by Nancy Koester William
B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids, Mich. 371 pages
The Antebellum Period of the 1840s and 50s in the U.S. saw a great literary flowering over which some of the most revered names in American letters presided: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne. There were also a number of less brilliant figures who were, nonetheless, equally or even better known at the time, such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Melville quipped in “Moby-Dick” (1851) that if an author wanted to write a great book he had to pick a big subject. Yet, strangely, the towering literary giants of the age all shied away from the biggest subject of them all — slavery.
It was left to a literary newcomer, the wife of an obscure Old Testament professor and the mother of six, to write the blockbuster novel that would propel the abolitionist movement from the radical fringe of American life into the broad mainstream of the nation’s culture and politics.
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” (1851) was touted as “the story of the age” and is now universally acclaimed as a hugely influential social novel. Though sometimes dismissed as a popular rather than a literary work, Stowe’s novel gave us such celebrated fictional characters as Uncle Tom, Little Eva, Topsy and Simon Legree. She put a moral spotlight on the South’s “peculiar institution” while, at the same time, calling into question the complicity of America’s Christian leadership — both North and South — in the crime of slavery. Upon meeting the diminutive Stowe in 1862, Abraham Lincoln teased, “So you are the little woman who made this big war.”
Nancy Koester’s superb biography portraits Stowe in all her varying colors, from the fiery hues of the abolionist reformer to the soft pastels of the fully engaged mother and wife. Her one fault was gullibility, which Koester observes in Stowe’s dabbling in spiritualism following the death of a son and in her unquestioning support of her famous brother, Henry Ward Beecher, during the sensational sex scandal in the 1870s that nearly wreaked his career.
The major theme of Koester’s book, as denoted in the subtitle, is Stowe’s spiritual journey. She was of course a Beecher, arguably the most famous Christian family in 19th century America; and her father, Lyman Beecher, was one of the great proponents of New England Calvinism. Stowe loved and admired her father, but over time she slowly drifted away from his austere religious practices and rigorous theology. Her first clear sign of rebellion was the purchasing of a Christmas tree in 1854. Eventually she rejected eternal punishment and wrote novels set in New England that showed that one could still be a Christian without embracing the severities of Puritanism.
After her Calvinist husband retired from Andover Seminary and as the Civil War was winding down, Stowe joined the Episcopal Church. Its pre-Reformation traditions appealed to her need for a more sensuous religion. Yet she would never completely abandon the Puritan traditions of her beloved New England, to which — like Hawthorne — she was both attracted and repelled.
MICHAEL PARKER is director of graduate studies and professor of church history at Evangelical Theological Seminary in Cairo, Egypt.
