NARRATOR : The earnest seeker and hopeful discoverer of this new world always haunts the outskirts of his or her time. Our history is written in the lives of such individuals. The serial we're about to begin relates the story of one of American's most dynamic families, the Beechers. How a father and his eleven children wrote their destinies into our history in the years before the Civil War. A few of the younger ones even saw the turn of the Twentieth Century.
When the father, Lyman Beecher, retired at age 75, with the intention of sitting down to write his autobiography, he found that memories slipped away from him. His keen mind was gone, so his daughters Harriet Beecher Stowe and Catharine prompted him into conversations of his early days. They also added their own reminiscences and drew on the family round robin letters; Edward Beecher supplied materials, and so did the rest of the eleven Beecher children. Charles was finally designated editor, and when the two volumes of the Autobiography of Lyman Beecher was finally published, it was the chronicle of a remarkable family whose ideas and actions helped shape the country that we live in today. That material is the basis for what you will hear today.
So let us begin at the turn of the nineteenth century—the democrat Jefferson has just been elected, and many are worried that the democratic Terror that gripped the French Revolution just seven years before will grip America. In a remote village on the far end of Long Island, a young minister and his wife are about to begin a most remarkable family.
At the turn of the century, Lyman Beecher was 25 and fired up with ambition. He had been schooled at Yale under the thunderer Timothy Dwight, and when he received the call, he set out to bring back the Puritan revivalism of the Great Awakening of two generations before. He had boundless energy and zeal, traveling far to carry the word. A practical preacher, he measured his success by the number of converts.

LYMAN : There was a revival fever stirred the town. Oh, how I went down there I spilled over. All the old folks waked up, and when I went home, after meeting, to Aunt Phebe’s, the young people flowed together there. The work went on gloriously for six weeks and shook the whole town. 80 were converted.

ROXANA : Dear sister,—Mr. Beecher is everybody’s man. I will tell you a little how it has been this winter. Mr. Beecher has preached seven or eight times a week the whole winter. Last week, for example, he preached twice in town and two lectures, besides a funeral sermon on Gardiner’s Island, and five sermons to the Indians and white people down at Montauk. He every week lectures at some one of the villages adjoining Wainscott, four miles; Amagansett, three miles; Northwest, seven; the Springs, seven; and another place with an ugly Indian name. Some weeks at two or three of these places; and when not at these places, there have been meetings afternoons and evenings, and sometimes in the forenoon. I have not in the least exaggerated, and you may therefore suppose he has not had much leisure to attend to other business.
My principal business has been to prepare three meals a day, and now and then to put my house a little in order. I have spun enough for about two pairs of stockings, and almost knit them, and have mended my own and husband’s clothes. This uncommon attention to religion has brought a good deal of company. Indeed, there has been somebody here the greater part of the time. We have not passed above one or two evenings without visitors since I have been here, and they commonly stay till 11 o’clock, so that I find it difficult to seize a moment to write.

NARRATOR : But the next year, this schedule proved too much for Lyman. When he was hit with fever and ague in the winter of 1801, he had a breakdown. For weeks he was unable to do anything. Gradually he began to regain his strength and spirit and he began to fish, hunt, and ride. Later he could manage physical labor—making turf fences, haying, hauling seaweed—but recovery was slow.

LYMAN: : There was a long period in which I could not preach. Old Mr. Fithian one day told me he should not pay his rates any longer if I did not preach. ‘‘What is the reason,’’ said he, ‘‘You ministers are so hungry for money?’’
‘‘I don’t know,’’ said I, ‘‘unless it is that we see our people growing covetous and going to hell, and want to get it away from them.’’
About September I began to preach short sermons, 15 minutes long, the deacons taking the other services. When I finished speaking, my back and the cords down to my heels were in pain. Then I had a chair made to brace me and take the weight off my feet. Gradually I gained so that I could stand and preach, but it was about a year first.

NARRATOR : Catharine Esther was the firstborn of eleven children of Lyman and Roxana Beecher, born in 1800 in East Hampton, a village on the father shore of Long Island, still party inhabited by Indians. Also in the household was Mary Foote Hubbard. Roxana’s lovely and and charming sister had married a New Haven man who was a planter in the West Indies. Unfortunately, she found that he already had a mulatto family there. At the first chance, she fled in despair, and came to live with the Beechers in East Hampton. Catharine remembers her with affection.

CATHARINE : She was the poetry of my childhood.

MARY FOOTE : I wish, dear sister Esther, you would write me all the news. We get no paper, and know no more of the affairs of the world than if we were not in it. Here we are so still, so quiet, so dull, so inactive, that we have forgotten but that the world goes on the same way. We have forgotten that there are wars, murders, and violence abroad in the earth; that there are society, and friendship, and intercourse, and social affection, and science, and pleasure, and life, and spirit, and gayety, and good-humor, alive still among the sons of the earth.
All here is the unvaried calm of a—frog pond, and without the music of it. We neither laugh nor cry, sing nor dance, nor moan, nor lament; but the man that took ten steps yesterday taketh the same today, and as standing water begins to turn green, so all the countenances you meet seem to have contracted the expression indicative of the unagitated state in which they live. I wish I could procure some nitrous oxide—laughing gas—for them to inhale once a week. What do you suppose would be the effect? Suppose they would move a muscle in the face? Send me over a bottle. For my own part I am no better than an oyster, and as it is late I will creep into my shell.

NARRATOR : The household also included a housekeeper and two bound girls, Zillah and Rachel, who tended the cooking and the children. Two years after Catharine came William, then Edward.

CATHARINE : There was a free and easy way of living, more congenial to liberty and society than to conventional rules.

NARRATOR : Lyman’s wife Roxana never fondled or caressed the children, though Lyman did. She was gentle and kind, though she did not discipline them—that was for Lyman. At least, he took it over, exacting prompt and cheerful obedience from them, enforced with severity by a quince switch. He also loved openly and always showed concern.

LYMAN : I scarcely ever saw Roxana agitated to tears. Once, soon after we had moved into our new house, the two pigs did something that vexed me; I got angry and thrashed them. She came to the door and interposed. I the fire hadn’t gone out. I said quickly, ‘‘Go along in’’ She started, but hadn’t more than time to turn before I was at her side, and threw my arms around her neck and kissed her, and I told her I was sorry. Then she wept. That was the nearest to a quarrel we ever came.

NARRATOR : Since Lyman’s salary was inadequate for his growing family, Lyman and Roxana Beecher opened a girls’ school, and took in five boarders.

LYMAN : After I had been at East Hampton five or six years, and the family multiplied—for, besides Catharine and William, now we had Edward and Mary—our expenses were so increased that it became manifest that something must be done. A school was the only thing we could think of. So, without consulting the congregation, I advertised, and scholars came from towns around, and from Middle Island.
It was a select school, and your mother taught the higher English branches, besides French, drawing, painting, and embroidery. I took great interest in the school, and used to help about subjects for composition. The school prospered, and was, on the whole, profitable.

CATHARINE : I remember how mother and Aunt Mary studied Lavoisier’s Chemistry together. Chemistry was a new science then, and a constant subject of discussion. They tried a great many experiments, too, and sometimes with most ludicrous results. I also remember several large pieces of embroidery that were done by her scholars. Embroidery was an essential accomplishment then. Mother drew flowers from nature, and made fine copies from some splendid colored engravings of birds. In landscape drawing she was less successful.

NARRATOR : Catharine’s sister Harriet remembered her mother fondly.

HARRIET : Her forte was drawing likenesses on ivory. She took many of her scholars and friends, Dr. and Mrs. Woolworth, Grandma Foote, and Aunt Esther. There were about two dozen in all, which used to be kept in the family as a treasure to be shown us children when we were good.
The one she took of Aunt Esther was specially valuable as showing how she looked when a young girl. A little brunette, with clear olive complexion, keen, piercing hazel eyes, small aquiline nose, and great vivacity of expression; petite in figure, and dressed in bright crimson silk, with low neck and bare arms. Her wit was like lightning, and sometimes rather too keen. Her sayings had a peculiar neatness and point that made them apt to be repeated, and sometimes gave offense.

CATHARINE : The large room on the left, as you enter, was the sitting room, and behind it a bedroom. Father’s study was a small room on the right of the front entry. The schoolroom was over the sitting room, and in the two chambers opposite were four young ladies who boarded with us. The chambers over the kitchen and bedroom were given to the housekeeper, and to Zillah and Rachel.
We took our meals in the sitting room, and some of the most vivid of my early recollections are of the discussions between father and mother and Aunt Mary at table.
They read the Christian Observer, conducted by Macaulay, Wilberforce, Hannah More, and such works noticed in it as they woulc procure.
An Encyclopedia, presented to Aunt Mary by an English gentleman whose two daughters boarded with us, was mother’s constant resource. Here she studied perspective, and, as a specimen of her perseverance, finding a problem in which there happened to be a mistake, she did not leave it till she had substituted the true solution.
My remembrances of Aunt Mary are more vivid than those of any other friend of early life. The peculiar faculty of charming, which seemed to be her gift, was exerted as much upon children as on older people. It seemed to spring from her versatile power of throwing herself into sympathy with any associate for the time being. I was often her little nurse and attendant, and she secured my enthusiastic devotion by the high appreciation she seemed always to have of my childish services. She convinced me that I alone, of all the world, had the talent for finding the new-laid egg in the hay, that I could boil it exactly to a moment, and arrange the table and the chair, and do every service as no one else could.
Most observing and most sympathizing was she with all the little half-fledged wants and ambitions of childhood. One instance in point. I remember my imagination had been fired by hearing her read, in some poem, of the curls of some fair heroine dropped on her book; and so, one day, with great labor, I coaxed my hair into curl, and placed myself conspicuously before her, with the curls dropping on the page of an open book. She saw the artifice, and said, in her sweetest tones, ‘‘Oh, mother, come her and see these beautiful ringlets’’
Aunt Mary was a beautiful reader, and I have the most vivid recollection of the impassioned tones in which her favorite authors were given to the family circle. At East Hampton, when I was only eight or nine, my mind was stored with weird tales from Scott’s ballads, while the Lay of the Last Minstrel and Marmion were read aloud, mingled with enthusiastic en comiums on favorite passages.

NARRATOR : About this time, Noah Webster spoke for many Federalists when he warned about the new democrat President, Thomas Jefferson, with his dangerous liberal ideas, such as equality and rights that were not dependent on king or God.

NOAH WEBSTER : The truth is, many of our leading political men, during and after the Revolution, were visionary enthusiasts. The loose, undefined sense in which the words free and equal are used in some of the American constitutions has been, and will be, of immense evil to this country. The very principle of admitting everybody to the right of suffrage prostrates the wealth of individuals to the rapaciousness of a merciless gange, who have nothing to lose, and will delight in plundering their neighbors.

NARRATOR : Webster, like many of his time, distrusted democratic ideas. They pointed to France’s difficulties with its Reign of Terror, and then Napoleon. At one point, Judge Tapping Reeve, founder of the Litchfield Law Academy, believed that the Union would have to be dissolved, so distressing was the possibility of four more years under Jefferson.

JUDGE REEVE : I have seen many of our friends, and all that I have seen, and most that I have heard from, believe that we must separate, and that this is the most favorable moment.

NARRATOR : Generally, Lyman Beecher avoided political discussions, though they sometimes had a way of coming to him.

CATHARINE : I remember a visit of Uncle Samuel Foote while we lived at East Hampton, in which he brought with him various literary works, and also some of the first numbers of Salmagundi, conducted by Irving and his literary clique, whose careers were then just commencing. These papers were read aloud in the family with great enjoyment of their fresh and piquant humor.
Uncle Samuel Foote was a man of great practical common sense, united with large ideality, a cultivated taste, and very extensive reading. With this was combined a humorous combativeness, that led him to attack the special theories and prejudices of his friends, sometimes jocosely and sometimes in good earnest.
Of course he and father were in continual good-natured skirmishes, in which all New England peculiarities of theology or of character were held up both in caricature and in sober verity.
I remember long discussions in which he maintained that the Turks were more honest than Christians, bringing very startling facts in evidence. Then I heard his serious tales of Roman Catholic bishops and archbishops he had carried to and from Spain and America, whom he affirmed to be as learned and as truly pious and devoted to the good of men as any Protestant to be found in America.
His account of the Jews in Morocco was most curious; their ocndition appearing, even to his skeptical mind, the strongest verification of Hebrew prophecy. Poor, ignorant, despeised, abused in every way, and offered the privileges and dignity of Muslims if they would relinquish their faith, they still clung to their sacred books and their despised people with the pertinacity and heroism of martyrs.

CATHARINE : It was at this time, with his house full of young people, that father’s constitutional mirthfulness developed itself more freely than ever afterward.
He had learned to play the violin while in college, and every day practiced the liveliest airs. But if any of the girls began to take a dancing step, he would make the violin give a doleful screech, and thus always ended every attempt to dance. Some of the family, very sensitive to musical defects, were particularly annoyed by a monotonous tune he sometimes played, and so, when they happened to be late in the morning, he would station himself on the stairs, and play over and over this miserable air till all the delinquents made their appearance.
Sometimes, in school-hours, when he had got tired writing, the would come out of his study and go into the sitting-room under the schoolroom, and begin the play the violin as loud as he could. Pretty soon he would hear the schoolroom door open, and a light footstep on the stairs. Mother would come into the room, quietly walk up to him—not a word said by either of them, only a funny twinkle of the eye—and would take the violin out of his hands, go upstairs, and lay it on her table in the schoolroom.

CATHARINE : Occasionally we children were allowed to pass a narrow plank walk across a deep marsh where cranberries grew, but where we were told, if we stepped off to get them, we should sink and be drowned in the mud.
Beyond this we came to hills of sand, covered with beach plums, and then to the hard white sand, where the ocean broke and ran up in ceaseless play. Here we used to go down with the retreating wave, and wait till we saw another coming in ready to break, and then we all scampered to escape the upward flow. Sometimes we were overtaken and drenched, and it was strife with us to see who dared to go the furthermost down to meet the waves.
As to family government, it has been said that children love best those that govern them best. This was verified in our experience. Our mother was gentle, tender, and sympathizing, but all the discipline of government was with father. With most of his children, when quite young, he had one, two, or three seasons in which he taught them that obedience must be exact, prompt, and cheerful, and by a discipline so severe that it was thoroughly remembered and feared. Ever after, a decided word of command was all-sufficient. The obedience demanded was to be speedy, and without fretting or frowns. ‘‘Mind your mother quick no crying look pleasant’’ These were words of command obeyed with almost military speed and precision.
This method secured such habits of prompt, unquestioning, uncomplaining obedience as made few occasions for discipline. I can remember but one in my own case, and but few in that of the younger ones at East Hampton.
This strong and decided government was always attended with overflowing sympathy and love. His chief daily recreations were frolics with his children. I remember him more as a playmate than in any other character during my childhood. He was fond of playing pranks on us, and trying the queerest experiments with us, for his amusement as well as ours.
Gradually, as I grew older, I began to share with mother in his more elevated trains of thought. He never was satisfied with his writings till he had read them over to mother and Aunt Mary or Aunt Esther. By this intellectual companionship our house became in reality a school of the highest kind, in which he was all the while exerting a powerful influence upon the mind and character of his children.

NARRATOR : Lyman Beecher’s first claim to national attention came after he learned that Aaron Burr set out to practice shooting before he goaded Alexander Hamilton into a duel, thus killing him legally. Beecher studied the question for six months, then gave his Sermon on Dueling, which he was asked to repeat later at Synod.

LYMAN : Dueling is a great national sin. The whole land is covered with blood. A duelist may be a gambler, a prodigal, or fornicator, an adulterer, a drunkard and a murderer and not violate the laws of honor. Ten thousand plagues stand ready to execute His wrath: conflagration, tempest, earthquake, war, famine, and pestilence wait His command only, to cleanse the land from blood.

NARRATOR : He argued with vigor, and the synod voted to print 40,000 copies. Young Lyman Beecher’s reputation spread much further than East Hampton, Long Island.

LYMAN : I rose and knocked away opposing arguments and made them ludicrous. Oh, I declare if I did not switch ’em and scorch ’em and stamp on ’em. It was the center of old fogyism, but I mowed it down, and carried the vote of the house.

NARRATOR : When Lyman Beecher had a second sermon published, his growing reputation as a fire-breathing Calvinist prompted an invitation from the Congregational Church in Litchfield, Connecticut. Litchfield was a prestigious Federalist town with America’s first law school, created by Judge Tapping Reeve, a friend of the family. Litchfield offered double the salary. With five children and one on the way, Lyman decided it was time to move.

LYMAN : After a visit of three weeks in Litchfield, Connecticut, I went back to Long Island. Sold my house for $1800—the only speculation I ever made in my life; it cost me some $800. We had an auction of things we did not want to carry away. I brought the family over on a sloop, and left some at Nutplains, Roxana’s old home, and some at New Haven with Esther, and went up to Litchfield on horseback to purchase the place and make preparation.   
 Judge Allen let me take his large two-horse wagon, and I went down and brought up your mother and all the children—Catharine, William, Edward, and Mary, but George was left to be weaned.

NARRATOR : The third Beecher child, Edward, describes that trip, and his father’s prophecy.

EDWARD : I remember being in the wagon with William, and when we passed through New Haven, father stopped the horses before the college, and said to William and me, ‘‘There, boys, look there There’s where you’ve got to go one of these days.’’