If Lyman Beecher had not existed, someone would have invented him. He was thunderous in the pulpit, and rough-hewn away from it. Even though his children did not cleave to his brand of fundamentalist theology, they worshipped him for all his charismatic, sometimes coarse ways. But at his core, Lyman was a storyteller, and one of his favorite stories involved his own birth. How he came to this story one can only guess, as one can only guess if it’s accurate. But it’s a good story.
As so often happened with marrying men in the 1700s, Lyman’s father, a blacksmith named David, was widowed and married five times — to Mary Austin, Lydia Morris, Esther Lyman, Elizabeth Hoadly, and Mary Lewis Elliott. He had twelve children with his wives, though eight of the children died in infancy. This, too, was common in a time of infant mortality that ranged, depending on the year and location, from 10 to 30 percent.3 Lyman, born October 12, 1775, in Guilford, Connecticut, was the product of David’s third and best-loved wife, Esther. She was from Middletown, Connecticut, and of Scottish descent. She possessed, said her son, “a joyous, sparkling, hopeful temperament.”4
This characterization is conjecture on his part, or it is a description based on information gathered from his relatives. Lyman Beecher was born in the seventh month of his mother’s pregnancy, and she died of consumption — the “great white plague”— two days after his birth.5 Her illness had weakened her to the point that the midwives had little hope for the baby, and, wrote Beecher, wrapped his tiny body and laid him aside to die, until one of the women attending his mother thought to check him, and found him alive. She cleaned him and properly ushered him into the world.
“So you see it was but by a hair’s-breadth I got a foothold in this world,” Lyman wrote.6 That early brush with death — or, at least, the family stories he heard about it — helped set Lyman Beecher on the road to a lifetime of conquering — starting with his weak infant nature and branching out to conquer his adult sinful nature and that of sinners who refused to hear the gospel. The story paints Lyman as stronger than mere mortals — a view his children, including Isabella, all seemed to share.
He entered Yale College, then nearly a hundred years old, in 1793.7 His education was interrupted in its first year when he contracted scarlet fever. An epidemic swept through Connecticut and peaked in New Haven in January 1794 with some seven hundred cases reported.8 Lyman recovered, only to discover during his second year that he was abysmal at mathematics. During his third year, he became heavily involved in gambling — so much so that he ended the year in debt. Frightened at the hold gambling had on him, he took a leave of absence for a week and cured himself of “that mania.”9
A degree from Yale — a school with a theology far more orthodox than that of the other premier New England school, Harvard — gave graduates two career choices, law or the ministry. By Lyman’s junior year, the thought of entering law — with its “little quirks, and turns and janglings — disgusted me,” wrote Lyman.10 He graduated in 1797 with a class of thirty-one, sixteen of whom became lawyers, fifteen of whom entered the ministry.11
As he was completing his education, Lyman met the woman who would be the love of his life, Roxanna Foote. Roxanna traced her family back to the early congregation of Thomas Hooker, who settled Connecticut and was known as the first American democrat.12 The men of her family fought in the French and Indian and Revolutionary Wars.
Roxanna Foote was every bit as intellectually curious as her young swain. As a girl, she’d learned French by propping her lesson books on her distaff so that she could read them as she spun flax. Her grandfather once described his three eldest granddaughters by guessing what each girl would say upon rising from bed. Harriet, the eldest, would encourage everyone to start a fire and sweep. Betsy would wonder which ribbon to wear to a party. And Roxanna would say, “Which do you think was the greater general, Hannibal or Alexander?”13 Neighbors shared books with one another, and when one much-awaited volume was published, a neighbor rode on horseback to bring it to Roxanna, and “a great treat they had of it.”14
Lyman had sworn he’d never marry a weak woman, though Roxanna’s Episcopal religion — against which Lyman waged a lifelong war — must have given him pause. After a brief courtship, Lyman asked if she would marry him. In response, she mentioned their religious differences and the fact that he was still in school. Undeterred, he told her he intended to continue his visits with an eye on marriage, and Roxana — as she told him later — consented because she never thought the relationship would amount to much. At one point, Lyman seems to have agreed with her, and he came to the family’s Guilford home, Nut Plains, prepared to end the problematic relationship. But Roxanna, perhaps sensing a breakup, began to cry and he wasn’t able to tell her why he’d come — and he never did. He did, however, send her books to read that might convince her of the errors of her theology. In turn, Roxanna wrote impassioned letters asking for her beloved’s help in finding the defects in her prayer life.15
Later, as Lyman aged and began to slip into dementia, his son Charles read him snippets of the letters he’d written to Roxanna so long ago and saved. As Charles read, occasionally Lyman interrupted him and said, “Who is that fellow? He’s all wrong.” When Charles told his father he was reading Lyman’s love letters to Roxanna, Lyman stopped a moment, then said, “Well, I was an ignoramus, but if I had him and her in one of my inquiry meetings, I could have set them all right in half an hour.”16
They married on a rainy September 19, 1799, and with Roxanna at his side, Lyman Beecher set out to spread his influence by writing sermons that lit on the topics of the day. A series of sermons against dueling in 1806 was delivered in response to the death-by-dueling of former secretary of treasury Alexander Hamilton at the hand of Vice President Aaron Burr.
But it was a sermon Lyman gave in 1807 in East Hampton, New York, and later delivered at a larger church meeting in Newark, that placed him firmly in the public eye. Remember, this was a time when the leading thinkers of the day were not politicians, but ministers, and sermons were reprinted as booklets and in newspapers and circulated widely. Beecher’s first popular sermon, “The Government of God Desirable,” was favorably compared with the work of the storied Jonathan Edwards, whose 1741 sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” was supposed to have moved his congregation to “tears and convulsions.”17 Printed, Lyman’s sermon ran twenty-seven pages and ended with the warning, “But rebel, and still he will reign, still he will bless his kingdom, but he will exclude you, forever, from its holy joys.”18
It’s not a modern-day page-turner, but this was Christian orthodoxy at its most raw, and it would make Lyman Beecher as much a household name as possible in the days before mass communication — “a Puritan of the Puritans,” according to his son Henry Ward.19
But Lyman was restless, and he and Roxanna and their growing family — Catharine born in 1800, William Henry in 1802, Edward a year later, and Mary two years after him — could not live on Lyman’s $400 a year. Roxanna would prove a practical balance to the high-strung Lyman by taking in boarders, but when that didn’t meet the family’s financial needs, she opened a school and taught English and French. Lyman’s growing influence caught the attention of Congregationalists in Litchfield, Connecticut, and the family soon settled in the Litchfield Hills in a large and drafty home that was the frequent stop of wayfarers and teachers intent on taking advantage of a poor minister’s largesse.
The move’s timing could not have been better. With world-class educational institutions, Litchfield was a vibrant, changeable town. For a short time between 1790 and 1830, all roads passed — or seemed to — through Litchfield.
The two main educational institutions in Litchfield —
