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Continuing Bonds with the Dead

Parental Grief and Nineteenth-Century American Authors

The University of Alabama Press

Hatty's Grief

Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Death of Charley

In the early years, America's frontier towns faced dire circumstances, not the least of which were contagious diseases like typhoid and cholera. Infant cities along rivers were suddenly teeming with people and the germs they carried, and they struggled to provide an infrastructure for all the new arrivals, including fresh, relatively pure water. Cholera first came to the Ohio Valley in 1832, evidently by way of the state's many new immigrants flowing down the riverways of the Ohio and Mississippi. The city of Cincinnati had very poor sewage systems, and as the rainwater ran through the streets, it accumulated the microbes from the garbage of city residents and the manure of horses, pigs, and other animals. Sewers became like open petri dishes, perfect for the rapid multiplication of germs — especially in the humid days of summer. Stagnant water, commonly found in the newly constructed canals of central Ohio, also festered disease. One result was widespread cholera infection among canal workers. Treatment for the disease before the Civil War was almost as bad as the illness, resulting often in mercury poisoning. And the ailment was not understood to be contagious. As a result, the river cities of America, including Cincinnati, were known to be places of serious health hazards, particularly in terms of infectious disease.

In 1833, when Calvin Stowe was preparing to move from his beloved New England to a new position at the Lane Seminary in Cincinnati, he realized that one of the greatest dangers in moving out West would be widespread contact with disease. He wrote to his wife Eliza, "in more senses than one we may take our lives in our hands when we go to Cincinnati." Calvin Stowe was correct: He was forced to delay his arrival at Lane because of a cholera epidemic. The next year, in summer 1834, the city was again burdened with a huge outbreak of cholera. It struck Lane Seminary. The wife of Lyman Beecher, president of Lane and one of America's most famous preachers, wrote the following sad account to her twenty-three-year-old daughter Harriet in August 1834: "nothing special occurred the ten days preceding your departure among ourselves, but the sickness in the city was dreadful, one hundred & more deaths in one week, & Edwards affecting letter came with the intelligence of the death of his second little boy, which I forwarded to Boston — next came the illness of our dear Mrs. Stowe. ... She was taken ill of the dysentery the very day you left." She was referring to Eliza Stowe, wife of Calvin, who seemed to recover, but soon enough she entered into her death throes, and died surrounded by family in August 1834.

Harriet Beecher arrived soon afterward and began the task of consoling her good friend Calvin in light of the loss of his wife Eliza. Harriet (known to friends and family as Hatty or Hattie) was gifted at this task of consolation. She knew Eliza well and understood the great loss Calvin had undergone. She also had excellent skills as a counselor of women and over the course of her lifetime wrote scores of letters of consolation to women near and far. According to her biographer, Harriet "pursued a self-conscious lay ministry to the bereaved and troubled." She had learned many of these counseling and pastoral techniques at the Hartford Female Seminary, which her sister Catherine had organized. Hatty resisted the urge of most ministers to scrutinize the spiritual state of the lost. Instead, she fully embraced the pain and confusion and anger that often follow the death of loved ones, as in this letter to one bereaved mother: "When the heartstrings are all suddenly cut, it is, I believe, a physical impossibility to feel faith or resignation; there is a revolt of the instinctive and animal system, and though we may submit to God it is rather by a constant painful effort than by a sweet attraction."

Calvin was greatly strengthened by the arrival and ministry of the young Harriet Beecher, and within a year of Eliza's death he was ready to proclaim his love for Hatty. In 1835 he wrote to her, "I thank God that he has given me a female friend to whom I can open my heart. There are some feelings which a man cannot exercise, and my heart cannot rest in masculine friendship alone. I must be within reach of woman's love, or my own feelings will suffocate me." In May of that year he wrote several more letters proclaiming his fondness for her: "My affection for you is no sudden caprice. ... It is of slow and natural growth, & true to its object as the needle to the pole star." He felt bonded to this new guiding light: "I have a sort of feeling of the inseparable as though my blood somehow circulated through your veins, and if you were to be torn from me I should bleed to death." Soon, in January 1836, they would make the formal vows of matrimony and begin their lives together — a union brought about to a large extent by the devastating effects of a cholera epidemic.

Calvin and Harriet produced seven children and suffered numerous further heartaches during a long union. Besides outliving three of the children born to her, Hatty also suffered at least two miscarriages. As theologian Serene Jones explains, the loss of "the hoped-for child" must necessarily include loss through miscarriages. Jones argues that we should become particularly sympathetic in the case of women who have suffered the death of their child within them, a trauma that turns the woman's body into a kind of "living grave." Trauma is "an event that continues, that persists in the present. Trauma is what does not go away. It persists in symptoms that live on in the body, in the intrusive fragments of memories that return. ... Trauma is what is not integrated in time; it is the difference between a closed and an open wound. Trauma is an open wound." Both of Stowe's miscarriages left their scars, and Hatty's extraordinary career continued to be marked by other similarly traumatic wounds. Many of her stories, arising from the "living grave" of her earthly memories of loss, famously depicted trauma as well.

The loss of a child was not the only traumatic experience during these early years of her marriage to Calvin. Her joyful and well-liked brother George also died under tragic circumstances, in June 1843. George had accompanied the Beecher family west to Ohio, when the patriarch Lyman Beecher brought his young brood with him to found Lane Seminary. George married and then set up his household in a town called Chillicothe. He was well known for the care with which he tended to his garden there: "George had just written exuberantly in a circular letter of his completed house and his wish that they would all come and see him that summer, including within enumeration of the flowers and fruits that he was cultivating." But evidently all was not well with George. One fine morning he went to market and then returned to work in his beloved garden. Then George evidently took a shotgun and blew a round into his head, to the great horror of his survivors.

Her brother's apparent suicide threw Hatty into a deep spiritual crisis. She wrote to another brother Thomas: "The sudden death of George shook my whole soul like an earthquake, and as in an earthquake we know not where the ground may open next so I felt an indistinct terror as a father, brothers, husband, might any or all sink next — these deep stunning agonies show us heart secrets before undreamed." She wrote a family circular letter to all of her siblings: "I woke up last night from a troubled dream about funeral processions and accidents and alarms — and it came slowly over me, that it was so indeed, that on earth I had no more that brother — that I never should see his face, or hear his voice or exchange a word with him again. ... Our circle has begun to break up." Again, it was a wound with teeth, and it left a mark of "indistinct terror" on her view of the world and its evils.

But what may have been the worst of these misfortunes (though by no means the last) began with the reappearance of the dreaded cholera, in the very hot summer of 1849. If anything, the epidemic of 1849 was even worse than earlier ones. Its most famous victim was in Tennessee, where it took the life of former president James Polk. Saint Louis, arguably hardest hit of all, lost at least 10 percent of its population that year to the disease: "Sextons, undertakers, even horses in St. Louis were exhausted in the Sisyphean task of removing and burying the dead." Cincinnati was also one of the hardest hit areas, claiming over eight thousand dead. The city had become so used to such outbreaks by midsummer that life continued almost as usual. Since most of the illness and death was confined to the poorer quarters of the city, populated mostly by African Americans and immigrants, families like the Stowes did not prepare as rigorously as they might have. But as the end of June approached, it became clear to most residents that this visit was an attack of unusual magnitude. Harriet wrote to Calvin on June 29 concerned about the "universal panic" gaining traction throughout Cincinnati: "Those who had talked confidently of the cholera being confined to the lower classes and those who were imprudent began to feel as did the magicians of old, 'This is the finger of God.'" Her reference is to Exodus 8:19, where the magicians describe to Pharaoh what they believe to be the source of the plagues, thus casting the cholera panic into biblical proportions. Earlier that year she had also invoked Exodus, in a letter to her sister Sarah Beecher: "it is all shoreless tideless hopeless unmitigated mud here — mud without hope or end — dreadful to look upon & like the Egyptian frogs it comes into our houses to our bed chambers and kneading troughs — and still the weather is cross and sour and baleful and everyone is sleepy and has the headache my own poor self among the number." Her mood is tied directly to the horrid weather as symbolized by mud — and the mud itself is seen as a living organism carrying the plague sent by God into the homes of the city's citizens, to judge those in the land of the living. A view of the cholera epidemics as a judgment of God was commonplace, as in the comments by the governor of New York State at about the same time: "an infinitely wise and just God has seen fit to employ pestilence as one means of scourging the human race for their sins, and it seems to be an appropriate one for the sins of uncleanliness," he proclaimed. Her brother Henry Ward later wrote that he remembered "very long sermons [proving] that the cholera did not depend on natural agencies, but that God held it in his hand, and dropped it down upon the world."

Henry's account stressed his misgivings with the Calvinist tendencies of his famous father. Lyman Beecher's version of Calvinist theology during Henry's and Hatty's childhood and young adulthood sought to develop a model society based on strict discipline and a "moral sense" enforced by the terror of an eternal Hell. From a Calvinist perspective, it was also typical to see pain and suffering as the natural wages of our sinful nature as fallen humans, and also as our faithful teacher in the way of all flesh. According to such a view, cholera was a just recompense for the rampant sins of newly sprawling urban areas, and since it struck mainly the poor and the destitute, it reflected particularly on their vices. Lyman Beecher's sermons represented for Henry and Hatty a version of old-school Calvinism that both came to regard as dark, unemotional, judgmental, and guilt ridden: "The monstrousness of a deity who allows the undeserved suffering of the innocent and who shows his love by wrath, the visceral conviction that the mass of men are irredeemably predestined to destruction, the gross popular abandonment to belief in miracles and special providences, and the final bind that man is responsible for his actions even though not free to determine them."

Harriet and her maverick brother Henry became important voices of protest against the severity of Calvinism, and both began searching for ways of mitigating "dark Calvinism's" extraordinarily painful emotional effects. This conflict comprises a common understanding of this era that emphasizes a "rejection of Calvinism," as seen for example in the ways some writers of fiction protested aspects of Calvinism such as predestination. But as Thomas J. Davis claims, these writers, such as Catharine Maria Sedgwick, tended to "adopt uncritically the negative attitudes toward Calvinism that were common in the nineteenth century." In fact, the religious changes at work during this era were far more complex than such an account can suggest, and additionally, a growing schism within Presbyterianism indicates how even the most Reformed denominations were debating the legacy of Calvin. For starters, as one historian sees it, "the term Calvinism is profoundly unhelpful. It was coined as a polemical tool for tarnishing the reputation of the Reformed, and it is of no real use to modern intellectual history ... so-called Calvinists were not those who look to Calvin as the major theological authority but rather those who look to the tradition of reformed confessions." Another agrees: "Calvinism became virtually synonymous in the minds of its critics with the enigma of predestination and the bondage of the will." In addition, some scholars of Calvinism argue that these tensions of the nineteenth century were inherent in Calvin's thought from the very beginning: "the deep division over religion and national identity did not originate with the New England Puritans, however much they exhibited the division. Rather, that ambivalence is at the root of the Calvinist tradition of which they were apart, going back to the founder, John Calvin himself. ... In many ways, American Puritanism exemplifies conflicting propensities within Calvin himself." Finally, as Charles Hodge, one of the great theologians of the era, proclaimed in 1851, these clashes certainly predate the Reformation by many centuries: "from an early period in the history of the church, there have been two great systems of doctrine in perpetual conflict. The one begins with God, the other with man. The one has for its object the vindication of the divine supremacy and sovereignty in the salvation of men; the other the rights of human nature."

Hodge labels these contesting parties the Augustinian and the Pelagian — a common vocabulary among educated Christians of the period, but one that unfortunately pits one system, fully and completely, against the other. Stowe's theological vision attempts a middle ground, and so in many ways remains highly dependent upon Calvinism. Rather than viewing her as merely a staunch critic of Reformed theology, as many critics do, we should recognize Stowe as a well-read and astute believer who is powerfully drawn to major aspects of Calvin's thought, while at the same time strongly critical of others. Mark Valeri writes, "Calvin modeled for his followers a highly disciplined moral method grounded in the Bible. His vision for social order was breathtakingly rigorous and demanding in such terms. Calvinists applied the Bible to everything." The same could be said for Stowe. The beauty of Calvinism remained very real to her and was evident in many of her own remarks. For example, she writes, "Calvinism, in its essential features, will never cease from the earth, because the great fundamental facts of nature are Calvinistic, and men with strong minds and wills always discover it." Peter J. Thuesen ingeniously recognizes Stowe's idealizing of aspects of Calvinism as suggestive of famous concepts in the work of sociologist Max Weber: "[Stowe] lauded the industriousness of the New England Puritans and their heirs even while critiquing the harsher aspects of their theology. She also anticipated Weber in annexing the notion of the 'Protestant ethic' to nationalism, in her case by identifying Calvinism as the source of the Yankee propensity for hard work and moral clarity." What emerges in Stowe's novels is "an alternative to the negative ideogram of Calvinism that so often prevailed in American culture and even, at times, in her own writings. On Stowe's reading, the term Calvinist was synonymous with the sober, virtuous Yankee yeoman — the sort of citizen whose industry built the American Republic." Of course, Stowe also sharply criticizes the New England Calvinist obsession with the evidences of conversion — as we shall see. But as Charles H. Foster argued many years ago, "Stowe said both yes and no to Calvinism."

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Excerpted from Continuing Bonds with the Dead by Harold K. Bush. Copyright © 2016 Harold K. Bush. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
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