eight children in fifteen years: Catharine, William, Edward, Mary, George, Harriet, Henry Ward, and Charles. She had imprinted upon her children the notion of Perfect Motherhood — and no woman would ever compare. Catharine would later transform it into “a public mission fired with the passion and preeminence of the ministry.”40 But ill health dogged Roxanna, and in 1816, at age forty-one, she died of consumption.41 Her youngest child was just one, and the next oldest — Henry Ward — was not yet three. Her oldest, Catharine, was sixteen.
Lyman Beecher stood in a tub pulpit with Roxanna’s coffin below, and preached her funeral service.42 The rest of the family quickly began to turn the accomplished woman into a saint. Later, Henry Ward, although he was still a toddler when she died, would tell his congregation that his mother meant to him what the Virgin Mary meant to a devout Roman Catholic.43
As mournful as was the family — particularly Lyman, who had lost both an intellectual partner and a Christian wife — it would not do for a man of the cloth, and the father of eight, to go unwed. So Lyman Beecher followed in his father’s footsteps of rapid wife replacement and, nearly a year to the day of Roxanna’s death, traveled to the Park Street Church in Boston to give a sermon titled “The Bible, a Code of Laws.” For both Litchfield and Boston Congregationalists, the reason for his trip was clear. According to the supposition of the girls he taught at Miss Pierce’s school, Lyman had gone to Boston to seek a wife and a mother for his children.44
And he was successful. He returned to Boston a month later to retrieve twenty-seven-year-old Harriet Porter, the daughter of a prominent doctor from Portland, Maine, who counted among her family a Maine governor, a congressman, and a member of the Continental Congress.45 Her family members did not approve of the union of their fair Harriet with the older firebrand who had, as he’d done with his first wife, proved to be a persuasive suitor in his letters. Lyman Beecher may have had a growing influence on the country’s theology, but he would never earn a decent living, and what did Harriet Porter know of raising children?
Harriet Porter was beautiful, and hardly equipped for the rigors of parish life or ministerial poverty that was not always so genteel.46 Catharine, who was just ten years younger than Harriet Porter, wrote a letter that sought to alert her soon-to-be stepmother of the welcome that awaited her. Catharine said she and her siblings “promise to make it our constant study to render you the affection, obedience, and all the kind offices which we should wish to pay our own mother were she now restored to us from the grave. The sacred name of mother, so bound up in our hearts, would alone entitle you to the most undeviating affection and respect.”47
Despite the Porter family’s trepidations, from all indications, everyone’s first impressions were favorable. Harriet Porter Beecher, who was every bit as committed to orthodoxy in her religion as was her new husband, seemed pleased with the relative sophistication of her new home.48 On first meeting his stepmother after he’d already gone to bed for the night, Henry Ward Beecher wrote, “I remember well how happy I was. I felt that I had a mother. I felt her kiss, and I heard her voice. I could not distinguish her features, but I knew that she was my mother.”49
Of that first meeting, his sister Harriet wrote:
I was about six years old and slept in the nursery with my two younger brothers. We knew Father was going away somewhere on a journey, and was expected home, and thus the sound of a bustle or disturbance in the house more easily awoke us. We heard Father’s voice in the entry, and started up, crying out as he entered our room, “Why, here’s pa!” A cheerful voice called out from behind him, “And here’s ma!”
A beautiful lady, very fair, with bright blue eyes and soft auburn hair bound round with a black velvet bandeau, came into the room, smiling, eager, and happy-looking, and coming up to our beds, kissed us and told us she loved little children and would be our mother. We wanted forthwith to get up and dressed, but she pacified us with the promise that we should find her in the morning.50
That next morning, Harriet Beecher wrote, “We looked at her with awe.”51
She seemed to us so fair, so delicate, so elegant, that we were almost afraid to go near her. We must have been rough, red-cheeked, hearty country children, honest, obedient, and bashful. She was peculiarly dainty and neat in all her ways and arrangements; and I remember I used to feel breezy and rough and rude in her presence. We felt a little in awe of her, as if she were a strange princess rather than our own mamma; but her voice was very sweet, her ways of speaking and moving very graceful, and she took us up in her lap and let us play with her beautiful hands, which seemed wonderful things, made of pearl, and ornamented with strange rings.52
As for her impression of her new family, Harriet Porter Beecher wrote to her sister: “I never saw so many rosy cheeks and laughing eyes. They began all, the first thing, to tell their dreams, for it seems they have dreamed of nothing else but father’s coming home; and some dreamed he came without me, and some that he brought two mothers.”53 She would write subsequent letters extolling the family’s cheerfulness and health, and the “uncommon intellect” shown by even the smallest of the brood. She was particularly taken with Edward, the third child, and suggested he would one day be a great scholar. She would also express thanks that the children were so self-sufficient. Being without a mother — even for just a year — had pushed Catharine and Mary into the role, and both seemed willing and capable of continuing their motherly duties even after the arrival of their new stepmother. The new Mrs. Beecher found herself called upon only a little, and she displayed her sensitive nature early when her husband tried to read to her Edwards’s “Angry God” sermon. As Lyman read, she stormed from the room, saying, “Dr. Beecher, I shall not listen to another word of that slander on my Heavenly Father!”54
Church life, as well, required little of Harriet Porter. She described in letters church services that relied heavily on singing and reading scriptures aloud. She was impressed with the relationship between Harriet and Henry, sister and brother just two years apart, who were “always hand-in-hand.”55 She did, however, travel with her husband to visit the flock, and she held church teas. She also tried to start a women’s committee. She was heartily impressed with her husband’s stamina.
The family was on the verge of scattering — the boys to college, the girls to marriage — and they held on to one another through their letters. In one, Catharine wrote to Edward of the death of a family cat, Tom Junior, and noted that their sister Harriet was “our chief mourner always at their [the cats’] funerals,” to which Lyman added his concern that “soon none but letters so solid and weighty as to earn their postage will be passing to and fro.” An addition from Catharine reminded Edward that “papa loves to laugh as well as any of us, and is quite as much tickled at nonsense as we are!”56
Soon after he was joined by his new wife, Lyman Beecher’s prodigious energy failed him, and he stepped away from the pulpit to spend a year working the farmland around his Litchfield homestead. The diagnosis was “nervous dyspepsia,” or an upset stomach caused by stress or exhaustion. After a year’s sojourn in the fields, he was back in the pulpit, and traveling at the same hectic pace as before.
About the same time Lyman stepped back into his ministerial duties, Harriet Porter Beecher began having babies, starting in 1818 with Frederick C. Beecher, who would live not quite two years. On June 20, 1820, Catharine wrote brother Edward, then a student at Yale:
“We are all anxious and troubled at home. Frederick had the canker, or scarlet fever, very badly. For two of three days we have despaired of his life.”57
On June 23, Catharine wrote family at Nut Plains that “little Freddy had breathed his last” and that:
were it not for religion, I think mamma would sink, but she is
