Chapter 3
“IF YOU WISH TRUE, UNALLOYED, GENUINE DELIGHT, FALL IN LOVE WITH SOME AMIABLE GIRL”
It was 10:00 P.M. and the streets of Boston were dark when Henry set off for his freshman year of college in the summer of 1830. It would be an uncomfortable night, sleeping sitting up on the stiff stagecoach seats, swaying with every rut and pothole as the horses raced along at the miraculous rate of one hundred miles in fifteen hours. But by midday he would be ensconced at his sister’s house in Hartford, Connecticut, indulging in a rare, brief visit before heading on to Amherst, Massachusetts.
Henry had scarcely seen his older sisters since he went off to boarding school. In the intervening years the Beecher sisters had become prominent citizens in the city of Hartford. Catharine’s school for girls, the Hartford Female Academy, now boasted a national reputation, and she was publishing her first book, Suggestions on Education, to critical acclaim. Nineteen-year-old Harriet continued to teach at the academy, but Mary had taken a different path, marrying Thomas Clapp Perkins, a leading local lawyer, and retiring forever from public life. Mary now had two small children, several servants, and one large house, which she managed with the help of good Aunt Esther.
Not long after noon the next day, Mrs. Thomas C. Perkins was called downstairs by a knock on the front door. There, gazing up at her, stood a lanky, smooth-faced young man clad in an old suit patched at the knees and elbows and accompanied by a battered horsehair trunk. After a moment of confusion the stranger finally introduced himself—in this era before photography, before the railroad made travel commonplace, Henry had simply grown beyond Mary’s recognition. Canny Catharine did better, but Harriet, his old boon companion, had no idea who he was. “She could not think what to make of it when I went up and kissed her,” Henry chuckled.1
At the age of seventeen Henry had matured physically, but emotionally and mentally, to quote his sister, “it was difficult to say which predominated in him most, the boy or the man.”2 The next day Catharine insisted that he come to a “levee” she was hosting at her boardinghouse—after three years in a single-sex school this would be his first “boy-girl party.” Arriving early that evening, Henry hid by the pianoforte, paralyzed by adolescent embarrassment until Harriet rescued him. He basked happily in her attention until she began to urge him to come meet some of the girls.
In a panic Henry bolted for the hallway as soon as Harriet turned her back, nearly knocking over one startled gentleman. Red faced, he grabbed his hat, sneaked past the parlor, then dashed for the front door, picking up speed when he realized that half a dozen young ladies were sitting on the hall stairs watching him in amusement. He whipped out the door and hightailed it to his sister’s house, where Mary and Aunt Esther consoled him.3
The next day was more to his liking. For fun Harriet and Catharine dressed their pliant baby brother in a woman’s cloak, bonnet, and scarf, while Harriet put on a man’s cloak and hat, and then called in some of the girls to look. Everyone swore that Henry was Harriet, and Harriet, he thought, looked exactly like Charles! It seems safe to say that when Henry finally departed for college he was still much more boy than man.
THE EARLY 1830S WERE A REMARKABLE TIME to be a college student—more akin to the late 1960s than other eras. The average age of the population was sixteen in 1830, the result of a baby boom following the War of 1812, and the number of colleges had quintupled from nine to nearly fifty. The old generation of founding fathers was dying, symbolically passing the revolutionary mantle to this rising generation. A delicious sense of “Newness,” as one contemporary called it, pervaded the culture. “There was a breath of new air, much vague expectation, a consciousness of power not yet finding its determinate aim,” Ralph Waldo Emerson recalled forty years later.4
This “ go-ahead” spirit had many origins. It was drifting in from Europe, where Romantic writers were challenging the staid hierarchies of the classical tradition and the rationalism of the Enlightenment, and scientists were demystifying the natural world in every field from physics to physiology. It was stirred by homegrown technological inventions that harnessed iron, water, and steam to accomplish fantastic things that mere men never could. It was fed by the opening of the western frontier, where cheap land inspired even the poorest Americans to dream of reinventing themselves, and by a surge of democratic populism in government, as many states eliminated property qualifications and other barriers to mass political participation for white men.
In religion 1830 was the “Year of the Great Revival.” The religious revivals that had dotted the landscape for the last fifteen years suddenly massed into a tidal wave, washing tens of thousands of souls up to the shores of heaven, and unleashing a powerful optimism and energy upon the land. “Universal Education,” “Universal Reform,” and “Progress” were becoming the great rallying cries of the thinking classes.
Amherst College perfectly captured the zeitgeist. The campus was painfully plain, as even its admirers admitted. Johnson Chapel, with its mammoth white pillars, housed the classrooms and laboratory. Flanking the chapel were three unadorned brick boxes, student dormitories named simply South, Middle, and North colleges. A water well, privy, and woodshed rounded out the official architecture of the school. There was no dining hall, so students took their meals in town. The college had only six full professors, most of them ordained ministers, and a minuscule endowment, yet students were pouring in so fast that it was rapidly becoming the second largest college in New England.
Amherst had a different ethos than Harvard or Yale, where the prerogatives of tradition, wealth, and aristocratic bloodlines dominated. Here most of the students were from the hardscrabble hill towns of western New England and upstate New York, the pious sons of farmers and parsons, often the first in their families to go to college. Nearly half the students received financial aid from various charitable funds, and most supported themselves through odd jobs and schoolteaching. Many were recently converted older students, and a majority were heading for the ministry. They were “Country graduates,” to use Nathaniel Hawthorne’s phrase: “rough, brown-featured, schoolmaster-looking, half bumpkin, half-scholarly figures, in black ill-cut broadcloth,—their manners quite spoilt by what little of the gentleman there was in them.”5
But what these boys lacked in poise they made up in ambition. They were a brainy, intense lot, the vanguard of America’s growing obsession with self-improvement. Amherst College was “an infant Hercules,” Emerson wrote in admiration after visiting the campus. “They write and study in a sort of fury, which, I think, promises a harvest of attainments.”6 Their religious zeal was so notorious that their Unitarian foes dubbed Amherst “the priest factory.” Temperance societies, in which students pledged to avoid hard liquor, were common on many campuses, but Amherst was famous for adopting the radical “cold water” requirement that members abstain from beer, wine, opium, and tobacco as well.
In the twentieth century, evangelical Christians came to be characterized as reactionary and anti-intellectual, but in the 1830s they were the nation’s most ardent advocates of education, believing that ignorance and sin went hand in hand. Amherst was deeply influenced by the new German vision of liberal education, with its emphasis on independent thinking over rote recitation, and scientific observation and experimentation over a priorireasoning. It was among the first schools to use blackboards—an innovation that seems small today but that changed the very nature of teaching. The faculty’s attempt in 1828 to introduce the study of modern languages and literature fell apart for lack of support, but in 1831 they successfully scraped together four thousand dollars to send a professor to Europe to purchase the latest scientific books and equipment. Amherst in 1830, as one of Henry’s professors recalled, “was regarded as pre-eminently the live College and the progressive Institution of New England.”7
IF ANY PLACE SHOULD HAVE FELT FAMILIAR to Henry, then surely Amherst was it. Yet his transition to college was miserable. To save money he rented a room a mile from campus in a private home, sharing with a Boston Latin boy two years younger than himself, and several seniors who took no notice of the bashful freshman, leaving him lonely and isolated. At the same time, as the son of the notorious Lyman Beecher, Henry was “a marked man” on campus, as one classmate recalled (one fellow student was actually named Lyman Beecher Harkin). Everyone was judging his every move.
Perhaps the problem was that Amherst was too much like home, with its combination of high expectations, sharp scrutiny, and benign neglect. “I went through another phase of suffering which was far worse than any I had previously experienced,” he said years later. “It seemed as though all the darkness of my childhood were mere puffs to the blackness I was now passing through.”8
As usual schoolwork was the wellspring of his despair. The firstyear schedule was full of his worst subjects: Latin, Greek, algebra, geometry, and English grammar. Like many a freshman, Henry felt in over his head, certain that his classmates were far better prepared than he was. He was disorganized in every way. Clothes and books were strewn around his room, as one friend put it, “in utter confusion—some upon the floor, others in chairs, or the windows, and others under or upon the bed.”9 As Henry said, quoting his freshman roommate, “I had a place for everything and everything in its place—that is on the table.”10
“I have not fixed a plan of study or anything else hardly. I have tried to form them so many times and failed that I begin to distrust my own self,” he lamented to George a few months into the first semester. He lived in dread of disapproval and was shattered by the smallest setbacks. “I feel every day that I am blown about by every little circumstance, all at loose ends,”11 he wrote; “and so I seek conversation etc. to keep myself from my own thoughts—and if they trouble me now I don’t know what they will do when I grow older.”
Like his father, Henry laid the blame for his suffering on Mount Pleasant. “My going to Mt. Pleasant cut me all up as to being thorough,” he complained.12 Perhaps, he suggested, he should leave college and study for a year with Catharine and Harriet in Hartford. Or maybe he should become a farmer. But those ideas went nowhere.
In typical fashion Henry’s anxiety erupted into a spiritual crisis. He hit bottom in February of his freshman year, just as a new wave of religious revivals was sweeping through the colleges and academies of the Northeast. Hoping to join the trend, the faculty tried to spark their own revival with a “concert of prayer.” But none of their efforts took hold until one of the senior boys was suddenly struck down with a mysterious illness. Shocked and frightened by the death of their classmate, several seniors became “serious,” as the Calvinists liked to say, and experienced dramatic conversions, sending a domino effect through the rest of the school.
Night after night prayer meetings filled the classrooms, and morning after morning the names of new converts were announced at chapel. Once again Henry was “prodigiously waked up” by the spiritual commotion around him. Given that he was already ostensibly a Christian, however, this new emotional turmoil sent him into a spiral of uncertainty that, he later confessed, “came near wrecking me.” He tried attending “an inquiry-meeting” for those with spiritual hope, but when young Beecher walked in, the professor leading the meeting stopped dead, saying: “My friends, I am so overwhelmed by the consciousness of God’s presence in this room that I cannot speak a word.”
What he meant was not entirely clear, but Henry didn’t wait to find out. In the sudden silence the lad shamefacedly got up and left the room. “There was no humiliation that I would not have submitted to ten thousand times over if thereby I could have found relief from the doubt, perplexity, and fear which tormented me,” he said years later.13
After weeks of misery Henry went to see President Heman Humphrey for guidance. President Humphrey was an upright man of exemplary character, but even his admirers found him inflexible and uninspiring. Like all the authority figures in Henry’s life, he failed to help the poor boy. “I am without hope and utterly wretched, and I want to be a Christian,” Henry moaned as he sat down in the president’s study.
“Ah! it is the spirit of God, my young man,” President Humphrey responded solemnly, “and when the Spirit of God is at work with a soul I dare not interfere.”
“I went away in blacker darkness than I came,” Henry said.14
Ultimately aid came from a very different quarter. Moody Harrington, an earnest senior who at the age of thirty-two was older and more mature than most of his classmates, noticed Henry’s distress. At first Henry was intimidated by the upperclassman. “I remember that my poetic temperament, alongside of his rigorous, logical temperament, used to seem to me mean and contemptible,” he recalled. “I thought he was like a big oak-tree, while I was more like a willow, half-grown and pliant, yielding to every force that was exerted upon it.”15
But as Moody took the freshman under his wing, offering him sympathy and encouragement, Henry began to blossom. “I wanted someone to brood me,” Henry said later, and he did.16 It was a new kind of relationship. Moody did not treat him like a peer or a peon, but like the attentive, nurturing older brother Henry had always longed for. No one—certainly no one in the Beecher fold—had ever responded to his needs with such empathy.
Henry’s stories about how he emerged from this and other religious crises are always fuzzy. “The precise time of my conversion I cannot tell,” he later confessed. Over and over he describes epiphanies that turn out to be merely high points in an ongoing cycle of anguish and elation. Still, there was hope of progress. His earthly friendship with Moody inspired Henry to stumble, half blindly, toward a new vision of God. In one version of the story, his catharsis came as he was tramping through the woods after class, when “there arose over the horizon a vision of the Lord Jesus Christ as a living Friend, who had the profoundest personal interest in me, I embraced that view and was lifted up.”17
In another version, he was kneeling by the fireplace in his room, where he had been studying and praying, when he was struck by this thought: “Will God permit the devil to have charge of one of his children that does not want to be deceived?” Suddenly there arose in him “such a sense of God’s taking care of those who put their trust in him that for an hour all the world was crystalline, the heavens were lucid, and I sprang to my feet and began to cry and laugh; and feeling that I must tell somebody what the Lord had done for me, I went and told Dr. Humphrey and others.”18
These moments of relief and ecstasy came and went, but for the first time they were leading Henry in a new direction. This concept of Christ as personal friend and mentor—a divine version of Moody Harrington—stood in stark contrast to the legalistic theology he’d grown up with, in which God was a stern judge and Christ was the sacrificial scapegoat who would atone for mankind’s crimes. For the first time Henry glimpsed a new path to salvation based on acceptance rather than judgment.
AS IT DOES WITH MOST homesick freshmen, Henry’s unhappiness evaporated as soon as he discovered the pleasures of college social life. In no time at all he was one of the popular boys of the class. Official extracurricular activities were few in the 1830s, but he played flute in the college band, was a zealous member of the College Temperance Society, and undoubtedly shone in the Society for Inquiry, the school’s religious club. The boys loved Henry’s sparkling sense of humor and practical jokes, and he could often be found lounging on the steps of Johnson Chapel, regaling a crowd with his wit. “Nobody could be gloomy or desponding near your father,” one classmate, S. Hopkins Emery, told Henry’s son years later. “He made us all cheerful and happy.”19
By the time his freshman year drew to a close, Henry was brimming with newfound self-assurance. Over the summer break he intended to get a job as an agent for one of the voluntary societies, traveling around to small towns distributing Bibles or religious tracts, “or something like that, or do something or other,” he told Harriet. “I shall in a month or two be eighteen years old,” he said, “and I think that is old enough to begin to do something.”20
Finally the last day of school arrived. To save the cost of coach fare, Henry decided to walk the hundred-odd miles from Amherst to Boston, along with two of his new college friends, including one of his roommates, Ebenezer Bullard. It was too long to walk in a single day, so Ebenezer invited the fellows to stop overnight at his family’s farm in West Sutton, Massachusetts.
That evening the boys arrived at a big rambling white farmhouse. The kindly Mrs. Bullard fed the ravenous teenagers a raft of old-fashioned Yankee delicacies. Even in old age Henry remembered her home-churned butter spread on snowy white bread, bowls of thick cream poured over crumbled coarse brown bread and whortleberries, tangy homemade cheeses, and steaming fruit pies. But what really caught Henry’s imagination was Ebenezer’s sister Eunice.
MUCH HAD CHANGED in the nine months since that embarrassing evening in Hartford. Henry was no longer the bashful boy who stammered and blushed and ran away from the gentler sex. To speak plainly, Henry was girl crazy.
Perhaps this was not surprising. Even as a little boy Henry longed for female attention and seemed to feel, at least subconsciously, that the way to replace his long-lost mother was to find a wife of his own. When he was only eight or nine years old, Henry surprised his stepmother by declaring: “I am never going to get married.”
“Ah, why not, Henry?” she asked.
Blushing violently, he replied, “Well, I never could ask a girl, ‘Will you have me?’”21
It was an odd thing for a boy in short pants to worry about, but on this subject Henry was precocious. Years later he recalled infatuations with not one but two “older women.” At the age of twelve the object of his adoration was Mary Peck, a friend of his sisters; when she married he expressed his sorrow by copying into her keepsake album a maudlin poem about life’s disappointments and the consolations of Christ. In high school he developed a crush on Nancy, a classmate’s older sister. Home on vacation in Boston, he spiffed up his shabby clothes and screwed up the courage to visit Nancy’s house. As he lingered in the parlor with his family before he left, the transformation was obvious.
“Lyman,” Harriet Porter said slyly, without looking up from her lace knitting, “Mount Pleasant is an excellent school. Henry is improving very much. He has grown tidy, blacks his boots and brushes his hair, and begins to pay a proper attention to his clothes.” Charles exploded with laughter, and Henry turned red.
“Oh! it is the school, is it?” Lyman said, peering over his paper. “Humph! I guess the cause is nearer home.”
Unfortunately his social calls went no further than leaning against the window and watching Nancy sew—“she had such little pink fingers,” he said, “how I wanted to take hold of them!” Whenever the girl would glance up, however, “I would be covered with hot and awkward confusion.” But Nancy was also too old for him, and soon married someone her own age.22
Now a college man, he was determined to become “a complete gentleman,” turning to Harriet for help in improving his “manners, conversation, and propriety.” “I wish that you would tell me everything in which you think I need to improve and I will try to correct it,” he wrote his sister.23 He threw himself into the task with gusto, forcibly conquering any last shyness and discovering a natural gift for flirtation.
Soon his pals were complaining that Henry spent too many evenings taking tea and trading confidences with the young ladies of Amherst: girls like Lucy Humphrey, daughter of President Humphrey, or Catharine Dickinson, daughter of one of the college’s founding fathers and aunt to a newborn baby girl who would one day become the poet Emily Dickinson. He took a special shine to a young charmer he identified only as Susan.
Among girls Henry was at his best: sweet, attentive, witty, confident. In turn feminine friendships offered a cozy haven for his easily battered ego. When he was downhearted or discouraged, he was sure that marriage would solve all his problems, including his battle with the books. “I sometimes wish that I was married to one who could have enough influence over me to keep me thorough, in all my studies,” he confided to George. “I believe it would make another man of me.”24
EUNICE WHITE BULLARD was a handsome girl with rosy, clear skin, a curvy figure, and thick auburn hair styled in fashionable ringlets. Like Henry, Eunice was a middle child among a brood of nine children and was accustomed to the hard work required of even a well-to-do farm girl. The Bullards were devout Congregationalists, from old-line Puritan stock on both sides. Two of her brothers attended Amherst with Henry, and three joined the ministry. Intense and intelligent, she had recently graduated from an academy near Amherst and was now teaching school.
Eunice’s father, Dr. Artemas Bullard, was a prominent physician and the squire of Bullard Hill, one of the largest farms in the area. He was a tall, taciturn man, overbearing and notoriously cheap. Dr. Bullard loved his children, but he was often strict to the point of severity. When Eunice and her sister once dared to appear at the dinner table in relatively low-cut dresses, Dr. Bullard hurled a bowl of hot soup at them, remarking that they must be cold and the soup would warm them.
As a child of an orthodox, well-to-do doctor, forbidden from joining the other kids in such dubious pastimes as dancing lessons, Eunice grew up feeling isolated and socially awkward. As a little girl she was teased for her prissiness—“teasing, they called it—I called it tormenting me,” she remembered. One day some children from the village cornered her by the village gristmill, egging her on to swear and say wicked words. When she refused they picked her up and dangled her over the water-wheel, threatening to toss her into the churning stream if she didn’t “show the Doctor that his children could be just as bad as they were.”
Poor Eunice protested that if she cursed and took the Lord’s name in vain, “I should go to ‘the bad place’ when I died.” They pushed her head under the flume of water, then pulled her out, as she described it, “strangled and gasping for breath when in my great fright I cried out ‘By God!’—and wild with a great horror of what I had said I fell into convulsions in their hands.”
She lay there apparently unconscious until the miscreants finally ran for help. Eunice was bedridden for several weeks after her trauma. “Father was surprised and alarmed that I remained so long ill, but I dared not tell why,” Eunice remembered, “but young as I was I brooded over my great sin—sure that death was near and I should be forever lost.” The only consolation was that her mysterious illness brought her the undivided attention and open affection of her parents.
Eunice was close to her mild-mannered mother, Lucy White Bullard. Still, Eunice, like Henry, often felt neglected and misunderstood. She envied her brothers’ advanced educations, and resented that so much of her time was spent sewing and cooking for them. Surrounded by seven teasing brothers and a critical father, she could be oversensitive and insecure. But she also shared the Bullards’ sharp wit and could hold her own in any conversation.
Eunice was not overwhelmed by her first impression of Henry. He looked no older than fifteen, with his smooth boyish face, wide mouth, and saucer-size blue-gray eyes. “Truth to tell,” she confessed, he “was an exceedingly homely young man.” But his gawky looks were mitigated by “the roguish mouth, the laughing, merry eyes and the quaint humor and quicker repartee”—true, he was “not an Apolo for Beauty. But in youth or old age, who, after spending an hour with him, ever thought of that, or believed it?”25
After supper the family gathered in the cheery “home room.” Dr. Bullard was out on a house call to a patient, but the boys chatted and joked with Mrs. Bullard, while Eunice sat down to darn a coat that Ebenezer had brought home for mending. As she began to wind a skein of homespun thread into a ball for darning, Henry gallantly offered to hold the skein. Somehow, however, he managed to make a mess of the thread (“A badly tangled skein, is it not?” he asked innocently), requiring half the evening to untangle it. He filled in the time entertaining Eunice and her family with funny stories. His lively, clever talk and flattering attentions were a marked contrast to the dreary routine of farm life, and Eunice’s opinion of Henry was rising dramatically. “Before the first evening was past none of the family felt him to be a stranger,” said she.
Her father returned just as they were all laughing uproariously at one of Henry’s anecdotes. Dr. Bullard stood in the doorway, surprised and rather disapproving at the tumult, but by the end of the evening he found himself laughing and swapping stories with “young Beecher,” Eunice remembered, “as cheerfully as if they had been boys together.”
“He’s smart,” Dr. Bullard said approvingly. “If he lives, he’ll make his mark in the world.”26
The next day his companion left for Boston, but Henry decided to stay on through the weekend. His interest in Eunice was unmistakable. Like many farmers, the Bullards made their own cheese and Henry spent most of his time with the girl in the dank, sour-smelling milk-cellar room, helping her churn butter and rub down the rows of yellow cheeses aging on wooden shelves. He did his own buttering up of Dr. Bullard, roaming the farm with him, asking questions about planting, harvests, and husbandry. He flirted sweetly with Mrs. Bullard, who loved him from the first. “Henry always brings sunshine and makes me feel young,” she often said. He paid her the compliment of eating voraciously from her packed larder.27
By the time he left, Henry had a full-blown crush on Ebenezer’s “kind, amiable and beautiful sister.” As he wrote to his college friend Howard Chauncey, he now “put her on the list of those to be ‘tho’t more of’”—at the head of the list, in fact, replacing the unsuspecting Susan. Those days at Bullard Hill were the highlight of his vacation, fueling his fascination with the “important and interesting topic” of courtship.28
LITTLE TOM BEECHER, only seven years old, waited “in an agony of delight that could not be endured” for his big brother to come home from college. When Henry finally rattled the door latch, Tom dashed under his mother’s bed to savor the joy of being sought and found and “tossed above the clouds by great, strong brother Henry.” Tom’s joy was shared by his father, whose morning prayer was now one of thanks: “Thou hast brought back our boys in health.”29
Things were not going well for the Reverend Beecher. His plan to wipe out Unitarianism was stalled, and his crusade against the liquor trade and Sunday recreations had enraged the working classes, especially the Catholic immigrants, who resented his Protestant bigotry. But no one guessed the depth of their opposition until one frigid winter night in 1830, when the fire bell rang in the North End, signaling that the Hanover Street Church was ablaze. The firemen—a rough, rowdy lot with many Catholics among them—rushed to the scene, but when they realized it was “Old Beecher’s” church, they refused to put out the fire.
Bystanders joined the firemen standing in the snow, watching flames climb the steeple, when a series of blasts burst through the basement. The cellar had been rented to a local merchant who was, ironically, using it to store jugs of rum that were now exploding from the heat. The gathering crowd roared with laughter when they realized that Boston’s temple of temperance was spouting liquor. The firemen shouted jokes about “hell-fire” and Beecher’s “broken jug.” “Only smell the brimstone!” called out the rowdies. “I wonder what ‘Old Hell- fire’ will do now that his shop is burned?” Some began chanting a spontaneous little ditty, punning on the old rhyme about Christ’s offering of forgiveness, “While the lamp holds out to burn the vilest sinner may return”:
While Beecher’s church holds out to burn The vilest sinner may return.30
By two in the morning there was little left to save. Lyman wore a brave face, declaring the next day that they would rebuild, but his feelings about the city were never quite the same.
Far more bitter was the growing schism within his own ranks. The church he loved so much was beginning to splinter, and he was at the center of the divide. On one side stood the ultraorthodox ministers of Andover and Princeton, who feared that Beecher’s efforts to make Calvinist doctrine more palatable to his Boston audiences were treading close to heresy. On the other flank was a new, radical group of freelance revivalists headquartered in upstate New York, a region so thoroughly evangelized it was nicknamed the “Burnt-Over District.” Led by the legendary lawyer-turned-preacher Charles Grandison Finney, this “holy band” accused Beecher of being too conservative, of caring more for respectability than saving souls.
The conflict between Beecher and Finney was one of style, not theology. These itinerant preachers—modeled after Christ’s apostles—rode from town to town holding extended mass meetings that often went on for days, employing a barrage of psychological tactics to create a frenzy of emotion. Alarming tales were told of women breaking the taboo against speaking in mixed gatherings, of men and women fainting, weeping, and shaking with an almost erotic passion until they broke down, sobbing with repentance and ecstatic relief. Lyman was appalled by Finney’s “New Measures,” as they were called, and was certain that such unruly, unregulated behavior would undermine the traditional authority of the ministry and torpedo his cause with the Boston Brahmins and other self-styled sophisticates. “Satan as usual,” Lyman declared, “is plotting to dishonor a work which he cannot stand.”31
Beecher swore that Finney’s band would not set foot in New England, but as rumors spread of Finney’s power, Lyman’s own congregation clamored to see this fantastic phenomenon with their own eyes. Finally Beecher capitulated, inviting the great revivalist to Boston near the end of Henry’s freshman year. Finney stayed most of the summer, awakening a revival so powerful that many considered it the peak of the Second Great Awakening. Unfortunately Lyman’s new alliance with Finney only inflamed his “hyper-Calvinist” enemies.
Disheartened, Lyman was turning his mind to a fresh battleground: the western frontier. For years he had denounced the Yankees who headed west as shiftless malcontents, too foolish to stay at home. As a child Henry had hidden under his bed when wagons full of dusty migrants passed through Litchfield, terrified by rumors that the pioneers kidnapped little boys to take with them.
But Lyman’s tirades went unheeded. With the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, the vast valleys of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers were filling up with adventurous young men, landless farmers, and impoverished immigrants. When an 1828 landslide sent the roughneck Democrat Andrew Jackson to the White House and the legendary Tennessee frontiersman Davy Crockett to Congress, it was a clear sign that the West would no longer be an appendage to the Northeast but a force all its own.
Now Lyman began to believe that the moral destiny of America lay out West. “If we gain the West, all is safe; if we lose it all is lost,” he told his children; “the competition now is for that of preoccupancy in the education of the rising generation, in which Catholics and infidels have got the start of us.”32 Edward was the first Beecher to go, accepting a job as president of the newly established Illinois College. Soon Lyman was mulling over an equally enticing offer: the presidency of a new theological seminary in Cincinnati, Ohio. Nothing could be decided, however, until his Boston church was rebuilt.
For Henry it was a restless summer. Nothing came of his plan to peddle Bibles, so he spent the summer attending his father’s revival meetings, leafing through Sir Walter Scott’s adventure novels, and idly roaming the streets of Boston. He was surprisingly removed from his father’s battles. After years of training he could recite every theological argument against Unitarianism, “just like a row of pins on a paper,” but clearly his heart wasn’t in it.33
Charles Grandison Finney made a stronger impression on him. Finney was so personal, so emotional, in contrast to the dry formality of most orthodox preachers, that he seemed almost irreverent. Henry was shocked the first time he heard the revivalist pray for “Dr. Beecher” instead of “the pastor of this church,” and praying by name for sinful, sick, or suffering congregants.34 Instead of splitting theological hairs, Finney made God’s case with the simple, straightforward logic of a prosecuting attorney. Soon the boy was won over by his vibrant style. The famous Finney was “truly a grand preacher,” he declared to Chauncey Howard, “a man after my own heart.”35
But love was Henry’s primary preoccupation. As the beginning of the fall term neared, Henry decided to cut his vacation short a week early so he would have time to visit Ebenezer Bullard’s sister on the long walk back. “Bullard declared that before he tried to travel on foot again he would get in love,” Henry later chuckled to Chauncey, “for he found it improved the pedestrian powers most wonderfully.”36
SOPHOMORE YEAR MARKED a new phase in Henry’s life. His confidence was growing by leaps and bounds, both socially and intellectually. He embarked on a program of self-improvement, beseeching Harriet for advice on how to refine his manners and conversational skills, and keeping a notebook of “outlines of the lives who have made themselves or have attained any great end by decision of character.” He was determined to refute his father’s snobbish Boston critics, proving that a fellow could be both an evangelical Christian and a cosmopolitan gentleman.
Henry’s summer dalliance with Eunice Bullard only whetted his romantic ambitions. He spent Thanksgiving with a classmate’s family in the nearby village of South Hadley, where he fell hard for yet another sister, with the prim name of Mindwell Gould. “Dear Mindwell, Mrs. Mindwell Beecher!! How would that sound?” he asked Harriet with glee. Henry swore he was heeding President Humphrey’s warnings to the boys against early engagements, but he cited Humphrey’s one exception: “‘I’ve no objection to your thinking of it,’” the president told the boys. After all, Humphrey added, “‘if a man is going through a woods, and sees a good young sapling he may mark it and come back afterward and get it, if he can.’”
“At any rate I am determined to ‘mark her,’” Henry declared.37
But by the end of the fall semester Henry’s longings overpowered both President Humphrey’s advice and Mindwell’s charms. Whether it was true love or the fact that Ebenezer’s sister was the first girl to reciprocate his interest, Henry turned his attention back to Miss Bullard.
When Ebenezer mentioned to Henry that his sister would be spending the winter at her Aunt Fletcher’s home in Whitingsville, Massachusetts, Henry slyly found a position teaching school in the neighboring village of Northbridge over the long January vacation. He even arranged to board with Eunice’s aunt. Schoolteaching was hard, dull, poorly paid work, but Henry had a plan, and, as he said prophetically, “I possess real Beecher blood in the matter of planning.”38
On the way to his new job he dropped by Bullard Hill to share his good news. Eunice’s parents were pleased, and Henry seemed innocently surprised to hear that he and Eunice would be boarding in the same house. Dr. Bullard suggested that since his daughter had been hoping to continue her education, this would be a perfect opportunity for Henry to tutor her in Latin. Quite rightly Eunice didn’t think Henry had much to teach her in Latin—“I who have been a school-ma’am for three terms!”—but she made no objections to the plan.
On January 2, 1832, the very first evening he arrived in Whitingsville, Henry found Eunice in the parlor. Conveniently her aunt and uncle were out on errands, but her young cousin lingered by the fire. Henry helped her cousin with his lessons while she wrote letters, until impatience got the better of him and he struck up a conversation. So how were her Latin studies coming along? Did she know all the grammar? Could she conjugate all the verbs?
“Oh! yes,” she replied. “I think so.”
“Suppose you try some of them, and let me see how well you understand them.”
“I respectfully conjugated the verbs as he gave them out,” Eunice recalled, until at last he asked her to conjugate the verb amare, “to love.” She did so perfectly, and then turned back to her writing desk. Another hour passed. Finally Henry could wait no longer. Just before bedtime he slipped a note onto her writing desk: “Will you go with me as a missionary to the West?”
Stunned, Eunice didn’t know what to say, and she certainly wasn’t going to answer with her cousin in the room. After a long, excruciating silence, the cousin went off to bed and Henry pounced, urging Eunice to give her answer. The surprised girl demurred. But as he noted, she was halfheartedly saying no with her mouth, but saying yes with her eyes. She tried to deflect him by saying he must speak to her parents, but Henry pressed to hear how she felt about his proposal. Young Beecher was not the most subtle of suitors.
There was much to say against such a hasty engagement. They had known each other for only six months, and it would be years before they could marry—at least two and a half years of college and another three of seminary for Henry. But they were both sensitive souls, united in their romantic visions and their eagerness for undivided approval, loyalty, and love. Eunice was eighteen years old, with no other suitors in sight, and she was flattered by Henry’s passionate persistence, his gregarious charm, and his prominent family connections. She could hardly help but fall head over heels in love.
Eunice said yes then and there.
The next Saturday, Henry went to West Sutton to ask the Bullards for her hand. Naturally they were horrified, and her father was furious at “being outgeneraled by a boy.” This was clearly not the “mark” he’d meant Henry to make.
“Why, you are a couple of babies! You don’t know your own minds yet, and won’t for some years to come,” Dr. Bullard protested over and over again. A seven-year engagement was more risky for a woman than for a man, for if it was broken she could well end up a spinster. “But ‘only a boy’ as they thought him, who could resist Henry when he pleaded in earnest?” Eunice recalled with satisfaction. By the end of the day they were convinced that he was truly devoted to their daughter.
“Boy as he seems, he will be true to Eunice,” the doctor admitted to his wife, after Henry left. “I have no fear on that score.”39
In the end, it may be that Dr. Bullard’s doubts were well founded. But just then nothing could dim their enthusiasm for each other. “If you wish true unalloyed, genuine delight, fall in love with some amiable girl,” Henry exulted to his friend Chauncey. “It surpasses other pleasures as the golden grain does the dry chaff and husk!”40
THE LOVEBIRDS TRIED TO KEEP their engagement hush-hush, knowing his family would worry that Henry was throwing away his education, but he gushed so about his good fortune that he quickly tipped his hand. But love also gave Henry a newfound defiance. “I am not anxious to vindicate myself,” he responded to a scolding from his eldest brother, William. Nonetheless, he protested, “It is all false, as false as can be. No term since I have been in college have I studied so much as the last term; no year accomplished so much as the last.”41
Henry spoke the truth. After a dozen years of lackadaisical efforts, he was blossoming intellectually. His transformation did not occur in the classroom, though, but in a dusty little room cluttered with books and journals on the second floor of North dormitory: the home of the Athenian Society.
This was the heyday of the literary club in America. At Amherst the two main literary societies, the Athenians and Alexandrians, dominated intellectual and social life on campus. The Athenian Society met every week to read and write poetry, essays, and anonymous satires, and to debate the hot topics of the day. They sponsored guest speakers, held public-speaking exhibitions and intramural debates, and pooled their money to buy books. At a time when many college libraries amounted to several shelves of dreary textbooks and religious volumes, the literary clubs provided almost all outside literature, competing with their rivals to build the biggest collection. By the time the Athenians assembled a catalog in 1836 they owned 2,440 books, representing the full spectrum of contemporary writing in America, and subscribed to dozens of newspapers and journals from across the country.
Here Henry was exposed to the latest ideas in literature, philosophy, politics, and current events—all the modern movements ignored by the classical curriculum. The club room was the antithesis of the classroom: democratic, spontaneous, and cutting edge instead of hierarchical, formal, and conservative. The Athenians owned almost all the major works of European Romanticism, from the eminently Christian English poets and orators to the speculative German philosophers, even the radical French novelists and social theorists who were shunned by most orthodox Christians.
For the earnest young men of the 1830s, these Romantic writers represented a rebellion against the tyranny of tradition and a soul-deadening culture obsessed with money, propriety, and material comfort. They emphasized imagination over reason, spontaneity over formality, spirituality over religion, self-expression over social convention, nature over society, and individual conscience over the rule of law. Their manifesto was summed up by the English poet and critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge: “Deep thinking is attainable only by a man of deep feeling.”
There were scandalous aspects to the European Romantics, of course. Foes accused the worst of them of promoting irreverence, libertinism, and the dangerous politics of the French Revolution. But there also were many instinctive connections between American evangelical Christianity and European Romanticism: the emphasis on sublime inspiration and obsessive introspection, the repudiation of worldly concerns in search of the divine, and an abiding faith in the individual’s ability to transform himself and his world.
Henry took to this new ethos like a fly to honey. Always a slow reader, he absorbed most of it secondhand through journals and reviews (he would always prefer grazing periodicals to plowing through treatises), and he did not master all its philosophical complexities. But, having spent his youth struggling to shoehorn his own effervescent personality into starchy social conventions, he understood the Romantic impulse intuitively.
He loved the iconoclasm—the repudiation of old forms to get at fresh truths—the exaltation of the imagination, the fascination with beauty and nature, and the insistence that human passion was a subject worthy of exploration rather than suppression. He was enthralled by the idea of the Poet as a natural aristocrat whose self-expression was a conduit between heaven and earth. After years of probing his motives and moods and always falling short, suddenly his sensitivity, suffering, and self-doubt were no longer signs of sinfulness, but of his superior sensibility.
“I never have performed so much real mental labor as within six months past,” Henry enthused to Harriet in the spring of 1832. “I am beginning to learn to think, write and debate.” Forced for the first time to write regularly and read his compositions aloud, he quickly discovered that his father’s kitchen-table training gave him a leg up over the other boys. In Athenian meetings he spoke fluently on topics like “the importance of the three professions: medicine, law, and theology” and “the tendencies of society toward perfection,” and debated such questions as whether it was “desirable for students in college to enjoy female society” (arguing in the affirmative). “In mere recitation of mathematics or languages many of us could surpass him,” one classmate recalled, “but in extemporaneous debates he could beat us all.”42
He became an avid reader, picking up a passion for books that would drain his pocketbook and fill his shelves. No one on campus was better read in current events, poetry, and belles lettres. He read a great deal of English poetry: Spenser, Milton, Byron, and Burns, as well as lesser versifiers. He filled up notebooks with his own heroic couplets and blank verse, usually on themes of noble self-sacrifice and the glories of nature, and published his poems and essays in the college literary magazines, which he also helped edit.
Now Henry burned with a new aspiration: to be a Man of Letters. Among the boys he became renowned for his originality and eloquence. “He had always something to say that was fresh and striking and out of the beaten track of thought,” said his classmate Thomas Field, “something, too, that he had not gotten from books, but that was the product of his own thinking.”43 It was a sign of his stature that when the great statesman and presidential candidate Henry Clay visited the college, Henry had the honor of presenting Clay with a memorial Bible.
Henry was the quintessential sophomore, taking juvenile delight in his new sophistication, solemnly dedicating himself to Truth and Light and then merrily tossing out Latin puns and cracking in-jokes about professors, classes, and books. He was always on the lookout, as he put it, for the “opportunity of exhibiting the analogy between Conic sections and Comic sections.”44 He cultivated a reputation for eccentricity, building an odd doughnut-shaped desk for himself out of a circle of wood with a hole cut in the middle for a chair. Ensconced in his nest, surrounded by books, his room was the natural hangout for the late-night bull sessions he loved.
His schoolwork finally fell into a rhythm, based mostly on neglect. “I studied what I liked and didn’t study what I didn’t like,” he said flatly.45 Henry’s idiosyncratic approach to homework verged at times on insolence, saved only by his obvious good nature. He informed Ebenezer Snell, the round-faced, sweet-tempered young professor of mathematics, that he should not have to study math since it would be of no use to a minister. When Snell insisted that math would discipline his mind, he replied, “If that’s all, I shan’t go to class any more. My mind gets enough discipline inventing excuses for not being there.”46 By the end of his junior year, Snell had generally given up calling on him—a tacit admission of defeat.
But the most momentous event of Henry’s sophomore year was the arrival of a letter from home announcing that Lyman and Catharine were traveling to Ohio to survey the scene. Henry “fairly danced” with delight when he heard the news. “I sang, whistled, flew around like a mad man. Father’s removal to the West is my ‘heart’s desire,’” he wrote to Harriet. “Edward went to see and was caught—Eve went to see and ate some apples—father I trust will go to see and come back and let us go and see.”47
For the last few years Henry had toyed with the idea of becoming a foreign missionary in some exotic land, China, say, or the Sandwich Islands. Now his imagination was gripped by the Wild West. In typical fashion he read everything he could find on the western territories, pouring out poems and essays (“I have a book full of blank verse, all fixing for the West!” he boasted) and founding a club—“the society of Western Inquiry.” As he read, his sister Harriet recalled, it suddenly seemed possible to fulfill both his father’s wishes and his own dreams of glory, honor, and “knightly daring” that he had once pinned on the navy.48 He would be a home missionary, as they were called, dedicated to bringing the Yankee God to the uncivilized frontier.
By autumn it was definite. Everyone, from Aunt Esther to the sisters of the Hartford Annex, was pulling up stakes and heading to Cincinnati. Only Mary intended to stay settled with her family in Hartford. Charles and Henry would join the family after graduating, and study for the ministry at their father’s new theological seminary. The arrival of the Beecher clan, Henry declared with biblical hubris, “will make the people of the west think that Jacob and his family are again going down to Egypt.”49
Although Eunice tried to share his enthusiasm, her heart sank when Henry told her the news. From Ohio to Massachusetts, she observed sadly, “was too long a walk for vacation.”50
BY NOW IT SEEMED TO HENRY that his real life took place at school, surrounded by his chums; visits home were mere tours of duty. “‘There is no place like home!’ No thank fortune—for there is no one to talk with, no one to walk with and nothing to do but eat gingerbread and stroll around the streets,” he wrote to Chauncey Howard only a few days after his summer vacation began; “it will take me weeks to throw off the stupor acquired while stagnating here.”51
Returning for his junior year, Henry’s mind was primed to make another major intellectual leap. That fall the long-awaited crates of new scientific books and equipment—“philosophical apparatus,” as they called it—finally arrived from Europe. Suddenly scientific inquiry was all the rage on campus, inspiring the boys to found a new Society of Natural History with its own library and cabinet of natural curiosities.
The architect of the new science curriculum was the Reverend Professor Edward Hitchcock. A nationally prominent geologist as well as an ordained minister, Professor Hitchcock was doubly blessed with profound religious faith and a voracious curiosity about the natural world. Early in his geological expeditions across Massachusetts, Hitchcock was confounded by evidence suggesting that the earth was much older than biblical calculations—evidence such as ancient geological sedimentation and fossils of unknown, long-extinct animals. But unlike later generations, he refused to choose between abandoning the Bible and denying the physical evidence. Instead he sought a middle path, dedicating his career to reconciling rational observation and analytical rigor with biblical revelation—to proving, in his words, that “the principles of science are a transcript of the Divine Character.”52 For Hitchcock and his like-minded colleagues, the natural world was like a language or set of symbols by which God communicated with humanity. Natural Theology, they called it.
The study of cause and effect was Hitchcock’s passion. Instead of examining God’s creations one by one, he taught the boys to study nature’s mechanisms and interrelationships. He pushed them to see analogies and connections where they perceived only contrasts and antitheses, to observe closely and hold their presumptions until the evidence began to suggest theories and conclusions. He insisted that they develop the moral courage to question ideas that flew in the face of conventional wisdom.
Henry showed no special interest in science until the day he watched the normally shy and stammering Professor Hitchcock grow rapturous as he described his discovery of a new species of flower. It was just a plain little white flower, as far as Henry could see, but that only made his teacher’s enthusiasm more curious and compelling. He found that Hitchcock’s insistence on linking divine cause to earthly effect, and logical extrapolation to emotional inspiration, resonated strongly with his Beecher training. Soon the boy’s tramps in the woods were no longer devoted to catching flying squirrels and stealing apples but to collecting geological and botanical specimens. It was considered a tremendous honor when he was invited to join the Society of Natural History late in his junior year.
That same autumn a German scholar named Johann Spurzheim embarked on a tour of the United States to promote a new science called “phrenology.” Phrenology—a word taken from Greek to mean “discourse on the mind”—promised to demystify human behavior by breaking down the mind into approximately thirty different features, each one residing in a different “organ,” or section, of the brain. Spurzheim argued that the way the brain shaped the surface of the skull revealed information about one’s emotions, character, and intelligence. By interpreting the bumps and ridges of the skull, one could tell which characteristics dominated an individual’s personality. Armed with this knowledge, one could then exercise and strengthen the weak parts of his mind or character, just as one might build up a bicep.
Two months into his popular lecture tour, Dr. Spurzheim abruptly died, but in that short time he kindled a craze that lasted for years. Suddenly it seemed that every man in America was doffing his hat to have his skull examined. At Amherst the most ardent convert to phrenology was Orson Fowler, a solemn young man from a poor, orthodox farm family who was headed for the ministry. Looking for a good laugh, several skeptics invited Fowler to debate his case in Beecher’s room, with young Beecher leading the opposition.
The plan was to flummox poor Fowler with unanswerable objections. The more Henry researched phrenology, however, the more persuasive he found it. Finally a friend asked him point-blank: “What is your estimate of the real logical validity of these objections to Phrenology?”
“Why,” said Henry, “I was thinking if these objections were all that could be alleged I could knock them to pieces.”53 From that day forward, phrenology was Henry’s great passion.
To Henry the physiology of the skull was less compelling than the way phrenology illuminated human nature. “I suppose I inherited from my father a tendency or intuition to read man,” Henry noted.54 But in contrast to the Calvinist tendency to see human nature in black and white—natural/supernatural, body/soul, saint/sinner, saved/damned— what he loved about phrenology was the way it broke down the mind’s faculties into an array of motives, instincts, and attributes that combined to attain various ends. With its emphasis on complex “mixed motives” and therapeutic growth, phrenology was not physiology, as the experts claimed, but an early, practical version of psychology.
Henry immediately formed a “club for physiological research,” filling his room with pamphlets and charts, even a model of the human head with each “organ” traced and labeled. In Athenian meetings he debated phrenology’s scientific merits and lectured on it to the Natural History Society, taking Professor Hitchcock’s methods for categorizing and classifying natural phenomena like minerals or plant species, and using them to identify and classify the various elements of “human nature.”
He and Fowler began performing around campus as a duo, with Henry lecturing on the “fundamental principles” of phrenology and Fowler reading the boys’ skulls, charging two cents a head. As word spread they were invited to speak in several local villages. Flushed with their success, after graduation Fowler abandoned his plans to join Henry in attending Lyman Beecher’s new seminary in Ohio, instead embarking on a wildly successful career running his own “Phrenological Institute” in New York City. Although phrenology was eventually discredited as an independent science, its insights would have a huge impact on American culture over the next two decades, due largely to Orson Fowler.
As for Henry’s own skull, Fowler diagnosed “an impassioned temperament . . . a strong social brain,” with “very large Benevolence” (kindness toward others) and “Amativeness fully developed” (meaning sexual or romantic love). Speaking frankly, from the shape of Henry’s head—“small brow and big in the lower part of his head, like a bull”— he was “not likely to be a saint.”55 No doubt this was a helpful warning to the skull’s owner rather than a fatal prophecy.
HENRY GOT HIS FIRST TASTE of the ministry over winter vacation, while working as a schoolmaster in the district schools he had once despised. His first job passed without much excitement, but in his junior year he took a position in the village of Hopkinton, near Eunice’s home in eastern Massachusetts, where the Unitarians and Congregationalists were locked in a fierce battle. The Hopkinton school committee was split between those who thought it a coup to hire a Beecher and those who thought the devil’s spawn was coming to teach their children.
As soon as Henry arrived, several older, bigger students, sons of staunch Unitarian families—“the enemies of Godliness,” as Henry described them—began acting up, vowing, in his words, “that young Beecher should not stay in town a week.” Such rebellion wasn’t unusual in this haphazard educational system. Teachers were often the same age or size as their older students, and it was common for the bigger, rougher boys to challenge the authority of the new, usually transient schoolmasters—often through physical intimidation. It was, however, more specifically Beecherish to attribute his discipline problems to a divine conflict between the Unitarians and Congregationalists.
The disruptions continued until Henry finally kicked the ringleader out of class. The next morning the troublemaker returned “full of fight and with a huge goliath to back him,” to exact vengeance. Henry sought out the town school committee for help, but they told him to deal with the matter himself, suggesting that he just force out the misbehaving boy. So, Henry wrote to Chauncey, “I took my rod and struck at him.” The boy hit back.
A battle commenced. I parried his blows (you know I box a little) and beat him still over shoulders, arms, side and finally broke the ruler over his head. I then seized a club of wood which lay upon the floor and smote him again hip and thigh. The school was all in an uproar. The girls screamed, little boys cried. Some boys went to help me, some to fight me.
As shrieking children poured out of the one-room schoolhouse, townspeople rushed in to break up the fight. Henry resigned his position on the spot. The school committee begged him to stay on, but Henry refused. Finally some of the local parents asked him to open a private school for the rest of the term, which he did with great success. He still heard whispers that several boys were waiting to jump him as he walked home from late-night church meetings, but, he declared breezily, “I do not feel in the least troubled that God will overrule all things for good.”56
A brawl with his students was hardly a sign of maturity, nonetheless he was excessively proud of his sensational stand against the Unitarian menace. “To be reviled while one is trying to do good, is honorable—a privilege I have never deserved—but which I prize,” he wrote righteously to his brother William.57 Stirred by the adrenaline of battle, he threw himself into religious activities, helping the local minister, teaching Sunday school, and speaking at various church meetings five or six nights a week—“between you and me,” he bragged to Chauncey, “the good folks of Hopkinton are somewhat pleased with this schoolmaster.”58
Returning to Amherst, Henry now jumped at any chance to speak in public, leading prayer meetings, conducting a Bible class for the young ladies of the village, and delivering lectures on phrenology and temperance in the surrounding villages.
Temperance was the hot topic of the moment, with each speech ending in a dramatic call for everyone in the audience to sign “the pledge.” The instant feedback was exhilarating. “I was addicted to going out and making temperance speeches,” recalled Henry.59
Eunice came to as many of these speeches as she could, and her admiration for “My great Henry” was boundless. He used his first, unusually generous, lecture fee of five dollars to buy Eunice a gift: a copy of Richard Baxter’s classic religious treatise The Saint’s Everlasting Rest, a meditation on the heavenly bliss awaiting good Christians—“not a usual love-token,” she remarked dryly.60
The summer after his junior year, Orson Fowler arranged for Henry to give a major temperance lecture on the Fourth of July in Brattleboro, Vermont. It was a rousing success, and his delighted hosts promised him the magnificent sum of ten dollars to cover his expenses. Elated, he returned to school “no longer a mere student, but a public man, one who had made speeches, one who determined to be modest and not allow success to puff him up,” he remembered.
But vanity quickly overwhelmed his halfhearted humility. For a perpetually poor boy, who had to borrow cash to pay for the postage on his letters, the arrival of the ten-dollar bill in the mail was a red-letter day. “O that bill!” Henry recalled. “How it warmed me and invigorated me! I looked at it before going to sleep; I examined my pocket the next morning early, to be sure that I had not dreamed it. How I pitied the poor students, who had not, I well knew, ten dollars in their pockets.”61
The money did not linger long in his trousers. Walking into the local bookshop, he spied the works of the English orator Edmund Burke. “With the ease and air of a rich man I bought and paid for them,” Henry said, and then arranged them artfully on his desk, hoping to inspire whispers of envy among his friends. “After this I was a man that owned a library!” he recalled with fresh pleasure. Now “every penny I could raise or save I compelled to transform itself into books!” By the time he graduated his little library numbered almost fifty volumes.62
With his last eighty-five cents he bought a plain gold engagement ring for Eunice.
Theirs was a deeply romantic relationship, and if blushing hints of kisses, carriage rides, and covered bridges are reliable, it was also very sensual. Henry put his fiancée on a tall pedestal. “She is as I should think Mother was—and is in some respects like Mary,” he told Harriet.63 Eunice did share many characteristics with the female Beechers. They were all intelligent, affectionate, and strong willed, with a keen sense of humor and the ability to sacrifice and work hard. But Eunice had more in common with the public sisters—Catharine, Harriet, and Isabella—than with the modest, soft-spoken Mary and Roxana. Eunice’s inbred ethic of female self-sacrifice concealed potent, if unformed, ambitions.
Nonetheless Eunice differed from his family in crucial ways. Her drives and desires were as strong as any of theirs, but it was the rare woman in the nineteenth century who was raised to express herself as openly as a Beecher, male or female. While Henry was an optimist who channeled his insecurity into jokes, Eunice was a pessimist who expressed insecurity through hypochondria, false modesty, and jealousy. Thirty years later she could name every rival for her fiancé’s affection, marking “Mindwell Gould” in particular.64
Illness was her most common response to feeling neglected, disrespected, or socially awkward. For a young woman growing up in a physician’s family, sickness, guilt, and attention were all closely linked. She joked openly that any Bullard brother who was ill was the brother most loved at the moment. At a time when even minor maladies could lead to death, illness was a way to wrest the spotlight away from her siblings and to get her family’s unconcealed love.
At heart Eunice was a profoundly lonely young woman who fished for compliments or complained of aches and pains because she knew no other way to reassure herself that she was truly loved. “I know I’m a fretful girl sometimes but if others would only give me kind words and looks always, I’m very sure I should never fret whatever else might be my lot in life,” said Eunice.65 Nowadays we might say she lacked self-esteem. Yet even in that more sentimental era, it was unwise to put oneself at the mercy of a world filled with hard looks and unkind words.
In June 1833 the lovers set out separately to visit Henry’s brother William, who was preaching in Middletown, Connecticut, and his new wife. Henry and Eunice described the holiday in very different but characteristic ways. For Henry it was a triumph, an opportunity to show off his smart, pretty fiancée to his oldest brother. For Eunice it was a miserable trip alone on a crowded stagecoach in which no one spoke to her, except for a young lady with motion sickness who asked to switch seats.
Once the two were reunited in Middletown, she was again struck by illness. Walking to church on a rainy Sunday, her shoes became worn down and hurt her feet, creating blisters. Overnight the pain worsened in her foot and leg, until at length she began to feel spasms in her neck and jaw—the telltale signs of lockjaw, or what we now know as tetanus. The local doctor administered a poultice to the sores and gave her a drink of “fermentations of hops” (presumably some sort of beer), which eased her symptoms. Eunice was sure she had narrowly cheated death.
No one speculated openly that the spasms might have come from the tension of meeting her new relatives (which would explain why beer—no longer considered a remedy for tetanus—might help). William and his wife left no recorded opinion of the visit, but it is notable that the trip ended early, as Henry reported, when Eunice, “at the urgent request of my brother and sister returned me to school.”66
But if others did not always see Eunice’s charms, to Henry she offered the loyalty, attention, and affection he had always lacked in his own family. He had good reason to feel neglected. When the older children left home, Lyman plied them with long letters brimming with affection and advice. By contrast, Henry rarely heard from his preoccupied parents or older siblings. After the family left for Ohio, Henry was crushed when he did not receive a letter from his family for almost six months.
Finally a letter arrived from Harriet, delayed by the long, slow trip east. As he sat by the fire in his dorm room reading it, the old insecurity and self-pity welled up, now bolstered by the image of himself as the Romantic loner. “I began your letter in mighty good spirits, but am almost a mind to cry now I’ve finished it,” he began his reply to Harriet:
Mail after mail was come and wildly disappointed my eager expectations. I will not trouble you with complaints again—and for a long time to come will not pester you with letters. Dear sister in sober truth I find no place with so little sympathy as home, and I must say it—I almost always feel that my friends despise me. I know I don’t deserve it—tho’ they think I do. I don’t—for I am not deceitful as mother has said. I am careless and I never found freedom in telling my plans. I shrink from my own kindred for it always seemed they looked coldly upon me. I ought not to have written this—but I could not help it, for it swelled as it often does till it seems as tho’ my heart would burst. I never tell Eunice of it. I find there a home for all I want and am not unkindly thought of by her who is indeed very dear to me and will be to you. Don’t you show this to anybody, I don’t want father to know I feel bad, ever, for he is always kind to me—but I think he feels a sorrowful kindness and that is what cuts me more keenly.
In this jumble of emotions, it isn’t clear what he means by deceit, but one thing is obvious: In Eunice, Henry finally found the unconditional love and admiration he longed for.
HENRY ENTERED HIS SENIOR YEAR of college very much the big man on campus. He was elected president of both the Athenian Society and the Society of Natural History, had several pieces coming out in the literary magazines, and the college band had just acquired snazzy new white-and-black uniforms. He had a room on campus surrounded by all his friends. This was the year, he assured Chauncey, that they would have some fun.
Academically he was finally free of Greek and was taking subjects that genuinely interested him: political economy, anatomy, rhetoric, and moral philosophy. By now Henry seemed to care little for what his professors thought (“Indeed to be honest I have not looked at a lesson this term until in the recitation room,” he confessed to a friend67)—but occasionally his touchy pride overwhelmed his easygoing nature, making him defensive and defiant.
“To some my college course has seemed a shameless waste of time and money,” he wrote to Chauncey just before classes began. Such criticism, he declared, came from uninspired grinds who were content to regurgitate the worn-out rhetoric of old men. If they prefer “drowning their meager ideas in those of others—or be versed in the whole system of argumentation by cramming with x & y’s—+ & =’s, let them.” He, for one, had loftier goals. “I court a place not among great geniuses merely— but among the great benefactors of mankind,” he told Chauncey.
For this reason poetry—beautiful writing have been my delight. Mathematics, etc. have been of little esteem. Reasoning and splendid logic have been like spirits which possessed me. I do not mean with their efficiency but with deep admiration of them. I long to see some theological tenets exploded—to get up out of labyrinths which the whole creation have stumbled together in till now—to untwist many fallacious modes of reasoning which have no more foundations in the Bible than in the stars—views of God—of man—of doctrines.68
Yet, for all Henry’s noble protests, his iconoclastic ambitions warred with his Beecher breeding. He now had enough education and confidence to question the old orthodoxies and traditional social conventions, but not enough to repudiate them completely or to craft his own conclusions. In his own words, he had “strength enough to row out, but not enough to fight the tide to get back to shore.”69 Most of the time he simply trod water, waiting for a wave of conviction to wash him ashore.
As in the 1960s, the exhilarating spirit of “Newness” on campus soon spilled over into aggressive rebellion. Over the course of his senior year, the college was bedeviled by conflicts between the administration and the student body. The faculty infuriated the boys by banning anonymous essays in the literary clubs after their satires grew too nasty. They expelled several seniors for “gross immorality,” including drinking, cardplaying, stealing college property, and a hint of fornication.70 Complaining that their education ought not be tainted by coarse competition, a group of students petitioned to abolish the system of honorary speaking appointments at graduation and other public performances. When the trustees refused, the boys boycotted their speaking appointments in protest. But one issue towered above all these controversies: the battle over slavery.
Slavery was not a common topic when Henry entered college. The last time it had dominated public debate was in 1820, when Congress deadlocked over whether slavery would be legal in the new western states. The conflict grew so rancorous that, for a time, it seemed that the fragile bonds of the United States might snap. Disunion was narrowly averted by the Missouri Compromise, which preserved the federal balance of power by admitting Maine as a free state and Missouri as a slave state, and confined slavery below the latitude of 36° 30’ (excepting Missouri itself), which separated North from South. While many Northerners disapproved of human bondage, nearly all viewed it as a dangerous political quagmire, best left alone.
But this new generation, born after the upheaval of the Revolutionary era and mere children during the Compromise debates, was less fearful and more idealistic. Inspired by men like Lyman Beecher and Charles Grandison Finney, with their thundering insistence that now was the time to repent and immediately cease sinning, many genuinely saw themselves as their brothers’ keepers, duty bound to emancipate the world from sin.
As they threw themselves into a variety of humanitarian and moral reform campaigns, it was inevitable that they would eventually turn their attention to the enforced bondage of more than two million dark-skinned Americans. Reared to view all the world through the lens of evangelical religion, they did not see slavery as a question of political compromise but of religious principle. As such, they must act. “Young gentlemen,” the Reverend Beecher often insisted, “anything can be done that ought to be done.”71
On the slavery question, however, Lyman Beecher was not in the vanguard. “Never a conservative and never quite a radical,” as one family friend described him, Lyman viewed moral reform more as a means of restoring traditional social order than a path to democratic liberation.72 He regarded slavery as evil and encouraged efforts to end it. Yet, like many Christians, his sympathy for the slave was offset by inbred bigotry. Born when slavery was still legal in the North and raised in a culture of strict social hierarchies, Lyman had, as his future son-in-law observed, “without being conscious of it, not a little of the old Connecticut prejudice about blacks.”73 Lyman himself had held two black teenage girls as indentured servants for a number of years.
As with Finney’s controversial “New Measures,” Lyman feared that this volatile issue would taint his wider religious crusade. Instead he advocated gradual emancipation, supporting the American Colonization Society, which proposed to end slavery by purchasing and then deporting slaves back to Africa. It was a scheme that put as much emphasis on ridding America of free blacks as on ridding it of slavery.
In 1829, a balding, bespectacled twenty-six-year-old printer named William Lloyd Garrison called on the preacher, announcing that under Beecher’s influence he had come to believe that human bondage was a heinous sin and that Christians should demand that slaveholders immediately repent and free their slaves. Following Beecher’s example, he wished to start a national organization and a newspaper to awaken the conscience of Americans. He was asking for Beecher’s help.
To Garrison’s surprise, Lyman put the young man off, saying, “I have too many irons in the fire already.”
“Then you had better let all your irons burn than neglect your duty to the slave,” he retorted brazenly.
Lyman softened but did not relent. “Your zeal is commendable, but you are misguided. If you will give up your fanatical notions and be guided by us (the clergy), we will make you the Wilberforce of America,” referring to the legendary statesman who led the movement to ban slavery in the English colonies.74 Garrison left unsatisfied. Once more he appealed to Beecher by letter, but he received no answer.
Undaunted, Garrison went around to the other Boston churches, but every clergyman echoed Lyman’s response—they sympathized with his arguments but the issue was too explosive to touch. Finally Garrison decided to go it alone. When he published the first issue of the Liberator in January 1831, his masthead was a deliberate rebuke to these stodgy churchmen: “I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation. . . . I am in earnest—I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—and I will be heard.”75
Garrison’s newspaper might have languished in obscurity had it not been for an astonishing turn of events. In the summer of 1831 a Virginia slave named Nat Turner led a band of fellow bondsmen in an armed revolt, slaughtering several white families before being caught and hanged. Suddenly people who had never thought twice about slavery were gripped by a terror of murderous slave uprisings. Overnight the nascent abolition movement was thrust into the spotlight, as Garrison and his ilk were denounced as pernicious, violent agitators.
True to his word, Garrison did not retreat. In 1832 he published Fiery Thoughts on African Colonization, a watershed pamphlet denouncing the American Colonization Society as “the scurvy device of men stealers,” in his famous phrase. Colonization was not only impractical, he argued (estimating that in fifteen years fewer than fifteen hundred blacks had been sent to Liberia, while the population of slaves was increasing at an annual rate of 150,000), but it was immoral, rationalizing Northern bigotry while pandering to Southern slave owners. When Lyman defended the Colonization Society, Garrison charged him with hypocrisy for refusing to endorse the immediate abolition of slavery while demanding that everyone immediately cease all other sins.
Garrison’s stand electrified the righteous young men of Amherst, prompting vigorous public debate and private soul-searching. Radicalized by his arguments, ten bold students quit the College Colonization Society and made Amherst one of the first schools in the nation to establish a College Antislavery Society. Within a year the society grew to seventy members, nearly one-quarter of the student body. These were not troublemakers, but the most mature and pious students in the school, more than half of them bound for the clergy. So they were surprised when the nervous faculty asked both the Colonization and Antislavery societies to disband voluntarily, saying that they were injuring the cause of religion and threatening the prosperity of the college. The colonizationists quickly complied, but the abolitionists refused on principle.
In many ways it was a classic generation gap, with the older generation hoist by its own petard. After years of cultivating the moral consciences and religious passions of these boys, the faculty were startled when they turned their well-sharpened scruples against traditional authority. Steeped in a potent mixture of strong emotion, unyielding idealism, and social activism, these young “Romantic radicals,” as they came to be known, were equally startled by the stodginess of their elders.
On the slavery question, as in virtually all of these squabbles, both petty and profound, we find Henry hewing to the moderate middle, stranded awkwardly between the generations. By training and temperament he was a natural recruit for the Antislavery Society. He took a lively interest in various reform movements, and several of his closest friends were among its founders. Privately he referred to himself as an abolitionist.
But much as Henry admired cultural iconoclasm, he inherited his father’s political temperament. He shied away from the grand revolutionaries, leaning instead toward the conservative gradual reformism of the famed English Whig Edmund Burke, whom he deeply admired. And when facing disapproval, Henry instinctively mouthed the cant of conventional Christianity, often echoing his father’s opinions verbatim. Taking a stand for immediate abolition would have been a public betrayal of his father in his skirmish with William Lloyd Garrison. Instead Henry avoided official debate on the topic, his literary magazine reviewed Garrison’s Thoughts on Colonization unfavorably, and he declined to add his name to the Antislavery Society’s rolls. When the faculty forcibly shut down the society, he did not protest.
Many years later, when public opinion had shifted, he would forget all this, recalling that he took the side of immediate emancipation against colonization in the Athenian club debates. But that was simply rewriting history.
FOR EUNICE THIS LAST YEAR of college was one of mounting anxiety. As each day passed, she became more miserable at the prospect of Henry’s leaving for Ohio without her. She begged her father to let her go west as a schoolteacher, but he refused, and in the weeks before graduation Eunice spiraled into depression.
The Amherst College Commencement was the high point of the year for both town and gown. Not long after dawn on August 27, 1834, peddlers and farmers with wares to sell began to stake out spots on the green. As the morning air grew heavy and hot, the road outside the Congregational Church filled with carriages of every type, from lowly oxcarts to elegant four-in-hands. By nine o’clock the pews were overflowing, and perspiring young men jammed the back of the church. On the front platform the trustees and visiting dignitaries sat in stiff formality, and a choir perched in the center gallery.
President Humphrey opened the ceremonies and then introduced the first student speaker. Another speaker followed, then another and another. On and on the young orators droned, but Henry was not among them. Graduation speakers were chosen based on academic grades, and of thirty-nine students graduating, he was one of only thirteen who had no role in the commencement exercises.
Undoubtedly Henry’s pride was stung, but he hid his feelings with humor. He later liked to say that the only time he stood next to the head of his class was when they were all arranged in a circle. There were other disappointments as well. No family or far-flung friends were in the audience except for Harriet, who made the arduous ten-day trip from Cincinnati to Toledo by stagecoach, to Buffalo by steamboat, to Albany by canalboat, arriving by stage in Amherst. Lyman and Catharine had come east as well, but were too busy with fund-raising to attend the ceremony. But Henry could boast of one source of distinction. There, printed in the commencement program next to his name, where other boys listed commonplace Yankee villages, was his exotic new hometown: Cincinnati, Ohio.
When the ceremony ended, nearly three hundred graduates and guests trooped across the common to enjoy a celebratory dinner. The food was abundant but there was not a drop of liquor to be seen, recalled an astonished English visitor. Without the lubrication of liquor, the virtuous diners cleared out quickly to promenade the common. “Yet there was no sport, no show, no merrymaking of any kind,” the Englishman marveled. “But there was, as remarkably characteristic, in the midst of this bustle, a Yankee auctioneer resolved to improve the occasion. He was mounted in a cart and selling, or trying to sell, books, prints, harness, and carriages—the very carriage he came in.”76
After commencement Henry spent a final few days with Eunice. As he lit out for the West, she bade him farewell knowing that she might never lay eyes on him again.