Guilford’s “Complicity” with Slavery and the West India Trade Using The Foote Collection of the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center

Talk

Guilford’s “Complicity” with Slavery and the West India Trade Using The Foote Collection of the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center

March 7, 2019

Beth Burgess of the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center along with Dennis Culliton of the Witness Stones Project will share manuscripts and stories about Stowe’s maternal family from Guilford, the Hudson Valley, and Jamaica. From the Foote Collection they will display and share their analysis of ship’s manifests with consigned cargo from prominent Guilford families, account books referencing the sale of spices and rental of slaves, correspondence from the American South and the West Indies, stories of disease and death, the exploitation of the enslaved and other people of color in Guilford, East Hampton, Long Island, and Litchfield, and stories of hope and despair. The narrative of this family, which produces the greatest abolitionists of the mid-19th century, reflects the normalcy of the exploitation the enslaved during the previous generation.

This presentation is part of a two-part series which will conclude on April 9th with Jenifer Frank and Anne Farrow, co-authors of Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery sharing the story of gathering the evidence and writing the book. The Witness Stones Project hopes that attendees will read the book Complicity between the presentations and come to the book talk and discussion with questions, connections, and inspiration from the past to affect the present.

This project is co-sponsored by the Witness Stones Project, the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center in Hartford, the Guilford Preservation Alliance, and funded by the Guilford Foundation.

Location Guilford Free Library 67 Park Street Guilford, CT 06437

Doors Open 6:30 PM

Program 7 PM - 8 PM

Elizabeth Burgess

Collections Manager

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Isabella Beecher Hooker

Isabella Holmes Beecher Hooker (1822-1907)
An ardent member of the woman’s suffrage movement, Isabella Holmes Beecher Hooker joined in the cause along with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.

Isabella was the first child of Lyman Beecher and his second wife, Harriet Porter Beecher.

Isabella began her education at Catharine Beecher’s Hartford Female Seminary and lived with her sister Mary Perkins. In 1841 she married John Hooker, a descendant of Thomas Hooker, the founder of Hartford. John Hooker was a lawyer and an abolitionist.

In the early 1860s Isabella got involved in the woman’s suffrage movement. Isabella joined Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony as a member of the National Woman’s Suffrage Association in 1869. She was a founding member of the Connecticut Woman’s Suffrage Association. Isabella’s ideas of equality were influenced by John Stuart Mills’ On Liberty and the Subjection of Women.

In 1871, Isabella organized the annual convention of the National Woman’s Suffrage Association in Washington D.C. and presented her argument before the Committee on the Judiciary of the United States Senate. Her husband, John Hooker, believed in his wife and supported her activities. He helped Isabella draft a bill to the Connecticut Legislature giving married women the same property rights as their husbands. The bill passed in 1877. Isabella annually submitted a bill granting women the right to vote, but it did not pass in her lifetime.