done & hoped there."^^

In the winter of 1853—1854 she organized, in concert with Garrison, a Boston antislavery lecture series, believing that this was an effective way to cultivate into convictions "the popular impressions . . . produced by the reading and acting of Uncle Tom's Cabin."^^ She proposed to pay an honorarium of $25 for each speaker and to support the series up to the amount of $200. She hoped to involve speakers of "catholic" views "so far as shades of anti-slavery sentiment are concerned, embracing such as are willing to take the ground that slavery is a sin," but she admitted that her list was heavy on orthodox clergymen *'who had not spoken before in public on the subject." It was also weighted with two names whose antislavery reputations needed polishing: Calvin Stowe and Lyman Beecher. Her intentions were good, but her antislavery activity never moved far from the status of a family project.^^ She invested time as well as money in this scheme, wxiting to speakers and making sure that the Anti-Slavery Office was doing its part to publicize the lectures. By the spring of 1854, however, the excitement over the Kansas-Nebraska Act eclipsed this rather mild enterprise, and attendance at the lectures was sparse.'''* As the events of "bleeding Kansas" and John Brown's raid moved the nation closer to civil war, both Stowe's patience with the Protestant clergy and Garrison's pacifism were sorely tested.

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