A Biography of Rev. Henry Ward Beecher. Scoville Samuel
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coat-of-arms still bears an oak for its crest and a clover-leaf in its quarterings, with the motto “Loyalty and Truth.”
Her mother, Roxana Ward Foote, was descended from Andrew Ward, who came over with Sir Richard Saltonstall and settled in Watertown, Mass., in 1630.
He afterwards moved to Wethersfield, and was a member of the first General Court, or Legislature, held at Hartford in 1636. Later he moved to Stamford, and represented that colony in the higher branch of the General Court at New Haven.
From him descended Colonel Andrew Ward, who took part in the old French and Indian war and aided in the capture of Louisburg in 1745. Of him it is told that, being a stanch cold-water man, he took money in lieu of his daily rations of grog. With this he bought six silver spoons, on which he had engraved the name “Louisburg.” Some of these spoons are still preserved in the family, witnesses to the virtue and valor of one of its honored ancestors.
His son was General Andrew Ward, of Revolutionary fame, who, at the close of the war, went back to his native town, Guilford, and took up his residence upon a farm of about two hundred acres, called Nutplains. For many years he represented the town in the State Legislature, being nominated, it is said, year after year by some one of the town worthies in this primitive manner: “The meeting is now open, and you will proceed to vote for General Ward and Deacon Burgess for representatives.”
When his daughter, an only child, who had married Eli Foote, was left a widow, he took her with her ten children to his home at Nutplains, and cared for them as if they were his own. Being a great reader, and always bringing home with him from the Legislature his saddle-bags full of books, which were read aloud and discussed in the family, this home became a school that afforded superior advantages for gaining acquaintance with literature, for acquiring such knowledge of science as was accessible at that time, and for exciting thought and interest. In that school Roxana, the second-born of the family, is represented to have been easily first both in intellect and goodness.
Taking her part in the labor of the household at a time when it was expected that the woman portion would not only care for the house, prepare the food, and make the clothes for all the family, but also weave and spin the materials as well, she yet managed to acquire an education of which graduates of our modern schools and colleges might well be proud. “She studied while she spun flax, tying her books to the distaff.” She not only became well read in literature and history, and acquainted with the progress of science, then just beginning to attract the attention of scholars, but learned to write and speak the French language fluently. She gave enough attention to music to be able to accompany her voice on the guitar, and was sufficiently skilled in the use of pencil and brush to paint some very creditable portraits upon ivory, several of which are still in the family. She was an adept in the mysteries of the needle, “in fine embroidery with every variety of lace and cobweb stitch,” and was gifted with great skill and celerity in all manner of handicraft, so that in after-years “neither mantua-maker, tailoress, or milliner ever drew on the family treasury.”
Belonging to a family distinguished in both branches of her ancestry, and residing, while her father lived, in the centre of the village of Guilford, which could boast that more than four-fifths of its original population belonged to families with coats-of-arms in Great Britain, and afterwards taken to the home of her grandfather, General Ward, who was the foremost man of the town and one of the leading men in the State, and who kept open house to all strangers, she enjoyed the best social advantages which the times afforded.
Tall and beautiful in form and feature, with a winning and yet commanding presence, “she was so sensitive and of so great natural timidity that she never spoke in company or before strangers without blushing, and was absolutely unable in after-life to conform to the standard of what was expected of a pastor’s wife and lead the devotions in the weekly female prayer-meeting.”
She was early confirmed in the Episcopal Church; her parents, although both from strictly Puritan families, having joined that denomination upon their marriage. They had held through all the Revolutionary struggle to their loyalty to King George, and this had subjected them to the determined opposition of their neighbors, and stamped the family, perhaps, with something of that independence of character which opposition to a prevailing popular sentiment is adapted to give, and which is so marked a feature in her descendants.
Converted when she was but five years old, and scarcely remembering the time when she did not go with her joys and sorrows to God in prayer, and next to the oldest in a family of ten children, her mother a widow, and all dependent upon the grandfather, she early learned that patience, self-control, efficiency, and unselfishness that characterized her through life and left in her old home at Nutplains, as Mrs. Stowe tells us, traditions like these: “Your mother never spoke an angry word in her life.” “Your mother never told a lie.” And from the husband such a testimony as this: “She experienced resignation, if any one ever did. I never saw the like, so entire, without reservation or shadow of turning. In no exigency was she taken by surprise. She was just there, quiet as an angel from above. I never heard a murmur; and if ever there was a perfect mind as respects submission, it was hers. I never witnessed a movement of the least degree of selfishness; and if there ever was any such thing in the world as disinterestedness, she had it.”
No one reading her history will think that Henry Ward exaggerated when, speaking of her and her influence upon him, he said: “There are few born into this world that are her equals. She was a woman of extraordinary graces and gifts; a woman not demonstrative, with a profound philosophical nature, of a wonderful depth of affection, and with a serenity that was simply charming. From her I received my love of the beautiful, my poetic temperament; from her also I received simplicity and childlike faith in God.”
And again: “My communion with nature arose from the mother in me. Because my mother was an inspired woman, who saw God in nature as really as in the Book, and she bestowed that temperament upon me, and I came gradually to feel that, aside from God as revealed in the past, there was a God with an everlasting present around about me.”
With these elements of a more personal nature also appear certain family traits. As we saw how, from the father’s side, the old anvil was constantly making itself heard in the strong, sturdy qualities of the Beecher stock, so shall we see features from the ancestry on the mother’s side coming to him almost unchanged. The loyalty represented by the oak-tree, and the virtue displayed at Louisburg, will constantly show themselves. Who that has seen him standing, now for the black man in the face of the adverse popular sentiment of his time in obedience to his own convictions of right, now governing his political actions by the same authority, and anon following his religious convictions wherever they led him, can have failed to see, in him, the oak-tree standing in the clover-field with the motto written upon its shield, in letters of light, “Loyalty and Truth”? In his constant advocacy of reform, in his early and strenuous opposition to intemperance, appears “Louisburg” again, written this time, not upon silver, but upon life and character—the Ward and the Foote families showing in him the characteristics they had won.
More than this, probably no lines could better illustrate the New England race-elements, the union of its democracy and its gentry, the sturdy independence of its homes and its native ability in war and peace, its intellectual and its spiritual independence, its quaint humor and its shrewd common sense, than those that united in him from both the parental roots.
He was a natural product of the New England stock, tempered and sweetened by the broader traditions of the more aristocratic blood of the Cavalier, of New England institutions and New England character. And since New England, thus enriched, illustrates the whole land, and by reason of the diffusion of her blood has made her characteristics national, he was a typical American, standing with unusual ability and conscientiousness where every true American feels that he ought to stand—for right and liberty. This, we doubt not, was in part the ground of his national popularity and influence; he was felt to be so thoroughly American. He represented us as do our national colors and our battle-flags, and we were proud of him, grew enthusiastic over him, and men that never saw him loved him. And since these characteristics are but the product of English institutions and the putting forth of Anglo-Saxon tendencies which were always advancing, always protesting against some old abuse, and always seeking the recognition