Читать книгу Tempest-Tossed - Susan Campbell - Страница 12

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THE EDUCATION OF ISABELLA BEECHER

Despite his wife’s frailties, in the early 1830s the ever-restless Lyman Beecher began to look west, toward Cincinnati, an outpost that had been settled mostly by New Englanders. In what was then the Far West, men like Lyman Beecher “had ample opportunity to fit shoes of virtue on the clay feet of straying mortals.”¹ His work in Boston was nowhere near done, but Lyman Beecher was convinced that God in the mostly untrammeled Ohio wilderness had reached out to him to come glean the fields.

The trip would be fraught with challenges. The family could be in great peril from the diseases and uncertainties of the trail, but with a promised donation from supporters of the unearthly sum of $20,000 to Lane Theological Seminary if he took the helm, Lyman was sorely tempted.²

But first, he traveled with his then-thirty-year-old daughter and most trusted advisor, Catharine, to investigate the new land. While there, Catharine wrote back to sister Harriet: “I never saw a place so capable of being rendered a paradise by the improvements of taste as the environs of this city. Walnut Hills are so elevated and cool that people have to leave there to be sick, it is said.”³

The other Beecher women had reservations about the move, but Lyman was able to rouse them.⁴ Satisfied that their effort would be met with great results, in 1832 the family moved to Cincinnati, and Lyman assumed the presidency of the Lane Theological Seminary and pastorship of the town’s Second Presbyterian Church. The school, which had been operating since 1829, crowned a hill about two miles northeast of Cincinnati. The seminary’s ethos would have appealed to Lyman’s sense of asceticism. Quarters were not opulent, and students lived simply — and often chose a vegetarian diet.⁵

Most of the family made the move in a large caravan that eschewed hotels and opted, instead, to stay with friends along the way. As they traveled, the children — most specifically, George — distributed religious tracts. As always, there was a sense of too little money. In a letter to Catharine, Harriet described their westward trip as frequent stops for her father to “beg” money from supporters.

Begging seemed to agree with him. Lyman enjoyed the trip greatly, wrote Catharine, saying he was “all in his own element — dipping into books, consulting authorities for his oration; going round here, there, everywhere, begging, borrowing, and spoiling the Egyptians; delighted with past success and confident of the future.” Little mention is made of Isabella in the move, other than as a member of the traveling party. As a girl of ten, she would not have loomed large on the family landscape, but she would have been expected to mind her parents, and her manners.

When the family had to wait in Wheeling, West Virginia, for a bout of cholera to pass through Cincinnati, Lyman preached to other stranded travelers. It is not recorded whether those travelers were open to the message.

The students at Lane, who were living in fairly spacious quarters, fared better than most townsfolk during the cholera outbreak, which killed roughly 370 residents during the worst of the epidemic from April to September 1833.⁶ It was one of seven outbreaks from 1832 to 1852, brought to town by Ohio River traffic, by, wrote one doctor-historian, “every boat ascending the river, and in many of the towns on the banks.”⁷

The outbreak did nothing to endear her new town to Harriet Porter. Unlike the Beecher children, she did not share Lyman Beecher’s enthusiasm for the move. Suffering already from a variety of maladies, she found the trip onerous, and once she was settled, her letters back home took on a decidedly melancholy turn. Even the Cincinnati presence of her cousin, Gen. Edward King, did not change her mind about her new home.⁸ King, a lawyer, an author, and a member of the Ohio state legislature, may have tried to make his cousin’s transition easier, but bad health continued to dog Harriet Porter.⁹ In an 1833 letter to her sister, she wrote that she was always sick. A year later, she wrote that she wept night and day for her loved ones, whom she fully intended to never see again.

Though her suffering was most acute, Harriet Porter was not the only Beecher regretting the move. In a letter to her sister Mary, Harriet Beecher wrote that they were all — save for Lyman — quite homesick. That same year, the Beechers started sending one another round-robin letters, so as to include everyone and give everyone a chance to weigh in — and, perhaps, to more tightly tether those who’d moved west to their beloved New England.¹⁰

Epidemics notwithstanding, Cincinnati was thriving as the largest town in the West, with the exception of New Orleans. The 1830s saw the city double in size, to a little more than 46,000 by 1840. It boasted banks, a university, a museum, a theater, a bazaar, and hospitals — all of which sprang up in roughly a quarter century.¹¹ The family could have done worse than “Porkopolis,” though the hogs roaming the streets disgusted all but four-year-old James, who once, his sister Harriet wrote, threw his leg over the back of one and rode it down the street.

About a year after they arrived, the family moved to Walnut Hills, then a small town roughly three miles from the seminary, into a comfortable home with wide hallways and open rooms suitable for church and school committee meetings. Surrounding the house was a grove of trees, and at age eighty-five, Isabella could still remember climbing those trees and hanging on for dear life when the wind blew. When her brothers Charles and Henry returned from college and entered Lane, Isabella wrote that they were a “big and happy family” until slavery began to dominate conversations in and around the school.

The abolitionist movement that started in Great Britain had jumped the ocean and was beginning to spread in the United States. In 1829, a Boston printer published a call for “the coloured citizens of the world,” which condemned racism and reminded American citizens about the promise found in the Declaration of Independence.¹² Slavery was increasingly characterized by abolitionists as a sin, so the topic would inevitably arise at a seminary, though Lane’s discussions were particularly heated.

Lyman Beecher was ardently antislavery but believed the answer was to send slaves back to Africa, or colonize them. Some adherents in the colonization movement were motivated more by racism than a sense of fairness, and to them, colonization was not so much a way to right a 150-year-old wrong but rather a way to rid the country of Africans. In its beginning, the Ohio Colonization Society, an offshoot of the American Colonization Society, was “guided by growing resentment that freed slaves from southern states were migrating to Ohio and contaminating the social landscape.”¹³ The society distributed frequent warnings that the influx of freed slaves would soon tip the racial balance in the state to a majority of blacks, and when that occurred, a revolution was just around the corner. The message gained traction in Cincinnati, where the black population was among the state’s largest among urban areas.¹⁴

A series of debates held at Lane in February 1834 led many to conclude that slavery was a sin, and therefore needed to be abolished immediately. The debates were held against the wishes of the school faculty.¹⁵ Organized by Lane student Theodore D. Weld, who had transferred from the Oneida Institute in New York, the discussion sought to answer the question of whether slavery should be immediately abolished and whether colonization was the Christian stance.¹⁶ After Isabella came to the abolition movement, she might have appreciated that Weld not only preached abolition, he also unfailingly supported the rights of women to participate publicly — speaking and praying — at worship services.¹⁷ But Isabella would long remember her father’s tearful reaction to what he saw as disloyalty, and she would never quite embrace Weld’s legacy.

Until the Lane debates, abolition was considered the most radical answer to the slavery question. As word began circulating, the debates helped galvanize the country beyond Lane. Lane students, who left behind the notion of colonization in favor of abolition, formed an antislavery society, raised money to support a library for area African Americans, and volunteered to teach classes for free blacks living in Cincinnati. Some Lane students, seeking to better understand their lives, moved in with free black families.¹⁸ Fearful that association with such a radical stance would tarnish the school’s reputation — and, more to the point, threaten its ability to raise funds — the school’s executive committee voted to fire one of the abolitionist professors, and it vetoed further slavery discussions.¹⁹ Ohio bordered two slave states, and Lane looked “for a large measure of its resources to that portion of American Society with which slavery was incorporated.”²⁰

Lyman was in Boston when the board voted, and when he returned, he could not dissuade about forty of the more outspoken students — Weld and others known as the Lane Rebels — from moving to nearby Oberlin College. Their departure left Lane struggling and Lyman with one of his few public defeats.²¹ At twelve, Isabella could understand what was going on around her — including the threat the Lane Rebels’ leave-taking posed to her family’s livelihood.

A report published in December 1834 acknowledged that money was tight at Lane, but Easterners and Westerners agreed that “the salvation of our country and the world is intimately connected with the intellectual and moral elevation of the West; and that this school of the prophets, under God, is destined to exert a leading influence in accomplishing this important result.”²²

Meanwhile, in a July 1835 letter to his son William, then serving as first pastor of the newly formed Putnam Presbyterian Church in what would later become Zanesville, Ohio, Lyman wrote:

As to abolition, I am still of the opinion that you ought not, and need not, and will not commit yourself as a partisan on either side. The cause is moving in Providence, and by the American Union, and by colonization, and by [Benjamin] Lundy in Texas [who supported both] which is a grand thing, and will succeed, as I believe; and I hope and believe that the Abolitionists as a body will become more calm and less denunciatory, with the exception of a few he-goat men, who think they do God service by butting every thing in the line of their march which does not fall in or get out of the way. They are the offspring of the Oneida denunciatory revivals, and are made up of vinegar, aqua fortis, and oil of vitriol, with brimstone, saltpeter, and charcoal, to explode and scatter the corrosive matter.”²³

William, however, was an abolitionist, although he may not have been as firmly committed as his wife, Katherine Edes Beecher.²⁴ On this and other topics, with the lone exception of Henry Ward, the Beecher women — both Beechers by birth and Beechers by marriage — tended to be more outspokenly radical than the men.²⁵

Isabella would later remember her father in tears as he pleaded with the students to temper their talk, “for he loved the young men as if they were his own sons…. I can see him now, joining them in the little log house just opposite ours — pleading, remonstrating, with tears and almost with groans. I was but a child, but was in such sympathy with his distress that I could never forgive the young men for departing from such a loving guide and friend.”²⁶

There were other cracks in the life Lyman was trying to build for his family in Ohio. Despite Lyman Beecher’s relatively straitlaced theology, his views were evolving from strict Calvinism, and that did not endear him to a Cincinnati body already feeling besieged by the abolition movement.²⁷ Lyman’s official siding with the board over the Lane Rebels did not protect him from rigorous examination by his enemies, and in June 1835 he was put on trial for heresy, hypocrisy, and slander. Isabella would remember her brother Henry making jokes about their father’s tormentors.²⁸ She wrote in her Connecticut magazine piece: “Well do I remember sitting in the choir gallery of the church listening to the comments of the young men and maidens led by my brother Henry…. It seemed a strange thing to me, even then, that ministers of the Gospel should be found fighting such a good man as my father, and I have never changed my mind.”

Lyman’s chief accuser, Rev. Joshua L. Wilson, of the First Presbyterian Church of Cincinnati, seemed to have had his doubts about Beecher’s ability to preach the theology of the Presbyterian Church early on, based on an 1827 sermon in which Lyman Beecher denied the notion of original sin — or that humans are born sinful and cannot rise above it. Lyman Beecher’s theology stated that sin is voluntary and that humans are free agents.²⁹ Wilson, a Kentucky native known less for his gentility and more for his pugnacity, may have been acting out of jealousy.³⁰ Lyman Beecher responded to the charges by arguing that he had taught precisely what Wilson taught and that he would prove his theology was scriptural. He pleaded not guilty.

What followed was eight days of what today would seem like esoteric hairsplitting, when the testimony ranged from religious orthodoxy to Lyman’s motives for not publishing more sermons to whether he could be called a liberal Calvinist. At the heart of the discussion — though mostly unspoken — was the tug of modernism and whether theology could evolve and depart from the notion of original sin.³¹ As hidebound as Lyman Beecher was in regard to daily application of scriptures, he was, by most Presbyterian measures, fairly liberal.

Despite Reverend Wilson’s efforts, on the eighth day Lyman was acquitted. Though both accuser and accused took the trial seriously, Lyman’s associate Calvin Stowe, who would eventually marry Harriet Beecher Stowe, described the proceedings as: “It is all — ‘I say you did’ and ‘I say you didn’t,’ ‘Joe begun at me first.’”³²

After the trial, and perhaps in need of some familial shoring up, Lyman gathered all his children at their Ohio home. Given the age differences among the siblings, some of his offspring — including Mary and James — had never met.³³ With his children around him, Lyman could revel in his victory, even while his wife was failing.

As difficult as the trial must have been for Lyman Beecher, the transcripts and notes and news reports of the day make it appear that he relished the attention. He proved himself completely in his element as he argued his position; just defense of his faith was precisely what he encouraged from his students at Lane.

But as much as Lyman inspired his students to think — and as beloved as he was by most of his (male) students — the preacher turned a blind eye when it came to the education of his daughters beyond a certain age. Though he was willing to barter for cheap tuition for his daughters when they were young, as they grew older he assumed their education was complete. Yet on a poor minister’s salary, he managed to pay college tuition for all of his sons. Years later, Isabella wrote, “At 16½, just when my brothers began their mental education, mine was finished — except as life’s discipline was added with years & that we shared equally. Till twenty three, their father, poor minister as he was could send them to College & Seminary all six — cost what it might, but never a daughter cost him a hundred dollars a year, after she was sixteen.”³⁴

But if Lyman was not interested in his daughters pursuing degrees, his daughters were vigilant about their own and other young women’s education. In 1833, having hired people to keep her Hartford school going, Catharine opened the Western Female Institute in Cincinnati, and Isabella enrolled as a student and boarded downtown at the school during the week.³⁵ Though as she aged Catharine became more set in her ways, and though they had their share of sisterly arguments, Catharine and her sister Harriet mostly shared the role of principal in Cincinnati. Over time, however, the younger sister found her teaching duties expanding while her role as principal diminished. She despaired in a letter to a friend that teaching took up all her time and left her no time to read or write for amusement.³⁶ Later, Catharine would insist that she’d been asked to open the school, and despite health issues that were plaguing her, she did. As had happened with her Hartford effort, the school soon outgrew its one room, and so Catharine rented a larger building. But, as with her father’s school, funding was always an issue, and she was unable to keep the school going through the economic crash of 1837.³⁷

But it wasn’t just a melted-down economy that affected Catharine’s school. As the Beechers became more controversial in Cincinnati — the Lane Rebels, Lyman’s trial — support for the school began to wane.³⁸

Dark clouds gathered, but the younger children seemed unconcerned. They explored the large beech forest that separated the seminary from the parsonage. They hiked under the trees and practiced their singing and elocution there. The younger the Beecher, the more Walnut Hills seemed to agree with them.

But Harriet Porter Beecher was unable to regain her health. She’d tried to run the Cincinnati household, but relied increasingly on family members as she took to her bed. Even letters from diligent Mary back in Hartford did not brighten her mood.³⁹ Lyman would hint later that the strain of his trial had killed her, but consumption finally took her, at age forty-five, on July 7, 1835.⁴⁰ She left Isabella her dresses and books, and an entreaty that she take care of her younger brothers.⁴¹

This was not the magical Roxanna whose children were left bereft. A few days after Harriet’s death, the Cincinnati newspapers carried a cryptic obituary that was signed simply “C.” The author could have been anyone but was most likely Catharine, who was anxious to get a last dig at her stepmother, a woman she welcomed with letters but never quite warmed to. The obituary included the note that the dead Mrs. Beecher’s virtues “baffled the keen scrutiny of the gossip and the tattler,” and said the woman had thought of her time in the West as a “trial and privation.” And this:

When approaching the presence of a perfect and holy Being, the retrospection of the deficiencies of the past brought such anxiety and dismay that her spirit died within her, and it was not until after the most contrite acknowledgment of all she deemed her failings in duty to others … that her spirit found peace.⁴²

Lyman mourned the death of his second wife, though “with a reservation or two.”⁴³ He would, when speaking of his loss, sometimes confuse Harriet Porter with the much-loved Roxanna. The older children, too, talked about Roxanna as if Harriet Porter had only been a mirage. As he had earlier, Lyman waited about one year and then remarried, this time to Lydia Jackson, a Boston widow who brought children of her own into the union. According to one biographer, Lydia “displayed untiring zeal, supplying in part the lack of pastoral labors necessarily incident to Dr. Beecher’s position as head of the seminary, proving, in these respects, an invaluable auxiliary.”⁴⁴ In other words, Lydia was perhaps better suited to the role of Lyman’s wife than was Harriet Porter. They had no children together.

Isabella continued her education at Catharine’s school, where she studied geography, arithmetic, Latin, and English grammar.⁴⁵ When Isabella turned fourteen, Aunt Esther gave her the letter written for her by her mother.⁴⁶ The sensitive young woman was particularly troubled with the charge that she look out for her younger brothers, Thomas and James. Isabella confessed to Aunt Esther: “I have cried and cried again and again, over that letter of my mother’s that you gave me.”⁴⁷

She remained in sister Catharine’s seminary, though enrollment was lagging. The school was dealt another blow when Harriet Beecher left her role as teacher/associate principal to marry Calvin Stowe, whom she met as they both mourned the death of his first wife.⁴⁸

Frantic for funding, Catharine wrote a scathing letter to the Cincinnati newspapers, accusing the town of being backward. The combination of the family’s notoriety and Catharine’s “aggressive manner, New England chauvinism, and transparent social climbing” made fundraising even more difficult.⁴⁹

Meanwhile, Isabella proved herself to be a capable student — though from 1835 to 1837 her compositions showed an increasing dislike of sister Catharine’s teaching methods. From one note made on a Monday: “ … learned nothing new except some dry facts in Philosophy. Tired of school wish it was vacation … did not study any in the afternoon or evening — went to bed early. Slept soundly — dreamed of long lessons and bad marks.”⁵⁰

When the Panic of 1837 all but finished the school, Lyman suggested Isabella, age fifteen, was ready to teach and support herself. His suggestion baffled Isabella, who found the thought of teaching to be entirely confounding: “I, who had never been to school in earnest, for two years together in my whole life.”⁵¹

Her older siblings — particularly her sisters — feared that Isabella’s natural good looks and bubbly nature would get her into trouble. In a letter written in July 1837, Harriet suggested Isabella be sent to Hartford to live with Mary, as Cincinnati was “exerting a very deletirious [sic] influence.”⁵² “She is very much I think,” wrote Harriet, “under the influence of companions with whom dress and accoutrement are the absorbing topic and who may lead her farther and farther from all serious and profitable habits.” When she was approached with the idea, Isabella allowed that she could be helpful to Mary, who had four children.

Mary was married to a lawyer, Thomas Perkins, who in 1820 joined his father’s Hartford law practice. Like his wife, Thomas Perkins showed a disinclination to enter public life. He did, however, serve as Hartford County’s state’s attorney and, in 1861, was elected a state judge of the Supreme Court by a unanimous vote of the legislature, though he declined a seat on the bench.⁵³ Lyman allowed his youngest daughter to leave when she promised to study hard at sister Catharine’s Hartford school and help with the Perkins’ four children.⁵⁴

If the Perkins family showed no inclination for lives in the public sphere, that reticence was not passed on. Their oldest son, Frederick Beecher Perkins, a librarian and author, married a woman, also named Mary, who “personified the most ‘passionately domestic of home-worshipping housewives.’”⁵⁵ Their daughter, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, author of The Yellow Wallpaper, was a fiery orator, author, and utopian feminist who was every bit as outspoken and troublesome as her great-aunt Isabella. Gilman, like Isabella, “suffered a neglect in American history difficult to explain.”⁵⁶

From her 1905 piece for Connecticut magazine:

I was sent back to New England on account of the death of my mother and that is the last of my living at home with my father, and I knew him only through letters and his occasional visits. I date my interest in public affairs from those few years between 11 and 16 when our family circle was ever in discussion on the vital problems of human existence and the United States constitution, fugitive laws, Henry Clay and the Missouri Compromise, alternated with free will, regeneration, heaven and hell.

As much as she was nostalgic for the Cincinnati years, Isabella’s move back to Hartford made sense on several levels. She could continue her education. She could help her sister. And she could avoid suffering under the tutelage of a new stepmother, where she might find herself consigned — as were her older sisters — to the role of surrogate mother to her younger siblings. Instead, she settled into a genteel, upper-middle-class home, and enrolled in Catharine’s school to extend her formal education for a few years.⁵⁷