In 1825, Harriet Beecher Stowe's father, Lyman Beecher, gave a series of six sermons which helped to launch the temperance movement. In these sermons, published in 1826 and much reprinted thereafter, Beecher used the slave trade as a moral yardstick for the evils of intemperance. In doing so, he built on the moral outrage which brought an end to the legal importation of African slaves in 1808, and further criminalized the trade in 1820 when it was declared piracy. Beecher concluded that, morally reprehensible as the slave trade had been, intemperance was the greater evil, for it did greater damage to the individual soul, and cast a wider shadow of suffering. “We have heard of the horrors of the middle passage, the transportation of slaves, the chains, the darkness, the stench, the mortality and living madness of wo, and it is dreadful,” Beecher noted before counting the human cost of bondage to alcohol:

Yes, in this nation there is a middle passage of slavery, and darkness, and chains, and disease, and death. But it is a middle passage, not from Africa to America, but from time to eternity; and not of slaves whom death will release from suffering, but of those whose sufferings at death do but just begin. Could all the sighs of these captives be wafted on one breeze, it would be loud as thunder. Could all their tears be assembled, they would be like the sea.

Given the rhetorical power of the comparison between the evils of chattel slavery and the evils of alcohol dependency, it is hardly surprising that Lyman Beecher's daughter, writing some thirty years later, would build on her father's work, inverting, in Dred, the import of the comparison.