Fearful that association with such a radical stance would tarnish the school’s reputation — and, more to the point, threaten its ability to raise funds — the school’s executive committee voted to fire one of the abolitionist professors, and it vetoed further slavery discussions.19 Ohio bordered two slave states, and Lane looked “for a large measure of its resources to that portion of American Society with which slavery was incorporated.”20
Lyman was in Boston when the board voted, and when he returned, he could not dissuade about forty of the more outspoken students — Weld and others known as the Lane Rebels — from moving to nearby Oberlin College. Their departure left Lane struggling and Lyman with one of his few public defeats.21 At twelve, Isabella could understand what was going on around her — including the threat the Lane Rebels’ leave-taking posed to her family’s livelihood.
A report published in December 1834 acknowledged that money was tight at Lane, but Easterners and Westerners agreed that “the salvation of our country and the world is intimately connected with the intellectual and moral elevation of the West; and that this school of the prophets, under God, is destined to exert a leading influence in accomplishing this important result.”22
Meanwhile, in a July 1835 letter to his son William, then serving as first pastor of the newly formed Putnam Presbyterian Church in what would later become Zanesville, Ohio, Lyman wrote:
As to abolition, I am still of the opinion that you ought not, and need not, and will not commit yourself as a partisan on either side. The cause is moving in Providence, and by the American Union, and by colonization, and by [Benjamin] Lundy in Texas [who supported both] which is a grand thing, and will succeed, as I believe; and I hope and believe that the Abolitionists as a body will become more calm and less denunciatory, with the exception of a few he-goat men, who think they do God service by butting every thing in the line of their march which does not fall in or get out of the way. They are the offspring of the Oneida denunciatory revivals, and are made up of vinegar, aqua fortis, and oil of vitriol, with brimstone, saltpeter, and charcoal, to explode and scatter the corrosive matter.”23
William, however, was an abolitionist, although he may not have been as firmly committed as his wife, Katherine Edes Beecher.24 On this and other topics, with the lone exception of Henry Ward, the Beecher women — both Beechers by birth and Beechers by marriage — tended to be more outspokenly radical than the men.25
Isabella would later remember her father in tears as he pleaded with the students to temper their talk, “for he loved the young men as if they were his own sons…. I can see him now, joining them in the little log house just opposite ours — pleading, remonstrating, with tears and almost with groans. I was but a child, but was in such sympathy with his distress that I could never forgive the young men for departing from such a loving guide and friend.”26
There were other cracks in the life Lyman was trying to build for his family in Ohio. Despite Lyman Beecher’s relatively straitlaced theology, his views were evolving from strict Calvinism, and that did not endear him to a Cincinnati body already feeling besieged by the abolition movement.27 Lyman’s official siding with the board over the Lane Rebels did not protect him from rigorous examination by his enemies, and in June 1835 he was put on trial for heresy, hypocrisy, and slander. Isabella would remember her brother Henry making jokes about their father’s tormentors.28 She wrote in her Connecticut magazine piece: “Well do I remember sitting in the choir gallery of the church listening to the comments of the young men and maidens led by my brother Henry…. It seemed a strange thing to me, even then, that ministers of the Gospel should be found fighting such a good man as my father, and I have never changed my mind.”
Lyman’s chief accuser, Rev. Joshua L. Wilson, of the First Presbyterian Church of Cincinnati, seemed to have had his doubts about Beecher’s ability to preach the theology of the Presbyterian Church early on, based on an 1827 sermon in which Lyman Beecher denied the notion of original sin — or that humans are born sinful and cannot rise above it. Lyman Beecher’s theology stated that sin is voluntary and that humans are free agents.29 Wilson, a Kentucky native known less for his gentility and more for his pugnacity, may have been acting out of jealousy.30 Lyman Beecher responded to the charges by arguing that he had taught precisely what Wilson taught and that he would prove his theology was scriptural. He pleaded not guilty.
What followed was eight days of what today would seem like esoteric hairsplitting, when the testimony ranged from religious orthodoxy to Lyman’s motives for not publishing more sermons to whether he could be called a liberal Calvinist. At the heart of the discussion — though mostly unspoken — was the tug of modernism and whether theology could evolve and depart from the notion of original sin.31 As hidebound as Lyman Beecher was in regard to daily application of scriptures, he was, by most Presbyterian measures, fairly liberal.
Despite Reverend Wilson’s efforts, on the eighth day Lyman was acquitted. Though both accuser and accused took the trial seriously, Lyman’s associate Calvin Stowe, who would eventually marry Harriet Beecher Stowe, described the proceedings as: “It is all — ‘I say you did’ and ‘I say you didn’t,’ ‘Joe begun at me first.’”32
After the trial, and perhaps in need of some familial shoring up, Lyman gathered all his children at their Ohio home. Given the age differences among the siblings, some of his offspring — including Mary and James — had never met.33 With his children around him, Lyman could revel in his victory, even while his wife was failing.
As difficult as the trial must have been for Lyman Beecher, the transcripts and notes and news reports of the day make it appear that he relished the attention. He proved himself completely in his element as he argued his position; just defense of his faith was precisely what he encouraged from his students at Lane.
But as much as Lyman inspired his students to think — and as beloved as he was by most of his (male) students — the preacher turned a blind eye when it came to the education of his daughters beyond a certain age. Though he was willing to barter for cheap tuition for his daughters when they were young, as they grew older he assumed their education was complete. Yet on a poor minister’s salary, he managed to pay college tuition for all of his sons. Years later, Isabella wrote, “At 16½, just when my brothers began their mental education, mine was finished — except as life’s discipline was added with years & that we shared equally. Till twenty three, their father, poor minister as he was could send them to College & Seminary all six — cost what it might, but never a daughter cost him a hundred dollars a year, after she was sixteen.”34
But if Lyman was not interested in his daughters pursuing degrees, his daughters were vigilant about their own and other young women’s education. In 1833, having hired people to keep her Hartford school going, Catharine opened the Western Female Institute in Cincinnati, and Isabella enrolled as a student and boarded downtown at the school during the week.35 Though as she aged Catharine became more set in her ways, and though they had their share of sisterly arguments, Catharine and her sister Harriet mostly shared the role of principal in Cincinnati. Over time, however, the younger sister found her teaching duties expanding while her role as principal diminished. She despaired in a letter to a friend that teaching took up all her time and left her no time to read or write for amusement.36 Later, Catharine would insist that she’d been asked to open the school, and despite health issues that were plaguing her, she did. As had happened with her Hartford effort, the school soon outgrew its one room, and so Catharine rented a larger building. But, as with her father’s school, funding was always an issue, and she was unable to keep the school going through the economic crash of 1837.37
But it wasn’t just a melted-down economy that affected Catharine’s school. As the Beechers became more controversial in Cincinnati — the Lane Rebels, Lyman’s trial — support for the school began to wane.38
