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. 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.
The Beechers and the rest of America survived through the end of the war and into a new era with new concerns and political realignments. Frederick Douglass had supported the women’s movement as early as July 1848. In Seneca Falls, New York, the Woman’s Rights Convention brought him together with Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and their platform called for women’s equality in the right to vote, to own property, to have a legal identity separate from a husband, and unrestricted opportunities for education and employment. It was a brave beginning for a long hard fight.
In New York State, the feminists launched a campaign to soften the divorce law—and were labelled free love advocates. Horace Greeley fought them, debating in the Tribune with Robert Dale Owen—and by a few votes, the feminists lost. Then the war came, and the women’s movement put its own concerns on hold and supported the abolitionists and the rights of blacks. Wendell Phillips promised: ‘‘After the slave, then the woman.’’
Though Isabella Beecher Hooker had early found Blackstone utterly opposed even to recognition of the separate identity of a wife from her husband, she had done no more than to begin a private correspondence with John Stuart Mill and his wife Harriet Mill, and to wear Amelia Bloomer’s costume, a daring fashion in the 1850s.
Then in 1859, Isabella wrote a piece called ‘‘Shall Women Vote? A Matrimonial Dialogue,’’ answering objections to women’s suffrage, but with digressions and a weak conclusion—the wife would wait until public opinion demanded women’s suffrage. She sent it to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the essayist, who praised the idea but told her that deficiencies in style would have to be corrected—especially in a piece espousing radical views. The piece was never published.
About the same time, Charles Beecher in Newark published a report to the Congregational Association of New York and Brooklyn called A Review of the Spiritual Manifestations. In it, he connected the activities of spiritualists, clairvoyants, and mediums with drugs and demon possession. But, he said, the Bible does not recognize such manifestations, and the mediums were usurping the Christ role of mediator between God and human. Nevertheless, these were honest errors, out of which may come good. Charles continued his research into spiritualism, and over the years he appears to have given them more credence.
Though Charles stayed a short time in Galesburg with Edward, and then at Andover with the Stowes, he came to Georgetown to stay. The family decided that Charles should be the one to organize Lyman Beecher’s autobiography, including their own reminiscences, making it a family chronicle.
Then, in the year of Henry Beecher’s greatest triumph, the famous speeches in Britain, his brother Charles suffered defeat. While sorrowing for his son, who had been wounded at Gettysburg, he faced the ordeal that confronted his father thirty years before—a heresy trial. The chief charge against Charles was his brother Edward Beecher’s doctrine of the pre-existence of souls. Curiously, Edward himself had never once been accused of heresy, though he had published his doctrine ten years before in The Conflict of Ages.
The Essex North Conference officially declared Charles Beecher a heretic in 1863. And Charles protested.

CHARLES : I need hardly say that I regard the result of Council as not only slanderous, but mean beyond measure and as inevitably involving disgrace to all who accept it.
About the time of Charles’s trial, James Beecher was given the colonelcy of an experimental group, the 1st North Carolina Colored Volunteers—which he raised, organized, armed, and led for three years.

JAMES : I am amazed at the promptitude of these men to learn military drill. I wish doubtful people at home could see my three-weeks’ regiment. I think we shall make creditable showing in three weeks more and the Government will not grumble at a regiment enlisted, organized, uniformed, armed, equipped, and handsomely encamped in six weeks.

NARRATOR : While on a trip North to secure arms, James Beecher’s regiment was ordered into combat as a last resort at the Battle of Olustee in Florida. An officer describes the scene.

OFFICER : Our men were brave beyond description, and as their comrades fell around them, they stood up nobly without once shrinking. When the right arm of our color sergeant was broken, he knelt down and held up the dear old flag with his left until relieved.

NARRATOR : Even through his heresy trial, Charles’s congregation stood by him, by and large. His townspeople elected him to the Massachusetts legislature in 1864. And he continued to work, publishing Redeemer and Redeemed, a book of his own blend of theology, including the pre-existence of souls.
And together with Edward, he wrote a reply to the panel which had defamed him, The Result Tested—they charged that the trial was simply revenge against Lyman Beecher’s New School Calvinism and Charles’s undiplomatic sermon-pamphlets blasting President Buchanan and the Fugitive Slave Law.
In the course of the war, in 1864, when Henry Ward Beecher learned that Lincoln had sent a delegation to the Confederate Vice President, he called on the President.

HENRY : We were alone in his receiving room. His hair was ‘‘every way for Sunday.’’ It looked as though it was an abandoned stubble-field. He had on slippers and his vest was what was called ‘‘going free.’’ He looked wearied and when he sat down in a chair looked as though every limb wanted to drop off his body. And I said to him, ‘‘Mr. Lincoln, I come to you to know whether the public interest will permit you to explain to me what this Southern commission means.’’ Well, he listened very patiently and looked up to the ceiling for a few moments and said, ‘‘Well, I am almost of a mind to show you all the documents.’’
‘‘Well, Mr. Lincoln, I should like to see them if it is proper.’’ He went to his little secretary desk, and came and handed me a little card as long as my finger and an inch wide and on that was written—
‘‘You will pass the bearer through the lines’’ or something to that effect.
‘‘There,’’ he said, ‘‘is all there is of it. Now Blair thinks something can be done, but I don’t—but I have no objection to have him try his hand. He has no authority whatever but to go and see what he can do.’’
‘‘Well,’’ said I, ‘‘you have lifted a great burden off my mind.’’

NARRATOR : Lincoln instructed his Secretary of War Edwin Stanton to keep Henry Beecher informed of developments through the end of the war.
When Anna Dickinson came to Hartford, she was an eloquent speaker even at nineteen. Isabella took her home that night to talk—they discussed Harriet Mill’s article in the Westminster Review on ‘‘The Enfranchisement of Women,’’ and Anna allayed Isabella’s fears of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.
During the war, the women’s movement languished; factions were beginning to rise. While visiting her son-in-law Eugene in South Carolina, Isabella called on Caroline Severance, who enlisted her in the conservative faction. On the other side, Stanton and Anthony had opposed abandoning the women’s movement even during wartime—although they did gather 400,000 signatures in favor of the Thirteenth Amendment, to abolish slavery.
The suffragists expected that after the war, the abolitionists would support their cause in turn. However, Reconstruction and the bitter struggles in the South took up most political energies—the feminist call for a constitutional amendment that gave the vote to both blacks and women was drowned out. When the Fourteenth Amendment was passed, it gave the vote to all male citizens. It was a serious setback for the women’s movement.
With William Lloyd Garrison and others, Isabella helped found the New England Woman Suffrage Association. Isabella met the conservative suffragists—Julia Ward Howe, author of the ‘‘Battle Hymn of the Republic,’’ Paulina Wright Davis, as well as Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison. Davis invited her to Providence to meet Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Isabella was won over by their arguments.

ISABELLA : While I have been mourning in secret over the degradation of woman, you have been working through opposition and obloquy to raise her to self-respect and self-protection through enfranchisement, knowing that with political rights come equal social and industrial opportunities. Henceforth, I will at least share your work and obloquy.

NARRATOR : Late in the war, James Beecher was leading a charge at Honey Hill on the Charleston and Savannah Railroad when he was shot and his horse was killed. The wound was serious, but not fatal.
James Beecher soon returned to active duty, and his troops occupied half of Charleston, South Carolina. The first Sunday in the liberated city, James Beecher spoke to his men as chaplain as well as colonel. Dr. Marcy reports.

MARCY : He entered the pulpit through a crowd that filled every standing place, in full uniform followed by members of his staff. He unbuckled his sword, laying it tenderly on the desk, and took for his text, ‘‘The liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free.’’ His impassioned oratory at times swayed the vast audience as a mighty wind the treetops—again, recounting God’s care for his/her children, it fell as the soft dew from heaven, and there was not a dry eye in the house, and when at the close all bent in prayer, broken sobs and utterances of ‘‘Thanks to God, we’s free,’’ attested his power.

NARRATOR : After hostilities ceased, James Beecher’s regiment was the occupying force for ninety square miles, including two towns and six hundred plantations. When he resigned his commission, James had achieved the brevet rank of brigadier general of United States Volunteers.
When the fighting was over, Henry Ward Beecher was invited to give an address marking the fourth anniversary of the fall of Fort Sumter.

HENRY : But for the people misled, for the multitudes drafted and driven into this civil war, let not a trace of animosity remain. The moment their willing hand drops the musket and they return to their allegiance, then stretch out your own honest right hand to greet them. Recall to them the old days of kindness. Our hearts wait for their redemption. All the resources of a renovated nation shall be applied to rebuild their prosperity and smooth down the furrows of war.
Before he returned North from that speech of reconciliation, news came—President Lincoln had been assassinated.

HENRY : Did ever so many hearts in so brief a time, touch such boundless feelings? It was the uttermost of joy; it was the uttermost of sorrow—noon and midnight without a space between.

NARRATOR : In frustration with abolitionist leaders, the feminist leaders Stanton and Anthony took on a new campaign. Kansas was to be allowed to vote on an amendment to enfranchise women as well as blacks. That was a chink in the wall, and they spent four months crisscrossing Kansas prairie settlements and cities. At length, low in funds and spirits, they accepted the help of the flamboyant George Francis Train. The campaign failed, but Train offered to finance a newspaper for the women’s movement. This was the motto of their magazine, The Revolution.

STANTON : Principle, not policy; justice, not favors. —Men their rights, and nothing more; women their rights, and nothing less.

NARRATOR : In the two and a half years of its existence, the paper covered not only women’s rights but also divorce laws, treatment of working women, rape, legalization of prostitution, and the double standard.
A few years after Charles Beecher’s heresy trial, a second panel of Congregational ministers rescinded the earlier decision, and Charles Beecher was no longer a heretic.
Charles had already published his theological views, including the doctrine of the pre-existence of souls in Redeemer and Redeemed. He also wrote two more books on Christian spiritualism, an interest that Harriet and Isabella and other Beechers shared. And upon invitation of brother Henry, he took over editorship of the popular Plymouth Collection of Hymns and Tunes.
Despite his rapport with his vast audience, Henry Ward Beecher, like many a leader of the time, began to lose touch with popular sentiment.

HENRY : Everything marches. The style of thought is freer and more noble. The young men of our times are regenerated. The army has been a school. The war has changed not alone institutions, but ideas. Public sentiment is exalted far beyond what it has been at any other period.

NARRATOR : Henry Beecher’s plea for reconciliation with the South went unheeded in the North, which seemed to be bent on revenge. Beecher supported gradual— not immediate—citizenship for blacks—and in 1866 he said so in a letter to the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Convention in Cleveland—a fatal document. This Cleveland letter put him in the company of Andrew Johnson, who was facing impeachment, and with narrow-minded politicians who were fighting black representation in Congress.
The Republican Party had just picked up the cause of black citizenship at the same time Beecher dropped it. He was attacked by his old allies—Charles Sumner, the abolitionists, Horace Greeley, even by his own editor on The Independent, Theodore Tilton. Somewhere along the line, Beecher had lost his secure hold on the national mood.

HENRY : Better days are coming! Just now angry voices come to me as rude winds roaring through the trees. The winds will die; the trees will live! n : Greeley’s New York Tribune continued to find flaws in Beecher’s proposals, his congregation was cold, and Tilton continued to attack him in his own paper. In 1867, Beecher resigned from The Independent, leaving Tilton in charge.
Theodore Tilton was much like Beecher in many ways—he wrote a luxuriant prose and poetry, and he indulged in the same kind of polite essays as Beecher. He edited The Independent in the morning, and the Brooklyn Union in the afternoon. William Lloyd Garrison approved of him, and he had early declared himself an abolitionist. Tilton also had taken up feminism, and was friends with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Susan B. Anthony, Mrs. Greeley, and Isabella Beecher Hooker, Henry’s youngest sister. When push came to shove between Tilton and Beecher, all the feminists, even Isabella, would side with Tilton.
The feminists had a hard time making clear their objectives. Elizabeth Stanton was perhaps the most articulate figure in the feminist movement, yet her words appear not to penetrate male consciousness—in this case, Henry Ward Beecher and Henry James, Senior.

STANTON : Nothing can exceed the whole-souled, all-absorbing agonizing interest which I feel in the redemption of women. Our religion, laws, customs, are all founded on the belief that woman was made for man. How this marriage question grows on me! It lies at the very foundation of all progress.

HENRY : Woman is appointed for the refinement of the race. Man is said to have been made little lower than the angels; woman needs no such comparison; she was made full as high.

HENRY JAMES, SR. : Holding as I do that the human heart is the destined home of constancy and every courteous affection, I cannot but believe that it will abound in those fruits precisely as it becomes practically honored, or left to its own cultivated instincts.

NARRATOR : In late 1868, Isabella wrote a piece which appeared anonymously in Putnam’s Monthly—‘‘A Mother’s Letters to a Daughter on Woman’s Suffrage.’’ It was a comparatively tame effort, relying on the argument that women would raise the moral level of politics.
In May 1869 the Equal Rights Association, the group that had been formed to join the black struggle with the women’s movement, split on the Fifteenth Amendment—which gave the vote only to male citizens. Frederick Douglass declared:

DOUGLASS : When women because they are women, are hunted down through the cities of New York and New Orleans, when they are dragged from their houses and hung upon lamp-posts, when their children are torn from their arms, when they are in danger of having their homes burnt down over their heads, then they will have an urgency to obtain the ballot equal to our own.

NARRATOR : The New York wing, with Stanton, Anthony and Davis, saw this as a stab in the back. They withdrew and organized the National Woman Suffrage Association. In response the Boston group, with Julia Ward Howe, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Lucy Stone and her husband Henry Blackwell formed the American Woman Suffrage Association, and elected Henry Ward Beecher as its president. It would be twenty years before the two groups reconciled their differences. Isabella threw in her lot with the New York wing of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
Isabella proposed that she and Harriet be made associate editors of The Revolution, with pay—even though Stanton and Anthony were not paid. Anthony saw it as a chance to get the equivalent of Uncle Tom’s Cabin out of Harriet. They were offered positions as contributing editors.
But the paper’s editorial position alienated Harriet. She wrote an article in the Woman’s Journal, a rival publication to The Revolution, calling George Sand an evil influence. Stanton replied.

STANTON : George Sand has done a grander work for women than any woman of her day, while Mrs. Stowe has been vacillating over every demand made for her sex, timidly watching the weathercock of public sentiment and ridiculing the advance guard. When women first demanded suffrage in this country, where was Mrs. Stowe? While the thousands of wives of drunkards, licentious men, tyrants and criminals call aloud today for deliverance from all these degrading relations, where is Mrs. Stowe? Behold her, Bible in hand, proclaiming to these unhappy ones, ‘‘a woman hath not power over her own body, but the husband.’’

NARRATOR : Harriet responded in kind, in an article sent to brother Henry’s Christian Union magazine.
By 1870, the women’s movement suffered a decisive split—Henry Beecher supported the moderates, for a time serving as their chairman, and Tilton supported the radicals, including Isabella Beecher Hooker. The radical wing was soon to encounter the flamboyant and infamous bluestocking Victoria Woodhull. Thomas Beecher said of her—

THOMAS : Mrs. Woodhull only carries out Henry’s philosophy, against which I recorded my protest twenty years ago.

NARRATOR : Isabella organized the Connecticut Woman Suffrage Association and Society for the Study of Political Science. In 1870, she went on a speaking tour of the Midwest, and the next year organized at her own expense a national convention. Her early years reading law with her lawyer husband John Hooker had not gone to waste.

ISABELLA : This convention is for the purpose of calling the attention of Congress to the fact that women were already citizens of the United States under the Constitution, interpreted by the Declaration of Independence, and only needed recognition, by that body, to become voters.

NARRATOR : Before Isabella’s convention began, she and Susan B. Anthony went on a speaking tour of the West—she addressed the second convention of the National Woman Suffrage Association in Chicago. But when they returned to open the convention, they found that Victoria Woodhull had been invited to speak to the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives. Woodhull dressed conservatively and spoke well, arguing that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments referred to women and to men.
At her convention, Isabella introduced her to the delegates, and again Victoria Woodhull captivated her audience—though Isabella was later criticized for allying herself with the most outrageous woman in America.
Out of her convention, Isabella Beecher Hooker was able to present a petition with thousands of names to Congress. The Committee on the Judiciary of the United States Senate invited Isabella to present her argument in person. To her husband, she confided—

ISABELLA : I was perfectly infused with it and inspired by it—it flowed out of my inner consciousness as if it were a part of my very being. I dare not tell you all that I see in the future and know is to come to pass shortly. I would not put it on paper even if I had time and strength. God knows it and that is enough—but be sure that woman’s hour has come. I find such loving and supporting friends who believe that I am raised up to strike this last blow for freedom. I am every day touched by indications trivial in themselves that I am called to a great and holy work whereof no one can prophesy the end.

NARRATOR : Senator Charles Sumner characterized her argument before the Senate Committee as ‘‘able, lucid, and powerful.’’
Susan B. Anthony said of her—

ANTHONY : Isabella Beecher Hooker is the soundest constitutional lawyer in the country.

NARRATOR : Back in Hartford, Isabella was blacklisted by society leaders. As her husband was about to leave for Europe, she wrote him.

ISABELLA : Little do you know what it has cost me to tear myself away from you of late, even a little, and give a part of myself to womanhood—that intangible but yet sad reality that has thrust itself between me and all I hold dear. Remember that I do not love you any the less, that I love truth and justice beyond all things else.

NARRATOR : In 1870, she and her husband drew up a bill to give women the same property rights as their husbands, and had it introduced into the Connecticut legislature. It didn’t pass, but it was reintroduced every year until it passed in 1877 with the vigorous support of Governor Richard Hubbard. Another bill to grant the suffrage to women in Connecticut did not pass during her lifetime.
When Victoria Woodhull spoke to the New York convention in 1871, she called for a convention to establish a new government if Congress refused to act on the woman question.

WOODHULL : We mean treason; we mean secession. We are plotting a revolution; we will overthrow this bogus Republic and plant a government of righteousness in its place!

NARRATOR : Isabella’s more moderate ideas, as set forth in her book, Womanhood: Its Sanctities and Fidelities, more closely approximated those of her sister Catharine, putting woman as the center of the family at the heart of cultural change.

ISABELLA : One generation of instructed mothers would do more for the renovation of the race than all other human agencies combined.

NARRATOR : The book also included some of her correspondence with John Stuart Mill and Harriet Mill on the relation between the sexes. The last section, citing opponents of the licensing of prostitutes, was called "State Patronage of Vice." Because of this section, her critics called the book obscene.
Through it all, Isabella Beecher Hooker continued to defend the freethinker, free-love advocate Victoria Woodhull. At the 1872 convention, Susan B. Anthony was convinced that Victoria Woodhull simply wanted to capture support for her presidential campaign on the People’s Party—which is exactly what she started to do. Anthony tried to stop her speaking, and then shut the lights out. The struggle would go on.