American Experience; The Abolitionists; Interview with Joan D. Hedrick, part 1 of 3

Um, so we're, uh, as I think, you know, picking the story up, uh, shortly after, how you moved to Cincinnati. Um, but I wonder if, first, you would tell me what it was like growing up in the beach or home, uh, you know, most of the family would like to come on and stuff. Harry, but you still grew up in an intensely intellectual and religious family where they were constantly debating, uh, the, the latest, um, political issues, theological issues. So she from a, a, a young age was exposed to an informal education that was quite extraordinary. And within that household, uh, she was considered rather odd, eccentric, uh, and her father, uh, once remarked that, uh, he would give $100 if, if Harry were a boy and Henry were a girl. And he, he could see that, uh, she really had an extraordinary intellect. She, uh, and, uh, oh, feel free, by the way, if you were leaning on the table, we're just

going to have whoever you want to go back to. Um, uh, now tell me, tell me a bit more about her father, who, who was live in nature. Live in nature was one of the most famous clergymen of the, uh, pre-civil war period. He was, uh, a great leader of revivals. He was trying to bring about the, the millennium by bringing souls to Christ. And he was also very deeply involved in social and political issues. As many, uh, preachers of the time were because religion and politics at that time were very closely melded, especially for evangelical preachers. Um, and they were mainly, uh, in a very progressive, uh, place in terms of the issues they preached against, um, in temperance against slavery. Um, Lyman Beecher's first, um, sermon that brought him to national prominence was against the aristocratic practice of dueling, which he thought was just inappropriate

in Republican America. Uh, so he took on a lot of the big issues of the day. This is, uh, in some ways, the story is impudent for religion and our characters have different movements backgrounds. Could you tell me about, uh, Harrod State? All of the Beecher children were under intense pressure from their father to have a conversion experience, which was the, the gold standard of, of spiritual development in this Calvinist time in, uh, the United States. Harrod had a, a kind of gentle one after one of her father's sermons when she was 13. She went to him and said that, uh, I, I, I have come to, to Jesus Christ. It wasn't the kind of cataclysmic experience that, that one, uh, expected. And in her, uh, her later years and her 30s, she had what she sought of as a kind of second

birth where she really had the, the much more passionate, uh, religious experience, which I think, uh, was important to her development, both literally and spiritually. With, um, in a film, we'll be talking a bit about John Brown's Calvin, uh, and, uh, what was, you know, what was the essence of Harriet Beecher's, uh, kind of, the view of God and his visual and the world? Harriet grew up with a rather rigorous image of, of God. The Calvinist God she grew up with was rather judgmental. Uh, in Calvinism, it was predetermined whether you were going to go to heaven or hell. And if you didn't have a, a conversion experience, it was clear that you were going to go to hell. She grew out of that as she got older, mainly through her experiences as a mother because she didn't believe that

any God that she could embrace would have such a harsh view and would just throw children on the trash heap of eternity because they hadn't lived long enough to have a conversion experience. So she developed a much milder form of Calvinism as her brother Henry did too. It's the way the culture was moving. Good. Yeah. As bothering me too! Thank you. Thank you. I know, it's out of the way. Yes. So, in 1833, after she went to Cincinnati, she takes trip to Kentucky, and how, her first and, I'm not saying the only time, it was in a slight state, how was she effected for

the experience? She went to Kentucky for three days in 1833. It was the only time she was in the South. She doesn't write about it at the time, so it's hard to gauge how it affected her, but she did see plantation slavery there. And later on, she wrote that, after she wrote Uncle Tom's cabin, that that experience informed her understanding of it, and that the Shelby's, who are the kindest master and mistress in Uncle Tom's cabin, were loosely modeled on what she saw in Kentucky. There's not a lot of contemporary, as you mentioned, on the phone, because she kind of writes about it as if it's the master's moment, a little bit, seeing the slave girl in the church and so on. Did that seem like post-later rationalization? I'm not, how are you talking about the Kentucky experience?

That's right, yeah. She, I'm not familiar with this, she wrote about seeing the little slave girl. Oh, it's fine, we don't have to, but it's almost a vision that she remembers of a slave girl. Oh, yeah, it's coming back, yes, yes, yes, yes. I suspect that she embroidered her memories later on a bit. We altered. So a couple of years later, since then, she's in Cincinnati when there's all the South of Montana at the mosque and so on in 36. What, how did she respond to the mosque and to that end right? Harriet had not been involved in anti-slavery activity until 1836, when riots erupted in Cincinnati. It was really a free speech issue. There was an editor, James Bernie, who was publishing an anti-slavery newspaper and

the Cincinnatians didn't like it and were determined to shut it down so they broke into his press and threw it in the river. And got up a mob to run him out of town and Stowe was very upset at this shutting down a free speech and actually wrote a little editorial for the newspaper under an assumed name where she basically said, everybody likes a mob when it runs in their direction of opinion. But that's a mob could go against you and they don't think about that. So she was really standing up for constitutional principles of free speech at that time. But anti-slavery activity was getting very, very pronounced just at this time that they moved to Cincinnati in the 1830s and it was a very formative time, I think, in her consciousness. What did she make of Theodore Weld in his ilk?

She would have been very aware of Theodore Weld because he was a student at Lane Seminary where her father was the head and in 1834 he organized 18 days of debate on the slavery issue. For nine days they debated the anti-slavery position and for nine days the colonizationist position and then the students voted in favor of anti-slavery which was a much more radical position at the time. So this was a huge disruption at the school as you can imagine and when the Board of Trustees shut down the student meetings, Weld led most of the students to Oberlin. So it was a defining moment for Lane Seminary. So Stowe, as Lyman Beecher's daughter, would have been very aware of this event and the

power of Theodore Weld as a leader. She seems to have been on the fence a little bit that she's becoming converted to something to be a reaction to Weld but on the other hand, Weld is disrupting the father and the house. So what is it that she's been converted to then? It's not a garicony in abolitionist way to take it. On the 1830s, it's hard to see Harry Beecher Stowe as an abolitionist. She was much less vocal on this issue than her brothers and sisters. Much less involved in it. She was really moved, I think, at a later point to action. But in the 1830s, her interests seemed to be more intellectual, more if somebody would take the anti-slavery side, she would take the other side just to see what would happen. She was interested in the debate.

And she was also becoming a writer at this time and she's obviously tremendously gifted. What kind of thing was she writing, was she doing? Her first book was a geography which was adopted actually widely in the Ohio schools. She had been a school teacher for a number of years and realized that there weren't good textbooks for children. And I think of that book as really the first national book that she wrote because she was really describing the whole country, which is, in essence, what she does in Uncle Tom's cabin, but from a political and social and cultural point of view. Before that, she had written stories and sketches for magazines. She was a member of a literary club in Cincinnati called the Semicolon Club, and the members wrote pieces anonymously and then they were read aloud at the Monday Night Gatherings and then freely criticized.

So she had that as a kind of apprenticeship for her early writing career. Right. Right. I laugh on the name. I know. It's very silly. It was the worst performance. That wasn't the worst part. Now I'd like to talk about Taric's book and wondered, can you describe the atmosphere of Cincinnati in the summer of 1949 at the High to the Epidemic? In 1849, a terrible cholera epidemic struck Cincinnati. I knew disease. It was unknown in the western hemisphere until the first part of the 19th century. So it was particularly feared because it was new and because it was so deadly. And the epidemic of 49 killed 3,000 people in Cincinnati. And Stowe's six child, Samuel Charles, was one of those who got cholera.

And Harriet remarked in a letter to her husband who was out of town that she had very little hope. Only that he might die soon because there was no cure for it. And it was a terrible disease. You lost all the fluids in your body, you were wrecked by convulsions. And there was nothing that anybody could do. I wanted to really look at this episode. Do you know how she responded to the epidemic before it struck her home? I get the impression that it was something that people would stay in the core of her in town. I don't remember about that. You know, I was going to be like, yeah. The most people of color epidemic generally stayed in the core more closely.

So she tried to, she's alone in her husband's out of town. She's trying to maintain a normal life and presumably keeping her children close to home and stuff. I'm just trying to spin that sound. Spin that out a little bit. Well, cholera tended to strike the very old and the very young. Those who were most vulnerable and the very poor who were also vulnerable. And Cincinnati was not a very healthy town. It had been built rapidly. It was a boom town. It had been built without proper drainage. So when the rains came, the water built up in the streets. And the city's idea of garbage collection was to pile it all in the middle of the streets and let the pigs eat it. And a lot of pigs in Cincinnati, it was known as pork opalus. It was a big hog slaughtering industry there. And of course, there were horses and carriages going down the streets.

And when the dog days of July and August came, it was a perfect breeding ground for cholera. And it swept through the city. Now, we're often told that families in the 19th century and previously were accustomed to these and children expected to lose children. In the 19th century, because childhood diseases were not under control, losing a child was one of the most common and profound events of family life. And there are instances of families not even naming children until they got to a certain age. And they believed that they were going to survive. That was beginning to change in the 1840s and 50s. And you begin to see a more sentimental attachment in the part of parents for children developing.

And Harriet wrote such glowing praise of Charlie that her husband was actually disturbed by it. She said she never had such an easy time with a baby. And indeed, it was the first baby she was able to nurse herself. The other children were sent into the city to a wet nurse. So she developed an intense bond with Charlie. She called him her summer child. So to lose him was a very profound loss for her. It's a beautiful expression. Oh, yes. Yes, thank you. Is that all right? It's not poking up or anything? And I wonder if, again, you touched on it. Yes, if you could put it in that household as Charlie's dying. The color of it wasn't a quick and painful step.

I understand. It was extremely difficult for Harriet to watch as her child slowly died before her eyes. Because he was so healthy, he lasted three days before he died. And she was able to do nothing except sit by his side and pray that he might die soon. And she later wrote that there were circumstances of such great bitterness about the manner of his death. That she didn't think she could ever be reconciled for it unless his death allows her to do some great good to others. And she later wrote that losing Charlie made her understand what the slave woman felt when her child was taken away at the auction block. And this was a very profound catalyst for the writing of Uncle Tom's cabin. Thank you.

And on the phone you were saying that this was also that that response to some good had to come in this tragedy kind of place in her religious background as well. In the Calvinist scheme of things, if God sent you suffering, it was because he loved you and he wanted to teach you something. Therefore, it was your responsibility to learn from the affliction. They even had a phrase for it to improve the affliction. So in addition to grieving for a child who had died, there was this Calvinist expectation that he would somehow make something good of it. And the writing of Uncle Tom's cabin was Harriet's way of improving that affliction of making her baby short-life mean something.

And you mentioned in your book that the twin engines of Uncle Tom's cabin were that stayed in grief and also a white hot anger. The year after Charlie died, Congress passed the fugitive slave law which made it illegal for northerners to aid slaves who were fleeing their masters. And this resulted in many abuses of the law such as kidnapping black people who had been free for many years or maybe always free and selling them for a good amount of money to the masters in the south. And still was absolutely enraged by this. And one of the catalysts for writing Uncle Tom's cabin was to urge her readers to disobey what she took to be a very un-Christian and un-American law.

So she was really fueled by the grief for her baby but this anger that this could happen. And I suspect who perhaps angered a Calvinist God too, that she could not express that way but she could channel politically. Now what she hadn't written for some time at this point. She gets to Maine and what were the circumstances in her home at that point. She's had another baby or her sister's writing to her to write a book and do something about this. What were her circumstances at home?

Calvin Stowe had taken a job at Bowden which meant that they moved to Brunswick, Maine in 1850. Harriet was expecting her seventh child who was born soon after they arrived named Charlie after the baby who had died. Leaving Cincinnati, I think, allowed her to look back at those 18 years there and to process that experience of the slave riots, Charlie's death, the fusion of slave law, and it all came together in a vision that she had in the church there in Brunswick. At the communion service, she saw, instead of Christ on the cross, an image of a slave being whipped. And she went home and wrote the ending of Uncle Tom's cabin when Uncle Tom dies. And when she read it to her family, they were all crying and they said, Mommy, you've got to write the rest of the story. So that was the beginning of the book. It sounds like she was almost overwhelmed. She writes back to her sister, saying, if I was a baby sleeping with me, I can't do this, but it's nice to know that people of her caliber have the same problems.

I guess because she, you know, one of the reasons that she had written for so many years was just that she had been over with all of us. That's right. That's right. The 1840s were a very difficult decade for her. She had many children very close together. She was sick a lot of the time, partly from the medical treatments of the day, which included mercury pills, which made her lose the use of her hands. So, of course, she couldn't write. They were difficult years. So, coming to Brunswick felt to her like a kind of rebirth, I think. She loved the cold weather. After all that damp weather and Cincinnati, she liked that briskness. She was after all a New Englander. And I think getting back to New England was very healthy for her.

Is there an aside, was she still unwilling in 49 when the color epidemic struck? Or had she, had she, yeah? She had gotten healthier because she went to a water cure in Vermont for a couple of years in 46, I think it was. That's actually where Calvin was when Charlie died. They discovered the water cure, which more than anything else got overburdened mothers away from their large families of demanding children. And gave them a rest. That's all they needed. And lots of cold water to drink. And freed them from all those medical treatments that were making them sick. So, she was much healthier when she went to Brunswick as a result of that. And she became a devotee of the water cure and of healthy eating and no medicine, the homeopathic approach to health. That's so interesting. I knew the water aspect of it was rising, baby sitting aspect of it was essential. That's very important.

I, of course, touched on various facets of this question, just to hit it on the head. Why didn't Harry decide to write an anti-slapy novel? There were really two catalysts. One was personal and one was public and political. In 1849, the death of her baby Charlie made her understand the losses of slave parents who had their children taken away. And then in 1850, the fugitive slave law, which made a fugitive slave illegal, brought slavery home to the doorstep of northerners who before this could say, well, we don't like slavery. But that's the South peculiar institution. We can't do anything about it. Now they had to decide what they would do if a slave came knocking on their door for aid. So it made it a crisis of conscience for the North and still felt that very deeply and wrote to increase that anxiety on the part of her readers.

But you see, increasing anxiety on part of her readers, you also mentioned that she was deliberately playing on the hard strings of white pants that her experience of losing her child is very much a powerful tool in the book. That's right. She knew that many of her white readers had lost children and she deliberately attempts to link the grief she felt for Charlie to the grief she knew many of her readers would feel for their children. And then to have them link that to the way slave parents felt when their children were taken away at the auction block. She deliberately does that in the chapter on Senator and Mrs. Bird who have lost a child. Eliza comes to their door running away from slavery with her boy Harry.

And in the process of that conversation with her Mrs. Bird opens the drawer that has her babies clothes that she saved after he died and gives them to Eliza for Harry. It's a wonderful moment where a white parent makes that connection. And of course, Stowe milks it for all its worth makes Mr. Bird a senator who has been all the while in Washington urging his colleagues to more and more strenuous measures to catch fugitive slaves. But she says that he had never thought that a fugitive slave might be a little boy like the one wearing his boys little cap. So she really milks it for all the sentimental energy she can get out of it. But also really puts together the moral values of the 19th century in family, in children, in Christian care of one another in democratic principles of this country. She just brings it all together to make the contradictions between that law and what everybody commonly believed very, very uncomfortable.

And it seems to that part of the geniuses is that each of the characters and plots in that story invest a different type of northerner and senator in the story that I can relate to this situation or this situation that she plays that you know why, why, why did she succeed where 20 years in all persuasion had failed. Sensibilities of her readers who liked entertainment and she was also very tuned into popular culture. She puts so long she puts elements of so many entertainments that her audience would have known such as the minstrel show in her book but then turns it to her own political purposes. So she gets behind her readers defenses and is able to persuade them of anti-slavery principles that they never would have listened to if they had been approached head on and really she does it by creating very winning black characters that the reader gets invested in.

When Eliza crossed the Ohio River with Harry fleeing from the slave catchers and reached the other side it was said that when the novel was put on stage at the National Theatre in New York there was not one dry eye when Eliza reached the other side of the river and still knew that if she could get that response from her readers she didn't need to make arguments about slavery. She already and convinced them of the subjectivity of black people and thus revolutionized their consciousness and made slavery something that was then intolerable. She described it as painting pictures. Sure. Sure.