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.
In the late 1830s, the old Beecher home at Walnut Hills near Lane Seminary still sheltered the two youngest boys, Thomas and James. Soon after their mother died, Isabella Beecher had gone to stay with her sister Mary in Hartford. There Isabella learned the decorum and social graces that Catharine’s school had not taught her. Two years later, at 15, she returned to Cincinnati, to Catharine’s other school where Harriet was teaching. And at 16, she went back to Hartford for one more year of study.

ISABELLA : Father managed to send six sons to college, but never a daughter cost him a hundred dollars a year after she was 16. Yet I date my interest in public affairs from those years between 11 and 16 when our family circle was ever in discussion on the vital problems of human existence, where the United States Constitution, fugitive slave laws, Henry Clay and the Missouri Compromise alternated with free will, regeneration, heaven, hell, and ‘‘The Destiny of Man.’’

NARRATOR : Catharine, the oldest Beecher daughter, still lived in the household but she was more like a spinster aunt than a daughter. Rebuffed by Cincinnati society because of her outspokenness, and thwarted in her plans for expanding her school, she withdrew and busied herself with writing.
In 1836, Lyman Beecher married a third time, to Mrs. Lydia Beals Jackson, who brought to the household two children, Joseph and Margaret, about James’s age; she also had two married daughters. Lydia Jackson Beecher was a good organizer; her skills and energy proved useful in the busy Beecher household.
In that same year, Harriet married Calvin Stowe, one of the Lane Seminary professors, an old friend of the family. In their first year of marriage, Calvin journeyed to Europe to study public school systems, while Harriet gave birth to twin daughters. Harriet also helped her brother edit the Cincinnati Inquirer. The next year she had another child. Harriet the writer had to find time when she could. Here is how a volunteer describes Harriet’s new dictation methods, in actual practice.

VOLUNTEER : I am ready to write. The last sentence was: ‘‘What is this life to one who has suffered as I have?’’ What next?

MINA : Ma’am, shall I put in the brown or white bread first?

HARRIET : The brown first.

VOLUNTEER : ‘‘What is this life to one who has suffered as I have,’’ I repeated. Harriet brushed the flour off her apron and sat down for a moment in a muse. Then she dictated as follows:

HARRIET : ‘‘Under the breaking of my heart I have borne up. I have borne up under all that tries a woman—but this thought—oh, Henry’’

MINA : Ma’am, shall I put ginger into this pumpkin?

HARRIET : No, you may let that alone just now. ‘‘I know my duty to my children. I see the hour must come. You must take them, Henry; they are my last earthly comfort.’’

MINA : Ma’am, what shall I do with these egg-shells and all this truck here?

HARRIET : Put them in the pail by you.

VOLUNTEER : ‘‘They are my last earthly comfort.’’ What next?

HARRIET : ‘‘You must take them away. It may be—perhaps it must be—that I shall soon follow, but the breaking heart of a wife still pleads, ‘a little longer, a little longer.’ ’’

MINA : How much longer must the gingerbread stay in?

HARRIET : Five minutes.

VOLUNTEER : ‘‘A little longer, a little longer,’’ I repeated in a dolorous tone and we burst into a laugh. Then we went on, cooking, writing—and laughing till I finally accomplished taking the dictation. The piece was finished, copies and the next day sent to the editor.

NARRATOR : Late in 1834, Lyman, Calvin Stowe, and Harriet visited a Presbyterian synod meeting at Ripley on the Ohio River across from Maysville, Kentucky. They stayed with Rev. John Rankin. They asked him about a lantern he placed in his window—and he revealed the fact that his house was one of the first stations of an Underground Railroad—if a slave could cross the river and reach his light, then they would be on their way to Canada.
Rankin then told them of one escape—a slave woman with a baby had had to flee even without her husband—but when she reached the river, it was still frozen, but the ice was breaking up in the spring thaw. Nevertheless, she started across, and somehow reached the other side, climbed the bluff, and found white folks to give her food and clothing, and then to take her on a little further on the long road to Canada. Her husband did escape also, followed her, and they were finally reunited. Later on, several escaped slaves each claimed that she was the original of the character of Liza that Harriet used in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
The Panic of 1837, as Martin Van Buren was starting his administration, almost finished Lane Seminary, but Lyman Beecher did not lose hope.

LYMAN : When I got back to the seminary, I found Stowe sick abed and all discouraged. Said ’twas all over—of no use—might just as well leave and go back East first as last. ‘‘Stowe,’’ said I, ‘‘I’ve brought you 12 students. You’ve got no faith, and I’ve got nothing but faith. Get up and wash and eat bread and prepare to have a good class.’’

NARRATOR : When Henry Beecher first entered Amherst College, he began practicing public speaking almost incessantly to overcome what he believed to be an overlarge palate—though others thought it enlarged tonsils. John Lovell drilled him in posture, articulation, and gestures. Henry continued the practice at Lane with Charles and other students in the grove between the seminary and Walnut Hills, the Beecher home.

HENRY : We would make the night, and even the day, hideous with our voices, exploding all the vowels, from the bottom to the very top of our voices.

NARRATOR : When he graduated from Lane at last, his speech was clear, and he had begun to show real promise. In his first sermons, he was careful to preserve the Western prejudice for spontaneous speaking, though in fact his sermons were well thought out, sometimes entirely written out.
;Even at the beginning of his career, Henry Ward Beecher was generous with money he didn’t have. Though he earned a little by occasional teaching school, giving lectures, or editing the Cincinnati Journal, he was basically still dependent on his father. At the same time, two uncles—Samuel E. Foote and John P. Foote—were successful businessmen in the community, and the Beechers were welcome in upper class gatherings such as the Semi-Colon Club, and Daniel Drake’s evenings. So it was that he attempted to live beyond his means. In March, Lyman Beecher had had to lecture him about his debts; the third Mrs. Beecher came to the rescue with an unexpected $100.

HENRY : I thank God for it. I am resolved not again to get into debt for anything. I will live within my means by living by my means and not upon credit.

NARRATOR : In the same 1837 Panic, Catharine’s Cincinnati school failed, and suddenly she had no base from which to operate. She decided that fund-raising tours were more to her liking than teaching, in any case. In 1838, she published two books—The Moral Instructor for Schools and Families, and Letters on the Difficulties of Religion.
Just at that time, two abolitionists, Angelina and Sarah Grimke, set out to establish women’s societies for abolitionism. Catharine immediately challenged Angelina Grimke’s leadership, and published an Essay on Slavery and Abolitionsim with Reference to the Duty of American Females. For two years the three of them fought it out in print.
The Grimkes linked women’s rights to the cause of abolitionism; Catharine expanded her vision of a unified American culture centered on the family and the educated political woman. The anti-abolitionist riots at Alton and Cincinnati, she said, showed the bankruptcy of a male-dominated polity. Though the Beechers in general were anti-slavery, they were not abolitionists, and so they were caught in the middle, attacked by both sides. Catharine was seeking to broaden the issue, and to change basic cultural roles through education, not through politics. Angelina Grimke took another view.

GRIMKE : Now I believe it is woman’s right to have a voice in all the laws and regulations by which she is to be governed, whether in Church or State; and that the present arrangements of society, on these points, are a violation of human rights, a rank usurpation of power, a violent seizure and confiscation of what is sacredly and inalienably hers.

NARRATOR : To which Catharine replied:

CATHARINE : Heaven has appointed to one sex the superior, and to the other the subordinate station, but while woman holds a subordinate relation in society to the other sex, it is not because it was designed that her duties or her influence should be any the less important, or all-prevading. The woman’s influence should remain within the domestic and social circle, and win with kindly, generous, peaceful and benevolent principles.
Let every woman become so cultivated and refined in intellect, that her taste and judgment will be respected; so benevolent in feelings and action, that her motives will be reverenced; so unassuming and unambitious, that collision and competition will be banished; so ‘‘gentle and easy to be entreated,’’ that every heart will repose in her presence; then, the fathers, the husbands, and the sons, will find an influence thrown around them, to which they will yield not only willingly but proudly.

NARRATOR : In 1837, Henry graduated from Lane, and accepted his first post—at Lawrenceburgh, Indiana, twenty miles from Cincinnati. Just as soon as he was settled there, he sent a letter back East to Eunice, the girl he had tutored at Amherst, to see whether she would join him in Ohio. And then he almost outpaced the letter himself going to see her.

HENRY : I cannot assent. What then? Preach I will, licensed or not. On that point I am determined. If I can do no better, I will go far out into the West, build a log cabin among the lumbermen and trappers, or whoever may seek employment in the forests, and devote myself to trying to interest them in religious services, far from the busy haunts of men. What will you do if this is the only course left me? Will you go with me into the wilderness?

NARRATOR : They married in the East, and returned to Lawrenceburgh, a little town on a malarial lowland of the Miami River. The other Beechers helped them set up housekeeping, and Mrs. William Henry Harrison gave them the same bureau, brass andirons, shovel and tongs with which she had set up housekeeping 40 years before. Their boxes became bookcases.
;Western life was something of a shock to Eunice, who was not altogether thrilled with the responsibility of her first child. She was also jealous of Henry’s time away from home, relaxing with the men of the town. Henry, on the other hand, had never been happier in his life. When Eunice later published a novel anonymously, she did not hide her bitterness about the hardships of life in the Midwest. Her thinly veiled portrayal of Henry was not flattering, nor was her evaluation of Indiana.
The source for some of Henry’s sermon topics came from books.

HENRY : I was a great reader of the old sermonizers. I read old Robert South through and through. I formed much of my style and my handling of texts on his methods. I obtained a vast amount of instruction and assistance from others of those old sermonizers, who were as familiar to me as my own name. I read Barrow, Howe, Sherlock, Butler, and Edwards particularly. I preached a great many sermons while reading these old men, and upon their discourses I often founded the framework of my own.
Nobody ever tripped me up. I had no Board of Elders ready to bring me back to orthodoxy. It was done without damage to my people, for they knew too little to know whether I was orthodox or not. They don’t believe half that you say. The part that is nutritious they keep, and the rest they let alone.

NARRATOR : Though Henry wrote out his sermons, he was careful to preserve the notion that they were spontaneous. Yet he had a poor memory, even as a boy.

HENRY : The fact is, I was cheated when I was born. Hattie Stowe and George took all the memory and left me without any. I do not dare to lead in the Lord’s Prayer. I couldn’t repeat correctly one commandment from beginning to end. I cannot repeat a verse of any hymn in the English language.
Sometimes in preparing, I would find that after working a subject up all week, something else would take possession of me on Saturday, and I would have to preach that on Sunday to get rid of it. I felt ashamed and mortified, and began to fear I was on the way to superficiality.

NARRATOR : For a long time, Henry was so concerned with the style of delivery, the organization of his sermons that he went to bed on Sunday nights with a headache—and considered quitting the ministry altogether because of it. Sometimes he was so unsure of himself that he asked his wife Eunice not to attend church that Sunday.
Some months later, Henry went up before the Oxford Presbytery, an Old School body controlled by Scotch Presbyterians. The son of the New School leader lately come to Cincinnati was in for a close scrutiny. They voted to accept him, but first required that candidates adhere to the Old School Presbytery Assembly. On returning to his church, Henry explained that their church would be vacant if they continued under the Oxford Presbytery—and on Wednesday they voted to be independent, and to keep their new pastor.
Henry sermons gradually improved, showing some of the fluency, the humor and homely illustrations that would mark his later style. Henry took an active role in community affairs, volunteering his church for meetings. At the time, Henry believed colonization was a way in which slavery might dwindle and disappear. In his sermons, his main topic was temperance.
Henry tried a few fire and brimstone sermons—without much effect. Then he observed Rev. John Newland Maffit, a Methodist evangelist passing through the Ohio Valley—Maffit used appeals to the imagination and passionate, even loving tones.
In another part of the Ohio Valley, another Methodist evangelist, Peter Cartwright, encountered the leader of the Mormons. Here he gives a partisan view of Joseph Smith.

CARTWRIGHT : After the Mormons were driven from Missouri for their infamous and unlawful deeds, they fled to Illinois, Joe Smith and all, and established themselves at Nauvoo, or the foot of the Lower Rapids, on the east side of the Mississippi. Soon afterwards, it fell to my lot to became acquainted with Joe Smith personally. On a certain occasion I fell into a free conversation with Joe Smith on the subject of religion, and Mormonism in particular. I found him to be a very illiterate and impudent desperado in morals, but, at the same time, he had a vast fund of low cunning.
In the first place, he made his onset on me by flattery, and he laid on the soft sodder thick and fast. I gave him rope, as the sailors say, and, indeed, I seemed to lay this flattering unction pleasurably to my soul.

SMITH : Indeed, if the Methodists would only advance a step or two further, they would take the world. We Latter-Day Saints are Methodists, as far as they have gone, only we have advanced further, and if you would come in and go with us, we could sweep not only the Methodist Church, but all others, and you would be looked up to as one of the Lord’s greatest prophets. You would be honored by countless thousands, and have of the good things of this world all that heart could wish.

CARTWRIGHT : I then began to inquire into some of the tenets of the Latter-Day Saints. He explained. I criticized his explanation till, unfortunately, we got into high debate, and he cunningly concluded that his first bait would not take, for he plainly saw I was not to be flattered out of common sense and honesty. The next pass he made at me was to move upon my fears. He said that in all ages of the world the good and right way was evil spoken of, and that it was an awful thing to fight against God.

SMITH : Now, if you will go with me to Nauvoo, I will show you many living witnesses that will testify that they were, by the saints, cured of blindness, lameness, deafness, dumbness, and all the diseases that human flesh is heir to; and I will show you that we have the gift of tongues, and can speak in unknown languages, and that the saints can drink any deadly poison, and it will not hurt them. The idle stories you hear about us are nothing but sheer persecution.

CARTWRIGHT : I then gave him the history of an uncomfortable encounter I had in a camp meeting in Morgan County, some time before, with some of his Mormons. I ended up ejecting them to preserve the good of the meeting. When I closed, his wrath boiled over, and he cursed me in the name of his God.

SMITH : I will show you, sir, that I will raise up a government in these United States which will overturn the present government, and I will raise up a new religion that will overturn every other form of religion in this country

CARTWRIGHT : Yes, Uncle Joe; but my Bible tells me ‘‘the bloody and deceitful man shall not live out half his days’’; and I expect the Lord will send the devil after you some of these days, and take you out of the way.

SMITH : No, sir, I shall live and prosper, while you will die in your sins.

CARTWRIGHT : Well, sir, if you live and prosper, you must quit your stealing and abominal whoredoms
Thus we parted to meet no more on earth; for in a few years after this, an outraged and deeply-injured people took the law into their own hands and killed him, and drove the Mormons from the state.

NARRATOR : The appeal of Mormonism in the 1830s and 40s was that of a new revelation, complete with prophet and new sacred texts. Protestant revivals came in waves—hundreds of people meeting in the outdoors together sometimes reached pitches of enthusiasm that no church could contain. Lyman Beecher had made his earlier career on revivalism, but Henry was a failure as a revivalist, to judge by the number of new converts.
He really worked on his preaching, though, and Martha Sawyer, the woman who had first invited him to Lawrenceburgh, praised his preaching to Samuel Merrill in Indianapolis. Merrill was part of a small group who had broken away from the Old School Presbyterian Church and were just then about to form a New School church. So, on his travels, Merrill stopped by Lawrenceburgh just to hear Henry Beecher preach—and he invited the young man up to Indianapolis to give a trial sermon. The new congregation liked what they heard, and in May 1839, they invited him to be their pastor.
In the meantime, Charles Beecher had become a clerk in a cotton factor’s office, and he was sent on trips downriver to New Orleans. He also worked as a church organist. In 1840, he married. The newly ordained Henry gave his brother Charles this advice about his upcoming ordination:

HENRY : Preach little doctrine except what is of moldy orthodoxy; keep all your improved breeds, your short-horned Durhams, your Berkshires, etc. away off to pasture. They will get fatter and nobody will be scared. Take hold of the most practical subjects; popularize your sermons. I do not ask you to change yourself, but for a time, while captious critics are lurking, adapt your mode so as to insure that you shall be rightly understood.

NARRATOR : William resigned his Putnam post over a salary dispute, and remained without a position until brother George secured him a large country church near Batavia, New York, with double his previous salary. For a few years, everything went well—but a small group in the church finally forced him out. William and Katherine now had six children.
Catharine kept herself busy mentally just as ten years before, debating her mental and moral philosophy with other Beechers. Now she discussed theological fine points with Lyman, and argued in letters with Edward at Jacksonville and with Charles, now at Indianapolis, where he was helping Henry. These serious discussions produced some intellectual heat between the participants—Charles wrote a long letter to Lyman to adjudge Catharine’s claim to victory in an argument. Catharine felt that she represented the social good against the abstract reasoning of her brothers. Lyman wisely noted her need for the respect of her family.

LYMAN : Edward, Charles—omit from your letters anything that might wound Catharine too deep, for with her nervous incapacities she feels deeply any appearances of light estimation on the part of her family friends who she so sincerely loves. In her trying situation it is a happy knack of being aways in the right, demanding graditude. For shut out from her wanted active labor, if she could not plan and correspnd and keep herself in the stream of interested action for the public good, she would be exceedingly unhappy.

NARRATOR : On the other hand, Lyman soon saw that she would have to be called off; her attack on Charles was getting to be too much for him.
One of Harriet’s servants was a black woman whose son served as model for ‘‘little Harry.’’ She came fearfully one day, saying that her old master was in town looking for her. Calvin Stowe and Charles Beecher took the woman and her son to Jon Van Sant, whose house was on the Underground Railway. Van Sant had been a slave owner in Kentucky, but he had freed his slaves and moved to Ohio. He became John Van Trompe in Harriet’s novel.
Harriet visited the Edward and his wife, and met the Reverent Josiah Henson, a freedman. He described seeing his father lying on the ground bruised, bleeding and dying from the blows of an overseer because he had dared pretend that the mother of his children was his wife and had tried to defend her against an assault by the overseer. She was struck by the Christlike spirit of the man even in relating such horrors. More than anyone else, he would be the model for Uncle Tom.