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.
At mid-century, gold has just been discovered in California, the harsh Fugitive Slave Law has caused an uproar in the North, Henry Ward Beecher is newly installed in his Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, Harriet Beecher Stowe is quietly gathering materials for a book, Edward and Charles Beecher are writing and debating, Catharine Beecher’s travels are almost incessant in the cause of women’s education. Catharine’s Treatise on Domestic Economy had been so popular that Catharine and Harriet elaborated it, combined it with Catharine’s cookbook, and reissued it as The Housekeeper and Healthkeeper; hardly a home in America was without it.
Catharine did a survey of health of American women, and found that 35% were habitual invalids, 42% delicate or diseased, and only 23% were strong. This finding drove her to write Letters to the People on Health and Happiness, and also Physiology and Calesthenics, with many modern ideas on health incorporated in them. &
In her book The True Remedy for the Wrongs of Women, Catharine names the three branches of women’s essential education: training children, nursing the sick, and running a household.
In 1845, Harriet applauded Catharine’s book, Duty of American Women.

HARRIET : It is a stroke well aimed, well struck and must do good; well done Katy

NARRATOR : Since George Beecher’s death in 1843, Catharine Beecher developed her plans for women’s education.
She traveled, often using a man as a spokesperson. For three years, Calvin Stowe was persuaded to act as figurehead for her ambitions.
Sarah Beecher, George’s widow, was independently wealthy—and at Catharine’s urging offered to sponsor a seminary in Putnam, Ohio, and to see to it that Catharine never would have to struggle for lack of funds. Thomas K. Beecher was pressed into service as a speech-giver also—and Catharine managed to avoid being tied down to any school; she much preferred fund-raising and organizing.
The titles of her speeches are revealing: ‘‘The Evils Suffered by American Women and American Children: The Causes and the Remedy’’, ‘‘The Duty of American Women to Their Country,’’ and ‘‘An Address to the Protestant Clergy of the United States.’’ Her vision of a country redeemed by women—women united regardless of class, for poor women were exploited labor and upperclass women were suppressed and restricted—both groups, as teachers, could change the growing bitterness and divisiveness in the country.

CATHARINE : Soon, in all parts of our country, in each neglected village, or new settlement, the Christian female teacher will quietly take her station, collecting the ignorant children around her, teaching them habits of neatness, order and thrift; opening the book of knowledge, inspiring the principles of morality, and awakening the hope of immortality. Soon her influence in the village will create a demand for new laborers, and then she will summon from among her friends at home, the nurse for the young and sick, the seamstress and the mantuamaker; and these will prove her auxiliaries in good moral influence, and in sabbath school training. And often as the result of these labors, the Church will arise, and the minister of Christ be summoned to fill up the complement of domestic, moral and religious blessing.
It is to be lamented that the principle of national patriotism has had very little nourishment in our country, and, instead, has given place to sectional or state partialities. What more promising method for remedying this defect than uniting American women of every state and every section in a common effort for our whole country.

NARRATOR : Catharine became an excellent publicist. She would first pitch a town’s most prominent figure, then use the endorsement to form a substantial local committee. As she went through the country, she gained support from America’s top educators—Horace Mann, Henry Barnard, and others. Even those of a different persuasion found such ploys hard to refuse.
In 1846, Catharine could fund a fulltime agent, and Calvin was released from his obligation to her. William Slade, the former governor of Vermont, undertook the task.
At first they traveled together, speaking in the East, through the end of 1846. Then Slade went to Cincinnati to find places for the missionary teachers, while Catharine stayed East to prepare them for their difficulties—seventy women mad the journey, and most paid back the $100 given them when they started out. But though the movement was a success, and proved a mighty influence, two things were happening to change the complexion of Catharine’s situation. On the one hand, she was dissatisfied to sit around idly now that funds were available and the organization could operate without her. And on the other, Slade was unable to find support in Cincinnati, so he moved his base to Cleveland and renamed the association. Catharine now had a rival. She decided to strike out on her own again.
Both Henry Ward and Lyman Beecher attended Charles Beecher’s first sermon, ‘‘The Bible a Sufficient Creed’’—his remarks were widely quoted throughout the country, but wrongly attributed to Henry Ward Beecher, who was currently the most famous Beecher.

NARRATOR : At his new church in Brooklyn, Henry Ward Beecher gave his own declaration of principles in his first sermon. It foreshadowed a great career.

HENRY : If you come into this church, I want you to understand distinctly that I will wear no fetters; that I will be bound by no precedent; that I will preach the Gospel as I apprehend it, whether people will hear or whether they will forebear, and that I will apply it without stint, and sharply and strongly, to the overthrow of every evil and to the upbuilding of all that is good.
How hateful is that religion which says, ‘‘Business is business and politics is politics and religion is religion’’; Religion is using everything for God; but many people dedicate business to the Devil and shove religion into the cracks and crevices of time and make it the hypocritical outcrawling of their leisure and their laziness.
In the first sermon that I preached on the Sunday night in the new Plymouth Church, when I had accepted the call and came there in the fall, I made a proclamation of my sentiments on the slavery matter, on temperance matters, on war and peace, on all those great themes in which I have had zeal in all my public life, in the most explicit manner. I declared to them that if they continued to attend, or any of them wished to attend, my church on the supposition that I was going to be silent, or prudentially dumb, I wished to remove that impression at once, for I intended to be positive, active, and energetic on all those subjects.

NARRATOR : For six months Henry Beecher’s congregations were small—he was a backwoods preacher who dressed comfortably, not fashionably, he was ruffling feathers with his talks against slavery, against the liquor trade. All warnings to him to avoid controversy at the outset of his career in New York he ignored.

HENRY : I do not know what it is in me, whether it is my father or my mother or both of them—but the moment you tell me that a thing that should be done is unpopular, I am right there, every time.

NARRATOR : Then people started coming in increasing numbers—when the Plymouth Church burned down in 1849, its auditorium had proved hopelessly inadequate. The new church was well-lit, with no stained glass or gingerbread, and with large church parlors. The auditorium could seat two thousand—but within a few months, aisle sets were added so that it could seat twenty-five hundred—and three thousand could be crowded in—and for the next 37 years, the Plymouth Church was crowded. The saying went, ‘‘If you want to hear Henry Ward Beecher preach, take the ferry to Brooklyn and then follow the crowd.’’ People of many different beliefs came from all over the city to hear him preach.
But though Henry Ward Beecher had succeeded in converting four hundred people in two years, he was convinced that conversions were not enough; to solve social problems, a minister must work directly to correct social injustices and any other conditions that made right living impossible. ‘‘Right living’’ was his definition of religion—he believed that reform was an essential part of his job—not only to save souls, but to make conditions such that they could stay saved. And number one on his agenda to change was slavery. The immorality of slavery affected not only the slave but also the master.
Henry Beecher decided to dramatize the situation. A slave had been sent to the slave market by her white master and father. The trader who bought her for $1,200 decided to give her the chance to buy her own freedom and put up $100 of it himself. He let her go to Washington, where she raised another $400. Someone asked Henry Ward Beecher if he would raise the rest—he would if she would come to Brooklyn.
And so, one Sunday in 1848, Henry Ward Beecher read the text, ‘‘Then said Jesus unto them, I will ask you one thing: Is it lawful on the Sabbath day to do good, or to do evil? to save life, or to destroy it?’’ Then he called down—

HENRY : Come up here, Sarah, and let us all see you.

NARRATOR : The black woman came up on the platform, embarrassed and trembling.

HENRY : And this is a marketable commodity. Such as she are put into one balance and silver into the other. I reverence woman. For the sake of the love I bore my mother I hold her sacred even in the lowest position and will use every means in my power for her uplifting. What will you do now? May she read her liberty in your eyes? Shall she go free?

NARRATOR : The collection plates were passed around, and sobbing could be heard in the auditorium. Soon the plates came back overflowing with money and jewelry. When Beecher announced that they had reached the necessary amount, the congregation burst into applause.

HENRY : When the old Jews went up to their solemn feasts they made the mountains round about Jerusalem ring with their shouts. I do not approve of an unholy clapping in the house of God, but when a good deed is well done it is not wrong to give an outward expression of our joy.

LYMAN : (Letter of January 2, 1848)
Henry, you are a good boy for writing me that long, comforting letter. It cheered us all. I thank you for your Thanksgiving sermon; and though I could not write as you do, it is a pleasure to think that perhaps you have breathed an atmosphere with me without which you might not have been able to do it. You cannot conceive how much joy your successful revival labors afford me, and that efficient influence you are beginning to exert on the public mind, somewhat in the way God has helped me to do; and that so near the close of my day I see the wisdom of God and the power of God in younger hands, to send on the glorious, growing work down through another generation. God preserve and bless you!

NARRATOR Periodically, Catharine Beecher retreated to a water spa at Brattleboro, Vermont—Harriet had stayed there in 1845 for seven months—one of her lengthy stays away from Calvin. In Brattleboro, Catharine cultivated a friendship with Delia Bacon, an outstanding former student, who was a writer of historical fiction and a popular lecturer, sister of Leonard Bacon.
Delia was involved in a messy situation with Alexander MacWhorter, recently ordained—MacWhorter denied proposing to Delia, and he was supported by Nathaniel Taylor, Lyman Beecher’s close friend, and a good support for Catharine at the time of her own crisis. Catharine stayed with Delia—and the decision of the New Haven West Association was to proceed with a trial against MacWhorter for calumny, falsehood and disgraceful conduct.
Catharine’s talk with Taylor at this time surprised her—but it was now through Delia Bacon’s case that Catharine could attack the tradition that had denied her a personal happiness and allowed her such a narrow platform for a life of self-sacrifice. For two weeks of eight-hour days, Catharine sat with Delia Bacon at the trial, she spoke frequently as a witness, and supported Delia throughout. The decision of ‘‘imprudence’’ but not guilt set Catharine reeling.

CATHARINE : This decision, adopted by men who from early life I had regarded as the central agency of a great and powerful system of influences, came like desolation. During the sleepless night that followed, the waking visions that haunted the hours of rest seemed like some of those troubled dreams of the sickbed, when the sun seems moving from its center, and all the heavenly bodies are rushing from their courses in confusion and dismay.

NARRATOR : In 1848, Catharine wrote a manuscript about Delia Bacon’s trial, called Truth Stranger than Fiction, in which she attacks Nathaniel Taylor, Joel Hawes, Yale, and the Congregational Church. Delia herself was not interested.

DELIA BACON : I am tired of being a victim! I do not wish to be a hero. I cannot purchase anything but heaven at this cost. So you see beforehand some of the fiery garlands and sacrificial ornaments of this new kind of martyrdom to which, without my own consent, you wish to dedicate me.

NARRATOR : Lyman Beecher was appalled by the idea of his daughter attacking his church and his friend, and he and the Beecher sons tried to secure the manuscript and destroy it.

CATHARINE : My various brothers were in full pursuit, some of them fancying an insane hospital my only proper residence. The blame and outcry of those who would still hush up this monstrous outrage will all be turned on me. Let it come. I cannot suffer in a better cause.
Delia, the Almighty hand which has erased this purpose from your mind, has written it, as with living fire, upon mine, and if all the human voices on this vast globe should come up in one roar of rebuke and defiance, it would not move me. A hand that I cannot relinquish has led me on, a voice that I will not disobey has bade me go forward.

NARRATOR : She and Delia Bacon shared a room at the Round Hill Water Cure in Northampton for a month. Finally, Catharine obtained Delia’s consent, and in 1850, at her own expense, Catharine published Truth Stranger than Ficiton, and sent it to every Congregational association in New England, and to the journals.
In1849, Edward Beecher’s book Baptism, with Reference to Its Import and Modes shows the serious side of Edward Beecher the scholar, historian, and proponent. The book grew out of a debate in print with British Baptist leader Alexander Carson—Beecher’s conclusion is that the interpretation of just one word—baptism—separates Baptists from other Protestants. Edward’s attempt to reconcile the faiths failed—but he learned.

EDWARD : In practice words are things. Systems grow out of words, indeed the life of a whole denomination may depend on certain interpretations of words, which come to have an organic life of tremendous power.
No more can an architect of society work without the appropriate means. It is not self-denial, but self-sacrifice, to live in anguish from a view of what ought to be done and could be done, with a consciousness of the power to do it with appropriate means, and yet without the ability to secure these means.

NARRATOR : When Henry’s church burned down in 1849, he had the seats in the new church curved around a central platform with no pulpit or podium down in front.

HENRY : It is perfect, because it is built on a principle—the principle of social and personal magnetism, which emanates reciprocally from a speaker and from a close throng of hearers. I want them to surround me, so that they will come up on every side, and behind me, so that I shall be in the center of the crowd, and have the people surge all about me!
Heretofore I have had to labor uphill, to carry everything, and do everything. Now I seem to have gone to the opposite extreme. Now it is a question how I shall come out of prosperity. I came East with a silken noose about my neck and did not know it.

NARRATOR : Walt Whitman was more than a little drawn to Henry Ward Beecher as an orator, and a model for the new poetry that he was searching for. When Whitman finally produced his first book of poems, Beecher looked on favorably.
Charles Beecher wrote his first book, Pictures of the Virgin and Her Son, in Fort Wayne. When the Fugitive Slave Law was passed, Charles preached a sermon called ‘‘The Duty of Disobedience to Wicked Laws.’’ For this, the city’s ministerial association expelled him. But the sermon was printed as a pamphlet, and had a wide circulation in the North.
In 1851, he moved to Newark, New Jersey to reorganize a failing Presbyterian church into a thriving Congregational one. Here, he preached temperance and elaborated his anti-slavery position—like all the Beechers, he was not an abolitionist, but was opposed to slavery on moral and religious grounds.
Charles briefly served, at brother Edward’s request, as professor of rhetoric at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, but then returned East to head the Congregational Church in Georgetown, Massachusetts, north of Boston. Georgetown would be his home for the next thirty years.
Henry Ward Beecher’s salary at Plymouth Church quickly went to $3,300, and he was presented with a beautiful horse and carriage. Henry made the Grand Tour of Europe in 1850, alone. He saw his first ruined castle.

HENRY : I was entirely possessed and almost demented. I walked in a dream along the line of the westward wall. I had never before looked upon an old building! The cornices were not wood painted like stone, but stone curled, and carved. With us, stairs are such matters of mere convenience that I had no conception of the architectural effects to which they are susceptible. The fact is, we have no ceilings to paint, ours being low, circumscribed, and without grandeur. The number of pictures—the great number of pictures—not stuff to fill up—but noble, enchanting pieces, some of vast size, of wonderful brilliance, of novel subjects!
I am here. I am yours; do what you will with me; I am here to be intoxicated.

NARRATOR : Once home, Henry became a collector of books, rugs, precious stones, or ‘‘color-opiates,’’ as he called them; he carried them loose in his pockets. If Eunice had resented their poverty before, she deplored their wealth even more. She held herself aloof from Henry’s church; few came to know her.
Henry Ward Beecher came to believe that slavery and free labor were contradictory principles, one of which must wipe out the other. His study of the Constitution led him to believe that the founders knew this and fully expected slavery to die out naturally. The cotton gin changed things temporarily, making slavery profitable again.

HENRY : In 1850, when the controversy came up about Clay’s Omnibus Bill, including the Fugitive Slave Laws, I was thoroughly roused, and in the pulpit and with my pen I attacked with the utmost earnestness the infamous Fugitive Slave Bill. It was then that I wrote that article, ‘‘Shall We Compromise?’’ If anyone will compare that article with Mr. Seward’s subsequent speech s/he will find that it was reducing to a mere minimum the article on ‘‘Shall We Compromise?’’

NARRATOR : Henry Clay’s bill admitted California into the Union as a free state, but also passed the tough Fugitive Slave Laws, forbidding Northerners to aid or shelter runaway slaves. Harriet Beecher Stowe describes Henry’s reaction.

HARRIET : I was then in Maine and I well remember one snowy night Henry’s riding till midnight to see me, and then our talking till near morning what we could do to make headway against the horrid cruelties against the defenseless blacks. Henry told me then that he meant to fight that battle in New York; that he would have a church that would stand by him to resist the tyrannic dictation of Southern slaveholders. I said: ‘‘I, too, have begun to do something; I have begun a story, trying to set forth the sufferings and wrongs of the slaves’’ ‘‘That’s right, Hattie,’’ he said; ‘‘finish it and I will scatter it thick as the leaves of Vallambrosa.’’ And so came Uncle Tom and Plymouth Church became a stronghold where the slave always found refuge and a strong helper.

NARRATOR : Henry Ward Beecher’s ‘‘Star Papers’’ in The Independent hit home, especially ‘‘Shall We Compromise?’’

HENRY : These oppugnant elements, slavery and liberty, inherent in our political system, animating our Constitution, checkering our public policy, breeding in our members of state opposite principles of government and making our whole wisdom of public legislation on many of the greatest questions cross-eyed and contradictory—these elements are seeking each other’s life. One or the other must die. The very value of our Union is to be found in those principles of justice, liberty and humanity which inspire it. If these principles must be yielded up to preserve the Union, then a corpse will be left in our arms, deflowered, lifeless, worthless. Religion and humanity are a price too dear to pay even for the Union.

NARRATOR : This piece was read to the dying Southern leader John C. Calhoun. He said about it—

CALHOUN : That man understands the thing; he has gone to the bottom of it; he will be heard from again.

NARRATOR : Henry Ward Beecher’s ‘‘Star Papers’’ and his dramatic freedom auctions made him into a nationally recognized leader of the anti-slavery movement, even though he was not an abolitionist.
Catharine Beecher, though always independent, had begun to alienate her own family. Even Lyman Beecher felt her increasing isolation. When George’s widow Sarah offered Catharine a permanent home, Lyman encouraged her.

LYMAN : I spoke to her of my sympathy for Catharine more than for all the rest of my children, when I should be called away—and herself without support of her own and without health in the decline of life. When in health and prosperity, Catharine had cast her bread upon the waters. None of her age and with her means have been more public spirited and liberal than she. May they all remember this.

NARRATOR : It was through Harriet that Catharine approached the family again. For one year, while Harriet was preparing her book, Catharine took time out from her education associations to handle Harriet’s household, including seven children and Calvin Stowe.
In 1832, Catharine Beecher founded the American Women’s Educational Association, finally an organization entirely run by women. In retrospect, she said of it:

CATHARINE : Since the formation of this Association, more than twenty colleges and professional schools have been opened to women, so that all women of the higher grades of intellect, who wish to enter men’s professions, are amply provided with all needed advantages. In consequence of this, the Association has changed its plans and is now aiming to secure the proper training of the women of the lower classes.