Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Biography for Girls, by Martha Foot Crow

Transcriber’s Notes

Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected. Variations in hyphenation and accents have been standardised but all other spelling and punctuation remains unchanged.

Click on the [Listen] link to hear the music and on the [MusicXML] link to download the notation. As of the date of posting, these links to external files will work only in the HTML version of this e-book.

The key signature notation in the music on page 64 was corrected in the audio file. The notation should be F#, not E#.

A typo in the music notation on page 251 was corrected in the audio file. Beams bewteen bass notes A & F (beat 1) in bars 17 & 18 are missing in the original.

Thanks are very heartily due to Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin and Company, the publishers of the works of Mrs. Stowe, for their kind permission to quote freely from her books, and from the biographies of Mrs. Stowe written by her son, Rev. Charles E. Stowe, and by her grandson, Mr. Lyman Beecher Stowe. The same publishers have given permission to make an abstract of “Cleon,” the play by Harriet Beecher, which is found in the “Life and Letters of Harriet Beecher Stowe” by Annie Fields, of which they are the publishers. Messrs. Harper and Brothers have also been good enough to allow quotation from the “Autobiography and Correspondence of Lyman Beecher.” To Miss E. N. Vanderpoel, the compiler of “Chronicles of a Pioneer School,” the author wishes to acknowledge her indebtedness for some interesting passages.

The author has also greatly appreciated the permission given by Mr. John R. Howard to quote a short passage about childhood experiences in the Beecher home found in his valuable sketch of the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher.

To Mr. Charles E. Stowe, the author hereby makes[Pg viii] grateful acknowledgment for much helpful advice, and for material not hitherto published. From many friends in Litchfield, Guilford, Hartford and elsewhere, the writer of this book has received invaluable help and would be glad to acknowledge each one’s contribution if there were space to do so. The frontispiece is made from an old carte de visite kindly lent by Mrs. Hannah C. Partridge, of Hartford, Connecticut.

Without these bountiful sources of information and these privileges so graciously allowed, a book of this kind could, of course, not have been written. Where-ever possible the language of Mrs. Stowe herself has been quoted or adapted from the rich treasury of her correspondence and autobiographical writings, or from stories of her own. Among these the “Lyman Beecher Autobiography” fixes forever a composite portrait of the Beecher family and is an almost inexhaustible storehouse of material. Among Mrs. Stowe’s books, the childhood experiences of Tina in “Oldtown Folks” and of Dolly in “Poganuc People” have been a veritable panorama of the young life of Harriet herself. Indeed, so largely do her books reflect not only her ideas and emotions but even the objective incidents of her life, that many of them are almost autobiographic in their character.

In a little saucer-like valley of the lower Berkshires, where the hills stand about in a wide circle, lies that most beautiful of Connecticut villages, Litchfield. Here Harriet Beecher Stowe was born. There was not a day when she and her brothers and sisters did not run to the window to see that blue rim of hills, and even when they were grown into women and men they did not forget the charm of their early home in the mountains. From the door of the house where they lived there was an extended view. Here Harriet often stood and looked over to the distant horizon, where Mt. Tom reared its round, blue head against the sky, and the Great and Little Ponds gleamed out amid a steel-blue expanse of distant pine groves. Turning to the west, she saw a rounded height called Prospect[Pg 2] Hill, and many a pensive, wondering hour she sat on the stone threshold of that doorway, watching the splendor of the sunsets that burned themselves out beyond that hill. Harriet often said that her home was at the precise point of the country where the hills were most inspiring and vivacious, reminding one of the Psalm, “The little hills rejoice on every side.” Mountains are grand, she thought, and sometimes even dreary; but these half-grown hills uplift one like the waves of the sea.

Once when Harriet returned by stage-coach from a visit to her relatives down in Guilford, she could not restrain her raptures on beholding her mountains again. As the quaint old coach went lumbering along the winding road, the keen-eyed little girl leaned out of the window, peering in every direction, determined to let no bluebird’s flight escape her and no columbine flower pass unadmired. She took in all the sweeping bends of the beautiful brown river and watched the curves of water as they flowed over the shining rocks. After a while the coach wound up amid hemlock forests whose solemn shadows were all aglow with pink clouds of blossoming laurel. Presently they entered into great vistas of mountains whose cloudy, purple heads stretched and veered around the path like moving forms in a dream. There were the hills which meant home. Writing about this years afterward, she cried out, “Can there be anything on earth as beautiful as these mountain rides in New England?”[Pg 3] So she gave to her childhood’s home the name of Cloudland, and its inheritance of clear air and height and spaciousness became a part of her nature.

Any one would have loved the quiet village in 1811, the year when Harriet Beecher was born, with the large Green in the center on which stood the meeting-house where her honored father, Dr. Lyman Beecher, preached. From here extended to the four points of the compass the four spacious avenues, North, South, East, and West Streets, all of them thickly planted with double rows of fine elm trees, through which one could see the stately colonial mansions that had been there since before the days of the Revolution.

These mansions had looked upon many a thrilling scene, for in those Revolutionary days the town of Litchfield had been a place of great activity. The direct state road from Boston across to West Point and thence down the river to the city of New York passed at that time through the town, making connection with the station for military stores that were kept there. So on training days there would be dramatic episodes on the ample Green, while on many a dark night that great message-bearer, Paul Revere, would ride swiftly and mysteriously through the town.

In fact, the town of Litchfield, in the days of the Beecher family, fairly bristled with traditions of that ancient, eventful era. It is certain that the[Pg 4] little Harriet would be told about the time when the service of war had claimed all the men in the patriotic township of Litchfield except eight, who were too old or too young to go out and fight. It must also have been impressed upon her that the women of her native town shared in an especial degree this lofty patriotism, for it is related that when the leaden statue of King George was knocked off its pedestal in Bowling Green, in New York City, the shattered pieces were conveyed to the military storehouse at Litchfield and there hidden away. Then when the great need arose, the aristocratic ladies of Litchfield melted the broken fragments of that rejected statue and with their own hands molded the lead into bullets. Harriet’s heart swelled with pride as she heard this story or as she passed the very house where the lead was molded over or perhaps was shown the precious memorandum that indicated how many thousand bullets each helper had made. Litchfield, indeed, a very storehouse of patriotic tradition, was a fitting home for Harriet Beecher Stowe whose soul was to be a perfect flame of patriotic feeling by virtue of which she was to perform a great and permanent work.

In Harriet’s own childhood, too, Litchfield was a very busy place. There were some forty mills along the streams, not one of which remains to-day, and there was a famous law school, the first one in America, and a celebrated school for young ladies. The society in the village was singularly[Pg 5] good; it was a place where piety, intelligence, and refinement were united. Mrs. Stowe, remembering the history that lay back of it in Colonial and Revolutionary days, spoke of it as “burning like live coals with all the fervid activity of an intense, newly kindled, peculiar and individual life.”

Perhaps one would realize this somewhat better on a Sunday than on a week day. Then from the fine old residences that adorned the principal street the families of comfortable means and impressive traditions proceeded in a dignified manner and solemnly entered the little church. From the outlying population for miles around came also processions of wagons, bearing the well-dressed wives, stalwart sons and blooming daughters of the well-to-do farmers, all punctual as a clock to the ringing of the second-bell. They were alert-minded, independent people; it was a highly intelligent audience that gathered to hear Dr. Beecher expound problems of theology, which his hearers were quite ready to debate with him if they thought he bent a little too far to the one side or to the other in some hair-splitting argument.

The parsonage where Dr. Beecher lived, and where seven of his thirteen children were born, was a roomy edifice that seemed to have been built by a succession of afterthoughts. It was first a model New England house, built around a great brick chimney which ran up like a lighthouse in the center of the square roof; but various bedroom additions[Pg 6] had been gradually made and a new kitchen had been built on, and out of the kitchen a sinkroom, and out of the sinkroom a woodhouse, and out of the woodhouse a carriage house, and so on through a gradually lessening succession of out-buildings, until it might seem as if the house has been constructed on the model of a telescope. And besides all this, there were four great attics! What a wonderful house in which to play tag or blind-man’s bluff!

The house stood at the highest point on North Street in the midst of a colony of noble elms that gathered about the plain, old-fashioned parsonage like classic pillars, giving it a grand air of scholarly retirement. The surroundings of this rambling old house were delightful. There was the tall well-sweep, and a gate that swung with a chain and a great stone. From the pantry window could be seen a whole neighborhood of purple-leaved beets and feathery parsnips; the gooseberry bushes were rolled up by the fence in billows, and here and there stood an aristocratic quince tree. Far off in one corner a little patch penuriously devoted to ornament flamed with marigolds, poppies, snappers and four-o’clocks. Then there was a little box by itself with one rose geranium in it, which looked around the garden in a frightened way, as much a stranger as a French dancing master would be in a Yankee meeting-house. The little foreigner, however, received[Pg 7] delicate attention at the hands of Harriet’s beauty-loving mother.

But, although the house was a big one, there was not too much room for the Beecher family. Besides the father and mother, there were, when the last arrival completed the magic number, thirteen children in all. Then there was sometimes an aunt, or a grandmother, or a cousin; there were generally a number of students as boarders, and these, together with one Rachel and one Zillah, both black, completed the household circle.

Rich in children was this New England family, but not in other wealth. Economy in the Beecher family was a necessity, but economy was also a law of New England life. Dr. Beecher in one of his reminiscences tells of an old parishioner of his who was so steeped in the prevailing spirit of economy that he boasted of having kept all of his accounts for thirty years with one quill pen; that he knew exactly how to lean his arm on the table so as not to take the nap off the sleeve; and how to set down his foot with the least possible wear to the sole of his shoe. It stands to reason that when the minister has to deal with such deacons as this the minister’s wife will turn a dress several times, and must be forgiven if she requires even the smallest children of her family to overcast the long seams of the linen sheets and to hem interminable towels. This is what the little Harriet had to do, and perhaps it did not cause her any harm.

In spite of this rather narrowed way of living, the children in this family did not feel poor. Once there was sent from Boston to the Litchfield parsonage a barrel of dishes embellished with figures which you could worship without worshiping the image of anything either in the heaven or upon earth—so Henry said; but the children thought them the very embodiment of beauty. When the barrel was unpacked, one of the boys said, “Oh, mother, what rich people we must be to have such wonderful dishes!” Wealth, it seems, consists more in the way one feels than in what one really possesses.

An establishment such as this, as any one may see, afforded occupation for a number of hands. Little Harriet was a great worker. Her brother wrote that before he was ten years old he had learned to sew, knit, scour knives, wash dishes, set and clear the table, cut and split and bring in wood, break tumblers and—earn whippings! There can be no doubt that his sister next older shared these exercises with him—except the last! We are not going to believe that Harriet ever deserved that.

Harriet Beecher said once that work, thrift and industry are the incessant steam-power of Yankee life; certainly none of her family seems to have been in any degree scared by the prospect of hard work. Harriet’s brother Edward makes light of the labor in a very jolly letter which he sent in 1821 to his stepmother. “And what shall I say more? Shall I[Pg 9] speak of our orchard, from which the gale blew off apples enough for twenty barrels of cider, and whereon are yet cider and winter apples without number? Or of our cellar wherein are barrels small and great, moreover bins, boxes, cupboards, which I have arranged, having cleansed the cellar with bezom, rake, and wheelbarrow? Or of our garden, in which were weeds of various kinds, particularly pig; yea, also beets, carrots, parsnips and potatoes, the like of which was never seen?”1 And Dr. Beecher himself, writing to one of the boys in July, 1819, tells how he has weeded the parsnips and beets, has planted potatoes in the orchard, plowed the yard and carried out the stones. With some help he has got out in two days a pile of stones as big as the salt mountain in Louisiana! After that they set to and tore down a useless eighty-year-old barn. The garden, he went on to say, was waving with corn, canteloupes, cabbages and pumpkins. The peas were some of them big enough to eat but had politely waited for the younger brethren around them to come to maturity so that they might all have the pleasure of being eaten together! The raspberries were so thick that one could not see between them, nor even stick between them a sharp-pointed knife. “Can you not find out by algebra,” he asks, “how many there will be?” So he goes on through the list—lettuce, radishes, pepper-grass,[Pg 10] carrots, etc. “The garden gates shut,” he continues, “as regularly as they open, and no creature can get in except the hens, which are now about tired of coming, as they are sure to be saluted quite unexpectedly with a charge of powder, ‘speaking terror from the gun muzzle.’ Do you know,” he asks his son, “from whom the quotation is made? Some poet, you perceive.” So the wise father mixed instruction with gossip and made a game of work.

He was an interesting man, gifted with tremendous enthusiasm and untiring energy. And he had an individual way of doing things and a salty wit which can only be described as Beecher-ish. He knew instinctively just when to praise and when to blame. When he and the boys were splitting wood and carrying it into the shed, he sometimes said, “I wish, Harriet, that you were a boy, for, if you had been, you would have done more than any of them.” Then would Harriet run and put on a little black coat she had, and work like all possessed to outdo the others in her enthusiasm. The clever suggestion to Harriet also glanced sidewise and hit the lagging boys, who then bestirred themselves until the wood was all split and piled in the woodshed and the chips swept up. To make the work go faster and more cheerfully, Dr. Beecher sometimes made the children vie with each other to see who could tell the most Bible stories, or name the most Bible characters; or he started a discussion on some theological question, often taking the[Pg 11] weaker or wrong side himself and telling the children what point to bring forward, saying, the argument is thus and so! Now, if you will take this position, you will be able to trip me up! So he strengthened their reasoning powers.

The task done, the reward was a fishing excursion or a nutting party. Here again the father challenged the children in feats of climbing the trees and of gathering the nuts. Although not a man of special physical strength himself, he came from a line celebrated for vigor. His grandfather had been six feet tall and could easily lift a barrel of cider and drink from the bung. His father, not quite so tremendous, had been only strong enough to lift a barrel of cider and toss it easily into the cart! The descendant of these giant-like men was more celebrated for his intellectual feats than for his merely physical exploits. But no Highlanders ever gloried more proudly in the prowess of their chief than did the Beecher children in that of their father! The most difficult trees were climbed by the Doctor himself; sometimes to reach a branch that hung out over the cliff, he endangered his life to get the fruit. They were certain that no tree grew in so exalted a place that he could not climb it. Oh, those were great days! At noon a fire was made and the abundant luncheon was spread on a broad flat rock around which a white foam of moss made a soft seat. And here again the father was the hero, for around the fire no companion could be more jolly[Pg 12] than he. It is not strange that the children remembered their father rather as a playmate than as a stern disciplinarian.

Yet discipline in this home circle there must have been to keep order in so large and intensely active a family. Aunt Esther sometimes found a want of subordination among the troops. The very cleverness of the children made the problem great. For instance, if she told the boys that they should not be so boisterous, they would be likely to answer by complaining that she did not also try to keep the girls from being so girlsterous. And under cover of this witticism the boys would escape punishment. At one time she wrote to one of the children in a merry mood, “Your father and mother have been gone a fortnight and the crew at home are beginning to grow somewhat mutinous, and I am not sure but I shall be obliged to condemn and hang a half score of them before the return of your father.” In February, 1822, while Harriet was visiting her aunt at Guilford, her older sister, Catherine, wrote to her: “We all want you home very much, but hope you are now where you will learn to stand and sit straight and hear what people say to you, and sit still in your chair, and learn to sew and knit well, and be a good girl in every particular; and if you don’t learn this while you are with your Aunt Harriet, I am afraid you never will.” Then, to offset this rather strenuous piece of advice, Catherine, in relenting mood, added, very much as her father[Pg 13] might have done: “Old Puss is very well and sends his respects to you; and Mr. Black Trip has come out of the barn to live, and says that if you ever come into the kitchen he will jump up and lick your hand and pull your frock, just as he serves the rest of us.” This elder sister of Harriet’s was so full of fun that she was the life and joy of the house. Writing to their brother Edward in 1819, she said: “Apropos—last week we interred Tom, Junior, with funeral honors, by the side of old Tom of happy memory. What a fatal mortality there is among the cats of the parsonage! Our Harriet is chief mourner always at their funerals. She has asked for what she calls an ‘epithet’ for the gravestone of Tom, Junior, which I gave as follows:

Catherine’s father must have been looking over his daughter’s shoulder as she wrote this, for he added a postscript saying that, as every man must eat his pound of dirt, so he supposed every one must write his quire of nonsense, but that he hoped that soon none but letters so solid and weighty as to earn their postage would be passing to and fro. After this Catherine put on still another postscript and[Pg 14] said: “Never mind this, Ned, for Papa loves to laugh as well as any of us, and is quite as much tickled at nonsense as we are.”

There was, then, a merry side in the life at Litchfield Parsonage. Catherine wrote at one time, quite seriously, that her little sister was a very good girl, had been to school all summer and had learned to read very fluently, and that she had committed to memory twenty-seven hymns and two long chapters in the Bible; that she had a remarkably retentive memory and would make a very good scholar. Still, considering the spirit of fun that races through every book Harriet wrote, we cannot believe she was always sitting still in a chair, learning to sew and knit well, and being a good girl in every particular. We think of her also as having something in her of the fascinating little Tina in “Oldtown Folks,” one of Mrs. Stowe’s most powerful stories of New England life. We can even believe it to have been as difficult in Harriet’s case as it was in Tina’s to get her to go to bed at the proper hour. As night drew on, the little one’s tongue no doubt ran on with increasing fluency, and her powers of entertainment waxed more dazzling. On a drizzling, freezing night when the wind howled lonesomely around the corners of the house, who could have the heart to extinguish the candle at exactly eight or even at nine? Then little Harriet was ballet and opera to the household group, mimicking the dog, the cat, the hens, and the tom-turkey, or talking and flying[Pg 15] about the room in lively imitation of some member of the family. She stirred up butter and exclaimed, “Pshaw!” just like one of the grown-ups; she invented imaginary scenes and conversations and improvised unheard-of costumes out of strange old things she rummaged out of the garret, until nine o’clock sounded inexorably from the old family timepiece and put a stop to the fun for that night.

In the Beecher household there was naturally a necessity that every one should be up and doing: Monday, because it was washing day; Tuesday, because it was ironing day; Wednesday, because it was baking day; Thursday, because to-morrow was Friday, and so on through the week. Daily life began at four o’clock in the morning when the tapping of a pair of imperative heels on the stair and an authoritative rap on the door dispelled the slumbers of the children. On winter mornings the door was opened and a lighted candle was set inside. The sleepy eyes of little girl Harriet could then watch the forest of glittering frostwork made by her breath as it froze on the threads of the blanket. She saw rainbow colors on this frostwork, and she then floated off into dreams and fancies about it which would perhaps end in a doze. Very soon, however, her cold little fingers managed the fastenings on her own clothes as well as on those of[Pg 17] her little brother, and she was at her breakfast with the large family circle.

The breakfast! It was not like the five-course banquet we have to-day. The bread was that black compound of rye and Indian meal which the economy of New England made the common form because it could be most easily raised on a hard and stony soil; but Mrs. Stowe in later life informed all whom it might concern that rye and Indian bread, smoking hot, together with savory sausage, pork and beans formed a breakfast fit for a king, if the king had earned it by getting up in a cold room, washing in ice-water, tumbling through snow-drifts and foddering cattle. The children in the Beecher home no doubt partook of this form of nourishment with thorough cheerfulness, dividing their portions with the dog and the cat of the establishment in a contentment pleasant to behold.

After breakfast came family prayers. They read the Bible through in course, without note or comment. At that time the very letter of the Bible was one of the forces that formed the minds of the children, since it was for the most part read twice a day in every family of any pretensions to respectability. It was also used as a reading book in every common school. If the children understood, well; if not, the mental stimulant of constant contact with the Book was left to make what impression it would. It was wonderful to hear the Doctor read the Bible at family prayers in the morning, for he read it in[Pg 18] such an eager, earnest tone of admiring delight, with such an indescribable air of intentness and expectancy, as if the Book had just been handed him out of Heaven! The joy of his soul in every new ray of Heaven’s glory was manifest to each member of the home circle and had its effect on the impressionable children so that they could hardly fail to partake with him of that hunger and thirst after the knowledge of God. The reading of the chapter was followed by an earnest prayer by Dr. Beecher, and sometimes by what they called a “concert of prayer,” when every member of the family would offer an extemporaneous petition, long or short, according to ability and experience. These sacred hours were remembered by the children as long as life lasted.

After this ceremony, the first thing to do was to get the children off to school. It was not a small matter when the list included William Henry, Edward, Mary Foote, George, Harriet Elizabeth, Henry Ward and Charles. Later on were added the names of Isabella Holmes, Thomas Kennicut and James. Now the dinner for each child was packed in a small splint basket, and after much business was gone through all were away to Academy or Dame School, according to age and ability. In winter William and Edward had their sleds—not gayly painted ones from the emporium as modern boys have, but rude fabrics made on rainy days out of odds and ends of old sleigh runners and any[Pg 19] rough boards that could be fashioned with saw and hatchet. Such as they were, they served the Beecher family well, and happy was the day when big brother William or Edward would take the little sister to school on the sled, drawing her swiftly over the snow, her little charge, the younger brother, closely clasped in her arms.

On Sunday mornings strenuous exertions were required, for besides going through the usual routine, Sunday clothes had to be donned; also, it was to be made quite certain that the catechism had been successfully and permanently drilled into the mind of each child. In her account of the life of her distinguished brother, Henry Ward Beecher, Mrs. Stowe records an early experience of hers in trying to teach him his grammar, and if she had equal difficulties in making him learn the catechism, she certainly had her hands full.

“Now, Henry,” she would say, “A is the indefinite article, you see, and must be used only with a singular noun. You can say a man, but you can’t say a men, can you?”

“Why, yes, I can say Amen, too,” was the ready rejoinder. “Father says it at the end of his prayers.”

“Yes,” said the young teacher. “You see, his is[Pg 20] possessive. Now you can say, his book, but you cannot say him book.”

“Yes, I do say hymn-book, too,” said the incorrigible scholar, with a quizzical twinkle. Each one of his sallies produced from the teacher a laugh, which was the victory he wanted.

“But now, Henry, seriously. Just attend to the active and passive voice. Now I strike is active, you see, because if you strike you do something. But I am struck is passive, because if you are struck you don’t do anything, do you?”

When Harriet was old enough to become the instructor of a frisky pupil like this she may well have found that the New England Catechism occasionally brought her to her wit’s end.

The church to which the Beecher children were regularly led was one of those square, bald structures of which but few have come down to us from the old times. It was wide, roomy, and of a desolate plainness. During the long hours of the sermon the youngsters, perched in a row on a low seat in front of the pulpit, attempted occasionally sundry small exercises of their own, such as making their handkerchiefs into rabbits, or exhibiting slyly the apples and gingerbread they had brought for the Sunday dinner, or pulling the ears of some discreet, meeting-going dog, who now and then soberly pit-a-patted through the broad aisle. But woe be to them, says Harriet, if during those contraband[Pg 21] sports they should see the sleek head of the Deacon dodge up from behind the top of his seat. Instantly all the apples, gingerbread and handkerchiefs would vanish and the whole row of children would be seen sitting there with their hands folded looking as demure as if they understood every word of the sermon and more, too.

Mrs. Stowe says that her book, “Poganuc People,” consists of chapters taken right out of her own life, and so we may read the name “Harriet” in the place of “Dolly” all the way through. We may believe, then, that Harriet was disposed of in all those shorthand methods by which children were taught to be the least possible trouble. She was told to come when called, and to do as she was bid without question or argument, to be quiet in bed at the earliest possible hour of the night, and, in the presence of her elders, to speak only when spoken to. All this was a great repression to Harriet, who was by nature a lively, excitable little thing, bursting with questions that she longed to ask, and with comments and remarks that she burned to make. Perhaps it never distinctly occurred to her to murmur at her lot in life, yet at times she must have sighed over the dreadful insignificance of being only a little girl in a great family of grown-up people. For even the brothers nearest her own age were studying at the Academy and spouting scraps of superior Latin at her to make her stare and wonder at their learning. They were tearing, noisy, tempestuous boys, good-natured[Pg 22] enough and willing to pet her at intervals, but prompt to suggest that it was time for her to go to bed when her questions or her gambols interfered with their evening pleasures.

Moreover, since Harriet was a robust, healthy little creature, she received none of the petting which a more delicate child might have claimed. The general course of her experience impressed her with the mournful conviction that she was always likely to be in the way. But if she was it was because of her childish curiosity, and of her burning desire to see and hear all that interested the grown people about her.

At that time there were no amusements especially provided for children, no children’s books, and no Sunday schools to teach bright little songs and to give children picnics and presents. It was a grown people’s world. The toys of the period were so poor and so few that, in comparison with our modern profusion, they could scarcely be said to exist. Harriet was, however, not without some home-made toys, and we are glad to believe that a doll baby, though perhaps only a rag one, was, in the course of providential events, assigned to little, human-hearted Harriet Beecher.

We know that Harriet’s older sister Catherine was a master hand at making dolls. With scissors, needle, paint and other materials she could make dolls of all sizes, sexes and colors, and surround them with all sorts of droll contrivances. For instance,[Pg 23] she once made a Queen of Sheba with a gold crown, seated her in a chariot made of half a pumpkin drawn by four prancing steeds fashioned out of crook-necked squashes, whose ears and legs she whittled out and fastened securely in their proper places. Then she manufactured a negro driver and placed him above with the reins in hand. Her care and artistry were rewarded by the admiration and amusement of the whole family. It was certainly worth a great deal to the little Harriet to have a sister like that, and we believe that the exercise of Catherine’s talents was not wholly selfish.

In “Poganuc People,” Mrs. Stowe, remembering her own childhood well, gives to the young heroine a gorgeous wooden doll with staring glass eyes. This precious treasure was the central point in all Dolly’s arrangements. To this companion Dolly showed her stores of chestnuts and walnuts, gave jay-bird feathers and bluebird’s wings, and a set of tea cups made out of the backbone of a codfish. She brushed and curled the doll’s hair till she took all the curl out of it, and washed all the paint off its cheeks in her motherly zeal.

Besides her doll and its excellent codfish backbone tea-set—and no one who has not tried to make them, by the way, can know how beautiful and delicate such tea cups can be—Harriet had in her earliest play days an unfailing source of occupation and delight in the gigantic woodpile in the back yard where the fuel for the season was laid up in[Pg 24] long rows eight or ten feet high. Here was a world of marvels. The child skipped and sung and climbed among its intricacies, finding and collecting wonderful treasures, green velvet mosses, little white trees of lichen that seemed to have tiny apples upon them, fine scarlet cups and fairy caps. From these materials she constructed miniature landscapes in which the mosses made the fields, little sprigs of spruce and ground pine the trees, and bits of broken glass the lakes and rivers, reflecting the overshadowing banks.

With such delights as these, Harriet was busy, healthy and happy. When her brothers came home from the Academy in the evening and tossed her up in their long arms, her laugh rang out gay and loud as if there were no such thing as disappointment in the world. Sometimes the other children joined her in the magic field of the woodpile. Then they made themselves houses, castles and fortresses. They played at giving parties and entertainments at which the dog and the cat assisted. They held town meetings also, and had voting days with speeches against the Democrats. (The word did not mean then what it does now.) They held religious meetings, too, sung hymns and preached sermons, and on these occasions Harriet was known to exhort and recite texts of Scripture with a degree of fervor that seemed to produce a great effect upon her auditors. Thus the woodpile became a great forum of debate as well as a studio of art, and Harriet was[Pg 25] the first to welcome the time when its stores should be reinforced at that great event of the year, the wood-spell.

A wood-spell is an old-fashioned sort of donation party. The pastor used to be settled with the understanding that he should receive a certain sum of money as salary, and his wood, just as in Easthampton, Long Island, Dr. Beecher’s first pastorate, one-fourth of the whales that were stranded on the beach was assigned to the minister as a part of his yearly payment. In Litchfield a day was set apart in the winter about the time when the sleighs were running most smoothly over the pressed snow, and on that day every parishioner was to bring to the minister a sled-load of wood. This was built up in the back yard of the parsonage into a mighty woodpile for the year’s use. When Harriet was five years old, partly because sorrow had visited the Beecher family that year, and partly because of a quickened religious enthusiasm throughout the community, the wood-spell of that winter was more than usually interesting and the number of loads very generous. With her father’s rejoicing approval, Harriet’s elder sister, Catherine, now sixteen years old, was allowed to take the whole responsibility of preparing the banquet for the occasion. This meant a great deal. Everything in the house must be spick and span; dozens of doughnuts must be cooked; and, above all, the wood-spell cake must be made.

For nearly a week the kitchen was as busy as an ant-hill. The fat was prepared to fry the doughnuts, the spices were pounded, the flour was sifted, the materials for the flips were collected. Catherine was assisted by eleven-year-old Mary; William, Edward and George split and brought in an incredible amount of wood for the oven, and the girls sat all the evening about the kitchen fire stoning raisins, with the best story-teller in the midst to make the time pass—and she, we are sure, could have been none other than Harriet.

Then came the baking of the cake. For two days beforehand the fire was surrounded by a row of earthen jars in which the spicy compound was rising to the necessary lightness. At exactly the quivering instant for perfection each loaf was shoved into the little black door of the brick oven.

At last all the wood-spell loaves came out victorious, while each helper merrily claimed merit for the baking.

The frying of the doughnuts was also a matter of the greatest delicacy, requiring experience and the nicest art; but this also was a triumph. Catherine said, “Were I to tell how many loaves I have put in and taken out of the oven, and how many bushels of doughnuts I have boiled over the kitchen fire, I fear my credit for veracity would be endangered.”

Finally all was finished. A mighty cheese was brought; every shelf in the closet and all the dressers of the kitchen were crowded with the abundance.[Pg 27] The delicious stores of food were indeed a sight to behold, calling in admiring visitors, and Catherine’s success was a matter of universal congratulation. But may we not give Harriet some credit, too? For though her part may have been largely the care of the younger children, still, without her help, Catherine would not have been free to do the work.

The auspicious day for the coming of the farmers arrived. It was a jewel of a morning, one of those sharp, clear, sunny, winter days when the sleds squeak over the flinty snow and the little icicles, falling from the trees, tingle along on the glittering crust. The breath of the slow-pacing oxen steamed up like a rosy cloud in the morning sun and then fell back condensed in globes of ice on every hair.

All the children were astir early, full of life and vigor. The boys were at home for the day. There was a holiday at the Academy, for the teacher had been asked to come over to the minister’s to chat and tell stories with the farmers and give them high entertainment. There was enough work for all to do, for the three big boys and for the two sisters. Besides all the rest, there was little Henry Ward, aged three, and Charles, aged but one, to be cared for and kept out of mischief. Eager, lively, little Harriet could take care of herself, and do a great deal of helping besides.

Pretty soon the first load came squeaking up the village street, and the boys clapped their hands and[Pg 28] shouted, “Hurrah for Heber!” as his load of magnificent oak, well-bearded with gray moss, came scrunching into the yard.

“Well, Mr. Atwood,” said the Doctor, “you must have had pretty hard work on that load; that’s no ordinary oak, I can tell you.”

And now the loads began to arrive thick and fast. Sometimes two and three, sometimes four and five, came stringing along in unbroken procession. For every load the minister had an appreciative word, noticing and commending the especial points, and the farmers themselves, shrewdest of observers, looked at every pile and gave it their verdict. The loads were of the best, none of your crooked-stick makeshifts. Good, straight, shagbark hickory was voted none too good for the minister.

Before long the yard, street, and the lower rooms of the house were swarming with cheerful faces. Then Aunt Esther began to cut the first loaf of wood-spell cake. The flip-irons were taken out of the fire and thrust into the foaming bowl. The little folks were as busy as bees in waiting on the kind farmers. They handed around the good things to eat, the cider and doughnuts, the cheese and the cake. The teacher and the minister were in the midst of merry chatting circles; their best stories were told, and roars of laughter resounded.

Meantime such a woodpile was arising in the yard as never before was seen in ministerial domains! And how fresh and woodsy it smelt! Harriet[Pg 29] eyed it with a view to future plays. There was the black birch whose flavored bark she prized as a species of confectionery. There were also gleaming logs of white birch, from the bark of which she could cut strips for her woodland parchment. Then there were massive trunks of oak affording veritable worlds of supplies for her woodsy palette.

And now the sun was going down. The sleds had ceased to come, the riches of woodland treasure were all in, the whole air was full of a trembling, rose-colored light. All over the distant landscape there was not a fence to be seen, nothing but waving hollows of spotless snow, glowing with the rosy radiance and fading away into purple and lilac shadows. And the evening stars began to twinkle, one after another, keen and clear, through the frosty air, as the children all sat together in triumph on the highest perch of the woodpile.

In the town where the Beechers had their home there were other unique expressions of social feeling calculated to influence the mind of a growing child, as for instance, the Fourth of July, the apple bee, and the sleighing party. But perhaps Thanksgiving Day was the one most noted in the calendar. When this characteristic Yankee festival came around there was again an opportunity for the parishioners to show the grace of generosity toward the minister. In 1818 Dr. Beecher writes to his son at college: “We had a pleasant Thanksgiving dinner and, they say, a good sermon. We had presents[Pg 30] piled up yesterday at a great rate. Mr. Henry Wadsworth sent 6 lbs. of butter, 6 lbs. lard, 2 lbs. Hyson tea, 5 dozen eggs, 8 lbs. sugar, a large pig, a large turkey and four cheeses. The governor sent a turkey; Mrs. Thompson, do.; and, to cap it all, Mr. Rogers sent us a turkey!” Under such circumstances as these it is rather fortunate that the Beecher family had a considerable number of mouths to be filled.

Again the kitchen was fragrant with the smell of cinnamon, cloves and allspice which the children were set to pound to a most wearisome fineness in the great lignum-vitæ mortar. Again there was the stoning of raisins, the cutting of citron, the slicing of orange-peel. Again the fire was built up more architecturally than usual and roared and crackled up the wide chimney, brightening with its radiance the farthest corner of the ample room. Then a tub of rosy-cheeked apples, another of golden quinces, and a bushel basket full of cranberries were set in the midst of the circle of happy children who were being led in the ways of industry, sorting and cutting, to the tune of the snapping fire.

But who shall do justice to the dinner? Who shall describe the turkey, the chicken, with the confusing series of vegetables, the plum puddings and the endless variety of pies? After dinner the father of the house conformed to the old Puritan custom by recounting the mercies of God in his dealings[Pg 31] with the family. He recited a sort of family history, closing with the time-honored text that expressed the hope that as years went by every member of the house circle might so number his days as to apply his heart unto wisdom. Then with the national hymn of the Puritans,

So it was in the noble old New England days! Amid scenes like this a child was growing up in whose character love of home and love of country were to be corner stones.

Away down West Street in the village of Litchfield was a square pine building standing at the edge of the highway where no tree gave shade and no bush or fence took off the cold hard look. In this Dame School, kept by Ma’am Kilbourne, Harriet Beecher’s school education began. Before the door in winter was a pile of wood for fuel, and in summer all the chips of the winter’s wood still lay there outspread upon the ground. Inside the appearance was even less attractive than without. The benches were simple slabs with legs. The desks were slabs set up at an angle; they were cut, hacked, and scratched; each year’s edition of jack-knife literature overlay its predecessor’s, until in the days of the Beecher children the desks already possessed carvings two or three inches deep. But if a child cut a morsel, or stuck in a pin, or pinched off a splinter, the sharp-eyed little mistress was on hand, and one look from her eyes was worse than a sliver in the foot,[Pg 33] and one nip from her fingers was equal to the jab of a pin; each boy knew, for every one of them had tried both. The teacher in this school for children was a sharp, precise person possessed of many ingenious ways for fretting little ones. At any rate this was the way one little boy remembered her, and we may suppose that a little girl would realize some of her disagreeableness, even so obedient a child as Harriet.

Every morning, then, during both summer and winter little Harriet and her brother two years younger than herself, reinforced by a hearty breakfast and a more hearty session of morning prayers at home, and bearing the precious splint basket that contained their mid-day lunch of brown bread and apples, trudged down to the place of all-day work and perhaps of discipline.

Harriet and her brother Henry were inseparable companions. Together they were hurried off from the house, together they went down the village street, together they entered the dismal school, subdued for the moment into quiet. Together they endured the long day and envied the flies and the birds that could go about so freely. The windows were so high that they could not see the grassy meadows—only the tantalizing tops of the trees came above the window ledges, and above that the far, deep, bounteous, blue sky. There flew the bluebirds; there went the robins, and there followed the longing thoughts of the children. Long before[Pg 34] they knew what was written in Scripture they cried out, O that we had the wings of a bird! As for learning, it was Henry’s opinion in his mature life, that the sum of all they got at the village school would scarcely cover the first ten letters of the alphabet. One good, kind, story-telling, Bible-rehearsing aunt at home with apples and gingerbread premiums was worth all the school ma’ams that ever stood to see poor little fellows roast in those boy-traps called district schools! Such an aunt the Beecher children had at home, and beloved she was!

But that was a boy’s view; and boys’ views of teachers are well known to be entirely unreliable. Ma’am Kilbourne was highly respected in the community and her curriculum, though not wide, is known to have gone very deep. In fact we may say that in her school the character and influence of the teacher, together with the “New England Primer,” formed the main body of the instruction.

“Come here and learn your Primer,” the teacher said, and Harriet’s curly head bent over the little book as she spelled out the words,

“You see the picture?” Her teacher pointed out the right one in its little square on the page, a wood-cut of the feline musician with fiddle in hand.[Pg 35] Here Henry crowded forward to see, too, and, finding some great joke in the matter, he nudged and coughed and could not be made to stand still. The Dame continued:

continued these instructions in history and science. Biblical example was thus enforced for the benefit of Harriet:

That great New England classic, comprised in a mere booklet, three by four inches in size, contained also the “Alphabet of Lessons for Youth,” which Ma’am Kilbourne did not fail to enforce. She taught them to read from the printed page what they already knew in the better way—by heart, the immortal prayer, “Now I lay me,” and the hymns, “Hush, my dear,” and “Give ear, my children,” and other hymns and prayers. There were also “Moral Precepts for Children in Words of One Syllable.” They were tedious, but think of the glory of really knowing them by heart!

The Dame School was an English inheritance that came with the Puritans from their home across the[Pg 37] Atlantic—such a school as the poets Cowper and Shenstone have beautifully described in their poetry. In New England a special exercise for Saturday was added; then the little ones were required to learn and recite the answers in the Westminster Assembly’s Shorter Catechism, wherein the profoundest problems of Calvinism were thoroughly set forth. When Harriet was asked the first question: “What is the chief end of man?” and was taught to say: “The chief end of man is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever,” she thought the answer difficult. It was long and had words of more than one syllable in it. She liked far better the Church Catechism that her grandmother down in Guilford had her study which began simply with “What is your name?” This was more within her range; it was a good easy start, and the answer could be shouted out in a voice loud and clear.

Another custom of the New England Dame School was perhaps also an innovation—that of requiring the children to bring a piece of sewing from home for the boys and girls to work on at odd moments so that no precious interval of time might be lost. At recess after the lunch had been unceremoniously made away with there were long uninteresting towel seams to be ripped up on one side and sewed down on the other by the industrious little fingers of Harriet and of her robust and perhaps rebellious brother, Henry Ward. In these early New England schools, as in New England life[Pg 38] in general, the chief note was industry. Our heroic ancestors, when they left their comfortable homes in the mother country and came to this untraveled land, did not include in their plan a smooth and easy life. Since Harriet belonged to a supremely self-sacrificing family, she came to share this severe understanding of life, and her patriotic heart warmly responded to it. Perhaps when she was a little girl she did not realize that her school provided few means of healthful enjoyment for the children. But then, on the rare occasion when one of the children had a treat of nuts and raisins, or a little cake trimmed with caraway sugar plums to share with the others, her joy was all the greater because of the rarity of the festival; and if besides there were added some of those wonderful candies brought from Boston, heart-shaped and hard as pebbles, but inscribed with romantic mottoes, why, that was bliss indeed!

From these rather severe foundations Harriet passed on into lessons in the reading of the Bible and in the “Columbian Orator.” She learned to write from “set copies,” and to do “sums” from Daboll’s Arithmetic.

Soon the whole company of Beecher boys and girls were together in a schoolroom which was bare to the point of meanness with a vestibule where hats and dinner baskets were hung. The heating apparatus was a big stove whose long black pipe stuck out of the window. But if any Beecher child[Pg 39] complained of want of comfort, his father cut him short by saying, “Why, when I was a boy the fireplace in the schoolhouse, though big enough to take in logs of wood cart length and capable of making heat enough to roast an ox, did not carry the warmth much beyond the andirons. Only the biggest and smartest boys were able to get near the fire; the little fellows must do the best they could. I had to take my ink-bottle to the fire to thaw out the ice in it many times a day.” In this way he put their complaints to silence.

In New England the boys and girls were educated together in one school. As Mrs. Stowe said later in life, “If a daughter of Eve wished like her brother to put forth her hand to the tree of knowledge there was neither cherubim nor flaming sword to drive her away!” And how they did study! What industry! What rivalry! In English grammar, for instance, the school was parceled out into a certain number of divisions, each under a leader, and at the close of the term there was a great examination which was like a tournament. It was known that when the day came, the most difficult specimens of English literature would be given out for parsing and the most abstruse problems in grammar would be gathered together for use in the test. For a week the boys and girls spoke and dreamed of nothing but English grammar, and each division sat in solemn assembly, afraid lest one of its mighty secrets should possibly take wing and[Pg 40] be plundered by some of the scouts of another division. In the end the division that could not be puzzled by any doubtful phrase would be proclaimed victorious and would be crowned with laurels as glorious as those of the old Olympian games.

In due time Harriet was ready to enter the institution that she was looking forward to with longing eyes—the Litchfield Female Academy. This school was one of many seminaries for the higher culture of the New England daughters, which sprang up throughout the vigorous young states, and which testify to the enthusiasm for education of our Puritan fathers. Among them the original Mt. Holyoke Seminary and the Emma Willard School are perhaps the most noted. Some of these early schools have developed into strong colleges, and all of them in their times served a valuable purpose in our educational life. It was fortunate for the Beecher family that Litchfield contained an academy of this sort, and here under the training of the cultivated ladies, Miss Sally and Miss Mary Pierce, Harriet’s education was now conducted.

Miss Sally Pierce was the real head of the school. According to her picture in Miss Vanderpoel’s delightful book of reminiscences of the famous school, Miss Pierce was a very handsome woman with eyes that suggest sensibility, and a mouth that could smile charmingly. But we suspect also that the little stiff curls might bob warningly and the lips settle[Pg 41] down into a very firm line, while the tall cap standing up over the brow might strike terror to the heart of any child doubtful about the correctness of her examples, or nervous lest a half or a one-tenth of a “miss” should be counted against her. The truth is, however, that Miss Sally was very much beloved and so greatly admired that she must have been in danger of vanity. John Pierpont, a considerable poet in his day and not forgotten now, celebrated her worth in a passage in his Centennial Poem in 1851. He becomes almost eloquent.

The Academy was held in an insignificant house thirty by sixty feet. There was a small closet at each end, one for the piano and one for bonnets. There were desks of the plainest pine, long plank benches, a small table and an elevated chair for[Pg 42] the teacher—that was all. Upon the modest throne sat Miss Sally Pierce, the principal. She probably resembled Miss Titcomb, in Mrs. Stowe’s novel, “Oldtown Folks,” a thoroughbred, old-fashioned lady whose views of education were formed by Miss Hannah More and whose style like Miss Hannah More’s was profoundly Johnsonian, which means that her ideas were expressed in very grand and dignified language. The set of rules that she made for the conduct of her school required of the pupils absolute moral perfection. It was written there that persons truly polite would invariably treat their superiors with reverence, their equals with exact consideration, and their inferiors with condescension. Also, under the head of manners, they were warned not to consider romping as indicative of sprightliness or loud laughter as a mark of wit. When these rules were read to the pupils on a Saturday morning, we can imagine that there was some suppressed excitement, for these children with mountain air stirring in their veins were doubtless somewhat given to romping and loud laughter!

Dr. Beecher, who took a great interest in the school, came nearly every Saturday and talked with the girls about religious subjects. The young ladies also attended the church and were expected to report on the sermons they heard. Besides that, they wrote of their own accord long outlines of these mild entertainments in their diaries and commonplace books. Some of these old commonplace books[Pg 43] have been preserved and give testimony to the accurate attention of these girls of old New England. Said one: “Dr. Beecher visited the school. I was very much pleased; his doctrine is plain and easy to understand.” Another, after hearing him both morning and evening and stating the chapter and verse used on each occasion, went home and went to her room thinking seriously of what he had said. “He wished,” she said, “to have us all be good Christians!” The same good child once had an afternoon holiday, but came to school just the same. She was rewarded by being present when, at about sunset, Dr. Beecher “came down to see us. He talked very affecting,” she said. “He said he could not make a very long visit with us at present, but if we wished he would come in some time and pray with us. We all joined in the request. I should be very glad to have him come, for I like to hear religious instruction.”

Another girl wrote: “He said that we must repent and believe and explained how we should repent and believe, but my memory is so poor that I cannot remember it.”

An unusually independent young mind conceived the following critical passage: “Mr. Beecher preached a very good sermon quite as good as he usually does, though I do not think he is one of the best preachers.” Here is the record of one Saturday’s exercise: “Dr. Beecher came in and gave us a lecture on the first question in the[Pg 44] catechism. ‘What is the chief end of man? To glorify God and enjoy Him forever.’ He said that in order to glorify God we must love Him and become acquainted with Him and likewise endeavor to acquaint our companions with His goodness, as we would if we had a friend at home who was very amiable, and tell our companions how amiable she is. It would be glorifying her.”

Thus the great preacher made his influence felt as the adviser and helper of Miss Pierce and of her girls. Mrs. Beecher, too, though the most shy and retiring of women, acted, with other ladies of the village, on the committee for awarding prizes at the end of the term.

When the middle of June came there were important exercises, and on this occasion all was dignity and decorum. A long procession of schoolgirls came marching down North Street, walking under the lofty elms to the music of the flute and flageolet. The girls were gaily dressed and in the most joyous spirits. At the church each proud graduate received her diploma, a document printed elegantly upon white satin and bound with blue ribbon. Upon the refined surface was a beautiful picture, representing a lofty hill, on the top of which was a temple surrounded by rays of light. A clearly marked but steep and difficult path led up the side of this mountain. At the foot stood a lady who reached out her arm and pointed with a meaning finger to a bulky geographical globe[Pg 45] that rested upon a pile of books. She seemed to say that only by means of most severe study would you be able to climb this hill to the radiant temple of learning. The meaning of the picture was well understood by the young graduate. Above the design amid the most wonderful flourishes of penmanship was inscribed the title “Litchfield Female Academy,” and below were printed the words:

Several of these little diplomas, now yellowed with age, are preserved in the Town Museum at Litchfield. I do not know that Harriet Beecher came into possession of one of them; she probably went away to be a teacher herself before she reached that point.

We learn, however, from this little certificate what was the course of study in the Litchfield Female Academy. But no such list of titles can give us any real idea of what the days at the Academy meant to Harriet. Miss Pierce was a woman of great ability. She herself had made an “Abridgment of Universal History” in four volumes which was used as a text-book in her school; and after plodding through this ample work the students followed it by Russell’s “Modern[Pg 46] Europe,” Coot’s “Continuation,” and Ramsey’s “American Revolution,” and accompanied the study with map-drawing. They made historical charts in which the names of kings and queens were set in little sequins strung along a “riband” or skein of sky-blue silk. Within the charmed enclosure of this design were the royal genealogical patterns from Saxon to Brunswick with roses of red and of white appropriately interspersed. Nothing could be clearer. Mrs. Stowe thought so much of Miss Pierce’s method that when she had her own little family to bring up she wrote to ask Miss Pierce for a copy of the book she had used in childhood from which to instruct her children.

In Miss Pierce’s school Harriet Beecher laid the foundations for her understanding of the history and principles of our national government which in due time made it possible for her to write the biographies of a number of our most distinguished statesmen, and to talk with Abraham Lincoln in 1862 with some comprehension of his problems.

Harriet must have been a brilliant little student. Writing compositions, which is such a burden to most young scholars, she seems to have found only a delight. To this work she must have been trained from her earliest days, for her mother had always maintained a sort of home school in the family; and when Dr. Beecher was off on some ministerial quest he did not fail to send home on time the lists of composition subjects and outlines that he had[Pg 47] agreed to arrange for Mrs. Beecher to use in her work with these pupils. Here are some of the subjects: The Difference between the Natural and Moral Sublime, The Comparative Merits of Milton and Shakespeare, The Comparative Merits of the Athenian and Lacedaemonian Systems of Education, and, Can the Benevolence of Deity be Proved by the Light of Nature? Profound subjects! But when the young people were sharpening up their wits on such whetstones as these, it is not so strange that a little girl of twelve, who was filled with the spirit of aspiration and fired with curiosity about everything in the universe, should try her pen at the most difficult among them.

Her question was phrased in this way: Can the Immortality of the Soul Be Proved by the Light of Nature? And her essay, when handed in, was thought to be quite wonderful. And indeed it was wonderful; for even if the ideas were overheard by her in the classes of older pupils or in the table talk of her father at home, to set them down in order and arrange them effectively was a great achievement. This precious essay has been preserved and is reproduced in full in the “Life of Mrs. Stowe,” by her son, published in 1889. The learned subject is treated in the most systematic manner; the introduction, the point of view and arrangement of thought under separate heads.

The exhibition day came. The hall was crowded[Pg 48] with all the literati of Litchfield. Before this distinguished audience all the compositions were read aloud. Harriet’s father was present and was sitting on high by the side of the teacher. When they read Harriet’s piece she was closely watching her father’s face, and she saw that it visibly brightened. He looked really interested, and at the close she heard him say, “Who wrote that composition?” “Your daughter, sir.” was the answer. It was the proudest moment of Harriet’s life. She could not mistake the expression of her father’s face when he was listening to the essay; she knew that he was pleased, and to have him interested was the greatest triumph that her heart could ask.

The teacher that answered Dr. Beecher was a nephew of Miss Pierce, Mr. J. P. Brace, who assisted her in the work of the school. He must have been one of those strong and spicy old New England schoolmasters that Mrs. Stone speaks of in “Men of Our Times.” A well-informed and cultivated man, a writer of romances himself, and especially gifted in conversational power, he must have been a stimulating and inspiring instructor. An enthusiast in botany, mineralogy, and the natural sciences generally, he filled the students with an enthusiasm that made gathering specimens and making herbariums an easy task. He kept up a constant conversation on a great variety of subjects, better calculated to develop the mind and[Pg 49] to inspire love of literature than any mere routine could have been. Harriet afterward declared that she gained more from hearing the recitations and discussions in the classes of the older pupils than from her own work. There from hour to hour she listened with eager ears to historical criticisms and discussion of such works as Paley’s “Moral Philosophy,” Blair’s “Rhetoric,” and Alison on “Taste.”

In composition Mr. Brace excelled all teachers she ever knew. The constant interest that he aroused in the minds of his pupils, the wide and varied regions of thought into which he led them, formed a perfect preparation for their work in composition. He made them feel that they had something which they wanted to say, and this is the main requisite for success in writing.

Those were very busy, happy days for Harriet, probably the days she had in mind when she wrote in “Oldtown Folks”: “Certainly of all the days that I look back upon, this Academy life in Cloudland was the most perfectly happy.... It was happy because we were in the first flush of belief in ourselves and in life. Oh, that first belief! those incredible first visions! when all things look possible, and one believes in the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow and sees enchanted palaces in the sunset clouds! What faith we had in one another, and how wonderful we were in one another’s[Pg 50] eyes!... We believed that we had secrets of happiness and progress known only to ourselves. We had full faith in one another’s destiny; we were all remarkable people and destined to do great things!”

The account of Harriet’s education may sound somewhat meager to those who do not look beneath the surface. But it must be remembered that her own family formed an educational institution in itself. New England was celebrated, as Mrs. Stowe afterwards said, for “crisp originalities of character.” And even against this background the Beecher family stood out as a “sharp-cut and peculiar set.” These highly individual qualities in her parents and in her brothers and sisters made a constant current of life beneath the roof of the Beecher parsonage. It was an education to hear her father discuss things, whether at dinner or at wood-sawing or on a picnic; for he was like a high-mettled horse in a pasture, as Mrs. Stowe said of one of her characters in her novel, “My Wife and I”; he enjoyed once in a while having a free argumentative race all round the theological lot. But this discussion was by no means left to the leader alone; all the children were[Pg 52] expected to take part. The home circle thus became a great lyceum of thought. The rule of these debates was that each one should contribute his thought and bear his part with boldness, independence and originality. In this way the father trained the children in toughness, tenacity and endurance. Harriet’s father would have disowned any child that refrained in fair argument from putting forth every atom of logical strength he possessed. Every boy was expected, in supporting his opinions, to exert himself to the utmost, but without sophistry or unfairness. Against a refusal to argue or a resort to evasion or trick, the father’s anger burned like fire. And no child was allowed to find fault if his arguments were roughly handled, or to grumble and get angry if he were bruised or floored in fair debate. A stranger looking upon some hotly contested discussion might have said that the doctor and his children were angry with each other. Never! They were only in earnest. Moreover, the great household was filled with a spirit of active service, carried out with cheerfulness and even hilarity. Or if perchance the will for obedience deflected a little from perfection, the father’s sharp call, “Mind your mother. Quick! No crying! Look pleasant!” was sufficient to bring stragglers into line at once.

The work and plans and interests of the household went on like a great well-balanced machine, in which one little cog, that good child Harriet,[Pg 53] was taking its part according to its ability. Harriet was also getting ready to perform a greater part, for all these home experiences were turning in a direction that gave her a special preparation for her life-work.

At this time Harriet’s older sister, Catherine, was considered by far the more promising daughter. She did become a most efficient woman, who wrote a long list of educational books and who had a great influence on the schools of her time throughout the country. When Harriet was in the early teens, however, Catherine was simply a brilliant young woman, efficient, sparkling and full of life. She caused a breath of mirth to flow through the home every minute, even the stern father being indulgent toward her pranks and jokes. She made every occurrence the subject of a bit of composition in prose or in verse, like the “epithet” for the kit. Everything was turned into literary expression; the disappearance of a favorite calf inspired a threnody; if a precious brown-edged platter was smashed, an epic poem was forthwith composed; if a marriage took place among the cousins, a ballad appeared into which the names of all the guests were woven and which was learned by heart by every one and was quoted for months.

In such an atmosphere as this it is not strange that the bent of Harriet’s mind toward writing should have been strengthened. The wonder is not that she developed in that direction, but that she[Pg 54] did not begin to write even earlier than she did. We shall see that the reasons for that were sufficient.

A great deal has been said about Harriet’s father, but her mother must have a special word also. It could be said of her, as it has been of another ideal woman of history, that to know her was in itself an education. Roxana Foote Beecher belonged to the old Guilford Foote family, so conspicuous for intellectual and social attainments in the early New England days. One of Harriet’s sisters, in writing to her daughter of the Foote homestead at Nut Plains near Guilford, said: “These Footes are a people by themselves in their literary accomplishments, their good sense and fine breeding. Their homestead almost talks to you from its very walls of the days gone by. I never felt more sure of spirit companionship of the highest order, and your father thinks few parlors in all the land have gathered a more noble company. The place is full of rich and inspiring associations.”

In this Foote family there were traditions that must have been especially inspiring to a child like Harriet Beecher. One of the stories centered about a young girl named Lucinda Foote, who was born in Chester, Connecticut, only a few years before Roxana Beecher’s time. She displayed great taste for study and attained a distinction that not many other girls of her time gained. She was the[Pg 55] daughter of the Reverend John Foote, the minister in Chester, a man distinguished for his scholarship.

Little Lucinda Foote studied the “learned languages,” as they were called, that is, Latin and Greek, and when she was only twelve years old she was examined in them by the President of Yale College, the great Ezra Stiles. He testified in a parchment which is one of the precious treasures among her descendants that she had shown commendable progress in these studies, giving the meaning of passages in the Æneid of Virgil, the select Orations of Cicero and also in the Greek Testament, and that she was “fully qualified except in regard to sex to be received as a pupil in the freshman class in Yale University.” It may satisfy a natural curiosity to add that this child afterwards privately pursued a full collegiate course, including Hebrew, under President Stiles; was married at the age of eighteen; had ten children and lived to be sixty-two years old! In fact, as the elderly Mrs. Cornwall, wife of the physician in Chester, Harriet Beecher may possibly have seen her as she passed through the village in the stage coach on her way to visit her aunts in Guilford.

The traditions of this highly intellectual family were carried on excellently by Roxana Foote. Even in her girlhood, when the spinning-wheel was her daily companion, it was a habit of hers to adorn one end of the wheel beam with the pile of fleecy rolls ready for the spinning and then to lay on[Pg 56] the other end an open book which, with its face down, waited for the minute when her conscience would allow her to leave her work and pore for a while over its pages. Roxana’s grandfather, General Ward, used to tell a story about his three granddaughters. He said that when the three girls came down in the morning Harriet Ward’s voice would be heard briskly calling, “Here! take the broom; sweep up; make a fire; make haste!” Betsy Chittenden would say, “I wonder what ribbon it’s best to wear at that party?” But Roxana Foote would say, “Which do you think was the greater general, Hannibal or Alexander?”

Roxana took advantage of every opportunity for culture. From a French gentleman who, after the massacres at San Domingo had taken refuge in this country and settled in Guilford, she learned French and became able to speak it fluently. He lent her the best French authors, which she studied as she spun flax, tying the book, face forward, to the distaff. She had a brother who went into business in New York; while visiting him she studied drawing and painting with water colors and in oils; afterwards when any problem in perspective puzzled her she flew to the encyclopedia and was not content till she had overcome the difficulty. She was highly gifted in artistic execution of many kinds. She painted miniature portraits upon ivory for various members of her family and for her pupils and rarely failed to get a good likeness. Her[Pg 57] needlework was a marvel in its delicacy and complexity; bobbin lace and cobweb stitch like hers have now passed out of memory. The house was full of works of ingenuity devised by her which adorned wall and furniture and drapery. Her famous Russian stove, made with the aid of a mason from the description in her encyclopedia, warmed six rooms with less fuel than many of her neighbors used for a single fire. In fact, the second Mrs. Beecher declared that this wonderful stove entirely annihilated the winter indoors.

Under her mother’s guidance, Catherine, at about fourteen, decorated with landscapes a new chamber set of beautiful white wood, the bureau, dressing-table, candlestand, washstand and bedstead. She surrounded the pictures with garlands of flowers and fruits, and then varnished them according to a recipe in the same encyclopedia. Once Dr. Beecher sent home a whole bale of cotton which he bought just because it was cheap. Roxana found a use for this commodity. She conceived the idea of making a carpet of it—a thing unheard of in the little Long Island town where they began their housekeeping together. In that primitive place they still covered their floors with sand dampened and smoothed over, marking this smooth surface with the broom in zig-zag lines if they wanted decoration. But Mrs. Beecher’s artistic mind took a higher flight. She carded and spun the bale of cotton, had it woven, cut and sewed it to fit the[Pg 58] parlor, and then stretched it on the garret floor to begin the operations. Here she brushed it over with thin paste to make a stiff foundation. Meantime she had sent to her brother in New York for paints and had learned from the invaluable encyclopedia how to use them. She painted flowers and leaves in groups on this background, taking for models the plants in her own garden. The carpet, when it was done, was the admiration of the whole town, but the deacons, when they came to the door, did not dare to step on anything so splendid; they also thought it a sin to make the room so magnificent that the splendors of Heaven would lose their attractiveness! “Do you think,” said one of them, “that you can have all of this and Heaven besides?”

It is difficult to say what her chief interests were, she was so full of activities. She loved works on philosophy and on science, and was ingenious in making devices for experiments in natural philosophy. She was intensely interested in all the new books of poetry. Writing to her sailor brother Samuel, she besought him to come up to Litchfield to visit them. “Just pack yourself into the chaise,” she said, “and come up here and see how pleasant it is in winter. You might fancy yourself at sea now and then when we have a brisk breeze, with the help of a little imagination. You might find sundry other things to amuse you. I have a new philosophical work you may study and some new[Pg 59] poems you may read.” This was in November, 1814, when Harriet was two years old; while her mother was writing Harriet was clinging about her neck praying her to stop writing and make her a doll baby!

Mrs. Beecher was modest and retiring in the highest degree, so that she could not speak with a stranger or a guest without having the beautiful color sweep over her face; and she was so shy that she could never lead the weekly “female prayer-meeting”; yet she had so much tact that she never angered her impetuous husband, and she was the life and the center of the Beecher home.

But details like these, after all, give us very little insight into her real character. We may perhaps judge what sort of woman she was by the influence she had upon her children.

From what Harriet said of her we can see that she must have been the very quintessence of womanliness, of motherliness. Harriet said: “Mother was one of those strong, restful, yet widely sympathetic natures, in whom all around seemed to find comfort and repose. She was of a temperament peculiarly restful and peace-giving. Her union of spirit with God, unruffled and unbroken even from very early childhood, seemed to impart to her an equilibrium and healthful placidity that no earthly reverses ever disturbed.” In almost every book that Mrs. Stowe wrote she pays tribute to her mother in her pictures of motherly feeling.[Pg 60] All the mother influence upon St. Clair in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” is Harriet’s offering upon the altar of her own mother’s memory.

Harriet’s brother, Henry Ward Beecher, said that the loss of his mother was like a cheating of his heart’s best possession. All his life long he felt that there was a moral power in his memory of her—one of those invisible blessings that faith comprehends, but that cannot be weighed or estimated.

We may come a little nearer yet to an understanding of Roxana Foote’s character if we take a quotation from one of her letters written to Dr. Beecher before their marriage. Old-time love-letters were of a more serious kind than those of to-day. When the prevailing thought of a time dwelt upon religious questions it was but natural that the spiritual condition of the one beloved should be of the deepest concern to the lover. With such a thought we may read this passage which is given as a light upon the inner impulses and character of Harriet’s mother.

Roxana’s lover had, it seems, asked her certain perplexing questions as to her religious experience. In answer she said: “You ask, when I feel a degree of joy, whether it arises from anything I perceive in the character of God that charms me, or from anything that I perceive in myself that I think will charm God? I think the former.... In contemplating the character of God, His mercy and goodness are most present to my mind, and as[Pg 61] it were swallow up His other attributes. The overflowing goodness that has created multitudes of human beings that He might communicate to them a part of His happiness, and which openeth His hand and filleth all things with plenteousness, I can contemplate with delight.... I can not now describe what have been my feelings before, but on Sunday night I experienced emotions which I can find no language to describe. I seemed carried to Heaven and thought that neither height nor depth nor things present, nor things to come, should be able to separate me from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus. Yet, if I feel a degree of joy, I fear to indulge it and tremble at every emotion of pleasure. Last night I was almost in Heaven, but sunk to earth again by fears that I should rejoice without cause, but when I prayed my fears seemed to remove.”2

When we read such a love-letter as this we can a little understand how every son of that mother should become a notable minister of the Gospel and each daughter a source of wide influence for good.

It is also a matter beyond dispute that a mother with such tastes and accomplishments as Mrs. Beecher possessed would see to it that the education of her daughters on the artistic side should not be neglected. And in fact there was need—at[Pg 62] any rate we should think so to-day. In the Litchfield Female Academy there was indeed some instruction in art. Painting, embroidery and the piano were at that time considered the essential things in the proper education of a young lady. The description that Aurora Leigh gives of the instruction she received at the hands of her English aunts in the first book of Mrs. Browning’s great poem, “Aurora Leigh,” belongs to about the same period and will be considered sufficiently laughable by the girls of to-day. Ideas in New England were not very different from these. In the Academy in Litchfield they painted flowers that were delicate and stiff; they worked samplers and coats of arms in chenille and floss; pastoral pieces were in great favor, representing fair young shepherdesses sitting with crooks in their hands on green chenille banks, tending animals of uncertain description which were to be received by faith as sheep. There were mourning pieces with a willow tree by a family monument and weeping mourners with faces artfully concealed by flowing pocket-handkerchiefs. The sweet confiding innocence, said Mrs. Stowe with gentle irony in “Oldtown Folks,” which regarded the making of objects like these as more suited to the tender female character than the pursuit of Latin and mathematics was characteristic of the ancient régime. Did not Penelope embroider, and all sorts of princesses, ancient and modern? And was not embroidery a true feminine[Pg 63] grace?3 We may well doubt if Harriet took much interest in these beasts of floss and chenille and probably preferred, as we should think she would, her childhood landscapes of gray and brown mosses. But when she was older and could follow her home instruction in painting she gained a skill that made sketching landscapes and other work in water color a resource to her all her life.

In music, too, Harriet was not without opportunities for culture. Her mother, Roxana, played the guitar from her girlhood. Her father was devoted to the violin which always lay near him in the attic study to be taken up whenever the strain of his work made him feel the need of relaxation. Under the influence of such parents it is not strange that every member of the Beecher family began singing at a very early age. One of Harriet’s sisters said that she learned to read music by note as soon as she learned to read print. Dr. Beecher must have had the soul of music within him. He once said that if he could play what he heard inside his soul he would beat Paganini. But not being able to do that he had to content himself with “Merrily O” and other melodies of a simple sort. But whatever he may have lacked in execution he managed at every church he served as minister to[Pg 64] infuse into the singing a portion of his own buoyant enthusiasm. In earlier days the Puritan singing had been of a plaintive and minor kind. Lyman Beecher called forth a song of a bolder, livelier, more triumphant character, and uniting his endeavors with those of Lowell Mason, the great leader in later New England hymnology, he worked a great change in the psalmody of his country.

We do not think of the New England meeting-house as being the home of music, but to Harriet Beecher the singing in the Sabbath service must have meant a great deal. The Puritan music, with its solemn undertone of deep emotion, had a mysterious power over her. When the “wild warble” of “St. Martin’s,” which ran like this:

or “China” with its weird yet majestic movement of which this first line may remind us:

when these old beloved tunes swelled and reverberated through the church they expressed to her a solemn assurance of victory. In the old fuguing tunes, too, there was a wild freedom and energy of motion that came from the heart of a people who[Pg 65] had been courageous in combat and unshaken in endurance. They were like the ocean when it is aroused by stormy winds when deep calleth unto deep in tempestuous confusion, from which at last is evolved peace and harmony. Whatever a trained musician might say of such a tune as old “Majesty,” no person of imagination and sensibility could ever hear it well rendered by a large choir without deep emotion. So thought Harriet; and when back and forth from every side of the church came the different parts shouting

there was at least one young heart in the audience that could scarcely contain its rapture and that held itself quite still until the tempest sank away to peace in the words:

Stirred to the depths by songs such as this on Sunday, Harriet came home to a family that were making the rafters ring with music all the week. A fine-toned upright piano, which some lucky accident[Pg 66] had brought within the means of the poor minister, had been early brought all the way from New Haven; Harriet said that never was ark of the covenant brought into the tabernacle with such gladness as when this magical instrument came into their abode. Then indeed was the house filled with music. Catherine and Harriet had regular instruction from a charming and beautiful performer. Edward and William learned to play on the flute. Dr. Beecher brought out his fiddle, and many evenings were given to concerts in which piano, violin, flute and voice united, and Scotch ballads and hymns and chorals resounded through the house.

Sunday evening was a particularly pleasant time in the Beecher home. Something of the old law about Sunday observance ending at sundown still held in New England. And when the boys, who were closely watching, had at last seen the required three stars come out—why, that decided the matter; it was really evening, the Sabbath was over, and playing could now begin without making their consciences prick. When the preaching was done for the day, Dr. Beecher would join the family, and music would be in order. Never was the father so entertaining as at this time. He was lively, sparkling, jocose. He got out the old yellow music book and his faithful friend, the violin, and played “Auld Lang Syne,” “Bonnie Doon,” “Mary’s Dream” and other favorites. On week day evenings a concert like this ended with “Money Musk”[Pg 67] and “College Hornpipe,” and perhaps after the mother had gone to bed the father would exhibit the wonders of a double shuffle remembered from the corn-huskings of his youth; but it is said that the results on the feet of his stockings made the female authorities frown on them to such a degree that after a while the exhibition became a rare treat.

But there were other ways in which the high spirits of this sometimes frisky parent amused the family. For instance, in pursuance of a sort of dare the musical father went through the house before the housekeeper was up, energetically playing “Yankee Doodle.” At another time when he was tired of theological study he began to play the fiddle under the schoolroom (in the days when they had a school in the home), much to the delight of the pupils; but the mother came downstairs, took the instrument gently from his hands, carried it upstairs, and laid it on the desk in the schoolroom. This closed that incident and gave us an example of the mother’s tact in managing a rather difficult situation.

But not to dwell upon the jocose side of things which kept the life in the Beecher home from becoming too serious and dull for the welfare of a company of little ones who were full of activity that needed outlet, it is plain that there were many broadening educative influences about Harriet Beecher in her own immediate home.

These were also supplemented by others of a still wider character. When Harriet stayed at the Foote homestead in Nut Plains down near Guilford she slept in a bed that was hung with curtains of printed India linen on which bloomed strange mammoth plants with endless convolutions of branches in whose hollows appeared Chinese summer houses adorned with countless bells which gay Chinese attendants were ever in the act of ringing with a hammer. There were also sleepy-looking mandarins, and birds bigger than the mandarins. Drowsy little girl Harriet wondered why the bells did not ring when struck, and why the mandarins never came out of their summer houses.

These Oriental treasures were brought by a famous sea-faring uncle of Harriet’s, Uncle Samuel Foote. He had been a sailor at sixteen, a commander of a ship at twenty-one. And he, of course, was Harriet’s hero of romance. He it was that brought the frankincense from Spain, the mementos of the Alhambra and of the ancient Moors. He sent mats and baskets, almonds and raisins from Mogadore, Oriental caps and slippers, South American ingots of silver and hammocks wrought by the Southern Indian tribes. And when he came speaking French and Spanish and full of the very atmosphere of a great and wonderful world that lay beyond the rims of the mountains, what stories of adventure the children could hear! What discussions about the respective value of Turk and[Pg 69] Christian! What keen observations upon all life everywhere!

And this uncle always brought a box of books, the newest thing, the latest. He it was that sent up into the hills the wonderful “Salmagundi” of Irving the minute it was printed. He kept track of everything that Roxana might desire and saw to it that she received the last word in philosophy, art and poetry.

Still other opportunities were given to the acutely observing little girl to know the great outside world, its interests, its burdens. There was, for instance, Aunt Mary Hubbard who, returning from San Domingo, opened a vista into a life full of romance and tragedy. This admired aunt braids strangely into the pattern of Harriet’s life, as we shall see in a later chapter. Then Harriet’s father was always off for some tour of theological interest, bringing back a refreshing atmosphere of the outside world. We must also remember that Litchfield was full of young men who came to attend the Law School and who made the town more or less breezy. Among them was a French count who remembered the Beecher family to his latest days. These students and the young ladies of the Academy came from all parts of the country, each adding to the enlargement of life that such a collection of personalities always brings.

It was not a retired and quiet life that Harriet lived during her most formative years. She was on an intellectual highway and at a crossroads where many influences of the richest inspiration were felt.

The town attracted fine and interesting people from everywhere; and from all of them she was receiving liberalizing influences that were helping to make of her the great woman that she afterwards became.

In such a home circle as that of the Beechers, books were the very breath of life. From 1799, when Lyman Beecher and Roxana Foote were married, they had taken the Christian Observer, a paper conducted by Macaulay, Wilberforce and Hannah More, and they had always procured as many books as they could afford of those that were mentioned in that paper. A valuable encyclopedia came to the household as a gift from an English gentleman whose daughters had boarded with the[Pg 71] family. This bulky and useful work was not, as is often the case in our day when the public library is just around the corner, left to fall to pieces on the dusty shelf, but it was made a constant source of reference in all their lively discussions.

It may be thought that Harriet would have a constant resource in her father’s library. This attic study did indeed afford her a harbor, but his tastes and necessities were naturally for theological works and the walls of his room were fairly choked with tall volumes for his own use. Searching through such a library as this Harriet’s despairing and hungry glances found only such titles as these: Bell’s “Sermons,” Bogue’s “Essays,” Monnet’s “Inquiries,” Toplady on “Predestination,” Housley’s “Tracts”—not such books as would do much toward feeding the beauty-loving instinct of a gifted child.

One of the heroines in a book written by her when she was a woman is described in this way: “She was well-read, well-bred, high-minded, high-principled, a little inclined to be ultra-romantic, maybe.” We may surely think of Harriet as fitting this definition, even including the romantic inclination—that is, she was fond of stories of adventure, and was full of high feelings and enthusiasms. It would not be strange if the story-loving side of her nature bloomed a little shyly, since it had been almost starved. But it could not die.

This spirit of lofty enthusiasm is illustrated by[Pg 72] what she felt when as a little girl she first heard the Declaration of Independence read. She had but a vague idea of what it meant, but she gathered enough from the recital of the abuses and injuries that had driven her nation to revolt to feel herself swelling with indignation and ready with all her little mind and strength to applaud what seemed the resounding majesty of the Declaration. She was as ready as any one to pledge her life, fortune and sacred honor for such a cause. The heroic element was strong in her. It had come down from a line of Puritan ancestors; when the little girl heard that document read the spirit of her father swelled her little frame and brightened her cheeks and made her long to do something, she scarce knew what, to fight for her country or to make some declaration on her own account. This spirited child needed food for the imagination and fancy. She needed contact with the genius-lighted minds of the past. She had the power to assimilate a great amount of intellectual food, and she was hungry for it.

The first satisfaction she had for her intense longing for what she would call interesting reading was in the “Pilgrim’s Progress” of Bunyan. We know how deeply this sank into her heart from the fact that in the books she wrote she often illuminates her thought by some apt illustration from the Pilgrim’s adventures. That her mind began very[Pg 73] early to be haunted by those memories of the Pilgrim we know from one story about her youth.

It is related that sometimes when she was prowling about in the back attic she would timidly open a little door that she found in the side of the chimney and would peer into the dark abyss that yawned within. Looking into that smoky and fearsome place, she was reminded of the door that the Pilgrim found in the walls of a certain valley, an opening which was the way that hypocrites go in at, whence issued the scent of brimstone together with a rumbling noise as of fire. As this thought came to Harriet she would shut to the little door in the chimney with a bang and run away to a more friendly part of the house, seeking some room that might perhaps be called a “Chamber of Peace.”

This name could certainly be applied to her father’s study. Harriet loved that attic of her father’s with its quiet and its rows of books. There she would cuddle down in a corner and watch her father as he sat in his great writing chair with his Bible and his Cruden’s “Concordance” and now and then whispered out his rapidly forming sermon. She looked about upon those mysterious books with awe. To her father there was evidently good magic in them, but to her their charm was unrevealed. To be sure, from Harmer’s work on “Solomon’s Song” and from a book called “The State of the Clergy during the French Revolution,” she could gain some food for her hungry fancy. There was[Pg 74] also Cotton Mather’s “Magnalia,” that wonderful account of how this plantation of New England was made so considerable in a space of time so inconsiderable, a work that was a perfect storehouse of tales of these strange old days. These were wonderful stories indeed! And they were all about her own country, too, and made her feel that she herself trod upon ground that was consecrated by some special dealings of God’s Providence.

Nevertheless the story-loving side of little Harriet could never be convinced that there were no more lively bits to be found among all those unpromising black books. She sought perseveringly, and her efforts were rewarded. In a side closet full of documents there was a weltering ocean of pamphlets in which she dug and toiled for hours, to be repaid by disinterring a delicious morsel of “Don Quixote” that had once been a book, but was now lying in forty or fifty broken scraps amid Calls and Appeals, Essays, Replies and Rejoinders. The turning up of such a fragment, she thought, was like the rising of an enchanted island out of an ocean of mud. Further searches in certain barrels of old sermons brought to her a battered but precious copy of the “Arabian Nights.” She was now happy; such books as these could be read and re-read forever without ever palling.

We must remember that there were in those days no books written specially for children and so arranged as to be interesting at each step of the[Pg 75] child’s growth. Harriet had to grow to the great books, but as she had a very precocious and devouring mind she was fully ready by the time that she discovered the Oriental story-book in the bottom of the barrel, to read all the big words in Scheherazade’s long-winded, fascinating tales.

It was Harriet Beecher’s good fortune that no silly or trashy books were thrown in her way, to the injury or ruin of her mental development. Under all these encouraging influences she grew with astonishing rapidity, but in a perfectly simple and normal way.

Mrs. Stowe herself tells us in “The Minister’s Wooing” what was thought to be the proper selection for the personal library of a well-taught young lady of those times. Upon the snowy cover of the small table under her looking-glass should lie “The Spectator,” “Paradise Lost,” “Shakespeare” and “Robinson Crusoe.” Beside them of course the Bible should rest. There should also be the works of Jonathan Edwards. Laid a little to one side, as perhaps of doubtful reputation, might be found the only novel which the stricter people in those days allowed for the reading of their daughters, that seven-volumed, trailing, tedious, delightful old bore, “Sir Charles Grandison”—a book whose influence was almost universal and might be traced even in the epistolary style of some grave divines.

A story is told of a certain young lady of Litchfield, probably a devourer of such books as this,[Pg 76] who was once going in the stage from Litchfield to Hartford and happened to have Miss Sally Pierce, the principal of the Female Academy, for traveling companion. Miss Pierce recommended to the young lady the purchase of “Wilberforce’s View.” The young lady took this advice, paying the sum of six shillings for the work. Miss Pierce also suggested the “Memoirs of Miss Susanna Anthony” which could be bought for three and six, and a book called “Reflections on Death” which she declared to be very interesting as well as instructive. We are not told that the young lady did not slip in also “The Lady of the Lake,” which was just then becoming a fashionable book in the hill towns of Connecticut, or even perhaps volume one of that great romance, “Sir Charles Grandison.”

Harriet no doubt had books of the same solemn and metaphysical kind recommended to her by her beloved teacher, but decidedly not the seven-volume novel. We do not know that Harriet had a little room to herself and a small library of her own. But she must have read that classic novel some time, or how could she have pronounced it a bore? Besides this, we know that once when she was almost an old lady she stood on her feet with bonnet on and read a chapter of “Sir Charles” through to the end, oblivious of the fact that she was keeping a dinner party waiting for her to come.

Fortunately for Harriet with her strong literary instincts, the tastes of her mother were more catholic[Pg 77] than were those of her theological father; she included philosophical, scientific and poetic books among her favorites. In one of her letters to her sister-in-law she said: “May has, I suppose, told you of the discovery that the fixed alkalies are metallic oxyds. I first saw the notice in the Christian Observer and have since seen it in the Edinburgh Review.” Her eager mind led her to add: “I think this is all the knowledge I have obtained in the whole circle of the arts and sciences of late; if you have been more fortunate, pray let me have the benefit.”

To Mrs. Beecher a new interesting book was an event, heard of across the ocean, watched for as one watches for the rising of a new planet; and while the English packet was slowly laboring over, bearing it to our shores, expectation in the family was rising. When the book was to be found in the city book stores an early copy generally found its way to the family circle in Litchfield. Miss Edgeworth’s “Frank” came, and was read aloud to their great edification. Many a box of books appeared through the thoughtfulness of Uncle Samuel, who always selected the latest and most interesting things. “The Lay of the Last Minstrel” and “Marmion” made an epoch by their arrival; they were read in the home with wild enthusiasm, and afterwards spouted in glorious hours by the children. Can we take ourselves back to the freshness of a time when a letter from the mountains to[Pg 78] a New Haven sister could contain this message: “John brought ‘The Vision of Roderick,’ a poem by Scott. Do tell me about Scott.” There was an eager, unjaded appetite in that mountain town that would give a rapturous welcome to such a poem as the “Lady of the Lake,” such a novel as “Ivanhoe.” These were the days when the heart of the world was being periodically agitated by the appearance of a new Waverley novel; it was the time, too, of Moore, Southey, Wordsworth, and, above all, of Byron.

Ah, Byron! It was the day of Byron, too. Over the sea came the rolling rhythms, the bravado and the mockery of the wonderful living poet. Over the sea came, too, the Byronic melancholy and the loose, waving Byronic necktie. The sensitive young attendants of the Law School suffered from the one and wore the other. We know that they suffered from the Byronic melancholy, for Dr. Beecher preached against it; and this time he did, as he used to say, take hold without mittens. He preached cut and thrust, hip and thigh, and did not ease off. His sermon was closed with an eloquent lamentation over the wasted life and misused powers of the great poet.

Meantime Harriet, then eleven years old, had found a stray volume of Byron’s “Corsair.” Her aunt had given it to her one afternoon to appease her craving for something to read. This poem astonished and electrified her. She kept calling to[Pg 79] her aunt to hear the wonderful things she found in it and to ask what they meant. “Aunt Esther, what does this mean: ‘One I never loved enough to hate’?” “Oh, child, it’s one of Byron’s strong expressions,” said her aunt. That day Harriet went home full of dreaming about Byron, and after that she listened to everything that was said about him at the table. She heard her father tell about his separation from his wife, and one day he said, “My dear, Byron is dead—gone!” Then after a minute he added, “Oh, I am sorry that Byron is dead. I did hope he would live to do something for Christ. What a harp he might have swept!” That afternoon Harriet took her basket and went up to the strawberry field on Chestnut Hill. But she was too dispirited to do anything. She lay in the daisies and looked up into the blue sky and thought of the great eternity into which Byron had entered, and wondered how it might be with his soul.

It is interesting to recall that Harriet’s great English contemporary, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who afterward became the greatest of women poets and was one of Mrs. Stowe’s dear friends, at almost the same time was also mourning in a beautiful poem that “’midst the shriekings of the tossing wind,” “the dark blue depths” he sang of were then bearing all that remained of Byron to his native shore.

Harriet would probably know by instinct that[Pg 80] no novel would be approved by her father for the children. So we can imagine her joy when one day he brought a novel of Scott’s to her brother George, saying that, though he generally disapproved of such books as trash, yet in these he could see that there were real genius and real culture and therefore he would remove his ban upon them.

In that summer Harriet and her brother read “Ivanhoe” through seven times, and they were both able to recite many scenes verbatim from beginning to end. They dramatized it all. They named the rocks and glens and rivers about Litchfield by names borrowed from “The Lady of the Lake”; they clambered among the rocks of Benvenue and sailed on the bosom of the Loch Katrine, using Chestnut Hill and the Great and Little Pond for the purpose. In the reading circles among the law students and among the young ladies they discussed Scott’s treatment side by side with that of Shakespeare, and compared the poetry of Scott and Byron.

In the family all this great new poetry was read aloud—which is indeed the best and only way to get the good of poetry. And though Harriet’s father was necessarily most interested in theological argument and discussion, he, too, was fond of poetry and read it with wonderful expression. Harriet thought it the greatest possible treat to hear him read passages from that world-poem,[Pg 81] “Paradise Lost.” Especially was she moved when he read the account of Satan’s marshaling of his forces of fallen angels. The courage and fortitude of Milton’s Satan enlisted her in his favor, and when her father came to the passage beginning

her father himself burst into tears and the reading was ended for that day. Perhaps that poem was a favorite with Dr. Beecher because Milton’s confessed object in writing had been to “justify the ways of God to man,” and this was a theme that would appeal strongly to the great preacher.

Of course, if one were to speak of the books that were read by the future author of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” one would have to name first and foremost the one that was the daily and almost hourly study and reading and talk of all members of the Beecher home, the Bible. What Harriet Beecher Stowe thought of that book is written at large in all her works. Especially in the novel, “My Wife and I,” she takes occasion to speak of what she thinks it means to a young man to have a thorough knowledge[Pg 82] in the mind and the heart of that world-embracing book. It may be said also that her own books express in their content the spirit of the Bible. When later in life Mrs. Stowe traveled in the mountains of Switzerland, she said that she rejoiced every hour while among those scenes in her familiarity with the language of the Bible, for there alone could she find vocabulary and images to express her feelings of wonder and awe!

We are accustomed to think of the early New England life as offering few expressions of artistic beauty, and there is much truth in this view, for the thoughts of our forefathers were directed chiefly toward theology. But we must never forget that those first adventurers came from England during the greatest age of artistic expression that England ever had, the time of Sidney and Spenser and Shakespeare. When the New Englanders had become settled in their new home, had become somewhat unified, that “fervid activity of an intense, newly-kindled, peculiar and individual life” resulted in all sorts of out-croppings of that desire for beauty invincible in the human soul. We should be surprised to see how general were attempts in dramatic form. In all the schools, in the homes, in the societies and lyceums everywhere, original dialogues and plays were the order; and the Sunday school, when invented, threw a generous mantle of charity over various colloquies,[Pg 84] symbolisms, moralities, and other kinds of dramatic presentation.

In Miss Pierce’s school there were many exercises of this character. Miss Pierce herself was devoted, like her nephew, to the English classics; she was a good reader, given to quoting long passages of poetry and making her pupils do likewise. To the compositions for gala days, declamations, colloquies and dramatic sketches were added. Then

was invariably spouted. “The Will, or The Power of Medicine,” is the subject of one play on record; also a colloquy on “Improvements in Education.” A play called “The Country Boy” was given, in which the characters were John Hickory and Hotspur. In one called “The Curfew,” the hero is a robber disguised as a minstrel. “The Combat,” from “The Lady of the Lake,” was another favorite. Miss Pierce herself wrote some very respectable dramas which the pupils presented in the exhibitions at the close of school. On these occasions a stage was erected, scenery was painted and hung in true theatrical style, while all the wardrobes of the community were ransacked for stage dresses. When the principal’s favorite, “Jephtha’s Daughter,” was given, the Biblical hero, adorned with a helmet of gilt paper, surmounted by waving ostrich plumes, strode grandly in, declaiming,

There was a procession of Judæan maidens, bearing the body of Jephtha’s daughter on a bier after the sacrifice, and there was also a procession of sympathizing youths. For this part of the program the young students from the Law School came in very handy; and, judging by the diary of one of them which has been lately exhumed and published,4 the young gentlemen of a hundred years ago were not so different from those of to-day.

If one desired to know the type of a young man to be found in the town of Litchfield during the time that Harriet Beecher and her two sisters, Catherine and Mary, were a part of the social life there, one may have recourse to this published journal. George Younglove Cutler is the name of the writer, and, judging by the fascinating pages he indited, the name was not wholly inappropriate. He had a vivid way of writing, as if he were directly addressing the person to whom he was speaking, and he writes in his vehemence with a sublime disregard of punctuation. For instance, he says: “Miss M., you were becomingly dressed last night because there was less fix about you than common. I like richness of dress but hate ribbons & bows & knots & ruffles & rigmaroles generally speaking I dislike ornaments of any kind. To see ladies loaded with[Pg 86] as many kickshaws as are put on now-a-days looks more like burlesque than reality!” Again he harps on the same string when he says: “It is a very pretty thing, no doubt, to see a young lady dressed with Parisian flowers & Parisian gauzes & an Indian fan & the whole &c of fashionable array. But I question after all, the style in which a young man of any understanding sees a young lady with most danger to his peace.” Extremely critical as he is of the Litchfield young ladies, Mr. Younglove himself betrays a touch of vanity. There is a great deal of talk in his diary about his “adonizationizing” of himself in his toilet—by which manufactured word he means “frushing up,” “furbishing,” “making fix,” or “prigging.” Once he takes pains to say: “It being Sunday, I wore pumps and white stockings to meeting.” Again he records the sad news: “Tore my Angola pantaloons!” On one date he sets it down with an outburst of enthusiasm: “To begin this great day was powdered. Huzza!”

We may not know by what logic we reach the conclusion, but I believe all will agree that the sort of young man self-depicted in this long-buried, old diary could never have been averse to coming on the stage as a robber in the disguise of a minstrel, or as a proud Jephtha in a gilt paper helmet declaiming in stentorian voice,

and if George Younglove ever became in any way unruly, there was always the overwhelming Miss Pierce, more powerful than any warrior, to bring order out of chaos. The discipline that she gave to one youth of George’s class is recorded. He gazed for something more than a minute at one of the sacred members of her household, and the worst happened! He was exiled. Surely not very frequently did anything take place to bring so dire a fate upon a Litchfield youth!

But to come back to the play by Miss Pierce and the actors that took part in it. They certainly did all the honor they could to the dramatist. The costumes were copied out of the “Bible Dictionary”—with the single exception, perhaps, of the nose-jewels—and the stabbing to the heart and the chorus of wailing maidens were done to the life. In this play the part of Bethulah, wife of Jephtha, was taken by “C. Beecher,” as the list of actors shows, and she is on the stage most of the time. Catherine also took a prominent place in the dramatic representation of the beautiful story of Ruth. The story of Esther the Queen was also enacted. Her majesty had a dress of old flowered brocade from somebody’s wedding chest; Mordecai and Ahashuerus were appropriately enrobed, and the part of Haman—who was to be hanged—was taken by the dog. At least this is the way Mrs. Stowe tells about it, long afterward, in “Oldtown Folks,” but perhaps by that time she may have forgotten some of the particulars as to[Pg 88] the death of Haman. For the plots of their plays, the young ladies in Miss Pierce’s Seminary analyzed the stories in “Plutarch’s Lives,” and found treasures there for dramatic representation from Romulus and Remus down to Julius Cæsar. History in their own country came in for a share of attention. Bunker Hill was done with a couple of old guns to give effect to the scene and with the rolling of a cannon ball across the floor behind the curtains to make the cannonades of battle. Harriet, like Tina, a past master in getting up a cave of banditti, borrowed suggestions from the “Mysteries of Udolpho,” and delighted one audience with a playlet of the purest romance.

Those dramatic representations seem to have awakened no unfavorable comment in the Beecher family so long as they were carried on under the supervision of the Academy. But on an unlucky day Harriet’s brilliant sister Catherine lighted upon a thrilling story in Miss Edgeworth’s “Moral Tales,” called “The Unknown Friend,” which tells how an attractive sixteen-year-old young lady was cured of a foolish sentimentality. In this story Angelina, the heroine, reads a book written by an unknown lady by the name of Araminta. This book speaks extravagantly, and as it seems to Angelina alluringly, of the charms of friendship, and on the theory that one who wrote so feelingly of the beautiful and romantic must be herself the embodiment of those traits, Angelina sets out to find this paragon,[Pg 89] believing that in her she will gain such a friend as she has dreamed of. After wandering futilely for a time, she reaches a hut in the Welch mountains, where the writer of the sentimental book has taken refuge. She finds in Araminta a disheveled, unlovely, forbidding person. Every sense of taste and propriety is shocked, and they do not get on well together at all. The story shows Angelina’s complete disillusionment and the sorrows that will come to one who disregards the practical side of life. The incidents in this tale of Miss Edgeworth’s are ludicrous and the story is not a bit tame. It might afford amusement even to-day.

The clever Catherine conceived the idea of making it into a play and giving a happy surprise to the whole family by setting up the little drama in the house itself. There were characters enough for every one of the Beecher children to have one to himself—and that is saying a good deal! There was also variety. The dialects used included Welsh, Scotch, and broad Irish. The Lady Diana Chillingworth and her sister, the Lady Frances Somerset, trailed about in finery extracted from mother’s band-boxes and chests. A palace, a mountain top, a shop, afforded changes of scene that were easily designated in true Elizabethan fashion by the use of a parlor table, or a kitchen chair, or a set of shelves; and costumes were delightfully relied upon to give aid to the imagination. Rehearsals were carried on in the strictest secrecy for some weeks.[Pg 90] The appointed evening came. Father and mother wondered why a fire was built in the large parlor or why so many neighbors and students happened to come in at about the same moment; but before any questions could be asked, the door to the dining room was suddenly thrown open and a mysterious drapery was seen at the farther end of the room. The curtain rose and forthwith the actors appeared and completed the whole drama amid thunders of applause—at least so runs the account by an eye witness. The next day, however, Catherine was told with some severity that while it was very good, they must not do so any more!

When Catherine Beecher, the tragedy queen and star actress in all Miss Pierce’s plays, went away to Hartford, she left a great vacancy in the society of Litchfield; and when Harriet, author of the essay that had astonished Dr. Lyman Beecher, departed, she carried with her a secluded little ambition of which she spoke to no one. For in those days Harriet was full of poetry and shyly entertained a dream that she herself might join the glorious band of immortal poets. She was soon trying her hand at blank verse, and she planned out a drama that should be written in that form.

When at the age of about thirteen she was filled with her first enthusiasm for classic lore, the subject of “Cleon” attracted her dramatic instinct. Cleon was an historical person whose character and problem were, not so very long after Harriet’s attempt,[Pg 91] made the basis of a noble poem by Robert Browning.

The story of Cleon is this: He was a Greek, living at the court of Nero. This fixes the date for us as the first century of the Christian era. He was a follower of the Greek gods, but he heard about Christ and after much searching and doubting he at last came to a true knowledge of Christianity. This transformation is the theme of Harriet’s play.

The scene opens in a street in Rome. Some Roman patricians, dressed in their flowing togas, come upon the stage and discuss the lavish entertainment that this wealthy Greek, Cleon, has been giving.

declares the other. The first speaker continues the conversation, describing Cleon as one who has a thirst for pleasure so ravenous that he works with hand and foot and soul, both night and day, to gain diversion, and is so lavish of money that the Emperor Nero with all his waste seems parsimonious compared to Cleon.

This is the picture of Cleon given in the opening[Pg 92] scene of the play. In the next scene we find him reclining upon a luxurious couch in his palatial apartment. Enter his old friend and teacher, Diagoras, who has come from Athens to visit him. Diagoras is amazed to see the lavish richness and splendor of the house and the room. When Cleon asks him politely to sit down, he answers that he cannot, for he does not see any seat! Cleon cries out that he thinks that Diagoras must have lost his eyes, and points out that there is in the room a fair choice among some thirty different kinds of couches—couches of the Phrygian and of the Grecian pattern, and many other kinds. Diagoras is astonished when told that these beds adorned with pearls and gold are made to sit on; he is, he says, a simple man, used to plain things, and begs the pardon of Cleon if he has been unappreciative. Cleon thinks that behind this excuse his old teacher is displeased with him; but, as it is, there is no choice between two evils: either Diagoras must rest his philosophic feet upon that most profanely glittering floor which is all inlaid with gems, or he must rest himself upon one of those rich beds. Cleon perceives that this jesting way of speaking is giving pain to his good master, who should have known of old the reckless tongue of Cleon. He assures Diagoras of a hearty welcome and begs him to sit down that they may have a long visit.

Diagoras thereupon is made to recline upon one of the couches. He proceeds to tell the cause of[Pg 93] his disappointment in his pupil. He has heard that Cleon is the common talk of the city on account of his evil ways, his rioting and his luxuriousness. He has heard that his former pupil has become the companion of the very dross and dregs of all mankind. Cleon interposes, and asks if Diagoras means by the “dross and dregs” the Emperor Nero. Diagoras will not answer directly, but assures him that this is the tale that he has heard about him. He exclaims:

Diagoras succeeds in calling the soul of Cleon back from the downward path that it is following. At last Cleon exclaims that it has been only a curse to him to have had so much wealth; he has striven desperately to satisfy himself with the things that satisfy the common crowd, but he has not succeeded.

As the play goes on Cleon passes through a spiritual crisis and becomes a Christian. Now this, we must remember, is the time of the most extreme persecutions of the Christians. Cleon is brought to the supreme test that the followers of Christ were subjected to under the persecuting monarch Nero. An on-looker describes the scene, and tells us that Cleon[Pg 94] bore the ordeal with courage; he was steady and undismayed; he declared his fixed purpose, saying that he was willing to abide by whatever should come to him. The one who tells the story says that Cleon would have fared better if he had given a fiery answer to the Emperor, for his very composure made Nero mad and he stamped his foot as a signal to the slaves to bring in the torture.

In the next scene Cleon is led in by two soldiers. Though he is weak and faint from the torture he has endured, he insists upon standing on his feet. Harriet Beecher follows the historical tradition of Nero’s character, in making him cause his friend Cleon to suffer these frightful agonies. The unspeakable Emperor now apologizes for the severity of the torture, and assures Cleon that he has only loving intentions toward him. He gives him permission to keep his religion if he will but consent to worship—privately! “Suppose you do call yourself a Christian,” he says, “why need you let everybody know it? Only be quiet about it and I will not interfere; worship in any way you will, only let it be—out of my sight.” Cleon then asks the Emperor what he shall do if he is questioned about his faith. The Emperor suggests that he should under those circumstances make up some “smooth, decoying phrase” that would turn off the inquiry. Cleon receives this proposal with the shock that shows the inner truth of his nature. He exclaims:

Cleon’s whole nature revolts against anything so base. He declares that it is his settled purpose while he lives to leave nothing undone or untried to win everybody to the reverence for Christ that he has learned to enjoy within himself. Thus he defies the Emperor and all the world.

This drama which has many elements of nobility in it and which shows a great deal of skill, filled Harriet’s waking thoughts and her dreams at night, and for a long time she was joyously filling blank book after blank book with the flowing lines. But the play was never finished. Her sister Catherine pounced down upon her one day and told her that she should not waste any more time writing poetry, but that she should discipline her mind by the study of Butler’s “Analogy.” So the obedient Harriet laid aside her loved play and began to write out abstracts of the “Analogy.” Thus her dramatic aspirations were for the time arrested. Catherine snuffed out the little light of her sister’s budding poetic genius; or, rather, perhaps we should say that she turned those powers in another direction; she saved and stored that intellectual energy for a purpose of which neither of them had at that time the remotest dream.

After the death of Mrs. Beecher in 1816 the care of the younger ones fell to a large extent upon the elder daughter, Harriet’s capable and energetic sister Catherine, who was some twelve years older than she. So the traditions of the mother Roxana were carried on in the household until a second mother, another highly cultivated lady, came to take the headship of the home.

It is natural that this strong and brilliant Catherine should have a great influence upon the sensitive younger sister, and that the various steps in Catherine’s career and in her soul-history should be followed by Harriet with interest and sympathy almost as great as if she had been a responsible part in the story. And if disturbing experiences came to Catherine, a reflected tumult would naturally pass through the life of Harriet. This is exactly what did happen. Harriet’s days were shaded by the sorrows of Catherine through all the early years of her young womanhood.

Catherine Beecher was destined to be a remarkable[Pg 97] woman, author of many books, a trainer of teachers and a founder of educational institutions. The range of her thought seems to have been almost unlimited. She wrote on education, on slavery, on the evils suffered by American women and on the duties of American women to their country. She wrote on all subjects connected with the home. In one book only she treats of the following topics: The dignity and importance of woman’s work, the Christian family, scientific domestic ventilation, stoves, furnaces and chimneys, home decoration, health, exercise, food, cookery, early rising, domestic manners, system and order, charity and economy, care of infants, management of children, care of the aged, of servants, of the sick, accidents and antidotes, fires and lights, care of rooms, of yards and gardens, cultivation of plants, and care of domestic animals—and of all these things she writes with the object of dignifying domestic employment and increasing the wages paid for it. As if this were not enough to fill a single volume, she adds twenty-five more chapters on recipes of all kinds, meats and breads, preserving fruits, setting table, washing, ironing and cleaning; and finally she adds a chapter of “miscellaneous advice.”

In other books she takes still higher flights. Her “Elements of Mental and Moral Philosophy Founded on Experience, Reason, and the Bible,” published at Hartford in 1831, and her “Letters on Difficulties of Religion,” and her “Appeal to the[Pg 98] People as the Authorized Interpreters of the Bible,” are examples of her excursions into philosophical and theological realms. In the large collection of Beecher writings that would be ours if we should gather all the writings of the family into one library, an ample shelf would have to be given to this talented favorite daughter of Dr. Lyman Beecher.

A curious story is told in connection with one of Catherine Beecher’s philosophical essays. In 1840 she wrote an article called “Free Agency,” which was published in the Biblical Repository. This is a theological term, meaning “free will,” and Catherine’s object was to answer the arguments on the subject of the human will that had been given out by Jonathan Edwards, one of the most profound scholars of New England. The story is that a New England preacher in talking with a professor of theology in Germany once mentioned this essay of Miss Beecher’s, calling it the ablest refutation of Edwards that had yet been written. “Do you mean to say that you have in your country a woman who can write the ablest refutation of Edwards on the will?” exclaimed the German professor. “Then may God forgive Christopher Columbus for discovering America!” This story had a good point in its day. But now that women have proved by their achievements in all branches of science and in literature and the arts that they needed only education and opportunity to attain distinction, it is only[Pg 99] amusing that such a remark could ever have been made—even in Germany.

When Harriet was nine years old—about the time when she was writing essays on the “Difference Between the Natural and Moral Sublime”—her sister Catherine was away at Boston studying music and drawing, and preparing herself in general to be a teacher. Because of her remarkable powers of mind, she made such progress that in a short time she was able to take a position as teacher in a young ladies’ school in New London, Connecticut.

While in this place she met a young man of brilliant prospects and of great personal charm, a professor at Yale College. They became engaged and were most happy; but their joy was short-lived. Professor Fisher, commissioned to go to Europe to buy books for his department, set sail in the ship Albion, which encountered a severe storm and was dashed to pieces on the rocks of the Irish coast.

Catherine faced her grief bravely as her lover had faced death bravely. But added to her natural grief for the loss of her lover was a tormenting fear for the welfare of his soul, for she feared lest the spiritual conditions that she had been accustomed to regard as essential had not been met by her lover. Her disturbance was not quieted when she went to live for some years with the parents of her lost lover and while there listened to one of the strictest of the early theologians. Almost crushed in her grief,[Pg 100] her strong original mind nevertheless grappled with the problems of death and the after-life. She used her great power in metaphysical analysis in endless discussion, exchanging many long letters with her father, whose loving sympathy was a tower of strength to her in this crisis. After a long period of darkness and struggle, Catherine took the wisest course that the profoundest philosophy could suggest: she determined to find happiness in living to do good. This thought she clung to and in it she found comfort.

She looked about her to see what use she could make of her life. Writing to her father, she said that she did not see any very extensive sphere of usefulness for a single woman except in teaching, and asked his advice about starting a school or seminary, something like the Litchfield Female Academy, perhaps in Hartford.

Her father answered with characteristic energy that if she were going to have a school it should be a good one. She should not engage in it listlessly, expecting to superintend, and do a little, and have the weight of the school come on others. He would be ashamed, he said, to have her keep only a commonplace, middling sort of a school. Unless she was willing to put her talents and strength into it, it would be better not to begin. He called the spent energies of the daughter into line and made them march. He himself went straight to Hartford to[Pg 101] look over the ground and see whether there was a good opening for a school there.

Catherine felt that her own enthusiasms would rise to the occasion. She went to Hartford, canvassed the ground, gathered a company of pupils, and was eager to start. She resolutely prepared a text-book on chemistry, one on natural philosophy, and one on logic. Arithmetic and algebra and a part of geometry she also thoroughly reviewed. Under such a character as this Harriet was now to be trained.

When Harriet entered her sister’s school in the fall of 1824, there were but twenty-five pupils. Later there were hundreds. At the beginning the school was situated in an upstairs apartment on Main Street, nearly opposite to Christ Church. The lower floor was used for a harness shop and the shopkeeper had set up a dummy white horse on each side of the entrance. Harriet thought them beautiful and invested them with the glories of Castor and Pollux; and many a pupil of the hundreds that came to that school will remember through life the Sign of the White Horses that guided them to that quiet retreat. In another year the school was so prosperous that they put up a building for their own use; the stock was easily taken and a fine prospectus of the full-fledged Hartford Female Seminary was sent out.

On her arrival, Harriet was at once placed in the care of a delightful family named Bull, who, as[Pg 102] a convenient exchange, were sending a daughter to the Litchfield Academy to make her home, while there, at the Beecher homestead. Mrs. Bull was so good a housekeeper that even Harriet’s orderly stepmother was satisfied. She was a motherly woman and took Harriet to her heart at once in the place of the absent daughter. Harriet was given a charming little hall chamber with a beautiful outlook from the window over the Connecticut River valley. We may believe that this was the first time in her life when she had a room all her own. The little single bed assigned to her was the object of her special delight, and she took daily care of it with a satisfaction mingled with awe; and though the room was small as a nun’s apartment, it was, like that of one of Harriet’s heroines, as dainty in its neatness as the waxen cell of a bee.

At the Bulls, as in the Litchfield home, Harriet was surrounded with music. The eldest daughter had a fine soprano voice and was a leading singer in one of the church choirs. Also the brothers in the family were endowed with rich voices. So there were quartettes and there was also flute playing.

The next year Harriet and her elder sisters, together with two of the brothers, were established as a family with their father’s sister, the energetic and well-informed Aunt Esther, at the head. This was the wonderful aunt who, Harriet’s brother Henry said, would spend ages in Heaven wondering how it happened that she ever got there, while[Pg 103] the angels would always be wondering why she had not been there from all eternity!5 Besides being as good as gold, Aunt Esther had a memory that was well-nigh infallible, especially in the field of natural history. She could tell nineteen rat stories all in a string, and when asked how she happened to know so much about every sort of thing, answered: “Oh, you know the Bible says the works of the Lord are great, sought out of all them that have pleasure therein. Now I happened to have pleasure therein, and so I sought them out.” It must have been a happy home that was gathered about Aunt Esther at the Hartford School. Besides the immediate members of the family, several teachers of the school shared the home and helped to give a rare and fascinating atmosphere to the table talk.

The group of young ladies that came as the first students to this new school were of rather unusual caliber and mental power. Miss Beecher said some twenty years later if she were to make a list of the most gifted minds that she ever met, either male or female, among the highest on the list would stand five maidens, the earliest students grouped around her in that dawning experience of a teacher’s life.

All these influences furnished a new and wonderfully developing sort of discipline to Harriet Beecher. She possessed the combination of qualities that would to-day make her the best kind of college girl. She responded at once to these new inspirations, and was ready for the joyous and educating friendships that form one of the most valuable assets in school and college life.

Some of the leading girls had written welcoming letters to her before she started from Litchfield, and she had of course sent enthusiastic answers by the first post. Among these new friends were Catherine Ledyard Cogswell, daughter of a physician of Hartford, and Georgiana May, a girl from another fine family. These two became her lifelong friends and Harriet’s affection for them was boundless. Catherine Cogswell was one of the popular girls, and her time was greatly in demand, but she valued the fine qualities of Harriet and saw to it that her new friend should always come in for a share of her time. Georgiana was of a gentle nature, and between her and Harriet there continued through life a communion of a peculiarly close and comforting kind. They understood each other perfectly.

Harriet loved her friends absorbingly. There mingled with her friendly feelings nothing of the personal vanity that spoils so many friendships. But by reason of the very superiority of her mind, most of those she saw passed her by without moving her deeply. When they were present, she enjoyed[Pg 105] them; when they were gone, she forgot them. But with those she really loved, it was different. From them a separation meant much. In time she learned to take refuge in the thought that there is a heaven, a world of love; as she once said, “Love is, after all, the life-blood of existence, the all in all of mind.” This thought, coming to her early in life, was a great comfort to her through many years.

As the school increased in size, more teachers were added to the faculty, and among these Harriet found valuable companionship. The enlarging effect of such association cannot be overestimated. To compel one’s self to stand the comparison with people of like capacity and like advantages is in the highest degree stimulating. Harriet found it so. One of her fellow teachers, a young woman of fine mind and of unconquerable energy of character, became specially inspiring to her. From early childhood this teacher had been determined to obtain a higher education than was usual among the young women of that time. We must remember that this was before the day of colleges for girls, and that to have such an ambition was rare and to pursue it with grim resoluteness was rarer. It was the more inspiring when this ambition was realized only after a mighty struggle against difficulties. Harriet, looking upon this example of resolute endeavor, coolly observed, “Where persons are determined to be anything, they will be!”

When Harriet arrived at her sister’s school her[Pg 106] two friends, Catherine Cogswell and Georgiana May, were already reading Virgil. She therefore—now twelve years old—began the study of Latin alone, but before the first year was over she was translating Ovid into English verse. The result of her work was considered so creditable that it was read at the final exhibition of the school. Soon she herself was carrying classes of young ladies through Virgil’s Æneid and Bucolics, the best parts of Ovid, and Cicero’s Orations. She also began the study of both French and Italian with a good teacher.

Harriet was a hard worker. She began at nine in the morning and worked until after dark, with only a half hour’s intermission at noon to swallow a little dinner—a very bad plan, by the way. She blamed herself for being absent-minded and making mistakes. No wonder she did these things! She was in school all day, either as pupil or as teacher. After a hastily snatched supper she read and made out exercises for her class for half an hour, and the rest of the evening she spent in preparing French and Italian lessons of her own. Sister Catherine was certainly a disciplinarian. She was also entirely original in her methods. There were no normal schools to teach her, and she had to develop her own ways of working. No one who does not know the educational situation of that day can imagine how daring it was in her to attempt all this. Many of her thoughts are a prophecy of present day ideals. She emphasized physical exercise, and this was by[Pg 107] many thought dangerous, if not impious. She gave prizes for composition in verse. The girls were so enthusiastic in this work that they wrote their poetical effusions at night and rehearsed them to each other in the morning. They were then written out and brought to the teacher to have the ruthless knife of criticism applied. This work fell to the hands of Harriet and was a labor of love to her.

Harriet had also a painting and drawing master and worked faithfully at these subjects. After a while she wrote to her grandmother in Guilford that she would send her a dish of fruit of her own painting, and begged her not to devour it in anticipation lest she should find it sadly tasteless in reality. But if she did find it so, she must excuse the defects for the sake of the poor young artist.

Her painting made her think of her dear mother, who would have been most interested in her daughter’s efforts in this direction. Whatever artistic powers Harriet had, she wished to cherish for that mother’s sake. She told her grandmother that she was thinking more about that dearest of all earthly friends now that she was older and could understand her character better and appreciate her more. She thought that, had her mother lived, she might herself have been better and happier than she now was.

By this we see that a shadow seemed to be coming over Harriet’s spirit. But in her mental powers the young student must have been advancing with great swiftness, for when she was only seventeen years[Pg 108] old she thought of taking charge herself of a school in Groton where she went to visit her brother George. After consulting her father, and especially Catherine, however, she decided not to undertake the responsibility, and abandoned the project.

Again in the following year—1829—when the Hartford school was for a time deprived of the headship of Miss Catherine, Harriet took entire charge of things, turning the school for the nonce into a republican form of government by means of a system of “Circles,” called Circles of Order, of Neatness, of Punctuality, of Benevolence, etc. With profound cleverness she put the most fun-loving girls into the Circle of Benevolence. Then she gathered all together in a central body, called the “Senate of the Skies.” By this means she engaged the girls in a system of self-government, prophetic of methods used to-day. To Catherine, away at the Water-cure, Harriet wrote:

“Dear Sister:

“This morning I delivered a long speech on ‘Modes of Exerting Moral Influence,’ showing the ways in which an evil influence is unknowingly exerted and the ways in which each and all can exert a good one. The right spirit is daily increasing. Miss Brigham says all her classes seem so anxious to do right and are so interested in their studies that she loves them better and better every day. The other teachers also say they never saw the classes[Pg 109] form in more perfect order and go and return with so little noise. I feel as if we are holding the helm, and can turn the vessel the right way. The force of moral influence seems equal to that of authority, and even stronger. When the girls wish what is against my opinion, they say, ‘Do, Miss Beecher, allow just this.’ ‘Allow you?’ I say; ‘I have not the power; you can do so if you think best.’ Now, they cannot ask me to give up my opinion and belief of right and wrong, and they are unwilling to act against it.”

“Your absence,” she added, “is doing me good, for I never before felt so confident to go forward and act.” In another letter she said: “I shall become quite an orator if you do not come too soon. The school has never been more orderly than it is now, and I think all the young ladies, though some slowly, are realizing more than ever before that they must not live unto themselves.”

Again she said: “The girls are all anxious to have you stay as long as you can.”

Let us take this not only as an expression of loyalty to the Principal, but as an unconscious testimonial to the excellence and charm of the younger sister, then but eighteen years old.

The spirit of obedience was one of Harriet Beecher’s characteristic traits. So she resolutely devoted herself at Catherine’s command to the critical analysis of Butler’s “Analogy,” a book on the works of God as shown both in nature and in the spiritual realm. It sounds rather profound for a girl in the early teens; but when we recall the titles she chose for the essays she wrote at the school in Litchfield, we are not surprised that she found interest in such a book. Indeed, she discovered a real pleasure in subjects of this kind. At the time when she was improving her mind with the “Analogy,” she was reading also another famous book of spiritual import, Baxter’s “Saints’ Rest.” No other book she ever read moved her so profoundly. It filled her with a sort of exaltation that made her wish as she walked the street that the pavements might sink beneath her if only she might thus find herself in Heaven.

In this mood of spiritual elevation she went to[Pg 111] Litchfield for one of her early vacations. While there a sermon preached by her father made a strong appeal to her mind and heart. Dr. Beecher’s text on that Sunday was this: “I call you not servants, but friends,” and his subject was Jesus as a soul-friend offered to every human being.

Forgetting all about theology for the time, Dr. Beecher spoke that day with all simplicity of the faithful, unwearied love of Christ, how He tenderly cares for the soul’s wants through all its wanderings and sorrows, until He brings it through the darkness of earth to the perfection of Heaven.

Even a child could have understood him. Harriet sat absorbed, her eyes gathering tears as she listened; and when the doctor said, “Come, then, and trust your soul to this faithful Friend,” her heart throbbed, “I will.” For a moment she was discouraged by the thought that she had not had any “conviction of sin,” but like a flash came the thought that Jesus could give her that as well as anything else, and that she could trust Him for the whole. And so her earnest young soul went out to the wonderful Friend. She sat through the sacramental service that followed with swelling heart and tearful eyes, and walked home filled with a new joy. She went up to her father’s study in the attic room and, falling into his arms, whispered: “Father, I have given myself to Jesus and He has taken me.” The doctor held her silently to his heart a moment, and his tears dropped on her head. “Is it so?” he said.[Pg 112] “Then has a new flower blossomed in the Kingdom this day.”

In this simple and natural way began Harriet’s distinctive religious experience. But we must not think of it as going on always like the flow of a calm river. There were many doubts and tremblings to be mastered, many puzzles to unravel as she went along, especially during the years from twelve to twenty. We may say, however, that the experience of happy trust in God became in the end so much the law of her life that it could never be torn away from her by any of the events of her mature days, whether of suffering or of prosperity.

It seems the greatest pity that the earlier stages of her religious experience should not have gone on smoothly, as that of her wonderful mother had done. Perhaps, however, others with difficulties like hers may be glad to look over the record of her struggles and may take courage from her victories.

We have seen in the last chapter that Harriet had not been many years at Hartford before a shadow seemed to be settling down upon her spirit. There were certainly good reasons for this.

In the first place she was very much overworked as pupil and teacher in the Hartford Female Seminary. Translating Ovid into English verse at thirteen years of age, teaching Virgil and Rhetoric at fourteen, studying French and Italian and drawing and painting, taking a niggardly half hour for the[Pg 113] mid-day dinner, and snatching a bit of supper as she could, doing her share and more to keep the domestic wheels of the large household at Hartford running smoothly, and living excitedly in the midst of this company of complex personalities, having no outdoors, no rest, no play—this way of life was enough to interfere with the physical well-being of any growing girl, even with that of a robust one fresh from the Litchfield mountains!

Harriet’s father understood perfectly well the relation between our mental activity and our supply of physical energy. We know this because we so often found him relieving the overstrain by periods of devotion to the woodpile and the garden; and it is interesting to see how he accompanied a prescription for spiritual ills with one enjoining obedience to the laws of the body. None could have given better advice also than he did in regard to the steadying of religious emotionalism during revival among the students in Catherine’s school, to keep them from undue excitement and to make the revival season reasonable in its excitement and permanent in its effects. But it is one thing to advise and another to make people put the counsel into practice.

Catherine probably did not see the rocks ahead either for Harriet or for herself. She was indeed using up her own energies so fast that she was to face a breakdown later on in the very midst of a useful career. Then indeed she did have to listen[Pg 114] to the monitors; but only after a period of ill health did she regain strength for work. During all her life thereafter she preached obedience to the laws of health, and found the truth of the old adage, “‘Had I but known!’ is very poor comfort.”

Then we must remember, too, that Harriet had also drained her own spiritual energy in watching the soul-struggles of her sister Catherine during the sensitive years of her early girlhood. Catherine’s grief colored Harriet’s thoughts and wonderings in the years when everything in her own situation looked like a question.

So poor little Harriet fell into a disconsolate mood. She thought that she did nothing right, that she yielded to temptation almost as soon as it assailed her. What most commonly beset her, she believed, was pride; she could trace all her sins back to that fault. She thought she was not fit for anything, and she wanted to die young.

What young growing soul has not been assailed by moods like this? This half child, half grown woman was developing mentally with great swiftness, and could not understand the meaning of the tumults that were sweeping through her soul. Not being able to answer certain lofty questions, she decided at once that they were unanswerable and that therefore the universe must be all a disastrous affair. Who has not sometime made the same mistake?

Little things had great power over her. If she[Pg 115] met something that crossed her feelings she was unhappy for days. She wished she could bring herself to be perfectly indifferent to the judgments of others. She believed there never had been a person more dependent on the good and evil opinions of others than she was. This desire to be loved formed, she feared, the great motive for all her actions. Alas, she was in a parlous state!

That young mourner for the death of Byron and author of the dramatic poem, “Cleon,” found her love of literature a snare in her spiritual pathway. Of course, she could not know that those very powers that were shown by her tastes and inclinations were to be trained and used for the most important and world-influencing work.

It is unfortunate that her father did not think to say to her what he wrote in a letter some twenty years later: “Too long, quite too long, has the devil held in his exclusive possession the fine arts.” He came to the conclusion in the end that ministers would make their sermons more interesting if they would add to their “leaden prose” some of the untrammeled fire that gives charm to poetry and fiction. That Dr. Beecher had an open mind on this subject is shown by his attitude toward Byron and also toward the novels of Sir Walter Scott. It could never have been a pain to him to know that a daughter of his would become the author of a shelf full of novels, all strongly uplifting in their tendency.

But Harriet did not confide her deepest thoughts to him. If she had he might have recalled that his own early days had been checkered with despondency and shamefacedness and jealous feeling. He had imagined in his sensitive humility that everybody could see the interior of his mind and find the emptiness and vanity that he believed must be there. Yet he had a good cure for such moods, one that he could have recommended to his daughter. He resisted all this, he once said, as if it were a physical lying disease, representing things that were not as if they were, and saying to such feelings, “Get thee behind me, Satan, for thou savorest not the things that be of God!” But at the time of Harriet’s greatest despondency her father seems not to have remembered the cravings and perplexities of his own youth.

Harriet made up her mind to live a far better life. She would regulate it and improve it. She gave herself a strict set of rules, a regular system of things for every hour of the day. But she found that she could not live up to all this and the derelictions gave her sleepless nights. Her feelings were not always equable. She was absent-minded and made mistakes. Terrible faults, these! How like a page from the life of everybody! The trouble in Harriet’s case was that she took these variations of mood for a serious breakdown of her religious stability. She suffered intensely, yet for a long time she kept her suffering to herself. Her naturally[Pg 117] buoyant spirits did much to help her, but often she was reproved for laughing so much when she was feeling worst.

It was difficult for Harriet to speak of these inner feelings to others. The reason for this was that she was too humble-minded to speak of so weighty matters at all. Besides this, she felt that she should understand them better than she did, and did not know that every human being is beset by the same questions that puzzled her. Fortunately, Harriet at the age of fourteen had a brother who had just graduated at Yale and was studying theology at Andover. This strong and tender brother to whom she opened her heart just as Catherine had opened hers to her father, unraveled many of her difficulties for her.

The year 1829, when Harriet was sixteen years old, was a period of especial despondency. Catherine, worried about her state of health, sent her to spend a summer at Nut Plains. There at the Foote homestead, the rest in the beautiful country, and we may imagine, the regular meals and the abundance of good sleep, did wonders for tired Harriet.

In that year the Beecher home was moved from Litchfield to Boston, where Dr. Beecher had been called to the pastorate of the Hanover Street Church. Now the atmosphere of any house in which Lyman Beecher dwelt would perforce be stirred by theological controversy. As Harriet’s brother Henry said, “Theology was the food we ate,[Pg 118] and the milk we drank, and the air we breathed, and the ground we trod, from our earliest years.” But the new surroundings into which Dr. Beecher now came caused him to strike out more vigorously than ever in defense of his favorite beliefs. In this atmosphere Harriet whenever she came to her home must thrive as she could. Her son, who wrote a book about her life in 1911, says that the atmosphere of mental excitement and conflict in which her father lived and preached at this time drove her already over-stimulated mind to the point of distraction. “Too much mental strain and too little exercise had,” he says, “brought her to her seventeenth year without the strength which should have been the heritage of her robust childhood.”

It would not be possible in our short space to follow all the steps in her soul’s progress and the degrees by which, under the guidance of her brother Edward, she gained at last a comfortable view of her relation to God. But a glimpse here and there may be allowed to us.

Above all things, Harriet could not understand how a God of infinite perfection could stand toward imperfect human beings in any but the most severe attitude. She could not see that One of infinite power and infinite wisdom must have infinite love; and toward a realization of this truth she moved but slowly. How far along she had come in 1828 is shown in the following passage from a letter to Edward. “After all,” she said, “God is a being[Pg 119] afar off. He is so far above us that anything but the most distant reverential affection seems almost sacrilegious. It is that affection that can lead us to be familiar that the heart needs.... The language of prayer is of necessity stately and formal, and we cannot clothe all the little minutiæ of our wants and troubles in it.... I sometimes wish that the Saviour were visibly present in this world, that I might go to Him for a solution of some of my difficulties.”

Later on we see that she is making great progress though she herself may not realize that she is. She says in another letter: “It matters little what service He has for me.... I do not mean to live in vain. He has given me talents, and I will lay them at His feet, well satisfied, if He will accept them. All my powers He can enlarge. He made my mind, and He can teach me to cultivate and exert its faculties.”

At last in the character of Jesus Christ she finds a revelation of God as merciful and compassionate as He is powerful—in fact, she found in Him just such a God as she needed. The next summer she writes again to the same brother and says: “I cannot express to you, my brother, I cannot tell you, how that Saviour appears to me. To bear with one so imperfect, so inconsistent as myself, implied long-suffering and patience more than words can express. I love most to look on Christ as my teacher, as one who, knowing the utmost of my sinfulness,[Pg 120] my waywardness, my folly, can still have patience, can reform, purify, and daily make me more like himself.”

In these three selections from her letters we see the passage of her mind from the attitude of fear to the attitude of love. In fact, she has come about again to that child-like mood that was hers when she ran to her father’s study and made the beautiful confession of her earliest conscious faith.

Now she began to realize that the very best cure for a disappointing religious condition within us is to put our religion into practice in the world without us by means of a kind spirit instantly made real in kindly acts. Harriet caught this good idea, perhaps from the example of her sister Catherine who in her great sorrow had done this at last.

In a different way Harriet felt that she must come out of herself more than she had. Not that she thought her love of solitude and of going her own way wrong in itself, but that she knew that if she indulged it too much she would miss the joy of knowing that she was helping to make others happy.

She noticed one of her companions engaged in being particularly attentive to a particularly disagreeable elderly man, and as a result Harriet conceived the idea that it was a proof of grace to say something to people who were not agreeable, and to manage to say something or other even if one had nothing to say. She resolved to follow the[Pg 121] example of the friend who could sacrifice her own taste and comfort in order to make a “forlorn old daddy” happy and comfortable.

Writing to her great friend, Georgiana May, in 1832, Harriet told her of a sun-dial inscription that her Uncle Samuel Foote, who was sitting by her side as she wrote, has just been quoting for her benefit. It ran thus: Horas non numero nisi serenas—I count the fair hours only. This she said she was taking for her own motto. She had determined, she told her friend, to come out of herself more, to cultivate a general spirit of kindliness toward everybody, to hold out her hand to the right and to the left. To what good purpose she now put this resolution into effect is shown by the fact that her pupils at Hartford remember her to this day as one who took the greatest interest in each one’s affairs, laying aside her own matters and talking over the likes and aims of others. And perhaps she did not find it so hard after all to keep from shrinking into a corner. Perhaps she found a pleasure in meeting new and strange people and in trying to be friendly with them. She seems to have found that these social contacts, though not having any great meaning in themselves, yet could form a very pretty flower border to the way of life.

A wonderful discovery for one to make whose nature, did she but know it, was one great tide of loving impulses, whose heart was vast in its all-including kindliness!

In 1832, when Harriet Beecher was twenty-one years old, a great change took place in her fortunes. She was transplanted from her New England environment into the more dynamic life of the great, growing west. But of course we must not expect to find the west of eighty years ago very much like the west of to-day. In 1832 the middle of Ohio seemed separated by vaster distances and was more difficult of access than any part of our country this side of the Pacific Coast seems to-day. This alteration in our point of view has come about because there never has been a time or place in the history of the world when the growth of a region has been so swift or so picturesque as in that part of our country that we now call the “middle west.”

Of those wonderful things that were to take place in the advancement of our country’s resources and welfare, the building of schools, churches, libraries and institutions of all kinds, and the development of national spirit, Harriet Beecher’s father seems[Pg 123] to have had a prevision. He saw the great possibilities in the growing western country, and felt a burning desire to have a share in upbuilding the best things there. His feeling in regard to this great work is illustrated in one little page of his biography.

In order to impress the full meaning of prayer upon his mind and heart, Dr. Beecher would sometimes write it out in his diary; and in one of these prayers written at about this time he said: “If there be anything which by living I can do, or by dying I can do, to mitigate on earth the miseries of sin and to save my country and to save the world, then speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth.”

About this time also he wrote a letter to Catherine, in which he said: “I have thought seriously of going over to Cincinnati, that London of the west, to spend the remnant of my days in that great conflict, and in consecrating all my children to God in that region who are willing to go. If we gain the west, all is safe; if we lose it, all is lost.... This is not with me a transient flash of feeling, but a feeling as if the great battle is to be fought in the valley of the Mississippi, and as if it may be the will of God that I shall be employed to arouse and help marshal the host for the conflict.... These are only my thoughts, but they are deep, and yet withal, my ways are committed to God.”6

It was in this spirit that he received a call to become the head of Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati, Ohio. Catherine sympathized with her father in his enthusiasm for the intellectual and spiritual development of the west, and she decided to go with him into the new work. In fact he had said to her, “If I go, it is part of my plan that you go.”

Harriet had now to leave her many friends in Hartford and the relatives in Litchfield and Nut Plains. Her two brothers, William and Edward, were now established preachers, and Henry Ward and Charles were in college. The sister next older than herself, Mary, was married and was living in Hartford. To separate from all these loved ones and go out into a far distant land was very hard.

The journey west occupied many days and had something of the fascination of a wild adventure. They were going into a new land, into a great missionary field; their hearts were high and their courage was good. They chose the most expeditious way of going, which at that time was by way of New York City, Philadelphia, over the mountains to Wheeling, and then down the Ohio River to Cincinnati. This, we must remember, was before the through railroad lines to the west had been built.

There were many pauses by the way for the Beecher cavalcade, since the fame of Dr. Lyman Beecher as the greatest of the pulpit speakers of New England had been carried everywhere, and[Pg 125] the people in the large towns through which they passed wished him to stay long enough at least to preach to them—a request that he was anxious to grant.

The first stopping place was New York. Here they paused long enough for Dr. Beecher to preach several times and to see many of his friends among the ministers and to make more. Harriet found life in that great city of New York, as she said, “too scattering.” She believed it would “kill her dead” to live long in the way they were living there. It seemed to her like a sort of “agreeable delirium”! She began to be thirsty for the waters of quietness. But her father, she said, was in his element—dipping into books, consulting authorities for his orations, going around here, there, and everywhere, begging, borrowing, and spoiling the Egyptians, delighted with past success and confident for the future.

Dr. Beecher had also another object in view, which was to do some energetic begging for the foundation of the Biblical professorship in the Theological Seminary of which he was about to take charge. Harriet, in writing back to friends in Hartford about it, said casually: “The incumbent of this foundation is to be C. Stowe.” This is the first time that we hear the name of the one who is to bear so large a part in the story of Harriet Beecher’s life.

From New York the Beecher company went by[Pg 126] steamboat to Philadelphia. Here they had the great misfortune to lose track of all their baggage. They had to wait for a time in Philadelphia until it could be traced to another wharf. It was finally recovered and brought on, but not till after the ladies of the family, usually the very pink of perfection in their starched and snowy collars and lace edgings, had suffered extreme discomfort because of the limp and dusty condition of their frills. The comfort of the family was at last restored and the mother and Aunt Esther were supplied with fresh caps and ruffles. Great was the joy! Dr. Beecher struck an attitude as the boxes were brought in, swung his hat, and called for three cheers. “So should a man do,” cried Harriet, “whose wife has not had a cap or a ruffle for a week!”

The delay in Philadelphia was not specially unwelcome. Here the party was separated into two sections: the father and mother with Aunt Esther and the baby, went to one friend’s house, and the older children to another. Their hosts were rich, hospitable folks and their visits were full of enjoyment. There was much to be seen by the young people, and the father’s energies were taken up with conferences and preaching and with prayer-meetings held specially for the success of the great missionary object that was calling him into what seemed to them all a very far-away country.

By all this business they were kept so long that Mrs. Beecher and Aunt Esther demurred at the[Pg 127] delay. Dr. Beecher told them that they were in the hands of Providence, but they said that they would much prefer to trust Providence by the way!

If their journey had but been a few years later, a railroad train would have taken them as far as Columbia, Pennsylvania; then a canal would have carried them along the east bank of the Susquehanna River as far as the entrance to the Juniata. At this point the canal would have crossed that great river by means of an aqueduct and they would have followed the blue Juniata to Hollidaysburg. There the problem how to get over the forbidding mountain ridge that faced them would have been solved by the exciting method of a portage which by means of pulleys drew the cars up to fourteen hundred feet above that town, using three levels for separate short journeys from level to level. The descent to Johnstown on the other side of the ridge would have been made by the same method reversed, and the canal packet boat from that place would have used the Kiskiminetos River along to Pittsburgh, where the great Ohio River would have brought them to Cincinnati. All this could have been done in 1836. But this was 1832; and none of these things were under way at the time, though they were being more or less seriously thought of. The only method of traveling in the year 1832 was by the time-honored daily or tri-weekly stages.

Of these stage-coach lines an elaborate system was at their service; for the largest part of the journey, the family availed themselves of this method, sometimes, however, finding it more economical for so large a party to charter a coach and have it all to themselves.

We may imagine them climbing into a big old-fashioned stage, drawn by four great horses, and starting out for Wheeling, a city that lies right in the line from New York to the southern part of Ohio, if you make the line curve a little bit to the south in order to make the easiest cut through the mountains.

The company included Dr. and Mrs. Beecher and Aunt Esther; and for children, there were Catherine, Harriet, Isabella, George, Thomas and James; some of these names have been added to the list since the Litchfield days. As for this company of young folks, it may be safely said that they enjoyed every inch of the way; no badness of the roads, no threat of tempest, no weariness of unsupported backs, could subdue their skipping spirits. There was plenty of room in the coach with three on a seat. Besides that, George sat with the driver on the box, and as the journey progressed, and new drivers took their places at the points where horses were exchanged, he acquired every little while a new set of stories which he faithfully shouted back to the occupants behind. George was also a great singer, and led the choir of the whole coachful[Pg 129] in singing hymns and songs. Whenever they passed through a town or along by a small wayside village, he let loose a packet of tracts and snowed them all along the road for the inhabitants to pick up after the cavalcade had gone by. And woe be to any wayfaring people that came along the road if they did not love tracts, for these snowy batteries were discharged regularly upon the head of each one they met! Harriet called out to him, “George, you are peppering the country with moral influence.”

The first day was full of enjoyment; they had an obliging driver, good roads, good spirits, a good dinner, fine scenery. Harriet pronounced it all good. That day they went about thirty miles and reached Downingtown], Pennsylvania. Here, as Harriet said, they were dropped down like Noah and his wife and his sons and his daughters, with the cattle and creeping things. And here they had the first night’s rest of their real pilgrimage.

Wherever they stopped was home for the time being. To bring about this magical transformation of things that mean nothing, into things that mean “home,” was a special gift of Harriet’s, acquired in her own home circle. On this journey into the wilds there was always a gathering of the children for singing and prayer in the little parlor of whatever inn might be their stopping place for the time. On such an evening we can see them sitting around the table in the candle light, the father reading and[Pg 130] studying. Catherine writing to Mary at Hartford, and Harriet to her loved friend, Georgiana May, Thomas working at his journal, and Isabella keeping her little record, too, while George is only waiting for a chance to sit up to the table and take his pen. In her letter Harriet is saying this: “As for me, among the multitude of my present friends, my heart still makes occasional visits to the absent ones, visits full of pleasure and full of cause for gratitude to Him who gives us friends. I have thought of you often to-day, my Georgiana.... This afternoon as we were traveling, we struck up ‘Jubilee.’ It put me in mind of the time when we used to ride along the rough North Guilford roads and make the air vocal as we went along. Pleasant times, those! Those were blue skies, and that was a beautiful lake, and noble pine-trees and rocks they were that hung over it. But those we shall look upon ‘nae mair.’ Well, my dear, there is a land where we shall not love and leave. Those skies shall never cease to shine, the waters of life we shall never be called upon to leave. We have here no continuing city, but we seek one to come. In such thoughts as these I desire ever to rest, and with such words as these let us ‘comfort one another and edify one another.’”

The next stopping place was Harrisburg. Here they had another homelike evening, gathering in Catherine’s room for a “sing” before going to bed. Then followed a good restful sleep in preparation[Pg 131] for the long, slow journey up the Appalachian range that was to begin in the morning. In this part of the pilgrimage they were not so fortunate as they had hitherto been. The horses were poor and the roads very bad. It took them eight days to do what the mail-stage was accustomed to accomplish in two. But good company makes a long journey short. The children’s spirits were equal to the need, though they may have been by this time a little weary. They flung their songs upon the breeze and their tracts upon the traveler whenever they met one, and left a trail of gladness upon the mountain heights.

When they reached the city of Wheeling the family were again distributed among the homes of the people who were desirous that they should remain so that they might hear Dr. Beecher preach. At this place the family had expected to take the canal boat down the Ohio. But either because the water was too low or because of a rumor that cholera was becoming prevalent down the river, they decided against the great waterway as a means of travel. And if the canal boat experience would have been like that described by Dickens in his “American Notes” or even like the short sketch that Harriet Beecher made in her little story, “The Canal-boy,” the Beecher party had little to regret in being compelled to go a roundabout way, in a comfortably airy stage-coach, even though the journey by this method did take longer.

After a busy week in Wheeling, they chartered a coach again and went on westward. This time they verged a little northward and took in Granville, Ohio, where they stayed a while to attend a protracted meeting. Here there was more and more preaching. For the rest of the way there was a corduroy road, made of logs laid crosswise. George said, “They make the roads this way for the benefit of the dyspeptics out here.” But never mind! That corduroy road led over the most beautiful rolling prairie, and down along pleasant river courses, till it came in view of a wide valley through which the great Ohio, La Belle Rivière, swept with a great curve, leaving a charmed space for the building of a city. Here the stage-coach swung along through streets between rows of neat red brick houses surrounded by abundant gardens, and paused at last for rest after the long pilgrimage. Here the Beecher home was to be for eighteen years.

On arriving in this western metropolis, the Beechers were not entirely like strangers in a strange land. The Doctor, accompanied by Catherine, had made a tour of inspection the year before, and had made many acquaintances with whom they had talked over their educational plans. Besides this, Harriet had two prosperous uncles in Cincinnati, who were taking part in all the most vital concerns of the city; one was that fascinating Uncle Samuel Edmonds Foote, and the other was Mr. John Parsons Foote, brother of Uncle Samuel, who was also a highly cultivated gentleman. These uncles welcomed the wanderers and made them at home in their comfortable residences on the heights where the view of the whole city was spread out beneath their windows. Uncle John and Uncle Samuel, said Harriet, were the “intelligent, sociable, free, and hospitable sort of folk that everybody likes and everybody feels at home with.”

In the city they also found a large number of old Litchfield and Guilford friends, who had come out before them and had already become a part of the thriving intellectual and social life of the town and region. For in our thought of the western city, far removed from what were then the centers of national activity, we must not imagine too severe a picture of simplicity and wilderness life. The pioneering period had in fact passed entirely by. In 1833 the famous Buckeye Dinner celebrated the forty-fifth anniversary of the first settlement of the city, and this means a long time in the history of a western town in the United States where the growth is like that of a mushroom in the night. When the Beechers came there in 1832, there was a court house, a banking house, a medical college with a hospital and some asylums; there were fifteen churches, several Bible societies, several public libraries, a theater, a humane society and a museum. There were large markets, twenty-one foundries and factories, and a great steamboat business with large imports and exports. At the wharves there was room for thirty steamboats at one time, and the country all about Cincinnati was threaded with post roads. Before the Beechers left the city in 1850 there were railroad facilities in some directions, a Society of Fine Arts with thirty-three active working painters and sculptors in its circle, an Academy of Music, and forty-three churches. The population in 1833 was twenty-seven thousand. It increased[Pg 135] with amazing rapidity. During one year of the Beechers’ stay eleven hundred houses were built.

A place that was making such a record as this was certain to receive a great deal of notice. As the city was built on the banks of the Ohio River, the one possible thread of travel at that time from the Atlantic coast to the remoter west, travelers of an investigating turn of mind—of whom there has always been a constant procession to this country—had to pass Cincinnati on their way; they usually paused for a time to see this wonderful city grow. It grew so fast that they could fairly see the process going on! During the time that Harriet Beecher lived in Cincinnati many noted writers stayed for a longer or shorter time in the city, observing things more or less closely, and afterward wrote about what they saw. Among them were Fenno Hoffman, Godfrey de Vigne, Chevalier, Harriet Martineau, Captain Marryat, Professor Frank Hall, Buckingham, Mrs. Steele, Charles Dickens, Sir Charles Lyell, who spoke chiefly of the geological formation; the Honorable Charles Augustus Murray, the Lady Emmeline Stuart Wortley and Mary Howitt, who wrote most of her book in a quiet valley in the suburbs of the city. Captain Marryat said: “It is a beautiful, well-kept, clean town, reminding you of Philadelphia.... Situated on a hill on the banks of the Ohio, it is surrounded by a phalanx of other hills; so that, look up and down the streets[Pg 136] whichever way you will, your eye reposes upon verdure and forest trees in the distance.”

Other visitors noted also the “pretty gardens and ornamental shrubberies,” and some declared, with expressions of amazement, that every comfort and convenience was to be found in the city. Mrs. Steele called Cincinnati the “Queen of the West.” “We have explored it thoroughly by walking and riding, and we pronounce it wonderful,” she said. She was astonished that such a city could have come from what was so lately a wilderness. There were rows of handsome dwellings, surrounded by shade trees. An accidental opening among the trees gave you a glimpse of a pavilion where, among groves and gardens, the ladies and children of the family might enjoy the fresh air.

But it is not to be supposed that all the distinguished visitors to this mid-country city of the United States should be thus pleasantly impressed. One went so far as to laugh at the idea of calling it the “Empire City of the West,” and substitutes for this proud title the obnoxious one, “Empire City of Pigs!” for this writer claimed that the pigs ran in the street with perfect comfort to themselves though perhaps not to the members of the human family. We find, however, that Harriet Beecher’s little brother enjoyed this Cincinnati custom hugely, for he would frequently be found walking soberly along by the side of a pig with his arm around its neck, or even sitting astride one of the monsters, gallantly[Pg 137] riding it—at least for a few minutes!—to the great amusement of the populace.

It was six years before the coming of the Beechers that the famous Mrs. Trollope visited Cincinnati and thereafter wrote her ill-natured comments on the ambitious western metropolis. Harriet Martineau, coming in 1834, was possessed of a more genial spirit. She found the city so full of ambition that they were meditating on the place where the capitol building should stand when the center of the national government should be removed from Washington to the city of Ohio which was so much nearer to the center of the country. She thought this a very good idea. It seemed to her absurd for senators from Missouri and Louisiana to go so far as Washington when they might, by the mere removal of the seat of government, stop at Cincinnati. But we are most interested in hearing what Charles Dickens had to say about Cincinnati, which he visited in 1840. To this stirring city he assigned a chapter in his “American Notes,” where he gave it perhaps a more fair, certainly a more favorable, treatment than he did to some other cities that he saw. He says: “Cincinnati is a beautiful city; cheerful, thriving, and animated. I have not often seen a place that commends itself so favorably and pleasantly to a stranger at the first glance as this does, with its clean houses of red and white, its well-paved roads, and footways of bright tile.” He goes on to speak of the amphitheater of hills, the[Pg 138] comfortable houses, the elegant residences. Then he describes a great temperance convention held there on the day after his arrival. There was a procession with dramatic and symbolic floats; there was much speech-making and the school children sang in chorus. The main thing, however, was the conduct and appearance of the audience throughout the day, and that was admirable and full of promise.

I do not know that this particular city was specially given to processions or that the parade is a matter of western taste. Perhaps it is a national or even an Anglo-Saxon mode of expressing exuberant vitality. However that may be, we have another description of a Cincinnati pageant that may interest us, as it is one of the things that took place while Harriet Beecher was living in the city. It is reported for us by Harriet Martineau, who saw it while she was there in 1834. It was a wonderful parade of school children—two thousand in number! Miss Martineau thought it one of the most beautiful sights that she ever saw.

Can it be that our Harriet did not see that wonderful procession of two thousand Cincinnati school children? We do not believe it. And is it not strange to think that these two great Harriets of the Old and the New World should have stood together to watch this flaming sign of promise for the future of the English-speaking people, and should not have looked into each other’s eyes to know each other? At any rate, Harriet of America forgot all about[Pg 139] the visit of her British sister; but a long time after, Harriet of England sent an invitation to her American contemporary to visit her in her English home. She remembered the older Beecher girl, Catherine, very well; she had a clear recollection of Dr. Lyman Beecher; but—“Did I see you,” she asked, “in a white frock and a black silk apron?... I believe and hope you were the young lady in the black silk apron.” Of such unseen links as this is history made; the lives of the actors and leaders of thought cross each other and interweave, making a continuous onflow of life.

Before we leave the more general things that were happening in Cincinnati during the years that Harriet Beecher lived there, we must recur once more to that Buckeye Dinner that took place the year after she came. I do not know whether any of the theologues from the Seminary were present or not; but if they were, they heard a wonderful speech from one of the great men of the nation’s history. That was General Harrison, son of a patriot of Revolutionary fame, and himself a conspicuous patriot. A French guest of the city relates that he saw in the hotel a noticeable man of about fifty years old, of medium height, and of muscular build, with an open and cheerful countenance and with a certain air of command; and when he asked who that was he was told that that was General Harrison, Clerk of the Cincinnati Court of Common Pleas. “What! General Harrison of the Tippecanoe and the[Pg 140] Thames?” he cried. The answer was: “The same; the ex-Governor, the conqueror of Tecumseh and Proctor; the avenger of our disasters of the Raisin and at Detroit; the ex-Governor of the Territory of Indiana; the ex-Senator in Congress, and the ex-Minister to one of the South American Republics. He has grown old in the service of his country,” continued the informant; “he has passed twenty years of his life in those fierce wars with the Indians, in which there was less glory to be won but more danger to be encountered than at Rivoli and Austerlitz. He is now poor with a numerous family, and is neglected by the Federal Government, although yet vigorous, because he has the independence to think for himself. His friends got the place of clerk as a sort of retiring pension. So we have him as clerk of an inferior court.” This great man, then, was living at Cincinnati. In the Roman and the American fashion he was in retirement after a time of political activity and was living as a farmer; but he was to be recalled in a few years to the nation’s highest place of honor, a position that he was to hold, however, but one month before he was to pass away in the midst of his work. As time went on, General Harrison was intimately connected in various ways with the lines of life in the Beecher and Stowe households, and was venerated by them heartily.

There were many other distinguished people that passed a part of their lives in this city during the[Pg 141] years that interest us, but we must not stay to name them. Suffice it to say that life was by no means dull in Cincinnati. Besides processions and banquets, there was an occasional flood on the river to enliven things, or a steamboat explosion. There were passages of wild excitement over various public questions, there were hangings and bank mobs and negro mobs. All these events of a public nature were to be part of the warp and woof of the life of this family that were living there and were working eagerly for the best interests of the city and country. Harriet tells us that while they lived at Walnut Hills the favorite subjects of conversation at the home table changed. While the former subjects of free will and regeneration, of Heaven and the destiny of man were still discussed, new subjects were now added. The United States Constitution came into the debate, and—the fugitive slave laws. Is it any wonder? They must have talked over Harrison’s speech and all the other patriotic speeches, whether given in connection with the peaceful gatherings of white-robed school children in churches, or more passionately uttered when mobs swept through the town and burned and slew. Of all this we shall hear later on.

The house that the Beechers were obliged to live in when they first came to Cincinnati was, Harriet said in a letter to Hartford, the most inconvenient, ill-arranged, good-for-nothing and altogether execrable affair that ever was put together. The[Pg 142] kitchen was so arranged that their mother could not go into it without putting on a bonnet and cloak; the parlor had one window, and that opened upon a porch and had its lower half painted to keep out what little light there was. It was built, she averred, by a bachelor who of course acted up to whatever light he had, though that left little enough for his tenants. In this merry way Harriet made the best of everything and turned their difficulties and inconveniences into pleasantry. Nevertheless, it is to be feared that Harriet had some slight touch of homesickness. Not a day passed that she did not engineer the sending of somebody to the post office, and when the reply repeatedly came, “No letters,” her heart sank within her. Therefore, when the first letter did come to the circle at Cincinnati, Harriet was so overjoyed that she cut up all manner of capers expressive of thankfulness, went up three stairs at a time to get to the study to begin an answer, wishing devoutly that the path of duty led in the direction of writing a long letter instead of in the direction of darning the heels of George’s stockings! The possession of this letter was a secret from all but Catherine and herself, and they decided to keep it till supper time and then spring it as a surprise. This method had its disadvantages; it seemed too bad to keep it from mother and Aunt Esther for a whole afternoon, but the girls had the satisfaction of thinking that they were planning for their greatest happiness on the whole, which, Harriet[Pg 143] considered, was true metaphysical benevolence.

Supper time came. There was a suppressed excitement in the air. At last Catherine held up her hand and said, “We have a dessert that we have been saving all the afternoon. See here! This is from Hartford!” she cried, and then Harriet held up the Hartford letter. How all the people stared! Mrs. Beecher’s pale face was all one smile, Aunt Esther’s eyes were very bright and the father’s were almost tearful as he looked at the familiar and beloved handwriting. Harriet read the letter to an enraptured audience and every allusion was appreciated to the full. “Mrs. Parsons stopped in the midst of her pumpkins pies to think of us!” cried Harriet. “Seems to me I can see her now—that bright, cheerful face! She is making the pumpkin pies for Thanksgiving.”

This turned the conversation to the subject of Thanksgiving. And amid smiles and sighs they talked over the plan of keeping that sacred New England festival here in the far west. “But how can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?” quoted Harriet amid a hush all around the table.

In due time the family moved to the house prepared for them at Walnut Hills where the Theological Seminary was situated. This was about two miles from the center of the city as it was then, and the drive to and from the church and the markets passed up hill and down dale through the most[Pg 144] lovely succession of undulations, where the velvety richness of the turf and the groupings of the grove and forest made the scene, as Catherine said, nothing short of Arcadian. The “straight, beautiful shafts of the trees as one looked up the cool, green recesses of the woods seemed,” she said, with a flight of eloquence rather unusual for her practical nature, “as though they might form very proper columns for a Dryad temple.” Over this road the Beechers’ little horse “Charley” went many times a day, carrying messages and bringing supplies.

There were fine trees about the Seminary also. The ample two-story house had a long ell that ran back into the primeval forest. To this a classic grove of superb foliage gave shade in summer and protection from wind in winter. On these wonderful trees the adventurous little sister Isabelle climbed and swung on the upper branches in the wind. A dangerous feat! We fancy that the care of the Beecher children did not grow less as the number increased, even though the older ones were all the time moving away and becoming dignified ministers of churches. Mrs. Beecher and Aunt Esther, with the family of thirteen, including servants, had their hands full; so did Harriet and Catherine, who were going to town every day to look after their school. Harriet’s memory of the years passed in Walnut Hills was of a time full to the brim of life and animation. There was an electric current passing[Pg 145] every moment through the house. Things were being done; thoughts were passing like wildfire; not for an instant could there be stagnation in any part of the work. Everybody was carried along to the fullest use of his powers in such a home as that.

While the family were getting settled in the new home, Catherine and Harriet were making their plans about their school. In this somewhat formidable endeavor the Beecher daughters were not without rivals. There was already an academy in Cincinnati whose curriculum was said to “embrace an extensive circle of female education,” which included French, needlework and penmanship. I dare say they also taught their scholars how to depict tombstones and weeping willows in chenille and silk embroidery, but history does not inform us on this point. There were also other schools for “female education” to the number of perhaps fifteen. But none of these things were allowed to discourage them, for this was the land of initiative and of experiment. Besides, the new institution was to be far superior to anything yet dreamed of.

Catherine’s scheme was indeed an ambitious one. It included a young ladies’ school for fifty or sixty[Pg 147] pupils, with a primary department for about the same number of little girls, and also a primary school for little boys. These were to be the practice schools in her scheme for the training of teachers, exactly as we conduct our normal schools to-day. The school work was to be on the basis of that in a college; and they believed so thoroughly in woman’s teaching power, that they thought instruction in this country would never be well done until women were trained directly for that service. This was what these two young educators intended to do—to train perfect teachers for schools that were sure to arise and that were already sadly needed all over the central west and, indeed, throughout the country. They cherished the thought that women by their motherly instincts and by the qualities that housewifely lore and home-making and family life had fixed in the very fiber of their being, would be specially adapted to the work of teachers. The outcome in the next few decades of our national life proves not only that these two young theorists were able to look over the whole situation in the country and to see what was most needed and the best means to attain the desired ends, but also that they were far-sighted as to what the future was sure to bring forth. For the New England migration was to pass over the vast space of the prairies of all our middle states, making possible everywhere schools in which almost the whole burden of the work was to fall to the hands of women. They saw[Pg 148] that the gigantic burden of subduing the land was to be the special work of men. It turned out to be so. They saw that men of tact, versatility, talent, and piety, as Harriet put it, qualities absolutely necessary to successful teaching, would be constantly called away to missionary and ministerial and patriotic duties. If such a man were put to the work of teaching, he would be, said Harriet Beecher, like a Hercules with a distaff in hand ready to spring at the first call of the trumpet. The question of salaries also came in, for a man must have enough to support wife and family. But we can hardly realize how it seemed in 1832 when two young women urged forward the idea that if young women were to be well prepared for the work of teaching, were to be placed in responsible positions and were to devote themselves to this work, adequate provision really must be made for their support. Catherine spent a good part of her life and wrote chapters in her books maintaining that side by side with the many well-endowed institutions for men, there should be also a well-endowed provision for the education of women. Those days were not so very long ago; but things have happened at a wild rate since then. Yet Catherine Beecher has by no means had her meed of praise for the work she did in training the public mind toward the good things that we now take for granted almost as much as if we had had them since the beginning of time. To be sure, it is not at all certain that it is the best possible[Pg 149] scheme for an ideal country that nearly all teaching in its common schools should be done by women; but in the transition of a swiftly expanding people the great crisis was this: either the work of teaching had to be done by women or it could not be done at all. In this hour of need thousands of women arose to devote their lives to this work, receiving in payment a poor wage, always less than would be given to a man for the same work, and in the great majority of cases suffering the denial of that which is most precious to the woman, the home-making instinct.

Of course it cannot be asserted that Catherine saw all this; but she felt the immediate need of the situation. She believed that a woman’s nature was adapted to the precious occupation of training children, and being herself deprived of the place in life where her large, motherly nature could have its full fruition, she chose to aid her country in that day of need by helping to provide teachers for the swiftly forming schools all through the middle states.7 To this work the American girls of 1830 were called by the voice of Catherine Beecher; aided by her capable sister she took in hand the training of women for the work. They hoped to be able soon to say to many hundreds of young women, “Here is[Pg 150] a place where you may qualify yourselves to be first-rate teachers and receive help in finding a location in one of the many flourishing towns and villages of the west where such services are sorely needed.”

In doing all this for the sake of the nation’s welfare, Catherine and her sister were following an instinct that had been developed in the great body of New England women who shared with their fathers and husbands and sons the passionate interest in what a late writer has called its “adventure of democracy.”8 Our hazardous experiment in putting national control into the hands of the people was now on trial before the monarchical governments of the European world, from which our forefathers had run away in order to find a place in this wilderness where they might worship in peace and govern themselves according to their own ideas of justice and right. But the New England mothers were made to see that they also had a part to perform in the state. These early statesmen said: “Our women must concur in all plans for education for young men or no laws will ever render them effectual. To qualify our women for this purpose they should be instructed not only in the usual branches of female education, but should also be taught the principles of government and liberty, and the obligations of patriotism should[Pg 151] be inculcated in them.”9 Hence these early statesmen advised their wives to see to it that their sons were instructed in the “divine science of politics.” These words naturally fired the women with a desire to fulfill this great ideal so that they should not be found wanting when the republic called to them plainly. But they must be ready. They saw that. To prepare them for the task that was theirs they must do more than the Spartan mother did when she gave the shield to her son, saying, “Return either with it, or upon it!” They must have something more than a haphazard training in the mere rudiments such as had been their part in the country school. It came into the mind of such women as Emma Willard and Mary Lyon to build up schools where the training could be obtained that would give the women what they needed in order to fit their sons for citizenship in the republic. And they all had the same idea. The subjects must be advanced—not chenille and samplers only—and the teaching must be excellent.

While Roxana Foote Beecher was training her daughter in philosophy and perspective, and Lucinda Foote was privately studying Greek with President Stiles of Yale College, Mrs. Emma Willard was struggling to gain a foothold for her seminary for the daughters of well-to-do families, and Mary Lyon was as resolutely pressing forward[Pg 152] her effort to provide a school for those who must gain an education, if at all, in some more economical way. Mrs. Willard’s Female Seminary at Troy was finally founded in 1821, and Mt. Holyoke in 1837. But these were only two out of many. In New York State alone twelve academies for girls were founded between 1827 and 1839, and in New England and also further south the schools and academies for girls were multiplying so fast that there was soon opportunity for nearly every valley to offer some chance for further culture than the country school afforded to the young women of the region.

The great difficulty lay in getting the teachers for these schools; that was what pressed most deeply on the mind of Catherine Beecher. They could not call upon men for this work nor would it be well to do so if they could. “If men have more knowledge,” reasoned Harriet, “they have less talent in communicating it, nor have they the patience, the long-suffering and the gentleness necessary to superintend the formation of the child’s character.” Then with a touch of that passion for reform that was an essential part of the Beecher character wherever we find it she added: “We intend to make these principles understood, and ourselves to set the example of what females can do in this way!” In other words, she intended to be the best possible teacher, to be as near to perfection as she could compel herself to be. That she should make a[Pg 153] declaration like this was not a piece of self-conceit; it was merely the expression of her ideal. This saying of Harriet Beecher makes one think of what Joan of Arc said when she was asked by what charm or magic she made the soldiers go into battle. She simply answered, “I called to them to come on into the battle and then I went right on into the battle myself!” This is the principle that is at the basis of all the charm that lures human beings into glorious heroism; it is the very reason for the existence of leaders and prophets.

In 1833, then, and for some years thereafter, the two sisters labored for the success of the school in Cincinnati. Harriet, with characteristic energy, threw herself into the work. As the work of the school increased she lived a life of incessant labor. What she tried to do was enough to wreck the health of the most sturdy. Her whole time was absorbed with her efforts for the new school. Even when on Sunday she took advantage of the day of rest to lay aside her cares, the ill feelings that disturbed her took away the rest and filled the hours with misery. She had everything but good health. She felt as if she were scarcely alive, and there was great danger that the old morbid feelings would return. Again we find her mind and heart suffering from the state of her health and physical ability threatened by excessive overwork.

About this time she was reading the life of Madam de Staël and “Corinne.” The work moved[Pg 154] her intensely. It is interesting to see how she accounted for the great effect it had upon her emotions. She placed herself at once in the environment of her nation and saw how she herself illustrated a national characteristic. The effect of republican government, she reasoned, is to demand rigid forms of conduct. The emotions thus constantly repressed burn inwardly all the more. They burn to the very soul, leaving only dust and ashes, she thought. At any rate this seemed to her to be the case with herself. Tired to the bone, she felt that her soul was withered and exhausted. She wrote to Georgiana, her beloved friend, with whom she still shared all her deepest thoughts: “All that is enthusiastic, all that is impassioned, in admiration of nature, of writing, of character, in devotional thought and emotion, or in the emotions of affection, I have felt with vehement and absorbing intensity, felt till my mind is exhausted, and seems to be sinking into deadness. Half of my time I am glad to remain in a listless vacancy, to busy myself with trifles, since thought is pain, and emotion is pain.”

It is sad to see this young spirit so misunderstanding itself. What Harriet Beecher needed was to run away from those cares for even a short time. Just one little breathing spell, a little freedom from care and responsibility would have freshened her and made it possible for her to carry on her work far more thoroughly, though that perhaps could[Pg 155] hardly have been—but at any rate, with as much again of buoyancy and joy. Now she heard little girls recite and told them fairy tales beginning in the immemorial way with “once upon a time” and spinning them out as she went along to the utmost delectation of her young-hearted audience; now she took up the more serious subjects of history and grammar, and the philosophy of taste. After school hours she had to attend the teachers’ meeting, where such subjects as scattering the quill pens and the copy-books on the floor, forming classes, drinking in the entry (drinking water, of course), giving leave to speak, ringing the recess-bell, and such details were solemnly discussed.

During this time Dr. Beecher was supplying the pulpit in one of the churches of Cincinnati. On Sundays the pupils in the school went to hear him preach, and on Mondays they were called together to make reports on the sermon. A devotional character was given to the meeting of this class; it was conducted by Harriet and she gave to the service a quiet fervor that was most beautiful and helpful.

Very soon a rather important piece of work was put into Harriet’s hands. The school needed a geography for the younger scholars, and Harriet was appointed to make it. She went to work and produced a “New Geography for Children,” which was published in Cincinnati, and was used not only in the Beecher School, but also in all the primary[Pg 156] schools of the city. Her geography was not at all like the books of that name that we now use. It belonged with the class of instructive treatises represented by the “Present Condition of the Terraqueous Globe,” written by “Jedediah Morse, D.D.,” which he “Dedicated and Devoted to the Young Gentlemen and Ladies of America with the Most Ardent Wishes for Their Improvement,” and which was reprinted almost every year from 1784 to 1850. The Peter Parley and Malte Brun books belong in the same group. It was the era of a sort of pious compendium written generally in the kindly letters of a father or an uncle. In one number of the Western Magazine, a magazine published in Cincinnati during that time, there is a scathing review of several of these small attempts at giving young people some knowledge of the world they lived in. The editor mentions the manual of Peter Parley and that of Malte Brun and complains that these would-be purveyors of natural history take liberties with fact. The anaconda, they informed the children, was so big that it could crush a house; the buffaloes of America were domestic and harmless. “This,” said the editor, “is the way they are teaching the young idea how to shoot, but we should call it bad shooting!” Miss Beecher had no domestic buffaloes and no house-crushing anacondas in her book, and it seems to have been clear enough of inanities to displace that of Malte Brun in the city’s list of school books in 1834. It was a modest[Pg 157] little book, but it represented a great deal of work. She begins with the simplest but clearest directions for drawing a map of the schoolroom and then leads up gradually to the subject of the cape, isthmus, continent, etc. There are pictures of interesting places, descriptions of the products of the countries, the manners, costumes, religions and laws of the people. The book is written like a story, with frequent affectionate addresses to the young learner and admonitions that are to encourage him on his way where the study seems difficult or dry. The personal character of the writer has an opportunity to show itself in a book like this, and, if the reprint of 1852 was a facsimile of the original work, as seems likely, that Harriet Beecher, the teacher in the Cincinnati school in 1833, in a very earnest chapter on the subject of slavery, has shown clearly what her opinion would be when that great subject should come up for discussion. She also clearly points out the part that the English bore in the early history of our country in forcing the system of slavery upon their colonial subjects on this side of the sea. She takes good opportunity to urge the reasons why the New England forefathers left their native land and sought the inhospitable shores of New England and speaks feelingly of their sufferings in the early years of settlement. None of these passages was toned down when the little book was reprinted in England in 1852 for the use of the English schools.

Soon after the Beechers were settled at Cincinnati the circle of old New England friends exiled together in this western land formed a literary club that met alternately at Uncle Samuel Foote’s and Dr. Drake’s. They called this society the “Semi-colon Club,” and gave the following explanation of the name: The Spanish name of Columbus was Colon; if the discoverer of a continent may be called a “Colon,” the discoverers of a new pleasure should at least be allowed the honor of being called “Semi-colons.” This new pleasure consisted in the delight they got out of the interchange of thought at weekly meetings.

The society of Semi-colons grew out of what Harriet called “Uncle Sam’s soirée,” the social assemblies that that genial host gathered about him in his house on the heights. The house where most of the meetings were held and which should be called “the home of the Semi-colon Club” was on the corner of Vine and Third Streets. It was a[Pg 159] mansion with a stately colonnade of pillars across the portico. In the company that assembled beneath that friendly roof were several that were destined to become known to the world besides Catherine, Harriet and other members of their family. There were judges, generals, poets, professors, editors, and, as Harriet might have said, some human beings! Salmon P. Chase was there, a young man about twenty-five years old, afterwards the great statesman who met Mrs. Stowe at Washington and led her into the room where Abraham Lincoln greeted and talked with her. Mrs. Caroline Lee Hentz was one of the company; she had been the author of a poem, a play, and a novel before she was twelve years old, and had lately received from the Arch Street Theater in Philadelphia the five-hundred-dollar prize for her play, “De Lara, or the Moorish Bride.” Then there was Christopher Pearse Cranch, the poet, and Worthington Whitridge, the artist. There was Judge James Hall, editor of the Western Monthly Magazine, author of many letters, souvenirs, addresses, sketches and romances, who was then in the midst of a long and valuable literary career. Dr. Daniel Drake, a man some forty-five years old, had a national reputation in the field of medical research. The circle also included others in various fields of artistic activity. It is plain that the meetings of a company such as this must have been a great incitement to the genius of Harriet Beecher.[Pg 160] We must not forget to mention that the young and handsome professor of Biblical history, Professor C. E. Stowe, was also a member of the Club.

In natural reaction from the strenuousness of her daily tasks Harriet could not resist the impulse to loosen the reins of her whimsical fancy at the meetings and to be the very soul of merriment in this intimate circle. The first thing she wrote as a Semi-colon was a letter purporting to have come from Bishop Butler, composed, as Harriet said to Georgiana May, in his “outrageous style of parenthesis and foggification.” Her next essay was a satirical piece on the modern uses of languages. We can hardly imagine how this subject could be made interesting, yet we feel that we could trust Harriet Beecher to turn any prosy matter into mirth. This essay was so well received by the audience that the editor of the Western Magazine requested permission to publish it in his magazine. Elated by this success, she undertook a larger task, planning a series of letters that were to take up a number of different subjects. She liked to write in a slightly satirical manner. There had been some random talk in the social hours of the Club meetings on the antiquated jokes about old maids and bachelors. Harriet thought she would touch upon this and call for some fresh pleasantries to take the place of those worn-out ones. She wrote a list of legislative enactments solemnly forbidding the merest mention of the word “old maid” or[Pg 161] “bachelor” in the future and forever more. This was indeed a playing with fire, but the letters made no hard feelings, as there was a courteous spirit beneath the satire.

She followed this with an attempt at more serious writing, though here again her passion for fun made her resort to the device of a practical joke. Putting what she had to say this time into the form of letters, she carried out her idea with a wealth of incident and of particulars that made the letters give the feeling of a group of real people. The letters appeared to be written from a house in the country, where the hosts and their guests were pious, literary, and agreeable. By having the letters come apparently from different people who showed their various characteristics, the author had the opportunity to bring in different points of view and a lively interchange of ideas.

We can see how her story-making sense was developing. In these letters she was taking a hint from a certain plan which the Beecher family had been making use of since the members had been so widely scattered. They sent a circular letter around from one member of the family to another, each adding a letter to the collection that came to him, until all had read it. In this circular letter the different characteristics of the family were brought into a pleasant contrast, just as Harriet planned to bring them out in the imaginary family that she created. The first one of this series she[Pg 162] surrounded with particulars intended to carry out the deception. Her one idea at this time seems to have been to conceal her budding tendency toward authorship, and yet she could not resist the fertility of invention and the pleasure it gave her. When she had finished the letter she smoked it to turn it yellow and tore the edges to give it the look of age; she wrote and re-wrote the direction, imitated a postmark by means of smears of ink, sealed the letter with wax and then broke the seal open again, all in order to give the letter the appearance of a really old letter. Then she put it into another envelope on which she placed the address in different handwriting and directed it to “Mrs. Samuel E. Foote.” At the same time she sent another letter to her cousin directing her to be on the lookout for the coming of a letter and to aid her in the deception. The family, including even that wary and clever Uncle Samuel, were taken in by the joke. The erased names and dates were deciphered and the whole epistle was subjected to criticism, but it was believed in as a real letter. So much for Harriet’s practical joke.

It is a little difficult to understand why this young author should have surrounded with so much mystery her earliest attempts in the work that was to become the business of her life. She seems to have had a strange sense of shrinking from publicity as though there were perhaps a lack of dignity about the appearance of one’s name in print. How[Pg 163] little idea she had even by this time of her own powers is shown by the fact that her first published piece was, quite to Harriet’s satisfaction, attributed to Catherine. In fact she said that she did not know that she would have let it go if it had been assigned to its own author. She had no idea, she said, of appearing in propria persona. However, when the potent charm that lies in literary expression had once taken a firm hold of her genius those false scruples faded away; and we cannot believe that it was not a source of intense pleasure to her when she won the prize offered by the editor of the Western Monthly Magazine for the best story. This story appeared in the number for April, 1834, under the heading “The Prize Tale,” with the modest sub-title “A New England Sketch.” Her story was as different from the other articles in the magazine as black is from white. The contents of this heavy periodical consisted as a general thing of essays on the antiquities of America, the Indians and their customs, didactic tales related in trotting tetrameters, or perhaps a long-winded story of impossible adventure and sentiment in the Charles Brockton Brown manner. Harriet Beecher’s racy description of New England characteristics, the realness of the scenes, the actuality of the people, the easy simple flow of the discourse, the conversational quality of the language that the speakers used, the clever management of the incidents were all totally unknown to the readers of the magazine.[Pg 164] It must have been like a sudden invitation to a feast of good nourishing food to those who had been living for a long time upon chaff. The story was welcomed with intense delight.

It is not remarkable that the heart of this young writer, who was still homesick enough to find it impossible to sing any kind of a song in the strange land, should turn for its inspiration to the old New England home. This is the way she began:

“And so I am to write a story,” she said, “but of what and where? Shall it be radiant with the sky of Italy or eloquent with the beau idéal of Greece? Shall it breathe odor and languor from the Orient, or chivalry of the Occident; gaiety from France, or vigor from England? No, no; these are all too old, too romance-like, too obviously picturesque for me. No, let me turn to my own land—to my own New England; the land of bright fires and strong hearts; the land of deeds and not of words; the land of fruits and not of flowers; the land often spoken against yet always respected; ‘the latchet of whose shoes the nations of the earth are not worthy to unloose.’”

Having relieved her mind by this outburst of emotion, she apologizes for the bit of rodomontade, as she calls it, and proceeds to describe the Connecticut town that she was to picture under so many different names from the beginning to the end of her career—the beloved Litchfield-in-the-Hills, called in this story Newbury in New England. It[Pg 165] rested in a green little hollow wedged in like a bird’s nest among the high hills that kept off the wind in winter and kept out foreigners. Here life was so perfect that the people never died, but only kept growing old till they could not grow any older and then they stood still and lasted from generation to generation. The houses in this village were red, brown, or yellow, and the people that lived there all had Biblical names. They did all the things they ought to do, lived in neighborly charity with one another, read their Bibles, feared God, and were content with such things as they had which the author said is the best philosophy after all. We are told that the hero is Master James Benton; the chief person in the story, however, is James’s old uncle, who afterwards gave a title to the story, “Uncle Tim.” Timothy Benton was a character photographed directly from life; he was suggested by Harriet’s own Uncle Lot Benton of New Haven, who was celebrated for that very contrariousness that is the queerness and the chief charm of the uncle in the story, who was just like a chestnut burr, briars without but substantial goodness within. The following incident from the story will illustrate this:

“‘Uncle Tim, father wants to know if you will lend him your hoe to-day?’” says a little boy, making his way across the corn-field.

“‘Why don’t he have that mended? It’s a great pester to have everybody usin’ a body’s things.’

“‘Well, I can borrow one somewheres else, I suppose,’” says the suppliant. After the boy has stumbled across the ploughed ground and is fairly over the fence Uncle Tim calls:

“‘Halloo there, you little rascal! What are you goin’ off without the hoe for?’

“‘I didn’t say I wouldn’t, did I? Here, come and take it—stay, I’ll bring it; and do tell your father not to be a-letting you hunt squirrels with his hoes next time.’”

Another time Uncle Tim’s daughter, Grace, wants two candlesticks for her party. After long dallying and much coaxing and palavering he stumps off to the village store and brings back a package. He hands Grace one candlestick. Grace says:

“‘Well, then, there’s t’other’—taking the second candlestick out of his pocket, and adding, ‘and here’s a fol-de-rol for you to tie round your neck.’”

It is not difficult to see that when the young[Pg 167] James wishes to get into the good graces of this prickly old gentleman he will have a hard time. Uncle Tim did not “‘see why the boys need to be all the time a-coming to see Grace, for she was nothing extraordinary after all.’” In this opinion Master James did not at all concur; he thought Grace the most wonderful girl in the world, and he had an idea in regard to her that he was determined to carry out. Moreover, he was of the joyous, buoyant variety of youth who cannot see why their plans should fail. We understand perfectly who stood as model for this earnest, clean, optimistic, merry-hearted young man. Harriet could not have had any one in her mind but the brother that she had so loved and worshiped ever since the days when she led him by the hand down to the Dame School.

“‘Why, James,’ said his companion and chief counselor, ‘do you think Grace likes you?’

“‘I don’t know,’ said our hero with a comfortable appearance of certainty.

“‘Well, then, Jim, you’ll have to give up that flute of yours, I tell you, now.’

“‘Well, Jim, I tell you now, you don’t know Uncle Tim if you say so, for he’s just the settest critter in his way that you ever saw.’

“‘I do know Uncle Tim though, better than most folks; he is no more cross than I am; and as to his being set, you have nothing to do but make him think he is in his own way when he is in yours—that is all.’

“‘And I’ll bet you a gray squirrel that I’ll go there this very evening, and get him to like me and my flute both,’ said James.”

It is needless to say that the clever Jim carried this out to the letter. He went there that evening; he drove Uncle Tim’s sheep out of the garden, praised the old man’s bell-flower apples, told stories at the table, proved that it was not irreverent to use the flute even in church, and made Uncle Tim admit it; in short he made himself here, as everywhere, the great favorite. The story turns out as it should, and the Uncle is filled with joy at the outcome.

This was the substance of the first real story that Harriet Beecher wrote. It was a simple little story, but it gave promise of the abilities that she later showed not only in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” but in the long series of even more artistic, if not more influential, works in which she has enshrined for[Pg 169] us the fading memories of old New England traditions and customs.

Perhaps when we see the lively quality of this story, and of other sketches of this period of Harriet Beecher’s life, we may wonder what has happened to her, and may exclaim how she has changed from the profound theological discussions of the Litchfield days! Is this romantic and blithesome spirit the same one that shivered and was so stoical in the chillness of the Litchfield Hills! How shall we account for it?

Well, she has come out into the great boundless west whose free spirit has set her free—that is one way to account for the change. Then, those earlier studies and tastes may be considered as her attempts to find her way in the philosophies of the human mind, a struggle from which she gradually desisted after she had hit upon a practical and satisfying view of her own, which by showing her how to discharge each day’s duty, fulfilled her needs. We must recall, too, who were her favorites among the few great romantic writers that she was able to find in her father’s sermon-barrels. “The Arabian Nights,” “Don Quixote,” and above all, Sir Walter Scott were her great discoveries in Dr. Beecher’s garret. We must remember how well she loved Byron and how many times she read “Ivanhoe” through in one summer! Thinking of all this, we realize how she was being prepared to use the novel as the best expression for her thought when the[Pg 170] time should come when she felt she must speak out something God had given to her to say.

Meantime she wrote many little sketches and stories and sent them to various magazines: the Western Monthly, the New York Independent, the Godey’s Ladies’ Book, printed them and paid for them. In this way her training in the art of composing a story was going on steadily.

In January, 1836, Harriet Beecher and Calvin Edward Stowe were quietly married. A few days later they took a brief wedding journey, going by stage as far as Columbus; but the roads in an Ohio midwinter were not much to boast of, and, as a pleasant journey, the trip was not a success. They were happier when they returned to their own fireside and sat down there peacefully together. Mrs. Stowe was rather astonished to find that such a “wisp of nerve” as herself could pass through the wedding experience with a happiness that was tranquil and serene rather than overwhelming.

If she had been able to look into the future, however, she must have been appalled by the view. The darkest period of her life was before her, a time to try the stoutest soul, a stretch of fourteen years of struggle with narrowing means and increasing cares. The Seminary that her father had come into the west to found, and in which Professor[Pg 172] Stowe was the chief pillar of scholarship, did not for various reasons unconnected with either of these noble self-sacrificing men, increase in size and financial support as they had hoped it would. Students became fewer and salaries more and more meager. At last Professor Stowe, convinced that he could no longer carry the forlorn hope of that western work with any justice to his family, accepted one of several offers that came to him to enter upon more advantageous professional work in the east and removed to Bowdoin College, his own alma mater, in Brunswick, Maine.

In this period, then, between her marriage in 1836 and the removal to Maine in January, 1850, we see our brave little woman putting up the stiffest kind of fight against the most disheartening odds. Under household conditions that grew less and less encouraging for the housekeeper, she toiled on. Sickness visited various members of the family and the burdens grew heavier than the little mother was able to bear. Her knowledge was deepening, and her heart was enlarging, but her strength was too sorely tired. Her struggle was tragic; it is sad to reflect upon, but it is also inspiring! Many who read the pathetic record of these years of privation and suffering will lose sight of the great author in their sympathetic interest in the woman, the wife, and the mother; through her heroism and sweetness and nobility of character during this crucial time she is endeared to us as no fame and[Pg 173] glory could ever endear her. Her entry into the profession of literature came through the welcome prospect of a “douceur that might eke out a domestic accommodation.” Her literary training was gained when she was “a young mother and housekeeper in the first years of her novitiate, amid alternate demands from an ever dissolving ‘kitchen cabinet’ and from the two, three and four occupants of her nursery.” And if she had not been what Sam Lawson would call “one of these ’ere facultized persons,” she never could have accomplished the prodigies of work that came from her hands.

During these years of poverty in Cincinnati six children came to add their cares and their loves to Mrs. Stowe’s life. First twin daughters arrived and were named Eliza Taylor and Harriet Beecher. Two years later Henry Ellis was born. Then came Frederick William, named for the Prussian King for whom his father had a great admiration. Georgiana May followed and Samuel Charles was the next. This, omitting the last little one whose life was sacrificed in the cholera epidemic, made the circle of five who went with the little mother when she preceded her husband to the new home in Maine. Soon after her arrival there her seventh child was born and was named Charles Edward. This son survived to write in two noble transcriptions the chronicles of her happy and her tragic experiences.

Her children were the very heart of her life.[Pg 174] “When I can stop and think long enough to discriminate my head from my heels, I must say,” she said, “that I think myself fortunate in both husband and children. My children I would not change for all the ease, leisure and pleasure I could have without them.” To Mrs. Stowe motherhood was literally a religion. She knew in her heart what the love of a mother could be, and she said, “God invented mothers’ hearts, and He certainly has the pattern in His own.” So she found within herself a proof of the love of God, a beautiful path to spiritual attainment that is open to every woman that learns in any way to understand the meaning of a mother’s love.

Mrs. Stowe was a hard working woman, constantly beset by trials of housekeeping and home-making. Her husband was rich in Greek and Hebrew and Latin and Arabic, and, alas! rich in nothing else. But then, she said, she was abundantly enriched with wealth of another sort—meaning the children from the curly-headed twin daughters down. She considered that her first and best mission lay in this circle; and she maintained that to feel the importance of order and system and to carry it out through the family requires very much the same kind of talent which a good prime minister needs. She was the kind of housekeeper that she has shown us in the Aunt Betsey of “The Mayflower,” who was “the neatest and most efficient piece of human machinery that ever operated in[Pg 175] forty places at once. She was always everywhere, supervising everything.”

Mrs. Stowe’s dowry consisted of eleven dollars’ worth of china. That served her for two years. But when her brother, Edward, with his bride, came to visit her, she found that she could not set the table with the plates and tea cups she possessed. So she bought an additional set for ten dollars, and this supply lasted her for many years. Mrs. Stowe seems to have inherited all the cleverness of her mother, Roxana, in making and making over, in fitting and polishing up all sorts of things for the household. While she was getting settled in Maine she wrote to a sister, “Mrs. Mitchell and myself made two sofas and lounges, a barrel chair, divers bedspreads, pillow-cases, pillows, bolsters and mattresses; we painted rooms; we revarnished furniture; we—what didn’t we do?”10 She could nail a carpet in the corner and tack gimp on to mended furniture; she could make a loose screw firm, and, I am certain, drive in a nail without hitting her fingers. While she was as feminine as any woman that ever lived, she had the simple practical efficiency[Pg 176] that is—or was—supposed to be characteristically masculine. She could lay the cloth on the floor and cut out a dress for herself without any pattern; “I guess I know my own shape,” she said to one who caught her doing this. She made her husband’s coats and her own shoes. In the days when the congress gaiters were in fashion, she made very pretty ones for herself, fitting them nicely; she was an excellent cobbler and could cut the leather soles and nail on the heel with perfect art, and when she found the elastic on the sides difficult to set in she invented a way of lacing the shoe up behind, thus overcoming the trouble and giving a dainty and trim effect to the foot-gear.

In the winter of 1839 the Belle Rivière was choked up with ice; provisions could not be brought in and a famine was threatened; consequently there was a stiff rise in prices. Coarse salt was three dollars a bushel, rice was eighteen cents a pound, coffee was fifty cents a pound, white sugar the same; brown sugar was twenty cents a pound, molasses was one dollar a gallon and potatoes were one dollar a bushel. What was to be done? They simply did without these things. For months the diet consisted of bread and bacon, and happy they were to get that!

In spite of her blithe resistance, Mrs. Stowe’s health for a time gave way entirely, and she was obliged to go to a water-cure in Vermont. Her sister Catherine was there at the same time and[Pg 177] for much the same reason; so the two sisters had many hours of communion, and, no doubt, some fun. While she was there Harriet’s husband, who was rather inclined to look on the dark side, wrote her a most melancholy letter. She answered that she wished he could be with her at Brattleboro to coast down hill on a sled, or go sliding and snowballing by moonlight. “I would snowball every bit of the hypo out of you,” she said. Then to amuse him she copied a poem that Kate had just been writing on the cheerful subject of tombstones. It was accompanied by two pictures of tombstones they had drawn. On one was inscribed “Eheu me miserum = Hic jacket,” and over the stone on the branch of a tree was hung—a jacket! The poem, in two cantos, was written, she said, for the edification of certain dolorous individuals in the Semi-colon.

The letter closes with an exhortation to him to be patient and bear trouble as if it were the toothache or a driving rain or anything else that one cannot escape—which is good sound advice.

Her own power to put this advice into practice and to control her moods of depression is shown in a letter she once wrote to him when he was away in search of health.

“It is a dark, sloppy, rainy, muddy, disagreeable day, and I have been working hard all day in the kitchen, washing dishes, looking into closets, and seeing a great deal of that dark side of domestic life which a housekeeper may who will investigate after a girl who keeps all clean on the outside of cup and platter, and is very apt to make good the rest of the text in the inside of things.... I am sick of the smell of sour milk, and sour meats, and sour everything; and then the clothes will not dry, and no wet thing does, and everything smells mouldy; and altogether I feel as if I never wanted to eat again.” After enlarging upon her troubles further in the same whimsical vein, she added gravely, “Yet do I rejoice in my God, and know in whom I have believed, and only pray that the fire may consume the dross; as to the gold, that is imperishable. No real evil can come to me, so I fear nothing for the future, and only suffer in the present tense. God, the mighty God, is mine, of that I am sure, and I know that He knows that though heart and flesh fail, I am all the while desiring[Pg 179] and trying for His will alone.” As to money, for which there was imminent necessity, she said: “Money, I suppose, is as plenty with Him now as it always has been, and if He sees it is really best, He will doubtless help me.” At one time her husband wrote that he was sick a-bed and all but dead; he did not ever expect to see his family again; wanted to know how she would manage in case she was left a widow; he knew she would get into debt and never get out; he wondered at her courage, thought she was very sanguine, warned her to be prudent, as there would not be much to live on in case of death, etc., etc. This letter Mrs. Stowe read and poked into the fire. Then she proceeded with her writing. “You are not able just now to bear anything, my dear husband,” she replied; “therefore, trust all to me; I never doubt or despair. I am already making arrangements to raise money.”

Now, how was the little woman to “raise money”? Of course by writing. Certain of her friends, pitying her trials, copied and sent a number of her sketches to some liberally paying Annuals with her name. With the money earned in this way she bought a feather-bed! This was considered a profitable investment, and if the Shakespearean fashion of mentioning a treasured bed in the codicil of a will were to be followed, it might be suggested that here would be found the article most deserving of mention as an heirloom in successive testaments!

After this Mrs. Stowe thought that she had discovered[Pg 180] the philosopher’s stone! So when a new carpet or mattress was going to be needed or when at the close of the year it began to be evident that her accounts, like Dora’s, “wouldn’t add up,” she used to say to her faithful friend and factotum, the governess, who shared all her joys and sorrows, “Now, Anna, if you will keep the babies and attend to the house for one day, I will write a piece and then we shall be out of the scrape.” She began to make overtures to various editors. She wrote her husband: “I have sent some pieces to W. If he accepts them and pays you for them, take the money and use it as you see necessary; if not, be sure to send the pieces back to me. I am strong in spirit; and God, who has been with me in so many straits, will not desert me now. I know Him well; He is my Father, and though I may be a blind and erring child, He will help me for all that. My trust through all errors and sins is in Him. He will help us, and His arms are about us, so we shall not sink, my dear husband.”

Her early successes filled the heart of Professor Stowe with pride and with the desire that she should adopt a literary career. It was so written, he declared, in the book of fate, and she should make all her calculations accordingly. She must get a good stock of health and brush up her mind. She should drop the “E” out of her name because it only encumbered the name and interfered with its flow and harmony. “Harriet Beecher Stowe” it[Pg 181] should be, a name euphonious and flowing and full of meaning. “Then my word for it,” he said enthusiastically, “your husband will lift up his head in the gate, and your children will rise up and call you blessed.”

Of the tremendous odds under which Mrs. Stowe for a time pursued her literary labors, her sister Catherine gives an amusing account. Harriet had promised that she would get at a certain story when the house-cleaning was done and when baby’s teeth were through! Catherine said that the house-cleaning could be deferred one day longer and as to baby’s teeth, she did not see that there would ever be any end to them; she must have the manuscript that day, she said, for she had promised it to the editor. “Come, my dear,” she said, “in three hours you can finish the courtship, marriage, catastrophe, and all, and this three hours of your brains will earn enough to pay for all the sewing your fingers can do for a year to come. Two dollars a page, my dear, and you can write a page in fifteen minutes!” But Harriet called her sister’s attention to the fact that there was a baby in her arms and two pussies by her side, a great baking in the kitchen to be done, and a green girl to help—it was clearly out of the question for that day at least. Catherine would not take “no” for an answer.

“‘No, no; let us have another trial. You can dictate as easily as you can write. Come, I can set the baby in this clothes-basket and give him some[Pg 182] mischief or other to keep him quiet; you shall dictate and I will write. Now this is the place where you left off; you were describing the scene between Ellen and her lover; the last sentence was, “Borne down by the tide of agony, she leaned her head on her hands, the tears streamed through her fingers, and her whole frame shook with convulsive sobs.” What shall I write next?’

“‘Come,’ said I. ‘“The tears streamed through her fingers and her whole frame shook with convulsive sobs.” What next?’

“Harriet paused and looked musingly out of the window as she turned her mind to her story. ‘You may write now,’ she said, and she dictated as follows:

“‘“Her lover wept with her, nor dared he again to touch the point so sacredly guarded.” Mina, roll that crust a little thinner! “He spoke in soothing tones.” Mina, poke the coals in the oven.’

“‘Here,’ said I; ‘let me direct Mina about these matters, and write a while yourself.’

“Harriet took the pen and patiently set herself to the work. For a while my culinary knowledge and skill were proof to all Mina’s investigating inquiries, and they did not fail till I saw two pages completed.

“‘You have done bravely,’ said I as I read over[Pg 183] the manuscript; ‘now you must direct Mina a while. Meantime dictate and I will write.’

“Never was there a more docile literary lady than Harriet. Without a word of objection she followed my request.

“‘I am ready to write,’ said I. ‘The last sentence was: “What is this life to one who has suffered as I have?” What next?’

“Harriet brushed the flour off her apron and sat down for a moment in a muse. Then she dictated as follows:

“‘“Under the breaking of my heart I have borne up. I have borne up under all that tries a woman—but this thought—oh, Henry!”’

“‘No, you may let that alone just now,’ replied Harriet. She then proceeded:

“‘“I know my duty to my children. I see the hour must come. You must take them, Henry; they are my last earthly comfort.”’

“‘Ma’am, what shall I do with these egg shells and all this truck here?’ interrupted Mina.

“‘“You must take them away. It may be—perhaps it must be—that I shall soon follow, but the breaking heart of a wife still pleads, ‘a little longer, a little longer.’”’

“‘“A little longer, a little longer,”’ I repeated in a dolorous tone, and we burst into a laugh.

“Thus we went on, cooking, writing, nursing and laughing till I finally accomplished my object. The piece was finished, copied, and the next day sent to the editor.”

Some writer of to-day has complained that this tale of Mrs. Stowe’s habit of writing with the bread board in her lap had a great influence for harm on later writers in that it seems to furnish proof that a woman who is compelled to combine housekeeping and writing can do the writing any time and anywhere, right amid the business of the kitchen. This, of course, Mrs. Stowe would have been the first to deny. In fact, when it was found that she could write acceptably, and her husband said she was born for that work and must fulfill her destiny, she sent this appeal to him: “If I am to write I must have a room to myself which shall be my room. I have, in my own mind, pitched on[Pg 185] Mrs. W.’s room. I can put the stove in it. I have bought a cheap carpet for it ... and I only beg in addition that you will let me change the glass door from the nursery into that room and keep my plants there, and then I shall be quite happy. All last winter I felt the need of some place where I could go and be quiet and satisfied.... We can eat by our cooking-stove and the children can be washed and dressed and keep their playthings in the room above.... You can study by the parlor fire, and I and my plants, etc., will take the other room. I shall take my work and all my things there, and feel settled and quiet.” That she should feel so was absolutely necessary if she was to do any real work in writing. Her husband was most responsive. He wrote in reply: “And now, my dear wife, I want you to come home as quick as you can. The fact is that I cannot live without you, and if we were not so prodigious poor I would come for you at once. There is no woman like you in this wide world. Who else has so much talent with so little self-conceit; so much reputation with so little affectation; so much literature with so little nonsense; so much enterprise with so little extravagance; so much tongue with so little scold; so much sweetness with so little softness; so much of so many things and so little of so many other things?”

In answer to this beautiful love-making Mrs. Stowe could say: “If you were not already my[Pg 186] dearly-loved husband I should certainly fall in love with you.” And we do not wonder!

Thus far we have seen the heroine of this life story tried and disciplined by toil and narrowed means; but the light of love has been about her and her faith and her buoyancy of spirit have not failed. How will it be if a great sorrow comes, one that bereaves her of one of her greatest treasures? It seems that while she had the children about her she felt that all losses were turned into blessings. In January, 1849, she writes to her friend Georgiana May to tell her that for six months after she came home from the water-cure she had had neuralgia in the eyes so that she could not have any daylight in the room, and that she had been so burdened and loaded with cares as to drain her dry of all capacity of thought, feeling or memory; yet, in spite of all that she cried out with the greatest buoyancy, “Well, Georgy, I am thirty-six years old! I am glad of it. I like to grow old and have six children and cares endless. I wish you could see me with my flock all around me. They sum up my cares, and were they gone I should ask myself, What now remains to be done? They are my work, over which I fear and tremble.”

The words seemed almost like a premonition of what was to come to her in the desolate summer of 1849. A malignant epidemic of cholera broke out in the city and spread alarmingly. One hundred and twenty deaths occurred sometimes on[Pg 187] one day. The Seminary was turned into a hospital for the care of the sick students. The gloom and sorrow of the time had to be borne by her alone, for Professor Stowe was himself at this time at Brattleboro on account of the failure of his own health. At last her own children were attacked and, after a period of acute suspense, little Samuel Charles succumbed to the disease. Broken-hearted over this crushing sorrow, Mrs. Stowe could yet give loving sympathy to those around her who were suffering as she. “I write as if there were no sorrow like my sorrow,” she said to her husband, “yet there has been in this city ... scarce a house without its dead. This heartbreak, this anguish, has been everywhere, and where it will end God only knows.” It was her only prayer to God that such anguish as hers might not be suffered in vain. She felt that she never could be consoled unless the crushing of her own heart might enable her to work out some great good to others. This deep prayer was to be fulfilled in a way of which she had not yet dreamed.

When Mrs. Stowe was teaching in the Hartford School she was not without pupils that were full of mischief. One of these, being very fond of animals and bugs of all kinds, used to bring her favorites and install them in the desk, shutting down the wide cover as a door to their prison until she should get a chance to show them to her best-loved teacher, Miss Harriet Beecher, who could look unappalled into the desk with its nests of spiders or its families of toads, for there was not a creature that God could create that Harriet did not love. Nearly every novel that she ever wrote includes in its characters some favorite dog or cat; they were characters, too, for they were as different and as individual as people. Then there is her book called “Queer Little People,” where she tells tales about the Nutcracker family of Nutcracker Lodge, about Tip-top, Toddy, and Speckle of the Robin family, about that fascinating Hum, son of Buz, the humming-bird that was[Pg 189] blown in at the window on a chilly day at the seashore, about the Squirrels that lived in a house, about the Mrs. Magpie that put on such airs and could not be cut, and about all the congregation of Carlos and Rovers and Princes, including the wonderful high-bred Giglio who was destined to an early demise, and the aristocratic Italian dog Florence who as they were one day riding along through the streets of Rome barked a familiar greeting to the Pope. Aunt Esther’s wonderful power in telling stories about animals, nineteen in a row on rats only, seems to have been handed down to her clever niece.

Well, this mischievous pupil at Hartford had one morning only one small katydid in her desk. It was very interesting in its fine dress of green and silver, with wings of point lace from Mother Nature’s finest web. It perked itself and stood up airily as if it knew that it was about to be immortalized in a human story. Harriet’s fancy saw the possibilities. She said to the student, “You write a story about it.”

“Yes, you can. Come; you write one and I will write one, too; then we will read them to each other.”

Harriet wrote that story and the copy of it in her own hand is to-day one of the treasures of that same pupil. The tale was also published[Pg 190] later in “Queer Little People.” Strangely enough this story may serve to prove what Harriet Beecher Stowe’s feeling was even in her early life on the great matter that she made the theme of her greatest book.

The story is this: Miss Katydid consulted her cousin, the gallant Colonel Katydid, about the invitations to a grand party that she wanted to give. She was to ask only the higher circles, the Fireflies, of course, and the Butterflies; also the Moths, even though they were rather dull people, indelicately ate up ermine capes and got indigestion thereby. Then they must have that worthy family, the Bees, of course; the Bumblebees, too, who were so dashing and brilliant; the spiteful Hornets, just because they were so spiteful and must not be offended, and the plebeian Mosquitoes since they were becoming literary and had very sharp pens, and—the Crickets—should they be asked? The Locusts, of course, a very old and distinguished family, and the Grasshoppers, though they were not of much account, but the Crickets—no! One must draw the line somewhere.

“Oh, that’s it, is it? Excuse me, but I have been living in France where these distinctions are wholly unknown, and I have not yet got myself in the train of fashionable ideas here.”

“Well, then, let me teach you. You know we republicans go for no distinctions except those created by Nature herself, and we found our rank upon color, because it is clearly a thing that none has any hand in but our Maker. You see?”

“I’m surprised to hear the question. The only true color—the only proper one—is our color, to be sure. A lovely pea-green is the precise shade on which to found aristocratic distinction.... Society would become dreadfully mixed if it were not fortunately ordered that the Crickets are as black as jet. The fact is that a class to be looked down upon is necessary to all elegant society, and if the Crickets were not black, we could not keep them down, because, as everybody knows, they are often cleverer than we.... Their being black is a convenience, because, as long as we are green and they black, we have a superiority that never can be taken from us. Don’t you see now?”

The Colonel saw. The party was held; the Crickets, being very musical, were asked to play for the dancing and came in concourses to do so. The ball went on until daybreak, so that it seemed that every leaf in the forest was alive. In[Pg 192] fact those dissipated Katydids kept up this sort of thing till Parson To-whit preached against it and even till the celebrated Jack Frost epidemic occurred in the month of September.

Plainly Harriet had made up her mind that color was never a fit basis for social distinctions. One could, perhaps, even further back in her life, find sources for the conviction that to hold any person in a subject state because of the color of his skin was the greatest injustice. She had in Litchfield heard her father preach sermons on the subject of slavery and offer prayers for the slaves that had made her heart throb and ache. And when her Aunt Mary, spoken of in an earlier chapter, came from San Domingo and told of the sufferings of slaves as she had witnessed them there, her feeling was deepened and intensified.

As early as 1837 Catherine Beecher published a small book called “An Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism with Reference to the Duty of American Females.” It was written in answer to a movement to induce women to join the Abolition Society. She opposed this movement strongly. She agreed with the members of the society in thinking slavery an evil, but she was most disinclined to any radical measures against it. Indeed she spent most of her time in criticizing the unwise and hasty measures of the abolitionists, their undue urgency and sledgehammer methods.

Sister Catherine, however, showed some foresight[Pg 193] when she said, “It is my full conviction that if insurrection does burst forth, and there be the least prospect to the cause of the slave, there will be men from the North and West,11 standing breast to breast, with murderous weapons, in opposing ranks.” She counseled calm, rational Christian discussion as the only proper method of securing the ends of safety and peace. It seems that Catherine, with all her acumen, did not in the least realize that this was to be a case where benignity, urbanity, meekness and benevolence would not serve; and while she touches the idea of a possible “standing breast to breast with murderous weapons in opposing ranks,” the very fact that she can speak of it so calmly shows that it is now a matter of rhetoric with her rather than of shuddering prophecy. In her serene unconsciousness that the forces of war were even then forming, Catherine Beecher was not by any means alone. Almost to the last minute many, or perhaps most, of our great statesmen did not in the least imagine that sections of a people speaking one language, consecrated in their close relationship by like struggles in the past and united by like ideals and hopes for the future, could be separated by the sword over a mere difference of opinion as to the matter of holding slaves. We must try to remember that no one was really aware of this beforehand or we shall fail to understand[Pg 194] why the formation of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s thought on this subject was so gradual. No doubt she was influenced by such a statement of views as her sister made in her book; as a result of this, and perhaps of other influences of like kind, she was for years trying to keep the subject of slavery as much as possible out of her mind. To her it was a horror in a distant part of the world that she could do nothing to mitigate, and if she should let her mind dwell upon it, she would be unable to do the duties that lay at hand. It seemed a subject “too painful to inquire into, and one that advancing light and civilization would live down.”12

Meantime she was being quietly prepared in one corner of the world for a fit and not inconspicuous part in the thrilling drama of emancipation. She seems to have had a real human interest in the negroes as the expression of a certain individual and racial character. Nearly every novel she wrote had first or last a negro character. These dusky people of her imaginary world if placed by themselves would form a collection of highly individualized portraits, all taken from her picture gallery of actual memories. At Easthampton, Dr. Beecher had preached to an adjacent colony of colored people and when the family moved to Litchfield “one Dinah” and “one Zillah” came with the caravan and formed a very necessary part of the[Pg 195] household at the parsonage. There were always colored servants to help about the work in the big Beecher home. One of these, whose name was Candace, a portly old black washerwoman, would sometimes take the little Harriet aside and tell her with tears about the saintly virtues of her departed mother. When Harriet visited her aristocratic relatives in Guilford and was taught the catechism by her Aunt Harriet, black Dinah, along with Harry, the bound boy, ranged at a respectful distance behind her, was taught also. “Dine” was a great friend of Harriet’s; they had many frolics together and the black playmate told the little girl many stories and made herself very interesting.

When the Beechers came to live in Litchfield they found colored people still living there who had been born slaves. “Old Grimes,” famous in song and story, was a Litchfieldian slave; his character was sufficiently notorious for his death to be chronicled in the affecting lines:

This happened in the early days, but we would fain believe that the song was a favorite by the Parsonage fireplace.

The Beechers considered their dark-skinned household helpers as members of the family, and[Pg 196] absent children invariably included them when they sent messages of affection back to the home. When the Beecher party were pausing in New York on their way to Ohio, the faithful Zillah came to call upon them; Harriet said that she was quite unchanged, her voice soft as ever, as she told them that she was now in very comfortable circumstances. Harriet said that she would be glad if she were quite sure to fill up her chink in this mortal life as well as Zillah did!

All of these negroes were the descendants of the slaves of an earlier period, long since freed, who had lived for many generations on terms of equality and industrial exchange among gentle, high-born people. Harriet had known and met them on terms of mutual respect. It would have been inconceivable to her to enter into relations as owner and slave with that companionable “Dine” or that soft-voiced, ladylike Zillah.

As a result of her experience, she approached the slave question not as a mere theorist. It is evident that it cannot with truth be said that her study of it dated from the time of her settlement in Cincinnati; but it is certain that when she did come to live in Ohio, further opportunities were given her to know the conditions in her own country in regard to this matter. In New England she had been in a land of theories of human freedom; now she was to come into contact with facts; she was[Pg 197] to have her heart bleed for the human misery and oppression which she saw.

The Belle Rivière was the dividing line between slave country and free country, Kentucky on the south being a slave state and Ohio on the north being ardently anti-slavery. And after the movement for freeing the slaves began, there was formed an “underground railroad”—that is, a series of farmhouses and homes that served as stations, at convenient distances from each other, where friendly people lived with whom the escaping slaves could find shelter, from Cincinnati all across the state to Canada. By this means any fugitive could be taken by night on horseback or in a covered wagon from station to station, until he passed beyond the Canadian boundaries where he was under the protection of the British power.

It is evident that there was at that time scarcely a spot in the United States where the excitement and irritation of the slavery agitation ran so high. People in Cincinnati had “property” (consisting of slaves) over the line in Kentucky and people in Kentucky were seeking their “property” that was running off to Ohio.

Negroes were negotiable currency; they were collateral security on half the contracts that were at that time being made between the thriving men of Cincinnati and the planters of the adjoining slave states. It was natural that when the structure of business included this kind of property and[Pg 198] no one was willing to open the case of the rightfulness of keeping possession in that form at all, the excitement of the discussion should rise to a great pitch. It did reach such a height at last that there were mobs in the streets and danger to the lives of all about the city and the region.

Meantime Mrs. Stowe’s family were pursuing the even tenor of their way in the Walnut Hills suburb. Her husband was busied with Biblical exegeses, and she was giving her attention chiefly to pinafores and dishwashing; but each of them took the liveliest interest in what was going on. Mrs. Stowe’s brother Henry was one of the editors of the Cincinnati Journal and he took a great part in the activities of the hour; Mrs. Stowe also did some writing for his paper. Yet all this is in the very midst of the period in her life when, as she afterward said, she was trying her best not to think of the workings of slavery at all, because she did not see what could be done about it and could not bear to think about a wrong that she could do nothing to prevent!

Meantime the circle of friends about Mrs. Stowe must have thrashed out the whole subject, trying, as were many people elsewhere, to decide what was the right course to pursue. Good people felt that something ought to be done but were divided as to what was the wisest step to take first. There were extremists on both sides and many angry differences of opinion. Mrs. Stowe thought that[Pg 199] no one could have the system of slavery brought home to him without an irrepressible desire to do something; but what was there to be done?

For a time she, with many others, believed that the solution must lie in some intermediate position, in some scheme like the proposal of the Colonization Society to send the negroes back to Africa, or perhaps in some segregation plan. That a civil war could be the outcome of the disagreement was not imagined.

Among the students in the Theological Seminary was a young enthusiast named Theodore Weld who, in a lecturing tour through the southern states, had seen much of slavery and slave owners, and who, as a result, held the strongest views against the system, which he did not hesitate to declare. He had converted to his views Mr. J. G. Birney, of Huntsville, Alabama, who then proceeded to free his slaves and become an ardent supporter of the doctrine. Together with Dr. Bailey of Cincinnati he founded a paper called The Philanthropist. His strong anti-slavery utterances in this paper aroused much question in that city in the summer and fall of 1836.

As matters grew more serious the excitement increased. The printing establishment was mobbed and when Mrs. Stowe saw her brother Henry putting pistols in order, declaring, with set face, that he stood ready to fight if need be, she could see how critical was the time. The mobs even threatened[Pg 200] the houses of all that professed abolition sentiments and there was danger that the Theological Seminary might be attacked. From her home at Walnut Hills, Mrs. Stowe could see the light of the burning houses upon the sky for many nights. What was right to think or do, she could not see, but whatever the outcome was she thought that the rule of mob was wrong. While she believed the cause was a just one, she deplored the excesses of the excited people. As for herself, she was not afraid. They were protected, she said afterward in her funny way, by the distance of the Seminary from the city and by the providential depth and adhesiveness of the Cincinnati mud. She was, however, excited, indignant, and thoroughly aroused. She hoped that Mr. Birney would stand his ground in his fireproof building and assert his rights. If she were a man, she cried, she would go and she believed she could take good care of at least one window.

By this time Mrs. Stowe had gained some practical knowledge of what the slavery system really meant. When she had been but one year in Cincinnati she had gone with friends to visit a plantation across the river. Here she had seen a happy prosperous slave life, under owners that seemed to be the sincere well-wishers of the negroes who served them. There was little to shock or distress her in what she saw. Most of the day she moved about as one in a dream. She sat apart, heeding[Pg 201] not the antics and gambols of the little darkies. But we know that the scenes she saw that day were unconsciously laid up in her memory to be recalled when the building of the book had come into her mind and she needed the material for her great purpose. Years afterward, when the friend who accompanied her on that Kentucky visit read the account of the doings on the Shelby Farm as Mrs. Stowe depicted them in the “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” she saw in the description an exact correspondence to the events of that day as she remembered them.

Here was, then, a picture of the slave system at its best. Perhaps her gravity and absorption during the picnic merriment of the day was caused by the thought that the owners of the happy plantation had it in their power to separate any husband and father there from his family or any little girl from her mother, and, if he needed the money, sell them to slave traders who would carry them “down the river” to be lost to their own forever. Of what such a fate might mean Mrs. Stowe learned from her brother Charles, who acted for some months as collecting agent for a New Orleans commission house. On one of the trips up the Red River he had come upon a plantation where the slaves were treated with a brutality almost indescribable. Of this he tried to draw a faithful picture in his next letter to his sister, and she had thus placed in her storehouse another chapter for the book she was unconsciously preparing to write. Almost incredible[Pg 202] as it may seem, the Legree plantation was, therefore, a scene taken directly from life. In another letter Charles Beecher told how from the deck of a steamer on which he was traveling he had seen a slave mother seek death by springing into the river with her child clasped to her bosom. She preferred death for herself and her child rather than to allow her little girl to enter the life into which she knew she would be sold.

Still other ways of seeing the under side of the movement that was going on were being afforded the quiet little woman in the Cincinnati suburb. Every month there was something happening. A press that printed abolition matter was destroyed, a house was mobbed, a free negro was kidnapped, the shop of an abolitionist was riddled, or a negro schoolhouse razed to the ground. And in the mobs of 1840 there was a general attack upon the negro population in the midst of which rescued slaves were caught and hurried back across the line to their plantations. Houses were battered down by cannon, violence and crime naturally followed in the wake of mob law. The smoke of the conflagration could be seen from the house where Mrs. Stowe lived and the sorrowful processions of colored people with what remained of their possessions starting out for Canada, passed by her door; mothers passed with children in their arms or toddling along by their side, and discouraged men, bearing heavy burdens. Sometimes at night[Pg 203] she heard the rattle of a big covered wagon in which she would be sure was an escaping woman being helped to the border.

In such ways as these Mrs. Stowe was unconsciously trained for a special work. So far the preparation had been mostly by hearsay. The practical demonstrations that followed it were to be even more effective.

That charming writer and whole-souled man, Colonel T. W. Higginson, somewhere tells us that all the things he ever heard or read about slavery did not fix in his soul such a hostility to it as a single scene in a Missouri slave market that he once saw. He says that as he sat here, a purchaser came in to buy a little girl to wait on his wife. Colonel Higginson saw three little sisters brought in who were from eight to twelve years old; they were mulattoes, with sweet, gentle manners; they had evidently been taken good care of, and their pink calico frocks were clean and whole. He saw the gentleman choose one of them and heard him ask her, good-naturedly enough, if she did not wish to go with him. She burst into tears and said, “I would rather stay with my mother.”13 But her tears were as powerless, of course, as so many salt drops from the ocean.

That was the story. All the horrors of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” he said, all the stories told him by fugitive slaves, the scarred backs he afterward saw by dozens among colored recruits, did not impress him as did that hour in the gaol. The whole probable career of that poor, wronged, motherless, shrinking child passed before his mind. It seemed to him that a man must be utterly lost to all manly instincts who would not give his life to overthrow such a system; and he thought that a woman who could tolerate, much less defend it, could not herself be true, could not be pure, or must be fearfully and grossly ignorant.

Of such ignorance as this no one can accuse Mrs. Stowe. The personal touch that should fire knowledge into passion and make her keenly feel what had been hitherto but a part of her theory she also was to receive.

From her earliest housekeeping she had had “help” from the colony of Cincinnati colored people. In the year 1839 a certain colored girl came to work for her who had been a slave, but who had been brought by her mistress into Ohio and left there, and thus by the laws of Ohio made free. But by this time a new national requirement was under discussion called the Fugitive Slave Law; by this law the people of such a state as Ohio were to be commanded to give back to their masters all colored persons found in their territory, unless they had been set free by special papers[Pg 206] stating the fact and showing that payment had been made to the former owners. By this law the master of the girl that worked for Mrs. Stowe could come over the line and if he could find his former slave could reclaim her. And all people were to be required to aid the owners to gain possession of their runaway slaves. People who did not believe in the justice of such a law as this thought it right to evade it; and among these was the Beecher family. So when it was known that the former master of the girl was in the city looking for his property, Professor Stowe and Henry planned to conceal the girl from him. They put the fugitive in a carriage and together drove out into the country in the darkest hours of a dismal, stormy night. Following along Mill Creek to the first “station” in the underground railway, they put her in the care of the sturdy Quaker farmer, Mr. John Vanzandt, who protected her until she could be taken further on her way to Canada.

This is the law that is referred to in Chapter IX of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” by Mrs. Bird, that timid, blushing little woman who was about four feet in height, had mild blue eyes and a peach-blow complexion, and the gentlest, sweetest voice in the world; as for her courage, a moderate-sized cock turkey had been known to put her to rout at the very first gobble, and a stout house dog of moderate capacity would bring her into subjection merely by a show of his teeth. And yet when she[Pg 207] heard of this new law she stood up before her husband (who was a Senator and had voted for it!) and cried out, “Now, John, I want to know if you think such a law as that is right and Christian?” Her husband, the Senator, tried to argue her out of her prejudice, but did not succeed; and then, as every one remembers, this same sound-hearted Senator was the first to let his heart have sway when one of the poor runaways came distressed and hunted to the door asking for rescue.

It was Eliza, who had made her way across the river, springing from ice-block to ice-block, in the way so often pictured, and, strange to say, so true also to the fact. Kind Mrs. Bird made her comfortable on a settle by the fire. After this Eliza told the pathetic story of her escape and gave the real deep reason why she desired to leave her home in Kentucky. It was not merely a passion for freedom, though that intensely American trait was no doubt the fundamental cause why many colored people were willing to leave owners that gave them good homes and had not been specially unkind to them to launch out upon a hazardous attempt to win support in commercial lines for which they had no training. Let us read this passage, and find in it the aspect that most appealed to the soul of Harriet Beecher Stowe.

“‘What could induce you to leave a good home, then, and run away, and go through such dangers?’

“The woman looked up at Mrs. Bird with a keen, scrutinizing glance, and it did not escape her that she was dressed in deep mourning.

“The question was unexpected, and it was a thrust on a new wound; for it was only a month since a darling child of the family had been laid in the grave.

“Mr. Bird turned around and walked to the window, and Mrs. Bird burst into tears; but, recovering her voice, she said:

“‘Then you will feel for me. I have lost two, one after another, ... and I had only this one left.... And, ma’am, they were going to take him away from me—to sell him—sell him down south, ma’am, to go all alone—a baby that had never been away from his mother in his life! I couldn’t stand it, ma’am.... And when I knew the papers were signed, and he was sold, I took him and came off in the night; and they chased[Pg 209] me—the man that bought him and some of Mas’r’s folks—and they were coming down right behind me, and I heard ’em. I jumped right on to the ice; and how I got across I don’t know—but, first thing I knew, a man was helping me up the bank.’”

This picture, then, shows us what it was that seemed most terrible to the mother heart of Mrs. Stowe. When Mrs. Bird came to hunt for some clothing that she could give to Eliza and her child, she sought the drawer where the precious treasures of her own lost baby were sacredly stored. She “opened the little bedroom door adjoining her room, and, taking the candle, set it down on the top of the bureau there; then from a small recess she took a key, and put it thoughtfully in the lock of a drawer, and made a sudden pause, while two boys, who, boylike, had followed close on her heels, stood looking with silent, significant glances at their mother....

“Mrs. Bird slowly opened the drawer. There were little coats of many a form and pattern, piles of aprons, and rows of small stockings; and even a pair of little shoes, worn and rubbed at the toes, were peeping from the folds of a paper. There was a toy horse and wagon, a top, a ball—memorials gathered with many a tear and many a heartbreak. She sat down by the drawer, and, leaning her head on her hands over it wept till the tears fell through her fingers into the drawer; then suddenly raising her head she began with nervous[Pg 210] haste selecting the plainest and most substantial articles and gathering them into a bundle.

“‘Mamma,’ said one of the boys, ‘are you going to give away those things?’

“‘My dear boys,’ she said softly and earnestly, ‘if our dear, loving little Henry looks down from Heaven he would be glad to have us do this. I could not find it in my heart to give them away to any common person—to anybody that was happy; but I give them to a mother more heart-broken and sorrowful than I am; and I hope God will send his blessings with them!’”

Mrs. Stowe herself had learned what it means to the mother to have her child taken from her. In the depths of her own sorrow, when her most beautiful and beloved boy was lying on his dying bed, she had prayed that her anguish might not be suffered in vain. Her prayer was being answered in the great comprehension coming to her that the separation of the family tie was the most poignant wrong in the system of slavery. This feeling she embodied supremely in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” the very epic of human compassion. At the time of writing this great book her mind was full, her hand was trained, her soul was aflame. When the great inspiration came she was not disobedient to the heavenly vision, but asking no question how or why, she wrote as she was moved to write. How this happened is now to be told.

In the year 1850 the Stowe family were having[Pg 211] their first taste of a drizzling, inexorable, northeast storm in the State of Maine. It was while they were getting settled in this new home that the news came to them of the final passing of the Fugitive Slave Act—an event that sent sweeping across the north a furore of indignation. On her way to the new home in Brunswick, Maine, Mrs. Stowe stayed for ten days in Boston at the home of her brother Edward. Here she was in the very hotbed of the abolitionists; and as she heard of the sufferings of the slaves that were risking all to reach the Canada line beyond which they were safe, and of the cruelties inflicted upon those so hapless as to be taken back to their former owners, she cried, “It is incredible, amazing, mournful! I feel as if I should be willing to sink with it, were all this sin and misery to sink in the sea!” The cry of this great sorrow followed her after she was settled in her new home; she remembered all these things and pondered them in her heart; and when she bent over her own new child as he lay sleeping beside her at night, and thought of the slave mothers whose babies had been taken away from them, her tears fell thick upon his sleeping face.

Time went on and things did not get any better. Mrs. Stowe was writing to people everywhere north and south to gather unimpeachable testimony on all phases of the slave system, but nothing she heard in any way modified her opinion or her feeling. One day her sister-in-law, Mrs. Edward Beecher,[Pg 212] in Boston, wrote her: “Now, Hattie, if I could use a pen as you can I would write something that would make this whole nation feel what an accursed thing slavery is.” This touched Mrs. Stowe to the quick. She determined that she would heed the call. “I will write something—I will if I live,” she said as she rose with a determined gesture. She wrote to thank her sister-in-law for the letter. She said: “As long as the baby sleeps with me nights I cannot do anything, but I will do it at last. I will do that thing if I live.”

About this time her brother, Henry Ward Beecher, came to visit her. They sat up all night talking over the thrilling question of the hour. She confided to him that she intended to write something. He told her to do this, and he would scatter the book as thick as leaves of Vallombrosa!

Soon after this, as she was sitting among the worshipers at the Sabbath morning communion service, a vision passed before her mind, showing in minutest detail one whole scene of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Even as Colonel Higginson, in the passage quoted a few pages back, saw in his imagination the inevitable life of that little girl in the slave market, so she realized with the vividness of a dream, the central climax of her book. It was the death scene of the wonderful old negro, Uncle Tom, who in the midst of his lowly state is always made to preserve a certain dignity and even charm. She has pictured him as a man for whose character[Pg 213] only the highest reverence can be felt. His spirit was of a meekness so Christ-like that no outrage, no suffering, could ruffle its calm, nor could the steadfastness of his faith be shaken. Yet the effect is not of softness, but rather of a stern and commanding strength. After a life that illustrated nearly all of the ups and downs of slavery, a final misfortune came to him in the fact that he chanced to know about the plans for escape that some of his fellow-slaves had made. To compel him to yield up these secrets he was at the command of his master brutally whipped all one night long, and he died the next day as the result of this punishment. Yet toward this merciless master he cherished no ill feeling. Like his Lord and Master, he returned blessing for cursing; he was anxious only for the salvation of his enemies. “‘He ain’t done me no real harm—only opened the gate of the kingdom for me; that’s all!’ he said.” His last words were, “‘Who—who—who shall separate us from the love of Christ?’” And with a smile he fell asleep.

The description of this scene Mrs. Stowe wrote down at white heat, and when the first draft was made she called her children and had them stand about her while she read it to them. As she read the tears streamed down their faces, and one of them, a boy ten years old, clinched his fists and cried, “Oh, mamma, slavery is the most cruel thing in the world!” After a while their father came in and he read and cried, too. He said to her, “You[Pg 214] must do something with this,” and she answered quietly, “I mean to.” From then on, as she had opportunity, amid extraordinary household duties, the care of six children and a new baby, with various guests, with unskilled help, and with myriad distractions, she wrote on until the great book was finished. Her mind was so full of the subject and her vision of the incidents for the story was so clear that the words came rushing to her brain faster than she could write them down. She had the feeling that the story was in possession of her and not she in possession of the story; or rather as if some divine power were urging her on and giving her the words to set down. This strange experience was remembered by her as a time when the Lord Himself used her as an instrument of His purpose.

“Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was dispatched chapter by chapter, almost before the ink was dry, to the editor of The National Era, an anti-slavery paper published in Washington, in which the story ran from June, 1851, to April, 1852. The modest author who was accustomed to think of herself as a mere household drudge with very few ideas beyond babies and housekeeping, did not dream what was in store for her. In fact, she had at first a profound feeling of discouragement; she feared the book would fall to the ground unnoticed and do no good for the cause. That this might not happen, she sent copies to significant persons in England and in her own country to call their attention to the work and to win their interest if possible. Charles Dickens, Prince Albert, Macaulay, Charles Kingsley, Lord Carlisle and the Earl of Shaftsbury received copies and acknowledged them in courteous and feeling letters.

But Mrs. Stowe found that far from needing help from the great to make it find its way, her book of love and pity had struck a chord in the universal heart. It can almost be said of her as it was of Byron that she awoke one morning and found herself famous. No book in American literature ever achieved so immediate and so wide a popularity. There was an unprecedented call for it. Three thousand copies went off the first day, and soon eight power presses were kept busy night and day to supply the demand. It swept over the country, and people everywhere were reading it into the small hours of the night, weeping and sobbing over the death of little Eva and over the heroism of Uncle Tom. Before the year was over, more than three hundred thousand copies had been sold. As Emerson said, it “found readers in the parlor, the nursery and the kitchen of every household.”

The daughter of William Lloyd Garrison, Mrs. Henry Villard, in a passage recently written, said: “I read it as a little child with tears and sobs, as did many an older person, thrilled by its recital of the horrors of slavery, and touched by the kindness of those who were slaveholders, contrary to their wishes and the dictates of conscience. A moral whirlwind followed in its path, the anti-slavery agitation which preceded it having prepared the way for its wonderful reception in the north.”

Mrs. Stowe was now called the greatest of American women; her book was declared “a work of undoubted[Pg 217] genius”; it was “epoch-making”; Julia Ward Howe called it an “offering on the altar of a heavenly intuition, destined to go down to posterity as of supreme desert and of undying memory.” The poet Whittier wrote: “What a glorious work Harriet Beecher Stowe has wrought! Thanks for the Fugitive Slave Law! Better for slavery that law had never been enacted, for it gave occasion for ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin.’”

Yet not all the breezes that blew were balmy. There were many astonished outcries, some execrations. But these things influenced the mind of the author very little. She knew that they would not change the heart of her friends toward her, and they could not change the truth. So what had she to fear?

Very soon editions began to appear in England, and within a year a million and a half copies had been sold in that country. Through France and Germany, Italy and Sweden, too, the book went like wildfire. That good, friendly soul, Frederika Bremer, wrote to Mrs. Stowe that “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” had been translated and read and praised in Sweden as no book ever was before, adding that she had an unwavering faith in the “strong humanity of the American mind.” She said: “It will ever throw out whatever is at war with that humanity; and to make it fully alive, nothing is needed but a truly strong appeal of heart to heart, and that has been done in ‘Uncle Tom.’” In France George[Pg 218] Sand wrote a notable review of the book in which she said that it was no longer permissible to those that could read not to have read it. The people devour it, she said; they cover it with tears. In a short time there were few places in Italy also where “Il Zio Tom” could not be found.

Soon the pebble that had been thrown into the water began to make wider circles. Florence Nightingale wrote to Mrs. Stowe that the British soldiers amid the hardships of far eastern campaigns read the story of heroism. The book was printed at Venice by a fraternity of Catholic Armenian monks so that in the Armenian language it now was carried in all the wanderings of that intelligent people, in the towns and villages along the banks of the Euphrates, through southern Russia, and in the farthest confines of Persia. At last it reached Bengal, and, in their own language, became a household book among the Bengalese. Flying across the straits into Siam, it reached the royal group, where a member of the family liberated her own slaves to the number of one hundred and thirty as a result of its influence, and always signed her own name “Harriet Beecher Stowe,” because of her admiration for the author of the book. Professors Lin Shu and Wei-I of Peking together made a translation into Chinese, and Professor Takenobu of the Waseda University, Tokio, translated it into Japanese.

A poem by Dr. Holmes sums up, in his characteristic[Pg 219] merry vein, the tale of the nations that learned to recognize the author of “Uncle Tom.” If we should call the roll,

Of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” Germany has nine separate translations and France thirteen, besides dramas and abridgments, and chansons, and Russia has five. In Welsh and in Italian there are three; Finnish and Flemish must now be included and Hungarian and Illyrian, Portuguese, Modern Greek and Servian; Wallachian and Wendish and Yiddish are not in Dr. Holmes’ list, but should be. By 1913 there were sixty-six translations of this almost universal book, not counting abridgments or dramas. Of English editions there are forty-three, and in this country, how many? We have lost count. It would be also quite impossible to add up the dramatic versions of Eliza’s fateful adventure.

All of this goes to show that Whittier was hardly stretching the truth when he wrote his poem

It was a long time before people could look at the book fairly and judge of its literary rank; and even to this day there are writers who call “Uncle Tom” merely a colossal piece of journalism. It was indeed written at white heat and with the swiftness of a bird’s flight. “Hurry! help! hurry! help!” must have been ringing in her ears as she wrote.

During the winter that she wrote the book she had been running through with her children the novels of Scott, and Scott is the writer to whom she is the nearest of kin in the art of writing. There was a time when the tireless hand of that great story-teller was seen by an observer in a window across the way, to go back and forth, back and forth, through the evening and the night and into the wee sma’ hours. This makes us think of Mrs. Stowe’s smooth fluent script and the lightning swiftness of her little hand. She wrote like the wind, listening not for the cackle of literary critics, but to the inner voice that kept saying, “Write!”

So it happens that its lapses of style, its carelessness of technical laws have been a stumbling block to some good souls that have fed on other traditions and theories. The truth is that words grow from age to age; laws of style perish and new laws blossom out of their graves; but a torch of human[Pg 221] sympathy once truly set alight will burn on forever.

Mr. Howells in “My Literary Passions” says that he felt the greatness of the book when he first read it; and as often as he has read it since he has seen more and more clearly that it is a very great novel. He says that the art in it is very simple and perhaps primitive, yet it is still a work of art. Its power, however, is to him inexplicable.

This is one of the greatest things that could be said about the book. It does possess that consummate quality which supreme works of art always have, namely, that their power over us is great, but that we do not see why it should be so great. Their charm is inexplicable. Mrs. Stowe’s fellow genius, George Sand, said that in art there is but one rule—to paint and to move. By this law, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” is a great work of art. It painted; it made a great people see; and it moves the whole world. The same generous critic said that Mrs. Stowe may not have “talent, but she has genius as humanity feels genius. And we ought to feel,” she said, “that genius is heart, that power is faith, that talent is sincerity, and success is sympathy, since this book overcomes us, since it penetrates the breast, pervades the spirit, and fills us with a strange sentiment of mingled tenderness and admiration for a poor negro ... gasping on a miserable pallet, his last sigh exhaled toward God.”

Time alone can pass final judgment on “Uncle[Pg 222] Tom’s Cabin.” Let a few centuries move by and if as an Epic of Compassion, dissevered from variable historical associations, it continues to console and to strengthen, then its place among masterpieces will be secure.

For “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” is not a story of slavery; the system of slavery only happened to be the material out of which the story was made. It has a far wider meaning as a story of human love and pity. As such its mission is to carry comfort to any souls that are in doubt and sorrow. It makes us feel that to have faith is possible and it reinforces our belief that God will help in time of need. A reading of “Uncle Tom” has led myriads of distraught souls to a rereading of the Bible, that book so beloved by the black hero because it gave him strength to bear his sore trials. In his “Life” of his mother, published by her son in 1889, Mr. Charles E. Stowe says that “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” shows that “under circumstances of utter desolation and despair, the religion of Christ can enable the poorest and most ignorant human being, not merely to submit, but to triumph—that the soul of the lowest and weakest, by its aid, can become strong in superhuman virtue, and rise above every threat and terror and danger in a sublime assurance of an ever-present love and an immortal life.”

When “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” had been some four months in the hands of the people, the publishers sent Mrs. Stowe a check for ten thousand dollars! Professor Stowe held this magical piece of paper in his hands and looking helplessly at his wife, said, “Why, Harriet, I never saw so much money in my life!” He had hoped that the book would be successful enough in the financial way to buy for her what she very much needed, a new silk dress. The returns from the sale, however, besides accomplishing that modest result, also brought within reach many comforts hitherto unknown in the house of the professor’s family. More than this, they assured the opportunity for foreign travel and for the beneficial meeting with people in England and elsewhere who sympathized with the cause to which Mrs. Stowe had dedicated her heart.

In the spring of 1853, then, we find her starting out for her first sea voyage. This new experience[Pg 224] with that “restless, babbling giant,” the ocean, was described in her first letter home in her accustomed merry vein. If you are going to sea, she wrote to her children, you must have everything ready; you must set your house—that is, your stateroom—in order as if you were going to be hanged, for you may be sure that in half an hour after sailing an infinite desperation will seize you in which the grasshopper will be a burden. Her voyage she declared gave her a new sympathy for babies who are rocked at home without so much as a “by your leave”; she thought it no wonder there are so many stupid people in the world! There were moments, however, when she could conquer the nervous horror she always had of that “rude, noisy old servant” of the Lord, and could feel that the ocean was always obedient to His will, and could not carry her beyond His power and love, wherever and to whatever it might bear her. At one time on a later journey she had this faith put to the test when her ship was run into by another, and she found that it did not fail her, but kept her calm and serene throughout the ordeal.

When Mrs. Stowe, together with her husband and brother, reached England a great surprise awaited them. She had had no realization of the real significance of having written a book of universal pity and love that would awaken a response in every heart among rich and poor. She was dazed that so many people came to the boat to meet her,[Pg 225] that she walked up the wharf through a long lane of kindly, welcoming faces, and that wherever she went in England, and especially in Scotland, her carriage was run after by wild flocks of sympathetic people anxious to catch one glimpse of the author of “Uncle Tom.”

She felt, she said, like a child who had set fire to a packet of gunpowder. And if on the approach to some cathedral door her way was blocked by the crowd waiting to see her as she passed in, she could only, in her amazement, quote the words, “What went ye out for to see? A reed shaken with the wind?” “It seems to me so odd,” she wrote home from England, “so odd and dreamlike that so many persons desire to see me; and now I cannot help thinking that they will think when they do, that God hath chosen the weak things of this world!”

Evidently Mrs. Stowe had very little conceit about herself. She was always a quiet, unostentatious little body, “a little bit of a woman,” as she described herself, “just as thin and dry as a pinch of snuff.” She must have been utterly wanting in vanity, for when she began to be famous and everybody was desiring to see her, she thought it all simply wonderful and declared that she was “never very much to look at” in her best days.

There have been so many things to say about Harriet Beecher that too little attention has perhaps been given in this book to her personal appearance. Let us make up for that at one stroke. When[Pg 226] the Beecher children’s stepmother came to live with them she said that the four youngest children—George, Harriet, Henry and Charles—were all very pretty, and that Harriet and Henry were as lovely children as she ever saw. Harriet combined the aquiline Foote brow with the stronger lines of the Beecher family. She was small in figure and quick in her movements. Her hands were plastic and mobile, the most controlled and manageable hands in the world; their motion made a language in itself. Her dark-brown hair that never lost a warmness of tone until the snow began to fall upon it, curled about her face, and, in the fashion that prevailed during her young ladyhood, was allowed to fall in ringlets on each side. Her eyes were of the blue-gray that takes on all colors as emotion moves the soul; they had often a far-away dreamy expression that came from her complete absorption in thought. For instance, at a luncheon in her honor she did not join in the flow of conversation at all, but sat absorbed in her own thoughts, explaining afterward that she had been making the scheme of a new book and thinking out the characters for it, and had forgotten where she was. In this respect she was like Tennyson who, under similar conditions, is said to have remarked only that he had eaten “too much, much too much!” At other times, however, Mrs. Stowe delighted her fellow guests at some dinner table by her interest in the subject discussed; her heightened color, and her[Pg 227] shining eyes, together with the ardor and good sense of her talk, the vivacity of her expression, and the nobility that characterized her points of view, charmed all that came within her circle. After such a time the hostess might go away and complain, as one did, that she had not been told beforehand how beautiful Mrs. Stowe was! The printed pictures that appeared in the English papers never did her justice. But she had too little vanity to mind that. When she saw them she was amazed at the loving kindness of her English and Scottish friends who could keep up such a warm affection for such a Gorgon. She thought that the Sphinx at the British Museum must have sat for most of them. She planned to make a collection of them to carry home to her children—they would be useful, like the Irishman’s signboard, to show where the road did not go! These monstrous pictures, however, did her this service, that everybody was surprised and relieved when they came to her and found that she was not such a perfect Gorgon after all! There was one picture made of her about this time, however, that is worthy of preservation, a beautiful drawing by Richmond. Although Mrs. Stowe said when she saw it, “I shall look like that when I am in heaven!”—still many that knew her in earlier years thought it a good likeness.

Mrs. Stowe found not only curiosity but also friendly welcome among the English people. One typically pleasant English home was opened to them[Pg 228] at once. The morning after her arrival she was asked to breakfast at the sister-in-law’s of her host, and on running over in the most informal way found forty people sitting with bonnets on waiting for a chance to meet the lion; all of which would have been embarrassing had not the friendly warmth and cordiality of the circle been made evident by their smiling faces. As she traveled along, friends arose everywhere. Now she rested in some delightful, homelike room by a cheerful fire that flickered on pictures, statuettes, bookcases and all comfortable things, with an armchair drawn up before it and a pot of moss on the table set in the center of a round pin-cushion; or if in the vicissitudes of travel she found herself in the middle of the night in the street with baggage thrown about her and a vociferous circle of cabmen declaring they could do no more to discover a lost address, she would be sure to find shelter in a quiet house which would turn out to be the very place friends had prepared for her and her party. But it was not only in the quiet homes that she found welcome; she saw the routine in a ducal castle from morning prayers on through the joyous drives and visiting of the day to the putting out of the last candle at night. With the Queen herself she had what Professor Stowe called the “pleasantest little interview that ever was.” He described her as a “real nice little body, with exceedingly pleasant, agreeable manners!” And four royal children stared their eyes[Pg 229] almost out looking at the author of “Uncle Tom” while the interview was going on.

Mrs. Stowe’s first visit to England was made on the invitation of the Anti-Slavery Society of Glasgow, and the occasion became therefore semi-official in its character. Not only was there a great deal of interest in her personality, but there was also so much enthusiasm for the cause she was held everywhere to represent that associations as well as individuals were anxious to meet her and to do honor to her. Deputations came to greet her from the cities through which she passed and others that were in the vicinity. Every community seemed bent upon putting itself on record. At Glasgow there were deputations from Paisley, Greenock, Dundee, Edinburgh; and not to be outdone by the mother island, Belfast sent one over from Ireland. At the entrance to Edinburgh the magistracy of the city met her and made approaches to her. She was carried through long passages made in the masses of the people and conducted to a gallery where she took her tea with a thousand people and thought the teapot of Hadji Baba, the father of all teakettles, must have been there to go around so large a company. Enthusiastic meetings were held and speeches were made. For the quiet little figure on the platform the answer was always given by her husband whose handsome face and fine presence won everybody to admiration and regard; and when he said that he could not imagine how any sort of[Pg 230] a written book could have brought forward such expressions of friendliness as they were showing, that he thought the book had not been written at all, that he “’spected it grew,” the vociferous applause of the audience testified not only to their delight in his sally of wit, but to the fact that they knew by heart their “Uncle Tom,” and especially their excellent Topsy.

They made a practical expression of their sympathy with the cause Mrs. Stowe represented in wonderful gifts. At Edinburgh a national penny offering, summed up in a thousand gold sovereigns, was presented to her on a silver salver; Belfast sent a bogwood casket lined with gold, carved with national symbols and containing an offering for the cause; at Surrey Chapel in London she received an inkstand, which was a beautiful piece of silver work, carved into a group of figures representing Religion with a Bible in her hand giving liberty to the slave. A band of children gave her a gold pen, and she made her only public speech in talking a little to them. Above all other gifts in interest was that presented by the Duchess of Sutherland at Stafford House in London, a bracelet made in the form of a slave’s shackle of ten links and a clasp. On one of the links was inscribed the date of the abolition of the slave trade March 25, 1807, and of slavery in the English colonies August 1, 1834. On the clasp was written the number of signatures to an Address that was presented to Mrs.[Pg 231] Stowe on the occasion of that meeting at Stafford House. The number was 562,448. Of this Address we shall hear more after a while. On the other links of the bracelet it was suggested that Mrs. Stowe should have placed the date of the freeing of slaves in our own country; but Mrs. Stowe did not at that time believe that she should live to see the day when that happy event should come about. She was, however, as we know, to have that good fortune within a dozen years, and to record it upon the other links of the historic bracelet.

Many of these meetings were marked by tremendous excitement, such meetings as England has been famous for throughout modern days and such as have brought about many reforms. Attending such a meeting and realizing the strength of the feeling that flowed under the outward expression, Mrs. Stowe said: “I do not believe that there is in all America more vehemence of democracy, more volcanic force of power, than comes out in one of these great gatherings in our old fatherland. I saw plainly enough where Concord, Lexington, and Bunker Hill came from; and it seems to me there is enough of this element of indignation at wrong, and resistance of tyranny, to found half a dozen republics as strong as we are.”

In such ways as these Mrs. Stowe was becoming acquainted with the very heart of the English and Scottish people. But it was not only the great and titled that came forward to represent the leading[Pg 232] thought in greeting this woman who stood to them for so much. In the villages through which they drove and along the roadsides, the so-called common people were ready with their greetings also. In the doorways everywhere people stood bowing and smiling, and sometimes running out to offer flowers; and little boys ran after her carriage crying out that they knew her by the curls! She wrote: “The butcher came out of his stall and the baker from his shop, the miller dusty with flour, the blooming, comely young mother with her baby in her arms, all smiling and bowing with that hearty intelligent friendly look as if they knew we should be glad to see them.” Then there were in various cities meetings especially for the working men; and as her train went along, even at night, friendly faces were waiting at the stations, good souls watching through the dark to catch one glimpse of the writer or perhaps to grasp her hand; then as the train moved away, saying, “Good night!” with the unmistakable Scotch accent, making her think that she had felt a throb of the living Scotch heart. Mrs. Stowe felt the spirit that prompted this reverential tribute, a spirit that makes one blood of all the families of earth. She, in fact, considered herself altogether inadequate and disproportionate as an object to call forth such outbursts of applause; she was most modest in her reception of them, and believed them to be, as she afterward said to a friend, but the expression of a[Pg 233] great spirit of universal brotherhood, surging forward in a huge sympathetic wave. Beneath the weight of these honors the New England simplicity of her character remained unimpaired.

Everything that happened to her she enjoyed to the utmost, and she only wished that she had a relay of bodies and could slip from a tired one into a rested one now and then! She began to be so talked out and worn out that there was hardly a chip of her left. To breakfast with forty people, lunch with three hundred, take tea with a thousand, and go to an evening mass meeting and perhaps to more receptions the same night, would be rather trying to a delicate woman who had come abroad chiefly to seek rest after the strain of writing a great book. Mrs. Stowe began to feel a weariness that made seeing people a burden. For besides answering innumerable letters of invitation and congratulation, besides all the receptions and dinners and the babble of innumerable voices, she found that she could not lay her pen entirely aside, but must write full accounts of everything she saw and enjoyed and heard to send to her children at home. It is said that the most valuable document of his time is the “Diary of John Wesley,” because, I suppose, it is so full of unprejudiced and minutely truthful accounts of things that the dignified historians have no time to busy themselves with. In the same way, the series of letters that Mrs. Stowe wrote, afterward published in two volumes, called “Sunny[Pg 234] Memories,” contain observations of men and things that scarcely another person of her time would have had the opportunity to gain or to give; these volumes, besides being amusing and enlightening, will have for the future a distinct historic value.

There were many good times to be enjoyed as they went along on their journeys. They kept a bright lookout for ruins and all things that would touch into life their memories of English romance and poetry. They saw that “city of colleges,” Oxford, which seemed to them a veritable mountain of museums, colleges, halls, courts, parks, chapels, and lecture rooms. They took dinner at the White Hart Inn, where the scene of Shakespeare’s “Merry Wives” was laid; they wandered through chambers hung with tapestries woven to tell the tale of Medea and Jason; they had a pleasant drive in Hyde Park as Harriet had read of the heroines of romance doing in old novels; they felt sincere “dispositions to melancholies” beside the churchyard where the “Elegy” was composed, and found out only later that their tears had been shed at the wrong churchyard! They rode on the coach top and listened to the stories told by the driver just as they would have done in their own country; they visited the fishing ground of old Isaak Walton; they went through the great palace at Windsor, and there, above all the splendors they were chiefly interested in one little wicker baby-carriage they happened to see standing waiting for its occupant! All the[Pg 235] great works of art Mrs. Stowe saw moved her tremendously; they satisfied a lifelong hunger. How the lofty arches of the cathedrals touched her heart! She realized at once that these triumphs of architectural art give aspiration its noblest symbol, and she found a preparation of mind for religious emotions in the dusky choirs and the flame-like arches gorgeous with evening light. Then when she crossed to the continent and entered the galleries and saw the paintings there and on the walls of the churches, she was again astonished, delighted, and satisfied as never before. She was especially overcome when she saw the “Descent from the Cross” by Rubens. She said: “Art has satisfied me at last. I have been conquered and that is enough.” This was said before she went to Italy, where further enjoyments awaited her in later journeys. A young student of life wishing to make a visit to the great storehouses of delight in art and history in the European world and not able to cross the ocean for the purpose, could not do better than read these perfectly sincere and vital comments upon art, history and things in general found in Mrs. Stowe’s “Sunny Memories.”

In these “Sunny Memories” we see how much it meant to her to come into friendly relations with many people whose names had been well known to her through their books. To a writer the companionship of other writers means much. Mrs. Stowe had here her great opportunity. It would[Pg 236] not be possible to go over the large circle of great names she came to know by more than the printed letters. John Ruskin, George Eliot, Charles Kingsley were among them, besides the long lists of people whose titles were not their only claim to interest. In Paris there was another circle of great people, and when she came to Italy, there were the Brownings with whom a warm friendship arose, and many other very congenial people. Then on one of her return journeys she had the pleasure of having for companions Mr. and Mrs. Nathaniel Hawthorne and Mr. and Mrs. James T. Fields.

Among the happiest times that Mrs. Stowe had were the social gatherings in England with some of these literary friends. Seated at dinner where there were perhaps thirty or more at the table, with Macaulay at her right and Milman at her left, she was sometimes embarrassed with riches; she wanted to hear what they were both saying; but by the use of the faculty by which we play the piano with both hands, she got on, she said, very comfortably.

We can quite imagine that in these conversations it must have been sometimes a little startling to have this fresh vivid intelligence turned upon the customs that have in England had the benefit of long settled tradition. At one dinner she said that it had always seemed to her a curious thing that in the height of English civilization one vestige of savagery should remain, namely, sending a whole concourse of strong men out to hunt a single poor[Pg 237] little fox or hare, creatures so feeble and insignificant who can do nothing to defend themselves; to her it hardly seemed consistent with manliness. Now, she said, if you had some of our American buffaloes, or a Bengal tiger, the affair would be something more dignified and generous. The gentlemen who heard this only laughed and went on to tell more stories about fox hunting!

Mrs. Stowe was of course confronted with the traditional question as to how the English ladies compared with those of America in beauty. When her turn came she said within herself, “Now for it, patriotism!” Then she assured the questioner that she had never seen more beautiful women anywhere than she had in her own country. But she had to admit that the English ladies held their beauty longer than did those of this country. Why was it? Was it the sea coal and fog that made the women of England preserve their glowing, radiant, blooming freshness till long past fifty? Tell us, Muses and Graces! she cried. Then she suggested various reasons: our close-heated rooms, our hot biscuits and hot corn cakes made with saleratus, our worry over maid service, our climate, and so on. The American woman is possessed, she thought, with the ambition to do the impossible, which is the cause of the death of a third of the women of this country, and by the impossible she means that they try to play not only the head of the family but the head, hand, and foot, all at once![Pg 238] Certainly the undaunted bravery of the American woman in her difficult home arrangements can never be enough admired. Speaking of stoves, she said that she never saw one in England. (This was in 1853.) Bright coal fires in grates of polished steel were still the lares and penates of old England. If there was one thing in her own country that she was inclined to mourn, it was the closing up of the cheerful open fire, with its bright lights and dancing shadows, and the planting on our domestic hearth of that sullen, stifling gnome, the air-tight. She agreed with Hawthorne in thinking the movement fatal to patriotism; for who would fight for an air-tight?

One of the things that Mrs. Stowe noticed in England was that the distinguished people live so remarkably public a life. English newspapers told a great deal more about the concerns of the notable people than American papers tell: where the nobility were staying now, where they would go next, what they had for dinner, what they wore—all these things the English newspapers deemed important. And Mrs. Stowe was surprised also to have them take somewhat the same interest in her, even recording it when she had a dress made, and complaining that she sent it to a dress-maker of whom they did not approve!

When Mrs. Stowe came to France she noticed the ready enthusiasm of the French for all things beautiful, and she compared this with the Puritan[Pg 239] distrust of beauty for its own sake which she had seen and felt in New England. She was, of course, not the only one who has felt this about our serious forefathers and their view of life. Now she had found a people that could be equally enthusiastic about a barrel of potatoes and the adorning of a room. She observes: “But did not He that made the appetite for food make also that for beauty? and while the former will perish with the body, is not the latter immortal?” By this we see how far the soul of Harriet Beecher has progressed since the days when she found her love of literature a snare in the way of her spiritual progress.

Mrs. Stowe was delighted with Paris. She was released from care; she was unknown and unknowing. She employed herself in wandering about the shops, the streets and boulevards, seeing and hearing the life of Paris. She wished the children at home could see these Tuileries with their statues and fountains, these family groups under the trees, the men and women chatting, reading aloud or working muslin, the children driving hoops, playing ball, all chattering volubly. Afterwards she was able to give the children the opportunity to see all this when she brought the whole company to spend a winter in Paris to study French.

But the relief from the necessity of seeing people, which would have been so great a pleasure to her if she had not been too tired for it, did not stay with her very long in France, nor in Switzerland[Pg 240] whither they next went. Here also the fame of the author had gone before her. All knew the book; they stood in rows to see the author and to ask her to write another that should while away their long winter evenings as “Uncle Tom” had done. “Remember,” they said, “our winter nights here are very long!”

At last they came to Italy. Here every day opened to her a new world of wonders. And when she reached Rome she cried out, “Rome is a world! Rome is an astonishment! Rome is an enchantress! Think of strolling leisurely through the Forum, of seeing the very stones that were laid in the time of the Republic, of rambling over the ruined Palace of the Cæsars, of walking under the Arch of Titus, of seeing the Dying Gladiator, and whole ranges of rooms filled with the wonders of art, all in one morning!... In the Palace of the Cæsars, where the very dust is a mélange of exquisite marbles, I saw for the first time an acanthus growing, and picked my first leaf!”

It was during her second visit to Europe that Mrs. Stowe met the Brownings. That was in April, 1857. Mrs. Browning said of this visit that she and her husband had been charmed by Mrs. Stowe’s simplicity and earnestness, her gentle voice and refinement of manner. Never, said Mrs. Browning, did lioness roar so softly!14 After that[Pg 241] and till the end of the life of Mrs. Browning, correspondence was carried on between the two great women, in which the chief subject discussed was the possibility of spiritual communications between us and those that have passed into the other life. Both these great thinkers believed that such communications were within the range of possibility if we were able to realize them spiritually, but not through any material means then known. The same warm and permanent kind of friendship existed between Mrs. Stowe and George Eliot.

Mrs. Stowe was in Europe first in 1853, again in 1856-7, and the third time in 1859-60. In the intervals she was very hard at work in her home in Brunswick, Maine, and afterwards in a new home in Andover, Massachusetts, whither her husband had been called to the Theological Seminary. First she was writing the “Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” a compendium of the facts and materials she had used in writing the novel. Following this was the second anti-slavery work, a novel entitled “Dred.” This was an even more passionate treatment of the subject of slavery than was “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” though it did not have the concentration and the pathos of the latter. Just as a novel, however, it marked an advance in method and handling, and if one should look behind the preaching one would find a distinct promise for finer workmanship to come in later books. This promise was fulfilled in “The Minister’s Wooing,”[Pg 242] “The Pearl of Orr’s Island,” and “Agnes of Sorrento,” three novels that belong to this time of quickening by contact with the old world.

But these years between the time of her first novel and the beginning of the sixties were the days of the drawing tighter and tighter of the cords, the bursting of which was to produce our Civil War. To every varying of the needle she was sensitive. To every pang in her country’s agony she was sharply responsive. She wrote to a friend in England: “Sudden, sharp remedies are mercy.” Hating war, she yet said, if by war, then war it must be.

One day twenty farmers came to the Stone Cabin in Andover where the Stowes lived and sat down with Professor Stowe to ask the question, Will it be a long war? And he had answered buoyantly, Oh, no, short and decisive it will certainly be!

A year passed and it was not yet over; 1862 came in and the fierce battles of Shiloh, Cedar Mountain, Manassas and Antietam formed the bitter record of that one summer alone. In the very heart of the country soldiers by the thousand from the north and from the south stood glaring at each other, pressing forward, warding off, moving warily even upon the critical spaces about the city of Washington, while occasionally the Confederate raiders slipped through and ran almost up to the city itself. The resistance of the Confederate army was proving much more stubborn than had been dreamed possible, and by November of 1862 long streets of tents full of soldiers waiting[Pg 244] for orders were making white cities for miles and miles throughout the surroundings of Washington. The people began to fear the horror of a long, devastating war.

Almost worse than this was the feeling of criticism into which discouragement was concentrating. Grief at the defeats of the army of the Potomac was reacting in troubles among President Lincoln’s advisers. The northern abolitionists could not understand why he was so slow—why he did not stop the war at once. And he, poor man, in the midst of the most harassing executive difficulties, with personal sorrow for the recent death of his little son eating at his heart and national sorrow for the loss in deadly battle of many hundreds of soldiers overshadowing him, did not know which way to turn for strength, wisdom and good generalship. “I cannot create generals,” he said.

As the month for Thanksgiving Day, 1862, approached it would seem that no one could have the heart to celebrate. On the farms of New England and Ohio and Nebraska the women were beginning to have to carry the whole burden of home and town. In a New Hampshire countryside, not far from where the Stowes were living, fourteen strong daughters of the mountains went one night after their own farm work was done to the barn of an aged neighbor whose three sons had gone to the war, and before morning had husked for him[Pg 245] one hundred bushels of corn. This sort of thing was being done everywhere.

As for the homesick soldiers in their distant camps, certainly the approach of the time for the giving of thanks was not specially welcomed, for they did not know what a day might bring forth of new horror and disaster. They, too, together with statesmen and citizens everywhere, were beginning to realize distinctly that the war was no little quarrel to be lightly settled, but a fierce interlocking of stubborn wills. That it was the wills of brothers thus conflicting added to the poignancy of their grief.

Under circumstances so depressing as these, what could the governors of states think of to say in their Thanksgiving Day proclamations? Yet in the midst of the national dismay they had the courage and faith to send out their appeals. They called upon the people to come away and praise God even in the midst of the gloom. They found heart to be glad for something. The war, for instance, had not been followed by pestilence—that they could say; they begged the people to reflect that these national chastisements might possibly be blessings in disguise; they besought them not to think of the vacant chairs and the silent voices by the home firesides, but instead to remember that strength was being given to endure; they pointed out that if the people would give thanks in the right spirit, it would be for the exalted patriotism,[Pg 246] the heroic courage, the fortitude and humanity, of the soldiers. “Let the high praises of God be in our mouth,” they quoted, “and—the two-edged sword in our hand!”

In the Stone Cabin at Andover there was one in whose heart the whole terrible drama was being enacted as if it were an oppressive and unbearable nightmare. “It is our agony,” she said. “We tread the wine press alone. We are in the throes and ravings of the exorcism.” The heart of Mrs. Stowe had been broken by the loss of her eldest son by the accident of drowning. Now she was called upon to make another supreme sacrifice in giving up a son to the service of her country. Could she rejoice and give thanks?

With a sad patience she accepted an invitation to come to Washington and join in helping people even more stricken than herself to a little Thanksgiving cheer. The response in the capital city to the appeal for Thanksgiving testimonials had been as generous as the limited and disastrous circumstances would allow. For the city itself was at this time one great hospital of wounded soldiers; the churches and public buildings were all filled with the maimed, the sick and the suffering, who had been brought there after the battles of the summer and fall. Not every one, however, was in hospital and those that were well made the sufferers have a happy day. There were banquets for the convalescents, and banquets for the men in temporary hospitals[Pg 247] in the Patent Office, the Church of the Ascension, the Armory, the Marine Barracks and elsewhere.

The regiments of Union soldiers were not the only special guests of the season that were gathered in large numbers in and near the city. Many hundreds of negroes who had heard the call of freedom on the plantations of the south and had managed to escape from their masters and to make their way through the military cordons had come to the city as to a harbor of refuge. When the last Thursday in November drew near good friends planned to give to those desolate people a homelike Thanksgiving dinner that would gladden their hearts and give them a foretaste of what freedom was to mean to them. Encouraging speeches were to be made and distinguished people from various parts of the country were invited to come. It was to this sorrowful-happy banquet that Mrs. Stowe had been asked, and she was the more willing to make the journey, since she hoped to have an opportunity to see her son, Frederick, who was staying near the city with his regiment, the First Massachusetts Infantry. She had also another great purpose in coming, as will soon appear.

The Contraband Dinner, as the dinner of the freed men was called, was held on November 27, 1862, in the church that had been used as a hospital and place of rendezvous for the freedmen’s camp at the end of Twelfth Street East. As Mrs. Stowe[Pg 248] entered the room she saw that a great deal of affectionate pains had been spent in decorating it for the occasion. Garlands of evergreen had been hung all about, and wreaths encircled the portraits of great people who had been working for the cause of the down-trodden. Back of the platform were the picture of the President with the mottoes, “God bless Abraham Lincoln,” and “Liberty to the Captive.” Upon the walls were arranged the portraits of various sympathizers and philanthropists: Senator Pomeroy and Professor Stowe, Horace Greeley and General Wadsworth were in one group, and the professors from Oberlin—Finney, Morgan, Dascomb and Coles, with Thomas Clarkson and Horace Mann were in another circle. Another group, whose connection will perhaps be a puzzle, contained Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, Queen Hortense, Mary Queen of Scots, Charles V, General Cavaignac and General Havelock. Elsewhere on the walls were also Mrs. Elizabeth Fry, John Bunyon, John Knox, Hugh Miller, Peter Melanchthon, Mozart and Haydn. Under this array of inspiring portraits tables with a comfortable supply of good things to eat were spread for some hundreds of guests.

Mrs. Stowe was accompanied by a daughter and by her little son, Charles Edward. To greet them at the foot of the platform stood the Rev. John Pierpont with Bishop Payne, Senator Pomeroy, Dr. Channing and other celebrities. Mrs.[Pg 249] Stowe’s thoughts, however, were more with the wonderful audience that was beginning to gather than with the speakers who were to make the addresses. It was a marvelous sight that greeted her eyes as she took her seat and looked out over the white expanse of the tables that filled the audience room of the church. Already the long procession of strange guests was filing in; from the platform they looked like rivers of inky blackness flowing through the aisles and around the table. To the eyes of Mrs. Stowe it was a tragic scene, for she knew that these poor people had made their escape with untold sufferings. She saw that many were still in the tattered garments they had worn as they crept through the swamp; some had no jacket or coat at all but only a hempen sack with holes cut through for head and arms. But the look in their eyes was something wonderful to see!

The guests took their places at the tables which were loaded with meat, cake and fruits. One table also held a great pyramidal cake with an inscription that read, “To the Contrabands, from the Contraband Relief Association,” and the banquet began. At the beginning prayer was offered by Bishop Payne and then the contrabands were invited to fall in, and the food began to disappear rapidly. When one tableful had been well supplied the Superintendent said, “Men, you who have been eating, take something in your hands and give place to others. There,” he added, “don’t take the[Pg 250] plates!” At this point the disappearance of drumsticks, et cetera, was marvelous to behold.

After some two thousand contrabands had been fed the company on the platform adjourned to an improvised speakers’ stand where the addresses were made. Dr. Channing presided and Senator Pomeroy repeated once more to these poor freedmen the heavenly news that they had a good right to be where they were, and that universal freedom was at hand. This was a story that they could not hear told too often; it made every swarthy face in the room glow with broad delight and every voice break forth into shouts of joy. No wonder that from every throat burst that one great song, that psalm of their modern exodus, “Go Down, Moses.”

This most famous of negro melodies had so strange a moving power that the negroes all through the south had been forbidden to use it because it made them so wild for freedom that nothing could restrain[Pg 251] them. But these freedmen had come through fire and water to reach a place where they could shout it out freely; and the rich and vital tones of those negro voices rang out the twenty-five stanzas of the hymn as their hearts rose in the exaltation of the hour. When they came to the line,

the emotional impulse of the great appeal made an uncontrollable sob rise to the throats of those that heard it. The agony and the faith and the triumph of a whole people seemed to breathe forth from that great company of rescued slaves in the minor swell of this solemn chorus. Here is the simple music that went with this wonderful primitive song; but no notes can give any idea of the weird and mystically yearning effect of it as it was sung by the negroes themselves.

The words of the song went on to record in a sort of ballad fashion the dealings of the Lord with the Children of Israel; under this Old Testament symbolism the negroes always pictured themselves as a nation and felt they were telling their own sorrows as they followed the Bible story.

As the concluding strain of this psalm of praise and of prayer sank away into silence they carefully led a very old colored man to the platform. This was Old John the Baptist, as the negroes affectionately called him; he was looked up to as a sort of patriarch in Israel on account of his goodness and spirituality. The whiteness of his matted hair and the deep furrows in his face testified to the many, many years in which the pain of slavery had been burned into his soul. As they assisted him up the steps it could be seen that he was blind, and a deep hush fell upon the room as he raised his hands and lifted up his voice in prayer. He gave thanks for the joy of this day of emancipation and for their escape from the woe of slavery; he prayed for the friends and relatives so tenderly beloved that they had left behind, and, above all, he prayed that their feelings of joy and triumph at their own escape might not lead them into vainglorious pride and arrogance. The chief burden of his prayer[Pg 255] was that humility might dwell in the hearts of his people. “O God, keep us humble, keep us humble,” he repeated. “Let not thy people be puffed up with pride and then forget the God that brought them out of Egypt into Canaan’s land!”

During these simple, but most impressive, ceremonies Mrs. Stowe sat on the platform, her heart throbbing with the tragedy of the scene. There was a deep, absorbed, dreamy look in her eyes as she sat there pondering on all this great national matter. As she looked out over the vast assemblage, a fragment only of the great exodus from slavery, she grew more and more assured in her mind that the steps that had been taken were right. She thought over what had already been done. It was right to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia and to exclude it from the territories of the United States; it had been a good stroke for the United States to make that treaty with Great Britain for the suppression of the slave trade, making it legal to hang a convicted slaver as a pirate. And it was clear to her that the government offer of compensation to the slave owners in the southern states, to whom the negro was property, was a just and fair offer. She believed in release from slavery as a growth rather than as a sudden cut-off, and thought that this offer had been a move in the right direction.

Therefore, she thought, it is right and sensible to lead up by these steps to the promise of full[Pg 256] freedom to all—which the President had promised—or perhaps one should say, threatened, in the important document, the Emancipation Proclamation, which he had given out some four weeks before. “Oh, if he only will hold firm to this!” she prayed, “and if the Cabinet and the army and the country will only stand by him!”

Then she thought of her soldier son and she remembered the other mothers who had given their boys to the country’s need. With a gush of agony came the reflection that for the mothers to go themselves and to give their own lives would have been so much easier!

As these heavy thoughts were passing through her mind a thousand men just out of slavery were looking toward the quiet little woman on the platform who in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” had so marvelously told their story. There were many among the freedmen present who had been able to acquire the valuable and dangerous art of reading printed words, and who had read the wonderful story Mrs. Stowe had written. There were others who had listened breathlessly behind closed doors in their little cabins while the book was being read in low tones to them. So a great glow of grateful love was being poured out in the direction of that inconspicuous member of the distinguished company, for they felt that they knew her heart. As the last strains of “Go down, Moses” were fading away and the company was dispersing, an aged negress[Pg 257] met Mrs. Stowe in the doorway and, lifting up her hands in blessing, cried out, “Bressed be de Lord dat brought me to see dis first happy day of my life! Bressed be de Lord!”

At this time Mrs. Stowe must have looked very much like the picture which is reproduced as the frontispiece to this book, which is taken from a carte de visite made in 1862. At this meeting we may imagine her as this picture shows her, but we must add perhaps some kind of shawl or drapery for warmth, a pair of black silk mitts of ornamented net, and a bonnet tied with wide ribbons in a double bow knot under the chin. This bonnet must have concealed the abundant hair coiled up at the back, but not the soft wavy brown folds that came down on either side of the beautiful, refined face. The large breast-pin in the picture was made from a piece of softly clouded lava; the ring, worn in the fashion of the day on the first finger, had belonged to her son who was drowned while in college; this ring she wore and jealously guarded for his sake. Many people who knew Mrs. Stowe pronounce it one of the best likenesses of her that we possess.

Mrs. Stowe spent the next day after the freedmen’s jubilee in driving frantically from fort to fort in search of the proper officer to give her permission to extract her son Fred for a time from the military harness. She was afraid they would not let him come with her; at last, however, she succeeded, and she was never happier than when he sprang into the carriage, free for forty-eight hours. He, too, was filled with uncontrollable delight. “Oh!” he exclaimed in a sort of rapture, “this pays for a year of hard fighting and hard work!” A year ago she had bade him farewell at Andover, and, after the trip of his regiment to New York, she had again seen him for an hour. At that time she found him even in the two days’ experience of soldierly life mysteriously changed—an expression of gravity and care marking his face. “It is thus that our boys,” she said in her heart, “come to manhood in a day!” But what she felt at that time was as[Pg 259] nothing to the feelings that were now hers when this war-worn man came to her arms! For he was a lieutenant, having been promoted for bravery on more than one field.

That evening in a quiet little parlor, by a bright coal fire, she sat with three children around her, the young lieutenant, a daughter, and the little son who lives now to remember the events of this Washington visit. Her cup was as full of joy as any mother’s could be who yet must think what the fortune of war might mean to many a mother’s breaking heart.

It is now time to refer to the matter that Mrs. Stowe had in mind as one of the reasons for coming to Washington. During all these days she was carrying one special burden—something that seemed to her to be of national importance and also a matter of personal responsibility. To understand what this was we must recall the “Affectionate and Christian Address” which had been signed by those five hundred thousand women of Great Britain and Ireland, by duchesses, countesses, wives of generals and ambassadors, savants and men of letters, as well as by hands evidently unused to hold the pen. This “Address” had been sent to “their sisters, the women of the United States of America,” through that most representative of American women, Harriet Beecher Stowe, appealing to them to aid in the removal of slavery from the Christian world.

“We acknowledge with grief and shame,” they said, “our heavy share in this great sin. We acknowledge that our forefathers introduced, nay, even compelled the adoption of slavery in those mighty colonies. We humbly confess it before Almighty God; and it is because we so deeply feel and unfeignedly avow our own complicity that we now venture to implore your aid to wipe away our common crime and our common dishonor.”

Mrs. Stowe knew that her answer to this important letter would be a national matter—she could not make it otherwise. She must review the intricate history of the slave system and face its present problems, not one of the least of which was the fact that, in spite of letters and addresses to the contrary by an illuminated few, the great body of English sympathy was now being given to that party in this country that favored slavery. Therefore, the international situation was in a specially critical state. It seemed even possible that England as a nation would give aid to the forces that were trying to tear our republic apart. Mrs. Stowe saw that now in the fall of 1862 this was one of the greatest causes of apprehension. That this state of feeling should follow the outburst of enthusiasm for freeing the slaves that she herself had witnessed all over England and Scotland, seemed to her incomprehensible and heart-breaking, and it made her feel that she must not let the answer to the “Address” remain in the logic of[Pg 261] events only, but that it now called for some direct expression from the one to whom it had been intrusted.

Under the circumstances what she should say in her public letter was a very delicate matter. She might describe the various important preparatory steps that the President had already taken; and she might describe the proclamation just given out, that document we now consider to have ushered in the political regeneration of the American people, in which the President had made solemn announcement that unless by the following January the states now in rebellion laid down arms to signify that they abandoned the system of slavery, the emancipation of all slaves in those states would at once be enforced.

So far, so good. She could tell what had been already done; but how much might happen between now and January 1, 1863! What battles and conquests and losses might be written upon our scroll! What a test the national spirit might be put to! What failures were perhaps possible! As Mrs. Elizabeth Browning in an anxious hour said in one of her last letters: “What I feared most was that the north would compromise; and I fear still that they are not heroically strong on their legs on the moral question (meaning slavery). I fear it much. If they can but hold up it will be noble.” And this expresses the better side of England’s interest in our national problem.

Mrs. Stowe’s heart cried, “We cannot, we must not fail!” But she had the wisdom to see that her opinion needed to be bolstered up by some more weighty judgment. So she said to herself, “When I go to Washington I will try to see the heads of departments and satisfy myself that I may refer to the Emancipation Proclamation as a reality, for I should be sorry to call the attention of my sisters in Europe to an impotent conclusion. And I mean to have a talk with Father Abraham himself if possible.”

For her to gain an interview with President Lincoln was comparatively easy, for one member of the President’s Cabinet, Mr. Salmon P. Chase, now Secretary of the Treasury, was an old Ohio friend of hers. Years back, in Cincinnati, he had been a member of the Semi-colon Club. It was natural that this former friend should now find it easy to arrange for Mrs. Stowe to call upon President Lincoln and to have a quiet conversation with him. Her son, Charles Edward, twelve years old, who still remembers the distinguished event of that day as though it had happened yesterday, and her grown-up daughter, Harriet, accompanied her. It was a wonderful experience for them. The White House with its Ionic pillars seemed to young Charles a palace of dreamland; as they passed through the halls and caught a glimpse through an open door of the wonderful East Room where the carpet, selected for that room by Mrs.[Pg 263] Lincoln, was of a pale green tapestry worked with flowers, it must have seemed to him that the gleaming transparent waves of the ocean were tossing roses to his feet. They were conducted up a staircase and taken to the President’s reception parlor, then called the Red Room, where the interview was to be held. Though the room was richly furnished, it seemed like a quiet and cozy place to the little boy. Perhaps this was because it was a dark chilly day and there was a bright wood fire burning in the fireplace.

The President was sitting before the fire as they entered. His gaunt figure was bowed in a melancholy attitude, and he was warming his hands by turning them first the palms toward the flame and then the backs, seemingly just for the sheer enjoyment of the genial warmth.

Overcome by a natural feeling of reverence for the great man into whose presence they were being ushered, Mrs. Stowe and her little group held back for a moment and waited; but Mr. Chase led them forward and told the President that he had brought Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe to visit him. With that awkwardness which is one of our most appealing memories of him, Mr. Lincoln rose quickly from his chair, revealing his whole six feet and four inches of height, and came forward eagerly. “Why, Mrs. Stowe,” he exclaimed, holding out his hand, “I’m right glad to see you!” Leading her to a chair, he added with a mischievous twinkle in his[Pg 264] eye, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war.” With this pleasantry they sat down together before the fire.

The first thing he said was, “I do love an open fire; I always had one to home.” The homely phrase “to home!” How near it seemed to bring him! Like all the other common expressions he used, it only made us love him more! His advisers used sometimes to try to get him to write in a more polished manner, but he would say, “Well, it may not be so elegant or classical, but the people will understand it, the people will understand it!” And they always did. Mrs. Stowe could hardly have been more effectually made to feel “to home” than she was.

In response to the President’s humorous remark about her book, Mrs. Stowe no doubt answered, as she so many times did, by disclaiming any intention to do anything except to obey the inner voice that commanded her to write. “I did not write it, not I myself alone,” she always said. “It seemed to me that God himself made me write it, that I wrote it at his dictation.” And Lincoln, from the depths of his profoundly reverent nature, probably answered that he could understand how that could be said with all simplicity and true worship.

Gazing into that homely, noble, pain-marked face, and knowing so well how many reasons there were for its look of inexpressible sadness, her heart was touched with a great pity for him as a man. After[Pg 265] they had talked for a few moments, some one came through the room and spoke with him for a little while; then in passing out the visitor said casually, “Where do you dine?” The President answered, “Well, I don’t dine; I just browse around a little now and then.” To the woman that sat there waiting and letting nothing escape her eye, there was something irresistibly pathetic in the tone in which this was spoken. Where indeed could President Lincoln find an hour of rest in the midst of his overweighted days? The whole city was one hospital of wounded soldiers, the borders outside were one vast camp looking for battle. Even the Emancipation Proclamation, that one firm stone in the wide morass of despondency on which the wearied man at last had set firm foothold, did not just now seem to lead toward the land of promise. Struggling with an extraordinarily difficult problem, he was at that moment misunderstood on all sides. People criticized him for what he did and for what he did not do. He was too hasty, he was too slow. They called him stupid blockhead, satyr, ape, gorilla. They named his military plans imbecility; his humor they took for irreverence. But Mrs. Stowe understood him, and she somehow struck the note at the beginning which made them at home with each other. If this had not been the case, he would never have said the things to her that we know he did say.

Of her interview with the President, however,[Pg 266] Mrs. Stowe never gave any full account. I suppose it would not have been right for her to do so. It must, however, have been a very illuminating hour, for her sketch of Lincoln in a volume called “Men of Our Times,” which she wrote six years later shows a certainty of impression and an intimacy of view that could only have come from personal knowledge. Moreover, she tells us definitely of several things that were said; and from these as well as from references in that sketch, and from the influence of this conversation upon the “Reply” to the English “Address” which she was writing on the evening of the day when she saw the President, and from what we know was dwelling in the mind of the President and in hers in this month of November in 1862, we may to some extent reorganize that hour of vital converse between two souls that were sharing in the heavy woe of the national conflict.

As early in the conversation as possible, she called his attention to the “Address” on the part of the five hundred thousand women of England who had spoken to the women of America through her, and of the necessity that was upon her now to answer.

“They have called upon us,” she said, “in the name of a common origin, a common faith, and a common cause. They have said: ‘We appeal to you as sisters, as wives, and as mothers, to raise up your voices to your fellow-citizens, and your[Pg 267] prayers to God, for the removal of this affliction and disgrace from the Christian world.’ Now,” she continued, “in this eight years we have been answering this appeal. Step after step has been taken; chain after chain has fallen; now the day of emancipation has been set. Mr. President, it is of that that I must speak with you to-day.” Thus Mrs. Stowe brought forward the question that was pressing upon her mind. “Mr. Lincoln,” she said, “I feel that I must ask you about your views on emancipation.” At this point the President withdrew with her to the embrasure of a window-seat, where they sat together for an hour or more in uninterrupted conversation.

Mrs. Stowe had much to tell him about the condition of thought in England which she had learned from observation during her visits there and through the letters she constantly received from people of weight and importance who were watching with intense interest the progress of our bitter conflict. He on his part was able to interpret to her his border state policy which had been a burden of misunderstanding upon her mind; he explained the reasons why it had been necessary for him to proceed slowly and why the time for a more decided step had come at last. We know comparatively little about the conversation that went on by the window, but we do know that these were its subjects. She said that she desired, if possible, to have it made clear to her that the government was[Pg 268] not to take any steps backward in the course on which it had started out, before she could with dignity write the answer to the “Address.”

Abraham Lincoln made it clear. He set her mind quite at rest on that point. Before they parted he said in effect what he afterwards repeated in the Second Inaugural: “If this struggle were to be prolonged till there was not a home in the land where there was not one dead, till all the treasure amassed by the unpaid labor of the slave should be wasted, till every drop of blood drawn by the lash should be atoned by blood drawn by the sword, we could only bow and say, ‘Just and true are thy ways, thou King of Saints!’”

This was indeed a passage from his inmost soul. Sometimes a great man has an hour in which he finds it comforting to open his heart to the compassionate ear of a woman. Without disrespect to his revered memory we may believe that President Lincoln did on this day find such a relief in talking with a woman whose book with its key and whose letters and articles had proved not only the sensitive sympathy and flame-like patriotism of her soul, but also the statesman-like grasp of her mind.

Then perhaps in this interview with its high emotional tension there may have come a moment when personal things could be mentioned, for I do not know how otherwise to account for the great confidence he reposed in her in one of the things that he said in that interview. Perhaps the way[Pg 269] may have been opened by her saying something about her own feelings in writing “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” She may have told him how acutely she suffered when she was working on that book. Elsewhere she has said, “Many times, in writing ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin,’ I thought my health would fail me utterly, but I prayed earnestly that God would help me till I got through, and still I was pressed beyond measure and above strength.” Something of this sort she doubtless told Mr. Lincoln. To this the President must have listened with full understanding. “It lies like lead on my heart,” she would continue. “It shadows my life with sorrow. The more so since I feel for the south as for my own brothers, and am pained for every horror I have been obliged to describe, as one who is forced by an awful oath to disclose in court some family disgrace. Many times I have thought I must die, and yet I pray God that I may live to see the end of this struggle.”

These are the words of Mrs. Stowe; if she used the same words in speaking with President Lincoln it would surely be in response that he must have said what we know he did say in some part of this conversation, that he did not think that it would be given to him to rejoice in the successful outcome of the great rebellion. “Whichever way it ends, I have the impression that I shan’t last long after it is over,” was what he said. Mrs. Stowe afterwards said that she felt that no man had suffered[Pg 270] more or more deeply than he, although it was a dry, weary, patient pain that seemed to some like insensibility, but was not—Oh, never was at all! After he was gone his countrymen understood this perfectly. Mrs. Stowe understood it then. She said, “When we have passed through this trouble we shall think that no private or individual sorrow can ever make us wholly comfortless. If my faith in God’s presence and living power in the affairs of men ever grows dim, that thought shall make it impossible for me to doubt.”

With her sensitive sympathy, Mrs. Stowe probably knew that Lincoln’s mind was dwelling upon his own painful loss in the death of his dear young son the spring before; and she, for her part, was reminded of the day when, as she stood by the grave of the most beautiful and most beloved of her seven children, she learned the woe a slave mother feels when her child is torn away from her. She thought also of the crushing sorrow that came to her at Andover in the loss by drowning of her first-born son, Henry Ellis. Perhaps in this hour of quiet, intimate conversation she was able, in order to give comfort to the man before her, to speak of these things, for it is by showing to those in deep suffering that we suffer with them that we comfort them most.

And then perhaps she told the President that she, too, had a son at Washington, and saw the smile that she remembered so well all her life afterwards,[Pg 271] light up that homely-beautiful face as he said, “One of the twenty thousand encamped about the city?” and she answered that he was one of that vast company and that he had been made lieutenant for honorable service on several battlefields. And then she no doubt told how he was one of the first to volunteer when the First Massachusetts Infantry was formed. He had been a student of medicine under Dr. Holmes, who had tried to persuade him not to become a soldier, but to finish his studies and then go into the army as a surgeon. The boy would not hear of this; he threw his hat on the floor and cried, “I could not look my fellowmen in the face if I did not enlist. People shall never say that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s son is a coward!” And if in telling this she took a motherly pride, who shall blame her?

With this the interview ended. Mrs. Stowe was rejoined by her son and daughter, and the guests took their departure. That evening Mrs. Stowe wrote the greater part of her “Reply,” and it was soon on its way to Great Britain.

This “Reply” she wrote far more boldly and confidently than would have been possible if she had not talked with the President. She courteously acknowledged the compliment of the “Address” and its great weight with her and with the American people. She spoke of its influence upon north and upon south; and then she recounted the history of affairs in this country up to the Proclamation[Pg 272] of Emancipation which was to take effect in the following January. She spoke frankly of the things that were filling her with pain and solicitude, especially of the lack of English sympathy toward us in our struggle for union. “Alas, then, is it so? In this day of great deeds and great heroisms ... do we hear such voices from England?” She went on to tell the story of the Jubilee she had witnessed the day before and of the psalm of the modern exodus, “Go down, Moses,” sung by that strange company with all the barbaric fire of the Marseillaise and the religious fervor of the old Hebrew prophet. Giving free rein to her impassioned eloquence, she said: “Sisters (in your ‘Address’), you have spoken well; we have heard you; we have heeded; we have striven in the cause, even unto death. We have sealed our devotion by desolate hearths and darkened homesteads, by the blood of sons, husbands and fathers.... Now we beg leave in solemn sadness to return to you your own words: we appeal to you, as sisters, as wives, as mothers, to raise your voices to your fellow-citizens and your prayers to God, for the removal of this affliction and disgrace from the Christian world.”

Mrs. Stowe’s “Reply” was published widely in Great Britain, and was one of the most powerful agents in changing the public sentiment from a hostile to a friendly attitude. Meetings were held all over England and the tone of the speeches and[Pg 273] of the newspapers and of the discussions in Parliament was no longer favorable to the division of our country into two separate governments, a north and a south, but was for union and abolition. John Bright wrote to Mrs. Stowe stating that such had been the happy result of the outspoken and appealing home-thrust in her “Reply.” All this, we must remember, happened before the Battle of Gettysburg, which was the crisis following the 1862 phase of the war.

This assistance that Harriet Beecher Stowe was so fortunate as to be able to give in one of the epoch-making crises of our history, was one of her great services to our country. In the next chapter we are to see how she performed another real service, for which we owe her another debt of gratitude.

Harriet Beecher Stowe did for her country more than one inestimable service that should win for her the gratitude of her countrymen. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” besides being a clarion call to the world, happened also to be a book that was to become immortal. This was incidental; but it was not a small thing to do—thus to focus the attention of the whole world upon one American book. And it was no small service to the literary life and hopes of this country to write a book that should, as Sir Arthur Helps said, “insist on being read when once begun.” On the wave of a great enthusiasm of pity and love, her name was carried around the globe. Therefore, it is not too much to say that it was because of her that the famous British taunt, “Who reads an American book?” has now been answered, “Everybody!”

But “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” although the most famous, was not the only book that Mrs. Stowe[Pg 275] wrote. On the contrary, it was one of a long series of novels, some of which are to be specially valued for their historical import and some to be read for the sheer enjoyment of the pictures of life drawn in them. Mrs. Stowe was a great story-teller, a true raconteur. The story flows from her pen with a delightful smoothness and ease. In her later books she turned with a very glad and loving heart to the portrayal of scenes such as she had known in her girlhood and of the native and unique spirit of that life which was as the very marrow of her bones. We cannot be sufficiently thankful that the old-fashioned Thanksgiving, the quilting-bee, and the wood-spell survived to the year when the seeing eye and the recording memory came to the Connecticut parsonage in the person of Harriet Beecher. To every one that values those elements of our national character that were formed in the struggles of the heroic Pilgrim fathers and mothers in the wilderness and their inspired successors, this part of Mrs. Stowe’s writing ought to be doubly precious. Her work in the books that describe early New England life is a gift that every impulse in us of patriotic reverence should leap to acknowledge.

It will be remembered that in her first book of stories, “The Mayflower,” she drew from the rich field that was her native heath. Uncle Tim, the hero of her very first story, was a living, breathing expression of the New England spirit, and the[Pg 276] town, the church, the ways, the turns and queernesses of speech were of immortal simplicity and truth to life. Scattered through the stories in that book are found little character sketches of amazing vividness. How she makes us see these solemn and important brethren in the church! Here they are, Deacon Enos Dudley, solemn as an ancient Israelite, and, for contrast, the brisk little Deacon Abrams, who came to a meeting to manage things and to see that everything went off rightly!

“The services Deacon Enos offered to his God were all given with the exactness of an ancient Israelite. No words could have persuaded him of the propriety of meditating while the choir were singing, or of sitting down, even through infirmity, before the close of the longest prayer that ever was offered. A mighty contrast was he to his fellow-officer, Deacon Abrams, a tight, little, tripping, well-to-do man, who used to sit beside him with his hair brushed straight up like a little blaze, his coat buttoned up trig and close, his psalm-book in hand, and his quick, gray eyes turned first on one side of the broad aisle, and then on the other, and then up into the gallery like a man who came to church on business and felt responsible for everything that was going on in the house.”

The observant child Harriet, sitting on the bench in the children’s row from Sabbath to Sabbath in the Litchfield church, must have watched these grave deacons that seem so much like story-book[Pg 277] people as she gives her accurate memories of them.

“At this instant Deacon Enos Dudley’s mild and venerable form arose before me, as erst it used to rise from the deacon’s seat, a straight close slip just below the pulpit. I recollect his quiet and lowly coming into meeting, precisely ten minutes before the time, every Sunday, his tall form a little stooping, his best suit of butternut-colored Sunday clothes, with long flaps and wide cuffs, on one of which two pins were always to be seen stuck in with the most reverent precision. When seated, the top of the pew came just to his chin, so that his silvery placid head rose above it like the moon above the horizon. His head was one that might have been sketched for a St. John—bald at the top, and around the temples adorned with a soft flow of bright, fine hair.... He was then of great age, and every line of his patient face seemed to say, ‘And now, Lord, what wait I for?’ Yet still, year after year, he was to be seen in the same place with the same dutiful regularity.” Those two pins set precisely upon the deacon’s cuff ought to be immortalized along with the two-pronged stick in Defoe’s famous “Journal.” In either case it was not in the least necessary to mention the slight circumstance; yet by the very casualness of the reference is given the precious air of verisimilitude that the artist most desires.

Mrs. Stowe was one of the earliest among us to choose our own ancestral life as a field for story-telling.[Pg 278] To fix her place in the literary procession, we must recall that it was only in 1849 that Longfellow’s “Kavanagh” appeared, and that that great book, “The Scarlet Letter” of Hawthorne and that popular one, “The Wide, Wide World,” by Sarah Warner, were being written at the same time that Mrs. Stowe was writing “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” “The Blithedale Romance” and “Queechy” and “The Lamplighter” came in the early fifties. The true literary descendants of Mrs. Stowe in the realm of New England tales are Mary Wilkins Freeman, Sarah O. Jewett and Kate Douglas Wiggin. It will perhaps be a help to remember, too, that at the same time when Mrs. Stowe was giving us our racy Mary Scudder, George Eliot was introducing Mrs. Poyser in “Middlemarch” to the British public.

In this New England field Mrs. Stowe had therefore a unique opportunity. She had seen that life; having been separated from it, it grew precious to her, and, as her artistic instinct developed, seemed worthy of preservation. No one else has reproduced as she has done the first Christmas of New England, the days in the harbor of Cape Cod, the first day on shore, Christmas tide in Plymouth Harbor, and Elder Brewster’s Christmas sermon. These were the first fruits of the seed planted when little Harriet, unperceived in a dim corner of the garret study of Dr. Lyman Beecher, began to peer[Pg 279] into the pages of Cotton Mather’s “Magnalia” and thought it an excellent story-book.

Finally the more and more highly developed artistic skill of the novelist and the widened taste of the woman, and the deep and ineradicable religious nature of her soul united in the production of the novel, “The Minister’s Wooing,” a book in which Mrs. Stowe lets her passionate interest in old New England life have full sway. It is a story built solely upon religious feeling. Nothing like it had been done before, though since she led the way myriads of novels like it in this respect have been attempted. It was a torch borne onward into the dark. Mrs. Stowe maintained the right of the soul’s interests to a place among themes fit for artistic treatment in the novel as Elizabeth Barrett Browning did in poetry. Both were pioneers in this field of artistic endeavor. But people were totally unaccustomed to think of the novel in the terms of theology, and they at once classed “The Minister’s Wooing” as a theological treatise. This was not in the least true. It was a novel pure and simple, however seriously it dealt with the effects on certain souls of certain kinds of theological speculation. Gladstone appreciated the true position of the book. In a letter to Mrs. Stowe he called it a “beautiful and noble picture of Puritan life,” “exhibited upon a pattern felicitous beyond example as far as my knowledge goes.” Our knowledge also goes no farther, even to this day.

The “pattern” shows us the problem of a pure, young New England girl, Mary Scudder by name, whose mind is formed by religious aspiration, of the power of which her lover has no understanding. He reveres her and she stands to him as a religion, as often happens with a sincere and questioning soul. The lover goes to sea and after a while Mary hears that his ship has gone down and that he is lost. When a long time has gone by the Minister wooes her and, believing that the lover is forever gone, Mary consents to marry this man whom she reveres, though she does not give him the love she gave the lost lover. Shall I tell how the story comes out? I certainly will not, for that might destroy the charm that this novel will have for its reader. And the story must be read to be enjoyed. For who could give any idea of the charm of the heroine and the manliness of the lover? There are historic characters, Aaron Burr and Dr. Hopkins and President Stiles, delineated with genius. Like Shakespeare, Mrs. Stowe, while disregarding dates and sequences of events, has been loftily true to the spirit of things. One may look in this book for a true picture, if not for actual events in their exact order.

The scene of “The Minister’s Wooing” was laid at Newport. Mrs. Stowe’s next New England story, “The Pearl of Orr’s Island,” gives a picture of the Maine coast, not far from Brunswick, near Harpswell, and deals with a later time. Both,[Pg 281] however, undertake the difficult task of representing life a century or so back. Whittier called “The Pearl” the “most charming New England idyl ever written.” He liked it far better than the “Minister’s Wooing.” Its plot is simpler and there are fewer characters; but it has the clear background of a whole town with its quiet life streaked with tragedy, as life especially is along the sea coast where the waves take their annual toll regardless of human loves and ties. Mara Lincoln, the heroine, dies in the midst of the story, but her loyal friend, Sally Kittridge, takes her place in our interest; and after many sea-yarns, some ministrations by Aunt Ruey and Aunt Roxy, typical characters of the town, a touch of far-away Gothicism in the fact that the body of a beautiful woman floated ashore tightly holding a handsome Spanish boy to her breast, and the unraveling of the puzzle about her, we are allowed a happy wedding-bell ending to the story at last.

“Oldtown Folks,” published in 1869, Mrs. Stowe considered more than a story; it was her “résumé of the whole spirit and body of New England.” In writing it, she tried, she said, to make her “mind as still and passive as a looking-glass, or a mountain lake,” and then to give “the images reflected there.” We are not, then, to take any of the opinions expressed in the book as conclusively Mrs. Stowe’s opinions, but to think of her as reporting impartially the point of view taken[Pg 282] by the Calvinists, Arminians, High Church Episcopalians, skeptics and simple believers in the story. It has been said of Mrs. Stowe that she remained without change the Calvinist, the old New Englander, the Beecher, to the end of life. A close study of her work and spirit will reveal that she made the most amazing progress in thought, in spirit and in art. She herself knew this. One of her old friends who met her at one time rather late in her life was afraid of what would happen if she should be told that her friend did not hold exactly the same views as of old. “Why,” exclaimed Mrs. Stowe, “I should be ashamed to believe the same this year that I did last!” For “Oldtown Folks” Mrs. Stowe gathered her “images” in large part from scenes reported to her by her husband as he remembered them from his own boyhood. Together they went to the home of his youth, South Natick, Massachusetts, and there studied the places where the “visionary boy,” who was none other than Professor Stowe himself, passed through the lonely and dream-haunted experiences of his youth. From Professor Stowe’s account of the people and customs in the old village, and from her own memories, Mrs. Stowe organized a picture of the time a generation before her own.

The consummate masterpiece in the work is the character of Sam Lawson, a literary grandson of the Vicar of Wakefield, an own cousin to Ichabod[Pg 283] Crane, and a sort of stepfather to Huckleberry Finn. Sam Lawson was a “tall, shambling, loose-jointed man, with a long, thin visage, prominent, watery blue eyes, very fluttering and seedy habiliments, who occupied the responsible position of first do-nothing-in-ordinary in our village of Oldtown.” Why is it that such a character invariably endears itself to our whole country? Mrs. Stowe gives us a sort of explanation of the strange phenomenon. She says that the lovable, lazy genius and factotum of the town was a necessary appendage of every New England village; for Yankee life was so “harried by work and thrift and industry,” that society would “burn itself out with the intense friction if it were not for the lubricating power of a decided do-nothing!” But that, perhaps, was not all. Sam was the undeveloped artist and had a touch of the artist’s charm. He was a great singer; he could sing all parts, bass, tenor, counter, soprano, going from one to another at any point in the midst of the hymn; and as a story-teller he was beyond compare. “‘Why, didn’t you ever hear ’bout that?’” he would begin. “‘Want to know! Wal, I’ll tell ye, then. I know all ’bout it.’” And with this the story started out and the blissful listening of boys by the roadside or of friends around some fireside—not his own—would begin. He was a New England Scheherazade, with stories enough to last for a thousand and one long, lonely, winter nights. Sam Lawson “filled this post with ample[Pg 284] honor.” He would leave any work that ought to be done for his wife and large family of children and spend hours tinkering some boy’s knife, tending a dog’s sprained leg, or baiting hooks for a troop of boys in their fishing. He was a soft-hearted old body and would knock the fish in the head to put it out of torment. “‘Why, lordy massy!’” he would say, “‘I can’t bear to see no kind o’ critter in torment. These ’ere pouts ain’t to blame for bein’ fish, and ye ought to put ’em out of their misery. Fish has their rights as well as any of us.’” When Sam was engaged to put a clock in order, he would get it all to pieces about the kitchen and then go away to start in on some other body’s job, saying that “‘Some things can be druv and then agin some things can’t, and clocks is that kind. They’s jest got to be humored. Now this ’ere’s a ’mazin’ good clock; give me my time on’t and I’ll have it so ’twill keep straight on to the millennium.’” Speaking of the millennium starts a theological argument and under cover of this he leaves the kitchen with the clock wheels scattered all over, and goes off fishing. Sam Lawson’s philosophy of life is summed up in this: “‘It’s all fuss, fuss and stew, stew, till we get somewhere; and then it’s fuss, fuss and stew, stew, to get back agin; jump here and scratch your eyes out, and jump there and scratch ’em in agin—that ’ere’s life.’”

Sam loved nothing so much as to “‘kind o’ go[Pg 285] along and sort o’ see how things turn out’” with the boys. He told them tales that made their eyes stand out, constantly interspersing the incidents with moral persuasions and advice. “‘So, boys,’” he would say, “‘you just mind and remember and allers see what there is in a providence afore you quarrel with it.’” With this lofty moral altitude, an intellectual superiority in Sam combined to make him a popular favorite. For forty years in the village there had not been a marriage or a birth or a burial or a slight beginning of a love-making which he did not know all about. This knowledge made his charm and also his power. A great intellect had been really wasted in this shiftless fellow. The variety of his accomplishments was amazing. His work shop was filled with cracked china, lame tea-pots, rickety tongs and decrepit andirons, and any one of these would afford opportunity for hours of conversation if a neighbor came in and if—important consideration!—the sharp, black eyes of Hepsy, his wife, were not at the minute upon him. Hepsy was a “gnarly, compact, efficient little pepper-box of a woman.” Of course if she came in his fun was over. “‘You’re always everywhere but where you’ve business to be,’” her scolding voice would cry out, “‘helpin’ and doin’ for everybody but your own. For my part, I think that charity ought to begin at home.’” Hepsy was a “great talker.” She frequently was so bad in this respect that Sam, who was not a[Pg 286] specially silent person, could not “get in a word edgeways, nor crossways, nor noways.” At such times no one could blame Sam if he did “‘go Indianing around the country a spell till she kind o’ come to.’”

The main interest in “Oldtown Folks” is, however, in a little boy and girl, Henry and Eglantine Percival, or Harry and Tina for short, who are left orphaned and are distributed among the homes in the Calvinistic and theological town. As Sam Lawson said, they “‘was real putty children, as putty behaved as ever he see.’” Harry Percival is a fine, manly little boy and Tina, his sister, is the little witch whose buoyancy and charm can never be crushed out of her even by a Miss Asphyxia. Ah, Miss Asphyxia! Every creature in her service—horse, cow and pig—knew at once the touch of Miss Asphyxia; and when it was she that said, “Get up!” the beast would make the wagon spin. Into her hands fell the hapless and whimsical Tina. Miss Asphyxia was past fifty and her hair was well streaked with gray; but this would not matter only that when she did it up, she tied it in a very tight knot and fastened it with a horn comb; then she gave it a shake to see if it would certainly stay all day and went about her work. Her one idea in regard to the little fairy Tina was to give her efficient discipline. She put a brown towel into her hands and said, “‘There, keep to work.’” And when Tina’s fingers refused[Pg 287] to bend to the unusual task, Miss Asphyxia rapped her promptly on the head with the thimble, saying, “‘Keep to work.’” When Tina began to cry Miss Asphyxia displayed a long birch rod. At night when deluged with soapy water and rubbed with bony hands, Tina was so suppressed that she could only breathe out long sighs and whisper “‘Oh, dear!’” But she was helpless in the hands of Miss Asphyxia. Having despoiled the bright little head of its curls by means of her great shears, she rubbed some camphor on vigorously to keep the child from taking cold; then, after dropping the golden curls on the fire, she opened the door into a small bedroom and, pointing, said to the child, “‘Now go to bed.’” Tina crept in under the blue checked coverlet, thankful to be free of the dreadful woman. In a moment, however, her tormentor opened the door again. Miss Asphyxia had forgotten something. “‘Can you say your prayers?’ she demanded. ‘Yes, ma’am,’ faltered the child. ‘Say ’em, then,’ said Miss Asphyxia; and bang went the door again. ‘There, now, if I h’ain’t done up my duty to that child, then I don’t know,’ said Miss Asphyxia.”

Miss Asphyxia and her contemporaries thought that a child was “‘pretty much dead loss the first three or four years; but after that they’d more’n pay, if they’s fetched up right.’” Miss Asphyxia intended that Tina should be “‘fetched up right.’” Good old Sol, her hired man, suggested that perhaps[Pg 288] Tina cried at night because she was lonesome. “‘All sorts of young critters is,’” he argued; “‘Puppies is; kittens mew when ye take ’em from the cats. Ye see they’s used to other critters; and it’s sort o’ cold like, bein’ alone is.’” Miss Asphyxia gave a sniff of contempt. “‘Well, she’ll have to get used to it. I guess ’twon’t kill her.’”

When poor Tina broke a saucer and failed to make quick confession, that is, to speak with accuracy, when she did really and truly let a lie slip over her lips, we can imagine what an awful thing it seemed to Miss Asphyxia. She proceeded to cure her of lying by scouring out her mouth. Putting some soap and sand on a rag and grasping the child’s head under her arm, she rubbed the mixture through her mouth with the energy of an insulted prophetess. “‘See now if you will tell me another lie,’” she said, pushing the child from her, and feeling that her own conscience was quite clear, whatever might be the spiritual condition of the culprit.

But things were coming to a crisis. Explaining the final fuss, Sam said: “‘Wal, ye see, the young un was spicy; and when Miss Sphyxy was down on her too hard, the child, she fit her,—ye know a rat’ll bite, a hen will peck, and a worm will turn,—and finally it come to a fight between ’em.’”

Tina’s brother did not fare much better than did the little girl. His cruel master would not allow him to go to visit his sister any more than Miss Asphyxia would have allowed him to come in if he[Pg 289] had arrived, for she would “‘Just as soon have the red dragon in the Revelations come into her house as a boy!’” Finally Harry ran away, went to Tina’s window in the night and told her to come with him. They went off together, wandering in search of some good people to give them a home, an event in which they had a firm faith. They went along the roads and through the fields, playing that they were Hansel and Gretel in the story. They had the adventure of coming upon an Indian encampment with a little tent and an old woman weaving baskets. With her they dipped succotash with a clean clam-shell from a wooden trough and were content and comforted. Harry knelt in prayer before lying down in the tent and this act made the eyes of the Indian woman shine, for she, it seems, was the relic of a long since Christianized tribe. When he was through she said: “‘Me praying Indian; me much love Jesus.’” The next morning, however, the heathen husband came and drove the children away.

The children took up their wandering and soon came to an old stately mansion with an avenue of majestic trees. This, we were told, was the Dench House, home of a Tory family of pre-revolutionary days and now deserted with all its furnitures and its mysteries until it could be decided properly to whom, under the new order, it really belonged. In this beautiful place they found no giant waiting to execute fell purpose upon them, so they built a[Pg 290] fire, gathered berries, and slept, until a very human and kind-hearted giant came along in the form of Sam Lawson himself, who bore them to Oldtown, where the home and the loving hearts they had had faith would appear, were awaiting them.

So Tina and Harry came to the home of Horace Henderson, the writer, as Mrs. Stowe portrays it, of these annals. Horace and Harry became the friends of a lifetime. Tina was passed into the care of Miss Mehitable Rossiter, a plain-faced and true-hearted old maid. When Tina stood at her knee and looked up into her homely face, Miss Mehitable said: “‘Well, how do you like me?’” Tina considered attentively, looking long into the honest, open eyes. “‘I do like you,’ she said, putting out her hands; ‘I think you are good.’” Miss Mehitable said that it was well that she did, for otherwise, as she was a fairy, she might turn her into a mouse or a kitten. “‘I like you, and I will be your kitten,’” said Tina. That night Tina slept in a big four-poster bed with hangings of India linen, on which Oriental pagodas and peacocks and mandarins mingled together like the phantasms of a dream. In this pretty little bit of description we have a memory of Mrs. Stowe’s own childhood when she visited the old Foote homestead at Nut Plains, and went to sleep behind the famous bed-hangings that her Uncle Samuel Foote had brought home, and wondered why the mandarins on the printed India[Pg 291] linen did not ring the little bells in the pagodas and why the birds did not pick off the golden fruits and eat them.

Thus the children were safely landed on the shores of “quality,” where they belonged. They became a part of that best of New England connections, the Rossiter family. They came to know Parson Lothrop, his wig and cocked hat and, above all, his old shay. They paid reverence to his wife also, the great lady, and to her lady’s maid, who had “grown up and dried in all the most sacred and sanctified essences of genteel propriety.” Everywhere Tina went she did more good than harm. Even to Lady Lothrop’s lonely grandeur she was a blessing. Tina had been told that in the presence of that great personage she must not talk. So the active child sat still as long as she could keep the dismal silence and then burst forth in several long, loud sighs.

“‘O dear!’ said Tina, ‘I was just wishing that I could go to church.’

“‘I just want to say, “O Lord, open thou my lips,”’ said Tina with effusion.... ‘I am so tired of not talking. But I promised Miss Mehitable that[Pg 292] I wouldn’t talk unless I was spoken to,’ she added with an air of virtuous resolution.”

The irresistible child was given permission to talk all she wanted, and from then on she rattled and sparkled and went on with a verve and gusto that waked everybody up. The icy chains of silence being thus broken, everybody talked and Lady Lothrop looked from one to another in a sort of pleased surprise, for the childless woman had a loving heart beneath her decorous breast.

All this is but the beginning of the story. Would it be possible to guess what is going to happen? The old Dench House with its secret drawers should afford a suggestion to a good guesser, and the “visionary boy,” who is the teller of the whole story, will think a great deal about Tina, we may be sure. A first-class, fascinating rascal will be introduced as new material, and the threads of the plot will work up into tragic crises. Far be it from me, however, to make known how it is to come out!

When “Oldtown Folks” was published, the reading world was so charmed with Sam Lawson that they cried out for more. Like Shakespeare with “Merry Wives,” the writer had to exhibit a favored hero under new conditions. More, more of Sam Lawson’s stories, they said. For the garrulous fellow kept up his story-telling habit to the very end of the book, telling his very best story last of all; therefore, the thought of the lazy, delightful Sam[Pg 293] was in the mind even while the reader was sighing over the woes of Tina. Hence, after a while Mrs. Stowe wrote another book called “Sam Lawson’s Oldtown Fireside Stories,” in which she gathered some tales of adventure, ghostly and otherwise, and let Sam tell them in his inimitable way. To be sure, everybody does not care for such a character as Sam Lawson; but, as he himself says, “‘Wal, you know there an’t no pleasin’ everybody; and ef Gabriel himself, right down out o’ Heaven, was to come.... I expect there’d be a pickin’ at his wings, and sort o’ fault-findin’.’”

As Mrs. Stowe’s first book had been a reflection of her love for old New England, and her two greatest, considered purely from the artistic point of view, had also come from the same source, so the last novel that she wrote, “Poganuc People,” is again an echo from this music of her youth. The Tina of “Oldtown Folks” is said to be modeled upon her own daughter, Georgiana May; if this is so, the Dolly of “Poganuc People” must be Harriet herself. In fact, a copy of “Poganuc People” exists with Mrs. Stowe’s marginal notes, telling where it is “exact” in its delineation, “my own experience,” “my own childish experience,” “the whole chapter drawn from life,” etc. This book has a pathetic and joyous interest as the very tender memoranda of the child’s life recalled by that all-remembering mind in declining years.

In 1863 Mrs. Stowe removed from Andover to Hartford, Connecticut, where, in a lovely wooded suburb on the bank of a river, she built a house that was her home until the end of her life. Up to the death of her husband in 1886 she spent the winters at Mandarin, Florida, called thither by the condition of her son Frederick, who, at the close of the war, came back to her in a state of broken health resulting from a wound in the head received at Gettysburg. In the end that dear son was a sacrifice, one of thousands that mothers were called upon to make for their country all over the land from farthest north to farthest south.

The earlier years of this later period, while burdened with family cares and sorrows, were a time of great literary activity to Mrs. Stowe. In that time she lengthened the list of her books from ten to thirty. Among these works there were three novels of importance, “Pink and White Tyranny,” “My Wife and I,” and “We and Our Neighbors,” all[Pg 295] studies in the conditions of her own time, especially in New York City. Of “My Wife and I” Mrs. Stowe said that she wrote it for the many dear, bright young girls whom she numbered among her choicest friends; if they liked the book, it was no matter what the critics said of it! Then there were many stories for children, “Little Pussy Willow,” “Betty’s Bright Idea,” “The Dog’s Mission,” and many more, all as good to-day as they were thirty years ago. In conjunction with her sister Catherine she published several books of household papers, wise thoughts on house economy, on the beautiful in the house, on home religion, etc. Several books were purely religious in their character; of these “Bible Heroines” is, strangely enough, not reprinted in her complete works.15 A volume of poems among the number reminds us of Harriet’s passion for poetry in her childhood and of her young ambition to join the band of immortal poets, so carefully extinguished by her eldest sister. In spite of Catherine, however, Mrs. Stowe indulged her desire for poetic expression every now and then all through her life, as she did also her love for drawing and sketching, and one of her poems, “The Other World,” has been a favorite with many.

Beloved in her private life and honored as one of the great in our literature, Mrs. Stowe lived on in her quiet home at Hartford until her death in[Pg 296] July, 1896. On her seventy-first birthday, June 14, 1882, she was tendered by her publishers, Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin and Company, a tribute in the form of a garden party to which many of the literary people of the country were invited. It was held at the country residence of the Honorable and Mrs. William Claflin, at Newtonville, near Boston, Massachusetts. This beautiful place, “The Old Elms,” was never more lovely than on this perfect day. The majestic elms stood proudly, as if they, too, felt the responsibility. The friends that came bore the most honored names among the living writers of the land. There were Whittier and Holmes, Louise Chandler Moulton and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Lucy Larcom and Thomas Bailey Aldrich and A. Bronson Alcott and Julia C. R. Dorr. Of Mrs. Beecher’s family there were a goodly number: her three brothers, Charles, Edward and Henry Ward, and her sister Isabella (Mrs. Hooker), her daughter Mrs. Allen and her son Charles, being among the number.

After a time spent in delightful converse, the company gathered in a tent on the lawn and listened to an address by Mr. H. O. Houghton.

After a tender word for the memory of Longfellow and of Emerson; Mr. Houghton said that the garden party was being held in honor of a birthday—but what the number of the birthday was we would not inquire. If we estimated it by the amount of work accomplished by the beloved guest of the[Pg 297] day we must rank her with the antediluvians; but if we judged by the vigor and freshness of her writings, by her universal sympathy with young and old, we should have to say that she had discovered the fountain of perpetual youth! Then he spoke of “Uncle Tom,” calling it the “great epic of our age”; his trials, and the victories he wrought for this epoch were to be our Iliad and our Æneid for centuries to come. He then ran over the events of Mrs. Stowe’s life, showing how it had all been a preparation for the work she did; the New England youth, the western years on the borders of a slave state, the trials and the disciplines. With such a training, he said, “who can wonder that, while sitting at the communion table and meditating on the infinite sorrows and ignominy of Him who gave Himself for the redemption of humanity, she should have been inspired with the vision of another life of suffering and sacrifice, by which a race should be redeemed; and that while she mused the fire burned, and from the white heat came forth the vivid picture of the death of that other man of sorrows, so like its great prototype, as like as a human copy can be to a divine original?” Mr. Houghton then spoke of the widespread interest and the many translations of the book, telling how “crowned heads, statesmen, scholars, and the people alike, have read, wept over, and applauded the simple story.” He also referred to Mrs. Stowe’s service to American literature in writing the tales of New[Pg 298] England life. Although these alone, he said, were sufficient to make the reputation of any author, they were, in his opinion, eclipsed by the glory of “Uncle Tom.”

He thought that her friends through all the world ranked her with the Deborahs and Miriams and Judiths of old, and when she sang the refrain, “Sing ye to the Lord, for He hath triumphed gloriously,” they would respond, “The Almighty Lord hath disappointed them by the hand of a woman!” With a heartfelt blessing and benediction, the address closed.

After this an address was made by that beloved and devoted brother of Mrs. Stowe’s, to whom she had been so loyal a sister and friend ever since the days when she took him by the hand and led him to Ma’am Kilbourne’s school. Henry Ward Beecher was introduced and made a speech full of witticisms and good feeling. He said that people accused him at first of being the real author of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”; that he then wrote his novel “Norwood,” and that killed this rumor dead! He told how he first read the book and with what tears. Then he gave a most wonderful tribute to his father and his mother, saying of him that, while his father thought he was great by his theology, everybody else knew that he was great by his religion; and of his mother, that the daughter Harriet was most like her in graces and excellences, though perhaps not in bodily presence.

Following this came some beautiful poems written for the occasion. Mr. Whittier’s was the most beautiful of these: there was one also by Dr. Holmes which was full of his exquisite humor, and there were others by Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Mr. J. T. Trowbridge, Mrs. Fields, and one by Mrs. Stowe’s daughter, Mrs. Allen. This one at least must be copied here.

Among other speeches was one by her brother Edward, on the subject of the favorable influence of the works of his sister on woman suffrage.

Then it was announced that Mrs. Stowe would say a few words. She arose and with one movement the whole audience arose, too, in reverence to the “little wisp of a woman” who stood there, slightly bowed and with the snowy touch upon the waves of her hair. The audience listened with eager interest, and this is what she said: “I wish to say that I thank all my friends from my heart—that is all. And one thing more—and that is, if any of you have doubt or sorrow or pain, if you doubt about this world, just remember what God has done; just remember that the great sorrow of slavery has gone, gone forever.” Then she told how happy the negroes were that she was seeing all the time about her in her home in Mandarin in[Pg 301] Florida. They were working, building for themselves little houses; and they were happy—they knew how to be happy even better than white folks, she said. To be sure, they had faults—we must have patience with them. But they were doing as well as possible, and were justifying the confidence placed in them. Then she added those significant words: “Let us never doubt; everything that ought to happen is going to happen.” And as the audience dispersed they carried the echo of these brave words with them, as the summing up of the whole life’s thought of the good and great woman they had come there to honor.

An old age more serenely beautiful than that of Harriet Beecher Stowe could scarcely be imagined. Honored throughout the world, happy in the beautiful companionship of children in the Hartford home, she passed on through the years, living in a dream world full of happy, loving thoughts. At one time she said: “I thank God that there is one thing running through my life from the time I was thirteen years old. It is the intense unwavering sense of God’s educative guiding presence and care.” She refers, of course, to that Sabbath when at the age of thirteen, she went to her father in his study and told him about her new sacred hope. It is not given to every one to find that “one unceasing purpose” has run all through his life. To her was given the insight to realize this. She thought so much about the life of the spirit that[Pg 302] at last it seemed as if she lived even more in the spirit world than she did in this. Wonderful dreams visited her soul in which she “knew of a certainty” something of a “vivid spiritual life where the enthusiasm of love is the calm habit of the soul, where without demonstrations of affection heart beats to heart, soul answers to soul, we respond to the Infinite Love and we feel His answer in us and there is no need of words.” This was, she said, “but a glimpse” yet it had “left a strange sweetness in her mind.”

When Mrs. Stowe was about seventy years old she made a visit to Wellesley College. The first time that I ever saw her she was sitting in the seat of honor in the gallery of the old chapel. To me she seemed like a little fairy godmother needing but the wings of gauze to be made into a real vision. But there was a look in her eyes that no soulless fairy ever had. As she leaned upon the railing and looked out over the audience of young college girls, gathered there from all parts of the world and throbbing with vivid life, a look of wistful longing came over her face. It was almost as though she said, “Ah, if this had but happened to me!” As she viewed that college life so wisely and broadly organized, apparently so rich in opportunity, she may have felt with some yearning that these young women were realizing powers and opportunities furnished with an ease that had been denied to her. But it is more likely that without[Pg 303] any sadness or any reflection upon the difficulties of her own youthful experience, she enthusiastically rejoiced in the vigor, the happiness and the promise of power she saw in that college group, and that, with her characteristic wistful maternal tenderness, she yearned only for the fruition of that promise. And we may question whether she would have had a larger life or a greater influence if she had lived at a later time and had had the training that is given to young women now. As it was she used what she had to the full. Her industry was incessant. Her growth was constantly forced by the fire of her own passion for attainment. Then came the country’s crisis, and the crisis made the woman. But it would never have made the woman if she had not stood ready to be made. That preparation we have seen develop step by step in this story of her life.

It is, therefore, for the spirit of the woman behind the worker that we are most sharply indebted; for, after all, it is an even greater thing to live a great life than to write a great book. Harriet had courage; she had initiative. She was overwhelmingly magnanimous, she was utterly true. She was true to that part in us that grows, as well as to the part that inherits the teaching of the past. She was wise enough to know that the human mind and soul must be always impressionable, always open to the truth as well as staunch in defending it. She had faith in herself and she had faith in God.[Pg 304] Moreover, it was because of her faith in God that she had that faith in herself. After all, then, it was her perfect confidence in God that was the key-note of her character. “Let us never doubt,” she said; “everything that ought to happen is going to happen.” This was the supreme note in the harmony of her life.

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	CHAPTER	PAGE
I.	The Early Home of Harriet Beecher Stowe	1
II.	Work and Play in the Beecher Parsonage	16
III.	Harriet Beecher’s Schooling	32
IV.	Education in the Home	51
V.	The Books She Read	70
VI.	Dramatic Ventures	83
VII.	Studies and Teachers	96
VIII.	Some Steps Forward	110
IX.	A Pilgrimage	122
X.	The Western Home	133
XI.	The Founders of a School	146
XII.	The Semi-Colons	158
XIII.	Mrs. Stowe the Home-Maker	171
XIV.	Unconscious Preparation for a Work	188
XV.	The Great Inspiration	204
XVI.	“Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and Its Influence	215
XVII.	Wandering in Foreign Lands	223
XVIII.	A Unique Jubilee	243
XIX.	A Visit to Abraham Lincoln	258
XX.	Writing Stories of Old New England Life	274
XXI.	A Serene Old Age	294

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Harriet Beecher Stowe: a biography for girls

HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

PREFACE

CHRONOLOGICAL OUTLINE OF MRS. STOWE’S LIFE

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I
THE EARLY HOME OF HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

CHAPTER II
WORK AND PLAY IN THE BEECHER PARSONAGE

CHAPTER III
HARRIET BEECHER’S SCHOOLING

CHAPTER IV
EDUCATION IN THE HOME

CHAPTER V
THE BOOKS SHE READ

CHAPTER VI
DRAMATIC VENTURES

CHAPTER VII
STUDIES AND TEACHERS

CHAPTER VIII
SOME STEPS FORWARD

CHAPTER IX
A PILGRIMAGE

CHAPTER X
THE WESTERN HOME

CHAPTER XI
THE FOUNDERS OF A SCHOOL

CHAPTER XII
THE SEMI-COLONS

CHAPTER XIII
MRS. STOWE THE HOME-MAKER

CHAPTER XIV
UNCONSCIOUS PREPARATION FOR A WORK

CHAPTER XV
THE GREAT INSPIRATION

CHAPTER XVI
“UNCLE TOM’S CABIN” AND ITS INFLUENCE

CHAPTER XVII
WANDERING IN FOREIGN LANDS

CHAPTER XVIII
A UNIQUE JUBILEE

CHAPTER XIX
A VISIT TO ABRAHAM LINCOLN

CHAPTER XX
WRITING STORIES OF OLD NEW ENGLAND LIFE

CHAPTER XXI
A SERENE OLD AGE

A LIST OF MRS. STOWE’S BOOKS

INDEX

FOOTNOTES:

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Harriet Beecher Stowe: a biography for girls

HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

PREFACE

CHRONOLOGICAL OUTLINE OF MRS. STOWE’S LIFE

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I THE EARLY HOME OF HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

CHAPTER II WORK AND PLAY IN THE BEECHER PARSONAGE

CHAPTER III HARRIET BEECHER’S SCHOOLING

CHAPTER IV EDUCATION IN THE HOME

CHAPTER V THE BOOKS SHE READ

CHAPTER VI DRAMATIC VENTURES

CHAPTER VII STUDIES AND TEACHERS

CHAPTER VIII SOME STEPS FORWARD

CHAPTER IX A PILGRIMAGE

CHAPTER X THE WESTERN HOME

CHAPTER XI THE FOUNDERS OF A SCHOOL

CHAPTER XII THE SEMI-COLONS

CHAPTER XIII MRS. STOWE THE HOME-MAKER

CHAPTER XIV UNCONSCIOUS PREPARATION FOR A WORK

CHAPTER XV THE GREAT INSPIRATION

CHAPTER XVI “UNCLE TOM’S CABIN” AND ITS INFLUENCE

CHAPTER XVII WANDERING IN FOREIGN LANDS

CHAPTER XVIII A UNIQUE JUBILEE

CHAPTER XIX A VISIT TO ABRAHAM LINCOLN

CHAPTER XX WRITING STORIES OF OLD NEW ENGLAND LIFE

CHAPTER XXI A SERENE OLD AGE