letters. He saw in Isabella — who had gained a reputation for frivolity among her high-minded family — his intellectual equal. They would be engaged before she turned seventeen, with, wrote Isabella in Connecticut magazine, “the understanding that if either of us found we had made a mistake we were at liberty to choose elsewhere.”
She had every reason to hedge her bets. In the first blush of love, Isabella’s concern about her increasingly serious relationship fit the context of her day. The notion of control over whom and when one should marry was rapidly being wrested from the fathers, who up to then did most of the choosing and blessing of their children’s life-mates. Young people began to have more of a say in courtship and marriage. Young women often stalled marriage for fear that “marriage would snuff out their independence.”2 For an example of an unmarried woman who’d managed to forge a career of her own, Isabella had to look no further than Catharine. It had to have been tempting to follow her sister into the field of education.
John Hooker, 1842. Courtesy of the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, Hartford, Connecticut.
But even at age twenty-three, John Hooker was a rare breed. As had the much-missed Roxanna, he traced his roots back to Thomas Hooker, who’d established Connecticut’s first European settlement in the 1630s and was the author of the world’s first written constitution. John Hooker’s ancestor had originally settled in Massachusetts, but he left to establish his own colony over a disagreement about precisely who would be allowed to vote. The elder Hooker’s move may have also been predicated on a clash of personalities with the leadership of the Massachusetts colony.3 Either way, John Hooker’s family — on both mother’s and father’s side — boasted senators, judges, and governors. His father, Edward, graduated from Yale College in 1805 and ran a classical private school in Farmington, Connecticut, called the Old Red College. John Hooker would have a distinguished law degree and serve as reporter of the state Supreme Court.4 Later, his name was bandied about as a potential justice on the state Supreme Court, but he declined to pursue the appointment because the timing was never right.5
Hooker’s hometown of Farmington was a pleasant New England town through which George Washington passed several times. Whether he stopped and slept — as was so often claimed in New England in revolutionary times — is best left to one of those New England guessing games.6
Much of what we know about John Hooker comes from his autobiography, Some Reminiscences of a Long Life: With a Few Articles on Moral Subjects of Present Interest, which Hooker wrote in 1899. He was born in 1816 to Edward Hooker and Eliza Daggett, formerly of New Haven. John Hooker entered Yale at age sixteen — about the time Isabella was settling in Cincinnati — after a rigorous education by Edward in Greek and Latin. And, like the college education of his future father-in-law, his education was interrupted by illness. John Hooker was struck with typhoid during his second year, and when he recovered enough to go back to school, his attempts to catch up strained his eyes to the point that he was forced to leave school permanently. His eyesight would never recover, but John Hooker would be a lifelong student. Yale eventually gave him a degree in 1842.7
Unsure of a career, John Hooker did what many young men did in the early 1800s and took to the sea, an experience that was every bit as romantic as he’d imagined. He was even aboard a vessel that was overtaken by Portuguese pirates. But two years on the water was enough, and he returned to dry land and began reading for the law in the office of Thomas Perkins. At the time, law schools such as Judge Tapping Reeve’s were rare, and would-be attorneys often entered the profession by serving as clerks for already-practicing lawyers.
John Hooker entered the bar in 1841. He would eventually leave Perkins’s office to open his own practice and would earn a reputation for forthrightness and fairness. At the time, the law profession was mostly closed to women, but John Hooker would later break the gender barrier by taking in Mary Hall, of Marlborough, Connecticut, as his clerk in April 1878.8 She would enter the profession as a lawyer only after a decision by the state Supreme Court allowed it, and then she would work in Hooker’s office until she opened her own practice. “The decision,” wrote John Hooker in his autobiography, “was a great step in the direction of the recognition of the rights of women.”9
From his autobiography, John Hooker’s understanding of women evolved over the years, though he appears to have welcomed his future wife as an equal from the beginning. Later in life, the Chicago newspaper Union Signal, a publication from the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, asked prominent men to give sketches of their “ideal woman.” John responded that he once thought the ideal woman’s “essential qualities in youth were sweetness, delicacy and modesty and in later life, a home-loving wifeliness and Madonna-like motherliness.” But he’d changed his mind over fifty years, and while he still believed the ideal woman should be involved with her family, he also thought that
… she is to me the noblest woman who, without mere personal ambition or self-seeking of any sort and with a great spirit of helpfulness toward all the wronged and suffering, limits the field of her work only by her ability and opportunity, making these and not any conventional rules the test of what God meant that she should do.10
For her part, Isabella was, by her own admission, a “spicy young girl, who hated abolitionists even more than she did slavery.”11 Perhaps the sting of her father’s pain at the earlier defection of his Lane students — those he loved as his own sons — influenced her attitude. Perhaps she was more interested in social events than social issues.
If she hadn’t given much thought to abolition, she had thought a great deal about marriage. Shuttling back and forth between family members, Isabella had spent time observing the marriages in her family, and if she wasn’t sure what she wanted from her own union, she was at least aware of what she didn’t want. She wrote John in August 1838:
I have — for some moments in looking at the families of some even of my brothers and sisters — felt misgivings — many and great — but then, I feel that there is a radical defect in their plan — one which can be avoided — they did not start rightly … if I tho’t my married life would be such as I have seen exhibited in my own family — I never could bring myself to fulfill an engagement, other wise delightful.
Besides moving between the homes of family members, Isabella’s frequent absences from Hartford would give her and her intended ample opportunity to get to know each other through letters in which no topic was taboo. While Isabella was in Ohio, her sister Mary herself wrote affectionate notes from Hartford: “I do hope and trust you will not fail to write often and long to me, we know not how long this privilege will be permitted…. [W]rite as soon as you get this and remember that every thing is interesting that concerns you or your friends.”12
Mary added, a few months later, that she felt like a lover awaiting letters from Isabella as she gently chided her little sister to write more often:
I don[’]t believe Mr[.] H.[ooker] is more impatient to get one, but what a naughty girl you are to have the blues so dreadfully. I think a young lady who weighs 129 lb[.] must not consider herself very much of an invalid, if you are not ethereal in your person you must be so in mind or you will lose all chance of being an angel. I don[’]t believe an angel ever weighed 129 lb[.]13
By August 1839, conversation between John and Isabella turned to marriage, but Isabella wasn’t sure she wanted to marry a man who wasn’t a minister. All of her brothers had followed their father into the ministry, and her family, as well, worried that the law was not of sufficient importance for a Beecher. In November 1839, Catharine weighed in with (unasked-for) advice and a bit of information about her younger half-sister that might have scared a lesser man:
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