Tempest-Tossed. Susan Campbell
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
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,