Tempest-Tossed. Susan Campbell
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.
3
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