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.
This final chapter in the story of the Beechers will cover a lot of ground. Every Beecher still alive in the 1870s was active in his or her career.
In 1874, the Beecher-Tilton scandal was still current, with Isabella Beecher Hooker’s loyalties torn between her friend, the feminist editor Victoria Woodhull and her accused brother Henry Ward Beecher. To escape this awkward situation, Isabella and her husband John left for Europe. They stayed a year and a half. In Paris, Isabella had a vision of her mother as the Angel of Annunciation, her own Annunciation. Spiritualism took up most of her energies.

Harriet

Harriet Beecher Stowe, after the enormous success of her anti-slavery novels, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Dred, turned to her childhood and family life for her novels. Strong in her memory was the drowning of her sister Catharine’s lover—this reminiscence resulted in The Minister’s Wooing, the story retold with a happy ending. It was also an attack on Calvinism. While this story was appearing serially in the Atlantic Monthly, its editor, James Russell Lowell, wrote her—

LOWELL : What especially charmed me in the new story was that you had taken your stand on New England ground. You are one of the few persons lucky enough to be born with eyes in your head.

NARRATOR : In 1859, Calvin and Harriet Beecher Stowe made their third trip to Europe, meeting the critic John Ruskin in Geneva. He wrote:

RUSKIN : It takes a great deal, when I am at Geneva, to make me wish myself anywhere else, and, of all places else, in London; nevertheless I very heartily wish at this moment that I were looking out on the Norwood Hills and expecting you and the children to breakfast tomorrow.

NARRATOR : Mrs. Stowe’s correspondence also included George Eliot, the pen name for Mary Ann Evans, the popular English novelist.

ELIOT : My dear friend—I value very highly the warrant to call you friend which your letter has given me. The best joy your words give me is the sense of that sweet, generous feeling in you which dictated them. I shall always be the richer because you have in this way made me know you better.

Thomas

NARRATOR : In Elmira, New York, Thomas Beecher began his ministry with some quirks—for instance, office hours instead of pastoral calls. He secured additional rooms in his church for the women’s sewing circle and church suppers, even setting up a pool table for the boys of the church. He established the town’s first free library, partly with his own books.
In 1857 he had remarried, to Julia Jones. When friends of theirs died, leaving orphan children, Thomas and Julia adopted two daughters.
Toward the end of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln was asked whom he considered to be the greatest American. Perhaps in recognition of Henry’s five speeches in Britain that probably prevented British diplomatic recognition of the Confederacy, Lincoln hesitated a moment, then said, ‘‘Beecher.’’

Harriet

As the years went on, Harriet indulged her fantasies—as in the fantastical house in Hartford, and her second residence in Mandarin, Florida. So much did these, and social demands, make on her income that she was forced to continue to write. Eventually, the Hartford house proved to be too much of a burden, and the Stowes made their permanent home in Florida.
Mrs. Stowe’s Oldtown Fireside Stories include many of Calvin Stowe’s own tales. Professor Stowe was noted as a great storyteller and mimic. It’s likely that Harriet learned much of her art from him. He had a quick mind, and a phenomenal memory. As a general scholar, he was outstanding, with Biblical and classical learning, and several languages, including Hebrew, Italian, and Greek.

Thomas

Thomas Beecher left his Elmira church briefly at the beginning of the Civil War, but soon returned. He always acted as he thought Christ would act, giving away money and other generous acts. He also was mechanically inventive, devising a new cap, a tricycle, and keeping the town clock in good repair.
His major achievement, derived from Horace Bushnell’s ideas, was to build a church for people’s needs—the first institutional church, an enormous building with recreation rooms, parlors, and all kinds of facilities for social activities—dances, meetings, banquets. His idea served as a model for churches that became quite widespread throughout the United States. Like his church, Thomas K. Beecher was becoming an institution in Elmira, as he was to become a primary support within the Beecher family.

Henry

After the Tilton scandal had died down, Henry Ward Beecher began to espouse evolutionism. He had long had his own idea that there was no conflict between religion and science. At a dinner given for Herbert Spencer, the British evolutionist philosopher, Beecher called Jesus the first scientist and Paul the first evolutionist.

HENRY : Religion is simply right living. In both Old and New Testament it is called Righteousness. It begins as a seed. It develops as a growth. It is relative to the individual characteristics, to the age, the institutions, the whole economy of life. God is that circle into which human consciousness and experience have poured all the qualities that have been proved by the human race to be admirable, above reproach, transcendent.

NARRATOR : Besides his polite essays on every subject, Henry also wrote a novel, Norwood—it offers a collection of pictures of New England life.
He built up an art library, collected precious stones, rugs, paintings, books. On Saturdays he would visit Tiffany’s to look at their recent stones.
He read widely and by schedule. He talked with everyone, drawing them out.

HENRY : Every one knows more about some subjects than I do.

NARRATOR : To escape the enormous pressure of being the most famous preacher in America, Henry would go to his summer home in Peekskill on the Hudson, or to the White Mountains.

Catharine

Catharine Beecher, at the end of her life, saw her life’s work in terms of history. Much of her conclusions have been continued into the modern age.

CATHARINE : The great crisis is hastening on, when it shall be decided whether disenthralled intellect and liberty shall voluntarily submit to the laws of virtue and of heaven, or run wild to insubordination, anarchy, and crime. The great questions pending before the world, are simply these: Are liberty and intelligence, without the restrains of a moral and religious education, a blessing or a curse?
Only when education and no merely refinement is available will females cease to feel that they are educated just to enjoy themselves in future life, and realize the obligations imposed by heaven to live and to do good.

NARRATOR : In 1878, Catharine Beecher, the eldest child of Lyman Beecher, died at Thomas and Julia Beecher’s home in Elmira, New York. Her spiritual crisis in 1822, and the failure of Lyman Beecher’s Calvinism to provide any support or comfort, had affected the whole family. Catharine’s ideas of the importance of women as culture-changers, and her work in the cause of women’s education also had great influence on several other Beechers, as well as on the development of education in America.

Edward

The same year that Catharine died, Edward Beecher’s book History of Opinions on the Scriptural Doctrine of Retribution came out. It was full of the world of the church fathers; in fact, Edward was writing a historical novel at the same time. It was called Cornelia, and it involved some of these church fathers—but it was never published. The introduction says—

EDWARD : In our war with slavery, for the life of our country, a common interest and common danger united all who were willing to fight for their country. There was a readiness to subordinate all else to a great common interest and common danger. So it was during these early ages in the Church.

NARRATOR : As a work of fiction, Cornelia has major flaws—but Edward well drew the parallels between pre-Civil War America and Rome in 170–180 AD. Cornelia’s religious problem reflects Catharine’s crisis, Marcus Aurelius acts as Lyman Beecher did in that crisis, and the Christians are persecuted in a fashion similar to the mob at Alton persecuting Elijah Lovejoy.

Harriet

Harriet became friends with Oliver Wendell Holmes, and they exchanged letters.

HOLMES : How much you have done and are doing to make our New England life wholesome and happy! If there is anyone who can look back over a literary life which has pictured our old and helped our new civilization, it is yourself. Of course your later books have harder work cut out for them than those of any other writer. They have had Uncle Tom’s Cabin for a rival.

HARRIET : Dear Doctor, how time slips by! I remember when Sumner seemed to me a young man, and now he has gone. And Wilson has gone, and Chase, whom I knew as a young man in society in Cincinnati, has gone, and Stanton has gone, and Seward has gone, and yet how lively the world races on! A few air-bubbles of praise or lamentation, and away sails the great ship of life, no matter over whose grave!
They are living somewhere in intense vitality, I must believe, and you, dear doctor, must not doubt. I remember a remark you once made on Spiritualism. I cannot recall the words, but you spoke of it as modifying the sharp angles of Calvinistic belief, as a fog does those of a landscape. I would like to talk with you some time on Spiritualism. I have long since come to the conclusion that the marvels of Spiritualism are natural, and not supernatural, phenomena—an uncommon working of natural laws. I believe that the door between those in the body and those out has never in any age been entirely closed, and that occasional perceptions within the veil are a part of the course of nature, and therefore not miraculous. Of course such a phase of human experience is very substantial ground for every kind of imposture and superstition, and I have no faith whatever in mediums who practice for money.

NARRATOR : Harriet continued to write—her last novel came out in 1881. She lived another fifteen years, and in her old age she was remembered by many of her old friends at a birthday party. John Greenleaf Whittier, the old abolitionist poet, wrote these words for her:

WHITTIER : Thrice welcome from the Land of Flowers          and golden-fruited orange bowers          to this sweet, green-turfed June of ours!          To her who, in our evil time,          dragged into light the nation’s crime          with strength beyond the strength of men,          and, mightier than their sword, her pen;          to her who world-wide entrance gave          to the log cabin of the slave,          made all his wrongs and sorrows known,          and all earth’s languages his own—          North, South, and East and West, made all          the common air electrical,          until the o’ercharged bolts of heaven          blazed down, and every chain was riven!

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES :             If every tongue that speaks her praise             form whom I shape my tinkling phrase                   were summoned to the table,             the vocal chorus that would meet             of mingling accents harsh or sweet,             from every land and tribe, would beat                   the polyglots of Babel.             Know her! Who knows not Uncle Tom             and her he learned his gospel from,                   has never heard of Moses;             full well the brave black hand we know             that gave to freedom’s grasp the hoe             that killed the weed that used to grow                   among the Southern roses.             Her lever was the wand of art,             her fulcrum was the human heart,                   whence all unfailing aid is;             she moved the earth! Its thunders pealed,             its mountains shook, its temples reeled,             the blood-red fountains were unsealed,                   and Moloch sunk to Hades.

NARRATOR : And Harriet Beecher Stowe replied:

HARRIET : I wish to say that I thank all my friends from my heart—that is all. And one thing more—and that is, if any of you have doubt about this world, just remember what God has done.

NARRATOR : By which she meant Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which, finally, she denied writing.

HARRIET : The Lord Himself wrote it and I was but the humblest of instruments in his hands.

NARRATOR : At the age of 81, Edward Beecher went back into preaching, and for every Sunday for the next five years, he preached at the Parkville Church in Brooklyn.

Henry

Toward the end of his life, Henry Ward Beecher talked to a curious young friend about the Civil War and politics.

FRIEND : Who were the most influential leaders affecting the rise of the Republican Party?

HENRY : Well, I think Seward on the whole, Greeley was off and on. Horace Greeley was one of the ablest advocates in public affairs.

FRIEND : Do you share the belief that was quite general at the time that Fremont carried Pennsylvania despite the reported results?

HENRY : I do.

FRIEND : Do you believe that he was elected President?

HENRY : I do.

FRIEND : Do you believe that his inauguration as President would have averted a civil war?

HENRY : No.

FRIEND : Did you know President Buchanan?

HENRY : No, nothing more than just by sight.

FRIEND : Do you believe him to have been a square man?

HENRY : I believe him to have been a man of honest intentions, but utterly unfit for the times which found him. He had neither courage nor any commanding discretion.

FRIEND : How do you regard Douglas?

HENRY : I regard Douglas as a very able man indeed, but a dangerous man, because I do not think that he acted on great lines, but rather on the inner lines of political expediency.

FRIEND : Do you think he was a thoroughly loyal man?

HENRY : I think he was a thoroughly loyal man.

FRIEND : Do you think the election of President Lincoln precipitated the rebellion?

HENRY : Yes.

FRIEND : Do you think that his death and its manner, and at the time, was a great thing for him in history?

HENRY : Yes, sir; I think that his coffin was more than the Presidential chair. It certainly gave to the whole of his career the influence of a kind of political saintship.

FRIEND : Do you believe that he would have carried out a different policy from that of Johnson?

HENRY : I know that at the time that things were drawing to a consummation he had in an inchoate form the very policy that Johnson undertook to carry out under a change of circumstances. I know it, because the Cleveland letter that I wrote was the result of conferences with Governor Andrew and President Lincoln, just preceding Lincoln’s death, as to what were to be the next coming steps after the breaking down of the rebellion, and at that time, under the circumstances, it seems to me that they had, on the whole, very wise views.
It may be said almost in a sentence what their policy was. It was to say to the leading public men of the South: ‘‘Gentlemen, you took your section out of the Union; you must bring it back. We hold you responsible. We will give you all the power necessary to do it. Slavery is gone, and as you went out with those men who have been defeated, now you must come back and we will trust you.’’

FRIEND : Did you work for Grant?

HENRY : First, middle, and last.

FRIEND : You regarded him as a favorite with the people?

HENRY : I am not in a situation to determine that. I only know that when his name was mentioned in any large audience where I was present they always carried the day with great enthusiasm.

FRIEND : You knew Lincoln?

HENRY : Very well.

FRIEND : In a sentence, what did you think of him?

HENRY : I think that Lincoln was to a remarkable degree both a statesman and a politician, that he based his views of expediency on great principles, but that in executing expedient objects he was as shrewd and keen a politician as ever was in Washington.
He had a broad sympathy for human nature, and he understood it very well. He was as devoid of personal ambition and selfishness as any one of whom we have a record in our history. He was a man who wanted to do that which was right and best for this whole nation, South and North, and was willing to go as near to the edge of doubtful expediency as a man could go and not go over the precipice; but he saved himself.

NARRATOR : In 1884, Henry Ward Beecher spoke on behalf of Cleveland, and not Blaine the Republican, the candidate of the party he had helped to found. Cleveland’s character was called into question on baseless charges. In one speech, Beecher said:

HENRY : When in the gloomy night of my own suffering, I sounded every depth of sorrow, I vowed that if God would bring the day star of hope, I would never suffer brother, friend or neighbor to go unfriended should a like serpent seek to crush him. That oath I will regard now. Because I know the bitterness of venomous lies, I will stand against infamous lies that seek to sting to death an upright man and magistrate.
People counsel me to prudence lest I stir again my own griefs. No, I will not be prudent. If I refuse to interpose a shield of well-placed confidence between Governor Cleveland and the swarm of liars that nuzzle into the mud or sling arrows from ambush, may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth and my right hand forget its cunning.

NARRATOR : James Beecher, youngest of the Beechers, had a mental breakdown, and soon after he sought the water cure near Thomas Beecher in Elmira. His last years of increasing isolation in upper New York State led him to a final despair. He committed suicide in 1886.
Not long after James’s death, Henry died of a stroke. Fifty thousand people passed by his body. There were no special decorations, no mourning ceremonies, because Henry had forbidden it.

Isabella

Isabella Beecher Hooker continued to be active in the women’s movement, though her involvement in the Tilton-Beecher scandal had been a political embarrassment. In 1888 she helped convene the first international convention of women in Washington. But later, she was rebuffed in her own state at the Connecticut Constitutional Convention—suffrage was no longer a novelty and not yet powerful enough politically.
In 1889, William Beecher, the oldest son, died.
Isabella’s last public presentation was given at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, where she prepared a universal litany, made up of similar passages from religious writings of the Egyptians, Hebrews, Chinese, Buddhists, Hindus, Moslems, and Christians.
She told her granddaughter Isabel:

ISABELLA : Isabel, I don’t ask you to keep the Ten Commandments—you probably will anyway—but if I ever catch you being bored, I’ll disown you.

NARRATOR : Her ideas of religion became in some ways even broader and more skeptical than Henry’s.

ISABELLA : I am prepared to accept this life as the end—provided it’s the end for everybody else!
The world is my country; to do good is my religion.

NARRATOR : In 1895, Edward Beecher, active through his eighties, died at 92.
The next year, 1896, Harriet Beecher Stowe died in Florida.
In 1900, three Beechers died—Mary Beecher Perkins in Hartford, Charles, and Thomas.
In her last year, Isabella said to her granddaughter Isabel:

ISABELLA : I can’t stand all the suffering in the world.

ISABEL : Well, grandmother, you have the satisfaction of knowing you have always done more than your share to relieve it.

ISABELLA : That’s the point. As long as I could help, I could stand it, but now that I can no longer help, I can’t stand it!

NARRATOR : In 1907, Isabella Beecher Hooker died. The Beechers were gone.