Among the most prominent opposers of immediate emancipation were Dr. Lyman Beecher and the members of his remarkable family; and though they ultimately became converts to it, even so far as to allow a branch of the “underground railway” to run through their barn, their conversion was gradual, and only arrived at after various controversies and discussions, and much bitter feeling between them and the advocates of the unpopular cause.  Opposed to slavery in the abstract, that is, believing it to be a sin to hold a fellow creature in bondage for the “mere purposes of gain,” they utterly condemned all agitation of the question.  The Church and the Gospel were, with them, as with so many evangelical Christians, the true means through which evils should be reached and reforms effected.  All efforts outside were unwise and useless, not to say sinful.  And further, as Catherine Beecher expressed it, they considered the matter of Southern slavery as one with which the North was no more called to interfere than in the abolition of the press-gang system in England, or the tithe system in Ireland.  Some chapters back, the short but pleasant friendship of Catherine Beecher and Angelina Grimke was mentioned.  Very soon after that little episode, the Beechers removed to Cincinnati, where the doctor was called to the Presidency of the Lane Theological Seminary.  We can well understand that the withdrawal of nearly all its students after the great discussion was a sore trial to the Beechers, and intensified their already adverse feelings towards abolitionists.  The only result of this with which we have to do is the volume published by Catherine Beecher during the summer of 1837, entitled “Miss Beecher on the Slave Question,” and addressed to Angelina Grimke.

Catherine was the true counterpart of her father, and the most intellectual of his children, but she lacked the gentle, feminine graces, and was so wanting in tenderness and sympathy that Angelina charitably implies that her heart was sunk forever with her lover, Professor Fisher of Yale, who perished in a storm at sea.  With independence, striking individuality, and entire freedom from timidity of any sort, it would appear perfectly natural that Catherine should espouse the Woman’s Rights reform, even though opposing that of abolitionism.  But she presented the singular anomaly of a strong-minded woman, already successful in taking care of herself, advocating woman’s subordination to man, and prescribing for her efforts at self-help limits so narrow that only the few favored as she was could venture within them.

Her book was received with much favor by slave-holders and their apologists, though it was harshly criticised by a few of the more sensible of the former.  These declared that they had more respect for abolitionists who openly denounced the system of slavery, than for those people who, in order to please the South, cloaked their real sentiments under a garb like that of Miss Beecher’s book.  It was also severely handled by abolitionists, and Lucretia Mott wrote a very able review of it, which Angelina, however, pronounced entirely too mild.  She writes to Jane Smith: