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.

The Beecher family prepared for the move to the cultural capital of New England—Boston. Catharine Beecher had established her school for women at Hartford just two years before. The eminent Doctor Lyman Beecher had made a national reputation on the basis of his attacks on the new tendency called Unitarianism. In consequence, he received an invitation to be pastor at Boston’s Hanover Street Church. It would mean leaving rural Litchfield, Connecticut, the family home for sixteen years, for the rough and tumble of America’s premier seaport and intellectual center.
Meanwhile, the rest of the Beecher household was in flux. Edward, George, and William studied for the ministry, while Catharine’s Hartford school employs Mary, and sometimes Harriet—even Henry is sent to Hartford briefly, to try the backward lad in a new educational setting. Charles, Isabella, and Thomas are still children at home. And Lyman Beecher mulls over his decision. LYMAN : From the time Unitarianism began to show itself in this country, it was as fire in my bones. I watched it, even at East Hampton, and read everything that appeared on the subject.
The minister of King’s Chapel was the first that broached it. None else dared. Nor did they preach it. They used orthodox terms for a spell, ceasing to urge awakening truth, and left the old to die out, and the young to grow up Unitarians.
Then Channing came forward, and preached his famous sermon at Baltimore. He was their idol.
My farewell sermon at East Hampton seven years before had led me to give an outline of a theological system. In Litchfield I rewrote and enlarged it, and preached it in Boston.
1817 was the first time I had ever been in Boston. The sermon was long, but clear. I was not afraid, but took sight and struck on all points. The Unitarians were out. The interest grew to the last as blow after blow hit every nail on the head.
Come to go out, the old men were all in a glorification talking and chatting. Went to their dining-place, and there old Dr. Jones, not given to praising, let out. You see there had been no such attack on Unitarianism. The sensation all over the city was great. It was a perfect victory.

NARRATOR : Dr. Leonard Bacon, a supporter of Beecher’s, gives his account of the situation:

LEONARD BACON : The Unitarian defection was then at the height of its power and in the full tide of its progress, and a mind like his, ever watching for the signs of the times, could not be indifferent. Already he had found one opportunity of making himself heard at the center of that great defection from evangelical truth. His sermon, The Bible a Code of Laws, was a most telling argument against the Unitarian system, striking it where it is most defenseless.
Four years later, in 1823, he preached at Worcester, where I had the privilege of hearing his great sermon The Faith Once Delivered to the Saints. That sermon, I do not hesitate to say, was one of the most effective publications in the Unitarian controversy of the time.
Stuart had published his Letters to Channing, which remained unanswered. Woods, the Abbott Professor at Andover, on the one side, and Ware, the Hollis Professor at Harvard, on the other, had completed their debate, each to the general satisfaction of his own friends.
But the sermon on The Faith Once Delivered to the Saints was like a huge bomb thrown right into the camp of the adversaries. The Worcester sermon, by its clear, fresh statement of the two systems in their contrast, and by its ingenious, intelligible, and effective demonstration that the so-called liberal system could not possibly be the faith once delivered to the saints, put that system to the awkward work of defending itself.

LYMAN : Are the doctrines of the liberal system contained in the text, according to its most direct and obvious meaning? Do they receive the sanction of approbation from the most devout persons, and the sentence of condemnation from the irreligious and vicious? Does the liberal system produce the same objections which the faith delivered to the saints produced? Do the doctrines of the liberal system occasion the same fears and anxieties about a future state, the same deep conviction of sin, and the same joyful and often sudden conversion to God, as are manifested under evangelical preaching and in revivals of religion? Do the doctrines of the liberal system produce revivals of religion at all?

NARRATOR : At the end of 1825, Lyman Beecher accepted the invitation to the Hanover Street Church in Boston. His campaign against Unitarianism should be conducted at the enemy’s door, he felt. He began his Boston pastorate in April 1826, although his health and spirits were not good, as his eldest son William reports.

WILLIAM : I spent a week in Boston at Father’s installation. He was quite unwell with dyspepsia; he suffered much from fear, and does still. I never knew him more cast down. He felt as though his course was finished. He had serious thoughts of sending for you, and had even written the letter, but concluded to wait and see how he got over the Sabbath. This was Friday.
;He took a chair, and turned it down before the fire and laid down.
‘‘Ah, William,’’ said he, ‘‘I’m done over I’m done over’’ Mother told me he had often thought so before, and yet in two days had been nearly well again.
‘‘Yes, but I never was so low before. It’s all over with me I only want to get my mind composed in God—but it is hard to see such a door of usefulness set open and not able to enter.’’ You may be sure I felt this deeply. He seemed so sure that I almost feared it was so. I never saw him so low before.
But we at length succeeded in cheering him some, and on Saturday I rode with him to Marblehead, and he was very much better, and preached on the Sabbath quite well, without much fatigue; on Monday I left, and he has continued, with much fear and trembling, to preach since.
The house where he preaches is crowded, and the vestry meetings also. He has twenty or twenty-five inquirers; and there seems to be a revival spirit in the churches. They board at Deacon Lambert’s, in Pitt Street.

HARRIET : When Dr. Beecher came to Boston, Calvinism or orthodoxy was the despised and persecuted form of faith. The strict theocracy founded by the Puritans had suffered a reaction that forced open the doors of the state. It was the dethroned royal family wandering like a permitted mendicant in the city where once it had held court, and Unitarianism reigned in its stead.
The dominant majority entered at once into possession of churches and church property, leaving the orthodox minority to go out into school-houses or town halls, and build their churches as best they could. So bitter and so strong had been the reaction of a whole generation against the bands too stringent of their fathers—but in every such surge of society, however confident and overbearing, there lies the element of a counterreaction, and when Dr. Beecher came to Boston this element had already begun to assert itself.

NARRATOR : Dr. William Ellery Channing led the attack for the Unitarians, hitting on the real differences within Calvinism—the New-School advocates, such as Lyman Beecher, and Old-School.

CHANNING : It is a plain matter of fact that the hard features of that religious system which has bee ‘‘received by tradition from our fathers’’ are greatly softened, and that a necessity is felt by those who hold it of accommodating their representations of it more and more to the improved philosophy of the human mind, and to the undeniable principles of natural and revealed religion. Unconditional election is seldom heard of among us. The imputation of Adam’s sin to his posterity is hastening to join the exploded doctrine of transubstantiation. The more revolting representations of man’s state by nature are judiciously kept out of sight, and, what is still of greater importance, preaching is incomparably more practical than formerly.

LYMAN : It is certainly an unexpected task which devolves upon me of proving that my doctrinal opinions are Calvinistic. I perceive what appears to me a settled determination in Unitarians to make the impression on the public mind that every variation in the explanation, statement, and proof of our doctrines is an abandonment of our first principles—and an approximation to Unitarianism.
But not one of the thousand trumpets which blow the fame of favored Unitarians has swelled a note in my praise, and no Unitarian press has groaned with a second and third edition of this ‘‘anti-Calvinist’’ sermon for gratuitous distribution.
I have made inquiry, far and wide. But, while some differ with me on subordinate points or modes of explanation, all, without exception, have admitted that the sermon contains, substantially, a true account of the faith delivered to the saints.

NARRATOR : Another attack centered on Beecher’s New-School doctrine of immediate repentance—the idea that a person could repent by his or her own free will. Some Unitarians claimed that that wasn’t Calvinism at all, and some Calvinists agreed. A hundred years before, the Calvinist Jonathan Edwards had struggled with the same dilemma of free will, which was memorialized in this popular conundrum:
                     You can and you can’t                      You will and you won’t                      You’ll be damned if you do                      And damned if you don’t
A story is told that Dr. Beecher was to exchange pulpits with an Old-School Calvinist minister. They met halfway, and the Old-School man exclaimed, ‘‘Dr. Beecher, I wish to call to your attention that before the creation of the world God arranged that you were to preach in my pulpit and I in yours on this particular Sabbath’’ ‘‘Is that so? Then I won’t do it’’ retorted Beecher. And he wheeled his carriage about and drove back to his own church, to the astonishment of the other preacher.

HARRIET : He kept a load of sand in his cellar, to which he would run at odd intervals and shovel vigorously, throwing it from one side of cellar to the other, on his favorite theory of working off nervous excitement through the muscles, and his wood-pile and wood-saw were inestimable means to the same end. He had also, in the backyard, parallel bars, a single bar, ladder, and other simple gymnastic apparatus, where he would sometimes astonish his ministerial visitors by climbing ropes hand over hand, whirling over on the single bar, lifting weights, and performing other athletic feats, in which he took for the time as much apparent delight and pride as in any of his intellectual exertions.
His care of what he called regimen—diet, sleep, exercise, etc., went on with all his other cares without seeming to interrupt them. He seemed to navigate his body, as an acute mariner would work his ship through a difficult channel, with his eye intent on every spar and rope, each sail kept trimmed with the nicest adjustment.
The harsh climate of Boston, with its east winds, had long been famous for making all its literary workers dyspeptics; yet it was in this climate that his work lay; here he must conquer, notwithstanding he brought with him his life’s disease. So careful was he of atmospheric influences upon the sensitive surface of the body, that he would often undress and dress again completely three or four times a day, to meet various changes of the mutable Boston weather.

LYMAN : when I commenced in Hanover Street, the first three Sabbaths the seats were free to all, and thronged above and below. Then they sold the pews, and the fourth Sabbath I preached to the Church and congregation specifically. The house was not thinned. There was a flood of young people of the middle classes that kept the congregation overflowing.
The Church had many excellent young men in it, and a fine set of women. The Church had had charge of their own affairs, property, etc., a year before I came, so that they were used to business; and, for fear it might fall into the hands of Unitarians, as other church property had done, they had a trust deed, giving it entirely and forever to the Church. It was as finely organized a church as ever trod shoe-leather. Extremely wise they were; I never knew them to make a mistake.
I remember one Sabbath, Anderson came smiling after sermon, and said with emotion, ‘‘You will overset us if you are going to preach at this rate’’ I never shall forget that. I knew nobody then. I took those subjects that were unquestionable; I began with prudence, because a minister, however well known at home, and however wise and successful he has been, has to make himself a character anew, and find out what material is around him.
From the beginning my preaching was attended with interest. I could take hold. There was very earnest hearing in the congregation. I felt in my own soul that the word sent forth with power. It was a happy season, hopeful and auspicious.

HARRIET : When Father was in Boston, I was more with him, and associated in companionship of thought and feeling for a longer period, than any other of my experience—and it was the most activew, glowing, and successful period of his life. It was the high noon of his manhood, the ÷ood-tide of his powers; and a combination of circumstances in the history of Massachusets brought him in to labor there just as a whole generation were on the return-wave if a great moral reaction.

LYMAN : William, it is with a deep sense of the divine goodness that I am able to say that my most distressing malady is yielding to prayer and regimen, and, I hope, passing away. I preached on fast-day two long sermons on Intemperance, attended several other meetings in the week, and at the close found myself evidently gaining strength.
The sermons on Intemperance struck well, and it is the wish of many that I should preach them all, which I have concluded to do.
Yesterday was a good day, though full of care and labor. Three baptisms in the morning, and the admission to the Church of five members from the world. In the afternoon the ordination of deacons before the congregation, and subsequently the adminstration of the sacrament. There were, besides our own, nearly a hundred communicants upon the invitation, and not many of them from the three orthodox churches; persons probably who have formed as yet no connection with any church, though some of them were known to belong to Unitarian churches. But if they will commune with us, under such instruction as I gave in the sermon, it will be an omen for good.
But, after all, the kingdom of God cometh not with observation; and I rely more on my vestry meetings on Sabbath and Tuesday eve, and on my chapel meetings on Friday eve at the North, and on my visits and labors among the middle class and the poor, than upon all the eclat of reputed talents and eloquence, and all the running to hear, and all the movements and talk from that source among the mighty and noble.

NARRATOR : Mrs. Beecher rather liked the metropolis, seeing how well her husband appeared to be prospering in his career.

HARRIET PORTER : I am happy to say we are beginning to be really comfortable. I know not how a minister can desire anything better than to preach the Gospel in Boston.
The four youngest children are with us. The girls are at Hartford, established as a family, with Aunt Esther at their head. Edward and George are New Haven, William at Andover. My husband’s health is pretty good. He preaches a good deal, and with much encouragement.
There is a secret history of Boston which is very interesting—the history of minds and moral influence. We are at the North End, to which at first I felt reluctant. Mr. Beecher is enthusiastic in regard to this situation. This soil was pressed by the feet of the Pilgrims, and watered by their tears, and consecrated by their prayers. Here are their tombs, and here are their children who are to be brought back to the fold of Christ.

NARRATOR : Not every Beecher child showed early promise. Henry had grown up with an enlarged palate, which made him very shy, and he was thought a dullard. William Beecher, the eldest son, had always been overshadowed by his brilliant brother Edward. He suffered from poor digestion, as his father did, and he felt himself to be the black sheep of the family.

WILLIAM : I did not know how to study and none showed me. Edward, on the contrary, learned easily. I could not learn—the fact was I had trouble in my head—a gathering and discharge from my left ear while at East Hampton—the whole outer ear was poisoned by the discharge. As I had much tooth and ear ache and my left breast bone being much smaller than the other they feared rickets. They longed to have their firstborn son a scholar and minister, and I fear they were sorrowfully disappointed. How long I stopped at home, I can’t say, but the great question was, ‘‘What shall we do with William?’’

NARRATOR : William tried work as a cabinet-maker’s apprentice, and more than once as a store clerk. At a hardware store, William resolved to enter Andover Seminary and study theology. Lyman was happy about William’s conversion, but even though he had wanted all his sons to enter the ministry—even though Roxana Beecher on her deathbed had made him promise to do so—he tried to dissuade William.
William went ahead, despite father and dyspepsia. After some time at Andover, he had to give up formal courses, and he studied with Lyman at home.
Noting Henry’s lack of progress at school, Lyman Beecher had earlier sent him to his sister Catharine’s Female Seminary in Hartford—and the next year sent him to a fellow clergyman in a town close to Litchfield. But when the Beechers moved to Boston in 1826, Henry was entered into the Boston Latin School.
Henry no longer had his fields and woods to roam in, and he found himself down at the Boston Harbor, watching the ships come in from all over the world. Finally, he decided that school was intolerable—he would go to sea! Yes, that would be the life for a misfit like himself.
Emboldened by his new plan, Henry wrote a note to one of his brothers, but then was careful to drop it where his father would be sure to find it. It was Henry’s way—boldness, but cautiously.
Harriet reports the following dialogue, after Dr. Beecher called Henry to come and saw wood with him:

HARRIET : Now the wood pile was the principal debating ground and Henry felt complimented by the invitation, as implying manly companionship.

LYMAN : Let us see, Henry, how old are you?

HENRY : Almost 14.

LYMAN : Bless me how boys do grow! Why, it’s almost time to be thinking what you are going to do. Have you ever thought?

HENRY : Yes—I want to go to sea.

LYMAN : 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?

HENRY : Yes, sir, that’s what I want.

LYMAN : But not merely as a common sailor, I suppose?

HENRY : No, sir, I want to be a midshipman and after that a commodore.

LYMAN : I see. Well, Henry, in order for that, you know, you must begin a course of mathematics and study navigation and all that.

HENRY : Yes sir, I am ready.

LYMAN : Well, then, I’ll send you up to Amherst next week to Mt. 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.

HARRIET : And when he went up to Mt. Pleasant Collegiate Institute, his father remarked‘‘I shall have that boy in the ministry yet.’’ At Amherst, he did improve in mathematics; he also studied with the remarkable John E. Lovell, an elocution teacher.
Father had not been in Boston many weeks before every leisure hour was beset by people who came to him. There seemed to be an incessant ringing of the doorbell from morning till night.
The effect of all this on my father’s mind was to keep him at a white heat of enthusiasm. Within a stone’s throw of our door was the old Copp’s Hill burying-ground, where rested the bones of the Puritan founders; and, though not a man ordinarily given to sentiment or to visiting of graves, we were never left to forget in any prayer of his that the bones of our fathers were before our door.
His family prayers at his period, departing from the customary forms of unexcited hours, became often upheavings of passionate emotion such as I shall never forget. In hours of earnest excitement his petitions to the different persons of the Trinity would remind one of those antique, fervid invocations of the earlier Church.

LYMAN : Come, Lord Jesus, 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 countain—‘‘These sheep, what have they done?’’ Gather them, gather them, O good Shepherd, for their feet stumble upon the dark mountains.