Читать книгу Tempest-Tossed - Susan Campbell - Страница 13

4

ISABELLA IN LOVE

In the mid-1830s, Hartford was on the cusp of its glory days. The town was shifting from an economy built on oceangoing commerce to banking, manufacturing, merchandising, and publishing. The railroad would come to Hartford in 1839, and the population would reach 12,793 in 1840, up from 6,901 twenty years earlier.¹

The increasingly fashionable capital of Connecticut would yield social opportunities — introductions to potential mates chief among them — under the steady eye of Mary and Thomas Perkins, both of whom Isabella loved. If this possibility was ever broached with Isabella, the conversation is not recorded, though given her age, a good match would have been paramount in the minds of her sisters.

Within a short time after moving to Hartford, Isabella met John Hooker, a square-jawed young law student who was studying in her brother-in-law’s office. The attraction was mutual, and as Lyman had in his own courtships, John Hooker set out to win Isabella through letters. He saw in Isabella — who had gained a reputation for frivolity among her high-minded family — his intellectual equal. They would be engaged before she turned seventeen, with, wrote Isabella in Connecticut magazine, “the understanding that if either of us found we had made a mistake we were at liberty to choose elsewhere.”

She had every reason to hedge her bets. In the first blush of love, Isabella’s concern about her increasingly serious relationship fit the context of her day. The notion of control over whom and when one should marry was rapidly being wrested from the fathers, who up to then did most of the choosing and blessing of their children’s life-mates. Young people began to have more of a say in courtship and marriage. Young women often stalled marriage for fear that “marriage would snuff out their independence.”² For an example of an unmarried woman who’d managed to forge a career of her own, Isabella had to look no further than Catharine. It had to have been tempting to follow her sister into the field of education.

John Hooker, 1842. Courtesy of the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, Hartford, Connecticut.

But even at age twenty-three, John Hooker was a rare breed. As had the much-missed Roxanna, he traced his roots back to Thomas Hooker, who’d established Connecticut’s first European settlement in the 1630s and was the author of the world’s first written constitution. John Hooker’s ancestor had originally settled in Massachusetts, but he left to establish his own colony over a disagreement about precisely who would be allowed to vote. The elder Hooker’s move may have also been predicated on a clash of personalities with the leadership of the Massachusetts colony.³ Either way, John Hooker’s family — on both mother’s and father’s side — boasted senators, judges, and governors. His father, Edward, graduated from Yale College in 1805 and ran a classical private school in Farmington, Connecticut, called the Old Red College. John Hooker would have a distinguished law degree and serve as reporter of the state Supreme Court.⁴ Later, his name was bandied about as a potential justice on the state Supreme Court, but he declined to pursue the appointment because the timing was never right.⁵

Hooker’s hometown of Farmington was a pleasant New England town through which George Washington passed several times. Whether he stopped and slept — as was so often claimed in New England in revolutionary times — is best left to one of those New England guessing games.⁶

Much of what we know about John Hooker comes from his autobiography, Some Reminiscences of a Long Life: With a Few Articles on Moral Subjects of Present Interest, which Hooker wrote in 1899. He was born in 1816 to Edward Hooker and Eliza Daggett, formerly of New Haven. John Hooker entered Yale at age sixteen — about the time Isabella was settling in Cincinnati — after a rigorous education by Edward in Greek and Latin. And, like the college education of his future father-in-law, his education was interrupted by illness. John Hooker was struck with typhoid during his second year, and when he recovered enough to go back to school, his attempts to catch up strained his eyes to the point that he was forced to leave school permanently. His eyesight would never recover, but John Hooker would be a lifelong student. Yale eventually gave him a degree in 1842.⁷

Unsure of a career, John Hooker did what many young men did in the early 1800s and took to the sea, an experience that was every bit as romantic as he’d imagined. He was even aboard a vessel that was overtaken by Portuguese pirates. But two years on the water was enough, and he returned to dry land and began reading for the law in the office of Thomas Perkins. At the time, law schools such as Judge Tapping Reeve’s were rare, and would-be attorneys often entered the profession by serving as clerks for already-practicing lawyers.

John Hooker entered the bar in 1841. He would eventually leave Perkins’s office to open his own practice and would earn a reputation for forthrightness and fairness. At the time, the law profession was mostly closed to women, but John Hooker would later break the gender barrier by taking in Mary Hall, of Marlborough, Connecticut, as his clerk in April 1878.⁸ She would enter the profession as a lawyer only after a decision by the state Supreme Court allowed it, and then she would work in Hooker’s office until she opened her own practice. “The decision,” wrote John Hooker in his autobiography, “was a great step in the direction of the recognition of the rights of women.”⁹

From his autobiography, John Hooker’s understanding of women evolved over the years, though he appears to have welcomed his future wife as an equal from the beginning. Later in life, the Chicago newspaper Union Signal, a publication from the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, asked prominent men to give sketches of their “ideal woman.” John responded that he once thought the ideal woman’s “essential qualities in youth were sweetness, delicacy and modesty and in later life, a home-loving wifeliness and Madonna-like motherliness.” But he’d changed his mind over fifty years, and while he still believed the ideal woman should be involved with her family, he also thought that

… she is to me the noblest woman who, without mere personal ambition or self-seeking of any sort and with a great spirit of helpfulness toward all the wronged and suffering, limits the field of her work only by her ability and opportunity, making these and not any conventional rules the test of what God meant that she should do.¹⁰

For her part, Isabella was, by her own admission, a “spicy young girl, who hated abolitionists even more than she did slavery.”¹¹ Perhaps the sting of her father’s pain at the earlier defection of his Lane students — those he loved as his own sons — influenced her attitude. Perhaps she was more interested in social events than social issues.

If she hadn’t given much thought to abolition, she had thought a great deal about marriage. Shuttling back and forth between family members, Isabella had spent time observing the marriages in her family, and if she wasn’t sure what she wanted from her own union, she was at least aware of what she didn’t want. She wrote John in August 1838:

I have — for some moments in looking at the families of some even of my brothers and sisters — felt misgivings — many and great — but then, I feel that there is a radical defect in their plan — one which can be avoided — they did not start rightly … if I tho’t my married life would be such as I have seen exhibited in my own family — I never could bring myself to fulfill an engagement, other wise delightful.

Besides moving between the homes of family members, Isabella’s frequent absences from Hartford would give her and her intended ample opportunity to get to know each other through letters in which no topic was taboo. While Isabella was in Ohio, her sister Mary herself wrote affectionate notes from Hartford: “I do hope and trust you will not fail to write often and long to me, we know not how long this privilege will be permitted…. [W]rite as soon as you get this and remember that every thing is interesting that concerns you or your friends.”¹²

Mary added, a few months later, that she felt like a lover awaiting letters from Isabella as she gently chided her little sister to write more often:

I don[’]t believe Mr[.] H.[ooker] is more impatient to get one, but what a naughty girl you are to have the blues so dreadfully. I think a young lady who weighs 129 lb[.] must not consider herself very much of an invalid, if you are not ethereal in your person you must be so in mind or you will lose all chance of being an angel. I don[’]t believe an angel ever weighed 129 lb[.]¹³

By August 1839, conversation between John and Isabella turned to marriage, but Isabella wasn’t sure she wanted to marry a man who wasn’t a minister. All of her brothers had followed their father into the ministry, and her family, as well, worried that the law was not of sufficient importance for a Beecher. In November 1839, Catharine weighed in with (unasked-for) advice and a bit of information about her younger half-sister that might have scared a lesser man:

… Belle is formed by nature to take the lead — she will every year learn more and more of her power to influence others…. She is growing fast in piety — in power of intellect — in power of controlling other minds. What will you find for her to do[?] … I do not want to see a woman of her talents and power put out of her place as a leader. She is formed to be a minister[’] s wife as much as you are for a minister. If you decide to be a lawyer I shall not be very much disappointed or troubled for tho’ I shall think you and Belle will in consequence be less useful and of course less happy, still I shall esteem it as the will of God that so it should be.¹⁴

In an October 1839 letter, Isabella wrote to John, “Every young man with the means of education and common sense is called to be a minister.” And: “I have felt for some weeks past in visiting my brothers — who are ministers — that they are the only class of men, that can accomplish any considerable amount of good without turning aside from their usual business — all that a minister does, is designed in some way to save the souls of his fellow human beings…. Now it seems to me that it is not thus with a lawyer….”

She was mostly parroting her sister Catharine’s much longer letters. It would be John’s first taste of his soon-to-be sister-in-law’s meddling, and he was savvy enough to remain reluctant to discuss the topic with Catharine, for fear she would share his correspondence with a wider audience.

But if Isabella was pushing John toward the pulpit, she didn’t seem committed to the task, and as she questioned the role of a minister, she also questioned the role of a minister’s wife. In a July 1839 letter to John, she called herself a “tempest-tossed spirit” and fretted whether she would be worthy of so well educated a spouse.

She was quick to announce that she would be as dutiful a wife as was necessary, but she wouldn’t enjoy the role much. In an August 1839 letter to John, she wrote that she would give him “the required obedience without being constantly reminded that such is the will of God and the exception of man.” But she continued that such submission was “galling to a sensible woman.”

John Hooker wrote back repeatedly that he intended them to be partners — which in any other man of that age may have been strictly a means of placating a nervous fiancée. But from John Hooker’s lifelong support of his wife and his dedication to the suffrage movement, he appears to have meant it.

Meanwhile, Mary Beecher Perkins — knowing her husband’s financial struggles and the hole his clerk’s career move would leave in Thomas Perkins’s office — was against John entering the clergy. In a November 1839 letter, she corrected her younger half-sister on her entreaties to her intended, sought to soften Lyman’s weighing in on the matter, and summoned for her argument a powerful ally, Isabella’s dear, departed mother:

I am surprised that father should have made the remark you ascribed to him that “every man of good common sense and piety ought to be a minister,” I am sure it was uttered in the enthusiasm of the moment and that his cooler judgment would not endorse it — what would become of society if that principle should be acted upon, do we not need pious lawyers and physicians and mechanics and farmers and teachers and ought they not to be men of common sense? … I believe the responsibility and excitement would soon consume him…. It seems to me you are all running wild on this subject — pray bring common sense to bear…. [T]hink of your own dear mother as well qualified by education and piety as you and with a better prospect of health, after marriage her health gave way, her spirits sank, and she was ever mourning that she was so useless as she appeared to herself to be, I do not believe she would advise the change.

Mary also wrote to Isabella that from all she saw and heard from John, any career choice other than law would be “to please you and not from a conviction that he is called of God to enter the sacred offices.” And she wrote, “I think it would be utter madness for you to marry a minister and I wonder at father and Catharine and Harriet that they should think of such a thing.”¹⁵

Meanwhile, many of the rest of Isabella’s siblings felt called to encourage John Hooker’s career change. As boisterous and as traveled and as learned as was the family’s collective approach to life, its members — save for Mary — simply could not understand a man living outside the ministry. In a November 18, 1839, letter from Charles, Isabella’s older half-brother, who would later face his own apostasy charges, took a page from his father’s hyperbole and wrote to a bewildered John: “You have never stood by the dark cave of Insanity — and looked with horror in at the dark door — and down the frightful chasms.” Nor, Charles wrote, had John ever heard “the hideous noises — the shrieks and the laughter — feeling meanwhile your own brain boil.”

Considering that threat of hellfire — or mental illness — and how tenacious she normally could be, Catharine took an uncharacteristically lighter tone. Her younger brother Henry Ward had made an inauspicious entry into the clergy but had recently moved to Indianapolis, where the members of his new congregation were pleased to have a son of Lyman Beecher in their pulpit. Henry Ward, who would later command the attention of the country as a gifted orator, was beginning to come into his own in the Hoosier state.¹⁶ In a letter to John dated November 27, 1839, Catharine wrote: “I think in one year my brother Henry will make his influence felt all over the state of Indiana. I have never seen persons improve as fast morally and intellectually as my brother since they commenced the duties of their mission.”¹⁷

But there were other, more pressing topics to touch on in the lovers’ letters. Isabella was in Cincinnati in December 1839 and found her family of origin much reduced. She longed, she wrote John back in Hartford, for days that were probably forever gone, when the family was gathered around the table discussing the issues of the day. And then she caught herself: “See how poetical I am growing.”

Poetry had its place, of course, but plighting one’s troth was a serious matter, and Isabella intended to be practical.