Tempest-Tossed. Susan Campbell
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original sin — or that humans are born sinful and cannot rise above it. Lyman Beecher’s theology stated that sin is voluntary and that humans are free agents.29 Wilson, a Kentucky native known less for his gentility and more for his pugnacity, may have been acting out of jealousy.30 Lyman Beecher responded to the charges by arguing that he had taught precisely what Wilson taught and that he would prove his theology was scriptural. He pleaded not guilty.
What followed was eight days of what today would seem like esoteric hairsplitting, when the testimony ranged from religious orthodoxy to Lyman’s motives for not publishing more sermons to whether he could be called a liberal Calvinist. At the heart of the discussion — though mostly unspoken — was the tug of modernism and whether theology could evolve and depart from the notion of original sin.31 As hidebound as Lyman Beecher was in regard to daily application of scriptures, he was, by most Presbyterian measures, fairly liberal.
Despite Reverend Wilson’s efforts, on the eighth day Lyman was acquitted. Though both accuser and accused took the trial seriously, Lyman’s associate Calvin Stowe, who would eventually marry Harriet Beecher Stowe, described the proceedings as: “It is all — ‘I say you did’ and ‘I say you didn’t,’ ‘Joe begun at me first.’”32
After the trial, and perhaps in need of some familial shoring up, Lyman gathered all his children at their Ohio home. Given the age differences among the siblings, some of his offspring — including Mary and James — had never met.33 With his children around him, Lyman could revel in his victory, even while his wife was failing.
As difficult as the trial must have been for Lyman Beecher, the transcripts and notes and news reports of the day make it appear that he relished the attention. He proved himself completely in his element as he argued his position; just defense of his faith was precisely what he encouraged from his students at Lane.
But as much as Lyman inspired his students to think — and as beloved as he was by most of his (male) students — the preacher turned a blind eye when it came to the education of his daughters beyond a certain age. Though he was willing to barter for cheap tuition for his daughters when they were young, as they grew older he assumed their education was complete. Yet on a poor minister’s salary, he managed to pay college tuition for all of his sons. Years later, Isabella wrote, “At 16½, just when my brothers began their mental education, mine was finished — except as life’s discipline was added with years & that we shared equally. Till twenty three, their father, poor minister as he was could send them to College & Seminary all six — cost what it might, but never a daughter cost him a hundred dollars a year, after she was sixteen.”34
But if Lyman was not interested in his daughters pursuing degrees, his daughters were vigilant about their own and other young women’s education. In 1833, having hired people to keep her Hartford school going, Catharine opened the Western Female Institute in Cincinnati, and Isabella enrolled as a student and boarded downtown at the school during the week.35 Though as she aged Catharine became more set in her ways, and though they had their share of sisterly arguments, Catharine and her sister Harriet mostly shared the role of principal in Cincinnati. Over time, however, the younger sister found her teaching duties expanding while her role as principal diminished. She despaired in a letter to a friend that teaching took up all her time and left her no time to read or write for amusement.36 Later, Catharine would insist that she’d been asked to open the school, and despite health issues that were plaguing her, she did. As had happened with her Hartford effort, the school soon outgrew its one room, and so Catharine rented a larger building. But, as with her father’s school, funding was always an issue, and she was unable to keep the school going through the economic crash of 1837.37
But it wasn’t just a melted-down economy that affected Catharine’s school. As the Beechers became more controversial in Cincinnati — the Lane Rebels, Lyman’s trial — support for the school began to wane.38
Dark clouds gathered, but the younger children seemed unconcerned. They explored the large beech forest that separated the seminary from the parsonage. They hiked under the trees and practiced their singing and elocution there. The younger the Beecher, the more Walnut Hills seemed to agree with them.
But Harriet Porter Beecher was unable to regain her health. She’d tried to run the Cincinnati household, but relied increasingly on family members as she took to her bed. Even letters from diligent Mary back in Hartford did not brighten her mood.39 Lyman would hint later that the strain of his trial had killed her, but consumption finally took her, at age forty-five, on July 7, 1835.40 She left Isabella her dresses and books, and an entreaty that she take care of her younger brothers.41
This was not the magical Roxanna whose children were left bereft. A few days after Harriet’s death, the Cincinnati newspapers carried a cryptic obituary that was signed simply “C.” The author could have been anyone but was most likely Catharine, who was anxious to get a last dig at her stepmother, a woman she welcomed with letters but never quite warmed to. The obituary included the note that the dead Mrs. Beecher’s virtues “baffled the keen scrutiny of the gossip and the tattler,” and said the woman had thought of her time in the West as a “trial and privation.” And this:
When approaching the presence of a perfect and holy Being, the retrospection of the deficiencies of the past brought such anxiety and dismay that her spirit died within her, and it was not until after the most contrite acknowledgment of all she deemed her failings in duty to others … that her spirit found peace.42
Lyman mourned the death of his second wife, though “with a reservation or two.”43 He would, when speaking of his loss, sometimes confuse Harriet Porter with the much-loved Roxanna. The older children, too, talked about Roxanna as if Harriet Porter had only been a mirage. As he had earlier, Lyman waited about one year and then remarried, this time to Lydia Jackson, a Boston widow who brought children of her own into the union. According to one biographer, Lydia “displayed untiring zeal, supplying in part the lack of pastoral labors necessarily incident to Dr. Beecher’s position as head of the seminary, proving, in these respects, an invaluable auxiliary.”44 In other words, Lydia was perhaps better suited to the role of Lyman’s wife than was Harriet Porter. They had no children together.
Isabella continued her education at Catharine’s school, where she studied geography, arithmetic, Latin, and English grammar.45 When Isabella turned fourteen, Aunt Esther gave her the letter written for her by her mother.46 The sensitive young woman was particularly troubled with the charge that she look out for her younger brothers, Thomas and James. Isabella confessed to Aunt Esther: “I have cried and cried again and again, over that letter of my mother’s that you gave me.”47
She remained in sister Catharine’s seminary, though enrollment was lagging. The school was dealt another blow when Harriet Beecher left her role as teacher/associate principal to marry Calvin Stowe, whom she met as they both mourned the death of his first wife.48
Frantic for funding, Catharine wrote a scathing letter to the Cincinnati newspapers, accusing the town of being backward. The combination of the family’s notoriety and Catharine’s “aggressive manner, New England chauvinism, and transparent social climbing” made fundraising even more difficult.49
Meanwhile, Isabella proved herself to be a capable student — though from 1835 to 1837 her compositions showed an increasing dislike of sister Catharine’s teaching methods. From one note made on a Monday: “ … learned nothing new except some dry facts in Philosophy. Tired of school wish it was vacation … did not study any in the afternoon or evening — went to bed early. Slept soundly — dreamed of long lessons and bad marks.”50
When the Panic of 1837 all but finished the school, Lyman suggested Isabella, age fifteen, was ready to teach and support herself. His suggestion baffled Isabella, who found the thought of teaching to be entirely confounding: “I, who had never been to school in earnest, for two years together in my whole life.”51
Her older siblings — particularly her sisters — feared that Isabella’s natural good looks and bubbly nature would