New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
Complexity, complicity
Historians debate Harriet Beecher Stowe’s lauded yet ‘muddy’ legacy
GUILFORD — For many, Harriet Beecher Stowe — the Connecticut-bred woman behind the book “Uncle Tom’s Cabin — represents one of the country’s most famous abolitionists.
But Dennis Culliton, the Guilford history teacher behind the Witness Stones project, wants to illuminate another, largely untold piece of Stowe’s history: though Stowe and her like-minded relatives seemed to form the “epitome of an enlightened New England family,” they also benefited from slavery, a reality common throughout the region.
In a presentaton on Thursday at the Guilford Free Library, Culliton and Beth Burgess, collections manager of the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, will use archival evidence to illustrate this lesser-known and more complex story.
Culliton emphasized that Stowe’s story — which features her maternal relative’s hometown of Guilford — forms only a small piece of the puzzle, one he hopes will contribute to a larger conversation about the North’s complicity in slavery.
With that bigger picture in mind, Culliton plans a second event later this spring as a followup to his presentation: a discussion with Jenifer Frank and Anne Farrow, co-authors of “Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from the Slave Trade.” ‘Messy and muddy’ history According to the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center’s website, Stowe is thought to have helped precipitate the abolition of slavery by writing about its realities in her novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” which reached a global audience.
While Culliton said he does not seek to diminish Stowe’s work, he does want to tell a fuller story about her life and background. A longstanding but incorrect narrative about Stowe, for example, tells that as a Litchfield native, she was first exposed to slavery’s horrors during temporary residence in Ohio, he said.
In reality, Culliton said, archival evidence shows Stowe was exposed to slavery as a child in Connecticut, before her time in southern states. Stowe’s attitudes toward slavery evolved throughout her lifetime, Burgess added.
Changes in Stowe’s attitudes manifest in her writing, Burgess said, pointing to a chapter in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” that pertains to Liberia, where Stowe expressed support for the idea that, instead of living as members of a free and equal society in the U.S., slaves might be better off returning to Africa. Some years later, editorials in which Stowe urged Lincoln to end slavery immediately suggested her beliefs had changed, Burgess said.
According to Burgess and Culliton, myriad evidence shows
Stowe was exposed to slavery as a child in Connecticut, before her time in the South. Her aunt owned slaves, and Stowe had contact with them at her aunt’s house in Guilford.
Stowe’s maternal aunt, Harriet Foote, owned slaves, and that Stowe had contact with them during visits to her aunt’s house in Guilford (after Stowe’s mother died, she lived with her aunt for a time). During her early life, slavery would likely have been acceptable to Stowe, Burgess added, just as it was to her parents’ and grandparents’ generation.
While Culliton was conducting his research, a section from Stowe’s autobiography drew his attention. In the passage, Stowe describes a moment where, as a younger child who normally didn’t have much clout in the family, she felt pleased she wasn’t stuck at the bottom of Aunt Harriet’s household hierarchy; instead, she held status over “black Dinah” and “Harry the bound boy.”
Suspecting Harry and Dinah were slaves, Culliton pursued their identities in his research. Eventually, he found a family history in which a Foote cousin claims Harriet Foote inherited Dinah and Harry from another relative, indicating they were considered property.
Another aspect of Stowe’s background applies directly to her parents, Roxana and Lyman Beecher, Culliton said. Based on the evidence Culliton compiled, he and Burgess have concluded that while the Beechers were living in East Hampton, two young girls of color became servants in their household.
When the Beechers left for Litchfield some years later, they took the girls — likely just 10 years old, Culliton said — with them. Records suggest they were indentured to the Beechers until age 18, when they would have been released with a meager compensation for years of servitude, Culliton noted. The idea the Beechers took these girls far away from their families not only troubled Culliton, it struck him as ironic given Stowe’s famous condemnation of the family separations that slaves so often endured.
History, Burgess said, is “messy and muddy,” even when it comes to people such as Stowe. From Burgess’s perspective, rethinking Stowe’s relationship with slavery represents one of the “uncomfortable discussions about race” that “we have to have.”
Instead of being a house museum that only presents the positive aspects of a historical figure’s life, the HBSC has been working to take Stowe “off her pedestal” and paint a more nuanced historical picture, Burgess said. They are excited to participate in a program like Culliton’s, she added.
When it comes to Stowe, it’s important to recognize that “her narrative is not the only narrative,” Burgess said, and to bring the stories of people of color into dialogue with Stowe’s history.
Complicity: Broader implications of Stowe’s family history
Stowe’s connection to slavery went beyond her interaction with enslaved people. Like many prominent New England families, Culliton said, her predecessors owed much of their wealth to slavery.
Culliton pointed to the large, classic New England homes in towns like Guilford are known for: “You don’t have these big two- and three-story houses because people were selling hay to each other,” he said.
Among the documents essential to Culliton and Burgess’s presentation are correspondences, ship manifests and company records that indicate that along with his brothers, Stowe’s grandfather Eli Foote regularly participated in the West India Trade, Culliton said.
Foote would bring New England products to the West Indies and trade them for valuable goods like sugar and molasses, Culliton noted, adding it was the toil of hundreds of thousands of slaves that produced those goods.
And the Foote family business was not unique to Guilford or New England: one of Eli Foote’s ship manifests lists the goods he carried to the West Indies on behalf of other prominent Guilford families, Culliton said.
Frank, a journalist and the co-author of “Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from the Slavery” said this practice was commonplace.
Contrary to the belief the North was not involved in slavery, northerners both owned slaves themselves and profited from slavery, Frank said. “There was frequent and huge trade between New England and the West Indies. It’s how Connecticut got wealthy,” she added.
Stowe and the Footes provide a localized example of a reality common throughout the region, Culliton said, and their connection to abolitionism makes their case allthemore striking. “We’re using a unique family to tell a common story,” he added.
Culliton hopes the program will help people re-think their communities and question the idea slavery was a “southern” problem. He sees it as an “adult ed” extension of his Witness Stones Project, an initiative where middle-school students research the stories of Guilford’s slaves and install commemorative stones at the spots where they lived.
Burgess and Culliton will present their findings at the Guilford Free Library at 7 p.m. Thursday. The follow-up discussion with the authors of “Complicity” will be held on April 9 at 7 p.m. Attendees are encouraged to read the book prior to the event.