beautiful he looks even in death. I think I never beheld any thing earthly so perfect and lovely as his little corpse. His hair curls in beautiful ringlets all over his head, and he looks so natural and unaltered, one would think him in a peaceful slumber. I can not bear to think he must be laid in the grave.58
Harriet, the younger, was taken with the same illness but she recovered.
In January 1822, the house had four boarders, and even with the extra income, the family budget was stretched.59 With the birth of Lyman Beecher’s eighth child imminent, the family sent ten-year-old Harriet Beecher to Nut Plains, to her mother’s homestead. From a family letter describing Roxanna’s family:
These Footes are a people by themselves in their literary accomplishments, their good sense and fine breeding. Their homestead almost talks to you from its very walls of the days gone by. I never felt more sure of spirit companionship of the highest order, and your father thinks few parlors in all the land have gathered a more noble company.60
And while she wintered there, her ever-vigilant big sister Catharine wrote her:
I suppose you will be very glad to hear you have a little sister at home. We have no name for her yet. We all want you at home very much, but hope you are now where you will learn to stand and sit straight, and hear what people say to you, and sit still in your chair, and learn to sew and knit well, and be a good girl in every particular; and if you don’t learn while you are with Aunt Harriet, I am afraid you never will.61
Eventually, the family would settle on the name Isabella — consecrated to God. So tagged, the baby girl entered the frantic, intellectually challenging, and curious world of the Fabulous Beechers.
2
TRAINING TO BE A BEECHER
Childbirth in early America was a dangerous thing. Women gave birth anywhere from five to eight times, and a new mother’s chance of dying during the process was between 1 and 1.5 percent. Extrapolating for the non–math majors, that meant a woman’s chances of dying over the course of her childbearing years could be as high as one in eight.1 If she survived, her child might not. In the early 1800s, there wasn’t the language for birth control.2 You can perhaps see why pregnancy was approached with no small amount of dread.
We know nothing about Isabella’s actual birth, other than it took place on February 22, 1822, but we can take a few educated guesses. Unattended births were rare among people with any kind of social standing. A woman of Harriet Porter’s position might have opted to give birth in the presence of a physician.3 However, with her marriage to Lyman Beecher, Harriet Porter had slipped a few rungs down the socioeconomic ladder, and Isabella’s birth most likely was attended — if it was attended at all — by a house servant or a trusted family member such as the ever-present Aunt Esther Beecher, Lyman’s unmarried sister who frequently cared for the children. As Harriet Porter had had one child previously — little doomed Frederick — she would have at least known what to expect.
Meanwhile, the joys of child-rearing were being codified in a slew of parenting books that began hitting the markets in the 1820s. Previously, childhood was considered an event best navigated quickly, but in the early part of the nineteenth century, writers began to devote more time to essays and books on child-rearing, and on parental (read: maternal) involvement. By mid-decade, the relatively new genre focused most intently on the authority of the parent, and the need for the child to acquiesce.4 The books stressed self-discipline “over physical and moral faculties”— which dovetailed nicely with the Beecher family religion of rigorous self-examination.5
Two more children followed Isabella: Thomas Kinnicut Beecher in 1824 and James Chaplin Beecher in 1828. With each new child, Harriet’s sojourns in her bedroom grew longer and longer, and her time with her children — both step- and birth — grew increasingly short. Mary and Catharine proved themselves capable of helping run the household and manage the children, and Isabella most likely learned to look to her sisters for what mothering she needed.
Catharine, a generation older than baby sister Isabella, was engaged to be married and soon to leave the nest when word reached Litchfield that her fiancé, Alexander Metcalf Fisher, a brilliant mathematician from Yale, had been killed in a shipwreck off the coast of Ireland just two months after Isabella was born. For as much as he could move people from the pulpit, Lyman Beecher lacked the ability to comfort his grieving eldest daughter. He believed that her beloved had died in a state of sin, because although Fisher had studied religion at Yale, he was not a member of the Congregational Church. If the young mathematician had had a religious conversion — to Lyman’s brand of Christianity, as none other would do — he left no record of such a conversion.6 Instead of comfort, Lyman spoke to his daughter about how God tests his children, and he urged her to turn to God for comfort.
Being told by your father that your fiancé is burning in hell is not a motivator to draw nigh unto the Lord. Catharine, who had seemed likely to be the Beecher who would cling to the old rugged cross so adored by her father, suffered a crisis of faith from which she never quite recovered. Why should she give fealty to a God who took her beloved? An anguished father-daughter debate carried on for months, and was sometimes joined by Edward, three years Catharine’s junior and one of the family’s earliest abolitionists.
Catharine inherited Fisher’s library, which she began to rigorously explore. With study and debate within the family, Catharine became an ambassador of a new theology, and the family’s first break from their father’s brand of Calvinism had begun.7 And those family debates formed the foundation of Isabella’s instruction — that she should be as well-read as her brothers in order to create a home environment that would serve as a springboard for her future husband’s son’s success in the world.
At home, the family scene was dynamic. There was the ever-rotating crew of boarders and the continual addition of new babes, while older children rotated in and out, subject to the school calendar.
Not long after the death of her fiancé, Catharine founded the Hartford Female Seminary in a rented room over a harness shop, with two teachers and a student body of seven. The school was funded mostly by the women of Hartford, after their husbands balked at educating girls in mathematics and other topics that had been restricted to boys. One father wrote a worried letter to the local paper, the Courant: “I would rather my daughters to go to school and sit down and do nothing, than to study philosophy…. These branches fill young Misses with vanity to the degree that they are above attending to the more useful parts of an education.”8 If this gentleman had sat in on any of Catharine’s classes, he would have been even more concerned, for Catharine used her school to explore her own evolving notions about theology and women’s roles. Her father’s Calvinist theology insisted that salvation came from the grace of God. Instead, Catharine emphasized the importance of good works.9 She began to concentrate on raising funds for her school in 1826 and was able to move to a larger facility in a church basement at Main and Morgan in Hartford’s downtown, though the school was still confined to just one room. Catharine’s sister Harriet began teaching there soon after, and after another round of fundraising, Catharine moved into a neoclassical building on Pratt Street.10 When prospective student Angelina Grimké, who would later be an outspoken abolitionist and suffragist, visited from South Carolina in 1831, she found that Catharine wanted students “to feel that they had no right to spend their time in idleness, fashion and folly, but they as individuals were bound to be useful in Society after they had finished their education, and that as teachers single women could be more useful in this than in any other way.”11
