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 second Beecher family reunion took place in 1855, when Lyman Beecher was eighty years old. Nine brothers and sisters met at Henry Ward Beecher’s home in Brooklyn. Two were missing—George had committed suicide twelve years before, and James, the youngest, was in Hong Kong, a missionary preacher.
Though Lyman Beecher, the patriarch, had retired only four years before, and had tried to write his autobiography, he was fast losing ground. His deterioration affected all his children. Prompted by Catharine or Harriet, their father remembered scenes long past, sometimes before they were born. It would be the last time, probably, that most of them would see the old preacher.

LYMAN : My father, David Beecher, the son of Nathaniel, was short, like his mother, and could lift a barrel of cider and carry it into the cellar. He was a blacksmith, and worked on the same anvil his father had before him, on the old oak stump. He lived well, according to the times, and laid up four or five thousand dollars. He was one of the best-read men in New England, well versed in Astronomy, Geography, and History, and fond of politics.
He always kept a number of college students and of representatives to the legislature as boarders, being fond of their conversation. He often kept pace with his student-boarders in their studies, frequently spending his evenings in their rooms. He had a tenacious memory for what he read, but was entirely careless and forgetful as to his dress, hat, etc. Your Aunt Esther says she has known him at least twelve times come in from the barn and sit down on a coat-pocket full of eggs, jump up, and say, ‘‘Oh, wife!’’
‘‘Why, my dear,’’ she would reply, ‘‘I do wonder you can put eggs in your pocket after you have broken them so once.’’
‘‘Well,’’ he would say, ‘‘I thought I should remember this time.’’ He was, on the whole, a good deal like me. He was just of my height—five feet seven and a half inches—with the same colored hair, eyes, and complexion, though I am a little heavier. If father had received a regular education he would have been equal to anybody.
From keeping boarders, it came about that his table was rather better than farmers’ tables, and his cooking and seasoning rather too rich, and so he suffered severely from dyspepsia, and this produced hypochondria. He would pass from a state of cheerfulness to one of acute distress, apparently without cause. I knew all about them; have had just such feelings myself.

NARRATOR : By this time, Henry Ward Beecher had replaced Edward as the family mainstay. Not only was he the most famous clergyman in America, and a rich one at that, he had sheltered Charles and Thomas, and had kept in close touch with Harriet and Lyman and the others. Though his own marriage was not ideal—Eunice was a bitter, withdrawn woman—family was important to Henry.
As in Indianapolis, he was careless about other pastoral duties, but he was highly successful as a preacher. His church seated 2,500, and it was usually overflowing. But even large audiences were not enough for Henry. Each sermon must not be simply well received, it must accomplish its purpose.

HENRY : I never shoot an arrow at a venture; I always aim at a mark, though I may not hit the mark I aim at.
Others had learned this. It was the secret of success in everyone who ever was eminent for usefulness in preaching. But no one can inherit experience; it must be born in each for him/herself.

NARRATOR : Henry kept up an interest in phrenology, not to know the bumps in the skull, but because it gave him a method of studying men and women. Later, in sermons, he was often able to characterize people with great detail, imitating the posture, gestures, and intonations of a blacksmith, farmer, or shopkeeper.
At Plymouth Church, there was always a great amount of talking—in the informal meetings, and before and after services. Conversation did not stop when the organ began, but instantly, when Beecher began, there was a hush. The congregation knew that when Henry Ward Beecher began, he always spoke in low tones. After benediction, he stayed around to shake hands, and somehow the large church was run like a rural New England meetinghouse, friends meeting friends and exchanging social gossip, and strangers were greeted.
John Zundel, the church organist, was self-trained musically, but spiritual in his music.

ZUNDEL : I cannot pray with my lips, I pray with my fingers.

NARRATOR : Zundel’s emphatic pedal-stomping style fit well with Henry Ward Beecher’s insistence on music to be sung, not listened to. The result of two or three thousand untrained people singing melody was not often graceful, but every Sunday that swelling outpouring of emotion was intense. At the time, congregational singing was not the common practice—there was no hymnbook written for communal singing.
With help from brother Charles, Plymouth Church’s Temple Melodies was created to fill that need, but it only gave Henry the ambition of a larger undertaking, to be called the Plymouth Collection. He would include Calvinist writers and Arminians, Roman Catholic authors and Unitarians and non-religious poets such as Mrs. Browning, William Cullen Bryant, John Greenleaf Whittier, and James Russell Lowell. The Plymouth Collection was almost unique, yet because it now defined a new field, many hymn-writers turned to this new genre. By now, the Plymouth Collection is hopelessly out of date, but it did as much to change church music in America as any other single book.

LYMAN : My mother was tall, well-proportioned, dignified in her movements, fair to look upon, intelligent in conversation, and in character lovely. I was her only child. She died of consumption two days after I was born. I was a seven-months’ child; and when the woman that attended on her saw what a puny thing I was, and that the mother could not live, she thought it useless to attempt to keep me alive. I was actually wrapped and laid aside.
But, after a while, one of the women thought she would look and see if I was living and, finding I was, concluded to wash and dress me, saying, ‘‘It’s a pity he hadn’t died with his mother.’’ So you see it was but by a hair’s-breadth I got a foothold in this world.

HARRIET : With all that was truly great among humans, Father felt a kindred sympathy. Genius and heroism would move him even to tears. I recollect hearing him read aloud Milton’s account of Satan’s marshaling his forces of fallen angels after his expulsion from heaven. The description of Satan’s courage and fortitude was read with such evident sympathy as quite enlisted me in his favor, and in the passage       Millions of spirits, for his fault amerced       of heaven, and from eternal splendors flung       for his revolt, yet faithful how they stood,       their glory withered; as when heaven’s fire       hath scathed the forest oaks, or mountain pines,       with singed top, their stately growth, though bare,       stands on the blasted heath. He now prepared       to speak; whereat their doubled ranks they bend       from wing to wing, and half enclose him round       with all his peers; attention held them mute.       Thrice he essayed, and thrice, in spite of scorn,       tears, such as angels weep, burst forth. On reaching this point, Father burst into tears himself, and the reading ended.

NARRATOR : Henry Ward Beecher’s Star Papers, so named because on their first publication in The Independent, he signed them with an asterisk only, were published in 1855. By this time, Henry had begun his series of familiar essays on many topics in The Independent; often these simply celebrated the life of the senses.

HENRY : Today is goblet day. The whole heavens have been mingled with exquisite skill to a delicious flavor, and the crystal cup held out to every lip. It is a luxury simply to exist.

NARRATOR : He also established a farm at Lenox, and when that proved too far, another, called Boscobel, at Peekskill. Henry Ward Beecher was becoming a popular naturalist, an apologist for beauty and art. In earlier days, Lyman Beecher had not been kind to such an attitude.

LYMAN : It’s all moonshine with no doctrine, nor edification, nor sanctity in it, and I despise it.

NARRATOR : But out of Henry’s celebration of life came his mature philosophy of love.

HENRY : Let there be a perpetual tropical luxuriance of blessed love. I never knew how to worship until I knew how to love; and to love, I must have something that, touching my heart, shall not leave the chill of ice but the warmth of summer.
We are standing on the eve of a great day—a day multitudinous with truths and struggles. The life of the common people is the best part of the world’s life. The life of the common people is the life of God.

LYMAN : I remember in those days how the selectmen visited the farmhouses, and took an inventory and gave receipts. We paid in beef. The kitchen was full, and they came in with carts and carried it to the army.

HARRIET : Was there no complaining?

LYMAN : No complaint; not a word.

HARRIET : We were independent already, and only determined we would remain so.

LYMAN : Yes. If we had been slaveholders, we should have gone to the dogs.

HARRIET : Were there not some that held slaves, then?

LYMAN : Yes, a few. Darb, the fiddler, was a slave; belonged to old Mr. Ben Rossiter. Darb came in one evening and played dancing tunes after I was abed. There were about a dozen slaves in North Guilford, but the slavery was very lenient. Old Priest Fowler’s Moses was quite the man of business; sent Johnny Fowler to college, and paid the bills, managed the farm, rung the church bell, and was factotum. He lived a slave because he was a king.

NARRATOR : Henry Ward Beecher’s oratory was a marvel. Here is one eyewitness report: ‘‘It was a lesson in elocution to hear Mr. Beecher read a Scripture lesson. You might not agree with his interpretation, but you could not misunderstand it. I recall once hearing him, in a sermon on the gentleness of Christ, pause and say:

HENRY : But did not Christ denounce the Pharisees with bitterest invective? That depends upon the spirit with which he uttered and with which we read his words.

NARRATOR : ‘‘Then he took up the New Testament, turned to the twenty-third chapter of Matthew and read three or four verses—‘Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites’—with thunder in the tones, frown upon the brow, wrath in the voice; then, without note or comment, he read them again as a lamentation, with infinite pathos, with suppressed tears in the tones of his voice. Then he closed the New Testament and went on with his sermon.’’
The new head of Yale when Lyman Beecher went there was Timothy Dwight, leading the student body back to an earlier Calvinism that had almost disappeared.

DWIGHT : The numbers of the Poet, the delightful melody of the Song, the fascination of the Chisel, the spell of the Pencil, have all been volunteered in the service of Satan, for the moral destruction of unhappy humanity.

NARRATOR : Lyman Beecher’s religious experience occurred at Yale under Timothy Dwight’s hellfire regime. Lyman was spending a weekend at home, when his stepmother remarked that a drunk passing by had once been religious—she hoped that he might escape hell.

LYMAN : I rose to pray and had not spoken five words before I was under as deep a conviction as ever I was in my life. The sinking of the shaft was instantaneous. I understood the law and my heart as well as I do now or shall in the Day of Judgment, I believe. The commandment came, sin revived, and I died, quick as a flash of lightning.
The first time I went afishing, Uncle Benton took me down to Beaver Head, tied a brown thread on a stick, put a crooked pin on it and a worm, and said, ‘‘There, Lyman, throw it in.’’ I threw it in, and out came a shiner! The first time I caught a perch was at Quinnepaug Outlet. He got off my hook and fell in the shallows, and began to flapper off, and away I went after him down the shallows on all fours, quicker than a flash.
Another time I found a school of perch in a hole under the roots of a tree, and took them all out with my hand.
I always liked ‘‘training-day,’’ because then I could go a-fishing. Fished all day till dark, and felt sorry when night came. That was my passion. Couldn’t leave off till the bullheads had done biting. Once, at the saw-mill, I hooked a pickerel without bait; how I whopped him out!
Used to follow the trout brook round to the mill-dam. Once, below the dam, in a deep hole, I saw six salmon trout. Dropped my hook with a grasshopper; none of ’em bit. Tried a worm, squirmed lively; one of ’em struck it; took him out. Cut a stick, strung him; baited my hook, threw in; another of ’em struck it; pulled him out, strung him; another, and another, till I had the whole six.

HENRY : I seldom succeed when I try. The best things are unexpected insofar as my work is concerned. I always have floating in my head half-formed thoughts I would like to utter. Saturday is my day of rest. I am apt to spend it on my farm at Peekskill under the trees. I sleep soundly Saturday night; I sleep vicariously for my congregation. After breakfast I go into my study, feel of my different themes, the one that is ripe I pluck, select my text, organize my thought, and go into the pulpit with my theme fresh, my mind and heart full of it.

LYMAN : Annis was a noble girl, and had a great influence over my character. She was about thirteen, intelligent and well-favored. She was nurse, mother, sister, and all. She and Aunt Benton fill up the memory of my early days.
She was pious, and, though little was said to children then, talked with me about my soul. I remember one night, when the northern lights were very bright, a blood-red arch from horizon to zenith, and light enough to read out of doors. Everybody was out looking at it, and Uncle Stephen Benton said, ‘‘Ah! we don’t know at what time the day of judgment will come—at midnight or at cock-crowing.’’
The thought flashed through my mind, ‘‘It has come now,’’ and I felt all the dismay of the reality. I began to cry. Annis quieted me, and, after I went to bed—I always slept with her—she talked with me about my soul.
I remember near the close of the war, when New Haven was attacked by the British, Aaron Burr happened to be there, and took command of a party of militia. Father took his old firelock and went out with them. But the British were too strong for them, and the word came each one to look out for himself. Father was down in the ‘‘second quarter,’’ so called, and happened to see a scout; he raised his gun, and stood deliberating whether he could kill a fellow-being. The click of a trigger nearby turned his head toward a British marksman, who had no such scruples, but was aiming straight at his head. He popped down into a ravine, losing his gun and hat, and wandered about all that hot July day bareheaded, and got a sunstroke, from which he never wholly recovered.

NARRATOR : Henry Beecher’s great powers of sympathy allowed him to vividly portray scenes and characters, to make his congregation feel the presence of a living god there on the platform with him. His rather ordinary face had as much flexibility as his voice, and took on the character of the person he was describing. But all these skills were held to a moral purpose, and thus he never repeated a performance or a sermon.
Edward Beecher’s The Conflict of Ages introduced the idea of the pre-existence of souls into Calvinism. Lyman Beecher, among others, didn’t immediately respond to this theological argument.

LYMAN : Edward, you’ve destroyed the Calvinist barns, but I hope you don’t delude yourself that the animals are going into your little theological hencoop!

NARRATOR : Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll, the great atheist, had nothing good to say about Calvinism.

INGERSOLL : Henry Ward Beecher was born in a Puritan penitentiary, of which his father was one of the wardens—a prison with very narrow and closely grated windows. Under its walls were the rayless, hopeless and measureless dungeons of the damned, and on its roof fell the shadow of God’s eternal frown. In this prison the creed and catechism were primers for children, and from a pure sense of duty their loving hearts were stained and scarred with the religion of John Calvin.

NARRATOR : Catharine Beecher was more specific in her complaint, but every Beecher could vouch for its accuracy.

CATHARINE : What a record of vain attempts for twenty years, not in a single case rewarded with success! What anxiety, perplexity, disappointment, and agonizing fear are thre recorded on the part of the father, and what suffering and vain efforts on the part of the children!

REV. THOMAS DAVIES(editor of Christian Spectator—1819) : In his study Dr. Beecher spoke of the methods of mental culture. He said that it was not until he had been three years a preacher that he acquired the power of properly examining, discussing, and presenting important subjects in a sermon; and showed me, in folio form, a volume in which he wrote plans, arguments, and illustrations of discourses which he had preached, and said that, if the sermons should be burned or lost, that from the notes these contained he could reproduce them.

LYMAN : A new day was dawning as I came on the stage, and I was baptized into the revival spirit. It was the age of French Infidelity. There was a leaven of skepticism all over the world. The question was, Revival or Infidelity. I did not attack infidelity directly. Not at all. That would have been cracking a whip behind a runaway team—made them run the faster. I always preached right to the conscience. Every sermon with my eye on the gun to hit somebody.
After spending about two years in fitting for college, I went home to Father’s in New Haven, and spent a month before Commencement. I was eighteen. Farmer’s life and farmer’s fare had made me strong and hearty beyond anything I should have reached if I had grown up in Father’s family, though that was far more intellectual. I built up the physical first, the intellectual afterward.
Father was now living with his fifth wife, and Esther, her daughter, was about thirteen, and forever reading. Then there were Polly, Lydia, and David, so that there was a pretty good family of us. Besides, there were several boarders, and, at Commencement, the house was always filled to overflowing with company.

NARRATOR : Oratory was in full flower, as Henry Ward Beecher, Theodore Parker, Wendell Phillips, Emerson, Greeley, John B. Gough and others ranged the countryside speaking on everything of public concern. But Henry Ward Beecher was extraordinarily sensitive to his audience’s moods, and free to express emotions, to cry, to shout, to move, to speak candidly and to wax rhetorical—and speaking before such large crowds seemed to give him energy rather than to sap him. He captured audiences in New York, New England, and the West. As Theodore Parker said:

PARKER : The Rocky Mountains are his sounding board. He is eternally young and positively wears me out with his redundant, superabundant, ever-recovering, and ever-renewing energy. Mr. Beecher has great strength of instinct, of spontaneous human feeling. He has a genius to be loved. He captivates people without an effort. People look upon him as a national institution, a part of the public property.

HENRY : The voice is the bell of the soul, or the iron and crashing of the anvil. It is a magician’s wand, full of incantation and witchery; or it is a scepter in a king’s hand, and sways people with imperial authority. At times, there are no gestures comparable to the simple stature of the person him/herself.
I think of everything that makes my soul a terrible house of imagery. No one can go down into the dungeon of his/her own experience and not come up with a shudder and a chill.

NARRATOR : There seemed to be nothing special about Henry Ward Beecher—his face was plain and a bit puffy, his voice was not unusual. He would begin on a conversational level, then explosively he would be gay, sad, fulsome, or warmly falling. He was a superb mimic of the gestures of a blacksmith, a fisherman, a drunkard, a sailor. Some complained that his transitions were too quick, that he made religion an entertainment—but to every audience large or small, he bathed them in his warmth, and gave them all his gospel of love.
Henry David Thoreau called him a magnificent pagan. And Bronson Alcott said:

ALCOTT : It was a spectacle. I pronounced it good, very good—the best that I had witnessed for many a day.

LYMAN : Thought I could preach till I heard Henry.

HARRIET : Did Uncle Lot pay your bills through college?

LYMAN : In great part, and what he did not pay father paid himself. Father used to have the ‘‘hypo’’ dreadfully about supporting me. Esther heard him telling her mother he could not stand it; he should certainly have to take me out of college, or they should all go to ruin. She answered—she was my stepmother—that she couldn’t have it so; and said that her property might go to pay my bills. There was some property of hers, and he had the use of it.

HARRIET : Did you know how he felt?

LYMAN : Yes, I knew that he was bankrupt, as he supposed. I recollect saying, ‘‘Father, you needn’t be concerned; you have enough to live on at present; and when I get through and have a home, I’ll take care of you.’’
‘‘Pooh! poor fellow!’’ said he, ‘‘you’ll scratch a poor man’s head all your lifetime.’’
I did help myself a little, though. Staples, the butler, left college six weeks before the end of the year, and I took the buttery, and bought out his stock for about $300, which I borrowed. I went into it hot and heavy. One day I bought a lot of watermelons and canteloupes, and trundled them across the green on a wheelbarrow, in the face of the whole college. I sent to New York by an English parson—a judge of the article—and bought a hogshead of porter. It’s odd; but I can remember selling things to Moses Stuart—two classes below me.
That buttery was a regular thing in those days; it has wholly disappeared since, and is almost forgotten. The old Latin laws are a curiosity.

HARRIET : Did it pay well?

LYMAN : Well, I paid my note, and besides $100 in bad debts, cleared my Commencement expenses, bought a suit of clothes, and had $100 in cash. I worked hard. If I had gone into busienss then I should have made money.

NARRATOR : In the house of General Andrew Ward, Lyman Beecher found the girl Roxana that he would marry, who would bear his first eight children. But he had gone there one day determined to see if her faith could follow his vision, or else he would break off the engagement.

LYMAN : I explained my views, and laid before her the great plan of redemption. As I went on, her bosom heaved, her heart melted, and mine melted too; and I never told her to her dying day what I came for.

NARRATOR : Lyman Beecher was always the dominant force in the Beecher family, even after his sons and daughters left home. But he never squelched their initiative or suppressed their individuality or kept them back. Henry Ward Beecher said of him:

HENRY : He thought he was great by his theology; everybody else knew he was great by his religion.

NARRATOR : His theology had led him to preach his first sermon in Litchfield against morality—the notion that mere goodness could get one into heaven. But despite his theology, Lyman Beecher spoke against slavery, dueling, intemperance, and other social evils. And that, finally, was the lesson his children learned from him—that people couldn’t live right if social ills such as slavery were allowed to exist.
So it was that they all became reformers in one way or another, working to make this world better—Catharine in women’s education, Henry and Harriet against slavery, most of them, especially Edward, Charles, and Henry, in theology, Charles in music, Thomas in the institutional church, Isabella in women’s suffrage, James in tolerance.

LYMAN : One morning I went out for a duck hunt. ’Twas a great deal earlier than I had supposed; but I kept on, and came down the east shore, where the surf is always foaming up on the beach—wave after wave, rolling and roaring, as high as your head; but now, for once it was still; you couldn’t hear a sound except a little softly murmuring noise as the ripples came creeping up the beach; ’twas as still as stillness itself. I laid down my gun and sat down to hear such a silence as I never did before. I forgot the ducks.