In 1825, Harriet Beecher Stowe's father, Lyman Beecher, gave a series of
six sermons which helped to launch the temperance movement. In these
sermons, published in 1826 and much reprinted thereafter, Beecher used
the slave trade as a moral yardstick for the evils of intemperance. In doing
so, he built on the moral outrage which brought an end to the legal
importation of African slaves in 1808, and further criminalized the trade
in 1820 when it was declared piracy. Beecher concluded that, morally
reprehensible as the slave trade had been, intemperance was the greater
evil, for it did greater damage to the individual soul, and cast a wider
shadow of suffering. “We have heard of the horrors of the middle passage,
the transportation of slaves, the chains, the darkness, the stench, the
mortality and living madness of wo, and it is dreadful,” Beecher noted
before counting the human cost of bondage to alcohol:Yes, in this nation there is a middle passage of slavery, and darkness, and chains,
and disease, and death. But it is a middle passage, not from Africa to America,
but from time to eternity; and not of slaves whom death will release from
suffering, but of those whose sufferings at death do but just begin. Could all the
sighs of these captives be wafted on one breeze, it would be loud as thunder.
Could all their tears be assembled, they would be like the sea.Given the rhetorical power of the comparison between the evils of chattel
slavery and the evils of alcohol dependency, it is hardly surprising that
Lyman Beecher's daughter, writing some thirty years later, would build
on her father's work, inverting, in Dred, the import of the comparison.