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.
During the time that the Beechers lived in Boston, Lyman Beecher became a rallying point for Calvinists opposed to the modern liberalism of Unitarianism. Edward and George begin their ministerial careers. William is ordained but is without church, and so stays at home. Young Henry, finally convinced of the need for education, goes to Amherst. Catharine brings Mary and Harriet down to Hartford to work at Catharine’s Female Seminary. Charles, Belle—or Isabella—and Tom greet a new baby brother—James C. Beecher. He is the last of the tribe.

NARRATOR : It didn’t take Dr. Beecher very long after they had moved to Boston before he decided to do what he did best—begin a revival.

LYMAN : I began to say to the Church: ‘‘I think there is a work begun. Fire in the leaves—not only among us, but in the community.’’ I made no attack on Unitarians. I carried the state of warm revival feelings I had had in Litchfield for years. They came to hear; there was a great deal of talk about me—great curiosity.
Finally, my soul rose to it, and I preached to the Church one afternoon, explained to them the state of interest and opposition, and what an inquiry meeting was, and that they must be ready, and gave out an invitation to a long list of persons, whom I described. There were fifteen the first week, twenty the second, thirty-five the third, and the fourth time 300. The vestry was filled. Lambert met me at the door, when I came to meeting, with his eyes staring.
‘‘It’s a mistake; they’ve misunderstood, and think it’s a lecture. You must explain.’’
‘‘No,’’ said I, ‘‘it’s not a mistake; it’s the finger of God!’’
But I made an explanation, and only one person left.
The Baptists came in to see what was going on, and pretty soon they began to revive. When I first set up evening meetings not a bell tingled; but, after a few weeks, not a bell that didn’t tingle. The Unitarians at first scouted evening meetings; but Ware found his people going, and set up a meeting. I used to laugh to hear the bells going all round.
In this thing of revivals, you would find all these things came by showers. Each shower would increase, increase, increase; and when I saw it was about used up by conversion, I would preach so as to make a new attack on mind and conscience, varying with circumstances, and calculated to strike home with reference to other classes, and bring a new shower. The work never stopped for five years. In the revival the numbers increased so fast it was overwhelming, so I kept a record.

NARRATOR : Harriet describes the good doctor from the family’s perspective.

HARRIET : The time that he spent in actual preparation for a public effort was generally not long. If he was to preach in the evening he was to be seen all day talking with whomever would talk, accessible to all, full of everybody’s affairs, business, and burdens, till an hour or two before the time, when he would rush up into his study, which he always preferred should be the topmost room of the house, and, throwing off his coat, after a swing or two with the dumbbells to settle the balance of his muscles, he would sit down and dash ahead, making quantities of hieroglyphic notes on small, stubbed bits of paper, about as big as the palm of his hand.
The bells would begin to ring, and still he would write. They would toll loud and long, and his wife would say ‘‘He will certainly be late,’’ and then would be running up and down stairs of messengers to see that he was finished, till, just as the last stroke of the bell was dying away, he would emerge from the study with his coat very much awry, come down the stairs like a hurricane, stand impatiently protesting while female hands that ever lay in wait adjusted his cravat and settled his coat collar, calling loudly the while for a pin to fasten together the stubbed little bits of paper aforesaid, which being duly dropped into the crown of his hat, and hooking wife or daughter like a satchel on his arm, away he would start on such a race through the streets as left neither brain nor breath till the church was gained.
Then came the process of getting in through the crowded aisles, wedged up with heads, the bustle, and stir, and hush to look at him, as, with a matter-of-fact, businesslike push, he elbowed his way through them and up the pulpit stairs. LYMAN : When the time came for admission of converts to the communion, some 70 at once, it produced no small excitement. Till then all had been the butt of ridicule. The enemy had kept whist, except a few outlaws, at first, although the higher classes—the Cambridge College folks—had their spies abroad to see what was going on.
But, as the work deepened, I told my Church one of two things would come: either the revival would burst out through all these churches, or else there would be an outbreak of assault upon us such as could not be conceived. It was the latter. In one day after the seventy joined, the press belched and bellowed, and all the mud in the streets was flying at us. The upper class put mouth to ear, and hand to pocket, and said ‘‘shame on you’’ There was an intense, malignant enragement for a time. Showers of lies were rained about us every day. The Unitarians, with all their principles of toleration, were as really a persecuting power while they had the ascendancy as ever as ever existed. Wives and daughters were forbidden to attend our meetings; and the whole weight of political, literary, and social influence was turned against us, and the lash of ridicule laid on without stint.
As for me, I cared for it all no more than for the wind. I knew where I was, and what I was doing, and knew that I was right. All sorts of vile letters were written to me, but all this malignity did us no harm. They only rung the bell for me. It was two years before the leaders of the Unitarians began to change their tacitcs and treat me gentlemanly.
When I revised and preached my six sermons on Intemperance, they took strong hold, and made my audience even fuller. My young men were for having them printed. Marvin did it well, and a number of editions were sold. Then the Tract Society bought the copyright. They offered $50; but I said they ought to give a hundred, and they did. These sermons made a racket all around, more than I had any idea they would.

HARRIET : As to his preaching, it consisted invariably of two parts: first, careful statement and argument addressed purely to the understanding, and second, a passionate and direct appeal, designed to urge his audience to some immediate practical result. The first part was often as dry, condensed, and clear as a series of mathematical axioms.
After this followed the scriptural argument, on which he always and unhesitatingly relied, without the shadow of a doubt that we do have, in our English translation, the authoritative, inspired declarations of God. Then came the answering of objections. Here he was conversational, sprightly, acute, and often drew a laugh.. They were stirred up and enlivened, and, as a plain countryman once said, ‘‘He says it so that you feel you could have said it all yourself.’’
Last of all came what he considered the heart of his discourse—the application. A sermon that did not induce anybody to do anything he considered a sermon thrown away. These closing portions of his sermons were the peculiarity of his preaching. He warned, he entreated, he pleaded, urging now this motive and now that, talking as if his audience were one individual, whom he must, before he left the pulpit, persuade to take a certain step.

NARRATOR : In 1826, while Lyman Beecher was launching his Boston career, Catharine Beecher initiated her own revival at her school in Hartford, even though she herself had not experienced conversion. But once her revival spread beyond her circle of students, Catharine sought outside help from Joel Hawes, minister of the most prestigious church in Hartford. He did not encourage her activities, since she was not a minister nor formally trained in religion. So she wrote to brother Edward and to Lyman Beecher to come and help her. Lyman was cautious in his reply.

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. In my early efforts I gave myself up to strong feeling, which I have since learned to economize, or I should long since have been in my grave, or been useless.
You must, therefore, all of you, instantly put yourselves upon a different system, which I will describe and hasten to send you, or you will all be prostrate, I have no doubt.
The state of feeling to be cultivated in those who superintend a revival is a mind, but constant and intense desire of heart for the awakening and conversion of sinners.
When I say intense, I do not mean agitating, but strong and steady. It is a genial warmth of heart, of steady benevolent temperature, compared with the more intense heat and flashings of holy and animal affections and passions, all boiling at once in the heart.
This is the state of heart which has carried me through all the revivals I have been in but the first, and that broke me down, and induced nervous habits which I shall never wholly retrieve.
Another thing, also, is to be carefully shut out of your soul—I mean an overpowering weight of responsibility and care. We can neither carry the world on our shoulders nor govern it, nor even govern the wants of a very small part of it, which are most immediately under our eye. Settle it in your heart, therefore, that you are to exercise your best judgment, and perform in the best manner you can your duty, and leave the whole in the hands of God. You can not be accountable for consequences.

HARRIET : After his evening services it was his custom to come directly home and spend an hour or two with his children, as he phrased it, letting himself ‘‘run down.’’ This was our best season for being with him. He was lively, sparkling, jocose, full of anecdote and indicent, and loved to have us all about him, and to indulge in a good laugh.
Often his old faithful friend the violin was called in requisition, and he would play a few antiquated contra dances and Scotch airs—‘‘Auld Lang Syne,’’ ‘‘Bonnie Doon,’’ and ‘‘Mary’s Dream’’ were among the inevitables. He aspired with ardent longings to ‘‘Money Musk,’’ ‘‘College Hornpipe,’’ and sundry other tunes arranged in unfavorable keys, although he invariably broke down, and ended the performance with a pshaw.
These innocent evening gala hours, like everything else, were a part of his system of regimen.

LYMAN : If I were to go to bed at the key at which I leave off preaching, I should toss and tumble all night. I must let off steam gradually, and then I can sleep like a child.

HARRIET : In fact, he was an excellent sleeper, and usually knew of but one nap, which lasted from the time his head touched the pillow till the youngest child was sent to wake him up in the morning. Great would be the pride of the little monitor, who led him at last gravely into the breakfast room, and related in baby phrase the labors of getting him up.

NARRATOR : Now that he had established a base in Boston, Lyman encouraged another Boston church to call his second son, Edward, the intellectual of the family. People in Boston were eager to see another Beecher at work.

LYMAN : Edward, I have kept up the same strain of revival preaching, with the same results, as when you were here. Fifty or sixty attend the inquiry meeting, and from two to five new cases and new hopes each week. There are probably between thirty and forty who have hope. The congregation is full and solemn, and seems to be amalgamated into a homogeneous mass of belief and solemnity by the power of truth.
Edward, just as I was about to send a letter last evening, Mr. Evarts called on me to say that the deacons of Park Street, by agreement of the committee, have written to request you to supply four Sabbaths, with a prospect, as he thinks, of their being united to give you a call.
As to the importance of the stand in Boston, as the center of extended and powerful action, I have never stood in such a place before, and do not believe that there is such another on earth. It is here 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 evangelical tone.
All this, under God, is to be accomplished here by intellectual power upon an intellectual people, who are captivated with vigorous intellect and powerful argument, and will come to hear it, and will be influenced by it.
You were pleased to say once that nothing brought out your mental vigor and energized your soul like my society. The effect of your society, for obvious reasons, is the same on my mind; and if it please God to place us where the action and reaction of intellectual power may be habitually experienced by us both, the public results may be great and good.
It is my hope that you will not fail to take hold of the end of the rope that is put into your hand, and pull it, till we see what is on the other end.

NARRATOR : Now that the family was widespread, letters became a means of continuing long-distance conversations.

LYMAN : Catharine, your letter of the 6th came duly, and awakened many recollections. I was not, however, sick when you was laid in my arms, but young, and fresh, and well. It was a year from that that I ws invaded by sickness. Since then, with a constitution part of iron and part of miry clay, I have been permitted, for the most part, to preach and labor in my vocation, and to see a family of beloved and affectionate children rise up around me, some of whom, with my most beloved Roxana, are not, while most of them remain to be my crown and my comfort to this day. I am a man of many obligations daily multiplying.
I can neither speak or them nor feel them to their extent. In your life and prosperity I rejoice, being, after Aunt Esther, my nearest contemporary among the ancients of the early days. William, Edward, Mary, George, and Harriet, all in their time and place, have come to be my most affectionate companions and fellow-helpers.

NARRATOR : Lyman also continued to exert his influence to get Edward situated in Boston.

LYMAN : Edward, there is, I find, an earnest desire at Park Street Church to have you supply them. As things now stand there is no impediment, but a manifest providential indication that you should come. And my advice and my request now is that you will do it without fail. As we are not to push open doors before providence opens them, so neither are we to refuse to enter when they are opened.
Another reason is that there are the little clouds of a revival in every orthodox Church, which four weeks of exertion such as you, with myself and others, may make, might produce an overpowering shower. And the public feeling here now is such that another revival would tell wonderfully.

NARRATOR : In 1829, Cathatrine Beecher anonymously published an appeal to the ‘‘Benevolent Women of the United States,’’ on behalf of the Cherokee Indians. The Cherokees, perhaps the most advanced tribe on the continent, who had learned farming, had schools, could read and write, were being forced by President Jackson into exile across the Mississippi, along with all other Indian tribes. The caravan followed a route called the Trail of Tears to dusty Oklahoma. This publication was only the beginning of Catharine’s long career of public service.
It marked a difference of another kind, too—a difference in generations. Lyman Beecher spoke and wrote against dueling, as a matter of individual conscience, for his concern was with the soul. But he never saw matters as social problems, in which the ills to be overcome were a matter of public concern. Catharine’s appeal, and many to follow from her and from her sisters and brothers, were cries for social reform, social responsibility, and even social engineering. As the crisis over slavery came closer, this difference took on more and more importance in the Beecher family.
Meanwhile, Lyman Beecher was consolidating his position as a leader in Boston’s religious community. He attracted fine talents to work with him, such as Lowell Mason, the musician.

LYMAN : Lowell Mason was not with me at first, but came early, and stayed while I was in Boston. he came to us from Savannah. He did good. He took young converts and trained them to sing. They drew in the unconverted, and were instrumental in their conversion. His influence was not secular, but as efficacious as preaching. Almost all who went to his classes, instead of being decoyed by it and made frivolous, were converted.

LOWELL MASON : I was accustomed to go to Dr. Beecher before the time for the commencement of the public worship on Sunday morning. He would be always short and to the point with me, but I do not remember that he ever met me with an impatient or discourteous manner. One day, it was very near the time. He looked up, and, with a smile, said:

LYMAN : I can’t give you the hymns now; I don’t know what I shall preach about yet, so I wish you to select any you think proper.

MASON : I went to select hymna of a general character, which answered the purpose well, as such hymns always will. After this, he would request me always to make the selection, and to send the numbers to him. The following seemed to be the result: It is better that the first and second humns be those of direct worship, but that the last hymn sung after the sermon shall always be closely connected with the sermon, following exactly in its wake—following out and deepening, if possible, the state of mind or emotions awakened by the preacher.

LYMAN : You seem to take up the subject where I left it, and to carry it on beyond where I had the power to do.

MASON : Yes, blessed old man, but this cannot be done unless the preacher has done his work somewhat as you used to do it. I used to tell the doctor, ‘‘Sir, you laid the train, and there was nothing left for me to do but to apply the fuse.’’

NARRATOR : An ambitious young man in Lyman Beecher’s congregation thought he had discovered in the reverend doctor a leader to be emulated. But William Lloyd Garrison, then in his early 20s, and at the time an advocate of gradual emancipation and of colonization, could not persuade Lyman Beecher that slavery was a national sin of overriding importance.
Then, events moved swiftly, and so did Garrison. he renounced his former position, which he had recently given in a speech at Edward’s Park Street Church. In 1831, Nat Turner’s slave revolt resulted in 61 whites being killed, and William Lloyd Garrison published the first issue of The Liberator, an abolitionish paper that would eventually reach an enormous circulation. Lyman Beecher’s personal solutions were not enough for the headstrong Garrison, who had now become unshakable on the question of slavery.

GARRISON : I am in earnest—and I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—and I will be heard.

NARRATOR : While in Boston, Beecher took the initiative in organizing groups and civic committees to combat the growing and pervasive power of the Unitarians. These groups then succeeded in prohibiting lotteries, and collectively, they gave a good start to the idea of popular lecture series and lyceums for both sexes. As these caught on in the rest of the country, the lyceums provided the platforms that launched the careers of more than one Beecher. Amasa Walker remarks on lyceums in Boston.

AMASA WALKER : It is quite difficult now to realize the great imporetance of this lyceum effort in changing the public taste, and in giving a higher and better tone to the public mind. The first Boston lyceum was the practical introduction of the important idea of combining popular improvement and amusement for both sexes—of furnishing someplace of rational resort which the people might visit more beneficially than the theater.
Ideas become impressed upon society never to be obliterated. Lyceums, however transient as organizations, have produced a social revolution in a most essential particular, and the several lecturers who now traverse the broad territory of the United States, entertaining thousands with their eloquence, have been created by the new tastes generated by the lyceum movement.
I feel that the vast influence which Dr. Beecher exerted while in Boston, through the various agencies he set in motion, is but little appreciated by the present generation. I speak not now of his denominational services, but of that great social influence which he exerted.
The results of all these great efforts to improve the moral and intellectual condition of the city, and furnish the people with rational and elevating entertainments were that in a few years the theater was in a great degree superseded. So many courses of lectures, so many interesting discussions were furnished by these various associations, that there was neither time nor taste for the entertainment of the drama, so that for some few years it nearly ceased to exist.

NARRATOR : In 1830, the Hanover Street Church burned. Dr. Beecher agreed to stay until the church was rebuilt, but he already had begun to map out his future in a new direction—the West.
After six years in Boston, Lyman Beecher felt that he had done what he could. He had failed to turn the tide of Unitarianism, though his Boston pulpit had given him national eminence in his field. An invitation to be president of the newly formed Lane Seminary in Cincinnati proved a catalyst for his ambitions. The West was a vast new field to conquer, the next steppingstone of his career, to train the next generation of preachers, to win the West. Yes, it would be a fitting solution. He confides his thoughts first to his first-born. Perhaps she, too, can be persuaded of the urgency of the need.

LYMAN : Catharine, I now believe the moral destiny of our nation and all our institutions and hopes and the world’s hopes turns on the character of the West, and the competition now is for that of preoccupancy in the education of the rising generation in which Catholics and infidels have got the start of us. I have thought seriously of going over to Cincinnati, the London of the West, to spend the remnant of my days in that conflict, and of consecrating to God all my children who are willing to go. If we gain the West, all is safe; if we lose it, all is lost.

NARRATOR : Catharine Beecher independently made the same decision—America was moving into the Ohio Valley, and it seemed an open promise to thousands. She arranged for her Hartford school to carry on without her, and set out for Cincinnati about the same time, with the intention of setting up another school. For her, too, it will be an important steppingstone.
Meanwhile, Charles Beecher was proving to be quite a scholar and athlete at school, like his brother Edward. He attended Boston Latin School, then Lawrence Academy, where his brother George had just been appointed principal. Just before the Beechers left Boston, Charles would depart for Bowdoin. He was 16 years old.
William Beecher, the eldest son, finally secured a parish in Newport, Rhode Island, through one of Lyman Beecher’s connections. He married Katharine Edes soon after. William was built strong, like his grandfather, and when he learned that his new church, a pre-Revolutionary building, had an unsafe steeple, he pulled it down himself. But he failed at fund-raising for a new church building, and so, when he received an invitation from a Middletown, Connecticut church, he took it. Unfortunately, not long afterward, his predecessor decided to return, and William was forced to resign. So it was that William, too, traveled west with the younger Beechers, to Cincinnati, the London of the West.