Three years later, Mr. Beecher, who had now become widely known as a revivalist and brilliant preacher, was called to Boston, where he remained for six years.  His six sermons on intemperance had stirred the whole country.

Though he loved Boston, his heart often turned toward the great West, and he longed to help save her young men.  When, therefore, he was asked to go to Ohio and become the president of Lane Theological Seminary at Cincinnati, he accepted.  Singularly dependent upon his family, Catharine and Harriet must needs go with him to the new home.  The journey was a toilsome one, over the corduroy roads and across the mountains by stagecoach.  Finally they were settled in a pleasant house on Walnut Hills, one of the suburbs of the city, and the sisters opened another school.

Four years later, in 1836, Harriet, now twenty-five, married the professor of biblical criticism and Oriental literature in the seminary, Calvin E. Stowe, a learned and able man.

Meantime the question of slavery had been agitating the minds of Christian people.  Cincinnati being near the border-line of Kentucky, was naturally the battle-ground of ideas.  Slaves fled into the free State and were helped into Canada by means of the “Underground Railroad,” which was in reality only a friendly house about every ten miles, where the colored people could be secreted during the day, and then carried in wagons to the next “station” in the night.

Lane Seminary became a hot-bed of discussion.  Many of the Southern students freed their slaves, or helped to establish schools for colored children in Cincinnati, and were disinherited by their fathers in consequence.  Dr. Bailey, a Christian man who attempted to carry on a fair discussion of the question in his paper, had his presses broken twice and thrown into the river.  The feeling became so intense, that the houses of free colored people were burned, some killed, and the seminary was in danger from the mob.  The members of Professor Stowe’s family slept with firearms, ready to defend their lives.  Finally the trustees of the college forbade all slavery discussion by the students, and as a result, nearly the whole body left the institution.

Dr. Beecher, meantime, was absent at the East, having raised a large sum of money for the seminary, and came back only to find his labor almost hopeless.  For several years, however, he and his children stayed and worked on.  Mrs. Stowe opened her house to colored children, whom she taught with her own.  One bright boy in her school was claimed by an estate in Kentucky, arrested, and was to be sold at auction.  The half-crazed mother appealed to Mrs. Stowe, who raised the needed money among her friends, and thus saved the lad.