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.
In 1832, most of the Beecher family moved to Cincinnati, a boom town on the Ohio River, right on the border between slavery and free soil. Dr. Beecher had decided, in his last year in Boston, that the West was the future.

LYMAN : The West is destined to be the great central power of the nation. The West is a young empire of mind, and power, and wealth, and free institutions, rushing up to a giant manhood, with a rapidity and a power never before witnessed below the sun.

NARRATOR : Even before Lyman took his family west, Edward Beecher had planted himself in Illinois. Catharine Beecher went with the family, and William and his wife Katherine Edes and child joined the caravan. Harriet and Aunt Esther managed the children—Belle, Tom, and James. Henry and Charles were off at college, and George was still principal at Lawrence Academy in Boston. Mary was well settled in Hartford with Thomas Perkins, a lawyer.
At first, the group stayed with Uncle Samuel Foote, the former sea captain, at his mansion, which was one of the social centers of the city. Catharine’s prospects for founding a new school for women was good, at the outset. But Cincinnati was not homogeneous, as Hartford had been. Southerners, Yankees, and border state folk mingled easily by the expedient of not bringing up division subjects, such as slavery or abolitionism. A hard lesson for someone as outspoken as Catharine.
By the time the Beechers moved to Cincinnati in 1832, it held 30,000 people, had 60 foundries, slaughtered 120,000 hogs a year—and its factories and mills supplied much of the settled territory of the Midwest.
Frances Wright passed through Cincinnati after failing at a utopian experiment of freeing and educating slaves in backwoods Tennessee. She also spoke out for women’s rights.
And Robert Dale Owen, the socialist, entered into a marathon debate about Christianity with Rev. Alexander Campbell, the man who later founded the Disciples of Christ.
After six months in a rented house, the Beechers finally moved into Walnut Hills, their permanent residence near Lane Seminary. Charles describes life there:

CHARLES : The household was replete with moral osygen—full charged with intellectual electricity. A Kind of moral heaven, the purity, vivacity, inspiration and enthusiasm of which those only can appreciate who have lost it.

NARRATOR : A visiting member of the Foote family saw it this way:

FOOTE : Catharine has had a bilious fever. George has the dyspepsia all the time dreadfully. Mrs. Beecher is always sick and Aunt Esther is suffering from a sore mouth. And they all have nerves.

NARR : Dr. Beecher suffered an unexpected reversal when the Old School man who had invited him to Lane Seminary changed his mind, and repudiated him. But Beecher was an old pro at church politics.

LYMAN : Before I left Boston, Dr. Joshua Wilson had veered about. There had been some talk in the General Assembly some years before about a theological seminary at Cincinnati rather than near Pittsburgh when they got ready; but now, when they found it was going to be a New School affair, they vowed it should never be. All their plans would be blown up, and a mighty power exerted against them. I heard what they said.
So they wrote to Wilson a flattering letter, explaing the whole campaign, and attacking us as New England men. I had it from Wilson’s own mouth that he had been accustomed to consult his particular friends at Princeton and in the Pittsburgh Synod, and as it was their wish he should take back his invitation to me, he did so.
Besides that, Wilson fired off a 44-pounder in the New York papers, warning brethren to take heed, had it read on trail. I replied by publishing parts of his own letters to me. Wilson objected to my reception, and said he had no confidence in my doctrines. I rose and said that I was sure Dr. Wilson did not understand, and was laboring under a mistake; that I had not altered my views since he saw me years ago; and that if Presbytery would take recess and have free conversation in the vestry, I could explain.
We all went into the vestry, and I began to speak kindly (I felt kindly) and solemnly. I saw Wilson felt. Something was said about prayer, when he said, with a gentle face, waving his hand to me, ‘‘You pray’’; and I did so, and we had a good season. Just then the devil in a good man jumped up and said that there had never been a man of sufficient calibre to excite Dr. Wilson’s jealousy but that he opposed and drove him away. Then the fat was in the fire. I was sure I should win him. I never was more chagrined. We went up, and it was pitched battle after that.
I was able to keep down all improper feeling; treated him politely and kindly; gave him credit for honesty; but every concession contrasted with his treatment of me burnt like coals of juniper. In closing I expostulated with Dr. Wilson affectionately; stated the rising prospects of a revival in the churches, and conjured him to desist till I had furnished some better evidence of heresy than rumor, or afforded him conclusive evidence of my orthodoxy, which I had not a single doubt I should ere long be able to do.
I spoke an hour about as well as I could desire, and the verdict of public sentiment is as adverse to him, and favorable to me as I could wish. He has appealed to Synod, including items, thus giving me a more extended opportunity to defend myself and put down rumor and slang.
As it happened, Synod met at Cincinnati the very day my society had appointed to visit me in expression of welcome. I, of course, was occupied, and did not think of Synod, till suddenly I was sent for by messenger. I had no time to prepare. Wilson was speaking when I got there, and I heard the main part of his argument. I rose and made an offhand reply, as keen as ever I did, as good as I wanted. Synod decided in my favor by a large majority.
From Synod Wilson appealed to General Assembly; but they sent him back with a flea in his ear; told him if he had any case to take it up himself. He had tried to make Presbytery take it up first on common fame, and next to appoint a committee to examine my printed sermons and report. He wanted them to prosecute. He did not want to assume the responsibility of tabling charges himself. But that Assembly happened to be very strong New School, and they would have nothing to do with him.

NARRATOR : Dr. Wilson, however, was not finished with Lyman Beecher. The test would come three years later.
Catharine and Harriet joined the Semi-Colon Club, a literary club that included Calvin Stowe and his lovely wife Eliza, Judge James Hall, editor of the Western Monthly, Mrs. Peters, who later founded the Philadelphia School of Design, and Salmon P. Chase, later Lincoln’s Treasury Secretary and then Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Harriet won a $50 prize for a short story in Hall’s Western Monthly, and from that time on decided to devote herself to writing.

HARRIET : Edward, you speak of your predilections for literature having been a snare to you. I have found it so myself. I can scarcely think, without tears and indignation, that all that is beautiful and lovely and poetical has been laid on other altars. I do not mean to live in vain. He has given me talents, and I will lay them at His feet, well satisfied if He will accept them.

NARRATOR : Catharine also participated in literary evenings at Daniel Drake’s, and hobnobbed with editors and judges and their wives. Judge James Hall agreed to be one of Catharine’s trustees for her new school.
A new group, the Western Literary Institute and College of Professional Teachers, allowed Catharine to participate as an observer. Lyman Beecher became a member also.
Three months after her arrival, Catharine advertised the Western Female Institute, and with Harriet, two teachers from her Hartford schook, and $500, the school opened in 1833.
One of the teachers, Mary Dutton, and Harriet decided to visit Kentucky, and to meet some plantation owners. Mary remembers Harriet as a dreamy, abstrated visitor, oblivious to what was going on around her, even though these scenes would emerge later in the biggest novel of the century.
Charles Beecher for a time held a job working for a cotton factory, and in the course of his duties traveled down the Ohio and Mississippi as far as New Orleans, the great slave-market for the Deep South. There he met a man he couldn’t forget; he describes him to Harriet. Later, she would give him the name of Simon Legree.

CHARLES : He wasn’t a big man, but he’d say, ‘‘Waal, I tell ye this yer fist has got hard as iron knocking down niggers. I never see the nigger yet I couldn’t bring down with one crack. You see, I just put ’em straight through sick or well. When one nigger’s dead, I buy another; and I find it comes cheaper and easier, every way.’’

NARRATOR : Harriet’s portrait of Topsy is based on a little girl brought up from Louisiana with a number of slaves by a wealthy and cultivated family that settled near Cincinnati.

HARRIET : ‘‘Have you ever heard anything about God, Topsy?’’
The child looked bewildered but grinned as usual.
‘‘Do you know who made you?’’
The idea appeared to amuse her considerably for her eyes twinkled and she added:
‘‘I ’spect I grow’d, nobody never made me.’’

NARRATOR : Dr. Beecher did not see slavery as a central issue. In any case, he felt that it would disappear gradually with or without his help.

LYMAN : I am not apprised of the ground of controversy between the Colonizationists and the Abolitionists. I am myself both without perceiving in myself any inconsistency. Were it in my power to put an end to slavery immediately I would do it, but it is not. I can only pursue the measures best calculated, in my judgment, to get the slaves out of bondage in the shortest time, and best manner; and this, as I view the subject, is to make emancipation easy instead of attempting to row up-stream against them.

NARRATOR : In Dr. Beecher’s first year at Cincinnati, a cholera epidemic took the lives of several Lane students.
More damaging, perhaps, to the fate of the school was the abolitionist controversy. The graduating class, under the leadership of Theodore Weld, organized an anti-slavery society while Dr. Beecher was back East fund-raising. In his absence, the trustees decided to abolish the abolitionists, and as a consequence, the entire class withdrew. They were welcomed at Oberlin, not far away.
The stink of the affair made Lane a symbole for unwanted controversy in Cincinnati. It affected Lyman Beecher’s career; it also doomed Catharine Beecher’s fund-raising efforts for her school.

LYMAN : Weld was a genius. First-rate natural capacity, but uneducated. Would have made a first-rate man in the Church of God if his education had been thorough. In the estimation of the class, he was president. He took the lead of the whole institution. The young men had, many of them, been under his care, and they thought he was a god.

Catharine's reputation as an educator opened some doors. William McGuffey, the textbook writer, invited Catharine to teach moral philosophy at a girls’ school in Oxford, Ohio, about 20 miles away.
Catharine’s book, Geography for Children, actually was suggested by her and written by Harriet, who was 22 at the time. Geography treated as a readable narrative was a novelty in itself. Catharine and Harriet collaborated on several other projects.
But the abolitionist controversy at Lane Seminary had turned Cincinnati against Lyman Beecher—and Lyman, in Boston, had made some uncomplimentary remarks about the backwardness of Westerners. When Lyman’s A Plea for the West came out, the editor James Hall noted the discrepancy between published text and reported speeches—the offensive passages had been deleted. Hall cried foul. Daniel Drake sided with Hall.
Catharine defended her father—but then went further. She campaigned to get Hall and Drake excluded from social circles; such an action would have divided easterners from westerners. Even with her persistence, Catharine failed. Cincinnati society ran on different rules than Hartford. Edward King, an old Federalist aristocrat, and a relation, instructed his wife not to allow Catharine Beecher to run their social life; a guest in their house—and a relative at that—must act as a guest, not as a director.
For all her socializing, Catharine’s ideas were not readily received either in the Western Monthly Magazine or by the Western Literary Institute. Her next blast at traditional methods was made at the American Lyceum in New York, a speech called An Essay on the Education of Female Teachers. Catharine called for the creation of an enormous corps of women teachers.

CATHARINE : The education of the lower classes is deteriorating, as it respects moral and religious restraints, and at the same time thousands and thousands of degraded foreigners, and their ignorant families, are pouring into this nation at every avenue.
In one of the best educated Western states, one third of the children are without schools. 90,000 teachers are needed, but it is chimerical to hope that enough men will become teachers when there are multitudes of other employments that will lead to wealth.
It is woman who is fitted by disposition and habits and circumstances, for such duties, who to a very wide extent must aid in educating the childhood and youth of this nation. Moral and religious education must be the foundation of national instruction.

HARRIET : Harriet went all the way to Amherst to attend Henry’s graduation, and the two of them returned to Cincinnati together. Henry enrolled in Lane Seminary. He practiced his oratory in the woods, and taught Sunday school.
For a time, Henry served as temporary editor of the Cincinati Journal and Western Luminary. On his return to Lane, he roomed with Calvin Stowe. Stowe’s Bible course was the only one that interested Henry.

HENRY : He led me to an examination of the Bible and to an analysis of its several portions, not as parts of a machine, formal and dead, but as a body of truth instinct with God, warm with divine and human sympathies, clothed in language adapted to their fit expressions and to be understood as similar language used for similar ends in everyday life.

NARR : By 1835, Catharine’s vision was unraveling. A select committee to raise $15,000 did not act. Her association with Lyman Beecher, and her own outspokenness and the campaign of ostracism that backfired, had thwarted her.
About this time, Charles returned from Bowdoin to continue his studies at Lane Seminary. He despaired of ever believing Jonathan Edwards on the will, and he feared that he must give up the idea of entering the ministry. But he was enthusiastic about music, and at Lane he began a study of church music instead. He had studied under Lowell Mason, perhaps the leading church musician of the time, at Lyman Beecher’s Hanover Church. And Charles had begun teaching music. Lyman Beecher was disgusted by Charle’s choice.

LYMAN : Charles has founded his determination on feeling, his plans on hopes, and his arguments on obstinacy.

NARRATOR : William secured a post at Putnam, Ohio, and he began working there, building a church and a school. He lasted at this job just a few years, resigning over a matter of principle, but a small one—a salary dispute. The pattern of William’s life, paradoxically, was as principled and upright as those of his more famous brothers, yet all the Beecher qualities doomed him to failure. ‘‘What are we going to do with William?’’ was still asked in the Beecher house.
For two years, Henry, like Charles, remained a skeptic—but in his last year at Lane, Henry had a conversion experience.

HENRY : It came to me like the bursting forth of spring. It was as if yesterday there was not a bird to be seen or heard, and as if today the woods were full of singing birds. There rose up before me a view of Jesus as the Savior of sinners—not of saints, but of sinners unconverted, before they were any better—because they were so bad and needed so much; and that view has never gone from me. When I found that it was Christ’s nature to lift me out of weakness to strength, out of impurity to goodness, out of everything low and debasing to superiority, I felt that I had found a God. From that hour I felt that God had a father’s heart; that Christ loved me in my sin, and cared for me with unutterable tenderness. When that vision was vouchsafed to me I felt that there was no more for me to do but to love, trust, and adore.
I shall never forget the feelings with which I walked that morning. The golden pavements will never feel to my feet as then the grass felt to them; and the singing of the birds in the woods—for I roamed in the woods.

NARRATOR : And in his last months at Lane, he heard a nine-day debate between Rev. Alexander Campbell, later the founder of Disciples of Christ, and John B. Purcell, Catholic bishop of Cincinnati—and all the charges of papist plots seemed merely bigotry and prejudice. The talks showed him how religiously intolerant Calvinism had become.
In 1835, Harriet Porter Beecher, Lyman’s second wife, and mother of Isabella, Thomas, and James, died.
In 1836, Lyman Beecher married a third time, to Mrs. Lydia Beals Jackson, who brought to the household two children, Joseph and Margaret, about Jame’s age—and also two daughters who had already been married. Mrs. Jackson was a good organizer; her skills and energy proved useful in the busy Beecher household.
Harriet broke off a trip East when she learned that her friend Eliza Stowe died, so that she could comfort Calvin Stowe. Harriet and Calvin married in 1836. Calvin proved to be more manic-depressive than Harriet, but he was learned in Greek, Hebrew, Italian, and Arabic, a stimulating companion, as Harriet describes to Mary Dutton.

HARRIET : We are domestic as any pair of tame fowl you ever saw. And now, my dear, perhaps the wonder to you, as to me, is how this momentous crisis in the life of such a wisp of nerve as myself has been transacted so quietly. My dear, it is a wonder to myself. I am tranquil, quiet, and happy. I look only on the present and leave the future with Him who has hitherto been so kind to me. NARR : In mid-1836, James G. Birney, forced out of New Richmond, brought his anti-slavery weekly, The Philanthropist, to Cincinnati. The businessmen didn’t approve; Southern buyers regularly came up during the summer, and on July 12, Birney’s printer, Achilles Pugh, had his equipment damaged. Henry Ward Beecher was handling the editorship of the Cincinnati Journal at the time, and he printed a letter of Harriet’s, under a pen name, calling for freedom of the press, but not touching on the issue of slavery.
Several prominent Cincinnatians, including Salmon P. Chase, organized a meeting, but anti-abolitionists took it over. On July 31, a mob demolished Pugh’s press and threw it in the river. Mayer Davies at this point tried to disperse them, but they advanced on Franklin House, where Birney was staying. Salmon Chase raced ahead to bar the way—and he hadn’t even met Birney.
Mayor Davies appeared in the doorway and said Birney wasn’t there—and so the mob turned away, finally burning a few shacks in the black slums.
Next morning, when the mob reassembled, the mayor hurriedly swore in a posse authorized to shoot to kill. Henry went out with two pistols to volunteer. Harriet said, at the time:

HARRIET : For a day or two we did not know but there would actually be war to the knife, as was threatened by the mob, and we really saw Henry depart with his pistols with daily alarm, only we were all too full of patriotism not to have sent every brother we had rather than not have had the principles of freedom and order defended.

NARRATOR : Later, James G. Birney helped found the Liberty Party, and was their candidate for President in 1840 and 1844, drawing enough votes to swing at least one election.
In 1836, Catharine went on a speaking tour in the East to promote her call for teachers. She got a hundred names of missionary teachers, with promise of some funding to pay them with. Traveling agreed with her, and this new role linking East and West proved useful—because in the following year, the Cincinnati school failed. Harriet blamed Catharine for her inability to see projects through to their end; Mary Dutton also blamed her. Catharine quarreled with Harriet over small sums of money, and then left in the middle of the sale of the school property.
Catharine Beecher had a national reputation at this point, but she now had no school, and no means of starting one. For three years, she became simply a spinster aunt under the roof of Lyman Beecher. She was unable to act.
She formed a literary partnership with Harriet, and they wrote a book of moral instruction, arithmetic texts, and a book that finally gave her enough income to pursue her goals—the Treatise on Domestic Economy. In it, Catharine defined and elaborated on the home as the foundation of women’s influence, the parlor as a podium for cultural change, the way the Beecher household always had been. Catharine Beecher had founded the new study of Home Economics.