Compassion and Complexity: the Prophetic Voice of Harriet Beecher Stowe

In preparation for writing this post, I spent a quiet morning in “Harriet’s Writing Room” in the Stowe House here in Brunswick, Maine, where Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

As I sat in the room and looked at her portrait, I thought about how grief at the death of her 18-month-old son had been part of the impetus for writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin, as she acknowledged in a letter to a friend. “It was at his dying bed and at his grave that I learned what a poor slave mother may feel when her child is torn away from her….I felt I could never be consoled unless this crushing of my own heart might enable me to work out some great good to others. I allude to this here because I have often felt that much that is in that book had its root in the awful scenes and bitter sorrow of that summer.”

Stowe made clear that the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was part of what compelled her to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but it was the “crushing” power of maternal grief that deepened her portrayal of the brutality of slavery and informed her compassionate identification with her characters. In her concluding comments, she directly addresses her readers: “I beseech you, pity the mother who has all your affections, and not one legal right to protect, guide, or educate the child of her bosom, … pity those mothers who are constantly made childless by the American slave trade.” The prophetic power of her book galvanized Northern anti-slavery sentiment; Abraham Lincoln is said to credit Uncle Tom’s Cabin with helping start the Civil War.

I know that controversy surrounds Harriet Beecher Stowe because, although she named the sin of slavery and embraced the humanity of those who were enslaved, she failed to recognize their equality. In spite of this failure, it seems to me that from her place and time, what she did accomplish is worth celebrating. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, did, after all, as she hoped, “work out some great good for others” in its exposure of the appalling atrocities of chattel slavery. Out of compassion arising from grief, grounded in her Christian faith, Stowe fashioned a prophetic book that touched the hearts of millions and changed the course of history.

And I am reminded that we continue to venerate those Church Fathers who, because of their own time and place, were deeply anti-Semitic. Human beings are complex mixes, and while we might regret [even judge] other people’s prejudices, I’m aware that even after co-facilitating five Sacred Ground circles on racial justice, I still bump into ingrained racial stereotyping, or find myself responding to events from the vantage point of my own white privilege.

I admit to a soft spot in my heart for Harriet Beecher Stowe. I’ve worked in pediatric hospice and with incarcerated mothers separated from their children; my own stepdaughter died of cancer the year she should have started college. I’ve witnessed and experienced the myriad ways people deal with parental grief, awed by their strength and courage. So as I sat in that quiet Writing Room, I once again thought about how it was the loss of a child that spurred Stowe to action on behalf of those she perceived as “other.” And I thought of how much of the passion behind the quest for racial justice in our own time comes in response to the violence perpetrated against Black children. I wonder, if Harriet Beecher Stowe were alive today, might she rephrase her closing words to say: “…pity those mothers who are constantly made childless by ongoing systemic racism in America”? If she lived now, in our time in history, I like to hope that she would be on the frontlines of Black Lives Matter.

As I said good-by to her portrait and closed the door behind me to go home, my final thought was that God accepts even our imperfect offerings, especially when they are offered in love, and that what Stowe offered the country in Uncle Tom’s Cabin was an act of love that furthered the cause of freedom.