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                               BIOGRAPHY
                                   OF
                        REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER.

[Illustration: Henry Ward Beecher]

                              A BIOGRAPHY
                                   OF
                        REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER.

                                   BY
                WM. C. BEECHER AND REV. SAMUEL SCOVILLE,

                              ASSISTED BY
                        MRS. HENRY WARD BEECHER.

                               NEW YORK:
                     CHARLES L. WEBSTER & COMPANY.

                                  ---

                                 1888.

                             COPYRIGHTED BY
                     CHARLES L. WEBSTER & COMPANY,

                                  1888
                        (_All rights reserved._)

                      JENKINS & McCOWAN, PRINTERS,
                   224, 226 and 228 Centre St, N. Y.

                        =To Our Mother=,

        WHOSE FAITHFUL LOVE AND PATIENT SELF-DEVOTION COMFORTED

                  AND STRENGTHENED OUR BELOVED FATHER

                DURING TROUBLES, BLESSED AND ENCOURAGED

                           HIM IN PROSPERITY,

                 A TRUE COMPANION AND DEVOTED HELPMEET,

                  WE DEDICATE THIS STORY OF HIS LIFE.

                               CONTENTS.

                                -------

                              CHAPTER I.

                                                                PAGE

   Ancestry—Beecher—Ward—Foote—The Anvil—The                   17-29
     Oak—Courtship and Marriage of Lyman Beecher and
     Roxana Foote—Home at East Hampton, Long
     Island—Removal to Litchfield, Connecticut

                              CHAPTER II.

   Litchfield—Situation—Natural Features—Early                 30-45
     Settlers—Social and Moral
     Advantages—Patriotism—North Street described—The
     Beecher Home—Birth of Henry Ward—The Times at Home
     and Abroad—His Birth-Mark

                             CHAPTER III.

   Early Glimpses—Recollections of the Mother—Going to         46-71
     School at Ma’am Kilbourne’s—His First
     Letter—District School—The Coming of the New
     Mother—His First Ride on Horseback—A Merry
     Household—Fishing Excursions—Minister’s
     Wood-Spell—Saturday Night—Going to Meeting—The
     Puritan Sabbath—The Cold of Litchfield
     Hill—Rats—Work—The Catechism—Formative
     Influences—Summing Up

                              CHAPTER IV.

   Boyhood—Sent to School at Bethlehem—The Widow               72-81
     Ingersoll’s—Failure—A Champion—Sent to Catharine
     Beecher’s School in Hartford—Humorous
     Incidents—Religious Experience

                              CHAPTER V.

   Boston—Home Atmosphere—Various Experiences—Ethics           82-92
     rubbed in by a Six-pound Shot—Discontent—Makes up
     his Mind to go to Sea—To Study Navigation—Picture of
     his Life in Boston

                              CHAPTER VI.

   School-Life at Mount                                       93-108
     Pleasant—Mathematics—Elocution—Testimony of
     Classmates—Religious Experiences—Troubles—A Romantic
     Friendship—Another Kind—Letter of Reminiscence—A
     Royal School-Boy

                             CHAPTER VII.

   Amherst College—Private Journal—Testimony of              109-135
     Classmates—Tutor’s Delight—Begins his Anti-Slavery
     Career—Spiritual Darkness—Engagement—Letters of his
     Mother—Experiences in Teaching School—First
     Sermons—Lecturing—His Reading—The Record

                             CHAPTER VIII.

   Lane Seminary—Dr. Beecher Called—Home at Walnut           136-156
     Hills—Amusing Incidents—Family Meeting—Death of Mrs.
     Beecher—Extracts from Journal—First Mention of
     Preaching in the West—Experience in Ecclesiastical
     Matters—Despondency—Meeting of Synod—Influences of
     the Times—Revulsion—A Rift along the Horizon—“Full
     iolly Knight”

                              CHAPTER IX.

   Call to Preach—License—Examination by Miami               157-180
     Presbytery—Refusal to Subscribe to Old
     School—Ordination by Oxford Presbytery—Visit
     East—Marriage—Housekeeping

                              CHAPTER X.

   The New Field—Growth of Influence—Social Life—The         181-209
     Secret of Effective Preaching—Editorial
     Labors—Lectures to Young Men—Call to
     Brooklyn—Departure

                              CHAPTER XI.

   Invitation to come East—Call to Plymouth                  210-224
     Church—Friendly Misgivings—Plainly Outlining his
     Views—Early Success—Plymouth Burned—Preaching in the
     Tabernacle

                             CHAPTER XII.

   Plymouth Church—The New Building—Sabbath                  225-232
     Service—Prayer-Meeting—Weekly Lecture—Socials—Church
     Polity—The Pastor’s Policy

                             CHAPTER XIII.

   Beginning of the Great Battle—Five Great                  233-270
     Eras—Compromise Measures of 1850—“Shall We
     Compromise”—The Fugitive Slave Law denounced—Right
     of Free Speech defended—Commercial Liberty—Fighting
     Caste—Liberty of the Pulpit defended—Quickness of
     Retort—Sentiment of the Times—Reaction—Visit of
     Kossuth—Election of 1852—The Parker
     Controversy—Degraded into Liberty—John
     Mitchel—Garrison—Close of this Era

                             CHAPTER XIV.

   The Battle renewed—Repeal of the Missouri Compromise      271-291
     proposed—The Struggle in Congress—Mr. Beecher’s
     Appeals—The Battle lost in Congress is transferred
     to the Territories—Forces engaged—Kansas War—Dred
     Scott Decision—Mr. Beecher’s Defence of
     Kansas—“Beecher’s Bibles”—Charles Sumner attacked in
     the Senate—The Fremont Campaign—The Dog Noble

                              CHAPTER XV.

   Remarkable Experiences—The Edmonson Sisters—Pinky and     292-308
     her Freedom-Ring—Slave Auction in Plymouth
     Church—John Brown—The Wrong and Right Way—Election
     of Abraham Lincoln—Secession—Buchanan’s Fast

                             CHAPTER XVI.

   War Begun—Firing upon Fort Sumter—“The American Eagle     309-338
     as you want it”—Death of Col. Ellsworth—Equips his
     Sons—Personal Feeling yields to Patriotism—His House
     a Store-house of Military Supplies—Sends a Regiment
     as his Substitute—Our National Flag—The Camp, its
     Dangers and Duties—Bull Run—Becomes Editor of the
     _Independent_—Salutatory—The _Trent_ Affair—Fight,
     Tax—Soldiers or Ferrets—Characteristics as an
     Editor—One Nation, one Constitution, one Starry
     Banner—McClellan Safe, and Richmond too—Mildly
     carrying on War—The Root of the Matter—The only
     Ground—A Queer Pulpit—President’s Proclamation of
     Emancipation—Let come what will—Close of the Third
     Era

                             CHAPTER XVII.

   First Voyage to England—Extracts from Diary—Warwick       339-349
     Castle—Stratford-on-Avon—The Skylark—Oxford—Bodleian
     Library—London—Old-time Sadness—Paris—Catch-Words
     from Diary—Effect of Picture-Gallery—The Louvre—His
     Return

                            CHAPTER XVIII.

   Church and Steamboat—Jenny Lind—Hospitality—Colonel       350-395
     Pertzel—The Family—Twins—Medicine—Giving Counsel—For
     the Sailor—An Absurd Story
     contradicted—Salisbury—Trouting—Death of Alfred and
     Arthur—Letters to his Daughter at
     School—Lenox—Equivocal Honors declined—The
     Pulpit—“Plymouth Collection”—“Shining Shore“—A
     Church Liturgy—Courting with his Father’s old
     Love-letters—1857 a Year of Trial—Matteawan—Visit to
     Litchfield—1858 a Year of Harvest—Revival
     Meetings—Hospitality of Plymouth Church—Courtesy to
     Errorists—New Organ—Peekskill—Letters to his
     Daughter abroad—Marriage of his
     Daughter—Lecturing—Title of D. D. declined—Flowers
     in Church—Christian Liberty in the use of the
     Beautiful—His two Lines of Labor

                             CHAPTER XIX.

   Visit to England in 1863—The Need of Rest—Condition of    396-407
     Affairs at Home—Arrival at Liverpool—Refusal to
     Speak—Visit to the Continent—Reception by the King
     of Belgium—Civil War discussed—News of
     Victories—Return to England

                              CHAPTER XX.

       Facing the Mob in Manchester—Glasgow—Edinburgh—Desperate
   Attempts to break Mr. Beecher down at                     408-442
     Liverpool—Victory in London

                             CHAPTER XXI.

   Close of the War—Distrust of the                          443-456
     Administration—Kindlier Feelings after Mr. Beecher’s
     Return from England—Growing Confidence—Intimacy with
     Secretary Stanton—Fort Sumter—Lee’s
     Surrender—Lincoln’s Death

                             CHAPTER XXII.

   Reconstruction—Mr. Beecher favors speedy                  457-478
     Readmission—Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Convention at
     Cleveland—The “Cleveland Letters” cause great
     Excitement

                            CHAPTER XXIII.

   The “Silver Wedding” of Plymouth Church—Children’s        479-487
     Day—Services in the Church—Reunion of old
     Members—Historical Reminiscences—Dr. Storrs’s
     Tribute

                             CHAPTER XXIV.

   The Conspiracy—Relations with Mr. Bowen—Disputes and      488-522
     Arbitration—Theodore Tilton’s Early Promise and
     Intimacy with Mr. Beecher—Bowen’s Ill-Will and
     Tilton’s Malice—Tilton discharged from _Independent_
     and Brooklyn _Union_—Tripartite Agreement—Moulton
     and Tilton Conspire to Blackmail Mr. Beecher—Tilton
     consults Dr. Storrs

                             CHAPTER XXV.

   After-Effects—Charges against Tilton—Advisory             523-536
     Council—Investigating Committee called by Mr.
     Beecher—Its Report—Dropping Mr. Moulton—Council
     called by Plymouth Church

                             CHAPTER XXVI.

   After-Effects of the Conspiracy—Calling Council of        537-563
     1876—Principle of Selection—Mr. Beecher cautions his
     Church—Bowen Reappears; Proposes a Secret
     Tribunal—Mr. Beecher’s Reply—Bowen Dropped by
     Plymouth Church—Deliverance of Council sustaining
     Plymouth—Mr. Beecher’s Persecutors Denounced—Special
     Tribunal

                            CHAPTER XXVII.

   Rest and renewed Activity—Lecturing Tours—Resignation     564-570
     from the Congregational Association—Boston
     Criticisms

                            CHAPTER XXVIII.

   Attacking Corrupt Judges—Interest in Political            571-587
     Questions—Advocating Arthur’s Renomination—Opposing
     Blaine—Supporting Cleveland—Campaign of 1884—After
     the Battle

                             CHAPTER XXIX.

   A Preacher—His Place—His Training—His Estimate of the     588-613
     Work—Defects—Effectual Call—Upon Drawing an
     Audience—His Theory—Preparation—Results—A
     Theologian—His
     Orthodoxy—Evolution—Ordinances—Christian
     Unity—Sectarianism—Peacemaker

                             CHAPTER XXX.

   Love of the Country—Communion with Nature—Farming at      614-638
     Salisbury—Lenox—Matteawan—The Peekskill Farm

                             CHAPTER XXXI.

   Home Life—Love of Children—His Method of Training and     639-664
     Education—Formation of Library and Art
     Collection—Personal Traits

                            CHAPTER XXXII.

   1886—England Revisited—Speaking in the City               665-683
     Temple—Westminster Abbey—Lecturing through Great
     Britain—Addressing the Theological Students at City
     Temple—“Life of Christ”—Sickness—Rest

   Appendix                                                      687

                             ILLUSTRATIONS.

                                                                   PAGE

   1. Anvil and Oak Stump                                            18

   2. Foote Coat-of-Arms                                             21

   3. Church in which Lyman Beecher preached, in                     28
        East Hampton, L. I.

   4. Beecher Residence at Litchfield                                39

   5. Room in which Mr. Beecher was born                             43

   6. Elms and Well which mark the Site of the                       45
        “Beecher House” in Litchfield

   7. Facsimile of the first Letter of Mr. Beecher                   50

   8. Ingersoll House                                                73

   9. Stairs in Catharine Beecher’s House in                        111
        Hartford

  10. Mr. Beecher at the time of his Marriage                       168

  11. Mrs. Beecher at the time of her Marriage                      169

  12. Church at Indianapolis                            Facing page 182

  13. Mr. Beecher’s House at Indianapolis               ”     ”     202

  14. Mr. Beecher and his Father at time of Call to     ”     ”     210
        Brooklyn,

  15. Pinky’s Freedom-Ring                                          295

  16. Mr. Beecher in 1850                                           367

  17. Mr. Beecher at the Close of the War                           445

  18. Mr. Beecher and his Sister, Mrs. H. E. B.                     525
        Stowe

  19. Cottage at Peekskill                                          619

  20. Old Apple-Tree                                                621

  21. Mr. Beecher on his Farm                                       625

  22. House at Peekskill                                            631

  23. Hall in New House at Peekskill                                633

  24. Mr. and Mrs. Beecher at the time of Visit to                  667
        England in 1886

  25. Lying in State in Plymouth Church                             679

                                PREFACE.

A few months prior to his death our father undertook the preparation of
his Autobiography. This was earnestly encouraged by his family, who
shared with the public the desire that he should tell the tale of his
life in his own words, giving those pictures of his inner self, the
impressions made on him by his varying experiences, that he alone could
give, and which, to a large extent, he alone knew. Confiding and
free-spoken as he was in his joys, in his griefs he withdrew within
himself, bearing in patient silence a load of sorrow unknown even to
those nearest to him. But it was not to be. He had only jotted down a
rough outline of his plan, and written a part of an intermediate
chapter, when he laid down his pen for a little rest, never to be
resumed again.

In his contract with our publishers but a single volume of not less than
six hundred pages was contemplated. Unconscious of its magnitude, we
undertook to complete the contract. Accepting the limitations of a
single volume, we began to collect the necessary material, and, when too
late to change the form of the work, discovered that two volumes would
hardly contain the history as it opened up to us, so closely interwoven
has his life been with the nation’s history, and so full of important
incidents. In the work of condensation, to bring our story within the
space prescribed, we found it necessary to omit many of his letters,
hoping that in the not far-distant future we might publish a
supplemental volume containing all of his important correspondence.

The book before us we have sought, as far as possible, to make
autobiographic, telling the tale in our father’s words; happily the many
letters furnished us by friends, or retained in the family, his public
writings and utterances, supplemented by the many personal reminiscences
which he gave us at various times, has enabled us to do so to a large
extent.

We are fully conscious of the imperfect manner in which we have woven
these quotations into our story; the ordinary writer who attempts to
connect with his words those glowing sentences white-hot with his fiery
indignation against slavery, or his eloquent appeal to the English
public for fair-dealing, or the brilliant play of wit and fancy in his
more humorous utterances, can hope, at the most, to give but a
respectable background that may aid by contrast.

We have sought to make this book a truthful history from the beginnings
of his life, through boyhood, manhood, and ripened age, to the end,
omitting no important period, though passing innumerable incidents.

A man loving peace, he reached peace only through war. From his early
manhood he was called to meet in deadly combat the great sins of the
nation. Through his life, at different times, he met and overcame bitter
and deadly assaults made upon him.

In our narration of these events we have had no revenge to gratify nor
theory to maintain. We have tried to give only facts, omitting
deductions or conclusions, leaving each reader to draw his own
inferences. If parts of our narrative bear hardly on any, it is only the
pressure of the facts which cannot be suppressed in any fearless,
truthful portrayal of our father’s life. We do not make them; we merely
state them.

We would acknowledge our indebtedness to the many friends who have
kindly furnished letters and reminiscences, but especially to our
mother, whose memory, running back along the paths they travelled for so
many years together, has given to us much that never would otherwise
have been known.

If our readers get from a perusal of these pages a tithe of the comfort
and inspiration which we have obtained from their preparation, we shall
feel that our work has not been in vain.

If they can see something of the fearlessness for right, the patience
under unjust suffering, the inextinguishable love for fellow-men, and
the abiding faith in God, that has been revealed by a study of his life
even to us, who knew him best, we shall be satisfied.

                                                    W. C. BEECHER,
                                                    SAMUEL SCOVILLE.

BROOKLYN, March 12, 1888.

                               CHAPTER I.

Ancestry—Beecher—Ward—Foote—The Anvil—The Oak—Courtship and Marriage of
    Lyman Beecher and Roxana Foote—Home at East Hampton, Long
    Island—Removal to Litchfield, Connecticut.

Henry Ward Beecher used to say that the first thing for a man to do, if
he would succeed in life, is to “choose a good father and mother to be
born of.” He himself was eminently wise, or fortunate, as the case may
be, in this matter.

“My earthly life,” he says, “was given me by two of the best folks that
ever lived on earth.” His father, Lyman Beecher, was one of the leading
preachers, reformers, and controversialists of his day. Sturdy in body
and mind, full of sensibility, aflame with enthusiasm, devoted to the
highest aims and utterly unselfish in life, a Christian in whom deep
spirituality and strong common sense were happily blended, he was just
the man to transmit excellent qualities to his children; a father to be
enjoyed while living, and to be remembered with love and reverence after
his death.

Of him his son says: “While he was eloquent and among the foremost
speakers of his day, I remember particularly that I never heard from him
a word of uncharitableness, nor saw a symptom of envy or jealousy, or
aught else but the most enthusiastic love of men, and of young men and
young ministers; and knowing him in the household, I have yet to know
another person that was so devoid of the inferior feelings and so
eminent in the topmost feelings of human nature.”

Lyman’s father’s name was David, a well-read, clear-headed man, with
decided opinions upon the questions of the day; one with whom Roger
Sherman delighted, upon his return from Congress, to talk over the
business of the session and discuss public affairs. He kept college
students as boarders, that he might enjoy their conversation, and made
himself proficient in many of their studies. Of him his son said: “If he
had received a regular education he would have been equal to anybody.”
He was both blacksmith and farmer, and had the reputation of “raising
the nicest rye and making the best hoes in New England.”

[Illustration: The Anvil and Oak Stump.]

Lyman Beecher’s mother was a Lyman, a woman “of a joyous, sparkling,
hopeful temperament.” Her grandfather was a Scotchman, thus giving a
little Gaelic blood to the veins of her descendants. In his
autobiography Lyman Beecher says: “She died of consumption two days
after I was born. I was a seven-months child, and when the woman that
attended on her saw what a puny thing I was, and that the mother could
not live, she thought it useless to attempt to keep me alive. I was
actually wrapped up and laid aside. But after a while one of the women
thought she would look and see if I were living, and, finding I was,
concluded to wash and dress me, saying: ‘It’s a pity he hadn’t died with
his mother.’ So you see it was but by a hair’s-breadth I got a foothold
in this world.” He was taken in charge by “Aunt Benton” and brought up
on his uncle Lot Benton’s farm in North Guilford, where farm-work and
farm-fare made him strong.

Their intention was to make a farmer of him; but the intolerable
slowness of an ox-team, in ploughing fifteen acres of summer fallow
three times over in a single season, so disgusted the lad that he became
restless. His uncle saw it, and upon consultation with the father they
decided to send him to school to prepare for Yale College, which was
accordingly done. He often said, “Oxen sent me to college.”

David’s father’s name was Nathaniel. He was also a blacksmith, and the
anvil of both father and son stood upon the stump of that old oak under
which John Davenport preached his first sermon to the New Haven Colony.
He married a Sperry, “a pious woman,” whose mother was a Roberts from
Forlallt, Cardiganshire, Wales. From her, his great great-grandmother,
came the fervid Welsh blood with which Henry Ward was always so well
pleased.

Joseph was the father of Nathaniel. His father’s name was John, of whom
tradition says that he was one of those who in the fall of 1637
accompanied Samuel Eaton in his explorations for a suitable location for
the colony of John Davenport, that had just come over and was then
staying at Boston; and that he was one of the very few men who lived
through the winter in the poor hut that had been built at “Quinnipiack,”
New Haven, that they might pre-empt the territory and be in readiness to
welcome the colony in the following spring.

He was the only son of Hannah Beecher, whose husband, born in Kent,
England, died just before the colony sailed. She was about to abandon
the enterprise, but, being a midwife and likely to be of service to the
youthful colony, they promised her her husband’s share in the town plot
if she would come. They kept their word, and it was in her lot that the
historic oak just mentioned stood.

Her business seems not to have been remarkably lucrative, for at her
death her estate inventoried only £55 5s. 6d.

One earlier mention of the family was found by Mr. Beecher in the
British Museum during his visit to England in 1863, and copied in his
diary:

“Visitation of Kent, 16,279 Brit. Museum.

“Henry Beecher, alderman and sheriff of London 1570, ob’t 1571.”

Apparently of more than the average intellectual ability of their class,
there was one feature in which the men whom we have described markedly
excelled—namely, in their physical strength. The standard of measurement
was peculiar to those early times, and may not be as well understood by
us; yet it even now conveys the idea of great stalwartness. David, it
was said, could lift a barrel of cider and carry it into the cellar;
Nathaniel, his father, was not quite as strong, yet he could throw a
barrel of cider into a cart; while Joseph exceeded them all, for he
could lift the barrel and drink out of the bung-hole. Of Henry, the
sheriff, no description has been found.

There was one especial feature of degeneracy in these modern days,
compared with the good old times of the fathers, over which Henry Ward,
when Mrs. Beecher was just within earshot, moaned and groaned. His
grandfather, he said, had five wives, his father had three, but such was
the meagreness of these penurious times in which he lived, and the
persistence of the Bullard blood, that he saw no chance for himself to
have more than one. But afterwards, lest she should feel hurt at his
raillery, he writes her with many expressions of affection, in a letter
dated March 31, 1872: “It has always been a shadow over the future to
fear that I should walk alone the few remaining years of my life, for
alone I shall be if you go from me. In jest we have often spoken of
other connections. But such a thing is the remotest of possibilities.
Should you go no one would ever take your place.”

Such was the ancestry selected on the father’s side. Six generations,
without question, are known to us, reaching from the hills of
Litchfield, in Connecticut, to the chalk-cliffs of Kent, England. For
that distance we can trace the family stream up to its sources in the
great body of the English common people, in that county most
characteristic of England, where the Roman had first struggled with the
Briton, where the “free-necked men,” under Hengist and Horsa, had first
made a lodgment on English soil, and near which was Hastings and the
fields of the Norman conquest, and where, perhaps more than in any other
county, mingled those different strains of blood, Briton, Roman, Saxon,
Northmen, Scots, and Picts, out of which has come England’s strength and
England’s greatness. We find all of them of the yeomanry, all of them
honest, useful, God-fearing men, fit to be the progenitors of one who
delighted in nothing more than in his common experiences with common
people, and valued nothing more highly than their confidence and
friendship.

Nor would it be difficult to find in the sturdy independence and quaint
humor of these men of the anvil and the plough, the origin of much of
that robust and humorous manliness which made Henry Ward Beecher so
conspicuous in his day and generation.

His power to strike heavy blows and to hit the nail on the head was
partly inherited, and that anvil-ring of the fathers has been often
heard in these latter days under his sledge-hammer strokes. If the iron
were not hot, he heated it by striking, and sparks flew, and men’s
hearts and minds were moulded and welded before he was done.

[Illustration: Foote Coat-of-Arms]

More than this, there appears in him something of the love of the
“shield-game” and the “sword-play” of those earlier generations that
were “at heart fighters,” and something also of the sadness and heroism
which led them to say, “Each man of us shall abide the end of his
life-work; let him that may, work his doomed deeds ere death come.”

On the mother’s side the selection was somewhat different. While we find
no more sterling qualities, there is in this line a higher social
position, more culture, a broader training in public affairs, both civil
and military, and what with some may appear of still greater importance,
a coat-of-arms given as a special mark of royal gratitude.

Roxana Foote had gentle blood in her veins. She could trace her
genealogy on the father’s side back through Nathaniel Foote, who came
into Connecticut with Hooker’s company in 1636, to James Foote, an
officer in the English army, who aided King Charles to conceal himself
in the “Royal Oak” and was knighted for his loyalty. As the old primer
has it:

                  “It was the tree, the old oak-tree,
                   Which saved his royal majesty.”

The tree stood in a field of clover, and the Foote 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 of some
right—now at Runnymede among the barons, and now at Westminster among
the Commons; now taking up the question of negro-slavery, and now the
Irish question; always hopeful, expectant, progressive—and America is
but, as he claimed, “the better England transplanted,” and he but “an
Englishman from a broader England,” a continental instead of an insular
one, he was hailed by all the English-speaking people as belonging to
them as do King Alfred and Shakspere.

As we go on we shall find many other influences at work—influences of
nature, of books, of college and profession; but thus early we can see
that, more than of any and all the rest, Henry Ward Beecher was the
product of New England parentage, full-veined with English traditions
and race characteristics.

The courtship of Lyman Beecher and Roxana Foote took place in 1798. It
was marked by the interpenetration of religious sentiment and earthly
love, and was a true preparation for home-making, and of such a home as
should help to form the remarkable personality of H. W. Beecher.

The letters that passed between them during this year give evidence of
the strong love of those who, while having still upon them the dew of
their youth, have each found in the other the chosen mate—a love than
which earth has no more influential nor beautiful thing to give. They
also show us the two akin in intellectual powers and pursuits, and
equally enjoying the treasures which the world of letters opened to
them. But most prominent of all matters referred to in these letters are
religious questions and personal religious experiences. They revolve
around “the evidences” and similar subjects with an absorption of
interest that must seem almost incomprehensible to modern lovers. In the
perfect and unrestrained communion of heart with heart these two speak
of the sweet and wonderful experiences that they have enjoyed from the
presence of the Lord, share their common hopes and anticipations of the
coming glory of the Redeemer’s kingdom, and strive to help one another
to a better understanding of the best things of God. Such thoughts and
efforts as these undoubtedly went far toward laying the foundation of
that “intimacy that existed throughout the whole range of their being,”
and for that deep and unswerving regard and confidence which each
cherished for the other until death. She rested upon him, and he always
looked upon her as intellectually and morally the stronger and better
portion of himself. The very differences in their nature and education
contributed to this large and beautiful unity and confidence. While
resembling each other in many things, in others they were the
complements of each other. He was quick and impulsive, she, perfectly
serene and self-poised. He was logical, she was intuitive as well. He
was of the Independents, she was an Episcopalian. From such a union, so
sincere and broad, we may expect a happy home.

Judging from these letters, we should say also that whenever these two
shall build their home they will build it strong and high. Not only will
love be there, with all its attractions, and intellect with its stimulus
and power, but the grand things of heaven will be builded into it. And
wherever it shall be established, whether by the sea-shore at East
Hampton or among the hills of Litchfield, it will have a broad horizon;
it will look out upon something wider and deeper than the sea and higher
than the mountains. The high things of God will always be kept in view;
His broad, deep, measureless purposes will be held within the range of
its contemplation, and His presence will be felt in shaping its policy
and in giving vitality to its atmosphere.

From such a home we shall expect children that shall have power in the
world.

They were married at Nutplains, September 19, 1799.

“Roxana’s friends were all present and all my folks from New Haven.” ...
“Nobody ever married more heart and hand than we.” Then came the packing
up; “the candle-stand, bureau, clothing, bedding, linen, and stuffs
generally,” and the going over by sloop to Long Island.

Their life in East Hampton, Long Island, was that of two who believed,
without one shadow of doubt, in their call of God, and who took up their
work, not only with the firm grasp of duty, but with the enthusiasm of
devout, self-sacrificing love. Their faith was tested by his
long-continued sickness, by the death of one of their children, and by
the numerous discouragements of a country minister; but it stood the
test, deepening and brightening under trial.

It was a barren place to which they had come, but Lyman Beecher brought
such vigorous faith and added to it such enthusiastic labors, now in the
home church, now in the school-houses of the surrounding districts, and
now among the Indians at Montauk Point, that he made the whole district
fruitful. The field was a narrow one, but by the interest awakened by
his sermons, especially the one upon duelling called forth by the death
of Alexander Hamilton from the pistol of Aaron Burr, he broadened it
until his parish stretched across the Atlantic.

[Illustration: Church in which Rev. Lyman Beecher preached, in East
Hampton, L. I.]

The wants of a young family made some effort necessary to eke out the
meagre salary of four hundred dollars, and a school for girls was
decided upon, to be kept by Mrs. Beecher. It was successful in every
respect but financially, and moderately so in that; but it did not bring
the relief that was sought, and there came a necessity to change for a
field where sufficient salary could be had to support the family without
the harassments of other and unpastoral labors.

A marked providence, as it seemed to Mr. Beecher, opened the way to his
preaching on trial in Litchfield, Connecticut. He made a good
impression; the people were unanimous and eager in their call; the
Presbytery gave its consent; and now, without a doubt that it is
according to the will of God, the decision is made, and the home which
had first been planted within the sound of the ocean surf at East
Hampton, Long Island, in 1799, was transplanted to the quiet inland
village of Litchfield in 1810.

                              CHAPTER II.

Litchfield—Situation—Natural Features—Early Settlers—Social and Moral
    Advantages—Patriotism—North Street Described—The Beecher Home—Birth
    of Henry Ward—The Times at Home and Abroad—His Birth-Mark.

As Henry Ward was perfectly satisfied with the parents that bore him, so
he was with the place in which he was born. “Surely old Litchfield,” he
says, “was a blessed place for one’s birth and childhood. Although there
were no mountains, there were hills, the oldest-born of mountains, high,
round, and innumerable. Great trees there were, full of confidences with
the wind that chastised them in winter and kissed and caressed them all
the summer.”

The hills referred to were “Prospect” and “Mount Tom” on the west,
“Chestnut Hill” on the east, and others like them but unnamed—the “high,
round, and innumerable” ones of which he speaks, and which together
formed, with their sloping sides and valleys between, that broad and
irregular plateau of elevated land, extending for miles on either side,
in the midst of which the village of Litchfield is situated. A country
of hills, with that wide and picturesque horizon which only such a
landscape can furnish, where the irregular outline appears as walls and
watch-towers for the protection of the home territory, with here and
there an open door, through which the imagination of youth or the feet
of maturer years may pass out into the great world of sunshine or of
cloud beyond.

Litchfield Hill itself, on which the village stands, is more than a
thousand feet above sea-level, “high and broad-backed,” and belongs,
with all its fellows, to the Green Mountain range, which, beginning near
the Gulf of St. Lawrence, sweeps in an irregular curve to the seaboard
at Long Island Sound, the back-bone of this great New England peninsula.

High enough to be breezy and healthy, but not so high as to be
unfertile, and sloping to the south, it afforded then, as now, all the
inducements for residence which sun, soil, pure air, and a beautiful
landscape could furnish.

Lakes, without which no landscape is perfect, were added: Little Pond to
the southwest, and Big Bantam Lake beyond, were the ones that were
visible from the village, out of a large number that can be found in the
township; but the Sawmill Pond, where Henry Ward caught his first fish,
with an alder-stick for a pole and a bent pin for a hook—caught it so
thoroughly that it was dashed in pieces upon the rocks behind him—has
disappeared with the tearing away of the dam that held it.

Brooks ran down between the hills and sang their way through the
meadows, each one offering some new feature to the landscape, and each a
field of new discovery for inquisitive youth.

Woods, made up of every variety of tree and shrub native to our
latitude, where nuts grew and all kinds of small game abounded, where
crows and now and then a hen-hawk built their nests, were in easy reach
upon the slopes of the hills both to the west and east. Ledges of rock
to the north were the lair of wildcats, a vermin so numerous
seventy-five years ago as to be a serious pest to the farmers; and stone
walls, where woodchucks retreated from the clover-fields and thought
themselves safe, were the usual division-fences for the fields.

There were other things that were equally pleasing to a boy’s fancy, and
perhaps equally influential in his education. The lakes, streams, and
forests of the town had been the favorite fishing and hunting ground of
the Indians; arrow-heads were occasionally picked up on the lake shore
or turned up by the ploughshare upon the hillside; and, best of all,
Mount Tom was one of the series of stations where blazed the
signal-fires which the Indians of this region built to warn their
brethren of the whole territory between the Housatonic and Naugatuck
rivers of the approach of their enemies, the fierce Mohawks.

Litchfield, in short, was the paradise of a birth-place for any boy. It
was paradise, school-house, gymnasium, church, and cathedral to Henry
Ward Beecher. In it he experienced his sweetest pleasures, learned his
best lessons, gained control of his powers, and offered his first
worship. He breathed its pure air, climbed its rocks, wandered in its
woods, wrestled with its winter storms, and in this way laid the
foundation for that superb health for which he was remarkable through
life.

With the hunger and inquisitiveness of a growing boy, he searched
nature’s storehouse of fruits and nuts, which opens with the wintergreen
plums and squaw-berries of the melting snow-time of spring, and
continues, a house of plenty for all that know her secrets—partridges,
squirrels, and boys—until the snow covers the ground in December, and so
gained that habit of investigation into the things of nature, and of
close observation, that distinguished him ever after.

He lay on the ground and looked up into the blue sky and the moving
tree-tops for hours together, and listened to the voices of spring-time
and eventide, and in this way, as he tells us, received the first
distinct religious impressions that he remembered. His nature, which
seemed closed almost to the verge of stupidity to the rules of syntax
and the answers in the Westminster Catechism, was wide open and
receptive to all the processes and influences of nature around him. He
drank them in, and they became not only a vast storehouse of facts and
images to which he resorted in after-life for illustrations, but, even
more than that, a very part of himself. The tree that so often appeared
in his sermons was made from those up whose trunks he had climbed, in
whose shade he had lain, and to the whisperings of whose leaves he had
listened in boyhood. The spring which so often served in illustrating
spiritual truths was but the description of those that burst out from
the foot of Chestnut or of Prospect Hill, and the flowers so frequently
referred to in the pulpit or in private conversation were such as he had
grown familiar with by the roadside, in the meadows or the forests of
his country home. The moving of the great cloud-shadows across the
fields of Litchfield, the blue of its skies, the reddening of its
mornings and the gold of its sunsets, the flash of its sunlight upon the
lake, its wealth of apple-blossoms, the exquisite beauty of its violets
hidden away in fence-corners, the grace of its elm-branches, the
ruggedness of its oaks, the strength of its rocks, the soft catkins of
its willows, its meadow flower-garden of clover, daisy, and buttercup,
the gorgeousness of its forests in autumn, the gurgle of its brooks, the
song of its birds, the plaintive voices of its twilight, the gentle
breathings of its August winds and the fierce rattle of its December
storms, were all absorbed by his receptive nature and continually
reappeared in his writings and talk of after-years. They added the grace
and beauty native to them to all that he wrote or spoke, and were in
part the secret of that charm in his words which attached and interested
all alike. They did more than this: they prepared him to be an
interpreter of nature to others, and, when he had become equally well
equipped with a rich spiritual experience, they fitted him, as we shall
see farther on, to be the reconciler of a spiritual faith and a material
science.

It was not an unimportant thing, but one of God’s beautiful provisions,
that Henry Ward Beecher was born in Litchfield, where there is more of
nature to the square foot, as we believe, than in any other place on the
globe; to learn his first lessons in the beautiful school of her
flowers, birds, brooks, meadows, pasture lands, hill-tops, and forests.

“Dear old Litchfield! I love thee still, even if thou didst me the
despite of pushing me into life upon thy high and windy hilltop! Where
did the spring ever break forth more joyously and sing at escaping from
winter, as the children of Israel did when that woman’s-rights Miriam
chanted her song of victory? Where did the torrid summer ever find a
lovelier place in which to cool its beams? What trees ever murmured more
gently to soft winds, or roared more lion-like when storms were abroad?

“It was there that we learned to fish, to ride a horse alone, to do the
barn chores, to cut and split wood, to listen at evening to the croaking
frogs and whistling tree-toads, to go to meeting and go to sleep, to
tear holes in new clothes; there we learned to hoe, to mow away hay, to
weed onions, to stir up ministers’ horses with an unusual speed when
ridden to water; there we went a-wandering up and down forest-edges, and
along the crooked brooks in flower-pied meadows, dreaming about things
not to be found in any catechism.”

Equally marked was Litchfield at that day for its social and moral as
for its natural advantages. Its early settlers, mostly from the
excellent stock from which the colonies of Hartford and Windsor were
formed, were men of broad and liberal mould, and began their work upon
this hilltop in a characteristic fashion. They laid out their streets
and staked off the village common with such generous breadth that they
remain the delight of residents and the admiration of strangers to this
day. They made such liberal provision for education and religion that
the settlement soon became noted for the excellency of its schools and
the commanding influence of its pulpit.[1]

-----

Footnote 1:

  Out of sixty-four allotments into which the town was divided, one was
  to be given to the first minister, to be his and descend to his heirs
  for ever; a second was to be reserved for the use of the minister
  during his ministry, and a third was reserved for the benefit of a
  school. While as yet three houses, one in the centre of the present
  village, and one on either side a mile distant, were picketed and
  garrisoned for protection against the Indians, and while there were
  but sixty adult male inhabitants, they built their first church
  edifice, with a Sabbath-Day House for the better accommodation of the
  people.

-----

The law-school of Judges Reeve and Gould, and the young ladies’ school
of the Misses Pierce, made it an educational centre scarcely second in
the breadth of its influence to any in the land, and attracted a class
of residents of high social position.

Its courts gathered from time to time some of the leading members of the
bar from the whole country, not for a few hours, as now with our
railroad facilities, but for days and weeks together. All these things
helped to create a very high order of public spirit—that force which,
often wholly unregarded, is yet so powerful in moulding the character
and giving direction to the life.

One other element in this communal influence must not be omitted—its
intense patriotism. From the beginning to the close of the Revolutionary
struggle the records of the county of Litchfield are stamped with the
evidence of the most enthusiastic loyalty to the cause of the struggling
colonies. At the time of the Boston Port Bill, Litchfield had forwarded
a liberal contribution for the aid of the poor of that city. When the
equestrian statue of King George, of gilded lead, was missing from the
Bowling Green in New York, it was shortly found in the dwelling-house of
Oliver Wolcott in this village, was melted down by his daughters and
their friends, and furnished forty thousand bullets, which were sent to
our soldiers in the field, to be afterwards forwarded by them, from the
muzzles of their muskets, to the king’s Hessians, with the hissing
compliments of the American colonies.

No town excelled her in the proportionate number or quality of the men
she sent into the field (at one time every able-bodied man in the town
being, it is said, at the front), nor in the suffering and loss which
they endured. Thirty out of a company of thirty-six who surrendered at
Fort Washington, New York, “died miserable deaths from cold, hunger,
thirst, suffocation, disease, and the vilest cruelties from those to
whom they had surrendered on a solemn promise of honorable treatment.”
This had made Ethan Allen, a native of this village, and, as is well
known, a professed infidel, grind his teeth and exclaim: “My faith in my
creed is shaken; there ought to be a hell for such infernal scoundrels
as that Lowrie,” the officer in charge of the prisoners. Nor were these
days so remote that their influence was unfelt. In 1810 the spirit of
’76 was not seriously diminished, and many of the principal actors in
the stirring scenes of the Revolutionary struggle were still alive.
Colonel Tallmadge, one of the most dashing and able cavalry officers of
the army, Governor Oliver Wolcott, Jr., a member of Washington’s
cabinet, and many other soldiers of the Revolution and actors of less
note, were residents of the village at the time of the coming here of
Lyman Beecher. When we note the burning patriotism which was always so
marked a characteristic of Henry Ward, we must remember that he drank it
in in his youth from its primitive sources among the old soldiers of
Litchfield.

We give his description of the village as it appeared to him in his
childhood, although a part of it is out of chronological order. It is
found in an article entitled “Litchfield Revisited,” written in 1856:

“The morning after our arrival in Litchfield we sallied forth alone. The
day was high and wide, full of stillness, and serenely radiant. As we
carried our present life up the North Street we met at every step our
boyhood life coming down. There were the old trees, but looking not so
large as to our young eyes. The stately road had, however, been bereaved
of the buttonball trees, which had been crippled by disease. But the old
elms retained a habit peculiar to Litchfield. There seemed to be a
current of wind which at times passes high up in the air over the town,
and which moves the tops of the trees, while on the ground there is no
movement of wind. How vividly did that sound from above bring back early
days, when for hours we lay upon the windless grass and watched the top
leaves flutter, and marked how still were the under leaves of the same
tree!

“One by one came the old houses. On the corner stood and stands the
jail—awful building to young sinners! We never passed its grated windows
without a salutary chill. The old store, and same old name, Buell, on
it; the bank, and its long, lean legs spindling up to hold the shelf up
under the roof! The Colonel Tallmadge house, that used to seem so grand
that it was cold, but whose cherry-trees in the front yard seemed warm
enough and attractive to our longing lips and watery mouths. How well do
we remember the stately gait of the venerable colonel of Revolutionary
memory! We don’t recollect that he ever spoke to us or greeted us; not
because he was austere or unkind, but from a kind of military reserve.
We thought him good and polite, but should as soon have thought of
climbing the church-steeple as of speaking to one living so high and
venerable above all boys!

“Then came Judge Gould’s! Did we not remember that and the faces that
used to illuminate it? The polished and polite judge, the sons and
daughters, the little office in the yard, the successive classes of law
students that received that teaching which has since so often honored
both bar and bench. Here, too, we stopped to retrace the very place
where, being set on by a fiery young Southern blood, without any cause
that we knew of then or can remember now, we undertook to whip one of
Judge Gould’s sons, and did not do it. We were never satisfied with the
result, and think if the thing could be reviewed now it might turn out
differently.

“There, too, stood Dr. Catlin’s house, looking as if the rubs of time
had polished it instead of injuring. Next there seemed to our puzzled
memory a vacancy. Ought there not to be about there a Holmes house, to
which we used to go and get baskets of Virgaloo pears, and were inwardly
filled, as a satisfying method of keeping us honest toward the pears in
the basket?

“But Dr. Sheldon’s house is all right. Dear old Dr. Sheldon! We began to
get well as soon as he came into the house; or, if the evil spirit
delayed a little, ‘Cream-o’-tartar with hot water poured upon it and
sweetened’ finished the work. He had learned, long before the days of
homœopathy, that a doctor’s chief business is to keep parents from
giving their children medicine, so that nature may have a fair chance at
the disease without having its attention divided or diverted.

“But now we stop before Miss Pierce’s—a name known in thousands of
families, where gray-headed mothers remember the soft and gentle days of
Litchfield schooling. The fine residence is well preserved, and time has
been gentle within likewise. But the school-house is gone, and she that
for so many years kept it busy is gone, and the throng that have crossed
its threshold brood the whole globe with offices of maternal love. The
Litchfield Law School in the days of Judge Tapping Reeve and Judge
Gould, and Miss Pierce’s Female School, were in their day two very
memorable institutions, and, though since supplied by others upon a
larger scale, there are few that will have performed so much, if we take
into account the earliness of the times and the fact that they were
pioneers and parents of those that have supplanted them. But they are
gone, the buildings moved off, and the ground smoothed and soft to the
foot with green grass. No more shall the setting sun see Litchfield
streets thronged with young gentlemen and ladies, and filling the golden
air with laughter or low converse which, unlaughing then, made life
musical for ever after!

“But where is the Brace house? An old red house—red once, but picked by
the winds and washed by rains till the color was neutral, thanks to the
elements. The old elm-trees guard the spot, a brotherhood as noble as
these eyes have ever seen, lifted high up, and in the part nearest
heaven locking their arms together and casting back upon their separate
trunks an undivided shade. So are many, separate in root and trunk,
united far up by their heaven-touching thoughts and affections.

“Mrs. Lord’s house is the only one now before we reach our own native
spot. This, too, holds its own and is fertile in memories. Across the
way lived Sheriff Landon, famous for dry wit and strong politics.

“But south of him lived the greatest man in town, Mr. Parker, who owned
the stages; and the wittiest man in town, with us boys, was Hiram
Barnes, that drove stage for him! To be sure, neither of them was
eminent for learning or civil influence, but, in that temple which boys’
imaginations make, a stage proprietor and a stage-driver stand forth as
grand as Minerva in the Parthenon!

“But there are houses on the other side. The eastern side of Litchfield
North Street, like the eastern side of Broadway, was never so acceptable
to fashion, albeit some memorable names lived there. It was our good
fortune to be born on the west side of the street. We know not what
blessings must have descended upon us from having been born on the
fashionable side; one shudders to think how near he escaped being born
on the other, the east side of the street.”

Into this village Lyman Beecher brought his family in 1810. The dwelling
had been described by himself: “The house I shall purchase is in a
beautiful situation, is convenient, has a large kitchen, a well-room, a
wood-house, besides two barns and a shop on the premises, and one and a
half acres of land; price, about $1,350; and there is a good young
orchard near for sale, so that we can keep a horse and one or two cows
and have apples of our own from the money we shall reserve after paying
our debts.” A row of quince-trees “whose early blossoms were so tender
and whose switches were so tough—ah! those trees used to come home very
near to me!” was on the north side of the house.[2]

-----

Footnote 2:

  This house, enlarged by the addition which Mr. Beecher found it
  necessary to make, still remains substantially as it was seventy years
  ago, although not upon the old lot. It is now a part of Dr. Buel’s
  hospital for the insane, about a quarter of a mile above the original
  site.

-----

The home circle was large and varied. There were at this time the
parents and six children, “Sister Roxana and her little group of
countless numbers.” “Aunt Mary Hubbard,” the mother’s favorite sister,
“spent much of her time with us, and some of mother’s favorite pupils
from East Hampton, who had come to attend Miss Pierce’s school, sought a
home in our family. Betsy Burr, an orphan cousin, lived with us like an
adopted daughter, while the kitchen department was under the care of the
good and affectionate Zillah and Rachel, who came with us and completed
the home circle.”

The circle was still farther enlarged by the coming of Grandma Beecher
and Aunt Esther, who, it will be remembered, was Lyman Beecher’s
half-sister—“a woman,” as Henry Ward once said, “so good and modest that
she will spend ages in heaven wondering how it ever happened that she
ever got there, and that all the angels will be wondering why she was
not there from all eternity.” “They occupied half of the next house to
ours on the way to Prospect Hill, making a place of daily resort for
some of the family.”

[Illustration: The Beecher Residence at Litchfield.]

“Uncle Samuel Foote,” the mother’s sea-captain brother, “came among us,
on his return from each voyage, as a sort of brilliant genius of another
sphere, bringing gifts and wonders that seemed to wake new faculties in
all. Whenever he came to Litchfield he brought a stock of new books,
which he and Aunt Mary read aloud.”

It will be seen that, without referring to other inmates of the family,
such as boarders and visitors, who afforded a great variety, some
amusing and others instructive, the things which Henry Ward said were
“the great treasures of a dwelling—the child’s cradle, the grandmother’s
chair, the hearth and the old-fashioned fireplace, the table and the
window”—were all there, and a great many things beside.

There were trials, almost hardships we should call them, as appears from
a letter of Mrs. Beecher’s dated January 13, 1811, but none of them
sufficient to bring discouragement or destroy her interest in scientific
subjects: “... Would now write you a long letter, if it were not for
several vexing circumstances, such as the weather extremely cold, storm
violent, and no wood cut; Mr. Beecher gone, and Sabbath day, with
company—a clergyman, a stranger; Catharine sick; George almost so;
Rachel’s finger cut off, and she crying and groaning with the pain. Mr.
Beecher is gone to preach in New Hartford, and did not provide us wood
enough to last, seeing the weather has grown so exceedingly cold.... As
for reading, I average perhaps one page a week besides what I do on
Sundays. I expect to be obliged to be contented (if I can) with the
stock of knowledge I already possess, except what I can glean from the
conversation of others.... Mary has, I suppose, told you of the
discovery that the fixed alkalies are metallic oxides. I first saw the
notice in the _Christian Observer_. I have since seen it in an
_Edinburgh Review_. The former mentioned that the metals have been
obtained by means of the galvanic battery; the latter mentions another
and, they say, a better mode. I think this is all the knowledge I have
obtained in the whole circle of arts and sciences of late; if you have
been more fortunate, pray let me reap the benefit.”

Looking at both its sunshine and its shadows, this Litchfield parsonage
offers an illustration of an ideal New England home. The household was
large, large enough to contain in itself a great variety of resources,
and able in that roomy house to offer a broad hospitality to all comers.
Democratic in the best sense of the word, servants being considered and
treated as constituent members; wide awake, reading all the new books,
discussing all the vital questions of the day, arguing all the knotty
points of theology; industrious and frugal; allied to the best life of
the place and the times, with a broad outlook that took within its
horizon all the interests of country and humanity, of the kingdom of God
at home and abroad, social, political, and spiritual, it was good soil,
and a good exposure for planting a tree whose branches should spread
abroad throughout the land and the whole earth.

Into this family was born a son, June 24, 1813—“the fourth, fifth,
sixth, or seventh child, somewhere thereabouts,” as he himself says in a
speech before the London Congregational Board, with that forgetfulness
of numbers which was always characteristic of him. In fact, the ninth
child, the eighth living at the time. It was in one of his favorite
months, that of June, “which bursts out from the gates of heaven with
all that is youngest, and clothed with that which is the most tender and
beautiful,” that he began his career.

The grandmother, Roxana Foote, being with her daughter at the time, and
remembering her own two favorite sons, who died in youth, named the
new-born infant after his uncles, Henry and Ward.

They were stirring times, those of the early summer of 1813. The second
war of our national independence was then in progress, and tidings had
just reached the village that Fort Brown had been captured by the United
States forces. Lyman Beecher says of those times:

“Our dangers in the war of 1812 were very great, so great that human
skill and power were felt to be in vain. Thick clouds begirt the
horizon, the storm roared louder and louder; it was dark as midnight,
every pilot trembled, and from most all hope that we should be saved was
taken away; and when from impenetrable darkness the sun burst suddenly
upon us and peace came, we said: ‘Our soul is escaped as a bird from the
snare of the fowler. The snare is broken and we are escaped.’”

Across the water Napoleon was rallying from the disaster of his Russian
campaign, and making the Continent again resound with the roar of his
cannon. Not only did these events stir mind and heart of all alike, but
the increased taxation and the high prices that resulted from a world at
war were severely felt in the parsonage. Mrs. Lyman Beecher wrote: “We
feel the war somewhat more than we should one between the Turks and Crim
Tartars, inasmuch as, for the most part, every article is double or
treble the former price, and some things even more than that.”

These were also the days of the inauguration of some of those great
moral movements that are even now in progress in this State and in the
land. It was but the year before that the General Association of
Connecticut, under the leadership of Lyman Beecher, had taken decided
action upon the temperance question. In speaking of it he says:

“I was not headstrong then, but I was heart-strong—oh! very, very! From
that time on the movement went on, not only in Connecticut but marching
through New England and marching through the world. Glory to God! Oh!
how it wakes my old heart up to think of it!”

Morals in general at this time were at a low ebb, and he secured the
organization of a “General Society for the Suppression of Vice and the
Promotion of Good Morals in the State.”

His sermon upon the “Building of Waste Places” resulted in the
institution of a “Domestic Missionary Society” for the work of home
evangelization in Connecticut, and he had already secured a Foreign
Missionary Society for Litchfield, which was one of the most efficient
auxiliaries of the American Board, then but recently established. The
conflict concerning the Standing Order which in 1818 resulted in the
withdrawal of State aid from the Congregational churches, and which Dr.
Beecher feared as likely to open the flood-gates of ruin upon the State,
and by reason of which he says, “I suffered what no tongue can tell, for
the best thing that ever happened to the State of Connecticut,” was just
beginning.

In all the movements of this progressive period stands this village
parsonage, like an outpost of an advancing army, held almost within the
enemy’s lines.

Added to these public labors and troubles a very heavy family sorrow was
laid upon them during this year. The mother, for months before the birth
of her ninth child, saw her favorite sister, Mary Hubbard, slowly
wasting away with consumption, and had need to call up all her resources
of faith and resignation to meet this complication of trials that was
upon them.

[Illustration: Room in which Mr. Beecher was born.]

So this child was nourished, even before birth, in the sweet spirit of a
most godly soul, deepened and chastened by both private griefs and
public sorrows, and was ushered into the world at an era of most
important events, into the very midst of multiplied labors and stirring,
progressive movements. All these formed, as it were, an atmosphere of
influence as imperceptible to the eye as common air, but as powerful in
moulding character in its formative periods as are the natural forces in
shaping the mountains or growing the forests. By virtue of that law by
which the offspring are affected by those things which most interest the
parents, we may safely say that Henry Ward Beecher was in part a product
of the times that preceded, attended, and followed his birth, and was
stamped by their strong and peculiar characteristics. He carried war in
him as a birth-mark, but with him it was war against wickedness and
wrong.

The springs of consolation, which flowed from him in after-years for the
relief of troubled souls the world over, were such as his mother
resorted to in days of trial, and were opened to him in her bosom; and
he was continually pressing forward through life to some new measure of
reform, to some new step of attainment, by virtue of that reforming,
progressive age that so early became a very part of his nature.

[Illustration: The Elms and Well which Mark the Site of “The Beecher
House” in Litchfield.]

                              CHAPTER III.
                               CHILDHOOD.

Early Glimpses—Recollections of the Mother—Going to School at Ma’am
    Kilbourne’s—His First Letter—District School—The Coming of the New
    Mother—His First Ride on Horseback—A Merry Household—Fishing
    Excursions—Minister’s Wood-Spell—Saturday Night—Going to Meeting—The
    Puritan Sabbath—The Cold of Litchfield Hill—Rats—Work—The
    Catechism—Formative Influences—Summing Up.

We of course see but little of him in these early years.

“The younger members of the Beecher family came into existence in a
great, bustling household of older people, all going their several ways
and having their own grown-up interests to carry.

“The child growing up in this busy, active circle had constantly
impressed upon it a sense of personal insignificance as a child, and the
absolute need of the virtue of passive obedience and non-resistance as
regards all grown-up people. To be statedly washed and dressed and
catechised, got to school at regular hours in the morning and to bed
inflexibly at the earliest possible hour at night, comprised about all
the attention that children could receive in those days.”

Here and there a glimpse is given, just enough to tell us the direction
the stream is taking. The first is found in a letter of the mother to
her sister, Harriet Foote, written when he was a little more than a year
old:

“_July 12, 1814._—... I arrived Saturday at sunset, and found all well,
and boy (Henry Ward) in merry trim, glad at heart to be safe on terra
firma after all his jolts and tossings.”

Again in November of the same year:

“I write sitting upon my feet with my paper on the seat of a chair,
while Henry is hanging round my neck and climbing on my back.”

He himself gives an experience of a little later period:

“I remember very well when I was but two years old (strange as it may
seem; sometimes I think I spent all my remembering power on that early
period!) finding myself in the east entry of my father’s great house,
alone, coming down-stairs, or trying to. The sudden sense which I had of
being alone frightened me, and I gave one shriek; and then the echo of
my voice scared me worse, and I gave another shriek that was more
emphatic; and I remember seeing the light stream in from the
dining-room, and being taken up by loving hands. The face I do not
recall, the form I do not recall; but I remember the warm pressure. It
was my mother, who died when I was three years old. She took me to her
bosom. I recollect sitting by the side of some one who made me feel very
happy; and I recollect seeing my father’s swart face on the other side
of the table.

“Now I could not paint my mother’s face; but I know how her bosom felt.
I know how her arms felt. I have a filial sense, a child’s
interpretation, of motherhood. It was only an emotion or instinct in me,
but it was blessed.”

This incident of the mother is supplemented by two of the sister
Harriet, in which the little boy Henry had a part:

“In my own early childhood,” she says, “only two incidents of my mother
twinkle like rays through the darkness. One was of our all running and
dancing out before her from the nursery to the sitting-room one Sabbath
morning, and her pleasant voice saying after us, ‘Remember the Sabbath
day to keep it holy.’”

Another remembrance is this: “Mother was an enthusiastic horticulturist
in all the small ways that limited means allowed. Her brother John, in
New York, had just sent her a small parcel of tulip bulbs. I remember
rummaging these out of an obscure corner of the nursery one day when she
was out, and being strongly seized with the idea that they were good to
eat, and using all the little English I possessed to persuade my
brothers that these were onions such as grown people ate, and would be
very nice for us. So we fell to and devoured the whole; and I recollect
being somewhat disappointed in the odd, sweetish taste, and thinking
that onions were not as nice as I had supposed. Then mother’s serene
face appeared at the nursery door, and we all ran toward her and with
one voice began to tell our discovery and achievement. We had found this
bag of onions and had eaten them all up. Also I remember that there was
not even a momentary expression of impatience, but that she sat down and
said: ‘My dear children, what you have done makes mamma very sorry.
Those were not onion-roots, but roots of beautiful flowers; and if you
had let them alone ma would have had next summer in the garden great,
beautiful red and yellow flowers such as you never saw.’ I remember how
drooping and dispirited we all grew at this picture, and how sadly we
regarded the empty bag.”

When the mother grew sick and the children were admitted to her bedside
once a day, Henry was among the number, although no memory of the fact
lingered with him in after-years.

Mrs. Stowe writes of this event:

“I have a vision of a very fair face with a bright red spot on each
cheek, and a quiet smile as she offered me a spoonful of her gruel; of
our dreaming one night, we little ones, that mamma had got well, and
waking in loud transports of joy, and being hushed down by some one
coming into the room. Our dream was indeed a true one. She was for ever
well; but they told us she was dead, and took us in to see what seemed
so cold and so unlike anything we had ever seen or known of her.”

Mrs. Reeve, one of the most intimate friends of the family, writes of
the last day of her life:

“She told her husband that her views and anticipations of heaven had
been so great that she could hardly sustain it, and if they had been
increased she should have been overwhelmed, and that her Saviour had
constantly blessed her; that she had peace without one cloud, and that
she had never during her sickness prayed for her life. She dedicated her
sons to God for missionaries, and said that her greatest desire was that
her children might be trained up for God, and she trusted God would, in
his own time, provide another companion for him that would more than
fill her place.

“She spoke of the advancement of Christ’s kingdom with joy, and of the
glorious day that was ushering in.

“She attempted to speak to her children, but she was extremely
exhausted, and their cries and sobs were such that she could say but
little. She told them that God could do more for them than she had done
or could do, and that they must trust him.

“Mr. Beecher then made a prayer, in which he gave her back to God and
dedicated all that they held in common to him. She then fell into a
sweet sleep from which she awoke in heaven. It is a most moving scene to
see eight little children weeping around the bed of a dying mother; but
still it was very cheering to see how God could take away the sting of
death and give such a victory over the grave.”

Mr. Beecher’s remembrance of this event was simply of a feeling of fear
and pain at the weeping of the children around him, and of interest in
the baby, Charles, in his little white dress, as he was lifted up in the
arms of one of the attendants.

Of the funeral we read from Mrs. Stowe’s pen:

“Henry was too little to go; I remember his golden curls and little
black frock, as he frolicked like a kitten in the sun in ignorant joy.

“I remember the mourning dresses, the tears of the older children, the
walking to the burial-ground and somebody’s speaking at the grave, and
the audible sobbing of the family; and then all was closed, and we
little ones, to whom it was so confused, asked the question where she
was gone and would she never come back? They told us at one time that
she had been laid in the ground, at another that she had gone to heaven.
Whereupon Henry, putting the two things together, resolved to dig
through the ground and go to find her; for being discovered under sister
Catherine’s window one morning digging with great zeal and earnestness,
she called to him to know what he was doing, and, lifting his curly
head, with great simplicity he answered: ‘Why, I am going to heaven to
find ma!’”

We next hear of him in a letter written by his sister, February 1, 1817:

“... Henry is a very good boy, and we think him a remarkably interesting
child, and he grows dearer to us every day. He is very affectionate, and
seems to love his father with all his heart. His constant prattle is a
great amusement to us all. He often speaks of his sister Harriet, and
wishes spring would come, so that she might come home and go to school
with him.”

This was in the winter when he was past three years old.

Perhaps the prattle of this one will be instructive as well as amusing
some day. Who knows?

At last spring comes, and with it his sister Harriet from her long visit
at Nutplains, and an important era in his life opens. He begins to go to
school, with her as his companion and guardian.

He is just four years old that summer, the usual age for school
beginnings in rural New England. They went to Ma’am Kilbourne’s on West
Street, and there he clambered up the first rounds of the ladder of
book-learning and took his first lessons. These consisted in repeating
his letters twice a day, such as he could remember, and having the
others pointed out to him from Webster’s spelling-book, as he stood, a
chubby, bare-footed, round, rosy-faced boy, in front of the dreaded
schoolma’am, who had been made sharp and angular by her years of labor
in sharpening the intellectual faculties of generations of children.

In due time Charles is large enough to join the older brother and
sister, and tells us:

“I remember all three of us coming out of our yard and stringing along,
holding each other by the hand and saying every morning, ‘What if a
great big dog should come out at us?’ and Henry, as the larger brother
and protector of the group, answering, ‘I would take an axe and chop his
head off.’”

As yet he wears his hair in long golden curls, the badge of a continued
infantile state; but some of the girls at school improvising a pair of
shears from the pieces of tin thrown out from a shop near by, and
cutting off some of the coveted locks, it is thought best at home to cut
them all off; and now, with trousers, and suspenders, and jacket, and
short hair, and bare feet, he emerges from the half-infantile, girlish
state and becomes a full-fledged boy, much to his own satisfaction: “he
considered that his manhood had now commenced.”

That the instruction of his teacher is not all thrown away is evident by
the letter which he wrote at this time, when he was five years old, of
which a facsimile is given. Its merits of directness and originality, at
least in the matter of spelling, will be readily recognized:

  DER SISTER
  WE AR AL WEL
  MA HAZ A BABY
  THE OLD SOW HAZ SIX PIGS
]

One incident of about these times, which is related by his brother, is
ludicrously prophetic:

“I remember Henry’s coming in and taking his turn” (reading to Aunt
Esther). “Once the piece was about wild beasts, and it said ‘two
monstrous lions came out.’ I can see Henry’s red face and declamatory
air as he read it ‘two monstrofalous great lions came out.’”

From Widow Kilbourne’s he graduated into the district school, which was
a few rods north of the parsonage, and was attended by all the children
of quite a large farming district. Like the other children, he carried
sewing and knitting, and the sister tells us that “this bashful,
dazed-looking boy pattered bare-foot to and from the little unpainted
school-house, with a brown towel or a blue checked apron to hem during
the intervals between his spelling and reading lessons.”

His eagerness for sister Harriet to return, that he may begin school,
has long since subsided, and given place to an unusual dislike for his
whole district-school experience, as appears from reminiscences which he
wrote in after-years:

“It was our misfortune, in boyhood, to go to a district school. It was a
little, square pine building, blazing in the sun, upon the highway,
without a tree for shade or sight near it; without bush, yard, fence, or
circumstance to take off its bare, cold, hard, hateful look. Before the
door, in winter, was the pile of wood for fuel, and in summer there were
all the chips of the winter’s wood. In winter we were squeezed into the
recess of the farthest corner, among little boys, who seemed to be sent
to school merely to fill up the chinks between the bigger boys.
Certainly we were never sent for any such absurd purpose as an
education. There were the great scholars—the school in winter was for
_them_, not for us pickaninnies. We were read and spelt twice a day,
unless something happened to prevent, which _did_ happen about every
other day. For the rest of the time we were busy in keeping still. And a
time we always had of it! Our shoes always would be scraping on the
floor or knocking the shins of urchins who were also being ‘educated.’
All of our little legs together (poor, tired, nervous, restless legs
with nothing to do!) would fill up the corner with such a noise that,
every ten or fifteen minutes, the master would bring down his two-foot
hickory ferule on the desk with a clap that sent shivers through our
hearts to think how that would have felt if it had fallen somewhere
else; and then, with a look that swept us all into utter extremity of
stillness, he would cry, ‘Silence in that corner!’ It would last for a
few minutes; but little boys’ memories are not capacious. Moreover, some
of the boys had mischief, and some had mirthfulness, and some had both
together. The consequence was that just when we were the most afraid to
laugh we saw the most comical things. Temptations which we could have
vanquished with a smile out in the free air were irresistible in our
little corner, where a laugh and a spank were very apt to woo each
other. So we would hold on and fill up; and others would hold on and
fill up too; till by and by the weakest would let go a mere whiffet of a
laugh, and then down went all the precautions, and one went off, and
another, and another, touching the others off like a pack of
fire-crackers! It was in vain to deny it. But as the process of snapping
our heads and pulling our ears went on with primitive sobriety, we each
in turn, with tearful eyes and blubbering lips, declared ‘we didn’t mean
to,’ and that was true; and that ‘we wouldn’t do so any more,’ and that
was a lie, however unintentional, for we never failed to do just so
again, and that about once an hour all day long.

“Besides this our principal business was to shake and shiver at the
beginning of the school for very cold; and to sweat and stew for the
rest of the time before the fervid glances of a great box iron stove,
red-hot. There was one great event of horror and two of pleasure: the
first was the act of _going to school_, comprehending the leaving off
play, the face-washing and clothes-inspecting, the temporary play-spell
before the master came, the outcry, ‘There he is! the master is coming!’
the hurly-burly rush, and the noisy clattering to our seats. The other
two events of pleasure were the play-spell and the dismissal. O dear!
can there be anything worse for a lively, mercurial, mirthful, active
little boy than going to a winter district school? Yes—going to a summer
district school! There is no comparison. The one is the Miltonic depth,
below the deepest depth.

“A woman kept the school, sharp, precise, unsympathetic, keen, and
untiring. Of all ingenious ways of fretting little boys doubtless her
ways were the most expert. Not a tree to shelter the house; the sun beat
down on the shingles and clapboards till the pine knots shed pitchy
tears, and the air was redolent of hot pine-wood smell. The benches were
slabs with legs in them. The desks were slabs at an angle, cut, hacked,
scratched; each year’s edition of jack-knife literature overlaying its
predecessor, until it then wore cuttings and carvings two or three
inches deep. But if _we_ cut a morsel, or stuck in pins, or pinched off
splinters, the little sharp-eyed mistress was on hand, and one look of
her eye was worse than a sliver in our foot, and one nip of her fingers
was equal to a jab of a pin; for we had tried both.

“We envied the flies—merry fellows! bouncing about, tasting that
apple-skin, patting away at that crumb of bread; now out the window,
then in again; on your nose, on your neighbor’s cheek, off to the very
schoolma’am’s lips; dodging her slap, and then letting off a real round
and round buzz, up, down, this way, that way, and every way. Oh! we
envied the flies more than anything, except the birds. The windows were
so high that we could not see the grassy meadows; but we could see the
tops of distant trees, and the far, deep, bounteous blue sky. There flew
the robins; there went the blue-birds: and there went we. We followed
that old polyglot, the skunk-blackbird, and heard him describe the way
they talked at the winding up of the Tower of Babel. We thanked every
meadow-lark that sung on, rejoicing as it flew. Now and then a
‘chipping-bird’ would flutter on the very window-sill, turn its little
head sidewise, and peer in on the medley of boys and girls. Long before
we knew that it was in Scripture we sighed: Oh! that we had the wings of
a bird; we would fly away and be out of this hateful school. As for
learning, the sum of all that we ever got at a district school would not
cover the first ten letters of the alphabet. One good, kind,
story-telling, Bible-rehearsing aunt at home, with apples and
ginger-bread premiums, is worth all the schoolma’ams that ever stood by
to see poor little fellows roast in those boy-traps called district
schools.

“I have not a single pleasant recollection in connection with my
school-boy days. The woods were full of temptations, the trees called
me, the birds wanted me, the brooks sung entreaties. It seemed cruel to
be shut up. The brooks, birds, flowers, sunshine, and breezes were free;
why not I?”

In the autumn of 1817, when Henry Ward was a few months past four years
of age, Dr. Lyman Beecher married Miss Harriet Porter, of Portland,
Maine, and brought his bride at once to Litchfield.

The advent of the new mother is thus described by Mrs. Stowe:

“I was about six years old and slept in the nursery with my two younger
brothers, Henry and Charles. We heard father’s voice in the entry, and
started up in our little beds, 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 that she loved little children and that she would be our mother.
Never did stepmother make a prettier or sweeter impression. The next
morning I remember we looked at her with awe. 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 moving and speaking 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.”

In a letter written to her sister Mrs. Beecher gives her impressions of
the group. She says: “We surprised them here almost as much as Mr.
Beecher did us. They did not expect us till the following evening, but
it was a joyful surprise to them. I never saw so many rosy cheeks and
laughing eyes. The little ones were all joy and gladness. 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. They all became
immediately very free and social, except the youngest (Charles), and he
is quite shy; calls me ‘lady,’ and sometimes ‘dear lady,’ but he loves
aunt much the best. I have never seen a finer family of children, or a
more agreeable. I am delighted with the great familiarity and great
respect subsisting between parent and children. It is a house of great
cheerfulness and comfort, and I am beginning to feel at home. Harriet
and Henry are very desirous for me to send their love.”

Later she writes of them:

“I perceive them to be of agreeable habits, and some of them of uncommon
intellect.... Harriet and Henry come next, and they are always
hand-in-hand. They are as lovely children as I ever saw, amiable,
affectionate, and very bright.... Our dwelling is pleasantly situated.
The garden yields plenty of vegetables for the year, plenty of cherries,
and the orchard furnishes cider and apples enough. A barrel of
apple-sauce is made in the fall, which the children use instead of
butter.... The boys are up before it is quite day, and make fires, and
we are all down and have prayers before sunrise. Our domestic worship is
very delightful. We sing a good deal and have reading aloud as much as
we can.”

The following silhouette, although following the last by quite an
interval of time—it is in 1819—is our next family picture in order:

“Papa is well and is still writing that piece with a hard name, I can’t
remember what. Mamma is well, and don’t laugh any more than she used to.
Catherine goes on just as she always did, making fun for everybody.
George is as usual. Harriet makes just as many wry faces, is just as
odd, and loves to be laughed at just as much as ever. Henry does not
improve much in talking, but speaks very thick. Charles is the most
mischievous little fellow I ever knew. He seems to do it for the very
love of it; is punished and punished again, but it has no effect. He is
the same honest little boy, and I love him dearly.”

It must have been about this time that Henry had the experience which he
thus describes:

“When I was a lad I was ambitious to ride, but never was permitted to
ride except behind an elder brother; but one fair morning, as the horse
was brought out to be watered, I bestrode him and took the reins in my
hand. He made for the brook with considerable celerity; but though he
was nimble I was willing, and I succeeded in holding on and getting back
without any accident. So elated was I with my first attempt at
horseback-riding that I felt that I was the horseman of the
neighborhood. The next morning I repeated the ride, but with a
variation; for, being unaccustomed to some of the phases of
horseback-riding, I was not prepared for what occurred. The horse did
not perform just as I wanted him to, so I laid the whip on him, and he
darted forward, and when he reached the edge of the brook he suddenly
stopped and I went on!”

They are a merry lot of children, getting up little impromptu concerts,
charades, and games of all kinds, at one time going so far as to
dramatize a favorite story. They “curtain off the end of the parlor,”
and “complete the entertainment amid thunders of applause.”

Animal life is regarded, and the absent members of the family are kept
duly informed of the well-being of their favorites:

“Old Puss is very well and sends her respects to you. And Mr. Black Trip
has come out of the barn to live, and says if you ever come into the
kitchen he will jump up and lick your hands and pull your frock, just as
he serves the rest of us. Henry and Charles love to play with him very
much.”

Little events in the family are noted and immortalized in verse, of
which the following letter is a sample:

“... Apropos, last week was interred Tom, Junior, with funeral honors,
by the side of old Tom of happy memory. What a fatal mortality there is
among the cats of the parsonage! Our Harriet is chief mourner always at
their funerals. She asked for what she called an _epethet_ for the
grave-stone of Tom, Junior, which I gave as follows:

                         “‘Here died our Kit,
                         Who had a fit
                           And acted queer.
                         Shot with a gun,
                         Her race is run,
                           And she lies here.’”

When Henry was eight years old we read of the three in this wise:

“Harriet reads everything she can lay her hands on, and sews and knits
diligently. Henry and Charles go to school. Henry is as sprightly and
active, and Charles as honest and clumsy, as ever.”

Later in the year he can be had if really wanted:

“We have four boarders besides our own sick folk, so that if you are
lonesome for want of children we could easily spare Henry or Harriet.”

Whether the hint was taken, and the boy who was sometimes too “sprightly
and active” and this girl who “reads everything she can lay her hands
on” were wanted and sent, is not told. The next year perhaps they would
not care to spare him. “I had the alders down at the bottom of the east
lot cut up, broke it up, and planted to corn and potatoes. Henry and
Charles began to help hoe a little.” Any one who has had experience in
such matters knows that hoeing potatoes in a newly-ploughed field just
cleared of alders is no fun. At this time Henry was nine years old.

It has been said by one whose hatred of orthodox religion is only
equalled by the beauty of the language with which he is able to clothe
his misconceptions, that “Henry Ward Beecher was born in a Puritan
penitentiary, of which his father was one of the wardens; a prison with
very narrow and closely-grated windows.” But Mrs. Stowe wrote years ago:
“One of my most vivid impressions of the family, as it was in my
childish days, was of a great household inspired by a spirit of
cheerfulness and hilarity, and of my father, although pressed and driven
with business, always lending an attentive ear to anything in the way of
life and social fellowship.”

The brother Charles, who was an almost inseparable companion for Henry
in those days, says in a letter recently received: “The parental
authority was pronounced but not very strict. That is, there was never
any thought in the mind of the children of disobedience, but resort to
corporal punishment was rare.

“Nor was brother Henry made to work very hard, nor was father very
strait-laced or stern. Nor were we often _switched_, tho’ I dare say we
deserved it. I only remember once distinctly, when Henry performed the
gymnastics and I furnished the music (out in the barn). Fortunately for
me, the switch was mostly used up on him as the elder—a birthright I did
not envy—and I howled in sympathy, with a few cuts for _Da Capo_.

“The fact is, father was very fond of all his children and frolicked and
romped with them. All the work there was to do (chores we called it) was
to take care of a horse and cow, and in spring make garden, and, after
wood-spell, carry in and pile up wood. I remember that we were told if
we made the garden so and so, or did this or that, we should go fishing;
and we used to go, the whole family of us, to Little Pond or Great Pond,
and catch ‘Perchy, roachy, bullhead,’ as we sang it. One afternoon at
Little Pond, where father had taken Henry and me in the chaise
(‘one-hoss’), we were catching roach when the church-bell rang, and
father remembered that it was Preparatory Lecture, and the way we
scurried in the old vehicle may be imagined.”

Mrs. Stowe writes: “I remember when the wood was all in and piled and
the chips swept up, then father tackled the horse into the cart and
proclaimed a grand fishing party down to Little Pond; and how we all
floated among the lily-pads in our boat, christened ‘The Yellow Perch,’
and every one of us caught a string of fish, which we displayed in
triumph on our return.”

The father was very wise in directing the homely labors of the
household, so that they became occasions of mental stimulus.

“I have the image of my father still, as he sat working the
apple-peeler. ‘Come, George,’ he said, ‘I’ll tell you what we’ll do to
make the evening go off. You and I’ll take turns and see who’ll tell the
most out of Scott’s novels’ (for those were the days when the ‘Tales of
my Landlord’ and ‘Ivanhoe’ had just appeared); and so they took them
novel by novel, reciting scenes and incidents, which kept the eyes of
all the children wide open and made the work go on without flagging.

“Occasionally he would raise a point of theology on some incident
narrated, and ask the opinion of one of his boys and run a sort of tilt
with him, taking up the wrong side of the question for the sake of
seeing how the youngster could practise his logic. If the party on the
other side did not make a fair hit at him, however, he would stop and
explain to him what he ought to have said: ‘The argument lies so, my
son; do that and you’ll trip me up.’ Much of his teaching to his
children was in this informal way.”

A kindly country life surrounded the minister’s family, that could not
fail of stamping the impress of its plain sincerity upon all who were
brought in contact with it. Once a year this came to its climax in the
winter’s wood-spell, when all the farmers upon a given day added their
contribution to the minister’s wood-pile—a festival of kindness and good
cheer.

“The kind farmers wanted to see all the children, and we were busy as
bees in waiting upon them. The boys heated the flip-irons and passed
around the cider and flip, while Aunt Esther and the daughters were as
busy in serving the doughnuts, cake, and cheese.”

Another influence we must not forget, and that was, being let alone. “I
think,” he says, “that I was about as well brought up as most children,
because I was let alone. My father was so busy and my mother had so many
other children to look after that, except here and there, I hardly came
under the parental hand at all. I was brought up in a New England
village, and I knew where the sweet-flag was, where the hickory-trees
were, where the chestnut-trees were, where the sassafras-trees were,
where the squirrels were, where all things were that boys enterprise
after, therefore I had a world of things to do, and so I did not come
much in contact with family government.” “Nobody,” so says his sister,
“thought much of his future, further than to see that he was safe and
healthy, or even troubled themselves to inquire what might be going on
in his life.”

Some of the reminiscences of this period now given in his own words are
interesting, not only from the wide field which they cover, but from the
revelation they make of the susceptibility of his nature to outside
influences. Of “going to meeting” he discourses in this wise:

“The coming on of Saturday night was always a serious business with the
youngsters. We had no stores of religious experience on which it is
presumed the old folks meditated, and the prospect of a whole day
without anything in it to interest us was not a little gloomy. On no
night of the week did the frogs croak so dismally, or the tree toads
whistle in a mood so melancholy, as on Saturday night.

“But those blazing summer mornings! What a wealth of light spread over
that blessed old hill-top! What a wondrous silence dwelt in the great
round heavens above our head! The birds sang on. The crows in the
distance called out to each other in hoarse discourse. The trees stood
in calm beauty—the great elm-trees, tall, pliant, graceful, the
perfection of strength and beauty. All this we saw and heard while
buttoning up our Sunday clothes by the side of the open window. For the
cow and horse had been foddered, and the pigs fed, and all the barn
chores done up, and a bountiful breakfast eaten, and our face and hands
washed, and every article of apparel, from shoe to hat, had changed from
a secular to a sacred use. Not the every-day hat, soft, shapeless,
universal instrument, used as a liquid or solid measure; used now for
the head, and now for a football; used for a net to catch butterflies or
to throw at wasps—no, not this bag, pocket, hat, pouch, and magazine,
but the Sunday hat, round, stiff, hard, and respectable.

“Although the new hat was always disagreeable to our head, yet we had a
wonderful reverence for it, and spent no inconsiderable portion of our
time in church in getting it dirty and then brushing it clean.

“Our jacket, too, was new. Only a handkerchief was then in the pocket;
no knife, no marbles, no strings, no stones, no fishhooks or dried
angle-worms. No; a boy’s Sunday pocket of the olden time was purged of
all temptation. In meeting-time we often put our little hands down into
our Sunday pocket with a melancholy wish, ‘Oh! if I only had my other
clothes on!’

“As soon as we were dressed and mustered in the sitting-room an
inspection was had. The collar was pulled up a little, the hair had a
fresh lick from the brush, the mouth must be wiped with a wet towel, the
shoestring tied, and, after being turned round and round, we were
started off.

“‘Now, Henry, be a good boy.’

“‘Yes, ma’am.’

“‘You must not laugh, or tease Harriet.’

“‘No, ma’am.’

“‘Don’t stop on the road—go right in when you get to church.’

“‘Yes, ma’am.”

“Every word was sincerely promised, and efficaciously broken within ten
minutes.

“Oh! how high the trees seemed! Oh! how bright the heavens were! Oh! how
hard it was not to play with Chester Covington’s dog, that came running
to us with bark and frolic, and seemed perplexed at our sturdy
propriety.

“The old musical bell up in the open belfry was busy a-tolling. It was
the only thing that was allowed to work on Sunday—the bell and the
minister. That bell-rope was always an object of desire and curiosity to
our young days. It ran up into such dark and mysterious spaces. What
there was up in those pokerish heights in the belfry tower we did not
know, but something that made our flesh creep. Once we ventured to pull
that rope. It was a bold and venturesome thing, we knew. But a sorcery
was on us. It came gently and easily to the hand. We pulled again.
‘Dong! dong!’ went the bell. The old sexton put his head out of the door
when, on that particular morning, service had begun, and said, in a very
solemn and low tone, ‘Boy! boy! you little devil you!’ and much more, I
presume, but I did not wait for it, but cut round to the other door and
sat all church-time trembling and wondering whether he would ‘tell my
pa’; and if he did, what _he_ would say, and more especially what he
would _do_. I called up the probable interview. I had numerous
precedents on which to found a possible experience, and afflicted our
little soul all meeting-time with needless punishment by the
imagination.

“But ordinarily we escaped into the minister’s pew without special
temptations. Imagine a boy of eight years old, round as an apple, hearty
and healthy, an hour and a half in church with nothing to do! We looked
at the galleries full of boys and girls, and wished we might go into the
galleries. We looked at the ceiling, traced all the cracks back and
forth. We looked at the dear old aunties all round the church, fanning
themselves with one hand and eating fennel-seed or a bit of dried
orange-peel out of the other. We gazed out of the window high above our
heads into the clouds, and wished we could only climb up and see the
trees and horses and dogs that abounded around the church on Sunday.

“Gradually these died out and we dropped asleep. Blessed liberty! the
child’s gospel! All trouble fled away. For a half-hour paradise was
gained. But then an unusual thump on the pulpit Bible, and the ring and
roar of a voice under full excitement, that went on swelling like a
trumpet, and that no one, not the most listless, could hear without
catching its excitement, waked us, blushing and confused that we had
been asleep in church! Even on the serene and marble face of mother the
faint suggestion of a smile came, as we clutched our hat, supposing
meeting to be over, and then sheepishly dropped it and sank back in
dismay. But even Sunday cannot hold out for ever, and meetings have to
let out sometime! So, at length, a universal stir and bustle announced
that it was time to go. Up we bolted! Down we sat as quick as if a
million pins were sticking in our foot! The right leg was asleep!
Limping forth into the open air, relief came to our heart. The being out
of doors had always an inexpressible charm, and never so much as on
Sunday. Away went the wagons. Away went the people. The whole Green
swarmed with folks. The long village streets were full of company. In
ten minutes all were gone, and the street was given up again to the
birds!

“Little good did preaching do me until after I was fifteen years
old—little good immediately. Yet the whole Sunday, the peculiar
influence which it exerted on the household, the general sense of awe
which it inspired, the very rigor of its difference from other days, and
the suspended animation of its sermon time, served to produce upon the
young mind a profound impression. A day that stood out from all others
in a hard and gaunt way might, perhaps, be justly criticised. But it
left its mark. It did its work upon the imagination, if not upon the
reason. It had power in it; and in estimating moral excellence power is
an element of the utmost importance. Will our smooth, cosey, feeble
modern Sundays have such a grip on the moral nature? They are far
pleasanter. Are they as efficacious? Will they educate the moral nature
as much?”

The cold of Litchfield Hill and the exposure of his old home were always
remembered.

“You may think you know something about winter; but if you never spent a
winter on old Litchfield Hill, where I was brought up, you do not know
much about it. It was before the days of stoves. There were what we
called ‘box-stoves,’ but they were a very small power for generating
heat. The idea of a furnace was not born. It was not even within the
reach of a prophet to predict it.

“My father’s house was a great barn of a structure, with rooms scattered
about here and there. Mine was the west and north room—on the corner; so
that I had the full benefit, without any subtraction or discount, of
everything that was going on out of doors; for double windows were not
known, and the carpenters did not care about making a tight fit.
Therefore the wind found no trouble in coming in, and on many and many a
morning the snow had blown from the window to my bed and across the foot
of it; and if anything inspires alacrity of step on a winter morning
when the feet are bare, it is a drift of snow. Walking on it is like
walking on wasps.

“To go back to the frigid houses of New England in winter, without
furnaces or hard coal, or air-tight stoves or steam, would make our
dainty skin tingle. What a pother is made to ascertain the exact
position of the North Pole, the very centre and navel of cold! Why, I
could have pointed to the exact spot sixty years ago. It was on the
northwest angle of my father’s house in Litchfield, Connecticut, in the
room where I slept.”

Not only did the severity of the elements affect him, but their uproar
as well, especially in the night-time.

“The war of winter winds to our young ears was terrible as the thunder
of waves or the noise of battle. All night long the cold, shelterless
trees moaned. Their strong crying penetrated our sleep and shaped our
dreams. At every waking the air was full of mighty winds. The house
creaked and strained, and at some more furious gust shuddered and
trembled all over. Then the windows rattled, the cracks and crevices
whistled each its own distinctive note, and the chimneys, like diapasons
of an organ, had their deep and hollow rumble.”

And now comes an influence that we should have passed by, if he himself
had not given it place and elaborate notice:

“Next to the winds our night experiences in early boyhood were much
affected by rats. The old house seemed to have been a favorite of this
curious vermin. There is something in the short, hot glitter of a rat’s
eye that has never ceased to affect us unpleasantly. We could not help
imagining them to be the mere receptacles of mischievous spirits, and
their keen eyes had always a kind of mocking expression, as if they
said, ‘You think we are rats, but if we get hold of you you will know
that we are a good deal more than that.’ We never could estimate how
many populated our old house. The walls seemed like city thoroughfares,
and the ceiling like a Forum or Roman theatre. We used to lie in bed and
marvel at what was going on. Sometimes there would be a great stillness,
as if they had all gone to meeting. Then again they would troop about
with such a swell of liberty and gladness that it was quite plain that
the meeting was out. But nothing ever scared and amused us so much as
their way of going up and down the partitions. At first up would come
one, then another, and finally quite a bevy, squeaking and frolicking,
as if they were school-boys going up-stairs, nipping each other and
cutting up all manner of pranks. Then came a stillness. Next a
premonitory rat would rush down, evidently full of news, and immediately
down would pour after him a stream of rats, rushing like mad, and
apparently tumbling heels over head. By and by some old sawyer would
commence where he left off the night before, cutting the same partition.
To this must be added nibblings, rat-nestled paper, an occasional race
of rats across the bed, the manipulation of corn in the garret, the
foray with cats and kittens, the rat engines—‘steel traps,’ ‘box-traps,’
‘figure-four’s,’ and all manner of devices, in spite of which the rats
held their own, and, if allowed suffrage, would have outvoted the whole
family, dog and cats to boot, four to one.”

He was early taught to work and endure what now might be called
hardships.

“It was my duty, after I got to be about eight years old, to go
down-stairs and build a fire. Ours was a house in which, when the
weather was cold, if water was left in any vessel it would freeze and
split the vessel asunder; and of course crockery had no chance. Our well
used to choke up with ice so that we had to cut it out in order to get
the bucket down; and sometimes, when the cistern was frozen up so that
we could not get water from it, I have gone, on washing-days, two miles,
and dipped water from a brook into barrels, and brought it home.
Therefore you see that, however dainty I may be nowadays, I started on a
very different pattern.”

But he came in after-years to be glad of this experience:

“I am thankful that I learned to hem towels—as I did. I know how to knit
suspenders and mittens. I know a good deal about working in wood—sawing,
chopping, splitting, planing, and things of that sort. I was brought up
to put my hand to anything; so that when I went West, and was travelling
on the prairies and my horse lost a shoe, and I came to a cross-road
where there was an abandoned blacksmith’s shop, I could go in and start
the fire, and fix the old shoe and put it on again. What man has done
man can do; and it is a good thing to bring up boys so that they shall
think they can do anything. I could do anything.”

The greatest trial of those days was the catechism. Sunday lessons were
considered by the mother as inflexible duty, and the catechism was the
_sine qua non_. “The other children memorized readily and were brilliant
reciters, but Henry, blushing, stammering, confused, and hopelessly
miserable, stuck fast on some sand-bank of what is required or forbidden
by this or that commandment, his mouth choking up with the long words
which he hopelessly miscalled, was sure to be accused of idleness or
inattention, and to be solemnly talked to, which made him look more
stolid and miserable than ever, but appeared to have no effect in
quickening his dormant faculties.”

Such were the influences that were exerted upon Henry Ward Beecher
during these early and formative years. Various as they were, they
preserved a general character of healthful simplicity; and numerous as
they appear, they can yet be readily generalized. The first were those
that were addressed to conscience, and that went to make this the
strong, influential factor which it became in all well-trained New
England youth of that period, and in none more markedly than in him. The
stepmother led in this work. She was the conscience of the family,
training to the strict observance of duty with a thoroughness which the
father, with his more impulsive nature, could never have equalled,
although he was in sympathy with the process. Home duties carefully
exacted, regular attendance upon school, the strict keeping the Sabbath,
even the hated lesson in the catechism, were some of the instruments
employed. Open to criticism, they may be, in method and extent, yet they
did their work, and strong conscientiousness was developed that made him
tremble at the thought of wrong-doing, and kept him so free from
viciousness that he was able to say: “I never was sullied in act, nor in
thought, nor in feeling when I was young. I grew up as pure as a woman.”

And although in after-years he gave more stress to heart than
conscience, and preached the Gospel rather than the law, it was but the
carrying out the natural process of soil-making and forest culture: the
granite ridges of conscience formed the foundation, clothed and hidden
by the growth, but not destroyed.

With all her admirable qualities his step-mother failed to satisfy his
longing for affection.

“It pleased God to give me a second mother, a very eminent Christian
woman. Now, my nature was enthusiastic and outgushing; I was like the
convolvulus—I wanted to be running on somebody all the time. But my
second mother was stately and not easy to approach. She was a beautiful
person, serene and ladylike. She never lacked self-possession in speech,
gesture, or posture. She was polished; but to my young thoughts she was
cold. As I look back I do not recollect ever to have had from her one
breath of summer. Although I was longing to love somebody, she did not
call forth my affection; and my father was too busy to be loved.
Therefore I had to expend my love on Aunt Chandler, a kind soul that was
connected with our family, and the black woman that cooked, who were
very kind to me. My mother that brought me up I never thought of loving.
It never occurred to me. I was afraid of her. I revered her, but I was
not attracted to her. I felt that she was ready to die, and that I was
not. I knew that at about twilight she prayed; and I had a great
shrinking from going past her door at that time. I had not the slightest
doubt that she had set her affection on things above, and not on things
beneath. I had the strongest conviction of her saintliness. It stamped
itself upon my youth.”

Another division of influences comes under the head of spiritual:

“I can look back upon my own early life, and see how one and another
took me, and how one prepared me for another. I can see how the largest
natures did not always get access to me. It was late in life before my
father influenced me very much. I think it was a humble woman who was in
our family that first gained any considerable control over me. I feel
the effect of her influence to this day.

“I next came under the influence of a very humble serving-man. He opened
up new directions to me and gave me new impulses. He was a colored man;
and I am not ashamed to say that my whole life, my whole career
respecting the colored race in the conflict which was so long carried on
in this country, was largely influenced by the effect produced on my
mind, when I was between eight and ten years of age, by a poor old
colored man who worked on my father’s farm, named Charles Smith. He did
not set out to influence me; he did not know that he did it; I did not
know it until a great while afterwards; but he gave me impulses, and
impulses which were in the right direction; for he was a godly and
hymn-singing man, who made wine fresh every night from the cluster. He
used to lie upon his humble bed (I slept in the same room with him) and
read his Testament, unconscious, apparently, that I was in the room; and
he would laugh and talk about what he read, and chuckle over it with
that peculiarly unctuous throat-tone which belongs to his race. I never
had heard the Bible really read before; but there, in my presence, he
read it, and talked about it to himself and to God. He turned the New
Testament into living forms right before me. It was a revelation and an
impulse to me.

“He talked to me about my soul more than any member of my father’s
family. These things impressed me with the conviction that he was a
Christian; and I never saw anything in him that led me to think
otherwise. The feeling that I was sinful, that I needed to be born
again, that there was such a thing as a regenerate life produced by the
Spirit of God in the soul—these feelings came to me by observing the
actual example of persons that I lived with more than from all other
sources put together.”

But above all others for diffusive and permanent impression affecting
his whole nature, bringing him into sympathy with God in all his works
as in all his words, and increasing to the day of his death, was the
influence of his own mother.

“The memory of my mother as one sainted has exerted a singular influence
on me. After I came to be about fourteen or fifteen years of age I began
to be distinctly conscious that there was a silent, secret, and, if you
please to call it so, romantic influence which was affecting me. It grew
and it grows, so that in some parts of my nature I think I have more
communion with my mother, whom I never saw except as a child three years
old, than with any living being. I am conscious that all my life long
there has been a moral power in my memory of her. It is evident to me
that while in education and in other material respects her death was a
deprivation, it was also an inspiration, a communion—one of those
invisible blessings which faith comprehends, but which we are not apt to
weigh and to estimate.

“Do you know,” he says, “why so often I speak what must seem to some of
you rhapsody of woman? It is because I had a mother, and if I were to
live a thousand years I could not express what seems to me to be the
least that I owe to her. Three years old was I when singing she left me
and sung on to heaven, where she sings evermore. I have only such a
remembrance of her as you have of the clouds of ten years ago—faint,
evanescent; and yet, caught by imagination, and fed by that which I have
heard of her and by what my father’s thought and feeling of her were, it
has come to be so much to me that no devout Catholic ever saw so much in
the Virgin Mary as I have seen in my mother, who has been a presence to
me ever since I can remember; and I can never say enough for woman for
my sisters’ sake, for the sake of them that have gathered in the days of
my infancy around about me, in return for what they have interpreted to
me of the beauty of holiness, of the fulness of love, and of the
heavenliness of those elements from which we are to interpret heaven
itself.”

In those influences that went to move the intellect, to awaken interest
and thought, while the family life and the school and nature were all
doing something, the dear old Aunt Esther with her Bible-readings and
her innumerable stories and incidents of animal life stood pre-eminent
and unapproachable at this period. It was but a few years before his
death that he spoke of her early influence upon him, and read to us the
story of Joseph as she used to read it to him, with the tears rolling
down his cheeks. He told us that he had never yet been able to read that
story or hear it read without crying.

But in those practical influences that had to do with life, that gave
him the impression that things could be done and must be done, that gave
him inspiration to labor, his father took the lead.

“What I was going to speak of was the effect upon my young mind of
observing my father’s conduct under trying circumstances. I never once
saw him flinch before the cold, or look as though anything was hard, or
as if there was a reason for not pitching in and holding on when things
were difficult. I have seen the time when we had to cut a
twenty-five-foot tunnel outward from the kitchen-door, carrying the snow
through the house; and such tunnels would sometimes remain a month
before they would break down. I have seen the children around the house
crying with cold, and slapping their hands, and stamping their feet,
when father had to go and dig wood out of the snow-bank, and cut and
split it; and his alacrity and vigor infused themselves into the
children. I recollect particularly that if, on such nights as this, when
to the high wind severe cold and thick darkness were added, my father
had appointments, he always fulfilled them. It was customary to have
preaching-places all around the neighborhood, here, there, and
everywhere; and I never knew him to think of shrinking from an
appointment, or holding himself back for a moment, on account of the
weather. There never was a snow so deep, or a wind so high, or a rain so
driving, or a night so black that the thought seemed to enter his head
that he must give up a meeting. I have many times seen him, on cold,
bitter nights, take out his old silk handkerchief and put it on, and go
forth into the storm without seeming to dread it; and often, as I have
remembered it, I have wished I could put on his spirit in the same way.
He did it as a matter of course. And such was the effect of his example
on his children that there was not one of them that would not be ashamed
to show the ‘white feather’ in the presence of external difficulties.

“When I was a boy I learned some hymns, and committed to memory an
indefinite number of texts, and waded a certain distance into the
catechism, never getting through it; and I forgot them again very
quickly. But I do not think all of them put together exerted any
material influence upon me one way or the other—they did not remain in
my mind to be understood when I was older; but a great many things which
my father did, but which neither he nor anybody else spoke of, have had