This Day in Religious History (Death of Henry Ward Beecher, Brooklyn Abolitionist Preacher)

Mar. 8, 1887—Two days after suffering a stroke, the charismatic Congregationalist minister Henry Ward Beecher died in his sleep at age 73. 

It was an uncharacteristically quiet end to a life of striving and strife, particularly from his Brooklyn pulpit, where for four decades he had moved thousands of listeners by denouncing slavery and other forms of American racism, paying tribute to a Christian god of love—and enduring the suspicions of his congregation and tabloid readers over an alleged affair with a married parishioner.

Several months ago, while walking through Brooklyn Heights, I had hoped to take a photo of a striking statue of Beecher by Gutzon Borglum (sculptor of Mount Rushmore) at the religious institution the preacher founded, Plymouth Church. But, because there was no easy access to it because of the high courtyard fence blocking the way, I’ve decided to get closer to him through his words rather than an image.

And what words they were—all the more extraordinary for being delivered extemporaneously, then transcribed by stenographers. Each Sunday, as many as 2,500 people, often coming over from Manhattan by Brooklyn Ferry, crowded into the church for the spectacle of the long-haired Beecher doing something unexpected.

It could involve Beecher, unlike his Calvinist minister father, Lyman Beecher (who sired six other sons who, like Henry and their father, became preachers), speaking of a benevolent God, nudging the axis of Protestant rhetoric from a theology of punishment to one of forgiveness and love. Or it could involve Beecher deciding, like his equally abolitionist sister Harriet Beecher Stowe, to provoke slaveholders—in his case, by holding a mock auction of a nine-year-old slave girl in 1860.

President James Buchanan’s proclamation of a “National Day of Fasting” on Jan. 4, 1861, as the secession movement swept the South, provoked “Peace, Be Still,” one of Beecher’s most astonishing bursts of oratory. Why was the country “observing a “day of humiliation,” he asked? It was for “the strangest reason the world ever heard,” he noted: because, with the rise of abolitionist sentiment, “the spirit of liberty has so increased and strengthened among us, that the Government is in danger of being overthrown!”

While pointing out the presence of “the most alarming and most fertile cause of national sin—slavery” in the South, Beecher refused to let the North off the hook, noting that, because it “loved money, and that quiet which befits industry and commerce,” the region had allowed the institution to spread even though, when the Constitution was written in 1787, it was framed “only to give oppression time to die decently.”

Nor was he done yet. Still in the same sermon, he castigated as well America’s policy toward Mexicans and Native-Americans (“What must be the nature of that Christianization which makes this Republic a most dangerous neighbor to nations weaker than ourselves?”).

When he wasn’t bitterly criticizing the “peculiar institution,” Beecher was, together with William Ellery Channing and Theodore Parker, part of a liberal theological movement that advocated for God’s love with depths of eloquence. “Religion is in the man, or it is not anywhere,” Beecher took to saying. 

In the 1870s, Beecher received attention of an unwelcome kind when friend and parishioner Theodore Tilton accused him of improper relations with his wife. His charm and exuberance were such that women were continually falling in love with him, making him a constant object of gossip and, among husbands, jealousy, whether or not he acted on temptation. The adultery trial that followed provided newspaper fodder (some say the coverage exceeded that accorded to the Civil War) before ending in a hung jury. The congregation of Plymouth Church absolved Beecher of wrongdoing, but a cloud of scandal lingered on him to his death, and even beyond.

 
Nevertheless, Beecher remains an important figure in American religious history. He helped establish that politics was a right and proper subject for the pulpit.  Moreover, biographer Debby Applegate, in The Most Famous Man in America, credits him with putting progressive evangelicalism and a gospel of love, happiness and self-fulfillment at the center of modern American Christianity, in a pronounced shift from its dour Puritan origins. 

This Day in Theater History (‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ Adapted for Stage)

August 24, 1852—Theater producers, in the 19^th century, as much as now, knew a good property when they saw one, and by the summer of 1852 there may few as hot as Uncle Tom’s Cabin. With Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel about slavery causing a firestorm of controversy, interest would soar if the audience could see a play based on it.

And so, Charles Taylor, an English-born actor who had made a specialty of adapting famous novels to the stage, set to work. It was, he later admitted, a pretty hasty job—so much so that two of the novel’s best-loved characters, Topsy and Eva, never made it to the stage at all. Almost as bad, the bloodhounds pursuing Eliza across the ice were not depicted through real canines but, according to 20th century critic George Jean Nathan, "through the howling larnyx of one Joe Mitchell, a stagehand." 

It didn’t matter. The reach of the abolitionist novel was broadened when it was adapted for Purdy’s National Theatre in Chatham Street in New York. It was on its way to becoming the most popular stage play of its era.

Part of the reason the novel was so successful was that everybody took a crack at it--sort of similar to the situation that obtains today around Christmastime, when, it seems, every theater company in the nation stages A Christmas Carol, only in Stowe's case it was all year round.. Not one of these productions was authorized by Mrs. Stowe herself. Indeed, for producers and directors of the time, the thought of authorization or copyright was a joke.  The likes of Charles Dickens (himself almost unsurpassed as a theater buff) may have howled about writers’ royalties, but novelists such as himself and Mrs. Stowe could do little about it—at least, until the United States finally got around to passing a copyright act in 1891.

Taylor became something of an old hand at adapting Stowe, as he would, four years later, adapt another work of hers, Dred: A Tale of the Dismal Swamp. But he would soon be competing with other, more audience-appealing versions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

The one that won the most acclaim was a six-act version by George L. Aiken that began as a 100-performance run in Troy, N.Y., before coming to Purdy’s, where it made an even bigger splash, with 325 performances.

The impetus for the Aiken play was the desire for a vehicle for a child actress. Four-year-old Cordelia Howard had been stealing the show right from under her parents, Caroline and George C. Howard, in their production of a temperance drama, The Drunkard. Rather than displaying jealousy of their child, the Howard parents decided to milk her box-office appeal for all it was worth, and prevailed upon their cousin Aiken to adapt to the stage a novel in which a child also figured prominently: Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

The spotlighting of a child was crucial to the reception of the play. In his excellent novel of New York’s 1863 Draft Riots, Banished Children of Eve, Peter Quinn, through the consciousness of "Eliza," an actress in one of the later shows, demonstrates that, though Stowe’s understanding of African-Americans was extremely limited, she had hit upon a plot element with universal appeal: the death of a child:

“It wasn’t something she learned about through reading or conversation. Here was the central event of the play, the mystical chord that resounded through the audience. Slavery and the black man remained an abstraction for most, a white man in burnt cock serving as a summation. But the dead child was everywhere, in the past, the present, the future, cholera, scarlet fever, typhoid, a continual slaughter of the innocents.”

The Howards would go on to tour with Aiken’s play for 35 years. But it was the New York production that made the biggest impact in how dramas were presented. Before its premiere, no stage property was considered complete without another bit of theatrical entertainment, such as an “afterpiece” or a ballet. But the length of Uncle Tom’s Cabin was such, the Howards insisted, that any other property tacked onto it would only overstrain the audience.

The management of Purdy’s protested, but to no avail. The show’s nearly year-long engagement at the theater proved the Howards were correct. Thus was the concept of one-play entertainment in the United States born.

In the essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel” in his 1955 collection Notes of a Native Son, James Baldwin noted Stowe’s distinct lack of gifts as a fiction writer: “She was not so much a novelist as an impassioned pamphleteer; her book was not intended to do anything more than prove that slavery was wrong; was, in fact, perfectly horrible. This makes material for a pamphlet but it is hardly enough for a novel.”

But Stowe’s one-dimensional, over-the-top denunciation of slavery made her novel ideal as melodrama, the predominant American theatrical mode up to the 1920s. The presentation of good and evil in vivid colors, and the inevitable triumph of good, reassured audiences, despite a rapidly changing world, that the values with which they grew up endured, all appearances to the contrary.

The sheer theatricality of the show helped, too. Aiken and the Howards fixed that problem of the bloodhounds very well indeed in their version. Eventually, six real bloodhounds pursued Eliza across the icy floes in their production.

As I wrote, the one person who didn’t make money off  the many theatrical versions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin was Stowe herself. She could have used it. Her husband Calvin was a respected minister who, for all his gifts as a scholar, didn’t make much to support the family. Harriet’s novels helped gain the money to raise their seven children. 

(The accompanying photo from a 1901 stage production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin features Uncle Tom at the whipping post.)

This Day in Literary History (Stowe's “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” Creates Firestorm)

March 20, 1852—Written by a daughter, sister and wife of ministers, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe, was published in book form in two volumes, becoming a nationwide sensation—and bringing North and South one step closer to war—because of its author’s moral outrage over slavery.

The novel drew considerable attention even while serialized in an abolitionist newspaper, The National Era. Faced with a looming publisher’s deadline, the author used her three daughters to help transcribe and finish her work.

The immediate impetus for the book was the Fugitive Slave Act, which Stowe despised for making Northerners complicit in the recovery and return of captured slaves. For a key element of the novel—a slave mother’s grief when her child is sold—Stowe channeled her own emotions after losing her 18-month-old boy Charlie in 1849 to cholera.

Explaining why she felt compelled to write her most famous book, Stowe explained: "I wrote what I did because as a woman, as a mother, I was oppressed and broken-hearted with the sorrows and injustice I saw, because as a Christian I felt the dishonor to Christianity -because as a lover of my country, I trembled at the coming day of wrath."

It took less than a decade, but eventually she did get to experience that “coming day of wrath.” In 1862, when she finally had the chance to meet an anti-slavery President, Abraham Lincoln, towering over his diminutive guest, joked: “So you’re the little lady who wrote the book that started this great war.”

That “great war” soon took its toll on her own family. Already drinking heavily when he enlisted in the Union army, son Frederick became a full-fledged alcoholic after being badly wounded at Gettysburg. Rehabilitation—including stints in a sanitarium and moving to Florida, where he tried to manage a coffee plantation—ended badly. In 1871, after shipping out for the West Coast in a last-ditch attempt to save his life, Frederick disappeared, never to be seen again.

Stowe’s novel has experienced swings of opinion as extreme as any other work in American literature. In her own time, when it was not bringing down upon her head howls of execration from Southerners, her work was read over and over—selling more than 300,000 copies in the U.S. and over a million in Britain in its first year of publication. The fame of her narrative spread when it toured the country in countless stage adaptations (from which she gained not a nickel in royalties) as well as wallpapers and even songs about her character Little Eva.

By the middle of the 20th century, however, the phrase “Uncle Tom” had become shorthand for African-American too subservient to whites. Lending crucial support to this change was novelist and critic James Baldwin, whose Notes of a Native Son (1955) lashed out against Uncle Tom’s Cabin—what Baldwin acidly labeled “Everybody’s Protest Novel”—as “a very bad novel, having in its self-righteous, virtuous sentimentality, much in common with Little Women.”

A trenchant essayist, Baldwin was also far more subtle at characterization than Stowe. But sentimentality is not disabling in literature in and of itself—otherwise, how would Dickens have survived the modern turn from his unmistakable sentimental mode? It might also be argued that, if Stowe were not sentimental, she could not have otherwise have thrust Americans face to face with the reality of slavery.

With the rise of the women’s movement, greater respect has been given to Stowe and her artistic aspirations, in and out of literature. A year and a half ago, The Annotated “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” edited by Henry Louis Gates and Hollis Robbins, appeared to considerable acclaim.

Stowe wrote 30 books—about one a year—throughout her career, and they helped immensely in supplementing the income of her husband Calvin, a preacher who wrote one book over the course of his long lifetime, a scholarly tome on books of the Bible. She was also an enthusiastic painter. Her abiding sense of toleration, not just toward blacks but also groups such as Roman Catholics, has also won her deserved esteem, especially when placed in a time of virulent prejudice.

Twenty-one years after the publication of her most famous book, Stowe, Calvin and three of their daughters moved into a 17-room Victorian cottage in the Nook Farm community of Hartford, Connecticut. Her next-door neighbor was Mark Twain, author of the other 19th-century novel that most bitterly attacked slavery: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

On two occasions over the last few years I’ve taken guided tours of the Stowe house, now preserved as the Harrier Beecher Stowe Center. I came away with a greater appreciation for the multifaceted character and achievement of this pioneering novelist. The house not only contains furniture from the period (40% original to the home) but also first editions of her books and several paintings Stowe created.

I was also surprised to learn that she had collaborated with her sister Catharine on The American Woman’s Home, a precursor to Martha Stewart-style living advice, and that she practiced what she preached, including narrow, open shelves in the kitchen to allow her to use what she saw.