“A Deep, Immortal Longing”: Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Spiritual Path

In this biography, Nancy Koester convincingly demonstrates that although Harriet Beecher Stowe has most frequently been analyzed as an author and social reformer, spirituality was the glue that held all the parts of her life together. Stowe did not leave theology to the clergymen in her life—father, husband, brothers; rather, she herself saw the world through a religious lens, albeit one that she changed and refined over time. As her public and private writings attest, Stowe was in constant dialogue with herself and with others about theology and ecclesiastical practices. Her understanding of God and God's order shaped her views of people and events. And her relationships and the events of her life, in turn, affected her theological perspectives.

Stories of Stowe's childhood make for an engaging beginning, which may come as a surprise. If asked to come up with adjectives to describe some of the theological and ecclesiastical heirs of the Puritans, lively and fun-loving would probably not make it onto most people's lists. Here, however, the reader is immediately drawn into the hustle and bustle that was the Beecher household.

Harriet was the sixth living child born to Lyman and Roxana Beecher, and since (as she later noted) babies were by then “no longer a novelty,” she and her younger siblings had to find their own places among “the wants and clamors of older children” (p. 1). Everyone had chores to do, parceled out by age and gender; however, the descriptions of berry picking, fishing, browning coffee beans, and tending animals make these tasks (except for the sewing, which Harriet apparently despised) seem, á la Little House in the Big Woods, more inviting than arduous. Books, music, and walks in the meadow provided more conventional entertainment. Perhaps most surprising is the view of Lyman Beecher—Presbyterian pastor and theologian—as a father who roughhoused with his children, gathered nuts with them in the fall, played the fiddle, and danced the occasional jig.

Of course, it wasn't all fun and games in the Beecher household. As one would expect, Lyman Beecher was serious about his religion. So along with recounting anecdotes about the expanding Beecher household, Koester begins to trace the renovation of a different sort of house: the religious edifice of English Calvinism that came to the Americas with the Puritans. By the nineteenth century, this New England version of Calvinism was, Koester says, “the ultimate fixer-upper” (p. 11). The home renovation metaphor becomes, perhaps, a trifle stretched as Koester describes the “deep cellar” and ”steep roof” of New England Calvinism, the arguments over whether to simply “repaint” or “knock down the walls,” and the sounds of screeching nails and broken glass that accompanied this theological construction project (p. 11). Nonetheless, Koester's imagery paints a clear picture of her view of the religious landscape into which Harriet Beecher Stowe was born, how it shaped Stowe's early life, and how she adapted it over time in accordance with her own evolving principles.

Koester's background in American religion and church history makes her an ideal candidate to narrate the evolution of the nineteenth-century theological currents that influenced the Beechers. She begins with Lyman Beecher, describing his essential theological project as one of shifting the foundation of New England Calvinism away from the belief in a sovereign (and, we might say, despotic) God who arbitrarily selects some for salvation and others for damnation, to a reframed covenant that allowed human beings some agency in their fate. Likely influenced by Enlightenment and republican currents, Beecher proposed that God's moral government must include a way for people to choose to live according to divine law. God would not deny salvation to those who made this effort.

While the claim that salvation was accessible to all sincere Christians represented a seismic shift for Lyman Beecher and his peers, their new and improved theology still contained significant stumbling blocks. For his...