Status Updates From Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Sp...

Stowe did not live to see the Tiffany window, but Florida’s natural beauty was more than enough. “This glorious, budding, blossoming spring,” she wrote, brings “days when merely to breathe and be is to be blessed. I love to have a day of mere existence.”

I treasure days like that!

… “hands on.” She gathered flowers and arranged them in the church: “a cross of blood red phlox over the pulpit — a cross of fair white roses & other flowers in front & a bower of palmetto leaves & various flowers” at the lectern. By using flowers devotionally, Stowe merged nature and faith.

Just as Harriet cultivated her gardens, she tended Christian hope, keeping the holy seasons and festivals of the church year. Harriet wrote to her son Charley about Holy Week and Easter in the little church in Mandarin, Florida, where her spiritual practice was …

Stowe saw Christianity losing its power to shape public opinion; it seemed that the press had replaced the pulpit. No longer did people rely on preachers to tell them the news or make meaning of it. For that they relied on newspapers and magazines — which spewed more information than readers could absorb. Information overload, it seems, is not new.

There is a redeeming power in being beloved, wrote Stowe, but many human beings “have never known what it is to be beloved.” Theology should not alienate people from God. It should help them experience God’s love. And to know oneself as beloved by God is to be saved.45

All great social changes pass through three stages: ridicule, discussion, and acceptance, according to Mill. Stowe agreed that challengers of male authority were “often ridiculed as the Women’s Rights party.” Stowe hoped that the ridicule stage was passing and that Americans were getting ready for serious discussion of women’s rights.

In the long run, Stowe saw education as the key to the South’s future. Blacks needed education and so did whites, though for different reasons. Southern whites needed to un-learn their deeply embedded sense of racial superiority. “The only way to save the negro is to educate the white,” Stowe declared, by teaching them to treat blacks as free people with rights.

But no victory could ease the heartbreak caused by Lincoln’s death. “The kind, hard hand, that held the helm so steadily in the … storm [was] stricken down just as we entered port,” Stowe wrote.

Charles wrote, all “revolved in a kind of vortex during the day, a kind of general maelstrom of goods and chattels, the center of which was Hatty’s room, the vortex and outer suction, all London. Amen.”

So I’ve inherited this ‘maelstrom’ from the Beechers. I wish I had inherited Hattie’s writing ability.

Stowe’s stay in London was almost over, and it was time to pack her things. Harriet’s room looked like a tornado had passed through. “Books, pamphlets, dresses, letters, pictures, cameos, bracelets, brooches, combs, presents, notes, boxes, trunks, carpetbags, chambermaids,” Charles wrote

People are just as likely to elevate “coarse, bare, and disagreeable adjuncts of religion” as they are to venerate “beautiful and agreeable ones.” Original sin is the human problem, and it remains after all the statues are torn down.

People can make idols out of anything, even the hatchet that chops down the idols, Stowe said. Instead of aiming “an axe at the altar” the minister should have “aimed a sermon at the heart.”22 Harriet observed that “when human nature is denied beautiful idols, it will go after ugly ones.”

Stowe was now famous, but she was silent before the crowds because women were not supposed to speak in public — except to address an all-female group. Even in the British anti-slavery slavery movement, only a few Quaker women dared speak to mixed groups. When Stowe visited England and Scotland, her husband spoke for her.