Tempest-Tossed. Susan Campbell
for industrialization, because Puritanism rewarded those who worked hard and those who treated idleness as a sin. Puritanism rewarded thrift as well — so families living on meager resources found theological support for their scrimping.24 Salvation could be found in the lesser cut of meat — or in no meat at all. If life on earth was difficult, a reward in heaven could be gained by working hard.
With that foundation of a binary gender world, Lyman Beecher did not pursue the formal education of his daughters beyond a certain age, but he at least saw the wisdom of sending them to Miss Sarah Pierce’s Litchfield Female Academy. Miss Pierce adhered to the radical notion that women and men were intellectual equals. Her rigorous curriculum included logic, chemistry, botany, and mathematics — not a common course of study for women in the early 1800s. Townsfolk who worried that their daughters were being taught dangerous topics could rest assured that Pierce’s classes also included painting, singing, and dancing.25 Catharine and Harriet — and, for a while, Henry Ward — were students. The fit was not a comfortable one for Henry Ward. As the only boy, he once laughed out of turn in class, and as punishment was tied to a bench.26
Tuition was $5 per quarter for writing, history, grammar, rhetoric, and arithmetic and an additional $6 per quarter for French. Board was offered with “respectable families” for anywhere from $1.75 to $2 a week — a substantial sum at a time when median wages were roughly $10 a month.27 The fee did not include laundry.28 By teaching religion at Miss Pierce’s, Lyman Beecher earned his daughters a tuition discount. Given their close proximity to the school, the Beecher sisters would have avoided paying board, and of course they’d do their own laundry, so the family could just afford a world-class education for the young women — for a few years, at least.
When the Beechers entered the school, women were being encouraged to enter into lives of domesticity,29 and most of that was in class-specific terms.30 In fact, modern domesticity in America — think Food Network and mommy blogs — had its birth in the late eighteenth century.31 If the halls of power were closed to them, women “had a special role to play in promoting civic virtue. As ‘republican mothers,’ they should educate themselves and take an interest in political affairs, in order to raise their sons to be virtuous citizens and their daughters to become republican mothers in the next generation.”32 The British notion of “fashionable womanhood”— characterized by later marriage and more education — had all but been erased.33 Replacing it was the notion of the hearth as a haven and a sanctuary.34
Miss Pierce’s school became a focal point of the family’s activities. The school drew students from around the country, and during Miss Pierce’s forty years as a superintendent, the school educated some three thousand students in the Litchfield Hills, where “the country was preferred as most suitable for females’ improvement away from the frivolities and dissipations of fashionable life.”35
While the Beecher girls were getting an education, Lyman Beecher was throwing himself into church life. Writing in the 1860s, Henry Ward Beecher said that his father had no life separate from the church, that he “entered the church briskly, walked nimbly down the aisle, ascended the pulpit stairs with a springy step that threatened to throw him up two stairs at a time … he looked around the church as familiarly as if it was his own parlor.”
As God demanded Lyman’s energies, God also demanded the family’s support.36 Lyman’s enthusiasm was further fueled by his belief that his brand of American Christianity was exceptional, that it was the one true faith, and that it would be the salvation of the world. This led rather handily into a firm belief in American exceptionalism. Though there is some disagreement among modern-day scholars, for years, historians and theologians said that Jonathan Edwards — who framed early American Calvinism and whom Lyman Beecher held in great esteem — had predicted that the millennium would begin in America.37 The millennium, said Edwards, would involve a thousand-year reign of Jesus on earth, and when Beecher first heard that supposition, he’d dismissed it. Over time, though, he began to see the new country as the starting point of a new religious age, one that would hasten Jesus’ subsequent return to earth. “What nation,” he said, in a series of speeches given in 1834 as he toured the East Coast as head of Cincinnati’s Lane Seminary, “is blessed with such experimental knowledge of free institutions, with such facilities and resources of communication, obstructed by so few obstacles, as our own? There is not a nation upon earth which, in 50 years, can by all possible reformation place itself in circumstances so favorable as our own for the free unembarrassed application of physical effort and pecuniary and moral power to evangelize the world.”38
Before Jesus’ arrival — which at the time was thought to be imminent — the people would need to be made ready through rigorous policing of not just their actions but their thoughts and emotions as well. This notion would embed itself in Isabella’s psyche: only through rigorous self-examination could she aspire heavenward. Though her father would not have recognized her theology as she grew older, even when she was at the height of her political power, her letters and journals are full of self-condemnation in which she agonizes that she never measured up to the Christian ideal. For Isabella, there was no life but a simple striving toward the holy, however one defined holy.
“Hundreds of times,” wrote Charles of his father, “have we heard him ‘hew down’ antagonists, ‘wring their necks off,’ ‘hang them on their own gallows,’ and do other sanguinary things too dreadful to mention. But there was always something in his eye and manner which told that he was speaking in a highly figurative sense of the logical demolition of error.”39
At home, Roxanna Beecher, the exquisite mother and brilliant wife, had borne eight children in fifteen years: Catharine, William, Edward, Mary, George, Harriet, Henry Ward, and Charles. She had imprinted upon her children the notion of Perfect Motherhood — and no woman would ever compare. Catharine would later transform it into “a public mission fired with the passion and preeminence of the ministry.”40 But ill health dogged Roxanna, and in 1816, at age forty-one, she died of consumption.41 Her youngest child was just one, and the next oldest — Henry Ward — was not yet three. Her oldest, Catharine, was sixteen.
Lyman Beecher stood in a tub pulpit with Roxanna’s coffin below, and preached her funeral service.42 The rest of the family quickly began to turn the accomplished woman into a saint. Later, Henry Ward, although he was still a toddler when she died, would tell his congregation that his mother meant to him what the Virgin Mary meant to a devout Roman Catholic.43
As mournful as was the family — particularly Lyman, who had lost both an intellectual partner and a Christian wife — it would not do for a man of the cloth, and the father of eight, to go unwed. So Lyman Beecher followed in his father’s footsteps of rapid wife replacement and, nearly a year to the day of Roxanna’s death, traveled to the Park Street Church in Boston to give a sermon titled “The Bible, a Code of Laws.” For both Litchfield and Boston Congregationalists, the reason for his trip was clear. According to the supposition of the girls he taught at Miss Pierce’s school, Lyman had gone to Boston to seek a wife and a mother for his children.44
And he was successful. He returned to Boston a month later to retrieve twenty-seven-year-old Harriet Porter, the daughter of a prominent doctor from Portland, Maine, who counted among her family a Maine governor, a congressman, and a member of the Continental Congress.45 Her family members did not approve of the union of their fair Harriet with the older firebrand who had, as he’d done with his first wife, proved to be a persuasive suitor in his letters. Lyman Beecher may have had a growing influence on the country’s theology, but he would never earn a decent living, and what did Harriet Porter know of raising children?
Harriet Porter was beautiful, and hardly equipped for the rigors of parish life or ministerial poverty that was not always so genteel.46 Catharine, who was just ten years younger than Harriet Porter, wrote a letter that sought to alert her soon-to-be stepmother of the welcome that awaited her. Catharine said she and her siblings “promise to make it our constant study to render you the affection, obedience, and all the kind offices which we should wish to pay our own mother were she now restored to us from the grave.