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BIOGRAPHY OF REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER.
A BIOGRAPHY OF REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER.
BY WM. C. BEECHER AND REV. SAMUEL SCOVILLE,
ASSISTED BY MRS. HENRY WARD BEECHER.
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NEW YORK: CHARLES L. WEBSTER & COMPANY.
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1888.
COPYRIGHTED BY CHARLES L. WEBSTER & COMPANY,
1888 (All rights reserved.)
JENKINS & McCOWAN, PRINTERS, 224, 226 and 228 Centre St, N. Y.
=To Our Mother=,
WHOSE FAITHFUL LOVE AND PATIENT SELF-DEVOTION COMFORTED
AND STRENGTHENED OUR BELOVED FATHER
DURING TROUBLES, BLESSED AND ENCOURAGED
HIM IN PROSPERITY,
A TRUE COMPANION AND DEVOTED HELPMEET,
WE DEDICATE THIS STORY OF HIS LIFE.
I. PAGE
Ancestry—Beecher—Ward—Foote—The Anvil—The 17-29 Oak—Courtship and Marriage of Lyman Beecher and Roxana Foote—Home at East Hampton, Long Island—Removal to Litchfield, Connecticut
Chapter II
Litchfield—Situation—Natural Features—Early 30-45 Settlers—Social and Moral Advantages—Patriotism—North Street described—The Beecher Home—Birth of Henry Ward—The Times at Home and Abroad—His Birth-Mark
Chapter III
Early Glimpses—Recollections of the Mother—Going to 46-71 School at Ma’am Kilbourne’s—His First Letter—District School—The Coming of the New Mother—His First Ride on Horseback—A Merry Household—Fishing Excursions—Minister’s Wood-Spell—Saturday Night—Going to Meeting—The Puritan Sabbath—The Cold of Litchfield Hill—Rats—Work—The Catechism—Formative Influences—Summing Up
Chapter IV
Boyhood—Sent to School at Bethlehem—The Widow 72-81 Ingersoll’s—Failure—A Champion—Sent to Catharine Beecher’s School in Hartford—Humorous Incidents—Religious Experience
Chapter V
Boston—Home Atmosphere—Various Experiences—Ethics 82-92 rubbed in by a Six-pound Shot—Discontent—Makes up his Mind to go to Sea—To Study Navigation—Picture of his Life in Boston
Chapter VI
School-Life at Mount 93-108 Pleasant—Mathematics—Elocution—Testimony of Classmates—Religious Experiences—Troubles—A Romantic Friendship—Another Kind—Letter of Reminiscence—A Royal School-Boy
Chapter VII
Amherst College—Private Journal—Testimony of 109-135 Classmates—Tutor’s Delight—Begins his Anti-Slavery Career—Spiritual Darkness—Engagement—Letters of his Mother—Experiences in Teaching School—First Sermons—Lecturing—His Reading—The Record
Chapter VIII
Lane Seminary—Dr. Beecher Called—Home at Walnut 136-156 Hills—Amusing Incidents—Family Meeting—Death of Mrs. Beecher—Extracts from Journal—First Mention of Preaching in the West—Experience in Ecclesiastical Matters—Despondency—Meeting of Synod—Influences of the Times—Revulsion—A Rift along the Horizon—“Full iolly Knight”
Chapter IX
Call to Preach—License—Examination by Miami 157-180 Presbytery—Refusal to Subscribe to Old School—Ordination by Oxford Presbytery—Visit East—Marriage—Housekeeping
Chapter X
The New Field—Growth of Influence—Social Life—The 181-209 Secret of Effective Preaching—Editorial Labors—Lectures to Young Men—Call to Brooklyn—Departure
Chapter XI
Invitation to come East—Call to Plymouth 210-224 Church—Friendly Misgivings—Plainly Outlining his Views—Early Success—Plymouth Burned—Preaching in the Tabernacle
Chapter XII
Plymouth Church—The New Building—Sabbath 225-232 Service—Prayer-Meeting—Weekly Lecture—Socials—Church Polity—The Pastor’s Policy
Chapter XIII
Beginning of the Great Battle—Five Great 233-270 Eras—Compromise Measures of 1850—“Shall We Compromise”—The Fugitive Slave Law denounced—Right of Free Speech defended—Commercial Liberty—Fighting Caste—Liberty of the Pulpit defended—Quickness of Retort—Sentiment of the Times—Reaction—Visit of Kossuth—Election of 1852—The Parker Controversy—Degraded into Liberty—John Mitchel—Garrison—Close of this Era
Chapter XIV
The Battle renewed—Repeal of the Missouri Compromise 271-291 proposed—The Struggle in Congress—Mr. Beecher’s Appeals—The Battle lost in Congress is transferred to the Territories—Forces engaged—Kansas War—Dred Scott Decision—Mr. Beecher’s Defence of Kansas—“Beecher’s Bibles”—Charles Sumner attacked in the Senate—The Fremont Campaign—The Dog Noble
Chapter XV
Remarkable Experiences—The Edmonson Sisters—Pinky and 292-308 her Freedom-Ring—Slave Auction in Plymouth Church—John Brown—The Wrong and Right Way—Election of Abraham Lincoln—Secession—Buchanan’s Fast
Chapter XVI
War Begun—Firing upon Fort Sumter—“The American Eagle 309-338 as you want it”—Death of Col. Ellsworth—Equips his Sons—Personal Feeling yields to Patriotism—His House a Store-house of Military Supplies—Sends a Regiment as his Substitute—Our National Flag—The Camp, its Dangers and Duties—Bull Run—Becomes Editor of the Independent—Salutatory—The Trent Affair—Fight, Tax—Soldiers or Ferrets—Characteristics as an Editor—One Nation, one Constitution, one Starry Banner—McClellan Safe, and Richmond too—Mildly carrying on War—The Root of the Matter—The only Ground—A Queer Pulpit—President’s Proclamation of Emancipation—Let come what will—Close of the Third Era
Chapter XVII
First Voyage to England—Extracts from Diary—Warwick 339-349 Castle—Stratford-on-Avon—The Skylark—Oxford—Bodleian Library—London—Old-time Sadness—Paris—Catch-Words from Diary—Effect of Picture-Gallery—The Louvre—His Return
Chapter XVIII
Church and Steamboat—Jenny Lind—Hospitality—Colonel 350-395 Pertzel—The Family—Twins—Medicine—Giving Counsel—For the Sailor—An Absurd Story contradicted—Salisbury—Trouting—Death of Alfred and Arthur—Letters to his Daughter at School—Lenox—Equivocal Honors declined—The Pulpit—“Plymouth Collection”—“Shining Shore“—A Church Liturgy—Courting with his Father’s old Love-letters—1857 a Year of Trial—Matteawan—Visit to Litchfield—1858 a Year of Harvest—Revival Meetings—Hospitality of Plymouth Church—Courtesy to Errorists—New Organ—Peekskill—Letters to his Daughter abroad—Marriage of his Daughter—Lecturing—Title of D. D. declined—Flowers in Church—Christian Liberty in the use of the Beautiful—His two Lines of Labor
Chapter XIX
Visit to England in 1863—The Need of Rest—Condition of 396-407 Affairs at Home—Arrival at Liverpool—Refusal to Speak—Visit to the Continent—Reception by the King of Belgium—Civil War discussed—News of Victories—Return to England
Chapter XX
Facing the Mob in Manchester—Glasgow—Edinburgh—Desperate Attempts to break Mr. Beecher down at 408-442 Liverpool—Victory in London
Chapter XXI
Close of the War—Distrust of the 443-456 Administration—Kindlier Feelings after Mr. Beecher’s Return from England—Growing Confidence—Intimacy with Secretary Stanton—Fort Sumter—Lee’s Surrender—Lincoln’s Death
Chapter XXII
Reconstruction—Mr. Beecher favors speedy 457-478 Readmission—Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Convention at Cleveland—The “Cleveland Letters” cause great Excitement
Chapter XXIII
The “Silver Wedding” of Plymouth Church—Children’s 479-487 Day—Services in the Church—Reunion of old Members—Historical Reminiscences—Dr. Storrs’s Tribute
Chapter XXIV
The Conspiracy—Relations with Mr. Bowen—Disputes and 488-522 Arbitration—Theodore Tilton’s Early Promise and Intimacy with Mr. Beecher—Bowen’s Ill-Will and Tilton’s Malice—Tilton discharged from Independent and Brooklyn Union—Tripartite Agreement—Moulton and Tilton Conspire to Blackmail Mr. Beecher—Tilton consults Dr. Storrs
Chapter XXV
After-Effects—Charges against Tilton—Advisory 523-536 Council—Investigating Committee called by Mr. Beecher—Its Report—Dropping Mr. Moulton—Council called by Plymouth Church
Chapter XXVI
After-Effects of the Conspiracy—Calling Council of 537-563 1876—Principle of Selection—Mr. Beecher cautions his Church—Bowen Reappears; Proposes a Secret Tribunal—Mr. Beecher’s Reply—Bowen Dropped by Plymouth Church—Deliverance of Council sustaining Plymouth—Mr. Beecher’s Persecutors Denounced—Special Tribunal
Chapter XXVII
Rest and renewed Activity—Lecturing Tours—Resignation 564-570 from the Congregational Association—Boston Criticisms
Chapter XXVIII
Attacking Corrupt Judges—Interest in Political 571-587 Questions—Advocating Arthur’s Renomination—Opposing Blaine—Supporting Cleveland—Campaign of 1884—After the Battle
Chapter XXIX
A Preacher—His Place—His Training—His Estimate of the 588-613 Work—Defects—Effectual Call—Upon Drawing an Audience—His Theory—Preparation—Results—A Theologian—His Orthodoxy—Evolution—Ordinances—Christian Unity—Sectarianism—Peacemaker
Chapter XXX
Love of the Country—Communion with Nature—Farming at 614-638 Salisbury—Lenox—Matteawan—The Peekskill Farm
Chapter XXXI
Home Life—Love of Children—His Method of Training and 639-664 Education—Formation of Library and Art Collection—Personal Traits
Chapter XXXII
1886—England Revisited—Speaking in the City 665-683 Temple—Westminster Abbey—Lecturing through Great Britain—Addressing the Theological Students at City Temple—“Life of Christ”—Sickness—Rest
Appendix 687
ILLUSTRATIONS.
PAGE
1. Anvil and Oak Stump 18
2. Foote Coat-of-Arms 21
3. Church in which Lyman Beecher preached, in 28 East Hampton, L. I.
4. Beecher Residence at Litchfield 39
5. Room in which Mr. Beecher was born 43
6. Elms and Well which mark the Site of the 45 “Beecher House” in Litchfield
7. Facsimile of the first Letter of Mr. Beecher 50
8. Ingersoll House 73
9. Stairs in Catharine Beecher’s House in 111 Hartford
10. Mr. Beecher at the time of his Marriage 168
11. Mrs. Beecher at the time of her Marriage 169
12. Church at Indianapolis Facing page 182
13. Mr. Beecher’s House at Indianapolis ” ” 202
14. Mr. Beecher and his Father at time of Call to ” ” 210 Brooklyn,
15. Pinky’s Freedom-Ring 295
16. Mr. Beecher in 1850 367
17. Mr. Beecher at the Close of the War 445
18. Mr. Beecher and his Sister, Mrs. H. E. B. 525 Stowe
19. Cottage at Peekskill 619
20. Old Apple-Tree 621
21. Mr. Beecher on his Farm 625
22. House at Peekskill 631
23. Hall in New House at Peekskill 633
24. Mr. and Mrs. Beecher at the time of Visit to 667 England in 1886
25. Lying in State in Plymouth Church 679
Preface
A few months prior to his death our father undertook the preparation of his Autobiography. This was earnestly encouraged by his family, who shared with the public the desire that he should tell the tale of his life in his own words, giving those pictures of his inner self, the impressions made on him by his varying experiences, that he alone could give, and which, to a large extent, he alone knew. Confiding and free-spoken as he was in his joys, in his griefs he withdrew within himself, bearing in patient silence a load of sorrow unknown even to those nearest to him. But it was not to be. He had only jotted down a rough outline of his plan, and written a part of an intermediate chapter, when he laid down his pen for a little rest, never to be resumed again.
In his contract with our publishers but a single volume of not less than six hundred pages was contemplated. Unconscious of its magnitude, we undertook to complete the contract. Accepting the limitations of a single volume, we began to collect the necessary material, and, when too late to change the form of the work, discovered that two volumes would hardly contain the history as it opened up to us, so closely interwoven has his life been with the nation’s history, and so full of important incidents. In the work of condensation, to bring our story within the space prescribed, we found it necessary to omit many of his letters, hoping that in the not far-distant future we might publish a supplemental volume containing all of his important correspondence.
The book before us we have sought, as far as possible, to make autobiographic, telling the tale in our father’s words; happily the many letters furnished us by friends, or retained in the family, his public writings and utterances, supplemented by the many personal reminiscences which he gave us at various times, has enabled us to do so to a large extent.
We are fully conscious of the imperfect manner in which we have woven these quotations into our story; the ordinary writer who attempts to connect with his words those glowing sentences white-hot with his fiery indignation against slavery, or his eloquent appeal to the English public for fair-dealing, or the brilliant play of wit and fancy in his more humorous utterances, can hope, at the most, to give but a respectable background that may aid by contrast.
We have sought to make this book a truthful history from the beginnings of his life, through boyhood, manhood, and ripened age, to the end, omitting no important period, though passing innumerable incidents.
A man loving peace, he reached peace only through war. From his early manhood he was called to meet in deadly combat the great sins of the nation. Through his life, at different times, he met and overcame bitter and deadly assaults made upon him.
In our narration of these events we have had no revenge to gratify nor theory to maintain. We have tried to give only facts, omitting deductions or conclusions, leaving each reader to draw his own inferences. If parts of our narrative bear hardly on any, it is only the pressure of the facts which cannot be suppressed in any fearless, truthful portrayal of our father’s life. We do not make them; we merely state them.
We would acknowledge our indebtedness to the many friends who have kindly furnished letters and reminiscences, but especially to our mother, whose memory, running back along the paths they travelled for so many years together, has given to us much that never would otherwise have been known.
If our readers get from a perusal of these pages a tithe of the comfort and inspiration which we have obtained from their preparation, we shall feel that our work has not been in vain.
If they can see something of the fearlessness for right, the patience under unjust suffering, the inextinguishable love for fellow-men, and the abiding faith in God, that has been revealed by a study of his life even to us, who knew him best, we shall be satisfied.
W. C. BEECHER, SAMUEL SCOVILLE.
BROOKLYN, March 12, 1888.
Chapter I
Ancestry—Beecher—Ward—Foote—The Anvil—The Oak—Courtship and Marriage of Lyman Beecher and Roxana Foote—Home at East Hampton, Long Island—Removal to Litchfield, Connecticut.
Henry Ward Beecher used to say that the first thing for a man to do, if he would succeed in life, is to “choose a good father and mother to be born of.” He himself was eminently wise, or fortunate, as the case may be, in this matter.
“My earthly life,” he says, “was given me by two of the best folks that ever lived on earth.” His father, Lyman Beecher, was one of the leading preachers, reformers, and controversialists of his day. Sturdy in body and mind, full of sensibility, aflame with enthusiasm, devoted to the highest aims and utterly unselfish in life, a Christian in whom deep spirituality and strong common sense were happily blended, he was just the man to transmit excellent qualities to his children; a father to be enjoyed while living, and to be remembered with love and reverence after his death.
Of him his son says: “While he was eloquent and among the foremost speakers of his day, I remember particularly that I never heard from him a word of uncharitableness, nor saw a symptom of envy or jealousy, or aught else but the most enthusiastic love of men, and of young men and young ministers; and knowing him in the household, I have yet to know another person that was so devoid of the inferior feelings and so eminent in the topmost feelings of human nature.”
Lyman’s father’s name was David, a well-read, clear-headed man, with decided opinions upon the questions of the day; one with whom Roger Sherman delighted, upon his return from Congress, to talk over the business of the session and discuss public affairs. He kept college students as boarders, that he might enjoy their conversation, and made himself proficient in many of their studies. Of him his son said: “If he had received a regular education he would have been equal to anybody.” He was both blacksmith and farmer, and had the reputation of “raising the nicest rye and making the best hoes in New England.”
Lyman Beecher’s mother was a Lyman, a woman “of a joyous, sparkling, hopeful temperament.” Her grandfather was a Scotchman, thus giving a little Gaelic blood to the veins of her descendants. In his autobiography Lyman Beecher says: “She died of consumption two days after I was born. I was a seven-months child, and when the woman that attended on her saw what a puny thing I was, and that the mother could not live, she thought it useless to attempt to keep me alive. I was actually wrapped up and laid aside. But after a while one of the women thought she would look and see if I were living, and, finding I was, concluded to wash and dress me, saying: ‘It’s a pity he hadn’t died with his mother.’ So you see it was but by a hair’s-breadth I got a foothold in this world.” He was taken in charge by “Aunt Benton” and brought up on his uncle Lot Benton’s farm in North Guilford, where farm-work and farm-fare made him strong.
Their intention was to make a farmer of him; but the intolerable slowness of an ox-team, in ploughing fifteen acres of summer fallow three times over in a single season, so disgusted the lad that he became restless. His uncle saw it, and upon consultation with the father they decided to send him to school to prepare for Yale College, which was accordingly done. He often said, “Oxen sent me to college.”
David’s father’s name was Nathaniel. He was also a blacksmith, and the anvil of both father and son stood upon the stump of that old oak under which John Davenport preached his first sermon to the New Haven Colony. He married a Sperry, “a pious woman,” whose mother was a Roberts from Forlallt, Cardiganshire, Wales. From her, his great great-grandmother, came the fervid Welsh blood with which Henry Ward was always so well pleased.
Joseph was the father of Nathaniel. His father’s name was John, of whom tradition says that he was one of those who in the fall of 1637 accompanied Samuel Eaton in his explorations for a suitable location for the colony of John Davenport, that had just come over and was then staying at Boston; and that he was one of the very few men who lived through the winter in the poor hut that had been built at “Quinnipiack,” New Haven, that they might pre-empt the territory and be in readiness to welcome the colony in the following spring.
He was the only son of Hannah Beecher, whose husband, born in Kent, England, died just before the colony sailed. She was about to abandon the enterprise, but, being a midwife and likely to be of service to the youthful colony, they promised her her husband’s share in the town plot if she would come. They kept their word, and it was in her lot that the historic oak just mentioned stood.
Her business seems not to have been remarkably lucrative, for at her death her estate inventoried only £55 5s. 6d.
One earlier mention of the family was found by Mr. Beecher in the British Museum during his visit to England in 1863, and copied in his diary:
“Visitation of Kent, 16,279 Brit. Museum.
“Henry Beecher, alderman and sheriff of London 1570, ob’t 1571.”
Apparently of more than the average intellectual ability of their class, there was one feature in which the men whom we have described markedly excelled—namely, in their physical strength. The standard of measurement was peculiar to those early times, and may not be as well understood by us; yet it even now conveys the idea of great stalwartness. David, it was said, could lift a barrel of cider and carry it into the cellar; Nathaniel, his father, was not quite as strong, yet he could throw a barrel of cider into a cart; while Joseph exceeded them all, for he could lift the barrel and drink out of the bung-hole. Of Henry, the sheriff, no description has been found.
There was one especial feature of degeneracy in these modern days, compared with the good old times of the fathers, over which Henry Ward, when Mrs. Beecher was just within earshot, moaned and groaned. His grandfather, he said, had five wives, his father had three, but such was the meagreness of these penurious times in which he lived, and the persistence of the Bullard blood, that he saw no chance for himself to have more than one. But afterwards, lest she should feel hurt at his raillery, he writes her with many expressions of affection, in a letter dated March 31, 1872: “It has always been a shadow over the future to fear that I should walk alone the few remaining years of my life, for alone I shall be if you go from me. In jest we have often spoken of other connections. But such a thing is the remotest of possibilities. Should you go no one would ever take your place.”
Such was the ancestry selected on the father’s side. Six generations, without question, are known to us, reaching from the hills of Litchfield, in Connecticut, to the chalk-cliffs of Kent, England. For that distance we can trace the family stream up to its sources in the great body of the English common people, in that county most characteristic of England, where the Roman had first struggled with the Briton, where the “free-necked men,” under Hengist and Horsa, had first made a lodgment on English soil, and near which was Hastings and the fields of the Norman conquest, and where, perhaps more than in any other county, mingled those different strains of blood, Briton, Roman, Saxon, Northmen, Scots, and Picts, out of which has come England’s strength and England’s greatness. We find all of them of the yeomanry, all of them honest, useful, God-fearing men, fit to be the progenitors of one who delighted in nothing more than in his common experiences with common people, and valued nothing more highly than their confidence and friendship.
Nor would it be difficult to find in the sturdy independence and quaint humor of these men of the anvil and the plough, the origin of much of that robust and humorous manliness which made Henry Ward Beecher so conspicuous in his day and generation.
His power to strike heavy blows and to hit the nail on the head was partly inherited, and that anvil-ring of the fathers has been often heard in these latter days under his sledge-hammer strokes. If the iron were not hot, he heated it by striking, and sparks flew, and men’s hearts and minds were moulded and welded before he was done.
More than this, there appears in him something of the love of the “shield-game” and the “sword-play” of those earlier generations that were “at heart fighters,” and something also of the sadness and heroism which led them to say, “Each man of us shall abide the end of his life-work; let him that may, work his doomed deeds ere death come.”
On the mother’s side the selection was somewhat different. While we find no more sterling qualities, there is in this line a higher social position, more culture, a broader training in public affairs, both civil and military, and what with some may appear of still greater importance, a coat-of-arms given as a special mark of royal gratitude.
Roxana Foote had gentle blood in her veins. She could trace her genealogy on the father’s side back through Nathaniel Foote, who came into Connecticut with Hooker’s company in 1636, to James Foote, an officer in the English army, who aided King Charles to conceal himself in the “Royal Oak” and was knighted for his loyalty. As the old primer has it:
“It was the tree, the old oak-tree, Which saved his royal majesty.”
The tree stood in a field of clover, and the Foote coat-of-arms still bears an oak for its crest and a clover-leaf in its quarterings, with the motto “Loyalty and Truth.”
Her mother, Roxana Ward Foote, was descended from Andrew Ward, who came over with Sir Richard Saltonstall and settled in Watertown, Mass., in 1630.
He afterwards moved to Wethersfield, and was a member of the first General Court, or Legislature, held at Hartford in 1636. Later he moved to Stamford, and represented that colony in the higher branch of the General Court at New Haven.
From him descended Colonel Andrew Ward, who took part in the old French and Indian war and aided in the capture of Louisburg in 1745. Of him it is told that, being a stanch cold-water man, he took money in lieu of his daily rations of grog. With this he bought six silver spoons, on which he had engraved the name “Louisburg.” Some of these spoons are still preserved in the family, witnesses to the virtue and valor of one of its honored ancestors.
His son was General Andrew Ward, of Revolutionary fame, who, at the close of the war, went back to his native town, Guilford, and took up his residence upon a farm of about two hundred acres, called Nutplains. For many years he represented the town in the State Legislature, being nominated, it is said, year after year by some one of the town worthies in this primitive manner: “The meeting is now open, and you will proceed to vote for General Ward and Deacon Burgess for representatives.”
When his daughter, an only child, who had married Eli Foote, was left a widow, he took her with her ten children to his home at Nutplains, and cared for them as if they were his own. Being a great reader, and always bringing home with him from the Legislature his saddle-bags full of books, which were read aloud and discussed in the family, this home became a school that afforded superior advantages for gaining acquaintance with literature, for acquiring such knowledge of science as was accessible at that time, and for exciting thought and interest. In that school Roxana, the second-born of the family, is represented to have been easily first both in intellect and goodness.
Taking her part in the labor of the household at a time when it was expected that the woman portion would not only care for the house, prepare the food, and make the clothes for all the family, but also weave and spin the materials as well, she yet managed to acquire an education of which graduates of our modern schools and colleges might well be proud. “She studied while she spun flax, tying her books to the distaff.” She not only became well read in literature and history, and acquainted with the progress of science, then just beginning to attract the attention of scholars, but learned to write and speak the French language fluently. She gave enough attention to music to be able to accompany her voice on the guitar, and was sufficiently skilled in the use of pencil and brush to paint some very creditable portraits upon ivory, several of which are still in the family. She was an adept in the mysteries of the needle, “in fine embroidery with every variety of lace and cobweb stitch,” and was gifted with great skill and celerity in all manner of handicraft, so that in after-years “neither mantua-maker, tailoress, or milliner ever drew on the family treasury.”
Belonging to a family distinguished in both branches of her ancestry, and residing, while her father lived, in the centre of the village of Guilford, which could boast that more than four-fifths of its original population belonged to families with coats-of-arms in Great Britain, and afterwards taken to the home of her grandfather, General Ward, who was the foremost man of the town and one of the leading men in the State, and who kept open house to all strangers, she enjoyed the best social advantages which the times afforded.
Tall and beautiful in form and feature, with a winning and yet commanding presence, “she was so sensitive and of so great natural timidity that she never spoke in company or before strangers without blushing, and was absolutely unable in after-life to conform to the standard of what was expected of a pastor’s wife and lead the devotions in the weekly female prayer-meeting.”
She was early confirmed in the Episcopal Church; her parents, although both from strictly Puritan families, having joined that denomination upon their marriage. They had held through all the Revolutionary struggle to their loyalty to King George, and this had subjected them to the determined opposition of their neighbors, and stamped the family, perhaps, with something of that independence of character which opposition to a prevailing popular sentiment is adapted to give, and which is so marked a feature in her descendants.
Converted when she was but five years old, and scarcely remembering the time when she did not go with her joys and sorrows to God in prayer, and next to the oldest in a family of ten children, her mother a widow, and all dependent upon the grandfather, she early learned that patience, self-control, efficiency, and unselfishness that characterized her through life and left in her old home at Nutplains, as Mrs. Stowe tells us, traditions like these: “Your mother never spoke an angry word in her life.” “Your mother never told a lie.” And from the husband such a testimony as this: “She experienced resignation, if any one ever did. I never saw the like, so entire, without reservation or shadow of turning. In no exigency was she taken by surprise. She was just there, quiet as an angel from above. I never heard a murmur; and if ever there was a perfect mind as respects submission, it was hers. I never witnessed a movement of the least degree of selfishness; and if there ever was any such thing in the world as disinterestedness, she had it.”
No one reading her history will think that Henry Ward exaggerated when, speaking of her and her influence upon him, he said: “There are few born into this world that are her equals. She was a woman of extraordinary graces and gifts; a woman not demonstrative, with a profound philosophical nature, of a wonderful depth of affection, and with a serenity that was simply charming. From her I received my love of the beautiful, my poetic temperament; from her also I received simplicity and childlike faith in God.”
And again: “My communion with nature arose from the mother in me. Because my mother was an inspired woman, who saw God in nature as really as in the Book, and she bestowed that temperament upon me, and I came gradually to feel that, aside from God as revealed in the past, there was a God with an everlasting present around about me.”
With these elements of a more personal nature also appear certain family traits. As we saw how, from the father’s side, the old anvil was constantly making itself heard in the strong, sturdy qualities of the Beecher stock, so shall we see features from the ancestry on the mother’s side coming to him almost unchanged. The loyalty represented by the oak-tree, and the virtue displayed at Louisburg, will constantly show themselves. Who that has seen him standing, now for the black man in the face of the adverse popular sentiment of his time in obedience to his own convictions of right, now governing his political actions by the same authority, and anon following his religious convictions wherever they led him, can have failed to see, in him, the oak-tree standing in the clover-field with the motto written upon its shield, in letters of light, “Loyalty and Truth”? In his constant advocacy of reform, in his early and strenuous opposition to intemperance, appears “Louisburg” again, written this time, not upon silver, but upon life and character—the Ward and the Foote families showing in him the characteristics they had won.
More than this, probably no lines could better illustrate the New England race-elements, the union of its democracy and its gentry, the sturdy independence of its homes and its native ability in war and peace, its intellectual and its spiritual independence, its quaint humor and its shrewd common sense, than those that united in him from both the parental roots.
He was a natural product of the New England stock, tempered and sweetened by the broader traditions of the more aristocratic blood of the Cavalier, of New England institutions and New England character. And since New England, thus enriched, illustrates the whole land, and by reason of the diffusion of her blood has made her characteristics national, he was a typical American, standing with unusual ability and conscientiousness where every true American feels that he ought to stand—for right and liberty. This, we doubt not, was in part the ground of his national popularity and influence; he was felt to be so thoroughly American. He represented us as do our national colors and our battle-flags, and we were proud of him, grew enthusiastic over him, and men that never saw him loved him. And since these characteristics are but the product of English institutions and the putting forth of Anglo-Saxon tendencies which were always advancing, always protesting against some old abuse, and always seeking the recognition of some right—now at Runnymede among the barons, and now at Westminster among the Commons; now taking up the question of negro-slavery, and now the Irish question; always hopeful, expectant, progressive—and America is but, as he claimed, “the better England transplanted,” and he but “an Englishman from a broader England,” a continental instead of an insular one, he was hailed by all the English-speaking people as belonging to them as do King Alfred and Shakspere.
As we go on we shall find many other influences at work—influences of nature, of books, of college and profession; but thus early we can see that, more than of any and all the rest, Henry Ward Beecher was the product of New England parentage, full-veined with English traditions and race characteristics.
The courtship of Lyman Beecher and Roxana Foote took place in 1798. It was marked by the interpenetration of religious sentiment and earthly love, and was a true preparation for home-making, and of such a home as should help to form the remarkable personality of H. W. Beecher.
The letters that passed between them during this year give evidence of the strong love of those who, while having still upon them the dew of their youth, have each found in the other the chosen mate—a love than which earth has no more influential nor beautiful thing to give. They also show us the two akin in intellectual powers and pursuits, and equally enjoying the treasures which the world of letters opened to them. But most prominent of all matters referred to in these letters are religious questions and personal religious experiences. They revolve around “the evidences” and similar subjects with an absorption of interest that must seem almost incomprehensible to modern lovers. In the perfect and unrestrained communion of heart with heart these two speak of the sweet and wonderful experiences that they have enjoyed from the presence of the Lord, share their common hopes and anticipations of the coming glory of the Redeemer’s kingdom, and strive to help one another to a better understanding of the best things of God. Such thoughts and efforts as these undoubtedly went far toward laying the foundation of that “intimacy that existed throughout the whole range of their being,” and for that deep and unswerving regard and confidence which each cherished for the other until death. She rested upon him, and he always looked upon her as intellectually and morally the stronger and better portion of himself. The very differences in their nature and education contributed to this large and beautiful unity and confidence. While resembling each other in many things, in others they were the complements of each other. He was quick and impulsive, she, perfectly serene and self-poised. He was logical, she was intuitive as well. He was of the Independents, she was an Episcopalian. From such a union, so sincere and broad, we may expect a happy home.
Judging from these letters, we should say also that whenever these two shall build their home they will build it strong and high. Not only will love be there, with all its attractions, and intellect with its stimulus and power, but the grand things of heaven will be builded into it. And wherever it shall be established, whether by the sea-shore at East Hampton or among the hills of Litchfield, it will have a broad horizon; it will look out upon something wider and deeper than the sea and higher than the mountains. The high things of God will always be kept in view; His broad, deep, measureless purposes will be held within the range of its contemplation, and His presence will be felt in shaping its policy and in giving vitality to its atmosphere.
From such a home we shall expect children that shall have power in the world.
They were married at Nutplains, September 19, 1799.
“Roxana’s friends were all present and all my folks from New Haven.” ... “Nobody ever married more heart and hand than we.” Then came the packing up; “the candle-stand, bureau, clothing, bedding, linen, and stuffs generally,” and the going over by sloop to Long Island.
Their life in East Hampton, Long Island, was that of two who believed, without one shadow of doubt, in their call of God, and who took up their work, not only with the firm grasp of duty, but with the enthusiasm of devout, self-sacrificing love. Their faith was tested by his long-continued sickness, by the death of one of their children, and by the numerous discouragements of a country minister; but it stood the test, deepening and brightening under trial.
It was a barren place to which they had come, but Lyman Beecher brought such vigorous faith and added to it such enthusiastic labors, now in the home church, now in the school-houses of the surrounding districts, and now among the Indians at Montauk Point, that he made the whole district fruitful. The field was a narrow one, but by the interest awakened by his sermons, especially the one upon duelling called forth by the death of Alexander Hamilton from the pistol of Aaron Burr, he broadened it until his parish stretched across the Atlantic.
The wants of a young family made some effort necessary to eke out the meagre salary of four hundred dollars, and a school for girls was decided upon, to be kept by Mrs. Beecher. It was successful in every respect but financially, and moderately so in that; but it did not bring the relief that was sought, and there came a necessity to change for a field where sufficient salary could be had to support the family without the harassments of other and unpastoral labors.
A marked providence, as it seemed to Mr. Beecher, opened the way to his preaching on trial in Litchfield, Connecticut. He made a good impression; the people were unanimous and eager in their call; the Presbytery gave its consent; and now, without a doubt that it is according to the will of God, the decision is made, and the home which had first been planted within the sound of the ocean surf at East Hampton, Long Island, in 1799, was transplanted to the quiet inland village of Litchfield in 1810.
Chapter II
Litchfield—Situation—Natural Features—Early Settlers—Social and Moral Advantages—Patriotism—North Street Described—The Beecher Home—Birth of Henry Ward—The Times at Home and Abroad—His Birth-Mark.
As Henry Ward was perfectly satisfied with the parents that bore him, so he was with the place in which he was born. “Surely old Litchfield,” he says, “was a blessed place for one’s birth and childhood. Although there were no mountains, there were hills, the oldest-born of mountains, high, round, and innumerable. Great trees there were, full of confidences with the wind that chastised them in winter and kissed and caressed them all the summer.”
The hills referred to were “Prospect” and “Mount Tom” on the west, “Chestnut Hill” on the east, and others like them but unnamed—the “high, round, and innumerable” ones of which he speaks, and which together formed, with their sloping sides and valleys between, that broad and irregular plateau of elevated land, extending for miles on either side, in the midst of which the village of Litchfield is situated. A country of hills, with that wide and picturesque horizon which only such a landscape can furnish, where the irregular outline appears as walls and watch-towers for the protection of the home territory, with here and there an open door, through which the imagination of youth or the feet of maturer years may pass out into the great world of sunshine or of cloud beyond.
Litchfield Hill itself, on which the village stands, is more than a thousand feet above sea-level, “high and broad-backed,” and belongs, with all its fellows, to the Green Mountain range, which, beginning near the Gulf of St. Lawrence, sweeps in an irregular curve to the seaboard at Long Island Sound, the back-bone of this great New England peninsula.
High enough to be breezy and healthy, but not so high as to be unfertile, and sloping to the south, it afforded then, as now, all the inducements for residence which sun, soil, pure air, and a beautiful landscape could furnish.
Lakes, without which no landscape is perfect, were added: Little Pond to the southwest, and Big Bantam Lake beyond, were the ones that were visible from the village, out of a large number that can be found in the township; but the Sawmill Pond, where Henry Ward caught his first fish, with an alder-stick for a pole and a bent pin for a hook—caught it so thoroughly that it was dashed in pieces upon the rocks behind him—has disappeared with the tearing away of the dam that held it.
Brooks ran down between the hills and sang their way through the meadows, each one offering some new feature to the landscape, and each a field of new discovery for inquisitive youth.
Woods, made up of every variety of tree and shrub native to our latitude, where nuts grew and all kinds of small game abounded, where crows and now and then a hen-hawk built their nests, were in easy reach upon the slopes of the hills both to the west and east. Ledges of rock to the north were the lair of wildcats, a vermin so numerous seventy-five years ago as to be a serious pest to the farmers; and stone walls, where woodchucks retreated from the clover-fields and thought themselves safe, were the usual division-fences for the fields.
There were other things that were equally pleasing to a boy’s fancy, and perhaps equally influential in his education. The lakes, streams, and forests of the town had been the favorite fishing and hunting ground of the Indians; arrow-heads were occasionally picked up on the lake shore or turned up by the ploughshare upon the hillside; and, best of all, Mount Tom was one of the series of stations where blazed the signal-fires which the Indians of this region built to warn their brethren of the whole territory between the Housatonic and Naugatuck rivers of the approach of their enemies, the fierce Mohawks.
Litchfield, in short, was the paradise of a birth-place for any boy. It was paradise, school-house, gymnasium, church, and cathedral to Henry Ward Beecher. In it he experienced his sweetest pleasures, learned his best lessons, gained control of his powers, and offered his first worship. He breathed its pure air, climbed its rocks, wandered in its woods, wrestled with its winter storms, and in this way laid the foundation for that superb health for which he was remarkable through life.
With the hunger and inquisitiveness of a growing boy, he searched nature’s storehouse of fruits and nuts, which opens with the wintergreen plums and squaw-berries of the melting snow-time of spring, and continues, a house of plenty for all that know her secrets—partridges, squirrels, and boys—until the snow covers the ground in December, and so gained that habit of investigation into the things of nature, and of close observation, that distinguished him ever after.
He lay on the ground and looked up into the blue sky and the moving tree-tops for hours together, and listened to the voices of spring-time and eventide, and in this way, as he tells us, received the first distinct religious impressions that he remembered. His nature, which seemed closed almost to the verge of stupidity to the rules of syntax and the answers in the Westminster Catechism, was wide open and receptive to all the processes and influences of nature around him. He drank them in, and they became not only a vast storehouse of facts and images to which he resorted in after-life for illustrations, but, even more than that, a very part of himself. The tree that so often appeared in his sermons was made from those up whose trunks he had climbed, in whose shade he had lain, and to the whisperings of whose leaves he had listened in boyhood. The spring which so often served in illustrating spiritual truths was but the description of those that burst out from the foot of Chestnut or of Prospect Hill, and the flowers so frequently referred to in the pulpit or in private conversation were such as he had grown familiar with by the roadside, in the meadows or the forests of his country home. The moving of the great cloud-shadows across the fields of Litchfield, the blue of its skies, the reddening of its mornings and the gold of its sunsets, the flash of its sunlight upon the lake, its wealth of apple-blossoms, the exquisite beauty of its violets hidden away in fence-corners, the grace of its elm-branches, the ruggedness of its oaks, the strength of its rocks, the soft catkins of its willows, its meadow flower-garden of clover, daisy, and buttercup, the gorgeousness of its forests in autumn, the gurgle of its brooks, the song of its birds, the plaintive voices of its twilight, the gentle breathings of its August winds and the fierce rattle of its December storms, were all absorbed by his receptive nature and continually reappeared in his writings and talk of after-years. They added the grace and beauty native to them to all that he wrote or spoke, and were in part the secret of that charm in his words which attached and interested all alike. They did more than this: they prepared him to be an interpreter of nature to others, and, when he had become equally well equipped with a rich spiritual experience, they fitted him, as we shall see farther on, to be the reconciler of a spiritual faith and a material science.
It was not an unimportant thing, but one of God’s beautiful provisions, that Henry Ward Beecher was born in Litchfield, where there is more of nature to the square foot, as we believe, than in any other place on the globe; to learn his first lessons in the beautiful school of her flowers, birds, brooks, meadows, pasture lands, hill-tops, and forests.
“Dear old Litchfield! I love thee still, even if thou didst me the despite of pushing me into life upon thy high and windy hilltop! Where did the spring ever break forth more joyously and sing at escaping from winter, as the children of Israel did when that woman’s-rights Miriam chanted her song of victory? Where did the torrid summer ever find a lovelier place in which to cool its beams? What trees ever murmured more gently to soft winds, or roared more lion-like when storms were abroad?
“It was there that we learned to fish, to ride a horse alone, to do the barn chores, to cut and split wood, to listen at evening to the croaking frogs and whistling tree-toads, to go to meeting and go to sleep, to tear holes in new clothes; there we learned to hoe, to mow away hay, to weed onions, to stir up ministers’ horses with an unusual speed when ridden to water; there we went a-wandering up and down forest-edges, and along the crooked brooks in flower-pied meadows, dreaming about things not to be found in any catechism.”
Equally marked was Litchfield at that day for its social and moral as for its natural advantages. Its early settlers, mostly from the excellent stock from which the colonies of Hartford and Windsor were formed, were men of broad and liberal mould, and began their work upon this hilltop in a characteristic fashion. They laid out their streets and staked off the village common with such generous breadth that they remain the delight of residents and the admiration of strangers to this day. They made such liberal provision for education and religion that the settlement soon became noted for the excellency of its schools and the commanding influence of its pulpit.[1]
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Footnote 1:
Out of sixty-four allotments into which the town was divided, one was to be given to the first minister, to be his and descend to his heirs for ever; a second was to be reserved for the use of the minister during his ministry, and a third was reserved for the benefit of a school. While as yet three houses, one in the centre of the present village, and one on either side a mile distant, were picketed and garrisoned for protection against the Indians, and while there were but sixty adult male inhabitants, they built their first church edifice, with a Sabbath-Day House for the better accommodation of the people.
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The law-school of Judges Reeve and Gould, and the young ladies’ school of the Misses Pierce, made it an educational centre scarcely second in the breadth of its influence to any in the land, and attracted a class of residents of high social position.
Its courts gathered from time to time some of the leading members of the bar from the whole country, not for a few hours, as now with our railroad facilities, but for days and weeks together. All these things helped to create a very high order of public spirit—that force which, often wholly unregarded, is yet so powerful in moulding the character and giving direction to the life.
One other element in this communal influence must not be omitted—its intense patriotism. From the beginning to the close of the Revolutionary struggle the records of the county of Litchfield are stamped with the evidence of the most enthusiastic loyalty to the cause of the struggling colonies. At the time of the Boston Port Bill, Litchfield had forwarded a liberal contribution for the aid of the poor of that city. When the equestrian statue of King George, of gilded lead, was missing from the Bowling Green in New York, it was shortly found in the dwelling-house of Oliver Wolcott in this village, was melted down by his daughters and their friends, and furnished forty thousand bullets, which were sent to our soldiers in the field, to be afterwards forwarded by them, from the muzzles of their muskets, to the king’s Hessians, with the hissing compliments of the American colonies.
No town excelled her in the proportionate number or quality of the men she sent into the field (at one time every able-bodied man in the town being, it is said, at the front), nor in the suffering and loss which they endured. Thirty out of a company of thirty-six who surrendered at Fort Washington, New York, “died miserable deaths from cold, hunger, thirst, suffocation, disease, and the vilest cruelties from those to whom they had surrendered on a solemn promise of honorable treatment.” This had made Ethan Allen, a native of this village, and, as is well known, a professed infidel, grind his teeth and exclaim: “My faith in my creed is shaken; there ought to be a hell for such infernal scoundrels as that Lowrie,” the officer in charge of the prisoners. Nor were these days so remote that their influence was unfelt. In 1810 the spirit of ’76 was not seriously diminished, and many of the principal actors in the stirring scenes of the Revolutionary struggle were still alive. Colonel Tallmadge, one of the most dashing and able cavalry officers of the army, Governor Oliver Wolcott, Jr., a member of Washington’s cabinet, and many other soldiers of the Revolution and actors of less note, were residents of the village at the time of the coming here of Lyman Beecher. When we note the burning patriotism which was always so marked a characteristic of Henry Ward, we must remember that he drank it in in his youth from its primitive sources among the old soldiers of Litchfield.
We give his description of the village as it appeared to him in his childhood, although a part of it is out of chronological order. It is found in an article entitled “Litchfield Revisited,” written in 1856:
“The morning after our arrival in Litchfield we sallied forth alone. The day was high and wide, full of stillness, and serenely radiant. As we carried our present life up the North Street we met at every step our boyhood life coming down. There were the old trees, but looking not so large as to our young eyes. The stately road had, however, been bereaved of the buttonball trees, which had been crippled by disease. But the old elms retained a habit peculiar to Litchfield. There seemed to be a current of wind which at times passes high up in the air over the town, and which moves the tops of the trees, while on the ground there is no movement of wind. How vividly did that sound from above bring back early days, when for hours we lay upon the windless grass and watched the top leaves flutter, and marked how still were the under leaves of the same tree!
“One by one came the old houses. On the corner stood and stands the jail—awful building to young sinners! We never passed its grated windows without a salutary chill. The old store, and same old name, Buell, on it; the bank, and its long, lean legs spindling up to hold the shelf up under the roof! The Colonel Tallmadge house, that used to seem so grand that it was cold, but whose cherry-trees in the front yard seemed warm enough and attractive to our longing lips and watery mouths. How well do we remember the stately gait of the venerable colonel of Revolutionary memory! We don’t recollect that he ever spoke to us or greeted us; not because he was austere or unkind, but from a kind of military reserve. We thought him good and polite, but should as soon have thought of climbing the church-steeple as of speaking to one living so high and venerable above all boys!
“Then came Judge Gould’s! Did we not remember that and the faces that used to illuminate it? The polished and polite judge, the sons and daughters, the little office in the yard, the successive classes of law students that received that teaching which has since so often honored both bar and bench. Here, too, we stopped to retrace the very place where, being set on by a fiery young Southern blood, without any cause that we knew of then or can remember now, we undertook to whip one of Judge Gould’s sons, and did not do it. We were never satisfied with the result, and think if the thing could be reviewed now it might turn out differently.
“There, too, stood Dr. Catlin’s house, looking as if the rubs of time had polished it instead of injuring. Next there seemed to our puzzled memory a vacancy. Ought there not to be about there a Holmes house, to which we used to go and get baskets of Virgaloo pears, and were inwardly filled, as a satisfying method of keeping us honest toward the pears in the basket?
“But Dr. Sheldon’s house is all right. Dear old Dr. Sheldon! We began to get well as soon as he came into the house; or, if the evil spirit delayed a little, ‘Cream-o’-tartar with hot water poured upon it and sweetened’ finished the work. He had learned, long before the days of homœopathy, that a doctor’s chief business is to keep parents from giving their children medicine, so that nature may have a fair chance at the disease without having its attention divided or diverted.
“But now we stop before Miss Pierce’s—a name known in thousands of families, where gray-headed mothers remember the soft and gentle days of Litchfield schooling. The fine residence is well preserved, and time has been gentle within likewise. But the school-house is gone, and she that for so many years kept it busy is gone, and the throng that have crossed its threshold brood the whole globe with offices of maternal love. The Litchfield Law School in the days of Judge Tapping Reeve and Judge Gould, and Miss Pierce’s Female School, were in their day two very memorable institutions, and, though since supplied by others upon a larger scale, there are few that will have performed so much, if we take into account the earliness of the times and the fact that they were pioneers and parents of those that have supplanted them. But they are gone, the buildings moved off, and the ground smoothed and soft to the foot with green grass. No more shall the setting sun see Litchfield streets thronged with young gentlemen and ladies, and filling the golden air with laughter or low converse which, unlaughing then, made life musical for ever after!
“But where is the Brace house? An old red house—red once, but picked by the winds and washed by rains till the color was neutral, thanks to the elements. The old elm-trees guard the spot, a brotherhood as noble as these eyes have ever seen, lifted high up, and in the part nearest heaven locking their arms together and casting back upon their separate trunks an undivided shade. So are many, separate in root and trunk, united far up by their heaven-touching thoughts and affections.
“Mrs. Lord’s house is the only one now before we reach our own native spot. This, too, holds its own and is fertile in memories. Across the way lived Sheriff Landon, famous for dry wit and strong politics.
“But south of him lived the greatest man in town, Mr. Parker, who owned the stages; and the wittiest man in town, with us boys, was Hiram Barnes, that drove stage for him! To be sure, neither of them was eminent for learning or civil influence, but, in that temple which boys’ imaginations make, a stage proprietor and a stage-driver stand forth as grand as Minerva in the Parthenon!
“But there are houses on the other side. The eastern side of Litchfield North Street, like the eastern side of Broadway, was never so acceptable to fashion, albeit some memorable names lived there. It was our good fortune to be born on the west side of the street. We know not what blessings must have descended upon us from having been born on the fashionable side; one shudders to think how near he escaped being born on the other, the east side of the street.”
Into this village Lyman Beecher brought his family in 1810. The dwelling had been described by himself: “The house I shall purchase is in a beautiful situation, is convenient, has a large kitchen, a well-room, a wood-house, besides two barns and a shop on the premises, and one and a half acres of land; price, about $1,350; and there is a good young orchard near for sale, so that we can keep a horse and one or two cows and have apples of our own from the money we shall reserve after paying our debts.” A row of quince-trees “whose early blossoms were so tender and whose switches were so tough—ah! those trees used to come home very near to me!” was on the north side of the house.[2]
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Footnote 2:
This house, enlarged by the addition which Mr. Beecher found it necessary to make, still remains substantially as it was seventy years ago, although not upon the old lot. It is now a part of Dr. Buel’s hospital for the insane, about a quarter of a mile above the original site.
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The home circle was large and varied. There were at this time the parents and six children, “Sister Roxana and her little group of countless numbers.” “Aunt Mary Hubbard,” the mother’s favorite sister, “spent much of her time with us, and some of mother’s favorite pupils from East Hampton, who had come to attend Miss Pierce’s school, sought a home in our family. Betsy Burr, an orphan cousin, lived with us like an adopted daughter, while the kitchen department was under the care of the good and affectionate Zillah and Rachel, who came with us and completed the home circle.”
The circle was still farther enlarged by the coming of Grandma Beecher and Aunt Esther, who, it will be remembered, was Lyman Beecher’s half-sister—“a woman,” as Henry Ward once said, “so good and modest that she will spend ages in heaven wondering how it ever happened that she ever got there, and that all the angels will be wondering why she was not there from all eternity.” “They occupied half of the next house to ours on the way to Prospect Hill, making a place of daily resort for some of the family.”
“Uncle Samuel Foote,” the mother’s sea-captain brother, “came among us, on his return from each voyage, as a sort of brilliant genius of another sphere, bringing gifts and wonders that seemed to wake new faculties in all. Whenever he came to Litchfield he brought a stock of new books, which he and Aunt Mary read aloud.”
It will be seen that, without referring to other inmates of the family, such as boarders and visitors, who afforded a great variety, some amusing and others instructive, the things which Henry Ward said were “the great treasures of a dwelling—the child’s cradle, the grandmother’s chair, the hearth and the old-fashioned fireplace, the table and the window”—were all there, and a great many things beside.
There were trials, almost hardships we should call them, as appears from a letter of Mrs. Beecher’s dated January 13, 1811, but none of them sufficient to bring discouragement or destroy her interest in scientific subjects: “... Would now write you a long letter, if it were not for several vexing circumstances, such as the weather extremely cold, storm violent, and no wood cut; Mr. Beecher gone, and Sabbath day, with company—a clergyman, a stranger; Catharine sick; George almost so; Rachel’s finger cut off, and she crying and groaning with the pain. Mr. Beecher is gone to preach in New Hartford, and did not provide us wood enough to last, seeing the weather has grown so exceedingly cold.... As for reading, I average perhaps one page a week besides what I do on Sundays. I expect to be obliged to be contented (if I can) with the stock of knowledge I already possess, except what I can glean from the conversation of others.... Mary has, I suppose, told you of the discovery that the fixed alkalies are metallic oxides. I first saw the notice in the Christian Observer. I have since seen it in an Edinburgh Review. The former mentioned that the metals have been obtained by means of the galvanic battery; the latter mentions another and, they say, a better mode. I think this is all the knowledge I have obtained in the whole circle of arts and sciences of late; if you have been more fortunate, pray let me reap the benefit.”
Looking at both its sunshine and its shadows, this Litchfield parsonage offers an illustration of an ideal New England home. The household was large, large enough to contain in itself a great variety of resources, and able in that roomy house to offer a broad hospitality to all comers. Democratic in the best sense of the word, servants being considered and treated as constituent members; wide awake, reading all the new books, discussing all the vital questions of the day, arguing all the knotty points of theology; industrious and frugal; allied to the best life of the place and the times, with a broad outlook that took within its horizon all the interests of country and humanity, of the kingdom of God at home and abroad, social, political, and spiritual, it was good soil, and a good exposure for planting a tree whose branches should spread abroad throughout the land and the whole earth.
Into this family was born a son, June 24, 1813—“the fourth, fifth, sixth, or seventh child, somewhere thereabouts,” as he himself says in a speech before the London Congregational Board, with that forgetfulness of numbers which was always characteristic of him. In fact, the ninth child, the eighth living at the time. It was in one of his favorite months, that of June, “which bursts out from the gates of heaven with all that is youngest, and clothed with that which is the most tender and beautiful,” that he began his career.
The grandmother, Roxana Foote, being with her daughter at the time, and remembering her own two favorite sons, who died in youth, named the new-born infant after his uncles, Henry and Ward.
They were stirring times, those of the early summer of 1813. The second war of our national independence was then in progress, and tidings had just reached the village that Fort Brown had been captured by the United States forces. Lyman Beecher says of those times:
“Our dangers in the war of 1812 were very great, so great that human skill and power were felt to be in vain. Thick clouds begirt the horizon, the storm roared louder and louder; it was dark as midnight, every pilot trembled, and from most all hope that we should be saved was taken away; and when from impenetrable darkness the sun burst suddenly upon us and peace came, we said: ‘Our soul is escaped as a bird from the snare of the fowler. The snare is broken and we are escaped.’”
Across the water Napoleon was rallying from the disaster of his Russian campaign, and making the Continent again resound with the roar of his cannon. Not only did these events stir mind and heart of all alike, but the increased taxation and the high prices that resulted from a world at war were severely felt in the parsonage. Mrs. Lyman Beecher wrote: “We feel the war somewhat more than we should one between the Turks and Crim Tartars, inasmuch as, for the most part, every article is double or treble the former price, and some things even more than that.”
These were also the days of the inauguration of some of those great moral movements that are even now in progress in this State and in the land. It was but the year before that the General Association of Connecticut, under the leadership of Lyman Beecher, had taken decided action upon the temperance question. In speaking of it he says:
“I was not headstrong then, but I was heart-strong—oh! very, very! From that time on the movement went on, not only in Connecticut but marching through New England and marching through the world. Glory to God! Oh! how it wakes my old heart up to think of it!”
Morals in general at this time were at a low ebb, and he secured the organization of a “General Society for the Suppression of Vice and the Promotion of Good Morals in the State.”
His sermon upon the “Building of Waste Places” resulted in the institution of a “Domestic Missionary Society” for the work of home evangelization in Connecticut, and he had already secured a Foreign Missionary Society for Litchfield, which was one of the most efficient auxiliaries of the American Board, then but recently established. The conflict concerning the Standing Order which in 1818 resulted in the withdrawal of State aid from the Congregational churches, and which Dr. Beecher feared as likely to open the flood-gates of ruin upon the State, and by reason of which he says, “I suffered what no tongue can tell, for the best thing that ever happened to the State of Connecticut,” was just beginning.
In all the movements of this progressive period stands this village parsonage, like an outpost of an advancing army, held almost within the enemy’s lines.
Added to these public labors and troubles a very heavy family sorrow was laid upon them during this year. The mother, for months before the birth of her ninth child, saw her favorite sister, Mary Hubbard, slowly wasting away with consumption, and had need to call up all her resources of faith and resignation to meet this complication of trials that was upon them.
So this child was nourished, even before birth, in the sweet spirit of a most godly soul, deepened and chastened by both private griefs and public sorrows, and was ushered into the world at an era of most important events, into the very midst of multiplied labors and stirring, progressive movements. All these formed, as it were, an atmosphere of influence as imperceptible to the eye as common air, but as powerful in moulding character in its formative periods as are the natural forces in shaping the mountains or growing the forests. By virtue of that law by which the offspring are affected by those things which most interest the parents, we may safely say that Henry Ward Beecher was in part a product of the times that preceded, attended, and followed his birth, and was stamped by their strong and peculiar characteristics. He carried war in him as a birth-mark, but with him it was war against wickedness and wrong.
The springs of consolation, which flowed from him in after-years for the relief of troubled souls the world over, were such as his mother resorted to in days of trial, and were opened to him in her bosom; and he was continually pressing forward through life to some new measure of reform, to some new step of attainment, by virtue of that reforming, progressive age that so early became a very part of his nature.
III. CHILDHOOD
Early Glimpses—Recollections of the Mother—Going to School at Ma’am Kilbourne’s—His First Letter—District School—The Coming of the New Mother—His First Ride on Horseback—A Merry Household—Fishing Excursions—Minister’s Wood-Spell—Saturday Night—Going to Meeting—The Puritan Sabbath—The Cold of Litchfield Hill—Rats—Work—The Catechism—Formative Influences—Summing Up.
We of course see but little of him in these early years.
“The younger members of the Beecher family came into existence in a great, bustling household of older people, all going their several ways and having their own grown-up interests to carry.
“The child growing up in this busy, active circle had constantly impressed upon it a sense of personal insignificance as a child, and the absolute need of the virtue of passive obedience and non-resistance as regards all grown-up people. To be statedly washed and dressed and catechised, got to school at regular hours in the morning and to bed inflexibly at the earliest possible hour at night, comprised about all the attention that children could receive in those days.”
Here and there a glimpse is given, just enough to tell us the direction the stream is taking. The first is found in a letter of the mother to her sister, Harriet Foote, written when he was a little more than a year old:
“July 12, 1814.—... I arrived Saturday at sunset, and found all well, and boy (Henry Ward) in merry trim, glad at heart to be safe on terra firma after all his jolts and tossings.”
Again in November of the same year:
“I write sitting upon my feet with my paper on the seat of a chair, while Henry is hanging round my neck and climbing on my back.”
He himself gives an experience of a little later period:
“I remember very well when I was but two years old (strange as it may seem; sometimes I think I spent all my remembering power on that early period!) finding myself in the east entry of my father’s great house, alone, coming down-stairs, or trying to. The sudden sense which I had of being alone frightened me, and I gave one shriek; and then the echo of my voice scared me worse, and I gave another shriek that was more emphatic; and I remember seeing the light stream in from the dining-room, and being taken up by loving hands. The face I do not recall, the form I do not recall; but I remember the warm pressure. It was my mother, who died when I was three years old. She took me to her bosom. I recollect sitting by the side of some one who made me feel very happy; and I recollect seeing my father’s swart face on the other side of the table.
“Now I could not paint my mother’s face; but I know how her bosom felt. I know how her arms felt. I have a filial sense, a child’s interpretation, of motherhood. It was only an emotion or instinct in me, but it was blessed.”
This incident of the mother is supplemented by two of the sister Harriet, in which the little boy Henry had a part:
“In my own early childhood,” she says, “only two incidents of my mother twinkle like rays through the darkness. One was of our all running and dancing out before her from the nursery to the sitting-room one Sabbath morning, and her pleasant voice saying after us, ‘Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.’”
Another remembrance is this: “Mother was an enthusiastic horticulturist in all the small ways that limited means allowed. Her brother John, in New York, had just sent her a small parcel of tulip bulbs. I remember rummaging these out of an obscure corner of the nursery one day when she was out, and being strongly seized with the idea that they were good to eat, and using all the little English I possessed to persuade my brothers that these were onions such as grown people ate, and would be very nice for us. So we fell to and devoured the whole; and I recollect being somewhat disappointed in the odd, sweetish taste, and thinking that onions were not as nice as I had supposed. Then mother’s serene face appeared at the nursery door, and we all ran toward her and with one voice began to tell our discovery and achievement. We had found this bag of onions and had eaten them all up. Also I remember that there was not even a momentary expression of impatience, but that she sat down and said: ‘My dear children, what you have done makes mamma very sorry. Those were not onion-roots, but roots of beautiful flowers; and if you had let them alone ma would have had next summer in the garden great, beautiful red and yellow flowers such as you never saw.’ I remember how drooping and dispirited we all grew at this picture, and how sadly we regarded the empty bag.”
When the mother grew sick and the children were admitted to her bedside once a day, Henry was among the number, although no memory of the fact lingered with him in after-years.
Mrs. Stowe writes of this event:
“I have a vision of a very fair face with a bright red spot on each cheek, and a quiet smile as she offered me a spoonful of her gruel; of our dreaming one night, we little ones, that mamma had got well, and waking in loud transports of joy, and being hushed down by some one coming into the room. Our dream was indeed a true one. She was for ever well; but they told us she was dead, and took us in to see what seemed so cold and so unlike anything we had ever seen or known of her.”
Mrs. Reeve, one of the most intimate friends of the family, writes of the last day of her life:
“She told her husband that her views and anticipations of heaven had been so great that she could hardly sustain it, and if they had been increased she should have been overwhelmed, and that her Saviour had constantly blessed her; that she had peace without one cloud, and that she had never during her sickness prayed for her life. She dedicated her sons to God for missionaries, and said that her greatest desire was that her children might be trained up for God, and she trusted God would, in his own time, provide another companion for him that would more than fill her place.
“She spoke of the advancement of Christ’s kingdom with joy, and of the glorious day that was ushering in.
“She attempted to speak to her children, but she was extremely exhausted, and their cries and sobs were such that she could say but little. She told them that God could do more for them than she had done or could do, and that they must trust him.
“Mr. Beecher then made a prayer, in which he gave her back to God and dedicated all that they held in common to him. She then fell into a sweet sleep from which she awoke in heaven. It is a most moving scene to see eight little children weeping around the bed of a dying mother; but still it was very cheering to see how God could take away the sting of death and give such a victory over the grave.”
Mr. Beecher’s remembrance of this event was simply of a feeling of fear and pain at the weeping of the children around him, and of interest in the baby, Charles, in his little white dress, as he was lifted up in the arms of one of the attendants.
Of the funeral we read from Mrs. Stowe’s pen:
“Henry was too little to go; I remember his golden curls and little black frock, as he frolicked like a kitten in the sun in ignorant joy.
“I remember the mourning dresses, the tears of the older children, the walking to the burial-ground and somebody’s speaking at the grave, and the audible sobbing of the family; and then all was closed, and we little ones, to whom it was so confused, asked the question where she was gone and would she never come back? They told us at one time that she had been laid in the ground, at another that she had gone to heaven. Whereupon Henry, putting the two things together, resolved to dig through the ground and go to find her; for being discovered under sister Catherine’s window one morning digging with great zeal and earnestness, she called to him to know what he was doing, and, lifting his curly head, with great simplicity he answered: ‘Why, I am going to heaven to find ma!’”
We next hear of him in a letter written by his sister, February 1, 1817:
“... Henry is a very good boy, and we think him a remarkably interesting child, and he grows dearer to us every day. He is very affectionate, and seems to love his father with all his heart. His constant prattle is a great amusement to us all. He often speaks of his sister Harriet, and wishes spring would come, so that she might come home and go to school with him.”
This was in the winter when he was past three years old.
Perhaps the prattle of this one will be instructive as well as amusing some day. Who knows?
At last spring comes, and with it his sister Harriet from her long visit at Nutplains, and an important era in his life opens. He begins to go to school, with her as his companion and guardian.
He is just four years old that summer, the usual age for school beginnings in rural New England. They went to Ma’am Kilbourne’s on West Street, and there he clambered up the first rounds of the ladder of book-learning and took his first lessons. These consisted in repeating his letters twice a day, such as he could remember, and having the others pointed out to him from Webster’s spelling-book, as he stood, a chubby, bare-footed, round, rosy-faced boy, in front of the dreaded schoolma’am, who had been made sharp and angular by her years of labor in sharpening the intellectual faculties of generations of children.
In due time Charles is large enough to join the older brother and sister, and tells us:
“I remember all three of us coming out of our yard and stringing along, holding each other by the hand and saying every morning, ‘What if a great big dog should come out at us?’ and Henry, as the larger brother and protector of the group, answering, ‘I would take an axe and chop his head off.’”
As yet he wears his hair in long golden curls, the badge of a continued infantile state; but some of the girls at school improvising a pair of shears from the pieces of tin thrown out from a shop near by, and cutting off some of the coveted locks, it is thought best at home to cut them all off; and now, with trousers, and suspenders, and jacket, and short hair, and bare feet, he emerges from the half-infantile, girlish state and becomes a full-fledged boy, much to his own satisfaction: “he considered that his manhood had now commenced.”
That the instruction of his teacher is not all thrown away is evident by the letter which he wrote at this time, when he was five years old, of which a facsimile is given. Its merits of directness and originality, at least in the matter of spelling, will be readily recognized:
One incident of about these times, which is related by his brother, is ludicrously prophetic:
“I remember Henry’s coming in and taking his turn” (reading to Aunt Esther). “Once the piece was about wild beasts, and it said ‘two monstrous lions came out.’ I can see Henry’s red face and declamatory air as he read it ‘two monstrofalous great lions came out.’”
From Widow Kilbourne’s he graduated into the district school, which was a few rods north of the parsonage, and was attended by all the children of quite a large farming district. Like the other children, he carried sewing and knitting, and the sister tells us that “this bashful, dazed-looking boy pattered bare-foot to and from the little unpainted school-house, with a brown towel or a blue checked apron to hem during the intervals between his spelling and reading lessons.”
His eagerness for sister Harriet to return, that he may begin school, has long since subsided, and given place to an unusual dislike for his whole district-school experience, as appears from reminiscences which he wrote in after-years:
“It was our misfortune, in boyhood, to go to a district school. It was a little, square pine building, blazing in the sun, upon the highway, without a tree for shade or sight near it; without bush, yard, fence, or circumstance to take off its bare, cold, hard, hateful look. Before the door, in winter, was the pile of wood for fuel, and in summer there were all the chips of the winter’s wood. In winter we were squeezed into the recess of the farthest corner, among little boys, who seemed to be sent to school merely to fill up the chinks between the bigger boys. Certainly we were never sent for any such absurd purpose as an education. There were the great scholars—the school in winter was for them, not for us pickaninnies. We were read and spelt twice a day, unless something happened to prevent, which did happen about every other day. For the rest of the time we were busy in keeping still. And a time we always had of it! Our shoes always would be scraping on the floor or knocking the shins of urchins who were also being ‘educated.’ All of our little legs together (poor, tired, nervous, restless legs with nothing to do!) would fill up the corner with such a noise that, every ten or fifteen minutes, the master would bring down his two-foot hickory ferule on the desk with a clap that sent shivers through our hearts to think how that would have felt if it had fallen somewhere else; and then, with a look that swept us all into utter extremity of stillness, he would cry, ‘Silence in that corner!’ It would last for a few minutes; but little boys’ memories are not capacious. Moreover, some of the boys had mischief, and some had mirthfulness, and some had both together. The consequence was that just when we were the most afraid to laugh we saw the most comical things. Temptations which we could have vanquished with a smile out in the free air were irresistible in our little corner, where a laugh and a spank were very apt to woo each other. So we would hold on and fill up; and others would hold on and fill up too; till by and by the weakest would let go a mere whiffet of a laugh, and then down went all the precautions, and one went off, and another, and another, touching the others off like a pack of fire-crackers! It was in vain to deny it. But as the process of snapping our heads and pulling our ears went on with primitive sobriety, we each in turn, with tearful eyes and blubbering lips, declared ‘we didn’t mean to,’ and that was true; and that ‘we wouldn’t do so any more,’ and that was a lie, however unintentional, for we never failed to do just so again, and that about once an hour all day long.
“Besides this our principal business was to shake and shiver at the beginning of the school for very cold; and to sweat and stew for the rest of the time before the fervid glances of a great box iron stove, red-hot. There was one great event of horror and two of pleasure: the first was the act of going to school, comprehending the leaving off play, the face-washing and clothes-inspecting, the temporary play-spell before the master came, the outcry, ‘There he is! the master is coming!’ the hurly-burly rush, and the noisy clattering to our seats. The other two events of pleasure were the play-spell and the dismissal. O dear! can there be anything worse for a lively, mercurial, mirthful, active little boy than going to a winter district school? Yes—going to a summer district school! There is no comparison. The one is the Miltonic depth, below the deepest depth.
“A woman kept the school, sharp, precise, unsympathetic, keen, and untiring. Of all ingenious ways of fretting little boys doubtless her ways were the most expert. Not a tree to shelter the house; the sun beat down on the shingles and clapboards till the pine knots shed pitchy tears, and the air was redolent of hot pine-wood smell. The benches were slabs with legs in them. The desks were slabs at an angle, cut, hacked, scratched; each year’s edition of jack-knife literature overlaying its predecessor, until it then wore cuttings and carvings two or three inches deep. But if we cut a morsel, or stuck in pins, or pinched off splinters, the little sharp-eyed mistress was on hand, and one look of her eye was worse than a sliver in our foot, and one nip of her fingers was equal to a jab of a pin; for we had tried both.
“We envied the flies—merry fellows! bouncing about, tasting that apple-skin, patting away at that crumb of bread; now out the window, then in again; on your nose, on your neighbor’s cheek, off to the very schoolma’am’s lips; dodging her slap, and then letting off a real round and round buzz, up, down, this way, that way, and every way. Oh! we envied the flies more than anything, except the birds. The windows were so high that we could not see the grassy meadows; but we could see the tops of distant trees, and the far, deep, bounteous blue sky. There flew the robins; there went the blue-birds: and there went we. We followed that old polyglot, the skunk-blackbird, and heard him describe the way they talked at the winding up of the Tower of Babel. We thanked every meadow-lark that sung on, rejoicing as it flew. Now and then a ‘chipping-bird’ would flutter on the very window-sill, turn its little head sidewise, and peer in on the medley of boys and girls. Long before we knew that it was in Scripture we sighed: Oh! that we had the wings of a bird; we would fly away and be out of this hateful school. As for learning, the sum of all that we ever got at a district school would not cover the first ten letters of the alphabet. One good, kind, story-telling, Bible-rehearsing aunt at home, with apples and ginger-bread premiums, is worth all the schoolma’ams that ever stood by to see poor little fellows roast in those boy-traps called district schools.
“I have not a single pleasant recollection in connection with my school-boy days. The woods were full of temptations, the trees called me, the birds wanted me, the brooks sung entreaties. It seemed cruel to be shut up. The brooks, birds, flowers, sunshine, and breezes were free; why not I?”
In the autumn of 1817, when Henry Ward was a few months past four years of age, Dr. Lyman Beecher married Miss Harriet Porter, of Portland, Maine, and brought his bride at once to Litchfield.
The advent of the new mother is thus described by Mrs. Stowe:
“I was about six years old and slept in the nursery with my two younger brothers, Henry and Charles. We heard father’s voice in the entry, and started up in our little beds, crying out as he entered our room, ‘Why, here’s pa!’ A cheerful voice called out from behind him, ‘And here’s ma.’
“A beautiful lady, very fair, with bright blue eyes and soft auburn hair bound round with a black velvet bandeau, came into the room smiling, eager and happy-looking, and, coming up to our beds, kissed us and told us that she loved little children and that she would be our mother. Never did stepmother make a prettier or sweeter impression. The next morning I remember we looked at her with awe. She seemed to us so fair, so delicate, so elegant that we were almost afraid to go near her. We must have been rough, red-cheeked, hearty country children, honest, obedient, and bashful. She was peculiarly dainty and neat in all her ways and arrangements; and I remember I used to feel breezy and rough and rude in her presence. We felt a little in awe of her, as if she were a strange princess rather than our own mamma; but her voice was very sweet, her ways of moving and speaking very graceful, and she took us up in her lap and let us play with her beautiful hands, which seemed wonderful things made of pearl and ornamented with strange rings.”
In a letter written to her sister Mrs. Beecher gives her impressions of the group. She says: “We surprised them here almost as much as Mr. Beecher did us. They did not expect us till the following evening, but it was a joyful surprise to them. I never saw so many rosy cheeks and laughing eyes. The little ones were all joy and gladness. They began all, the first thing, to tell their dreams, for it seems they have dreamed of nothing else but father’s coming home; and some dreamed he came without me, and some that he brought two mothers. They all became immediately very free and social, except the youngest (Charles), and he is quite shy; calls me ‘lady,’ and sometimes ‘dear lady,’ but he loves aunt much the best. I have never seen a finer family of children, or a more agreeable. I am delighted with the great familiarity and great respect subsisting between parent and children. It is a house of great cheerfulness and comfort, and I am beginning to feel at home. Harriet and Henry are very desirous for me to send their love.”
Later she writes of them:
“I perceive them to be of agreeable habits, and some of them of uncommon intellect.... Harriet and Henry come next, and they are always hand-in-hand. They are as lovely children as I ever saw, amiable, affectionate, and very bright.... Our dwelling is pleasantly situated. The garden yields plenty of vegetables for the year, plenty of cherries, and the orchard furnishes cider and apples enough. A barrel of apple-sauce is made in the fall, which the children use instead of butter.... The boys are up before it is quite day, and make fires, and we are all down and have prayers before sunrise. Our domestic worship is very delightful. We sing a good deal and have reading aloud as much as we can.”
The following silhouette, although following the last by quite an interval of time—it is in 1819—is our next family picture in order:
“Papa is well and is still writing that piece with a hard name, I can’t remember what. Mamma is well, and don’t laugh any more than she used to. Catherine goes on just as she always did, making fun for everybody. George is as usual. Harriet makes just as many wry faces, is just as odd, and loves to be laughed at just as much as ever. Henry does not improve much in talking, but speaks very thick. Charles is the most mischievous little fellow I ever knew. He seems to do it for the very love of it; is punished and punished again, but it has no effect. He is the same honest little boy, and I love him dearly.”
It must have been about this time that Henry had the experience which he thus describes:
“When I was a lad I was ambitious to ride, but never was permitted to ride except behind an elder brother; but one fair morning, as the horse was brought out to be watered, I bestrode him and took the reins in my hand. He made for the brook with considerable celerity; but though he was nimble I was willing, and I succeeded in holding on and getting back without any accident. So elated was I with my first attempt at horseback-riding that I felt that I was the horseman of the neighborhood. The next morning I repeated the ride, but with a variation; for, being unaccustomed to some of the phases of horseback-riding, I was not prepared for what occurred. The horse did not perform just as I wanted him to, so I laid the whip on him, and he darted forward, and when he reached the edge of the brook he suddenly stopped and I went on!”
They are a merry lot of children, getting up little impromptu concerts, charades, and games of all kinds, at one time going so far as to dramatize a favorite story. They “curtain off the end of the parlor,” and “complete the entertainment amid thunders of applause.”
Animal life is regarded, and the absent members of the family are kept duly informed of the well-being of their favorites:
“Old Puss is very well and sends her respects to you. And Mr. Black Trip has come out of the barn to live, and says if you ever come into the kitchen he will jump up and lick your hands and pull your frock, just as he serves the rest of us. Henry and Charles love to play with him very much.”
Little events in the family are noted and immortalized in verse, of which the following letter is a sample:
“... Apropos, last week was interred Tom, Junior, with funeral honors, by the side of old Tom of happy memory. What a fatal mortality there is among the cats of the parsonage! Our Harriet is chief mourner always at their funerals. She asked for what she called an epethet for the grave-stone of Tom, Junior, which I gave as follows:
“‘Here died our Kit, Who had a fit And acted queer. Shot with a gun, Her race is run, And she lies here.’”
When Henry was eight years old we read of the three in this wise:
“Harriet reads everything she can lay her hands on, and sews and knits diligently. Henry and Charles go to school. Henry is as sprightly and active, and Charles as honest and clumsy, as ever.”
Later in the year he can be had if really wanted:
“We have four boarders besides our own sick folk, so that if you are lonesome for want of children we could easily spare Henry or Harriet.”
Whether the hint was taken, and the boy who was sometimes too “sprightly and active” and this girl who “reads everything she can lay her hands on” were wanted and sent, is not told. The next year perhaps they would not care to spare him. “I had the alders down at the bottom of the east lot cut up, broke it up, and planted to corn and potatoes. Henry and Charles began to help hoe a little.” Any one who has had experience in such matters knows that hoeing potatoes in a newly-ploughed field just cleared of alders is no fun. At this time Henry was nine years old.
It has been said by one whose hatred of orthodox religion is only equalled by the beauty of the language with which he is able to clothe his misconceptions, that “Henry Ward Beecher was born in a Puritan penitentiary, of which his father was one of the wardens; a prison with very narrow and closely-grated windows.” But Mrs. Stowe wrote years ago: “One of my most vivid impressions of the family, as it was in my childish days, was of a great household inspired by a spirit of cheerfulness and hilarity, and of my father, although pressed and driven with business, always lending an attentive ear to anything in the way of life and social fellowship.”
The brother Charles, who was an almost inseparable companion for Henry in those days, says in a letter recently received: “The parental authority was pronounced but not very strict. That is, there was never any thought in the mind of the children of disobedience, but resort to corporal punishment was rare.
“Nor was brother Henry made to work very hard, nor was father very strait-laced or stern. Nor were we often switched, tho’ I dare say we deserved it. I only remember once distinctly, when Henry performed the gymnastics and I furnished the music (out in the barn). Fortunately for me, the switch was mostly used up on him as the elder—a birthright I did not envy—and I howled in sympathy, with a few cuts for Da Capo.
“The fact is, father was very fond of all his children and frolicked and romped with them. All the work there was to do (chores we called it) was to take care of a horse and cow, and in spring make garden, and, after wood-spell, carry in and pile up wood. I remember that we were told if we made the garden so and so, or did this or that, we should go fishing; and we used to go, the whole family of us, to Little Pond or Great Pond, and catch ‘Perchy, roachy, bullhead,’ as we sang it. One afternoon at Little Pond, where father had taken Henry and me in the chaise (‘one-hoss’), we were catching roach when the church-bell rang, and father remembered that it was Preparatory Lecture, and the way we scurried in the old vehicle may be imagined.”
Mrs. Stowe writes: “I remember when the wood was all in and piled and the chips swept up, then father tackled the horse into the cart and proclaimed a grand fishing party down to Little Pond; and how we all floated among the lily-pads in our boat, christened ‘The Yellow Perch,’ and every one of us caught a string of fish, which we displayed in triumph on our return.”
The father was very wise in directing the homely labors of the household, so that they became occasions of mental stimulus.
“I have the image of my father still, as he sat working the apple-peeler. ‘Come, George,’ he said, ‘I’ll tell you what we’ll do to make the evening go off. You and I’ll take turns and see who’ll tell the most out of Scott’s novels’ (for those were the days when the ‘Tales of my Landlord’ and ‘Ivanhoe’ had just appeared); and so they took them novel by novel, reciting scenes and incidents, which kept the eyes of all the children wide open and made the work go on without flagging.
“Occasionally he would raise a point of theology on some incident narrated, and ask the opinion of one of his boys and run a sort of tilt with him, taking up the wrong side of the question for the sake of seeing how the youngster could practise his logic. If the party on the other side did not make a fair hit at him, however, he would stop and explain to him what he ought to have said: ‘The argument lies so, my son; do that and you’ll trip me up.’ Much of his teaching to his children was in this informal way.”
A kindly country life surrounded the minister’s family, that could not fail of stamping the impress of its plain sincerity upon all who were brought in contact with it. Once a year this came to its climax in the winter’s wood-spell, when all the farmers upon a given day added their contribution to the minister’s wood-pile—a festival of kindness and good cheer.
“The kind farmers wanted to see all the children, and we were busy as bees in waiting upon them. The boys heated the flip-irons and passed around the cider and flip, while Aunt Esther and the daughters were as busy in serving the doughnuts, cake, and cheese.”
Another influence we must not forget, and that was, being let alone. “I think,” he says, “that I was about as well brought up as most children, because I was let alone. My father was so busy and my mother had so many other children to look after that, except here and there, I hardly came under the parental hand at all. I was brought up in a New England village, and I knew where the sweet-flag was, where the hickory-trees were, where the chestnut-trees were, where the sassafras-trees were, where the squirrels were, where all things were that boys enterprise after, therefore I had a world of things to do, and so I did not come much in contact with family government.” “Nobody,” so says his sister, “thought much of his future, further than to see that he was safe and healthy, or even troubled themselves to inquire what might be going on in his life.”
Some of the reminiscences of this period now given in his own words are interesting, not only from the wide field which they cover, but from the revelation they make of the susceptibility of his nature to outside influences. Of “going to meeting” he discourses in this wise:
“The coming on of Saturday night was always a serious business with the youngsters. We had no stores of religious experience on which it is presumed the old folks meditated, and the prospect of a whole day without anything in it to interest us was not a little gloomy. On no night of the week did the frogs croak so dismally, or the tree toads whistle in a mood so melancholy, as on Saturday night.
“But those blazing summer mornings! What a wealth of light spread over that blessed old hill-top! What a wondrous silence dwelt in the great round heavens above our head! The birds sang on. The crows in the distance called out to each other in hoarse discourse. The trees stood in calm beauty—the great elm-trees, tall, pliant, graceful, the perfection of strength and beauty. All this we saw and heard while buttoning up our Sunday clothes by the side of the open window. For the cow and horse had been foddered, and the pigs fed, and all the barn chores done up, and a bountiful breakfast eaten, and our face and hands washed, and every article of apparel, from shoe to hat, had changed from a secular to a sacred use. Not the every-day hat, soft, shapeless, universal instrument, used as a liquid or solid measure; used now for the head, and now for a football; used for a net to catch butterflies or to throw at wasps—no, not this bag, pocket, hat, pouch, and magazine, but the Sunday hat, round, stiff, hard, and respectable.
“Although the new hat was always disagreeable to our head, yet we had a wonderful reverence for it, and spent no inconsiderable portion of our time in church in getting it dirty and then brushing it clean.
“Our jacket, too, was new. Only a handkerchief was then in the pocket; no knife, no marbles, no strings, no stones, no fishhooks or dried angle-worms. No; a boy’s Sunday pocket of the olden time was purged of all temptation. In meeting-time we often put our little hands down into our Sunday pocket with a melancholy wish, ‘Oh! if I only had my other clothes on!’
“As soon as we were dressed and mustered in the sitting-room an inspection was had. The collar was pulled up a little, the hair had a fresh lick from the brush, the mouth must be wiped with a wet towel, the shoestring tied, and, after being turned round and round, we were started off.
“‘Now, Henry, be a good boy.’
“‘Yes, ma’am.’
“‘You must not laugh, or tease Harriet.’
“‘No, ma’am.’
“‘Don’t stop on the road—go right in when you get to church.’
“‘Yes, ma’am.”
“Every word was sincerely promised, and efficaciously broken within ten minutes.
“Oh! how high the trees seemed! Oh! how bright the heavens were! Oh! how hard it was not to play with Chester Covington’s dog, that came running to us with bark and frolic, and seemed perplexed at our sturdy propriety.
“The old musical bell up in the open belfry was busy a-tolling. It was the only thing that was allowed to work on Sunday—the bell and the minister. That bell-rope was always an object of desire and curiosity to our young days. It ran up into such dark and mysterious spaces. What there was up in those pokerish heights in the belfry tower we did not know, but something that made our flesh creep. Once we ventured to pull that rope. It was a bold and venturesome thing, we knew. But a sorcery was on us. It came gently and easily to the hand. We pulled again. ‘Dong! dong!’ went the bell. The old sexton put his head out of the door when, on that particular morning, service had begun, and said, in a very solemn and low tone, ‘Boy! boy! you little devil you!’ and much more, I presume, but I did not wait for it, but cut round to the other door and sat all church-time trembling and wondering whether he would ‘tell my pa’; and if he did, what he would say, and more especially what he would do. I called up the probable interview. I had numerous precedents on which to found a possible experience, and afflicted our little soul all meeting-time with needless punishment by the imagination.
“But ordinarily we escaped into the minister’s pew without special temptations. Imagine a boy of eight years old, round as an apple, hearty and healthy, an hour and a half in church with nothing to do! We looked at the galleries full of boys and girls, and wished we might go into the galleries. We looked at the ceiling, traced all the cracks back and forth. We looked at the dear old aunties all round the church, fanning themselves with one hand and eating fennel-seed or a bit of dried orange-peel out of the other. We gazed out of the window high above our heads into the clouds, and wished we could only climb up and see the trees and horses and dogs that abounded around the church on Sunday.
“Gradually these died out and we dropped asleep. Blessed liberty! the child’s gospel! All trouble fled away. For a half-hour paradise was gained. But then an unusual thump on the pulpit Bible, and the ring and roar of a voice under full excitement, that went on swelling like a trumpet, and that no one, not the most listless, could hear without catching its excitement, waked us, blushing and confused that we had been asleep in church! Even on the serene and marble face of mother the faint suggestion of a smile came, as we clutched our hat, supposing meeting to be over, and then sheepishly dropped it and sank back in dismay. But even Sunday cannot hold out for ever, and meetings have to let out sometime! So, at length, a universal stir and bustle announced that it was time to go. Up we bolted! Down we sat as quick as if a million pins were sticking in our foot! The right leg was asleep! Limping forth into the open air, relief came to our heart. The being out of doors had always an inexpressible charm, and never so much as on Sunday. Away went the wagons. Away went the people. The whole Green swarmed with folks. The long village streets were full of company. In ten minutes all were gone, and the street was given up again to the birds!
“Little good did preaching do me until after I was fifteen years old—little good immediately. Yet the whole Sunday, the peculiar influence which it exerted on the household, the general sense of awe which it inspired, the very rigor of its difference from other days, and the suspended animation of its sermon time, served to produce upon the young mind a profound impression. A day that stood out from all others in a hard and gaunt way might, perhaps, be justly criticised. But it left its mark. It did its work upon the imagination, if not upon the reason. It had power in it; and in estimating moral excellence power is an element of the utmost importance. Will our smooth, cosey, feeble modern Sundays have such a grip on the moral nature? They are far pleasanter. Are they as efficacious? Will they educate the moral nature as much?”
The cold of Litchfield Hill and the exposure of his old home were always remembered.
“You may think you know something about winter; but if you never spent a winter on old Litchfield Hill, where I was brought up, you do not know much about it. It was before the days of stoves. There were what we called ‘box-stoves,’ but they were a very small power for generating heat. The idea of a furnace was not born. It was not even within the reach of a prophet to predict it.
“My father’s house was a great barn of a structure, with rooms scattered about here and there. Mine was the west and north room—on the corner; so that I had the full benefit, without any subtraction or discount, of everything that was going on out of doors; for double windows were not known, and the carpenters did not care about making a tight fit. Therefore the wind found no trouble in coming in, and on many and many a morning the snow had blown from the window to my bed and across the foot of it; and if anything inspires alacrity of step on a winter morning when the feet are bare, it is a drift of snow. Walking on it is like walking on wasps.
“To go back to the frigid houses of New England in winter, without furnaces or hard coal, or air-tight stoves or steam, would make our dainty skin tingle. What a pother is made to ascertain the exact position of the North Pole, the very centre and navel of cold! Why, I could have pointed to the exact spot sixty years ago. It was on the northwest angle of my father’s house in Litchfield, Connecticut, in the room where I slept.”
Not only did the severity of the elements affect him, but their uproar as well, especially in the night-time.
“The war of winter winds to our young ears was terrible as the thunder of waves or the noise of battle. All night long the cold, shelterless trees moaned. Their strong crying penetrated our sleep and shaped our dreams. At every waking the air was full of mighty winds. The house creaked and strained, and at some more furious gust shuddered and trembled all over. Then the windows rattled, the cracks and crevices whistled each its own distinctive note, and the chimneys, like diapasons of an organ, had their deep and hollow rumble.”
And now comes an influence that we should have passed by, if he himself had not given it place and elaborate notice:
“Next to the winds our night experiences in early boyhood were much affected by rats. The old house seemed to have been a favorite of this curious vermin. There is something in the short, hot glitter of a rat’s eye that has never ceased to affect us unpleasantly. We could not help imagining them to be the mere receptacles of mischievous spirits, and their keen eyes had always a kind of mocking expression, as if they said, ‘You think we are rats, but if we get hold of you you will know that we are a good deal more than that.’ We never could estimate how many populated our old house. The walls seemed like city thoroughfares, and the ceiling like a Forum or Roman theatre. We used to lie in bed and marvel at what was going on. Sometimes there would be a great stillness, as if they had all gone to meeting. Then again they would troop about with such a swell of liberty and gladness that it was quite plain that the meeting was out. But nothing ever scared and amused us so much as their way of going up and down the partitions. At first up would come one, then another, and finally quite a bevy, squeaking and frolicking, as if they were school-boys going up-stairs, nipping each other and cutting up all manner of pranks. Then came a stillness. Next a premonitory rat would rush down, evidently full of news, and immediately down would pour after him a stream of rats, rushing like mad, and apparently tumbling heels over head. By and by some old sawyer would commence where he left off the night before, cutting the same partition. To this must be added nibblings, rat-nestled paper, an occasional race of rats across the bed, the manipulation of corn in the garret, the foray with cats and kittens, the rat engines—‘steel traps,’ ‘box-traps,’ ‘figure-four’s,’ and all manner of devices, in spite of which the rats held their own, and, if allowed suffrage, would have outvoted the whole family, dog and cats to boot, four to one.”
He was early taught to work and endure what now might be called hardships.
“It was my duty, after I got to be about eight years old, to go down-stairs and build a fire. Ours was a house in which, when the weather was cold, if water was left in any vessel it would freeze and split the vessel asunder; and of course crockery had no chance. Our well used to choke up with ice so that we had to cut it out in order to get the bucket down; and sometimes, when the cistern was frozen up so that we could not get water from it, I have gone, on washing-days, two miles, and dipped water from a brook into barrels, and brought it home. Therefore you see that, however dainty I may be nowadays, I started on a very different pattern.”
But he came in after-years to be glad of this experience:
“I am thankful that I learned to hem towels—as I did. I know how to knit suspenders and mittens. I know a good deal about working in wood—sawing, chopping, splitting, planing, and things of that sort. I was brought up to put my hand to anything; so that when I went West, and was travelling on the prairies and my horse lost a shoe, and I came to a cross-road where there was an abandoned blacksmith’s shop, I could go in and start the fire, and fix the old shoe and put it on again. What man has done man can do; and it is a good thing to bring up boys so that they shall think they can do anything. I could do anything.”
The greatest trial of those days was the catechism. Sunday lessons were considered by the mother as inflexible duty, and the catechism was the sine qua non. “The other children memorized readily and were brilliant reciters, but Henry, blushing, stammering, confused, and hopelessly miserable, stuck fast on some sand-bank of what is required or forbidden by this or that commandment, his mouth choking up with the long words which he hopelessly miscalled, was sure to be accused of idleness or inattention, and to be solemnly talked to, which made him look more stolid and miserable than ever, but appeared to have no effect in quickening his dormant faculties.”
Such were the influences that were exerted upon Henry Ward Beecher during these early and formative years. Various as they were, they preserved a general character of healthful simplicity; and numerous as they appear, they can yet be readily generalized. The first were those that were addressed to conscience, and that went to make this the strong, influential factor which it became in all well-trained New England youth of that period, and in none more markedly than in him. The stepmother led in this work. She was the conscience of the family, training to the strict observance of duty with a thoroughness which the father, with his more impulsive nature, could never have equalled, although he was in sympathy with the process. Home duties carefully exacted, regular attendance upon school, the strict keeping the Sabbath, even the hated lesson in the catechism, were some of the instruments employed. Open to criticism, they may be, in method and extent, yet they did their work, and strong conscientiousness was developed that made him tremble at the thought of wrong-doing, and kept him so free from viciousness that he was able to say: “I never was sullied in act, nor in thought, nor in feeling when I was young. I grew up as pure as a woman.”
And although in after-years he gave more stress to heart than conscience, and preached the Gospel rather than the law, it was but the carrying out the natural process of soil-making and forest culture: the granite ridges of conscience formed the foundation, clothed and hidden by the growth, but not destroyed.
With all her admirable qualities his step-mother failed to satisfy his longing for affection.
“It pleased God to give me a second mother, a very eminent Christian woman. Now, my nature was enthusiastic and outgushing; I was like the convolvulus—I wanted to be running on somebody all the time. But my second mother was stately and not easy to approach. She was a beautiful person, serene and ladylike. She never lacked self-possession in speech, gesture, or posture. She was polished; but to my young thoughts she was cold. As I look back I do not recollect ever to have had from her one breath of summer. Although I was longing to love somebody, she did not call forth my affection; and my father was too busy to be loved. Therefore I had to expend my love on Aunt Chandler, a kind soul that was connected with our family, and the black woman that cooked, who were very kind to me. My mother that brought me up I never thought of loving. It never occurred to me. I was afraid of her. I revered her, but I was not attracted to her. I felt that she was ready to die, and that I was not. I knew that at about twilight she prayed; and I had a great shrinking from going past her door at that time. I had not the slightest doubt that she had set her affection on things above, and not on things beneath. I had the strongest conviction of her saintliness. It stamped itself upon my youth.”
Another division of influences comes under the head of spiritual:
“I can look back upon my own early life, and see how one and another took me, and how one prepared me for another. I can see how the largest natures did not always get access to me. It was late in life before my father influenced me very much. I think it was a humble woman who was in our family that first gained any considerable control over me. I feel the effect of her influence to this day.
“I next came under the influence of a very humble serving-man. He opened up new directions to me and gave me new impulses. He was a colored man; and I am not ashamed to say that my whole life, my whole career respecting the colored race in the conflict which was so long carried on in this country, was largely influenced by the effect produced on my mind, when I was between eight and ten years of age, by a poor old colored man who worked on my father’s farm, named Charles Smith. He did not set out to influence me; he did not know that he did it; I did not know it until a great while afterwards; but he gave me impulses, and impulses which were in the right direction; for he was a godly and hymn-singing man, who made wine fresh every night from the cluster. He used to lie upon his humble bed (I slept in the same room with him) and read his Testament, unconscious, apparently, that I was in the room; and he would laugh and talk about what he read, and chuckle over it with that peculiarly unctuous throat-tone which belongs to his race. I never had heard the Bible really read before; but there, in my presence, he read it, and talked about it to himself and to God. He turned the New Testament into living forms right before me. It was a revelation and an impulse to me.
“He talked to me about my soul more than any member of my father’s family. These things impressed me with the conviction that he was a Christian; and I never saw anything in him that led me to think otherwise. The feeling that I was sinful, that I needed to be born again, that there was such a thing as a regenerate life produced by the Spirit of God in the soul—these feelings came to me by observing the actual example of persons that I lived with more than from all other sources put together.”
But above all others for diffusive and permanent impression affecting his whole nature, bringing him into sympathy with God in all his works as in all his words, and increasing to the day of his death, was the influence of his own mother.
“The memory of my mother as one sainted has exerted a singular influence on me. After I came to be about fourteen or fifteen years of age I began to be distinctly conscious that there was a silent, secret, and, if you please to call it so, romantic influence which was affecting me. It grew and it grows, so that in some parts of my nature I think I have more communion with my mother, whom I never saw except as a child three years old, than with any living being. I am conscious that all my life long there has been a moral power in my memory of her. It is evident to me that while in education and in other material respects her death was a deprivation, it was also an inspiration, a communion—one of those invisible blessings which faith comprehends, but which we are not apt to weigh and to estimate.
“Do you know,” he says, “why so often I speak what must seem to some of you rhapsody of woman? It is because I had a mother, and if I were to live a thousand years I could not express what seems to me to be the least that I owe to her. Three years old was I when singing she left me and sung on to heaven, where she sings evermore. I have only such a remembrance of her as you have of the clouds of ten years ago—faint, evanescent; and yet, caught by imagination, and fed by that which I have heard of her and by what my father’s thought and feeling of her were, it has come to be so much to me that no devout Catholic ever saw so much in the Virgin Mary as I have seen in my mother, who has been a presence to me ever since I can remember; and I can never say enough for woman for my sisters’ sake, for the sake of them that have gathered in the days of my infancy around about me, in return for what they have interpreted to me of the beauty of holiness, of the fulness of love, and of the heavenliness of those elements from which we are to interpret heaven itself.”
In those influences that went to move the intellect, to awaken interest and thought, while the family life and the school and nature were all doing something, the dear old Aunt Esther with her Bible-readings and her innumerable stories and incidents of animal life stood pre-eminent and unapproachable at this period. It was but a few years before his death that he spoke of her early influence upon him, and read to us the story of Joseph as she used to read it to him, with the tears rolling down his cheeks. He told us that he had never yet been able to read that story or hear it read without crying.
But in those practical influences that had to do with life, that gave him the impression that things could be done and must be done, that gave him inspiration to labor, his father took the lead.
“What I was going to speak of was the effect upon my young mind of observing my father’s conduct under trying circumstances. I never once saw him flinch before the cold, or look as though anything was hard, or as if there was a reason for not pitching in and holding on when things were difficult. I have seen the time when we had to cut a twenty-five-foot tunnel outward from the kitchen-door, carrying the snow through the house; and such tunnels would sometimes remain a month before they would break down. I have seen the children around the house crying with cold, and slapping their hands, and stamping their feet, when father had to go and dig wood out of the snow-bank, and cut and split it; and his alacrity and vigor infused themselves into the children. I recollect particularly that if, on such nights as this, when to the high wind severe cold and thick darkness were added, my father had appointments, he always fulfilled them. It was customary to have preaching-places all around the neighborhood, here, there, and everywhere; and I never knew him to think of shrinking from an appointment, or holding himself back for a moment, on account of the weather. There never was a snow so deep, or a wind so high, or a rain so driving, or a night so black that the thought seemed to enter his head that he must give up a meeting. I have many times seen him, on cold, bitter nights, take out his old silk handkerchief and put it on, and go forth into the storm without seeming to dread it; and often, as I have remembered it, I have wished I could put on his spirit in the same way. He did it as a matter of course. And such was the effect of his example on his children that there was not one of them that would not be ashamed to show the ‘white feather’ in the presence of external difficulties.
“When I was a boy I learned some hymns, and committed to memory an indefinite number of texts, and waded a certain distance into the catechism, never getting through it; and I forgot them again very quickly. But I do not think all of them put together exerted any material influence upon me one way or the other—they did not remain in my mind to be understood when I was older; but a great many things which my father did, but which neither he nor anybody else spoke of, have had a strong influence on my whole life. For instance, his defying the elements, making himself master in every condition and under all circumstances, and exhibiting an indomitable pluck which did not pause nor shrink—that made a powerful impression upon me, and has been one of the reasons of the success of my life; not just here and now, but in my earlier career, when I was in the West on the frontier, and when I was very poor and had to do a great deal of rough work under circumstances of discouragement. I had an ideal of what a man should be and should do, and it stood me in stead better than any amount of catechetical instruction could have done.”
So joined these—the stepmother, the mother, the humble servant in the family, Charles Smith the happy Christian black man, Aunt Esther, and the father—hand-in-hand with nature, with the life and events that were moving on around them, and with God, in directing and moulding him in every part in these early years.
There were none of them, perhaps, unusual, certainly not unprecedented; for others besides Henry Ward Beecher have had heavenly-minded and large-hearted mothers; others, as well as he, have been trained in conscientiousness and have had a happy Christian example set before them, and have enjoyed the influence of fathers full of manly inspiration, while God and nature have been with and around them, and yet no such marked results have been seen as in him. Something native there was in the soil that enabled it to respond to such genial influences with such unusual fruitage. We are driven, in accounting for this, to that especial endowment that was given to him and withheld from others through the will of One who gives to every man according to His own good pleasure. “And to one He gave five talents.”
His appearance and attainments at this time are thus summed up by Mrs. Stowe: “Henry was now ten years old, a stocky, strong, well-grown boy, loyal to duty, trained in unquestioning obedience, inured to patient hard work, inured also to the hearing and discussing of all the great theological problems of Calvinism which were always reverberating in his hearing;... but as to any mechanical culture, in an extremely backward state, a poor writer, a miserable speller, with a thick utterance, and a bashful reticence which seemed like stolid stupidity....
“He was not marked out by the prophecies of partial friends for any brilliant future. He had precisely the organization which often passes for dulness in early boyhood. He had great deficiency in verbal memory—a deficiency marked in him through life. He was excessively sensitive to praise and blame, extremely diffident, and with a power of yearning, undeveloped emotions which he neither understood nor could express. His utterance was thick and indistinct, partly from bashfulness and partly from an enlargement of the tonsils of the throat, so that in speaking or reading he was with difficulty understood. In forecasting his horoscope, had any one taken the trouble then to do it, the last success that ever would have been predicted for him would have been that of an orator! ‘When Henry is sent to me with a message,’ said a good aunt, ‘I always have to make him say it three times. The first time I have no manner of an idea more than if he spoke in Choctaw; the second I catch a word now and then; by the third time I begin to understand.’”
Of the bashfulness referred to in the above he says: “We had our own fill of it in childhood. To walk into a room where ‘company’ was assembled, and to do it erectly and naturally, was as impossible as it would have been to fly. The sensations of sensibility were dissolving. Our back-bone grew soft, our knees lost their stiffness, the blood rushed to the head, and the sight almost left our eyes. We have known something of pain in after-years, but few pangs have been more acute than some sufferings from bashfulness in our earlier years.”
Healthy, robust, frolicksome, conscientious, obedient, loving, and efficient, but bashful in the extreme and backward in all his studies, is the summing-up that we must make of Henry Ward Beecher at this period of his life.
Chapter IV
Boyhood—Sent to School at Bethlehem—The Widow Ingersoll’s—Failure—A Champion—Sent to Catharine Beecher’s School in Hartford—Humorous Incidents—Religious Experience.
To remedy the marked defects in his training, noticed in the preceding chapter, something must be done, or this boy will fail not only of becoming a student but of acquiring even a decent common-school education. Mr. Brace’s select school was tried for a year, but with little benefit. After a good many family discussions and some correspondence it was decided to place him in a private school in the village of Bethlehem, seven miles distant from his home, under the care of Mr. Langdon, to begin study in earnest. Of this important era, his first going from home, we have not a syllable, as we are aware, from his own pen or lips. That there was a mingled feeling of pain at leaving home, of pleasure in the novelty, and a shrinking from the new faces and the new duties, every one who remembers this epoch in his own life can readily imagine. The ride, for a large part of the distance across a broad plateau that stretched away cold and strange like the Downs of England, was well calculated to awaken that yearning sadness which was so prominent a feature of his secret experiences from childhood, and gave in part that tone of melancholy which appears so markedly in everything that we know of him at this period.
Singularly enough, he boarded with the grandmother of the one who afterwards became his son-in-law and is now aiding to write this biography. Her name was Ingersoll, and she is well described as a “large-hearted, kindly woman, a widow, living in a great, comfortable farm-house where everything was free and unconstrained.”
He was well remembered by my mother, Mrs. Martha Ingersoll Scoville, who, being somewhat older than he, had him much under her care. She said he was always a good boy about the house, but very bashful. “I used to feel very sorry for him, he seemed so homesick. He liked to be off by himself, wandering around in the woods, and I don’t think he studied much.”
This was true. Whether it was because this first separation from home brought an increase of those gloomy yearnings of heartsickness to which he was subject at times through life, or simply because of his innate dislike to the study of mere names and forms of things, that he failed to make progress in his books, no one knows. We only know on the authority of his sister, Mrs. Stowe, that “Henry’s studies were mostly with gun on shoulder roving the depths of the forest, guiltless of hitting anything because the time was lost in dreamy contemplation. Whence returning unprepared for school, he would be driven to the expedient of writing out his Latin verb and surreptitiously reading it out of the crown of his hat—an exercise from which he reaped small profit, either mentally or morally.” This was not understood at home at the time, and Dr. Beecher writes concerning him:
“Mr. Langdon has been faithful with Henry, and I trust successful; he says in a letter: ‘His observance of my regulations relating to study has become exact and punctual. His diligence all along has gradually increased, and I think he has arrived at that full purpose which will insure his making a scholar. My method of instruction for beginners is a system of extended, minute, and reiterated drilling, and the make of his mind is such as fits him to receive benefit from the operation.”
Perhaps the method of “reiterated drilling, extended and minute,” was not so well adapted to the boy as the teacher thought. At all events we have this testimony on the other side, that “after a year spent in this way it began to be perceived by the elders of the family that as to the outward and visible signs of learning he was making no progress.”
He was therefore brought home to Litchfield, leaving but one incident of his life at Bethlehem especially worthy of note. It was this: One of the older boys, having studied Tom Paine’s “Age of Reason,” was freely advocating infidel sentiments and gaining a strong and vicious influence over his companions. Young Beecher saw it and came to the rescue. He brushed up the knowledge he had already gained at the hearth-stone and table of his home, studied “Watson’s Apology,” challenged the advocate of Tom Paine’s philosophy to a debate, and, in the judgment of the school, gained a complete victory, proving himself thus early to be a doughty champion of the faith.
The experiment at Bethlehem having proved substantially a failure, his oldest sister, Catharine, who was then teaching a young ladies’ school in Hartford, proposed to take the boy under her care to see what she could do with him.
If his nature lay in strata, as has been said—the one a dreamy, yearning melancholy lying at the bottom, which had its full exercise in his lonely wanderings around Bethlehem; and the other, the surface one, of humor and fun—it was the latter, constantly effervescing and exploding, that appeared in his life in his sister’s school of thirty or forty girls in Hartford. The story of his arranging the umbrellas on the stairs one recess, when he was supposed to be studying grammar, so that when the outside door was opened by a late comer the whole series rushed pell-mell down into the street, greatly to the dismay of the teachers and the enjoyment of the school—with whom, of course, he was a great favorite—is well known. And one of the incidents of the recitation-room is equally familiar, but, as it is very characteristic, we give it place, copied verbatim from Mrs. Stowe:
“The school-room was divided into two divisions in grammar, under leaders on either side, and the grammatical reviews were contests for superiority in which it was vitally important that every member should be perfected. Henry was generally the latest choice, and fell on his side as an unfortunate accession, being held more amusing than profitable on such occasions.
“The fair leader of one of these divisions took the boy aside to a private apartment, to put into him with female tact and insinuation those definitions and distinctions on which the honor of the class depended.
“‘Now, Henry, a is the indefinite article, you see, and must be used only with a singular noun. You can say a man, but you can’t say a men, can you?’ ‘Yes, I can say amen, too,’ was the ready rejoinder. ‘Father says it always at the end of his prayers.’
“‘Come, Henry, now don’t be joking! Now decline he.’ ‘Nominative he, possessive his, objective him.’ ‘You see his is possessive. Now, you can say his book, but you can’t say him book.’ ‘Yes, I do say hymn-book, too,’ said the impracticable scholar, with a quizzical twinkle. Each one of these sallies made his young teacher laugh, which was the victory he wanted. ‘But now, Henry, seriously, just attend to the active and passive voice. Now, I strike is active, you see, because if you strike you do something. But I am struck is passive, because if you are struck you don’t do anything, do you?’
“‘Yes, I do—I strike back again!’”
A letter from the afore-mentioned teacher, sent to him with her New Year’s salutation, January 1, 1858, has lately come to hand. She says, in recalling this incident: “Memory has daguerreotyped upon my mind a boy, a small specimen of perpetual motion, perpetual prank, and perpetual desire to give wrong answers to every sober grammatical rule, thereby not only overwhelming Murray but the studious gravity of a hundred school-girls.”
“Sometimes his views of philosophical subjects were offered gratuitously. Being held of rather a frisky nature, his sister appointed his seat at her elbow when she heard classes. A class in natural philosophy, not very well prepared, was stumbling through the theory of the tides. ‘I can explain that,’ said Henry. ‘Well, you see, the sun he catches hold of the moon and pulls her, and she catches hold of the sea and pulls that, and this makes the spring tides.’ ‘But what makes the neap tides?’ ‘Oh! that’s when the sun stops to spit on his hands,’ was the brisk reply.
“After about six months Henry was returned to his parents’ hands with the reputation of being an inveterate joker and an indifferent scholar. It was the opinion of his class that there was much talent lying about loosely in him, if he could only be brought to apply himself.”
Of his religious life at this time we have a glimpse in a letter written by Dr. Beecher in November, 1825:
“Our family concert of prayer was held in the study on Thanksgiving Day—your mother, Aunt Esther, Henry, and Charles. It was a most deeply solemn, tender, and interesting time.... Henry and Charles have both been awakened, and are easily affected and seriously disposed now. But as yet it is like the wind upon the willow, which rises as soon as it is passed over. It does not grapple, but the effect is good in giving power to conscience, and moral principle producing amendment in conduct.”
This was during a revival which was then in progress in Litchfield, in which the pastor was assisted by Mr. Nettleton, the great revivalist of that period. Henry was twelve years old.
That no permanent good resulted from this work appears true, as the doctor feared, but for a reason very different from that which he gives.
Henry Ward himself tells us why it was:
“My mother—she who in the providence of God took me to her heart when my own mother had gone to see my Father in heaven, she who came after and was most faithful to the charge of the children and the household—she often took me, and prayed with me, and read me the word of God, and expounded to me the way of duty, and did all that seemed to her possible, I know, to make it easy for me to become a religious child; and yet there have been times when I think it would have been easier for me to lay my hand on a block and have it struck off than to open my thoughts to her, when I longed to open them to some one. How often have I started to go to her and tell her my feelings, when fear has caused me to sheer off and abandon my purpose! My mind would open like a rosebud, but, alas! fear would hold back the blossom. How many of my early religious pointings fell, like an over-drugged rosebud, without a blossom!”
Again, and more at length, he opens his religious experiences of the whole period:
“I remember having religious impressions, distinct and definite, as early as when I was eight or nine years of age.
“The first distinct religious feelings I had were in connection with nature. Although I was born, as far as any one can be born so, a Calvinist, and although I was conversant at a very early age with the things which pertain to Calvinism, yet, as I look back, I see that the only religious feelings or impressions I had were those which were excited in my mind through the unconscious influence of God through nature. It was not until years later that I knew it was the divine element. I yearned, I longed, for purity and nobility. I had the beginnings of the feeling of self-renunciation. I had a wistful desire that something higher, something superior to myself, should be developed out of the system of nature to help me. I had the germs of evangelical teaching; but I never spoke to anybody about them, and it seems to me a hermit could not have been more solitary, so far as that part of my life was concerned, than I was.
“The next thing I remember was a transition, under the influence of teaching, from the religious conditions and tendencies in my mind to a speculative state. I began to listen to sermons when I was eight or nine years old, and what seems strange is that the picturesque parts stopped not much with me; that they faded out of my mind; that the colors were not ‘fast’; but that I caught hold of the speculative parts, particularly those which were most insoluble, about which men knew least and taught most—the nature of God, the purposes of God, the scheme of divine government, not those parts which are transcendently important, namely, the elements of justice, truth, and morality commingled; that God from all eternity foreknew; that, foreknowing, he predestinated; that by predestination things were fixed, made certain; that so many as he fore-ordained to be saved would be saved, do what they would or come what might—my mind greedily seized on these, not merely as undoubted facts, as they were to me, but as having special reference to myself.
“I recollect being sometimes, as it were, behind the entrenchments of such a doctrine, and wishing I could get over them, and feeling that I would give everything in the world if I only knew that I was one of the elect, and praying that God would in some way let me know whether I was or not.
“At other times it would come in this shape: I had probably been reprimanded for a misdemeanor or a delinquency, or something of that sort. I used to be melancholy and to sit in judgment upon myself; and I remember thinking, ‘Well, it is no use for me to try to be a good boy’—not a saintly boy; that sort did not abound where I was born, and I was certainly no exception to the average run. I don’t think there are many of that kind outside of Sunday-school books. Judged by the ordinary standard, I was a very good boy. I had no vices, and no objectionable tendencies except those which sprang from robust health, buoyant spirits, and immense nerve resources. But I thought I was a base sinner. The pulpit represented all men as being sinners, and I accepted it absolutely and literally. I thought I was an awful transgressor; every little fault seemed to make a dreadful sin; and I would say to myself, ‘There! I am probably one of the reprobate. I have tried to be good, but I am going down. The probability is, I am not one of the elect; and what is the use of my trying? If I am not fore-ordained to be saved there is no chance for me, and I may as well go by the wholesale as by the retail.’ So sometimes on the one side and sometimes on the other these thoughts wrought upon me. Not once or twice merely, but many times, they passed through my mind. They were the sub-base, as it were, of my life. I think it was a period of fifteen or twenty years before I got relief from that undertone. It had some advantages and not a few disadvantages.
“If I had had the influence of a discreet, sympathetic Christian person to brood over and help and encourage me, I should have been a Christian child from my mother’s lap, I am persuaded; but I had no such influence. The influences of a Christian family were about me, to be sure, but they were generic; and I revolved in these speculative experiences, my strong religious habitudes taking the form of speculation all through my childhood. I recollect that from the time that I was about ten years old I began to have periods when my susceptibilities were so profoundly impressed that the outward manifestations of my nature were changed. I remember that when my brother George—who was next older than I, and who was beginning to be my helpful companion, to whom I looked up—became a Christian, being awakened and converted in college, it seemed as though a gulf had come between us, and as though he was a saint on one side of it while I was a little reprobate on the other side. It was awful to me. If there had been a total eclipse of the sun I should not have been in more profound darkness outwardly than I was inwardly. I did not know whom to go to; I did not dare to go to my father; I had no mother that I ever went to at such a time; I did not feel like going to my brother; and I did not go to anybody. I felt that I must try to wrestle out my own salvation.
“Once, on coming home, I heard the bell toll, and I learned that it was for the funeral of one of my companions with whom I had been accustomed to play, and with whom I had grown up. I did not know that he had been sick, but he had dropped into eternity; and the ringing, swinging, booming of that bell, if it had been the sound of an angel trumpet of the last day, would not have seemed to me more awful. I went into an ecstasy of anguish. At intervals, for days and weeks, I cried and prayed. There was scarcely a retired place in the garden, in the wood-house, in the carriage-house, or in the barn that was not a scene of my crying and praying. It was piteous that I should be in such a state of mind, and that there should be nobody to help me and lead me out into the light. I do not recollect that to that day one word had been said to me, or one syllable had been uttered in the pulpit, that led me to think there was any mercy in the heart of God for a sinner like me. For a sinner that had repented it was thought there was pardon; but how to repent was the very thing I did not know. A converted sinner might be saved, but for a poor, miserable, faulty boy, that pouted, and got mad at his brothers and sisters, and did a great many naughty things, there was no salvation so far as I had learned. My innumerable shortcomings and misdemeanors were to my mind so many pimples that marked my terrible depravity; and I never had the remotest idea of God except that he was a Sovereign who sat with a sceptre in his hand and had his eye on me, and said: ‘I see you, and I am after you.’ So I used to live in perpetual fear and dread, and often I wished myself dead. I tried to submit and lay down the weapons of my rebellion, I tried to surrender everything; but it did not seem to do any good, and I thought it was because I did not do it right. I tried to consecrate myself to God, but all to no purpose. I did everything, so far as I could, that others did who professed to be Christians, but I did not feel any better. I passed through two or three revivals. I remember, when Mr. Nettleton was preaching in Litchfield, going to carry a note to him from father; and for a sensitive, bashful boy like me it was a severe ordeal. I went to the room where he was speaking, with the note in my trembling hand, and had to lay it on the desk beside him. Before I got half-way across the floor I was dazed and everything seemed to swim around me; but I made out to get the note to him, and he said: ‘That’s enough; go away, boy,’ and I sort of backed and stumbled toward the door (I was always stumbling and blundering in company), and sat down. He was preaching in those whispered tones which always seem louder than thunder to the conscience, although they are only whispers in the ear. He had not uttered more than three sentences before my feelings were excited, and the more I listened the more awful I felt; and I said to myself: ‘I will stay to the inquiry meeting.’ I heard Mr. Nettleton talk about souls writhing under conviction, and I thought my soul was writhing under conviction. I had heard father say that after persons had writhed under conviction a week or two they began to come out, and I said: ‘Perhaps I will get out’; and that thought produced in me a sort of half-exhilaration of joy. I stayed to the inquiry meeting, felt better, and trotted home with the hope that I was on the way toward conversion. I went through this revival with that hope strengthened; but it did not last long.”
It is evident from this chapter that if we would understand Henry Ward Beecher and the influences that went to the formation of his character and to the success of his life, other things than parentage, home, school, or nature must be taken into the account. The vast things of the invisible realm have begun to speak to him, and his nature has proved to be peculiarly sensitive to their influence.
He is thus early groping, unresting, and unsatisfied; but it is among mountains, and not in marshes or quicksands. Some day these mountain truths, among which he now wanders in darkness, shall be radiant in his sight with the Divine Compassion and his gloom shall give place to abiding love, joy, and peace.
Chapter V
Boston—Home Atmosphere—Various Experiences—Ethics rubbed in by a six-pound Shot—Discontent—Makes up his mind to go to Sea—To Study Navigation—Picture of his Life in Boston.
In the spring of 1826 Dr. Lyman Beecher moved with his family to Boston. Henry Ward was thirteen years old the following June, “a green, healthy country lad,” “with a round, full, red-cheeked face.” Here a new world opened to him and a new set of influences was brought to bear upon him.
The same home life was around him, and, if possible, more intense than ever; for Dr. Beecher had come to Boston to be the champion “of the Faith once delivered to the saints,” and he threw himself into the work with all the zeal and enthusiasm of an intensely ardent nature.
He had watched with intense interest every step of that reaction in Massachusetts from the strict theocracy of the Puritans, called the “Unitarian Controversy.” He thoroughly understood and heartily condemned the process, employed by the wealthy and literary classes, of taking away from the church, composed presumably of regenerate persons, the power to govern their own affairs and of giving it to the congregation, which was often composed of men hostile to a spiritual religion. He had seen the dominant majority enter into the possession of church edifices and church property, employ ministers opposed to the old faith, and drive the orthodox ministry out into school-houses and town-halls; and old foundations established by the fathers to perpetuate the faith had been seized and made to support opposite and antagonistic views. All this had kindled in him a burning indignation against the wrong that had been perpetrated, and a deep sympathy for the brethren who had suffered. “It was as a fire in my bones,” he said. “My mind was all the time heating, heating, heating.”
“His family prayers,” we are told by Mrs. Stowe, “at this period, departing from the customary forms of unexcited hours, became often upheavings of passionate emotion such as I shall never forget. ‘Come, Lord Jesus,’ he would say, ‘here where the bones of the fathers rest, here where the crown has been torn from thy brow—come and recall thy wandering children. Behold thy flock scattered on the mountains; these sheep, what have they done? Gather them, gather them, O Good Shepherd, for their feet stumble upon the dark mountains.”
Mr. Beecher in after-years spoke of the work here as something deeper than a mere dispute between rival denominations or antagonistic creeds. “The outward form of the great excitement was that of controversy between the Unitarian and Calvinistic faiths. But, as compared with the great inward reality, this was but superficial. It was broader than any doctrinal controversy, deeper than any sectarian conflict. It was a resurrection of vital religion, in all churches of every name, and in the Unitarian churches as well as the Evangelical.”
It will be seen that the same atmosphere of deep feeling and triumphant faith, if possible more tropical and more thoroughly charged with electricity, continued in the new as in the old home; but outside the family very different influences were brought to bear upon the lad, and he was led out into a much wider range of experiences. We give as many of these as space will allow.
The first thing that greatly impressed him seems to have been the bells:
“Is there any boy left in Boston to whose ears the Christ Church chimes sound as they did to mine? Some travelled persons in Litchfield had informed me that the churches in Boston were so thick that the bells on Sunday morning would almost play a tune. The first Sunday morning after the family took possession of the house in Sheafe Street, being in the back-yard, I heard in a wondrous manner the tune of ‘Greenville,’ played on bells! The whole air was full of ‘Greenville.’
“I was fully persuaded that this was the thing predicted, and that this tune simply fell into place among the vast number of bell-strokes. Too young to analyze or reason upon the matter, I listened with a pleasure and amazement which I fear nothing will ever give me again till I hear the bells ring out wondrous things in the New Jerusalem. Blessed city! in which dwelt so divine a spirit of harmony that some airy hand governed the widely scattered belfries, and taught the notes which each bell carelessly struck to come together in time and tune, and march through the air in harmony. And when, after a few minutes, the tune changed and ‘St. Martyn’s’ came sadly and slowly through the air, I could contain myself no longer, but rushed, red and eager, to bring out ‘Charles,’ the inseparable companion of all my marvels, who opened his great eyes with a look of amazement as utter and implicit as if he had been a young devotee witnessing his first miracle. I expounded to him the cause, taking for text the reports which had been made to me while yet in the country. Alas for marvels! The cook, overhearing, laughed us out of countenance, and explained that it was a chime of bells, and also what a chime was. Of course we were wiser and less happy. But never, in forty years, has that chime of bells sounded in my ears without bringing back, for a second, the first electric shock of wonder and pleasure.
“Next to Boston bells were Boston ships. Here first we beheld a ship! We shall never again see anything that will so profoundly affect our imagination. We stood and gazed upon the ship, and smelt the sea-air, and looked far out along the water to the horizon, and all that we had ever read of buccaneers, of naval battles, of fleets of merchantmen, of explorations into strange seas, among rare and curious things, rose up in a cloud of mixed and changing fancies, until we scarcely knew whether we were in the body or out. How many hours have we asked and wanted no better joy than to sit at the end of the wharf, or on the deck of some newly-come ship, and rock and ride on the stream of our own unconscious imagination! We went to school in Boston Harbor.
“Next to the merchant marine was the Navy-Yard. We stole over to Charlestown almost every week. With what awe we walked past the long rows of unmounted cannon! With what exhilaration we looked forth from the mounted sea-battery that looked down the harbor, and just waited for some Britisher to dare to come in sight! We have torn any number of ships to pieces with those cannon, with imagination for our commodore and patriotism for our cannoneer. There have been great battles in Boston harbor that nobody knows anything about but ourself!”
Other experiences there were of a different nature.
The peaceful life of the quiet New England village, where each one took his place mostly by the position of the family and held it largely undisturbed, had given way to that of a city full of antagonisms and strife. It was a life not exactly in accordance with the instructions of a well-regulated Christian family, but its rough experiences were undoubtedly adapted to bring out some qualities that were useful in an after-career in which battle was to have so prominent a place.
“It was with some slight contempt that we beheld our first companions. Our first home was in Sheafe Street, far down at the North End, next door to Mr. Gay, the landlord. The boys thereabouts were smart and lively, but few of them could wrestle, and none of them often held out with us in a downright race. I was always long-winded, even before I began public speaking.
“In those days no boy was a good boy among his fellows who had not the courage of battle. It was the duty of all living in certain districts, upon proper occasion, to fight the boys of other streets or districts. The Salem-Streeters included all the small streets adjacent—Sheafe Street, Bennett Street, etc. When nothing else was on hand small scrimmages were gotten up between ourselves—Sheafe Street vs. Bennett Street, etc.; but we all united against Prince Street. Prince-Streeters were the natural enemies of all the surrounding streets. Yet, when the West-Enders came over in battle array, yelling, throwing stones, and driving in the timid lads caught out of bounds, all the North-Enders rose, forgot their local feuds, and went forth in awful array to chastise the wretches that lived at the West End. And if one were to believe all the feats of which we boasted for a month thereafter, he would be sure that since the days that Homer sang no such fighting had ever taken place.
“But what were all these things to that implacable and ineradical hatred which all true Boston boys entertained against Charlestown Pigs? For by such a title did we expose the meanness, the degradation, the cowardice, the utter despicableness of a boy born the other side of the ‘draw’ of the Charlestown Bridge!”
While the father was coming to leadership in the pulpit his son Henry was reaching the same point in his set by the only way opened to him at that time.
“Copp’s Hill? It recalled many a boyish prank. One sport engaged our youthful leisure. It was called ‘Follow your leader.’ It was considered as a testimony to one’s courage when, by acclamation, he was elected to leadership! The game was simple; but the results, always amusing, were sometimes somewhat too stimulating for pleasure. The leader started upon a run, with a long trail of boys in a line behind him, whom he endeavored to throw off by doing things which they were not strong enough or skilful or daring enough to imitate. If twenty boys started, half would drop away, after a sharp run, by mere want of breath; another section could be thrown off by some feat that terrified them.
“We recall one memorable chase. Called to the head of the column, I plunged down Margaret’s Lane, up Prince and back, up toward Copp’s Hill, reducing my followers, by sheer exhaustion, one-half. A brick house was going up; into it I dashed, ran up the ladder, walked along the floor-joists, and let myself down by a rope attached to a guy on the front. Only six or seven could follow. A large mortar-bed lay near by. I dashed into that, wading through the slush. Five came out on the other side with me. Tough five! They followed me into a shop, right back into the adjacent parlor, out at a side-door, though some of the last got the yard-stick well laid on by the indignant shop-keeper, and the last one out came dripping from a pail of water which a woman flung after ‘the nasty varmints,’ as she styled us. Many other feats did we, but in vain. The five would stick. I remember that a large part of Copp’s Hill had been dug down for filling the ‘Causeway,’ leaving a precipitous face—well, say fifty feet high to the eyes, but, if measured, perhaps twenty feet. Ascending the hill, I drew near the verge, a little hesitant to venture the plunge. But to confess that I dare not do anything would be disgraceful, and so, with but a moment’s pause, I jumped for a little crumbling foothold half-way down, and off from that, as soon as on it, to the bottom, which I reached in a heap, with dirt and stones and two boys following after! Not stopping to rub my shins, rejoicing that only two were left, and desperate, I took my way to the near wharf where ‘Billy Gray’s’ ships used to be, climbed the side, ran along the deck, up the bowsprit, far out, and then, with a spring, off into deep water! Down, down, down we went, and seemed likely to go on for ever. At length the descent stopped, and we rose again to the surface—O joy!—to see the two boys standing on the bowsprit! They did not dare! That day’s work established our reputation! We know how Alexander felt! Cæsar and Napoleon can tell us nothing new about the glories of victory!”
That his country honesty was not altogether proof against the temptations of his life in the city is shown by a description he gives, in “Eyes and Ears,” of his successful attempt to purloin a six-pound cannon-ball from the Navy-Yard:
“One day I visited some ill-constructed vaults where shot had been stored. The six and twelve pound shot were extremely tempting. I had no particular use for them. I am to this day puzzled to know why I coveted them. There was no chance in the house to roll them, and as little in the street. For base-ball or shinty they were altogether too substantial. But I was seized with an irresistible desire to possess one. As I had been well brought up, of course the first objection arose on the score of stealing. But I disposed of that, with a patriotic facility that ought long before this to have sent me to Congress, by the plea that it was no sin to steal from the government. Next, how should I convey the shot from the Yard without detection? I tried it in my handkerchief. That was altogether too plain. I tried my jacket-pocket, but the sag and shape of that alarmed my fears. I tried my breeches-pocket, but the abrupt protuberance was worse than all. I had a good mind to be honest, since there was no feasible way of carrying it off. At length a thought struck me: Wrap a handkerchief about it and put it in your hat.
“The iron ball was accordingly swaddled with the handkerchief and mounted on my head, and the hat shut over it. I emerged from the vault a little less courageous than was pleasant, and began my march toward the gate. Every step seemed a mile. Every man I met looked unusually hard at me. The marines evidently were suspecting my hat. Some sailors, leering and rolling toward the ships, seemed to look me through. The perspiration stood all over my face as an officer came toward me. Now for it! I was to be arrested, put in prison, cat-o’-nine-tailed, or shot, for aught I knew. I wished the ball in the bottom of the sea; but no, it was on the top of my head!
“By this time, too, it had grown very heavy; I must have made a mistake in selecting! I meant a six-pounder, but I was sure it must have been a twelve-pounder, and before I got out of the Yard it weighed twenty-four pounds! I began to fear that the stiffness with which I carried my neck would excite suspicion, and so I tried to limber up a little, which had nearly ruined me, for the shot took a roll around my crown in a manner that liked to have brought me and my hat to the ground. Indeed, I felt like a loaded cannon, and every man and everything was like a spark trying to touch me off. The gate was a great way farther off than I had ever found it before; I seemed likely never to get there.
“And when at length, heartsore and headsore, with my scalp well rolled, I got to the gate, all my terror came to a culmination as the sentinel stopped his marching, drew himself up, and, looking through me, smiled. I expected him to say: ‘O you little thievish devil, do you think I do not see through you?’ But, bless his heart! he only said: ‘Pass!’ He did not say it twice. I walked a few steps farther, and then, having great faith in the bravery of my feet, I pulled my hat off before me, and, carrying it in that position, I whipped around the first corner and made for the bridge with a speed which Flora Temple would envy.
“When I reached home I had nothing to do with my shot. I did not dare show it in the house nor tell where I got it; and after one or two solitary rolls I gave it away on the same day to a Prince-Streeter.
“But, after all, that six-pounder rolled a good deal of sense into my skull. I think it was the last thing I ever stole (excepting a little matter of a heart now and then), and it gave me a notion of the folly of coveting more than you can enjoy, which has made my whole life happier. It was rather a severe mode of catechising, but ethics rubbed in with a six-pound shot are better than none at all.”
His student life, which had been such a failure heretofore, was improved a little, and but a little. By means of the pressure of school discipline, backed up and made formidable by family pride and the advice and exhortations heard at home, he managed to make fair progress in most of his studies, especially in the rules and exceptions of the Latin grammar, and to the day of his death was able to establish his claims to proficiency in that language by rattling off the list of eleven prepositions that govern the ablative. But his heart was not in the work. Disgust, insurrection, revolution, was the stormy way along which he was rapidly travelling.
This period in his own life is described in “Norwood”: “Long before the Amazon reaches the ocean it has grown so wide that from the channel no shore can be seen from either side. It is still a river, but with all the signs and symptoms of becoming an ocean. There is a period, beginning not far from fourteen, in young lives, when childhood is widened suddenly, and carries its banks so far out that manhood seems begun, though as yet it is far off. The stream is ocean-deep. Upon this estuary of youth the currents are shifting, the eddies are many. Here are united the strength of the sea and the hindrances of the land.
“The important organic changes which, in our zone, take place in the second full seven of years, produce important results even in the coldest temperaments and in the slenderest natures. But in persons of vigor of body and strength of feeling there is frequently an uprising like a city in insurrection. The young nature, swelling to the new influences with a sense of unmeasurable strength, sometimes turbulent with passions, but always throbbing with excited feelings led on and fed by tantalizing fancies, seems transformed from its previous self and becomes a new nature. New moral forces are developed into activity. Aspirations begin to quicken the soul. Ambitions grow nobler.”
Mrs. Stowe says: “The era of fermentation and development was upon him, and the melancholy that had brooded over his childhood waxed more turbulent and formidable. He grew gloomy and moody, restless and irritable. His father, noticing the change, got him on a course of biographical reading, hoping to divert his thoughts. He began to read naval histories, the lives of great sailors and commanders, the voyages of Captain Cook, the biography of Nelson; and immediately, like lightning flashing out of rolling clouds, came the determination not to rest any longer in Boston, learning terminations and prepositions, but to go forth to a life of enterprise. He made up his little bundle, walked the wharf and talked with sailors and captains, hovered irresolute on the verge of voyages, never quite able to grieve his father by a sudden departure. At last he wrote a letter announcing to a brother that he could and would no longer remain at school; that he had made up his mind for the sea; that if not permitted to go he should go without permission. This letter was designedly dropped where his father picked it up. Dr. Beecher put it in his pocket and said nothing for the moment, but the next day asked Henry to help him saw wood. Now, the wood-pile was the doctor’s favorite debating-ground, and Henry felt complimented by the invitation, as implying manly companionship.
“‘Let us see,’ said the doctor, ‘Henry, how old are you?’ ‘Almost fourteen!’ ‘Bless me! How boys do grow! Why, it’s almost time to be thinking what you are going to do. Have you ever thought?’ ‘Yes; I want to go to sea.’ ‘To sea! Of all things! Well, well! After all, why not? Of course you don’t want to be a common sailor. You want to get into the navy?’ ‘Yes, sir; that’s what I want.’ ‘But not merely as a common sailor, I suppose?’ ‘No, sir; I want to be a midshipman, and after that a commodore.’ ‘I see,’ said the doctor cheerfully. ‘Well, Henry, in order for that, you know, you must begin a course of mathematics and study navigation and all that.’ ‘Yes, sir; I am ready.’ ‘Well, then, I will send you up to Amherst next week, to Mount Pleasant, and then you’ll begin your preparatory studies, and if you are well prepared I presume I can make interest to get you an appointment.’”
And so he went to Mount Pleasant, in Amherst, Mass., and Dr. Beecher said shrewdly: “I shall have that boy in the ministry yet.”
In a sermon preached by his brother, Rev. T. K. Beecher, we have this picture:
“All of you know more about ‘Henry Ward Beecher’ than I do, but I know more about ‘Brother Henry’ than you do.
“A little Boston boy five years old had a brother Henry who was sixteen, and a brother Charles who was fourteen; and though he knew of David and Goliath, who ‘fell down slambang,’ and David, ‘little David ran up and cut his head off’! though he knew about Samson and the lion, yet for the present strength and greatness Henry and Charles were his heroes. Did they not own a long sled and coast down Copp’s Hill and jump sixteen sleds at the bounce? Did they not sharpen skates with enthusiasm and go off to the mill-dam alone?
“By night when the tocsin rang and the little boy covered his head and shivered under the sheets, did not Henry and Charles rush down two flights of stairs and out the door, yelling fire? And they were at school fitting for college at Mt. Pleasant. Their hair-trunk was two days a-packing, and the stage took them away before daylight, leaving the house so quiet and so empty. Sixteen and five—oh! how magnificent the boy of sixteen to the little boy of five. I speak of brother Henry.
“But at prayers, family prayers, Henry and Charles could sing, and so could the little boy. A frail, blue-eyed, willowy mother sat in the rocking-chair. Father would read—the little boy knew not what. But for the singing from village hymns Henry sometimes fluted, making a queer mouth; and then, all kneeling, it was ever asked by father, ‘Overturn and overturn, till He whose right it is shall come and reign, King of nations as King of saints.’
“Prayers over, Aunt Esther and the little boy, he standing in a chair, washed the dishes, and Henry and Charles stormed out to the Latin School. But they went to Mount Pleasant, and Mr. Colton was the teacher. Twice a year they came home, at Thanksgiving and the summer vacation. The expected stage drove up, and the little boy, in agony of delight that could not be endured, hid himself on a trundle-bed under mother’s and braided bed-cords till, searched out, he was tossed above the clouds by great, strong brother Henry.
“At morning prayers, ‘Thou hast brought back our boys in health,’ the little boy heard that and the ‘overturn and overturn’ part; and that little boy, now your pastor, bears witness in your ears that the boys were kept, and that since those days there have been overturnings not a few. And further he tells you that those family prayers propagated the ancestral religion in brother Henry, though they have failed to hand down the ancestral theology.
“The boys must go to college, and leave the little boy to go to infant school, to Miss Bull, and learn to tell the hour on a card clock, and add, subtract, and count with an abacus. Henry in the world of departed spirits, Amherst; Charles at Bowdoin. Every morning father praying for our boys at college: ‘May they become good ministers of our Lord Jesus Christ!’
”... Edward was a man, like father. But Henry and Charles were heroes, doing things. How they could jump! How they whirled around the horizontal bar! How Charles could flog a top! And Henry had peanuts and red peppermints. Shall I ever be big and do things, and run to fires, and go way down Milk Street?
“Yes, one vacation brother Henry took the little boy down on Milk Street, past two Unitarian churches safely, past Tremont Theatre, past an open stable-door where lay a red cow with monstrous horns, chewing her big mouth with nothing in it, and looking, oh! so strong and hungry at that little boy. But Henry wasn’t scared. He was whistling. ‘Come along, Tom,’ he said, ‘that’s only a cow.’
“Henry and Charles at college; father and eight of us staging from Boston to Cincinnati, leaving my heroes. Amherst and Bowdoin loom large in my fancy still. My heroes were to stay and grow! Tidings once a month: Charles has a fiddle, Henry has a six-keyed flute; Charles, and something about circles and geometry; Henry, and phrenology and temperance lectures.”
Such was his life in Boston, undoubtedly to a certain extent beneficial, and, by reason of the activity of the streets of the city and the bustle of the wharves, attractive. But coming at the turbulent period of his own development, when the rough elements of its thoroughfares were more congenial to him than the influences of its churches, libraries, or homes, it was far from being satisfactory. Its liberty was not altogether safe, nor were its restrictions healthful; and he says: “I cannot see how, if I had remained much longer in Boston, I could have escaped ruin.” We see him, therefore, start off on the lumbering stage-coach, in the early autumn morning before daylight, for Amherst, with a sense of relief and hearty thankfulness that he is escaped as a bird from the snare of the fowler.
Chapter VI
School-Life at Mount Pleasant—Mathematics—Elocution—Testimony of Classmates—Religious Experiences—Troubles—A Romantic Friendship—Another Kind—Letter of Reminiscence—A Royal School-boy.
It was in 1827, and Henry was fourteen years old, when he entered the Mount Pleasant Institute. “He was admitted to the institution at a price about half the usual charge, for one hundred dollars per year.” “His appearance was robust and healthy, rather inclined to fulness of form, with a slight pink tinge on his cheeks and a frequent smile upon his face. In his manners and communications he was quiet, orderly, and respectful. He was a good-looking youth.” This is the testimony of one of his teachers, Mr. George Montague.
“I think he must have been fond of children, for he was always ready for a frolic with me. I don’t remember how he spoke, except that he talked a good deal and was full of life and fun.” So says a friend, in whose home he boarded, in a letter written during the past year.
No place could have been better fitted to the condition of the boy, as he then was, than the one chosen. He was tired of the city with its brick walls, stone pavements, and artificial restrictions, and longed for the freedom and the freshness of the country. Amherst at that time was only a small village, fighting back with indifferent success the country that pressed in upon it from every side, and offering this city-sick lad, almost within a stone’s throw of the school, the same kind of fields and forests that were around him at Litchfield, and spreading out for him a landscape equal in beauty to that of his childhood home.
Besides, he has an object in view that stirs his blood. He is to fit himself for the navy; his father has promised his influence to get him an appointment, if wanted, and Admiral Nelson and all other brave admirals and commodores are his models. For the first time in his life he takes hold of study with enthusiasm.
The institution was very popular in its day, and a great advance upon the old academy. It was semi-military in its methods, and in its government there was great thoroughness without severity. Its teachers possessed superior qualifications, and all were men of great kindness as well as of marked ability. Among them were two men who especially had great influence in directing his energies and preparing him not only for Amherst College but for the greater work beyond, and who were ever remembered by him with the deepest gratitude.
The first of these was W. P. Fitzgerald, the teacher of mathematics at Mount Pleasant school:
“He taught me to conquer in studying. There is a very hour in which a young nature, tugging, discouraged, and weary with books, rises with the consciousness of victorious power into masterhood. For ever after he knows that he can learn anything if he pleases. It is a distinct intellectual ‘conversion.’
“I first went to the blackboard, uncertain, soft, full of whimpering. ‘THAT LESSON MUST BE LEARNED,’ he said, in a very quiet tone, but with a terrible intensity and with the certainty of Fate. All explanations and excuses he trod under foot with utter scornfulness. ‘I want that problem. I don’t want any reasons why I don’t get it.’
“‘I did study it two hours.’
“‘That’s nothing to me; I want the lesson. You need not study it at all, or you may study it ten hours—just to suit yourself. I want the lesson. Underwood, go to the blackboard!’
“‘Oh! yes, but Underwood got somebody to show him his lesson.’
“‘What do I care how you get it? That’s your business. But you must have it.’
“It was tough for a green boy, but it seasoned him. In less than a month I had the most intense sense of intellectual independence and courage to defend my recitations.
“In the midst of a lesson his cold and calm voice would fall upon me in the midst of a demonstration—‘No!’ I hesitated, stopped, and then went back to the beginning; and, on reaching the same spot again, ‘No!’ uttered with the tone of perfect conviction, barred my progress. ‘The next!’ and I sat down in red confusion. He too was stopped with ‘No!’ but went right on, finished, and, as he sat down, was rewarded with, ‘Very well.’
“‘Why,’ whimpered I, ‘I recited it just as he did, and you said No!’
“‘Why didn’t you say Yes, and stick to it? It is not enough to know your lesson. You must know that you know it. You have learned nothing till you are sure. If all the world says No, your business is to say Yes and to prove it!’”
The other helper of this period was John E. Lovell.
In a column of the Christian Union of July 14, 1880, devoted to “Inquiring Friends,” appeared this question with the accompanying answer:
“We heard Mr. Beecher lecture recently in Boston and found the lecture a grand lesson in elocution. If Mr. Beecher would give through the column of ‘Inquiring Friends’ the methods of instruction and practice pursued by him, it would be very thankfully received by a subscriber and student. / / / / / / E. D. M.
“I had from childhood a thickness of speech arising from a large palate, so that when a boy I used to be laughed at for talking as if I had pudding in my mouth. When I went to Amherst I was fortunate in passing into the hands of John Lovell, a teacher of elocution, and a better teacher for my purpose I cannot conceive. His system consisted in drill, or the thorough practice of inflexions by the voice, of gesture, posture, and articulation. Sometimes I was a whole hour practising my voice on a word—like ‘justice.’ I would have to take a posture, frequently at a mark chalked on the floor. Then we would go through all the gestures, exercising each movement of the arm and the throwing open the hand. All gestures except those of precision go in curves, the arm rising from the side, coming to the front, turning to the left or right. I was drilled as to how far the arm should come forward, where it should start from, how far go back, and under what circumstances these movements should be made. It was drill, drill, drill, until the motions almost became a second nature. Now I never know what movements I shall make. My gestures are natural, because this drill made them natural to me. The only method of acquiring an effective education is by practice, of not less than an hour a day, until the student has his voice and himself thoroughly subdued and trained to right expression.
H. W. B.”
Mr. Montague says: “Mr. Beecher submitted to Mr. Lovell’s drilling and training with a patience which proved his interest in the study to be great. The piece which was to be spoken was committed to memory from Mr. Lovell’s mouth, the pupil standing on the stage before him, and every sentence and word, accent and pronunciation, position and movement of the body, glance of the eye and tone of voice, all were subjects of study and criticism. And day after day, often for several weeks in continuance, Mr. Beecher submitted to this drilling upon the same piece, until his teacher pronounced him perfect.”
His dramatic power was displayed and noted at this early period. Dr. Thomas Field, a classmate in the school, says: “One incident occurred during our residence in Mount Pleasant which left an abiding impression on my mind. At the exhibition at the close of the year, either 1828 or 1829, the drama of ‘William Tell’ was performed by some of the students, and your father took the part of the tyrant Gessler. Although sixty years have passed, I think now, as I thought then, that it was the most impressive performance I ever witnessed.”
His love of flowers was so marked as to attract the attention of a gardener in the village, who gave him the use of a plot of ground where he might sow and plant what he chose; and here the boy spent many a play-hour in digging, sowing, and weeding, that he might enjoy the beauty which his own hand had been instrumental in producing. “In this garden-corner the chaplain of Mount Pleasant Institute found him one day lost in admiration for the opening buds and beautiful blossoms that were unfolding under his culture, and could not forbear to improve the opportunity and administer a gentle rebuke to the enthusiastic youth. ‘Ah! Henry,’ he said, ‘these things are pretty, very pretty, but, my boy, do you think that such things are worthy to occupy the attention of a man who has an immortal soul?’” The boy was abashed before so much dignity, and, we may add, stupidity, and assuming the stolid look that his bashfulness had made natural, at this time, under such circumstances, went on with his work among the flowers; but he said afterwards that he wanted to tell him that “since Almighty God had taken time to make these trifles, it did not seem amiss for him to take time to look at them.” So, now a youth, he is walking as when a child among flowers, and the leader of the boys in their most venturesome sports is kneeling in adoring silence over beds of pansies and asters, and feeding the hunger of his soul with the beauty of their forms and colors.
In a letter dated December 24, 1828, addressed to his sister Harriet—the first that has come to our hands from Mount Pleasant—he gives some account of his manner of life at school, and various experiences:
“DEAR SISTER:
”... I have to rise in the morning at half-past five o’clock, and after various little duties, such as fixing of room, washing, etc., which occupies about an hour, we proceed to breakfast, from thence to chapel, after which we have about ten minutes to prepare for school. Then we attend school from eight to twelve. An hour at noon is allowed for diversions of various sorts. Then dinner. After that school from half-past one to half-past four. At night we have about an hour and a half; then tea. After tea we have about ten minutes; then we are called to our rooms till nine.
“Now I will tell you how I occupy my spare time—in reading, writing, and playing the flute. We are forming a band here. I shall play either the flute or hautboy. I enjoy myself pretty well. In Latin I am studying Sallust. As to ease, all I have to do is to study straight ahead. It comes pretty easy. My Greek is rather hard. I am as yet studying the grammar and Jacob’s Greek Reader. In elocution we read and speak alternately every other day.
”... I find it hard to keep as a Christian ought to. To be sure, I find delight in prayer, but I cannot find time to be alone sufficiently. We have in our room only two, one besides myself, but he is most of my play-hours practising on some instrument or other. I have some time, to be sure, but it is very irregular, and I never know when I shall have an opportunity for private devotions until the time comes. I do not like to read the Bible as well as to pray, but I suppose it is the same as it is with a lover, who loves to talk with his mistress in person better than to write when she is afar off....
“Your affectionate brother, “HENRY.”
His religious experience, of which we have heard nothing since he left Litchfield, the life in Boston apparently not being very favorable to it, again attracts our attention at this point. He says:
“When I was fourteen years of age I left Boston and went to Mount Pleasant. There broke out while I was there one of those infectious religious revivals which have no basis of judicious instruction, but spring from inexperienced zeal. It resulted in many mushroom hopes, and I had one of them; but I do not know how or why I was converted. I only know I was in a sort of day-dream, in which I hoped I had given myself to Christ.
“I wrote to father expressing this hope; he was overjoyed, and sent me a long, kind letter on the subject. But in the course of three or four weeks I was nearly over it; and I never shall forget how I felt, not long afterward, when a letter from father was handed me in which he said I must anticipate my vacation a week or two and come home and join the Church on the next Communion Sabbath. The serious feelings I had were well-nigh gone, and I was beginning to feel quite jolly again, and I did not know what to do. I went home, however, and let them take me into the Church. A kind of pride and shamefacedness kept me from saying I did not think I was a Christian, and so I was made a church-member.”
In an editorial in the Independent, written in 1862, upon the disbanding of this old church, the Bowdoin Street—originally Hanover Street—Church, Boston, he describes this event:
“If somebody will look in the old records of Hanover Street church about 1829 they will find a name there of a boy about fifteen years old who was brought into the Church on a sympathetic wave, and who well remembers how cold and almost paralyzed he felt while the committee questioned him about his ‘hope’ and ‘evidences,’ which, upon review, amounted to this: that the son of such a father ought to be a good and pious boy. Being tender-hearted and quick to respond to moral sympathy, he had been caught and inflamed in a school excitement, but was just getting over it when summoned to Boston to join the church! On the morning of the day he went to church without seeing anything he looked at. He heard his name called from the pulpit among many others, and trembled; rose up with every emotion petrified; counted the spots on the carpet; looked piteously up at the cornice; heard the fans creak in the pews near him; felt thankful to a fly that lit on his face, as if something familiar at last had come to break an awful trance; heard faintly a reading of the Articles of Faith; wondered whether he should be struck dead for not feeling more—whether he should go to hell for touching the bread and wine, that he did not dare to take nor to refuse; spent the morning service uncertain whether dreaming, or out of the body, or in a trance; and at last walked home crying, and wishing he knew what, now that he was a Christian, he should do, and how he was to do it. Ah! well, there is a world of things in children’s minds that grown-up people do not imagine, though they too once were young.”
Unsatisfactory in many respects as was his religious experience, it seems to have been powerful enough to change his whole ideal of life. We hear no more of his becoming a sailor. He appears to have yielded to the inevitable, and henceforth studies with the ministry in view.
That there was awakened in him a strong sense of duty and a deep earnestness of purpose appears from a letter written from the school to his brother Edward:
“Mount Pleasant, July 11, 1829.
”DEAR BROTHER:
“I have been expecting a letter from you all the time; but I suppose you have too much to do to write letters. Mr. Newton has set up a Bible-class on Sabbath morning for the larger boys, and a Sabbath-school on Sabbath afternoon for the smaller boys. The Bible-classes are very interesting indeed. He first began with the 73d Psalm; then he commenced the New Testament and is going through it in course. The boys generally are very much pleased with the lecture.
“On Wednesday evenings he is a-going to deliver doctrinal sermons. All with whom I have conversed on the subject are very desirous that he should commence them.
“There has been a boy named Forsyth who has since the revival been very active in the cause of religion, and promised to be a man of great usefulness; he is a boy of great influence, and he has gone back. He does not oppose religion, but wishes that he had it. His going back has caused a great deal of sorrow here among the boys who profess to be pious.
“I room with Homes at present; he is, I think, very amiable and pious. We have prayers together every evening. Then he has an hour in the morning and I an hour in the evening for private devotions. I find that if I neglect prayer even once that I do not desire to pray again as much as I did before, and the more I pray the more I love to do it.
“At present I am comparing the Evangelists together, and looking up the passages in the Old which are referred to in the New Testament.
“Charles and I correspond regularly. In order to make it profitable as well as interesting, we have in every letter some difficult passage for one another to explain. I like the plan very much.
“Our examination is over, and exhibition also. I send you one of our papers (published at the institution), which has a scheme of the exhibition. I got through my examinations very well. I hope that you will find time to answer this soon. Give my best love to any of the family who may be in Boston, and Aunt Homes’s family.
“Your affec. brother, “H. W. BEECHER.“
In another one to the same, dated August, 1829, he says:
”MY DEAR BROTHER:
“I received your letter Sabbath eve. I expect father received a letter from me about the same time that you did this one, in which I asked him to explain some things from the Bible to me.... While I think of it, Mr. Newton explains the Bible twice a week now instead of once. He presses the boys to the study of the Bible and to prayer more than any minister I ever knew, and I believe it to be not without effect. I, for one, have read my Bible more and studied it more. Father recommended me to keep a little book in which I should put all my loose thoughts. I got one about a month since and have filled a good deal of it already. My studies go pretty well. At present I am studying Cicero and the Greek reader. I expect next term (in about five weeks) to take up the Greek Testament, and Virgil, and mathematics. I intend to stay here another year, almost for no other purpose than to learn mathematics, it is taught so well here! I exercise three hours in a day. One of the questions which I wished to ask you is this, Matthew ii. 23: ‘That it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophets: He shall be called a Nazarene.’ Mr. Newton gave one explanation, but it did not satisfy me. I have been and am still reading Dr. Gregory’s letters on the evidences, doctrines, and duties of the Christian religion.
“I intend to spend a part of my vacation (which will commence soon) in Hartford. I do not exactly understand the doctrine of predestination, and several boys have been to me and asked me to explain it to them, but I could never do it to my own satisfaction. I am paying a considerable attention to elocution, reading, etc.
“I wish to ask you concerning novel-reading. I know that to read much of any such thing is bad, but do you think that it would injure me to read now and then those of Scott and Cooper? Write soon as possible.
Your affec. brother, “HENRY.“
The following letter, written near the close of his school-life, affords a view of some of his troubles, and is given entire:
”MOUNT PLEASANT, Mar. 1, 1830.
“MY DEAR SISTER:
“I received your letter yesterday and have got up about an hour earlier this morning in order that I may have time to answer it. My studies are growing more and more difficult, for I am preparing for examination, and most of the Greek which I am reviewing I have never been over, and I have to learn something like ten pages. Sometimes I feel almost discouraged, and if I was studying for myself alone I should have given up long ago; but when I think that I am preparing myself to bear the commands of Him who is my Master, I can go with renewed strength from day to day. A little time spent here in performing our duty, and then our toil and trouble will be rewarded with double and eternal happiness. I feel just as you do while writing or thinking of these things—I feel drawn up toward heaven, my home, and am enabled to look upon the earth as a place of pilgrimage and not an abiding city. Those are moments of true happiness, which the world knows not; but when I mix with the boys I forget these things, and do talk and act unworthy of a disciple of Christ. I find this to need much watchfulness and prayer, for I believe that I take to light trifling more than people generally do. I find much trouble with pride. I am afraid every day that I shall get into some difficulty with my instructors. I feel more at liberty when I write to you than any other of my sisters; not because I do not love them, but because you are nearer my age. I notice many things in reading your letter which struck me as exactly like my own feelings. I feel when in meeting, or when reading any book, as if I should never cease serving Christ, and could run with patience the race which is set before me. Oh! then I have such thoughts, such views of God, and of His love and mercy, that my heart would burst through the corrupt body of this world and soar up with angels. Oh! how happy the thought that we may in all the ages of eternity serve and enjoy the presence of that God, the very glimpses of whom fill us with such joy here. I believe that if I had not somewhere to lay my troubles, if Christ had not invited all those that are ‘weary and heavy laden’ to come unto Him, that I should have long since been discouraged, for I do not think that my instructors do right with me; for although they know that my lessons are double those of any other boy, still they scold and ridicule me during recitation, and, what is worse, the principals will at the close of the week, when the reports are read, read off my reports and all the remarks which are made of me by the under-instructors, and yet will not even say (I can say it with my whole heart) that I exert myself all in my power. And the deficiency is not for want of study. Nevertheless, if it will do me any good, if it will break down my proud spirit, if it will make me depend more upon help from above than earthly help, I will suffer it—yes, rejoice in it.
“I write to you, Harriet, just as I would speak with you; and if it seems to you that I am childish in feeling thus, I can say perhaps I may be, but there are feelings which I have long had, and have wished to relate to some one whom I loved and who could advise me. I have said little or nothing to any of my schoolmates concerning these things. You inquired something concerning card-playing, etc. I don’t know what to think about it. I believe that there are little societies which meet at certain places for the purpose of playing. It is not among the large boys only, but among those of ten or twelve years of age, and most all the boys say ‘they would not play, because it is forbidden by Mr. Colton; but they don’t think there is any harm in it any more than there is in playing chess.’ Mr. Colton knows that the boys play, and all that he has found out he has punished in some way or other; but there are many that he has not found who still continue to play in secret places, and it is not uncommon to hear little boys of eight or nine years old swearing most shockingly.
“The bell is ringing and I must begin my studies now. Write soon.
Your most affectionate brother, “HENRY.
“P. S. Will you send me a few questions that will be good for a debating society? We wish to get the best one we can for a public debate.”
Occasionally in some moment of frolicsome reminiscence he would tell one of his grandchildren of another kind of experience that belonged to these days. Bashful as he was and retiring by nature, he was not by any means proof against the tender passion—in fact, such a nature as his was just the one that its arrows would reach the earliest, and into which they would strike deepest.
She was the sister of a schoolmate, and her name was Nancy. All this vacation he had developed great fondness for this school friend; was often at his house. “And there,” he said, “I would lean against the window and watch Nancy sew, she had such little pink fingers—how I wanted to take hold of them! And then once in a while she would just glance up, and I would be covered with hot and awkward confusion.”
On one evening in particular he had spruced up his dress and screwed up his courage preparatory to making an evening call, when, as the family sat around the fire, “Lyman,” said the mother, without looking up from her lace knitting, “Mount Pleasant is an excellent school. Henry is improving very much. He has grown tidy, blacks his boots and brushes his hair, and begins to pay a proper attention to his clothes.”
“At this point,” says Mr. Beecher, in telling the story, “Charles gave an explosive giggle and punched me slyly. Father lowered his newspaper; glancing over his glasses in our direction, seeing me covered with confusion and Charles full of suppressed laughter, said dryly:
“‘Oh! it is the school, is it? Humph! I guess the cause is nearer home.’”
“How did it turn out, grandpa?”
“Oh! she was older than I, and married another fellow soon after. A short time ago, after a lecture in Boston, a little old lady introduced herself to me as ‘Nancy ———.’ But the charm was gone. I shook the once tempting hand and felt neither awkward nor hot.”
To some of his letters of this school-boy era he signs the initials H. C. B. instead of H. W. B. The adoption of this letter C came about from that enthusiasm of friendship which was always one of his marked characteristics. The following is the history of the matter:
On the back of a sheet of letter-paper which we have before us, folded as if for filing, is written:
“HENRY W. BEECHER & CONSTANTINE F. NEWELL, Mount Pleasant Collegiate Institution, Amherst, Mass.”
Opening it we read:
“We do, in the presence of God and his holy angels, by our signatures, mutually pledge ourselves to be and perform all things subjoined:
“(1) We do pledge ourselves to be real, lawful, and everlasting brothers; and that we will perform toward each other all the duties of brothers, whether present or absent, in health or in sickness, in wealth or in poverty, in prosperity or adversity; and that we will love and watch over one another, seeking by all means in our power to aid and make each other happy.
”H. C. BEECHER, “CONSTANTINE F. NEWELL.
“(2) If parted hereafter we pledge ourselves to write to one another once in two months, provided we are both in the United States. But if either shall remove or reside in any foreign land, we will write four times each year, that is, once in three months, unless we shall alter the arrangement.
”H. C. BEECHER, “CONSTANTINE F. NEWELL.
“(3) If we hear one another’s character evil spoken of, we pledge ourselves fearlessly to defend it and shield it from reproach.
”H. C. BEECHER, “CONSTANTINE F. NEWELL.
“(4) We will pass over the little faults which we may observe in each other, nor will we reproach one another of any little misstep.
[Signatures omitted here.]
“(5) Our sorrows and joys shall be common, so that we may rejoice in mutual prosperity and assist one another in adversity.
”H. C. BEECHER, “CONSTANTINE F. NEWELL.
“And now we consider ourselves as brothers, and we are bound together by ties and obligations as strong as can be placed upon us. But we rather rejoice in the relationship, as now it has converted our former friendship into brotherly love. As formerly we were connected by nothing save voluntary friendship, which could be broken off, so now we are connected by a love which cannot be broken; and we have pledged ourselves before God and his angels to be as written above. But we do not sorrow on this account—far from it, we greatly rejoice—for we have not done this thoughtlessly, but being convinced by three years’ friendship that we mutually love one another; and from this time are now assumed new duties and obligations. And to all the foregoing we cheerfully and voluntarily subscribe our names. And now may God bless us in this our covenant and in all our future ways, and receive us both at last in heaven.
“H. C. BEECHER, “CONSTANTINE F. NEWELL.
“AMHERST, April, 1832.”
The explanation of this singular paper is found in a very romantic history and friendship.
Constantine Fontellachi was a Greek from the island of Scio, in the Grecian Archipelago. His parents were killed by the Turks in that terrible massacre of the Sciotese which horrified the world in 1822. Constantine, who was six or eight years old, escaped and hid among the rocks upon the coast until he was discovered and taken off by a coasting vessel. He made his way to the New World and was adopted by Mrs. Newell, of Amherst, as her own, and sent to the Mount Pleasant school. His romantic but sorrowful history, his great beauty and grace of person, captivated Henry Ward; as he said: “He was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. He was like a young Greek god. When we boys used to go swimming together I would climb out on the bank to watch Constantine swim, he was so powerful, so beautiful.”
The brightness of his intellect and his kindliness of heart were equal to the beauty of his person, and the admiration excited deepened into the warmest and most sincere affection. It was like that between David and Jonathan, and appears to have been mutual.
When they separated at the close of their school-days, one to enter college and the other to go into business in Boston, the above covenant was written, admirable only as it illustrates what has been called Mr. Beecher’s genius for friendship. Returning to his native land in 1842, Constantine died very suddenly of cholera. But even then the old friendship was not forgotten. Years after Mr. Beecher gave to one of his sons “Constantine” as a middle name, that he might have in his family one who should always remind him of the friend so greatly beloved.
We close this chapter with a letter of reminiscence of Mount Pleasant days.
“AMHERST, MASS., May 17, 1849.
”MY DEAR EUNICE AND VERY DEAR WIFE:
“Here am I in this memorable place. It is now fifteen years since you received a letter from me dated as is this one. It is twenty-three years since I first put my foot on the village sod! It gives my head a whirl to look back so far, or to hear myself, with my young-looking face and younger-acting one, talking of things that happened to me at such long distances of time.... Arrived at Northampton about four o’clock; took stage for Amherst, mounted on top for sight-seeing. Rode through the old town along by the ploughed fields to the bridge of memorable history. All our experiences came very freshly back. I thought I could tell the very places where I kissed you in our ride home....
“After emerging from this old town (Hadley) the colleges shone out from afar; then Mount Pleasant gradually, and one by one the various prominent dwellings in the village. I put up at the Baltwoods’ old tavern.... I first went to the college; walked up and down and around in the various entries, in the grove, by the well, in the chapel, in each recitation-room. Then I went to each of the rooms which I occupied in college. I sought out the spots which had a very melancholy interest from events in my morbid religious history. I then turned my steps to Mount Pleasant. I cannot tell the emotions that I had when I once more trod the grassy ascent where my opening manhood first fairly dawned. As I walked up the long slope I almost thought that I should see the crowd of boys break forth from some door. I stopped on the terrace where for three years I mustered with more than a hundred boys, and whence we marched to chapel, to meals, to church, etc. As I stood there Constantine seemed to rise up to greet me, as he never will greet me; Hunt, Pomeroy, French, Burt, Thayer, Tilghman, Dwight, Van Lennep, Fitzgerald, and scores of others. The wings of the building, the chapel, the kitchen, etc., were all taken away, so that the places where most I roomed, and the veranda in which I used to sit and muse and feel the rise and swell of yearnings the meaning of which I did not know, are all swept away. Here I spent the half-ideal and half-emotive, dreamy hours in which I used to look across the beautiful Connecticut River valley, and at the blue mountains that hedged it in, until my heart swelled and my eyes filled with tears; why, I could not tell. Then I would push out into the woods and romp with the wildest of them. I visited the grove, once beautiful, now meagre and forlorn. I went into the rear building; each room brought up some forgotten scene, some face remembered for good or ill. I went to the room where I roomed early in my course. The boys were at supper, and so I sat down and meditated awhile. The room in which I lived with Fitzgerald was not to be found, some changes in the interior of the house having shut it out from the entry where I formerly found it. It was a strange mixture of old things found again and old things not to be found—of surprise and disappointment, of things painful and of things joyful. All my favorites, the little fellows that I used to love and cherish, their faces looked out at me at every turn. I tried to find the trees, growing three from a root, on which I made steps and built a slat house up among the branches; where I used to sit wind-rocked and read or muse, cry and laugh, just as the fancy took me. It was gone. There are twenty-five boys here at a select school. They were playing down on the old football ground, and the voices and shouts, quips and jokes, were so natural that I could hardly help plunging down the hill, catching up a club, and going into the game of ball with all my old ardor. But they would have no remembrances to meet mine. I should not have been Hank Beecher to them.... Good-by, dear wife.
“Truly yours, “H. W. B.
“Love to all the children, big and little.”
For the benefit of all school-boys we call attention to some of the most marked features of this period in the life of H. W. Beecher, as they appear from the extracts given and from other papers for which we have no space. He was healthy and robust, a favorite among the boys upon the play-ground, who called him “Hank” Beecher. He was a leader in their sports, and at the same time a champion of the younger and weaker boys. He learned to master his work, and by drill in school-room and gymnasium gained control of his own powers of body and mind. He kept his eyes open to the beauty of the world around him, and was very susceptible to the attractions of fair faces as well. He was open and manly in following his religious convictions, clean-mouthed and pure-hearted in his morals. He pondered big matters, and asked large questions, and sought out satisfactory conclusions for himself and for his companions. He looked for information in all directions, and took great pains to store it away for future use. He read good books and a great many of them, and the novels he read were of the best kind. Withal he was a “hail-fellow-well-met” companion and a most devoted and faithful friend. Upon the authority of every word of testimony we have been able to get from teachers, classmates, and old residents of the town, we declare him to have been a royal school-boy, whose manly faithfulness, kindly service, stalwart morality, and loving, cheerful friendliness prepared him for the grand life which he afterwards lived and the great success which he achieved, and make him a worthy example for all the ingenuous, aspiring youth of our land.