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.
We are now in the mid-1820s in Litchfield, Connecticut. Catharine, as a result of her spiritual crisis, is turning her brilliant mind to the problems of women’s education. She has left for Hartford to investigate prospects for opening a new school for girls. Edward has graduated at the top of his class at Yale, and has come home to relax. Harriet suggests that home life at the Beechers was more often hectic than relaxing.

HARRIET : My father was famous for his power of exciting family enthusiasm. Whenever he had a point to carry or work to be done, he would work the whole family up into a pitch of fervent zeal, in which the strength of each one seemed quadrupled. For instance, the wood of the family used to be brought in winter on sleds, and piled up in the yard, exactly over the spot where father wished in early spring to fix his cucumber and melon frames; for he always made it a point to have cucumbers as soon as Dr. Taylor, who lived in New Haven, and had much warmer and drier land; and he did it by dint of contrivance and cucumber frames.  
  Of course, as all this wood was to be cut, split, and carried into the woodhouse before an early garden could be started, it required a miracle of generalship to get it done, considering the immense quantity required in that climate to keep an old windy castle of a house comfortable. How the axes rung, and the chips flew, and the jokes and stories flew faster; and when all was cut and split, then came the great work of wheeling in and piling; and then I, sole little girl among so many boys, was sucked into the vortex of enthusiasm by father’s well-pointed declaration that he ‘‘wished Harriet were a boy, she would do more than any of them.’’  
  I remember putting on a little black coat which I thought looked more like the boys’, casting needle and thread to the wind, and working almost like one possessed for a day and a half, till in the afternoon 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.

NARRATOR : In the autumn, the entire family would work on making a whole barrel of apple butter, which would remain frozen in the milk room, to be cut into chunks when needed. Baskets of apples and quince in the kitchen would go into the apple peeler, and then into a huge brass kettle in the fireplace. Lyman and George would relate the stories of Walter Scott’s newest novels—and this marked a real change for Dr. Beecher. Ever since Catharine had brought home the books and effects of Alexander Fisher, Lyman had decided, on looking them over, that Scott wasn’t such a bad fellow after all.

LYMAN : George, you may read Scott’s novels. I have always disapproved of novels as trash, but in these is real genius and real culture.

NARRATOR : At times, the large family had to be spread around among relatives. Harriet in particular lived for months at a time at Nutplains, her mother’s home. Catharine writes her the news of Isabella’s birth.

CATHARINE : Harriet, I suppose you will be very glad to hear you have a little sister at home. We have no name for her yet.  
  We all want you home very much, but hope you are now where you will learn to stand and sit straight, and hear what people say to you, and sit still in your chair, and learn to sew and knit well, and be a good girl in every particular; and if you don’t learn while you are with Aunt Harriet, I am afraid you never will.
   Old Puss is very well, and sends his 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 hand, or pull your frock, just as he serves the rest of us. Henry and Charles love to play with him very much.

NARRATOR : George and Hattie were the real readers of the family, and they grew up, not on children’s books, but on the Arabian Nights, Cotton Mather’s collection of Indian raids, witches and damnation, Don Quixote, Shakespeare, The State of the Clergy during the French Revolution.

HARRIET : One of father’s favorite resorts was Aunt Esther’s room, about half a minute’s walk from our house. How well I remember that room A low-studded parlor, looking out on one side into a front yard shaded with great elm trees, on the other, down a green sidehill. This room, always so quiet, so spotlessly neat, was a favorite retreat of all us children who were allowed, as a reward for good behavior, to go and pass an hour or two with Aunt Esther.  
  Aunt Esther herself, with her sparkling hazel eyes, her keen, read wit, and never-failing flow of anecdote and information, interested us even more than the best things she could produce from her closet. She had read on all subjects—chemistry, philosophy, physiology, but especially on natural history, where her anecdotes were inexhaustible. I once heard a child say, ‘‘Only think Aunt Esther has told me nineteen rat stories all in a string.’’ In fact, we thought there was no question we could ask her that she could not answer.  
  It was in Aunt Esther’s room that I first found a stray volume of Lord Byron’s poetry, which she gave me one afternoon to appease my craving for something to read. It was The Corsair. I shall never forget how it astonished and electrified me, and how I kept calling to Aunt Esther to hear the wonderful things that I found in it, and to ask what they could mean. ‘‘Aunt Esther, what does it mean— One I never loved enough to hate—?’’   ‘‘Oh, child, it’s one of Byron’s strong expressions.’’  
  I went home absorbed and wondering about Byron; and after that I listened to everything that father and mother said at the table about him, such as the account of his separation from his wife.

NARRATOR : At thirteen, Harriet heard her father say at dinner to his wife:

LYMAN : My dear, Byron is dead—gone. Oh, I’m sorry that Byron is dead. I did hope he would live to do something for Christ. What a harp he might have swept.

HARRIET : I looked up into the blue sky and thought of that great eternity into which Byron had entered, and wondered how it might be with his soul

NARRATOR : Doctor Beecher’s next sermon distinguished between some poems of Byron’s that would prove as imperishable as brass, and other works with impurities, as in Sterne and Swift, that would doom them to oblivion. He closed with a most eloquent lamentation over the wasted life and misused powers of the great poet.

LYMAN : I wish I could have seen him. If Byron could only have talked with Taylor and me, it might have got him out of his troubles.

NARRATOR : About this time, Dr. Beecher struck out in a new direction, with a sermon that would launch him on a new career. The danger that he denounced was a new theology in Boston called Unitarianism. It threatened the very heart of New England Calvinism with its openness and democratic spirit. William Ellery Channing’s defense of reason in religious matters roused Beecher to the attack.

LYMAN : From the time Unitarianism began to show itself in this country, it was a fire in my bones. I had watched the whole progress of the Unitarian controversy, and read with eagerness everything that came out on the subject. My mind had been heating, heating, heating. Now I had a chance to strike. Their power of corrupting the youth of the commonwealth by means of Cambridge is silently putting sentinels in all the churches, legislators in the halls, and judges on the bench, and scattering everywhere physicians, lawyers and merchants.

NARRATOR : Though young Harriet usually found her father’s sermons unintelligible, there was one spontaneous sermon that led her to believe she was experiencing what her father always hoped and watched for—religious conversion.

HARRIET : Forgetting all his hairsplitting distinctions and dialectic subtleties, he spoke in direct, simple and tender language of the great love of Christ and his care for the soul. He pictured him as patient with our errors, compassionate with our weaknesses, and how he was ever near us, comforting our sorrows with a love unchilled by ingratitude, till at last he should present us faultless before the throne of his glory with exceeding joy.
   I sat intent and absorbed. Oh how much I needed just such a friend, I thought to myself. Then the awful fact came over me that I had never had any conviction of my sins, and consequently could not come to him. I longed to cry out ‘‘I will,’’ when father made his passionate appeal, ‘‘Come then, and trust your soul to this faithful friend.’’ Like a flash it came over me that if I needed conviction of sin, he was able to give me even this also. I would trust him for the whole. My whole soul was illumined with joy, and as I left the church to walk home, it seemed to me as if Nature herself were hushing her breath to hear the music of heaven.   
 As soon as father came home and was seated in his study, I went up to him and fell in his arms, saying, ‘‘Father, I have given myself to Jesus, and he has taken me.’’ I never shall forget the expression on his face as he looked down into my earnest, childish eyes; it was so sweet, so gentle, and like sunlight breaking out upon a landscape. ‘‘Is it so?’’ he said, holding me silently to his heart. ‘‘Then has a new flower blossomed in the kingdom this day.’’

NARRATOR : Catharine’s tragic love affair ending with the death of her fiance, Alexander Metcalf Fisher, had left her in a deep depression. Even with the counsels of her father and brother Edward, she was unable to achieve spiritual conversion. Fisher had written her into his will before he left on his fatal voyage, and by reading his papers, Catharine found the same religious doubts that she had experienced, and an inner strength to go on. If not God, then she would serve the world.  
  As soon as he saw her decision, Lyman Beecher immediately supported Catharine, and made efforts to help her in her plan to establish a school at Hartford.

LYMAN : Catharine arrived Friday, and left all well at Hartford. Her examination was royal, and all her prospects of a school and of great usefulness are exceeding lood.

NARRATOR : The Hartford Female Seminary opened in 1823. Catharine set up house in Hartford and shared it with her sister Mary. Later Harriet and the unteachable Henry came down to attend her school. Three years after opening, the school had a hundred pupils. yet even with a fully functioning school, Catharine would often go back home to Litchfield.

CATHARINE : You know how happy it makes us to be with father. His society seems always to give a new impulse to the affection of the heart and to every intellectual power. I never hear anybody preach that makes me feel as father does; perhaps it may be because he is father. But I cannot hear him without its making my face burn and my heart beat.

HARRIET : Catharine has been here, and we have all been thoroughly metaphysicated. At breakfast we generally have the last evening’s argument hashed through and warmed over, indeed they serve us with an occasional nibble through the whole day. One of Bishop Butler’s arguments lasted us for nearly three meals.

NARRATOR : At her school, Catharine kept up a like intensity with her pupils.

CATHARINE : Students, the time may come to some of you, even now in the morning of life, when instead of the gay colors that adorn each scene, every object will be inscribed with ‘‘mourning and lamentation and woe.’’ Seek something that will endure when earthly expectations fail. You cannot now realize and I pray you may never experience how bereft, how lonely, how desolate is a heart that has no portion in heaven, when the hopes of this world pass away, when the bright visions of life are shrouded in darkness, when the midnight pillow is bathed in tears of lonely bitterness, and the dawn of day brings no light to the soul.

NARRATOR : That same year, 1823, Catharine joined her father’s church. She now felt that she could ally herself with Lyman Beecher.

CATHARINE : If I cannot be a Christian, I will try to be as near like one as I can.

NARRATOR : Meanwhile, Lyman Beecher extended his campaign to combat Unitarianism by founding the Connecticut Observer. Catharine was his strong support.

CATHARINE : Father is much animated with the success of the paper. There is nothing makes me feel so happy as to be with him, and nothing so stimulates my intellect as his conversation.

NARRATOR : In these years Catharine developed her ideas on education into a little book called Suggestions Respecting Improvements in Education, and she began to teach a course in mental and moral philosophy.  
  When Harriet was barely fourteen, Catharine brought her down to her Female Seminary, for one year as a student, and then as a teacher. Hattie became aware of the writings of the ‘‘sweet singer of Hartford,’’ Lydia Huntley Sigourney, and started writing a Byronic tragedy in blank verse—until sister Catharine advised her to use the time more profitably by studying Joseph Butler’s Analogy of Religion. In the fall, Catharine had her teaching Butler’s book in a class.   
 Madame de Stael’s novel Corinne, the story of an emotionally liberated woman, made the rounds at Catharine’s school, and it made a strong impression on Harriet.

HARRIET : I have felt an intense sympathy with many parts of that book, with many parts of her character. But in America feelings vehement and absorbing like hers become still more deep, morbid, and impassioned by the constant habits of self-government which the rigid forms of our society demand. They are repressed, and burn inward till they burn the very soul, leaving only dust and ashes. It seems to me the intensity with which my mind has thought and felt on every subject presented to it has had this effect. It has withered and exhausted it.  
  All that is enthusiastic, all that is impassioned in admiration of nature, of writing, of character, in devotional thought and emotion, or in the emotions of affection, I have felt with vehement and absorbing intensity—felt till my mind is exhausted, and seems to be sinking into deadness. Half of my time I am glad to remain in a listless vacancy, to busy myself with trifles, since thought is pain, and emotion is pain.

NARRATOR : Despite her new role as educator, Catharine found that she was not fond of teaching, or even of administration. Time spent away from the school on her own intellectual development became increasingly important to her.

CATHARINE : The only pleasant recollection of that first year was that of my own careful and exact training under my most accurate and faithful brother Edward.  
  I was never driven to mental effort till affliction came, but except for the comforts of religion and of friendship I find no so pure and interesting a source of earthly good as the exercise of the mind in acquiring and communicating knowledge. The exercise of the mind makes us realize the high faculties and immortal destinies of our nature.

NARRATOR : When she expressed doubts about continuing the school past its first year, Lyman told her—

LYMAN : It will not answer for you to leave that school. You must not think of it.

NARRATOR : By September 1824, Catharine had decided to put off marriage indefinitely. Edward returned to the seminary at Andover. Now Catharine was on her own, and responsible for four younger brothers and sisters. Her school at Hartford had become the second Beecher outpost.  
  She arranged to teach in the mornings while Mary taught in the afternoons. She organized Saturday evening social gatherings, and cultivated friendships with Hartford’s leaders, including Miss Lydia Sigourney, who had run her school for young ladies until 1819.

NARRATOR : In December 1825, Catharine asked her father whether she ought to rent a house of her own—it would mean giving up the idea of marriage for good. Lyman agreed with the idea.

CATHARINE : I have pretty much concluded not to take a matrimonial home.

LYMAN : The strong hand with which God has turned back your family course may and it may not indicate his purpose as to the way in which he intends to resolve your service.

NARRATOR : Lyman Beecher’s campaign against Unitarianism led him to accept a move to Boston, the heart of the new ideas.

LYMAN : It is in Boston that New England is to be regenerated, the enemy driven out of the temple they have usurped and polluted, the college to be rescued, the public sentiment to be revolutionized and restored to evangelic tone.

NARRATOR : Returning from a visit to Lyman’s new church in Hanover Street, Boston, Catharine instigated a revival in her own school in Hartford. She started with prayer meetings in her new house, and worked with her students—despite the fact that she herself was unconverted.  
  Perhaps fifteen students were involved— but the Reverend Joel Hawes of Hartford ignored Catharine’s revival to attend to one in Northampton. But in its third week, Catharine could report eight or ten townspeople involved. She wrote to Edward and to Lyman for help. But Lyman’s response was not what Catharine expected.

LYMAN : Your last letters, giving an account of the state of things in your school, have been read with deep interest and much thanksgiving, though not without some solicitude. The very high state of excited feeling, though extremely natural among young Christians, and powerful in its effects while it lasts, is too hazardous to health to be indulged, and necessarily too short-lived to answer in the best manner the purpose of advancing a revival. You must instantly put yourselves upon a different system or you will all be prostrate.

NARRATOR : Once her revival was over, Catharine knew that she could lead people, but that her father’s methods were not appropriate for her. Increasingly, she acted and wrote and published as an educator. The school was expanded into a full seminary. And within two years, Catharine developed her class in ‘‘Mental and Moral Philosophy’’ into a discipline that could carry her own ideas forward.  
  Catharine, Mary, and Harriet joined Joel Hawes’ church, the oldest in Hartford and the one which prominent and wealthy citizens attended. Catharine, now a leader of the community, could ask leading citizens to serve as trustees in her fund-raising—many of their daughters were in her school, many of their wives attended her social Saturdays.

CATHARINE : This was my first experience of the moral power and good judgment of American women, which has been my chief reliance ever since.

NARRATOR : But Catharine’s new seminary was not to give simply a refined education to young women, as had Lydia Sigourney’s academy. Catharine had more serious motives in mind. In an article in the American Journal of Education, she wrote:

CATHARINE : A lady should study, not to shine, but to act. To come out in conduct, education must shape a young woman’s principles and the formation of her habits. Public sentiment has advanced so much on the subject of female culture that a course of study very similar to that pursued by young men in our public institutions is demanded for young ladies of the higher circles. But facilities and teaching techniques are vastly inferior in girls’ schools.  
  The proper education of a man decides the welfare of an individual; but educate a woman and the interests of the whole family are secured.

NARRATOR : In 1831, Catharine published her seminal book, The Elements of Mental and Moral Philosophy, Founded upon Experience, Reason and the Bible. Catharine published it at her own expense—at first anonymously, and in some cases she cut out the heretical pages, before giving copies away.  
  In it, Catharine insists that, with or without God, morality exists, and that moral educators can change people’s behavior.
   The central role of the woman in the family now becomes the vision that Catharine Beecher was to pursue with intelligence and energy.
   Thus she became a reformer. She had taken one step further than Lyman Beecher ever did—he believed in saving souls, but not by changing the world. Catharine had found her career; out of her own struggles of conscience, she had first pieced together a life, and then built the foundations for a profound change in modern society.
   Her contribution to Common Sense philosophy, or the Scottish school, turned the traditional female virtues of submission for the general good and self-sacrifice into strong engines for social progress. By emphasizing the family, Catharine elevated the position of the woman. In her school, she worked to reconcile evangelical and upper class ethics. Her later career was no easy road, but the direction was now clear.
   When Catharine decided that morality could be taught, she realized that only a boarding school would do. But this last step, requiring her to raise an additional $20,000 for expansion, was too much. Catharine Beecher had carved out a career—now she faced her own physical limits. Her commitment to service brought on a nervous breakdown.
CATHARINE : I thought that if I exercised two hours a day and took eight hours of quiet sleep, and a proper time for meals, I might then work all the rest of the time without danger. And so I kept my mind under pressure of responsibility and mental effort for ten successive years. At the end of that time, without a day’s warning of danger, I found the entire fountain of nervous energy exhausted. I could not read a page or write a line, or even listen to conversation without distress. The evil was irretrievable and I never again could assume the duties that wore me down.