Tempest-Tossed. Susan Campbell
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Despite the Porter family’s trepidations, from all indications, everyone’s first impressions were favorable. Harriet Porter Beecher, who was every bit as committed to orthodoxy in her religion as was her new husband, seemed pleased with the relative sophistication of her new home.48 On first meeting his stepmother after he’d already gone to bed for the night, Henry Ward Beecher wrote, “I remember well how happy I was. I felt that I had a mother. I felt her kiss, and I heard her voice. I could not distinguish her features, but I knew that she was my mother.”49
Of that first meeting, his sister Harriet wrote:
I was about six years old and slept in the nursery with my two younger brothers. We knew Father was going away somewhere on a journey, and was expected home, and thus the sound of a bustle or disturbance in the house more easily awoke us. We heard Father’s voice in the entry, and started up, crying out as he entered our room, “Why, here’s pa!” A cheerful voice called out from behind him, “And here’s ma!”
A beautiful lady, very fair, with bright blue eyes and soft auburn hair bound round with a black velvet bandeau, came into the room, smiling, eager, and happy-looking, and coming up to our beds, kissed us and told us she loved little children and would be our mother. We wanted forthwith to get up and dressed, but she pacified us with the promise that we should find her in the morning.50
That next morning, Harriet Beecher wrote, “We looked at her with awe.”51
She seemed to us so fair, so delicate, so elegant, that we were almost afraid to go near her. We must have been rough, red-cheeked, hearty country children, honest, obedient, and bashful. She was peculiarly dainty and neat in all her ways and arrangements; and I remember I used to feel breezy and rough and rude in her presence. We felt a little in awe of her, as if she were a strange princess rather than our own mamma; but her voice was very sweet, her ways of speaking and moving very graceful, and she took us up in her lap and let us play with her beautiful hands, which seemed wonderful things, made of pearl, and ornamented with strange rings.52
As for her impression of her new family, Harriet Porter Beecher wrote to her sister: “I never saw so many rosy cheeks and laughing eyes. They began all, the first thing, to tell their dreams, for it seems they have dreamed of nothing else but father’s coming home; and some dreamed he came without me, and some that he brought two mothers.”53 She would write subsequent letters extolling the family’s cheerfulness and health, and the “uncommon intellect” shown by even the smallest of the brood. She was particularly taken with Edward, the third child, and suggested he would one day be a great scholar. She would also express thanks that the children were so self-sufficient. Being without a mother — even for just a year — had pushed Catharine and Mary into the role, and both seemed willing and capable of continuing their motherly duties even after the arrival of their new stepmother. The new Mrs. Beecher found herself called upon only a little, and she displayed her sensitive nature early when her husband tried to read to her Edwards’s “Angry God” sermon. As Lyman read, she stormed from the room, saying, “Dr. Beecher, I shall not listen to another word of that slander on my Heavenly Father!”54
Church life, as well, required little of Harriet Porter. She described in letters church services that relied heavily on singing and reading scriptures aloud. She was impressed with the relationship between Harriet and Henry, sister and brother just two years apart, who were “always hand-in-hand.”55 She did, however, travel with her husband to visit the flock, and she held church teas. She also tried to start a women’s committee. She was heartily impressed with her husband’s stamina.
The family was on the verge of scattering — the boys to college, the girls to marriage — and they held on to one another through their letters. In one, Catharine wrote to Edward of the death of a family cat, Tom Junior, and noted that their sister Harriet was “our chief mourner always at their [the cats’] funerals,” to which Lyman added his concern that “soon none but letters so solid and weighty as to earn their postage will be passing to and fro.” An addition from Catharine reminded Edward that “papa loves to laugh as well as any of us, and is quite as much tickled at nonsense as we are!”56
Soon after he was joined by his new wife, Lyman Beecher’s prodigious energy failed him, and he stepped away from the pulpit to spend a year working the farmland around his Litchfield homestead. The diagnosis was “nervous dyspepsia,” or an upset stomach caused by stress or exhaustion. After a year’s sojourn in the fields, he was back in the pulpit, and traveling at the same hectic pace as before.
About the same time Lyman stepped back into his ministerial duties, Harriet Porter Beecher began having babies, starting in 1818 with Frederick C. Beecher, who would live not quite two years. On June 20, 1820, Catharine wrote brother Edward, then a student at Yale:
“We are all anxious and troubled at home. Frederick had the canker, or scarlet fever, very badly. For two of three days we have despaired of his life.”57
On June 23, Catharine wrote family at Nut Plains that “little Freddy had breathed his last” and that:
were it not for religion, I think mamma would sink, but she is a most eminent Christian, and feels resignation and comfort from above. I wish you could see how beautiful he looks even in death. I think I never beheld any thing earthly so perfect and lovely as his little corpse. His hair curls in beautiful ringlets all over his head, and he looks so natural and unaltered, one would think him in a peaceful slumber. I can not bear to think he must be laid in the grave.58
Harriet, the younger, was taken with the same illness but she recovered.
In January 1822, the house had four boarders, and even with the extra income, the family budget was stretched.59 With the birth of Lyman Beecher’s eighth child imminent, the family sent ten-year-old Harriet Beecher to Nut Plains, to her mother’s homestead. From a family letter describing Roxanna’s family:
These Footes are a people by themselves in their literary accomplishments, their good sense and fine breeding. Their homestead almost talks to you from its very walls of the days gone by. I never felt more sure of spirit companionship of the highest order, and your father thinks few parlors in all the land have gathered a more noble company.60
And while she wintered there, her ever-vigilant big sister Catharine wrote her:
I suppose you will be very glad to hear you have a little sister at home. We have no name for her yet. We all want you at home very much, but hope you are now where you will learn to stand and sit straight, and hear what people say to you, and sit still in your chair, and learn to sew and knit well, and be a good girl in every particular; and if you don’t learn while you are with Aunt Harriet, I am afraid you never will.61
Eventually, the family would settle on the name Isabella — consecrated to God. So tagged, the baby girl entered the frantic, intellectually challenging, and curious world of the Fabulous Beechers.
2
TRAINING TO BE A BEECHER
Childbirth in early America was a dangerous thing. Women gave birth anywhere from five to eight times, and a new mother’s chance of dying during the process was between 1 and 1.5 percent. Extrapolating for the non–math majors, that meant a woman’s chances of dying over the course of her childbearing years could be as high as one in eight.1 If she survived, her child might not. In the early 1800s, there wasn’t the language for birth control.2 You can perhaps see why pregnancy was approached with no small amount of dread.
We know nothing about Isabella’s actual birth, other than it took place on February 22, 1822, but we can take a few educated guesses. Unattended births were rare among people with any kind of social standing. A woman of Harriet Porter’s position might have opted to give birth in the presence of a physician.3 However, with her marriage to Lyman Beecher, Harriet Porter had slipped a few rungs down the socioeconomic ladder, and Isabella’s