Here's a match-up that may have you scratching your hair shirt. James Theodore Holly, pioneering African-American bishop and missionary versus Harriet Beecher Stowe, author and abolitionist. Two 19th century figures who had a major impact upon race relations in the United States and abroad.
Yesterday F.D. Maurice defeated David of Wales in a day that saw a brief technical glitch in the initial daily e-mail sent out to subscribers. "Yes, Virginia, there are Lent Madness gremlins."
What's that? You say you don't receive these fantabulous e-mails insuring that you never miss a vote? Go to the home page and look on the right side just under the Voting 101 video -- enter your e-mail address and voila! You'll receive every match-up in your inbox at 8:00 am Eastern Standard Time.
Finally, as we enter into another exciting and occasionally heart-wrenching day of voting, remember that what we say about confessing our sins to a priest in the Episcopal Church also applies to engaging in Lent Madness: "All may, none must, some should."
James Theodore Holly
James Theodore Holly was the first bishop of the Episcopal Church in Haiti and the first African-American bishop in the Episcopal Church. He was born in 1829 to freed blacks in Washington, D.C. Holly was self-educated and taught himself Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, and Creole over the course of his life.
As a young adult, Holly devoted his time to the cause of abolitionism and greater inclusion of African Americans in the Episcopal Church. He also worked alongside Frederick Douglass and Lewis Tappan and served as an editorial assistant for The Voice of the Fugitive, an abolitionist newspaper in Canada. Although he was baptized and remained Catholic through his young adult years, in 1852—a year after he married his wife Charlotte—Holly was received into the Episcopal Church. Three years later, he was ordained deacon in the Episcopal Church and in 1856, a priest.
Holly founded the Episcopal Society for Promoting the Extension of the Church Among Colored People, a forerunner of the Union of Black Episcopalians. While a member, he passionately advocated for the Episcopal Church to make a public statement in opposition to slavery.
Emboldened by his belief that people of color could experience unique opportunities and freedom outside of the United States, Holly, his family, and a small group of emigrants left the United States for Haiti in 1861. During their first year on the island, many of the emigrants died, including Holly’s mother, his wife, and two children. Nevertheless, Holly went on to found Trinity Episcopal Church as well as a host of schools and health clinics. He was ordained the first missionary Bishop of Haiti in 1874.
Holly’s leadership and vision helped create a more culturally inclusive church in a period of great racial upheaval. Along with Holly’s dogged determination of a life of equality for all, his ministry expanded the geographical and cultural parameters of the Episcopal Church and served as a voice for the voiceless. At the time of his death in 1911, the Episcopal Church in Haiti had more than 2,000 members, fifteen parish churches, and fifteen ordained clergy. And today, the Episcopal Church in Haiti, with nearly 90,000 members, is the largest diocese in The Episcopal Church.
Collect for James Theodore Holly
Most gracious God, by the calling of your servant James Theodore Holly you gave us our first bishop of African American heritage. In his quest for life and freedom, he led your people from bondage into a new land and established the Church in Haiti. Grant that, inspired by his testimony, we may overcome our prejudice and honor those whom you call from every family, language, people, and nation; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
-- Maria Kane
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Harriet Beecher Stowe put pen to paper and changed the world. She actually wrote more than twenty books in her lifetime but is best remembered for Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which brought home the moral evil of slavery in graphically emotional terms.
Born June 14, 1811, Stowe was raised in a progressive and very devout household. She enrolled in a school run by her older sister and received an education in the classics, unusual for a girl at the time. At twenty-one, she moved to Cincinnati, Ohio (now known primarily as the headquarters city of Forward Movement, sponsors of Lent Madness) to join her father, who had moved there to serve as president of Lane Theological Seminary. There, she met Calvin Ellis Stowe, a professor at the seminary and fellow abolitionist. They got married in 1836 and had seven children. Their home became a stop on the Underground Railroad and Harriet continued with her writing and work as an abolitionist.
Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a response to the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. This law stated that if any former slave was captured in the North, they had to be forcibly returned South and returned to their owner, or sold.
By this time, Stowe and her family had moved to Maine, where her husband was teaching theology at Bowdoin College in Brunswick. Stowe would gather students and faculty to read over the chapters as she completed them. The book was published in June of 1851, when Stowe was forty-one years old. In a letter to an English Lord Chief Justice, “I wrote what I did because as a woman, as a mother, I was oppressed and broken-hearted with the sorrows and injustice I saw, because as a Christian I felt the dishonor to Christianity.” Initially, the novel came out in installments in the newspaper The National Era. She was paid only $400—considered a small payment, even for that time. When Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published in novel form, the book sold a staggering 300,000 copies in less than a year.
The book not only articulated slavery as intellectually wrong but also as emotionally wrong, with the effects of slavery played out in the tragic lives of its characters. And the book sparked outrage over slavery like nothing else had to that point. In 1862, Stowe went to the White House to meet with President Lincoln. Her son reported that Lincoln greeted her with “So you’re the little lady who wrote the big book that started this war.”
Stowe kept writing through the rest of her life, though nothing ever matched the success of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. And she kept fighting injustice. In her family’s summer home of Mandarin, Florida, she founded several integrated schools and promoted the ideal of equal education.
She died in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1896.
Collect for Harriet Beecher Stowe
Gracious God, we thank you for the witness of Harriett Beecher Stowe, whose fiction inspired thousands with compassion for the shame and sufferings of enslaved peoples, and who enriched her writings with the cadences of The Book of Common Prayer. Help us, like her, to strive for your justice, that our eyes may see the glory of your Son, Jesus Christ, when he comes to reign with you and the Holy Spirit in reconciliation and peace, one God, now and always. Amen.
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213 comments on “James Holly vs. Harriet Beecher Stowe”
Harriet's family was well educated and lived well. Everyone knows of her writings/ but Bishop Holly is new to me (many if the saints are) and yet he educated himself and worked so hard where so many are still so poor. Harriet Beecher Stowe did great things but certainly did not have as difficult time getting her word done. By the way, there is a new book being released soon about Isabella Beecher, the youngest sister in the Beecher family. The book's name is "Tempest Tossed, the Spirit of Isabella Beecher Hooker, " written by Susan Campbell. I have heard the author speak and the book sounds wonderful.
Thinking of our mission in Haiti, I needed to cast my vote in favor of Holly. A difficult choice
Uncontemporary though Stowe's sensitivity and style may seem to us now, the impact of Uncle Tom's Cabin--as Lincoln recognized--helped Americans end one of the darkest aspects of our history.
As a proud Haitian-American, I cast my vote for James Holly as he may very well by why my mother's family are Episcopalians.
Mmm, rough one. I am going to argue that Stowe herself would want us to vote for Holly, staunch ally that she was.
Just had to vote for Bishop Holly since my church has a direct connection to his legacy in Haiti, the Sisters of St. Margaret, who are on the front lines of continuing the care of the poor and teaching the young and feeding the hungry. Great women all who might not have a mission there if Holly had not had the courage to move the church to new frontiers.
Today's matchup was a toughie! In the end I voted for Holly in honor of the bishop but also because Holly is the name of my husbands seeing eye dog Holly. Both were/are amazing servants. What a choice.
Getting tired of the efforts to vote via the reminder emails. Hoping people review comments to learn how to remedy their confusion.
Yeah....maybe it's time.......
First time I haven't voted yet by this time of the day. I'm swinging toward Bishop Holly, but the following quote from wikipedia breaks my heart a little and makes me want to vote for Harriet:
Following Calvin Stowe's death in 1886, Harriet's own health started to decline rapidly. By 1888 the Washington Post reported that as a result of dementia she started "writing Uncle Tom's Cabin over again. She imagined that she was engaged in the original composition, and for several hours every day she industriously used pen and paper, inscribing long passages of the book almost exactly word for word. This was done unconsciously from memory, the authoress imagining that she composed the matter as she went along. To her diseased mind the story was brand new and she frequently exhausted herself with labor which she regarded as freshly created."[20] Modern researchers now speculate that at the end of her life Harriet was suffering from Alzheimer's disease.[21]
Aw,man, that's sad. We're going through that in our family right now. Really sad.
A united vote for Harriet from Hope and Skye. They thought it was cool that she visited the White House and met Honest Abe.
My son actually told me that Harriet was in the lead. Since I've yet to pick a winner all lent, I felt I owed yet another losing vote to Holley. I think he might rally, my son thinks I've doomed him.
Oh Man! I thought I knew who I was gonna vote for. Then I started reading these darn comments. It was Ms. Stowe all the way. But I had to go w/ Bishop Holly. Not only is he more of the Church, but his legacy and mission are alive and working as we write all this stuff. I know that could also be be said for Harriet, but as I read the comments there is more of a past tense to the comments.
Had to vote for Bishop Holly as I was an Episcopal missionary in Port au Prince Haiti with the Sisters of St. Margaret (Sister Joan Margaret) at Ecole St. Vincent for Handicapped Children. Without Bishop Holly would the Episcopal Church been able to spread it's faith and humanitarian work?
Gee, I've got connections on all sides! But I'm choosing the one whose life and gifts most closely challenge me and for today, that was Harriet Beecher Stowe.
I had to go with Stowe. I've had a renewed and special fondness for her since I preached a sermon about her a couple of summers ago.
Bishop Holly for me. I was very impressed with his self-education, and his legacy being the largest diocese of the Episcopal Church. But what really clinched it for me was the decision to pick up and go someplace else in search of better opportunities away from the historic evils of slavery as practiced in the US.
Wow, really difficult choice today! I voted for Holly, but feel guilty not supporting Stowe!
So I have not been on top of Lent very well thus far, and hadn’t kept my promise to read, mark, learn and vote daily on these illustrious webpages. But God’s mercies being new every morning, I trusted that the empty slots on my bracket would be forgiven, and logged on earlier today. Spotted HBS first. “Oh, wow! A childhood heroine of mine! A strong and courageous woman! Someone who did what she could to face down cruelty and injustice! An author who published her first book at 41! (though already 12 years beyond her, it still helps my hope spring eternal…). This one will be a no-brainer!” Some additional reasons: at one point, it looked like my family and I would be heading to the parish that’s not a stone’s throw from where she was living when writing the Uncle Tom’s Cabin (and which reportedly housed a station on the Underground Railroad, a fact about which I figured Mrs. Stowe would have been well aware). I’d walked on the village green, imagining HBS walking there in her own day, and praying that I could be as courageous and true to my convictions as she was. That I could work hard at encouraging the parish, inspired by her witness, to be equally brave as well. “What was the equivalent scourge in our time, and how could we respond faithfully? Etc., etc.” And finally, I learned a few years ago that I had married into the Beecher Stowe family, that Harriet was actually a kinswoman of mine, by matrimony if not by blood (though why my husband took such a long time before it occurred to him to mentioned this VERY COOL FACT remains one of the many mysteries of married life…).
So I figured my vote was a done deal. But then my eye found the second name: “Bp. Holly?! You guys have got to be kidding! THESE two, and THIS early in the brackets?! You’re killing us here. I remember now why this annual exercise is so excruciating for those of us who are constitutionally averse to forced choices. Geez, Louise!” I’d known of Bp. Holly for some time, and anyone who knows our church in Haiti knows what a disproportionate impact it’s had on the life of the entire nation. That with faithfulness, courage and great personal sacrifice, James Holly, as a missionary, had midwifed a living church that now transforms so many lives not only in Haiti, but in the American church from which it sprang. I’d known all that in recent years (though sadly, and tellingly, not in my earlier years), but then I had the great privilege of serving as interim at St. Luke’s, Whalley Ave in New Haven, CT for 10 months, where Holly was rector, and I felt an even deeper connection to, and respect for him. Have his photo pinned on my office bulletin board even now, as a reminder to pray for the amazing people of that parish, and as a reminder of his witness. St. Luke’s is breathtakingly full of history and courage related to the agonies of race in this country. To name just two examples: its first Treasurer was W.E.B. DuBois’ grandfather, Alexander. I nearly stopped breathing the morning I found the first parish register and was able to run my finger over his signature! Another momentous signature in the registers of this faithful congregation that sent Holly (and others of its members) to Haiti, this one in the 20th c.: that of bride Constance Baker Motley, whose signature also stood alongside that of Thurgood Marshall’s on the law suit that forced “Ole Miss” to admit James Meredith. She’s the beautiful woman in the iconic photo of Meredith walking into the registration building, but till my time at St. Luke’s, I had no idea who she was, let alone that she was a fellow Episcopalian. (Perhaps her story will become better known and a future generation will find her on a Lenten bracket.)
So…in the end, I finally had to turn my back on kinswoman Harriet, and vote for Bp. Holly. I think she’ll forgive me. And now I have certainly used up more than my due allotment of “Comment” space for this entire Lent Madness, so will refrain from waxing on in any later brackets. But at least want to add here an enormous “THANK you!” to all the very smart, wickedly funny and remarkably talented people who are bringing us Lent Madness once again for 2014. That includes everyone from the SEC to the CB’s to the people who write both smart and funny comments each day. I learn from and am blessed by all of you!
Both our saintly contenders of today were abolishionists. And, well known for their work. Both were sincere christians. However, it was Bishop Holly who evangelized for Jesus Christ. His efforts in Haiti eventually procuced the largest diocese in the Episcopal church. Vote for Bishop James Holly!
Uncle Tom's Cabin had a huge impact on me when I first read it as a teenager, but my vote goes to Bishop Holly for his tenacity, his commitment to education and for the Church in Haiti, a country that I pray for regularly but will now pray for in a more informed way.
So frustrated - have only been able to vote once so far. What is going on?