The Beechers and their God

America is often regarded as one of the most religious countries in the West: our huge percentage of churchgoers, our militant religious right, the politicians who invoke God in almost every speech. But our culture is in fact strongly if insecurely secular. Americans have long experienced anxiety over the separation of church and state; by law we honor it but in practice some part of the national psyche must yearn for the old, powerful conflation of the idea of God and the dream of American destiny. To this day, the evangelicals among us seem to believe that a Benevolence hovers over the Great Experiment in Democracy. Two centuries ago, however, the culture was religious, with secularism a feared incursion in a Calvinist America still connected to its Puritan roots. In 1800, Christian rhetoric informed daily life, notions of virtue coincided with a Christian definition of moral obligation, the young easily contemplated a life in the church, and in our colleges and universities religious thought and practice intermingled with every kind of intellectual inquiry. But by the 1830s a rejection of orthodox Calvinism -- with its insistence on original sin and the abiding threat of an eternity spent in Hell -- was developing so rapidly that Christianity itself (and along with it the country) seemed imperiled. Ralph Waldo Emerson, minister and moral philosopher, addressed the problem by deciding that God was within; to know oneself, Emerson assured his countrymen, was to experience the Transcendent. While his interpretation provided America with its lasting myth of self-creation, the country remained churchgoing even as the fervor for a God of wrath gave way to a conviction that God was love.

A great American family of the religious 19th century is the clan founded by Lyman Beecher, an impassioned New England minister born in 1775 and converted at Yale to Calvinism by the grandson of the celebrated Puritan theologian Jonathan Edwards. Between 1800 and 1824, Beecher fathered 11 children -- among them a son, Henry, who would one day become America’s most famous preacher, and a daughter, Harriet, who would write an American classic. Only the sons (all seven of them) went into the ministry, but the entire family personified the new religion struggling with the old. It was in the articulation of this struggle that the children distinguished themselves. By 1860, they had collectively adopted the Christianity of love; gone to work as scholars, educators and reformers; and among them written some 40 books. Religious conviction was still the mission, but out of it came a reverence for securing the rights of all God’s children, which translated into support for the antislavery movement, education for women, even universal suffrage. Not that the Beechers were radicals (none of them was), but as a group they were remarkable for their active association with the issues of their time.

Lyman Beecher commanded the affection of his children throughout his years. A flaming Puritan in lifetime need of erotic attachment (he married three times), he also showed, as Catharine, his oldest child, remarked, “that passionate love of children which makes it a pleasure to nurse and tend them.” His great tenderheartedness gave each child the inner strength to obey the dictates of his or her own spirit but also made it nightmarishly difficult for them to abandon their father’s orthodoxy. At daybreak, he kissed the children awake and pressed them to receive God’s grace -- that is, to submit to “conversion” -- that very morning. This pressure, coming at them on waves of love, ensured a state of everlasting anxiety in the whole family. Throughout their lives, one Beecher or another was always in the grip of stomachache, fever, nerves or breakdown, and two committed suicide. Yet all remembered childhood fondly. Isabella recalled “the strongest and most interesting combination in our family of fun and seriousness.” Though the family talked endlessly about free will, regeneration, heaven and hell, the house also rang with humor, practical jokes and the songs and fiddle-playing that Lyman Beecher loved; occasionally, he took off his shoes and danced in his socks.

Much has been written about the Beechers, and they figure individually in many histories, memoirs and biographies, but Barbara White’s “The Beecher Sisters” is, I believe, the first book devoted exclusively to Catharine, Harriet and Isabella, the three daughters who turned the family predilection for preaching into the didacticism of protest literature, education for women and universal suffrage. Each in her own way was a middle-class woman without any particular distinction of intellect, but as each was also a Beecher, endowed with the need to live life on a high spiritual plane, they all developed evangelical personalities to serve their particular causes. The reform confronting all three was women’s rights; collectively, their responses to the suffrage question reflected the representative responses of the nation.

Catharine opened a school for girls in 1823 and in time became a nationally known writer on behalf of education for women. Like every other reformer who stopped short of supporting suffrage (she was absolutely against it), she thought that women should be educated in order to help make better citizens of American men. For instance, she saw it as the duty of American women not to become antislavery activists themselves but to exercise a moral influence at home that would persuade their male relatives to help slavery die “a natural death.” Abolitionists and suffragists alike were cordially exasperated by every word Catharine Beecher wrote.

Harriet, who married one of her father’s seminarians, bore seven children and became a world-famous writer remained passionately connected to Christianity and adopted a hesitant liberalism akin to Catharine’s intelligent conservatism. She wavered on suffrage, finally denouncing George Sand as an example of deformed femininity just when Elizabeth Cady Stanton was hailing Sand as a hero. Then, in 1872, when her brother Henry was exposed by flamboyant suffragist Victoria Woodhull as an egregious adulterer and all the famous feminists stuck by Woodhull when Henry prosecuted her for slander, Harriet turned viciously on the movement, condemning Stanton and her friends as “the free love roost of harpies.”

White’s book concentrates, rightly, on Isabella, the youngest Beecher daughter and the one whose life is most evocative of the complicated inner confusions that marked her time. Isabella was the family beauty. At 19 she married John Hooker, a liberal Hartford lawyer who adored her, and that seemingly was that. But in 1859, after 18 years of marriage, she read an Atlantic article provocatively titled “Ought Women to Learn the Alphabet?” and suddenly saw the infantilism of her life. Within minutes she had become a feminist and soon brought together a convention in Hartford, at which her powers of oratory and organization were apparent. Elizabeth Stanton and Susan B. Anthony were impressed and immediately welcomed her into the women’s movement, where she rose quickly to become a national leader, traveling regularly to Washington, organizing conventions, speaking before legislatures. As she was a Beecher, Isabella’s commanding personality was yoked to a politics that remained irritatingly cautious. She maintained a religious reverence for motherhood and marriage, was convinced that women by nature are morally superior to men, and urged repeatedly that all reforms move slowly and patiently. Stanton’s and Anthony’s immodest radicalism made her wince. At the same time, her moral imperiousness left people open-mouthed and led Stanton (who, on and off, loved her) to exclaim, “The Beecher conceit surpasses understanding.”

Yet “the Cause” -- women’s suffrage -- forced Isabella to take positions and honor attachments that ultimately made her a pariah not only to her family but also to a large part of the respectable society whose approval she craved. What did her in was Henry Beecher’s trial for adultery. It was one of the great scandals of the age, and the family (as well as the entire church establishment) rallied to the famous preacher by reviling Woodhull. For Isabella, this development was a disaster. She could not side with the family when Stanton was urging all women to back Woodhull (“If a woman is to be crucified, let men drive the nails this time, not one of us”); besides, she knew Henry was guilty. When she begged him to confess, he looked at her as though she had gone insane. The whole Beecher clan did the same. In a moment, their doors were closed to her, rocking her to her very foundations and plunging her into such depression that she turned to spiritualism. Something in her came permanently undone. Thereafter, and for the rest of her long life (she died in 1907), communion with the dead was her major concern and her only comfort.

In this she was not alone. The great reform movements, as well as the 1859 publication of Darwin’s “Origin of Species,” had altered the national sensibility more profoundly than was popularly understood, leaving millions of people stranded, unable to retreat to the Christian simplicity of “God is love” yet equally unable to go forward into the cold excitement of science and secularism. So they stood stock still, holding hands around the seance table, praying with eyes wide shut that this intolerable littleness to which life had brought them wasn’t, couldn’t, be all there was. The list of famous and accomplished women and men who in the last decades of the 19th century joined Isabella Hooker in subscribing to spiritualism is deeply moving.

Although “The Beecher Sisters” is a model of academic research -- richly organized, scrupulously intelligent and offering a wealth of information, regrettably not a sentence in it lets the reader feel the sweep and stir -- the magnificent ardor -- of these people’s lives. The book is best read by those who come to it already conversant with the period and the protagonists.