Tempest-Tossed. Susan Campbell
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her mind about her new home.8 King, a lawyer, an author, and a member of the Ohio state legislature, may have tried to make his cousin’s transition easier, but bad health continued to dog Harriet Porter.9 In an 1833 letter to her sister, she wrote that she was always sick. A year later, she wrote that she wept night and day for her loved ones, whom she fully intended to never see again.
Though her suffering was most acute, Harriet Porter was not the only Beecher regretting the move. In a letter to her sister Mary, Harriet Beecher wrote that they were all — save for Lyman — quite homesick. That same year, the Beechers started sending one another round-robin letters, so as to include everyone and give everyone a chance to weigh in — and, perhaps, to more tightly tether those who’d moved west to their beloved New England.10
Epidemics notwithstanding, Cincinnati was thriving as the largest town in the West, with the exception of New Orleans. The 1830s saw the city double in size, to a little more than 46,000 by 1840. It boasted banks, a university, a museum, a theater, a bazaar, and hospitals — all of which sprang up in roughly a quarter century.11 The family could have done worse than “Porkopolis,” though the hogs roaming the streets disgusted all but four-year-old James, who once, his sister Harriet wrote, threw his leg over the back of one and rode it down the street.
About a year after they arrived, the family moved to Walnut Hills, then a small town roughly three miles from the seminary, into a comfortable home with wide hallways and open rooms suitable for church and school committee meetings. Surrounding the house was a grove of trees, and at age eighty-five, Isabella could still remember climbing those trees and hanging on for dear life when the wind blew. When her brothers Charles and Henry returned from college and entered Lane, Isabella wrote that they were a “big and happy family” until slavery began to dominate conversations in and around the school.
The abolitionist movement that started in Great Britain had jumped the ocean and was beginning to spread in the United States. In 1829, a Boston printer published a call for “the coloured citizens of the world,” which condemned racism and reminded American citizens about the promise found in the Declaration of Independence.12 Slavery was increasingly characterized by abolitionists as a sin, so the topic would inevitably arise at a seminary, though Lane’s discussions were particularly heated.
Lyman Beecher was ardently antislavery but believed the answer was to send slaves back to Africa, or colonize them. Some adherents in the colonization movement were motivated more by racism than a sense of fairness, and to them, colonization was not so much a way to right a 150-year-old wrong but rather a way to rid the country of Africans. In its beginning, the Ohio Colonization Society, an offshoot of the American Colonization Society, was “guided by growing resentment that freed slaves from southern states were migrating to Ohio and contaminating the social landscape.”13 The society distributed frequent warnings that the influx of freed slaves would soon tip the racial balance in the state to a majority of blacks, and when that occurred, a revolution was just around the corner. The message gained traction in Cincinnati, where the black population was among the state’s largest among urban areas.14
A series of debates held at Lane in February 1834 led many to conclude that slavery was a sin, and therefore needed to be abolished immediately. The debates were held against the wishes of the school faculty.15 Organized by Lane student Theodore D. Weld, who had transferred from the Oneida Institute in New York, the discussion sought to answer the question of whether slavery should be immediately abolished and whether colonization was the Christian stance.16 After Isabella came to the abolition movement, she might have appreciated that Weld not only preached abolition, he also unfailingly supported the rights of women to participate publicly — speaking and praying — at worship services.17 But Isabella would long remember her father’s tearful reaction to what he saw as disloyalty, and she would never quite embrace Weld’s legacy.
Until the Lane debates, abolition was considered the most radical answer to the slavery question. As word began circulating, the debates helped galvanize the country beyond Lane. Lane students, who left behind the notion of colonization in favor of abolition, formed an antislavery society, raised money to support a library for area African Americans, and volunteered to teach classes for free blacks living in Cincinnati. Some Lane students, seeking to better understand their lives, moved in with free black families.18 Fearful that association with such a radical stance would tarnish the school’s reputation — and, more to the point, threaten its ability to raise funds — the school’s executive committee voted to fire one of the abolitionist professors, and it vetoed further slavery discussions.19 Ohio bordered two slave states, and Lane looked “for a large measure of its resources to that portion of American Society with which slavery was incorporated.”20
Lyman was in Boston when the board voted, and when he returned, he could not dissuade about forty of the more outspoken students — Weld and others known as the Lane Rebels — from moving to nearby Oberlin College. Their departure left Lane struggling and Lyman with one of his few public defeats.21 At twelve, Isabella could understand what was going on around her — including the threat the Lane Rebels’ leave-taking posed to her family’s livelihood.
A report published in December 1834 acknowledged that money was tight at Lane, but Easterners and Westerners agreed that “the salvation of our country and the world is intimately connected with the intellectual and moral elevation of the West; and that this school of the prophets, under God, is destined to exert a leading influence in accomplishing this important result.”22
Meanwhile, in a July 1835 letter to his son William, then serving as first pastor of the newly formed Putnam Presbyterian Church in what would later become Zanesville, Ohio, Lyman wrote:
As to abolition, I am still of the opinion that you ought not, and need not, and will not commit yourself as a partisan on either side. The cause is moving in Providence, and by the American Union, and by colonization, and by [Benjamin] Lundy in Texas [who supported both] which is a grand thing, and will succeed, as I believe; and I hope and believe that the Abolitionists as a body will become more calm and less denunciatory, with the exception of a few he-goat men, who think they do God service by butting every thing in the line of their march which does not fall in or get out of the way. They are the offspring of the Oneida denunciatory revivals, and are made up of vinegar, aqua fortis, and oil of vitriol, with brimstone, saltpeter, and charcoal, to explode and scatter the corrosive matter.”23
William, however, was an abolitionist, although he may not have been as firmly committed as his wife, Katherine Edes Beecher.24 On this and other topics, with the lone exception of Henry Ward, the Beecher women — both Beechers by birth and Beechers by marriage — tended to be more outspokenly radical than the men.25
Isabella would later remember her father in tears as he pleaded with the students to temper their talk, “for he loved the young men as if they were his own sons…. I can see him now, joining them in the little log house just opposite ours — pleading, remonstrating, with tears and almost with groans. I was but a child, but was in such sympathy with his distress that I could never forgive the young men for departing from such a loving guide and friend.”26
There were other cracks in the life Lyman was trying to build for his family in Ohio. Despite Lyman Beecher’s relatively straitlaced theology, his views were evolving from strict Calvinism, and that did not endear him to a Cincinnati body already feeling besieged by the abolition movement.27 Lyman’s official siding with the board over the Lane Rebels did not protect him from rigorous examination by his enemies, and in June 1835 he was put on trial for heresy, hypocrisy, and slander. Isabella would remember her brother Henry making jokes about their father’s tormentors.28 She wrote in her Connecticut magazine piece: “Well do I remember sitting in the choir gallery of the church listening to the comments of the young men and maidens led by my brother Henry…. It seemed a strange thing to me, even then, that ministers of the Gospel should be found fighting such a good man as my father, and I have never changed my mind.”
Lyman’s chief accuser, Rev. Joshua L. Wilson, of the First Presbyterian Church of Cincinnati, seemed to have had his doubts about