Virtual Visitor Questions: Cholera

Stay tuned for additional posts about Harriet dealing with cholera and other questions posed by the participants of the Harriet Beecher Stowe House Community Connection Facebook group. CLICK HERE to join the group and submit your own questions to our volunteer team! Today's question is answered by docent Nicholas Andreadis.

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Question: How did HBS deal with the cholera epidemics?
 
It is noteworthy that the scourge of cholera bookends Harriet Beecher Stowe’s time in Cincinnati. By the time of her arrival in autumn 1832, the illness had reached Cincinnati, probably brought by people traveling along the Ohio River. She departs for the East following the 1849 epidemic that took her beloved son Samuel Charles Stowe, affectionately known as Charley. Charley was one of three thousand people who died in Cincinnati in the epidemic of 1849. 
 
Cholera is a disease spread via contaminated water and sewage, of which Cincinnati had a generous share due to its pig processing industry. It was greatly feared because it was so lethal, its cause unknown at the time and the common belief that it was a consequence of God’s anger with his Christian flock.

Cholera struck close to Harriet. She grieved over the death of her friend Eliza Stowe, comforted Calvin and as we know, later became his wife. She herself displayed the symptoms in 1845. But without question it is the loss of young Charley that shaped her private and public expressions of grief.
 
When Charley fell ill, Harriet wrote to her husband Calvin that she had little hope of his recovery. There was no medical intervention available at the time, and all Harriet could do was watch helplessly while her eighteen-month-old child was wracked by convulsions and lost all the fluids in his body.
 
She writes:

“Today is a rather dejecting day. I don't particularly feel like talking about it because my heart can barely take all the emotion of today. I am overwhelmed with confusion and sadness. Today my eighteen month old son died of Cholera. As I sat cradling him in my arms for the last minutes, the last breath of his short life, I could see the life being sucked right out of his small, frail body. His eyes were glassy and his skin was as dry as the dust on my boots. It felt as if the life was being sucked out of me the longer I sat there staring into his blank expression. He seemed so disconnected; So helpless. That was one of the hardest things I have ever done. No way to help, all I could do was sit there and accept that my child was breathing his last breaths. I referred to him as my sunshine child. At only one year and six months he lit up my day like the sun fills the sky with light and gives everyone a feeling of warmth. I will never forget my baby boy. Having experienced losing someone so close to me I can sympathize with all the poor, powerless slaves at the unjust auctions. You will always be in my heart Samuel Charles Stowe.”
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She later wrote that there were circumstances of such bitterness in the manner of Charley's death that she didn't think she could ever be reconciled for it unless his death allowed her to do some great good to others. Losing Charley made her understand what a slave woman felt when her child was taken away at the auction block. Harriet poured her grief onto the pages of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Her description of the evil of slavery are vividly displayed in a prose style that touched the hearts of many Americans, particularly those in the North.
 
As Joan Hedrick writes, “Harriet Beecher Stowe had a profound effect on nineteenth-century culture and politics, not because her ideas were original, but because they were common.”
 
Note: The source material for most of the information contained within this brief essay is Harriet Beecher Stowe: A life by Joan Hedrick published 1994 by Oxford University press
 
About the author:
Dr. Nicholas Andreadis is a docent at the Harriet Beecher Stowe House. He was a professor and dean at Western Michigan University prior to moving to Cincinnati.