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TRAINING TO BE A BEECHER

Childbirth in early America was a dangerous thing. Women gave birth anywhere from five to eight times, and a new mother’s chance of dying during the process was between 1 and 1.5 percent. Extrapolating for the non–math majors, that meant a woman’s chances of dying over the course of her childbearing years could be as high as one in eight.¹ If she survived, her child might not. In the early 1800s, there wasn’t the language for birth control.² You can perhaps see why pregnancy was approached with no small amount of dread.

We know nothing about Isabella’s actual birth, other than it took place on February 22, 1822, but we can take a few educated guesses. Unattended births were rare among people with any kind of social standing. A woman of Harriet Porter’s position might have opted to give birth in the presence of a physician.³ However, with her marriage to Lyman Beecher, Harriet Porter had slipped a few rungs down the socioeconomic ladder, and Isabella’s birth most likely was attended — if it was attended at all — by a house servant or a trusted family member such as the ever-present Aunt Esther Beecher, Lyman’s unmarried sister who frequently cared for the children. As Harriet Porter had had one child previously — little doomed Frederick — she would have at least known what to expect.

Meanwhile, the joys of child-rearing were being codified in a slew of parenting books that began hitting the markets in the 1820s. Previously, childhood was considered an event best navigated quickly, but in the early part of the nineteenth century, writers began to devote more time to essays and books on child-rearing, and on parental (read: maternal) involvement. By mid-decade, the relatively new genre focused most intently on the authority of the parent, and the need for the child to acquiesce.⁴ The books stressed self-discipline “over physical and moral faculties”— which dovetailed nicely with the Beecher family religion of rigorous self-examination.⁵

Two more children followed Isabella: Thomas Kinnicut Beecher in 1824 and James Chaplin Beecher in 1828. With each new child, Harriet’s sojourns in her bedroom grew longer and longer, and her time with her children — both step- and birth — grew increasingly short. Mary and Catharine proved themselves capable of helping run the household and manage the children, and Isabella most likely learned to look to her sisters for what mothering she needed.

Catharine, a generation older than baby sister Isabella, was engaged to be married and soon to leave the nest when word reached Litchfield that her fiancé, Alexander Metcalf Fisher, a brilliant mathematician from Yale, had been killed in a shipwreck off the coast of Ireland just two months after Isabella was born. For as much as he could move people from the pulpit, Lyman Beecher lacked the ability to comfort his grieving eldest daughter. He believed that her beloved had died in a state of sin, because although Fisher had studied religion at Yale, he was not a member of the Congregational Church. If the young mathematician had had a religious conversion — to Lyman’s brand of Christianity, as none other would do — he left no record of such a conversion.⁶ Instead of comfort, Lyman spoke to his daughter about how God tests his children, and he urged her to turn to God for comfort.

Being told by your father that your fiancé is burning in hell is not a motivator to draw nigh unto the Lord. Catharine, who had seemed likely to be the Beecher who would cling to the old rugged cross so adored by her father, suffered a crisis of faith from which she never quite recovered. Why should she give fealty to a God who took her beloved? An anguished father-daughter debate carried on for months, and was sometimes joined by Edward, three years Catharine’s junior and one of the family’s earliest abolitionists.

Catharine inherited Fisher’s library, which she began to rigorously explore. With study and debate within the family, Catharine became an ambassador of a new theology, and the family’s first break from their father’s brand of Calvinism had begun.⁷ And those family debates formed the foundation of Isabella’s instruction — that she should be as well-read as her brothers in order to create a home environment that would serve as a springboard for her future husband’s son’s success in the world.

At home, the family scene was dynamic. There was the ever-rotating crew of boarders and the continual addition of new babes, while older children rotated in and out, subject to the school calendar.

Not long after the death of her fiancé, Catharine founded the Hartford Female Seminary in a rented room over a harness shop, with two teachers and a student body of seven. The school was funded mostly by the women of Hartford, after their husbands balked at educating girls in mathematics and other topics that had been restricted to boys. One father wrote a worried letter to the local paper, the Courant: “I would rather my daughters to go to school and sit down and do nothing, than to study philosophy…. These branches fill young Misses with vanity to the degree that they are above attending to the more useful parts of an education.”⁸ If this gentleman had sat in on any of Catharine’s classes, he would have been even more concerned, for Catharine used her school to explore her own evolving notions about theology and women’s roles. Her father’s Calvinist theology insisted that salvation came from the grace of God. Instead, Catharine emphasized the importance of good works.⁹ She began to concentrate on raising funds for her school in 1826 and was able to move to a larger facility in a church basement at Main and Morgan in Hartford’s downtown, though the school was still confined to just one room. Catharine’s sister Harriet began teaching there soon after, and after another round of fundraising, Catharine moved into a neoclassical building on Pratt Street.¹⁰ When prospective student Angelina Grimké, who would later be an outspoken abolitionist and suffragist, visited from South Carolina in 1831, she found that Catharine wanted students “to feel that they had no right to spend their time in idleness, fashion and folly, but they as individuals were bound to be useful in Society after they had finished their education, and that as teachers single women could be more useful in this than in any other way.”¹¹

In addition to running her classes, Catharine began to hold revival services in a house she rented in Hartford, though her father cautioned against that, given her gender. Universal education was not yet embraced in Hartford or elsewhere, and funding was always an issue. In 1832, when the family left for Cincinnati, Catharine would eventually join them.¹²

Catharine’s campaign for education for females, her notions about a woman’s place in the world, and her spiritual fluctuations affected her peers in ways great and small. While all around her women were confining themselves to the hearth, Catharine and later Harriet were making their way with their own careers. In family conversations, Isabella would have heard what was then the radical notion about education for females. Later, Isabella would take that notion further and insist a woman’s place was out in the world. Perhaps she was only building on her sister’s early lessons.

Throughout her life, Isabella clung to an idealized notion of a mother who offered unconditional support and love, and she would even, as a Spiritualist, believe that her mother crossed back into the world to give her advice and love when she acutely needed it. In the real world, her “mothers” included Catharine, Harriet, Mary, and Aunt Esther.

Other than snippets from family letters, not much is known about Aunt Esther. According to Catharine, Aunt Esther was a home economist in the truest sense of the word. She abhorred debt. She was methodical. She could not sew. She read every science book she could acquire. She made a wonderful gingerbread, the recipe for which Catharine included in an 1873 cookbook (and which I tried to make, with not a hint of success). In her 1874 book, Educational Reminiscences and Suggestions, Catharine wrote:

Oil and water were not more opposite than the habits of Father and Aunt Esther, and yet they flowed along together in all the antagonisms of daily life…. All Aunt Esther’s rules and improvements were admired and commended, and, though often overridden, the contrite confession or droll excuse always brought a forgiving smile.¹³

When Isabella turned four, the family left Litchfield and moved to Boston. Once again, Lyman Beecher could not provide for his growing family on his annual salary (this time, $800), but on a broader scale Litchfield had become too small for Lyman’s aspirations — and he believed the larger city was more in need of his ministrations. In his view, Boston had left Calvinism for a mushy, more liberal theology that was anathema to Beecher’s fire and brimstone. In Boston, in particular, “the wealth and fashion … were to be found in the Unitarian churches, while the literary men and the professors at Harvard College were all committed to the new way of thinking.”¹⁴ In fact, Harvard had become so universally Unitarian that Yale University was created from Yale College as an antidote.¹⁵

His Boston arrival was greeted as a burst of energy to the Hanover Street Congregational Church.¹⁶ But first, the church would have to get over its first impression of its new minister. One observer watched Lyman arrive with wife Harriet: “My first glimpse of the noted preacher, whose fame had reached our ears, was had one autumnal Sabbath morning as he rode up to the door of our new and elegant church, with his wife, in a poor country chaise covered with white cotton cloth. The horse and the minister were both alike very unattractive as well as the chaise.”¹⁷ Like Isabella, the church was just four years old, having been organized in 1822 with thirty-seven members and led by a series of itinerant ministers.¹⁸

The early disappointment of the congregation was not alleviated when Beecher took over the pulpit with such “unceremonious freedom that our Boston sense of propriety stood abashed!”¹⁹ For all of Litchfield’s relative sophistication, this minister was hardly refined. He was loud. He was nearly theatrical — though nothing like ministers who would follow him. But Lyman was a born orator, and the congregation could not withstand its new preacher’s rhetorical fervor. Before the sun set on his first day, the old horse and chaise were forgotten. Lyman Beecher’s three sermons that day kept the congregation talking for the rest of the week, and the fire burned unabated. The Bostonians found themselves drawn to their new pastor, who would delight them with statements such as “Brethren, it is my business to draw the bow, yours to see where the arrow strikes and to bring in the wounded.”²⁰

Later, the Reverend Artemas Bullard, a Hanover member, said “there was no minister in New England so uniformly dreaded and hated” by some Christians.²¹ He and other “champions of orthodoxy thundered their challenge” so loudly that his church was said to inhabit “Brimstone Corner.” Wrote one resident of the day, “We boys had been told, and seriously believed, that if we would thrust a match through the keyhole of the front door of this church it would ignite from the sulphurous fumes inside. We tried more than once to accomplish this feat, but found the theory, like many another in life, did not work.”²²

In the meantime, Isabella was enrolled in Lowell Mason’s juvenile class at the Boston Academy of Music, where she learned to sing before she learned to read, as she wrote years later in a 1905 essay for Connecticut magazine titled “The Last of the Beechers: Memories on My Eighty-Third Birthday.” Mason, perhaps the most famous native-born musician in the country in midcentury, sought to educate music teachers, and he wrote a popular instruction manual just a few years after Isabella became one of his students.²³ His collections of sacred music were classics, and he was able to accumulate a small fortune based on the sales. Lyman Beecher campaigned for his move to Hanover to shore up the choir.²⁴ In exchange for the use of the church facilities, where Mason was organist and choir director, Mason often gave music lessons for free.²⁵ It was just one more way Lyman Beecher managed to barter for the free (or inexpensive) education of his children.

While Lyman blazed against the threats of the newer, more liberal theology, his wife was growing increasingly incapacitated. Her letters to family and friends were more and more morose, and she wrote with feeling about her desire to meet her Lord. Already in retreat from her motherly and wifely duties, Harriet Porter Beecher found the demands of her husband’s new job and a new home to be too burdensome, and in 1825 she suffered a stroke that further removed her from family activities. By the time of Isabella’s seventh birthday, her mother was all but bedridden.²⁶

The invalid woman in the bed upstairs, then, was the mother that Isabella knew, and she would have absorbed the sometimes dismissive or worse comments of her older siblings, who continually compared this timid and ill woman with the boisterous and lively Roxanna. Lyman himself appears to have conflated his first two wives, and he frequently referred to Roxanna as the mother of all his children, as if his second wife had been only a shadow. As an adult, Isabella wrote to her husband that she feared being someone like her mother, “a trial to my husband — and children — a nervous, fidgety [sic] old woman causing gloom in the house instead of sunshine.”²⁷ Much of her memories of her mother seems lifted from the pen of her older half-sister Harriet, who called Harriet Porter a “strange princess.”²⁸ Henry Ward was more blunt. He called her “polished” but “cold.”²⁹

Thought to be a portrait of Harriet Porter Beecher and daughter Isabella, circa 1830. Courtesy of the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, Hartford, Connecticut.

“I always felt,” he said later, “when I went to prayer as though I was going into a crypt where the sun was not allowed to come, and I shrank from it.”³⁰ She may have been a saintly woman, but she “never reached saintly status among Roxanna’s children.”³¹

Whatever Isabella’s older siblings’ impression of their stepmother, Harriet Porter would have been, for Isabella, like a distant planet — removed, unreachable, and unknowable.