THE EDUCATION OF ISABELLA BEECHER
Despite his wife’s frailties, in the early 1830s the ever-restless Lyman Beecher began to look west, toward Cincinnati, an outpost that had been settled mostly by New Englanders. In what was then the Far West, men like Lyman Beecher “had ample opportunity to fit shoes of virtue on the clay feet of straying mortals.”1 His work in Boston was nowhere near done, but Lyman Beecher was convinced that God in the mostly untrammeled Ohio wilderness had reached out to him to come glean the fields.
The trip would be fraught with challenges. The family could be in great peril from the diseases and uncertainties of the trail, but with a promised donation from supporters of the unearthly sum of $20,000 to Lane Theological Seminary if he took the helm, Lyman was sorely tempted.2
But first, he traveled with his then-thirty-year-old daughter and most trusted advisor, Catharine, to investigate the new land. While there, Catharine wrote back to sister Harriet: “I never saw a place so capable of being rendered a paradise by the improvements of taste as the environs of this city. Walnut Hills are so elevated and cool that people have to leave there to be sick, it is said.”3
The other Beecher women had reservations about the move, but Lyman was able to rouse them.4 Satisfied that their effort would be met with great results, in 1832 the family moved to Cincinnati, and Lyman assumed the presidency of the Lane Theological Seminary and pastorship of the town’s Second Presbyterian Church. The school, which had been operating since 1829, crowned a hill about two miles northeast of Cincinnati. The seminary’s ethos would have appealed to Lyman’s sense of asceticism. Quarters were not opulent, and students lived simply — and often chose a vegetarian diet.5
Most of the family made the move in a large caravan that eschewed hotels and opted, instead, to stay with friends along the way. As they traveled, the children — most specifically, George — distributed religious tracts. As always, there was a sense of too little money. In a letter to Catharine, Harriet described their westward trip as frequent stops for her father to “beg” money from supporters.
Begging seemed to agree with him. Lyman enjoyed the trip greatly, wrote Catharine, saying he was “all in his own element — dipping into books, consulting authorities for his oration; going round here, there, everywhere, begging, borrowing, and spoiling the Egyptians; delighted with past success and confident of the future.” Little mention is made of Isabella in the move, other than as a member of the traveling party. As a girl of ten, she would not have loomed large on the family landscape, but she would have been expected to mind her parents, and her manners.
When the family had to wait in Wheeling, West Virginia, for a bout of cholera to pass through Cincinnati, Lyman preached to other stranded travelers. It is not recorded whether those travelers were open to the message.
The students at Lane, who were living in fairly spacious quarters, fared better than most townsfolk during the cholera outbreak, which killed roughly 370 residents during the worst of the epidemic from April to September 1833.6 It was one of seven outbreaks from 1832 to 1852, brought to town by Ohio River traffic, by, wrote one doctor-historian, “every boat ascending the river, and in many of the towns on the banks.”7
The outbreak did nothing to endear her new town to Harriet Porter. Unlike the Beecher children, she did not share Lyman Beecher’s enthusiasm for the move. Suffering already from a variety of maladies, she found the trip onerous, and once she was settled, her letters back home took on a decidedly melancholy turn. Even the Cincinnati presence of her cousin, Gen. Edward King, did not change her mind about her new home.8 King, a lawyer, an author, and a member of the Ohio state legislature, may have tried to make his cousin’s transition easier, but bad health continued to dog Harriet Porter.9 In an 1833 letter to her sister, she wrote that she was always sick. A year later, she wrote that she wept night and day for her loved ones, whom she fully intended to never see again.
Though her suffering was most acute, Harriet Porter was not the only Beecher regretting the move. In a letter to her sister Mary, Harriet Beecher wrote that they were all — save for Lyman — quite homesick. That same year, the Beechers started sending one another round-robin letters, so as to include everyone and give everyone a chance to weigh in — and, perhaps, to more tightly tether those who’d moved west to their beloved New England.10
Epidemics notwithstanding, Cincinnati was thriving as the largest town in the West, with the exception of New Orleans. The 1830s saw the city double in size, to a little more than 46,000 by 1840. It boasted banks, a university, a museum, a theater, a bazaar, and hospitals — all of which sprang up in roughly a quarter century.11 The family could have done worse than “Porkopolis,” though the hogs roaming the streets disgusted all but four-year-old James, who once, his sister Harriet wrote, threw his leg over the back of one and rode it down the street.
About a year after they arrived, the family moved to Walnut Hills, then a small town roughly three miles from the seminary, into a comfortable home with wide hallways and open rooms suitable for church and school committee meetings. Surrounding the house was a grove of trees, and at age eighty-five, Isabella could still remember climbing those trees and hanging on for dear life when the wind blew. When her brothers Charles and Henry returned from college and entered Lane, Isabella wrote that they were a “big and happy family” until slavery began to dominate conversations in and around the school.
The abolitionist movement that started in Great Britain had jumped the ocean and was beginning to spread in the United States. In 1829, a Boston printer published a call for “the coloured citizens of the world,” which condemned racism and reminded American citizens about the promise found in the Declaration of Independence.12 Slavery was increasingly characterized by abolitionists as a sin, so the topic would inevitably arise at a seminary, though Lane’s discussions were particularly heated.
Lyman Beecher was ardently antislavery but believed the answer was to send slaves back to Africa, or colonize them. Some adherents in the colonization movement were motivated more by racism than a sense of fairness, and to them, colonization was not so much a way to right a 150-year-old wrong but rather a way to rid the country of Africans. In its beginning, the Ohio Colonization Society, an offshoot of the American Colonization Society, was “guided by growing resentment that freed slaves from southern states were migrating to Ohio and contaminating the social landscape.”13 The society distributed frequent warnings that the influx of freed slaves would soon tip the racial balance in the state to a majority of blacks, and when that occurred, a revolution was just around the corner. The message gained traction in Cincinnati, where the black population was among the state’s largest among urban areas.14
A series of debates held at Lane in February 1834 led many to conclude that slavery was a sin, and therefore needed to be abolished immediately. The debates were held against the wishes of the school faculty.15 Organized by Lane student Theodore D. Weld, who had transferred from the Oneida Institute in New York, the discussion sought to answer the question of whether slavery should be immediately abolished and whether colonization was the Christian stance.16 After Isabella came to the abolition movement, she might have appreciated that Weld not only preached abolition, he also unfailingly supported the rights of women to participate publicly — speaking and praying — at worship services.17 But Isabella would long remember her father’s tearful reaction to what he saw as disloyalty, and she would never quite embrace Weld’s legacy.
Until the Lane debates, abolition was considered the most radical answer to the slavery question. As word began circulating, the debates helped galvanize the country beyond Lane. Lane students, who left behind the notion of colonization in favor of abolition, formed an antislavery society, raised money to support a library for area African Americans, and volunteered to teach classes for free blacks living
