Stuart Halpern
Tablet, Mar. 21, 2024
“A humble young woman thrust onto a stage she never expected to step on to, a scheming and irredeemably wicked antagonist, and a society hoping that by virtue of its faith it might merit heavenly favor have served as the concocted elements of countless American moments.”
Twenty-three years before her sister Harriet would publish a novel about a Black slave named Tom that would supercharge the abolitionist cause, Catharine Beecher authored a letter in Boston. Her 1829 missive, “Addressed to Benevolent Ladies of the United States,” urged the protection of another oppressed minority—Native Americans—and it drew from a rather unlikely source.
“The present crisis in the affairs of the Indian Nations in the United States,” the letter began, “demands the immediate and interested attention of all who make any claims to benevolence or humanity. The calamities now hanging over them, threaten not only these relics of an interesting race, but if there is a Being who avenges the wrongs of the oppressed, are causes of alarm to our whole country.”
The model for Beecher’s righteous cause was an ancient Persian Jew: Queen Esther, the heroine of the Purim story.
Beecher’s letter continued:
It may be, that female petitioners can lawfully be heard, even by the highest rulers of our land … still we remember the Jewish princess, who being sent to supplicate for a nation’s life, was thus reproved for hesitating even when death stared her in the way. “If thou altogether hold thy peace at this time, then shall deliverance arise from another place; but thou and thy father’s house shall be destroyed.” To woman, it is given to administer the sweet charities of life, and to sway the empire of affection; and to her it may also be said, “who knoweth whether thou art come to the kingdom for such a cause as this?”
Citing her admiration for Esther’s advocating on behalf of her people in the court of Ahasuerus (conventionally understood to be Xerxes) after being stirred by her wise cousin Mordechai’s call to action, Beecher had taken some poetic license. Esther was a queen, not a princess, and Mordechai said “… for such a time as this,” not “cause.”
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