in urban areas and small towns. The shift to a mercantile society helped spread capital to families that heretofore had scant opportunity — other than marrying into it — to amass wealth. You either owned a farm or you didn’t.
The shift also broadened the opportunities for education, making books and the advancement of knowledge not so much the enclave of the wealthy and the clergy but also open to anyone with access to a newspaper or book.20 At the same time, the shift to a more mechanized society and a more urban environment made the enforcement of the country’s slave economy more difficult.21
Those were the positive results of the modernization of the U.S. economy, but for every winner, there is a loser. Railroads might make travel more convenient, but they destroyed previously untouched vistas. Factories increased productivity, but they polluted the streams. Material wealth that had been unimagined outside of royal families rewarded a choice few — and consigned the losers to slums equally unimaginable.
With the shift came an even sharper division between the worlds of women and men. On a farm, chores were unending, and rare was the family that would begrudge an extra pair of hands in the fields — whether those hands were male or female. Not so in a mercantile society. To fulfill economic roles, the world was splitting in two, with, in general, women assigned the indoor tasks and men assigned the rest. That is not as much an overstatement as it might appear. The attitude of taming a wilderness — the new country of America — was being replaced by a desire for more order, starting with the home front. For the first time in the country’s short history, the feminine role was shrinking.
Lyman’s spiritual ancestors had come to the colonies with a mania for salvation equaled only by their disdain for royal rule. Their love of a heavenly king far trumped their embrace of an earthly one — and their worship began with discipline of self.22 The same way women of Isabella’s generation would be told they could rule the world by ruling their homes, the Puritans believed they could usher in a godly world by focusing on eradicating their own foibles. This rigorous self-examination shows up in the austerity in paintings and sculptures that portrayed the Puritans as possessing “rock-ribbed integrity.”23 Throughout Isabella’s life, the imagined simplicity and integrity of Puritan family life would be recalled with fondness — if not complete accuracy. Ironically, the same theology that would condemn modernity was a healthy backdrop for industrialization, because Puritanism rewarded those who worked hard and those who treated idleness as a sin. Puritanism rewarded thrift as well — so families living on meager resources found theological support for their scrimping.24 Salvation could be found in the lesser cut of meat — or in no meat at all. If life on earth was difficult, a reward in heaven could be gained by working hard.
With that foundation of a binary gender world, Lyman Beecher did not pursue the formal education of his daughters beyond a certain age, but he at least saw the wisdom of sending them to Miss Sarah Pierce’s Litchfield Female Academy. Miss Pierce adhered to the radical notion that women and men were intellectual equals. Her rigorous curriculum included logic, chemistry, botany, and mathematics — not a common course of study for women in the early 1800s. Townsfolk who worried that their daughters were being taught dangerous topics could rest assured that Pierce’s classes also included painting, singing, and dancing.25 Catharine and Harriet — and, for a while, Henry Ward — were students. The fit was not a comfortable one for Henry Ward. As the only boy, he once laughed out of turn in class, and as punishment was tied to a bench.26
Tuition was $5 per quarter for writing, history, grammar, rhetoric, and arithmetic and an additional $6 per quarter for French. Board was offered with “respectable families” for anywhere from $1.75 to $2 a week — a substantial sum at a time when median wages were roughly $10 a month.27 The fee did not include laundry.28 By teaching religion at Miss Pierce’s, Lyman Beecher earned his daughters a tuition discount. Given their close proximity to the school, the Beecher sisters would have avoided paying board, and of course they’d do their own laundry, so the family could just afford a world-class education for the young women — for a few years, at least.
When the Beechers entered the school, women were being encouraged to enter into lives of domesticity,29 and most of that was in class-specific terms.30 In fact, modern domesticity in America — think Food Network and mommy blogs — had its birth in the late eighteenth century.31 If the halls of power were closed to them, women “had a special role to play in promoting civic virtue. As ‘republican mothers,’ they should educate themselves and take an interest in political affairs, in order to raise their sons to be virtuous citizens and their daughters to become republican mothers in the next generation.”32 The British notion of “fashionable womanhood”— characterized by later marriage and more education — had all but been erased.33 Replacing it was the notion of the hearth as a haven and a sanctuary.34
Miss Pierce’s school became a focal point of the family’s activities. The school drew students from around the country, and during Miss Pierce’s forty years as a superintendent, the school educated some three thousand students in the Litchfield Hills, where “the country was preferred as most suitable for females’ improvement away from the frivolities and dissipations of fashionable life.”35
While the Beecher girls were getting an education, Lyman Beecher was throwing himself into church life. Writing in the 1860s, Henry Ward Beecher said that his father had no life separate from the church, that he “entered the church briskly, walked nimbly down the aisle, ascended the pulpit stairs with a springy step that threatened to throw him up two stairs at a time … he looked around the church as familiarly as if it was his own parlor.”
As God demanded Lyman’s energies, God also demanded the family’s support.36 Lyman’s enthusiasm was further fueled by his belief that his brand of American Christianity was exceptional, that it was the one true faith, and that it would be the salvation of the world. This led rather handily into a firm belief in American exceptionalism. Though there is some disagreement among modern-day scholars, for years, historians and theologians said that Jonathan Edwards — who framed early American Calvinism and whom Lyman Beecher held in great esteem — had predicted that the millennium would begin in America.37 The millennium, said Edwards, would involve a thousand-year reign of Jesus on earth, and when Beecher first heard that supposition, he’d dismissed it. Over time, though, he began to see the new country as the starting point of a new religious age, one that would hasten Jesus’ subsequent return to earth. “What nation,” he said, in a series of speeches given in 1834 as he toured the East Coast as head of Cincinnati’s Lane Seminary, “is blessed with such experimental knowledge of free institutions, with such facilities and resources of communication, obstructed by so few obstacles, as our own? There is not a nation upon earth which, in 50 years, can by all possible reformation place itself in circumstances so favorable as our own for the free unembarrassed application of physical effort and pecuniary and moral power to evangelize the world.”38
Before Jesus’ arrival — which at the time was thought to be imminent — the people would need to be made ready through rigorous policing of not just their actions but their thoughts and emotions as well. This notion would embed itself in Isabella’s psyche: only through rigorous self-examination could she aspire heavenward. Though her father would not have recognized her theology as she grew older, even when she was at the height of her political power, her letters and journals are full of self-condemnation in which she agonizes that she never measured up to the Christian ideal. For Isabella, there was no life but a simple striving toward the holy, however one defined holy.
“Hundreds of times,” wrote Charles of his father, “have we heard him ‘hew down’ antagonists, ‘wring their necks off,’ ‘hang them on their own gallows,’ and do other sanguinary things too dreadful to mention. But there was always something in his eye and manner which told that he was speaking in a highly figurative sense of the logical demolition of error.”39
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