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Turning Points
Two women, two centuries apart, exemplify the power of story
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By Alicia Auhagen
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Atop a bluff in Cincinnati’s Walnut Hills neighborhood, the Harriet Beecher Stowe House stands much as it did in the 19th century. Dressed in a period-appropriate pale yellow, the house is keen to reveal its secrets and stories with the help of the museum staff, a Miami University graduate student, and restoration specialists working to revive its 1800s facade.
Tuning out the whir of speeding traffic and occasional car horn, it’s not hard to imagine the house as it was when Harriet Beecher Stowe was a young woman writing her way through a tumultuous time in Cincinnati history.
The city was home to an influx of Irish and German immigrants, Black and white southern transplants, Protestants and Catholics, abolitionists and slavery sympathizers. Some of the white community feared the Black community was infringing on their opportunities for work and launched a violent riot intent on decimating the Black population. Approximately half of Cincinnati’s Black community fled north, their businesses, residences, and bodies attacked.
But as one Miami University graduate student discovered, newspaper coverage of these tensions and the resulting riots added fuel for more explosive conflicts.
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Two centuries later, in the former office of Harriet’s father, Lyman Beecher, Cincinnati native Haley Knuth stands back to survey the banners and artifacts of her exhibit on media bias.
Titled “Who Controls the Narrative?,” her exhibit examines the role newspapers and the newspaper industry played in Cincinnati’s anti-Black, anti-abolition riots of 1829, 1836, and 1841.
Knuth has come a long way from having no experience with in-depth research as an undergraduate to dexterously accessing archives, analyzing documents and rhetorical perspectives, and orchestrating a museum exhibit as a History master’s degree student at Miami University.
Interested in a career as a museum curator, Knuth began volunteering at the Harriet Beecher Stowe House prior to attending Miami. Having already established a relationship with the museum’s executive director Christina Hartlieb, she completed an internship with the House in the first year of her graduate program and a thesis exhibit for the museum in her second year. Her mentors and advisors encouraged this applied research experience, as it will make her more competitive in the job market.
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To author her exhibit, Knuth examined the crucible of culture that welcomed the Beechers to Cincinnati in 1832, as Lyman led a group of white students and faculty at the Lane Seminary who were shocked by the brutality of the riots and set to work garnering support for the immediate abolition of slavery.
Anti-abolitionist sentiment reached a boiling point in 1836 when former Alabama slaveholder-turned-abolitionist James Gillespie Birney arrived in Cincinnati and distributed his Cincinnati Weekly and Abolitionist paper on both sides of the Ohio River. To abolitionists, the paper was a symbol of growing support and influence. To anti-abolitionists, it threatened Kentucky slaveholders and the Cincinnati merchants who relied on trade with them.
Within seven months of the paper’s inaugural issue, a mob led by Irish immigrants violently attacked the Black community and white abolitionists. The mob ruled the streets until the Ohio governor intervened and declared martial law.
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As Knuth scoured the English and German language newspapers from the era, she found increasing evidence of the papers manipulating the story behind the scenes and shaping an environment that allowed for violence. Some accounts of the riots described the victims as instigators and the mob as well-behaved.
This insight emphasized the need to tell the story of this little-known time in Cincinnati history and cemented her decision to pursue the project.
Knuth’s faculty mentor, Lindsay Schakenbach Regele, the Robert H. and Nancy J. Blayney Associate Professor of History, was wowed by her initiative to enterprise the exhibit.
“Haley's thesis is one of the best I have ever seen. She has done the hard work of not only identifying, researching, and answering an important historical question, but in making it accessible to the public. I have been so impressed with how she has done such a thorough investigation into an understudied aspect of Cincinnati's history and developed the connections with the museum community to make this exhibit a reality,” she said.
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For the Harriet Beecher Stowe House, Knuth’s exhibit provides a deeper layer of understanding about the influential 18 years Harriet spent in Cincinnati as a witness to violence against Black people and abolitionists. In a time when women had few rights and fewer ways to affect change, Harriet did what she could: write. The result was a catalytic novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, that shifted white Americans attitudes toward slavery and laid the groundwork for the Civil War.
“As a small staff historic site, we welcomed Haley’s perspective and curatorial work,” executive director Christina Hartlieb said. “Her research and presentation really reframed the way I thought about the riots. One tangible example is that I stopped using the term ‘race riots’ and started calling them ‘anti-Black riots.’”
Knuth feels strongly that museums like the Harriet Beecher Stowe House have a role to play in sharing subject matter that relates to what’s happening today, even if those ties aren’t immediately apparent.
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“My greatest hope is that if [people have] seen my exhibit, that they take five seconds to think about what they’re reading or seeing and about who wrote it and what their objective is.”
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Her exhibit comes at a pivotal time in our own story. These histories are a testament to the power of narrative to set consequences in motion that can affect people in irreparable ways.
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