Chapter 5

“HUMPH! PRETTY BUSINESS! SON OF LYMAN BEECHER, PRESIDENT OF A THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY, IN THIS MISERABLE HOLE”

Out West, folks used to say that you could tell who had settled a town just by glancing around. If you saw a Congregational church and a college, you knew it was settled by New Englanders. If it had a Presbyterian church and a distillery, you could be sure it was established by Virginians. When Henry stepped off the steamboat onto the rough wharf of Lawrenceburgh, Indiana, in the spring of 1837, there was no question about it: He was in a Virginian town.

Lawrenceburgh (later spelled Lawrenceburg) was a slovenly little settlement carved out of the junction of the Ohio and Miami rivers twenty miles west of Cincinnati. A makeshift jumble of shops, taverns, and warehouses clustered around the wharf, and rangy, long-legged hogs roamed the muddy streets. Most of the houses were only one step above log cabins, built right up to the road, without a plant or shade tree in sight.

The town was a central exchange point for Kentucky, Ohio, and Indiana. Only fifteen hundred people called it home, but the streets were swollen by an endless tide of travelers—farmers and businessmen coming to trade, crews of transient day laborers working on the Whitewater Canal and the Lawrenceburgh & Indianapolis Railroad, and a stream of restless pioneers passing through on their way somewhere else. Taverns outnumbered churches, and grog shops and bawdy houses were the primary entertainment. It was, as Henry said, a town “with two distilleries and twenty devils in it.”1

Henry was welcomed to Lawrenceburgh by Martha Sawyer, a strong-willed Yankee woman of nineteen. Martha had discovered Henry that spring, speaking in a small hall across the border in Covington, Kentucky. She was immediately smitten by the young preacher and campaigned to bring him to the tiny, struggling Presbyterian Church of Lawrenceburgh. Almost a hundred people turned out to see Henry’s trial sermon, drawn by the Beecher name. The unexpected throng made the young preacher so nervous that the sermon fell flat. But the indomitable Miss Sawyer was so pleased with Henry’s performance that she insisted he return the next Sunday.

Lawrenceburgh was “a destitute place indeed,” Henry wrote in his diary after his first visit, and the congregation was a shabby collection of impoverished spinsters and laborers’ wives.2 But by the time he got home to Walnut Hills, he’d made up his mind: If they offered him the post, he would accept it.

Henry’s family and friends were appalled by his decision. No one with any ambition would go to Indiana. Of all the new western states, Indiana was considered the most backward and undeveloped, filled with land too swampy to farm and rivers too shallow to navigate, a place to pass by on the way to Illinois, Michigan, or more promising vistas. Why, everyone knew that native Indians still roamed the woods! (That is, until the autumn of 1837, when the U.S. militia drove the remaining tribes across the Mississippi River to Kansas.) Lyman Beecher vigorously advised Henry to wait for a better offer.

But Henry had his own motives. There was still a possibility that he might be offered a job as permanent editor of the Cincinnati Journal, and Lawrenceburgh was close enough for him to commute regularly to Cincinnati by steamboat (a prospect that didn’t pan out). He liked the freedom of starting in a young church with few expectations to bind him. Besides, the sooner he had a job, the sooner he could marry.

Just before his twenty-fourth birthday, he received the call from Lawrenceburgh—“a very flattering call it was and did my heart good,” he said with delight. The “vote for me unanimous, blank filled for $250, with but one dissenting voice ‘he voting for double that sum.’”3 With an additional contribution from the Home Missionary Society, his final salary was set at three hundred dollars annually—not much more than the seventy-five cents a day earned by the day laborers working on the Whitewater Canal. It wasn’t enough for him to rent his own home, but Martha Sawyer arranged for him to board with the local doctor, Jeremiah Brower, a staunch Old School Presbyterian. “Won’t grow rich, not much left to end year to lay up,” Henry wrote to his old friend Howard Chauncey, but there was plenty of room to rise in a town “growing in population and sin.”4

A few days after his graduation from Lane Seminary, Henry left his father’s house for good, taking with him only some hand-me-down clothes, his beloved books, and his journal. All he needed now was a wife. Like Jacob in the book of Genesis, he had waited—none too patiently—for seven years. Now his happy ending was at hand.

THE LAST SEVEN YEARS had been difficult for Eunice Bullard. Bound by her engagement but with no home of her own, Eunice lived the life of a spinster, drifting among the limited occupations open to women. Schoolteaching had never been to her taste, so she tried earning money by sewing clothes for her sisters’ families and weaving straw braid to be stitched into summer hats—exhausting, poorly paid work. Eventually she moved in with her older sister, Maria, and her brother-in-law Ira Barton, a well-to-do attorney in Worcester, Massachusetts. In exchange she tended her sister’s children, sewed, and kept house, an arrangement she soon came to resent. Eunice was merely biding time until Henry came to rescue her from her humdrum life and give her the right to her own happiness.

Yet her faith in Henry’s saving grace was clouded by anxiety. Their long-distance engagement was fraught with mysterious difficulties, only hinted at in Henry’s diary and various family letters. Illness was a constant threat—both the Bullards and the Beechers were constantly announcing their imminent deaths, only to find themselves miraculously recovered. Garbled rumors of Henry’s flirtations surely filtered back to Eunice, if only through teasing comments from her brothers living in Ohio. With her father’s warnings about broken engagements and old maids ringing in her ears, Eunice could hardly help but be distressed.

Eunice had her own problems with gossip and tale-telling. At one point Catharine and Eunice—neither of whom could be called easygoing—found themselves in a fracas after Catharine’s most recent trip East. The family spent an entire day resolving the matter, with Lyman and Calvin Stowe adjudicating and Henry leading Eunice’s defense. At the end of this odd proceeding, Henry—who always enjoyed drawing up official-looking documents—wrote a long, formal agreement signed by Henry and Calvin, which acquitted Eunice of any “suspicion of constitutional weakness or imprudence,” and of a general disposition to tattle and gossip. The “whole story,” Henry concluded in triumph, “shews her to be a young lady of strong mind, ardent feelings, great firmness of purpose and nice sense of honor, and sensibilities almost morbidly acute.”5

Unfortunately we have no record of Eunice’s side of the matter. Just before his graduation from Lane, Henry burned all her letters to him, putting them permanently “out of danger.”6 His love letters to her were lost in one of their moves. But Eunice left her own record, in the form of a fictionalized memoir. Published in 1859, From Dawn to Daylight, or the Simple Story of a Western Home was inspired by the rising popularity of women novelists, particularly the spectacular success of Harriet Beecher Stowe. But unlike the sentimental plots churned out by most women writers, Dawn to Daylight is a bitter exposé of the hardship and personal abuse suffered by the young wife of a western minister. Names and a few details were changed, but she insisted that the story was “literally true,” and independent evidence bears out her claim. The novel’s rare combination of sentiment and shrewishness draws a vivid emotional portrait of their early life together.

By Eunice’s account the most dramatic threat to their engagement came from her miserly father and his “increasing love of wealth.”7 Several times over the past seven years Dr. Bullard offered Eunice sums of money, from five to a hundred dollars, as tokens of his affection, only to withdraw the money just as she was reaching out to claim it. While the stern old man liked Henry personally, the fact that he was a poor home missionary did not stand in his favor.

The reader enters this dense thicket of oedipal tensions in the first pages of Dawn to Daylight. As the story opens, Eunice’s alter ego, Mary Leighton, is engaged to George Herbert (the combined names of Eunice’s two favorite sons), a young divinity student in the West, when suddenly her father, Dr. Leighton, accepts on her behalf another proposal of marriage from an obnoxious but wealthy local man. Delighted by the prospect of a rich son-in-law, the doctor insists that his daughter break her engagement to George. Like any good sentimental heroine, Mary refuses to deny her true love, but her father hounds her for months, insisting that she marry the loathsome suitor. After a final fight with her father, the heartsick girl falls ill with scarlet fever. The prospect of her death, brought on by his own greed, sends the doctor to his knees at her sickbed, begging forgiveness. She emerges from her feverish delirium only when he admits that he was a fool to sell his daughter’s happiness.

But here Eunice’s tale departs dramatically from the standard romantic plot, suggesting the unaccountable hand of truth. Mary is not rescued by her father’s change of heart, for despite his show of regret the doctor has not entirely relinquished his plans. She escapes only when Dr. Leighton discovers that while Mary was sick, old “ money-bags” ran off and married a wealthy lady from Boston. Mary, of course, makes a speedy recovery and joins George out West.

It is a peculiar, rather comic story that flatters no one—the heroine was publicly dumped and her father made a fool. Yet it unconsciously captures the emotional equation that ruled Eunice Bullard’s life. Although she was a remarkably strong woman, she was always eager to cast herself as a victim, even when it was unflattering or humiliating. Her painful need for sympathy outweighed—and impeded—her desire for happiness. Her grudges were as raw in 1859 as they were in 1837.

Henry was not averse to playing for sympathy, but unlike his fiancée, he was acutely aware of how he seemed to others. During their engagement he regularly kept his feminine confidantes sitting up late into the night while he recounted the tribulations of his courtship. But when Henry cast himself as victim, he burnished his image until it glowed. “I sit and think over all his sorrows, all the injustice that was at one time done him—all his gentle childlike tenderness of heart, till I think it cannot be that heaven will not claim its own and take him to the world where alone he will find those like him,” Harriet Stowe wrote of her brother, after one of these late-night sessions. “I thought all the time that I wanted to thank him for being so good [.]”8

His sister Isabella, younger and more impressionable, offered even more gratification than Harriet. “Had a long, long talk with Bella about dear E. Rehearsed some of our vicissitudes, trials etc.,” Henry confided to his diary. “Poor girl—she did as everybody has done who ever heard it truly told—wept.”9 While Eunice’s fiction burns with the acrid smell of reality even twenty years later, Henry lived as if he were the hero of a fascinating romantic novel.

AFTER ONLY TWO WEEKS in Lawrenceburgh, Henry’s patience finally ran out. One bright July morning he sat down and wrote Eunice her final love letter. If all went well he would be ordained in August, he told her, and would come to marry her at the end of October. Sealing up the letter, he rushed down to the post office.

Walking home to his little room through the dusty streets, however, his excitement faded as he contemplated four more months of waiting. “Why wait to be ordained?” he suddenly asked himself. “Why not go East at once and bring my wife back with me—to the ordination? I will do it.”

Henry strode directly to the church trustees to tell them of his intentions. He hopped on a steamer for Cincinnati that very evening, stopping only long enough to borrow his brother George’s good black suit for the wedding ceremony. Had it not been for that small concession to vanity, he might have beaten the letter to Bullard’s Hill.

Henry’s letter arrived on the morning of July 29. That evening Eunice retreated to her room to compose an answer to Henry and to make up an invitation list. “While I sat thinking to whom I should write I heard some little commotion and excitement at the front door,” Eunice recalled, “and then flying up stairs to my study, Mr. Beecher appeared!”

Breathlessly Henry tumbled out his story. And now, he concluded, they must be married at once. “Now Eunice I must start for the West— the last of next week. Will you be ready to go then?”

“Why, Henry. No! It will be impossible to get ready!”

“What do you need to get ready?” he asked naively.

There was a wedding dress and trousseau to sew, a cake to bake, plus a million other chores, she protested.

“Dress just as you are now. Who will mind it?” Henry replied. “Next week is August third. I must be in Worcester that evening, and in Boston the following day, on important business, which I have promised to transact and from Boston go to New York, and thence direct, and as quickly as I can, to my people.”

“But Henry! Tomorrow is Sunday—the last day of July—and that leaves me not quite three working days.”

It is a testament to the depth of their love that she did not object more heartily to his insensitivity. She agreed to hold the ceremony the following Thursday afternoon, August 3. But Henry had other advantages. As she sewed her dress, he wrote up wedding invitations, beat the eggs, and stoned the raisins for the wedding cake that Eunice baked, and kept her in good spirits. “Did he not ever make hard things easy—and crooked places straight,” Eunice marveled.10

Their wedding took place on one of those steamy summer days native to eastern Massachusetts, where the muggy air thickens until the middle of the afternoon, when it is washed clean by a sudden, magnificent downpour. Henry was uncharacteristically sober as the ceremony approached. “This afternoon at about three I am to be married to E.W. Bullard,” he wrote in his diary. “We are both dressed and waiting for the company.”11

A little after two o’clock, as the guests began arriving, the sky erupted with thunder and lightning. The rain was still raging at three o’clock. Eunice had seen her sisters married during storms, and took this as a bad omen. “I had always said I would not be married in a storm and refused to go down,” she said defiantly. “I had yielded to all else, but here I was deaf to expostulation.” The guests were growing restless, thinking of the feeding, milking, and dinners awaiting them at home. But, after seven years Eunice could wait a few more minutes, and so would they.

A little before four the storm rolled out as suddenly as it had rolled in. Henry, in his borrowed black suit, and Eunice, in her plain mull gown, were ushered into the steaming parlor. As the couple entered a huge, glorious rainbow—“the most brilliant I ever saw,” Eunice said—suddenly lit up the room. The guests murmured that it looked as if the couple was being married under its arch. The clergyman uttered a prayer that “the bow of peace and promise ever rest upon them thy servants.”12

As soon as the guests cleared out, the new Reverend and Mrs. Beecher traveled to the nearby town of Worcester to visit her sister and brother-in-law. Henry preached in Worcester, and then they went on to Boston, where he spoke at his father’s old church on Sunday morning and his brother Edward’s old church in the evening. It must have felt as much like a victory tour as a honeymoon.

CONTINUING THE PATTERN of their engagement, the honeymoon was more difficult for Eunice than for Henry. In a daze of pride and happiness, Henry seemed strangely blind to his beloved bride. Hurrying to the church in Worcester, he was certain he’d forgotten something but could not think of what it was until he mounted the steps of the pulpit and realized that it was Eunice.

Once they left the familiarity of her sister’s home for Boston, Eunice became anxious and ill, fearing that she might have contracted the deadly cholera morbis. She was just well enough to escape Boston by boat to New York City, where they stayed at the home of her other sister and consulted a doctor, who suggested that her discomfort might have come from eating too many cucumbers and leeks, both summer delicacies. That is to say, she was simply suffering from diarrhea and perhaps some nervous indigestion.

Whatever the cause of Eunice’s illness, she was plainly unnerved by her new life. She had never been to a major city and had rarely socialized outside of her own family circle. And then there was the looming prospect of sex. Undoubtedly both bride and groom were virgins at their wedding, and they had laid neither eyes nor lips on each other for four years. Plunged into the boisterous streets of Boston and New York, with a man she barely knew anymore leading her to the far end of America— who can blame Eunice for taking to her bed?

But if the big city was intimidating, the journey westward was downright frightening. When the newlyweds arrived at the train station in New York to board the cars for Pittsburgh, it was the first train she had ever ridden and perhaps ever seen. The “rail way” was still in its infancy, but already it was the symbol of modernity. Yet to see the great locomotive for the first time—belching soot, smoke, and red-hot cinders; huffing like a huge, hungry animal; the steam whistle and iron wheels on iron tracks shrieking as if in unearthly pain—it resembled nothing so much as a massive black dragon.

Eunice was understandably nervous about riding the “iron horse,” but she tried to mask her lack of sophistication. When they pulled into the station to change trains, the platform was chaotic with passengers and porters rushing to and fro. Henry set her beside the ticket window while he looked after the luggage, instructing her to stay put until he came to collect her to board the next train. She was waiting apprehensively when she spied a man who looked just like her new husband hop aboard the car and settle into reading his newspaper. Still Eunice did not move, assuming that Henry would come get her.

She stiffened with alarm when the final bell rang. Porters quickly loaded the last bags, husbands hurriedly gathered their wives and children, but Henry remained calmly reading his paper. Unable to endure a moment longer, Eunice rushed to the door and called out. He started up in shock, bounded across the platform, and, with the conductor’s help, swung her on board as the train began moving.

Again Henry apologized profusely for forgetting her. “He says it was absent-mindedness,” she wrote.13 Nonetheless Henry’s remarkable insensitivity to his new wife is surprising, when only weeks before he was quaking with desire for her. Eunice had lived so long in his imagination that in one sense their wedding was merely a way of stamping his dreams with the emotional authority of fact. He didn’t need her presence to feel loved, he needed only her consent. Yet his behavior was so obviously—and so unconsciously—hurtful that it suggests that the reality of his marriage was already disappointing to him. Henry smoldered with the pent-up passions of a twenty-four-year-old man, fanned by years of flirtations and fantasies. To be held at arm’s length by fretfulness, illness, and Eunice’s own (not unreasonable) disappointment must have been a terrible blow to his ego. Perhaps there was a part of him that did, indeed, want to leave her behind.

In Pittsburgh the couple left the railroad and boarded a canalboat, one of the ubiquitous flat-bottomed boats pulled by pack animals that walked along the shoreline. It was a slow, uncomfortable trip through low-lying water, so slow that travelers occasionally got off and walked alongside the boat to stretch their legs. Several times their boat got tangled in the dense canebreaks and thickets of alder saplings that lined the shore, forcing everyone to disembark while the boatmen cut through the swamp. The railroad had not brought them to a glorious future, it seemed, but to an almost primordial past.

The last leg was by steamboat, far faster than canalboat but equally crowded, dirty, and uncomfortable. A full gamut of western characters could be found crammed on the decks and in the parlors of the steamer—professional gamblers and pickpockets, rough boatmen with bowie knives strapped to their sides and shabby Methodist missionaries clutching their Bibles, dark-skinned slaves and calico-clad mothers shushing their wailing children. There was a constant stream of profanity, tobacco juice, and the easy intimacies that marked travelers in the West. Passengers ate at long wooden trestles, bathed at a couple of tin basins abetted by a common towel and comb, and slept in triple-decker bunks hung by ropes along the walls, with unlucky passengers stretched out on tables, floors, and benches. The danger of the steamboat equaled its discomfort. The shoreline and sandbars were littered with the wreckage of overheated boiler explosions and boats run aground.

After ten days of hard travel, the newlyweds arrived in Cincinnati, with eighteen cents remaining in their pockets. Up in Walnut Hills, the Beechers gave a warm welcome to Henry’s pretty, clever bride. “I thought you were the most of a beauty of anybody we had ever seen,” Harriet later told Eunice. Eunice put her best foot forward for her in-laws. “She has won the hearts of all that have seen her,” Charles wrote to Isabella. “And they are as happy as after so many trials I think they fully deserve to be.” Even Henry’s young admirer, Mary Wright, admitted petulantly that Eunice “seems farther from suspicion in every point than any of my friends. She is very pretty, sensible, and any thing but ill natured—she is very economical and cheerful—just the one to make your brother happy.”14

AS THEY BOARDED THE STEAMBOAT for Lawrenceburgh several days later, Henry warned Eunice to lower her expectations for their new home. But as they “picked their way from the wharf to the house through mud and over pigs,” in Eunice’s words, she was appalled by how crude and ugly the town was. She was openly relieved to arrive at Dr. Brower’s pleasant two-story clapboard house. It was not as genteel as she would have expected for a physician, which seemed odd, she observed, since Mrs. Brower had had the benefit of an “eastern education.” Still, it felt like an oasis.15

Eunice’s dismay resurged that evening, on her first encounter with the great scourge of the West: the mosquito. In these muggy, low-lying western river valleys, tall tales were told of mosquitoes so large they could carry off a cow, and swarms so thick they would block the sun. Mosquitoes were far more dangerous than the story spinners knew: Mosquitoes carried malaria, or what the settlers called “chills and ague”—a combination of high fevers and chills so intense that the entire body shook. Once contracted, malaria stayed in the body forever and could recur at any time. For longtime Hoosiers the periodic “shakes” simply became second nature. But, as Eunice was quick to notice, the chills often led to pneumonia and other more serious illnesses, which could easily kill off a body weakened by high fevers. She knew nothing of all this that evening, but by the next morning Eunice’s face, arms, and throat were swollen by mosquito bites.

The First (and only) Presbyterian Church of Lawrenceburgh was a homely, low-slung building, one of those plug-ugly country meeting-houses that were designed not so much to please God as to frighten the Devil, as the saying went. A rough wooden platform served as the pulpit, a single small stove provided heat, and the only light came from the windows. Henry did everything himself: sweeping, dusting, and cutting firewood on Saturdays, opening the church, building the fire, and closing up on Sundays. His first successful act was to beg money from his friends in Cincinnati for lard-oil lamps, which he installed, filled, and lit each Sabbath. “I was, literally, the light of that church,” Henry laughed. “I did all but come to hear myself preach—that they had to do.”16

The contrast between Cincinnati and Lawrenceburgh was much starker than that between Boston and Cincinnati. Unlike Ohio, which had a large Yankee population, Indiana drew most of its citizens from the upland South, especially the backcountry of Kentucky, as well as the tidal basin of Virginia and Delaware. Most were hardscrabble farmers chased by poverty and lured by cheap land and plenty of elbow room. Hoosiers had no tolerance for anything that struck them as pretentious or conceited. Indiana was a place where it was thought better not to wear fine clothing, if a traveler wished to avoid comments, stares, or a well-aimed dollop of tobacco juice; a place where the future governor, James Whitcomb, almost got off on the wrong foot when it was discovered that he wore a nightshirt to bed. Corn liquor, homemade peach brandy, and tobacco—“chawed” or in a pipe—were the primary indulgences, even among the women (who usually preferred smoking to chewing their tobacco).

Indiana put little stock in formal education, resting contentedly at the bottom of the free states in literacy, public education, and number of newspapers. In the southern counties where Lawrenceburgh lay, more than 40 percent of the population was illiterate. Most people held to the Methodist belief that too much education was a liability for a minister, and that a preacher who read a sermon from notes was, by definition, untouched by the Holy Spirit. Even lawyers and newspaper editors worried that being too grammatically correct would be seen as being “stuck up” or “puttin’ on airs.” But if Hoosiers had a reputation for being brusque and parochial, they also retained the Kentuckians’ open-hearted warmth, lively hospitality, and colorful wit.

With her pretty face swollen and bespeckled by mosquito bites, Eunice was now doubly anxious about her debut as the minister’s new wife. “They will not accuse their pastor of marrying for beauty, that’s certain,” she said gamely. As they entered the plain wooden church on Sunday, Henry stopped at the door to introduce her to his patron, Martha Sawyer. Intimidated and flustered, Eunice replied, “How do you do, Mrs. Beecher!” Henry laughed and moved the conversation along, but Eunice was mortified.17

As he mounted the platform that morning, the young Reverend Beecher did not cut a fancy figure. His wardrobe consisted almost entirely of hand-me-downs. With his smooth cheeks, unkempt hair (now cut by Eunice), and exuberant voice he did not bring much gravity to the pulpit. “How vividly I recall that first Sabbath! How young, how boyish he did look!” Eunice remembered years later. “And how indignant I felt, when some of the ‘higher classes’ come in out of simple curiosity, to see the surprised, almost scornful looks that were interchanged.”18

“Higher classes” was a relative term. Eunice was aghast at the odd parade of characters who came up to shake the new Mrs. Beecher’s hand after the service. “The most grotesque styles of dress,” she exclaimed; “the funniest and most uncouth modes of expression!” The settlers looked as weathered and sinewy as beef jerky, clad in cheap calico and homespun linsey-woolsey. They spoke in the peculiar dialects of their native regions, with a bluntness born of harsh, lonely lives. Eunice had never seen such a queer hodgepodge of people. What they had in common, she noted, was a uniformly pale yellow complexion and the aura of a hard-used life.

As they crowded around her, suspiciously eyeing her good dress, reserved Eastern manner, and robust good health, they were as leery of Eunice as she was of them. In a place where malaria left the skin sallow and drawn, they were so unaccustomed to seeing rosy cheeks that Eunice was asked several times “if I had not a ‘fever spell’ upon me, because my cheeks were so red!”19

Those first few weeks, Eunice’s homesickness was allayed only by her affectionate husband and her kind Yankee hosts. Just as she was beginning to adjust, Henry took a brief trip to Cincinnati on church business. Bad news arrived as soon as he left: Dr. Brower’s mother had died, and his widowed father would now have to move into Henry’s room.

In times of genuine hardship Eunice—with her unyielding practicality and bred-in-the-bone work ethic—truly shone. Unencumbered by the Beecher faith in divine financing, she immediately sat down and tallied up their money situation, something that Henry, with his resistance to math, had never really done. They could afford no more than thirty dollars a year for rent, a paltry sum even in such a poor place. Eunice clapped on her shawl and bonnet and began to scour the town.

“Oh! the search for that $30 house!” After two discouraging days of knocking on doors she abandoned that hope and began looking for four rooms, then lowered her sights to three rooms, and then two. Finally she swallowed her disgust and settled on two filthy rooms above a warehouse near the wharf, overlooking a backyard filled with old junk and sewage.

With the help of family and friends they cobbled together a home. Henry sold his gold college pin, and Eunice sold her new woolen cloak, a wedding present from her father, for thirty dollars. Lyman preached a rousing sermon on the duty of supporting the young clergy to his wealthy Cincinnati congregation, eliciting donations of linen, utensils, and furniture. Henry’s brother George, newly married to a well-to-do Ohioan named Sarah Buckingham, gave them the magnificent gift of a cookstove and oil lamps. To their everlasting pride, a family friend, Mrs. William Henry Harrison—the wife of the old Indian-fighting general who would soon be elected ninth president of the United States—gave them a sturdy bureau and the heavy brass andirons, shovel, and tongs with which she had begun housekeeping forty years before. A friendly steamboat captain agreed to ship the whole lot back to Lawrenceburgh for free.

Those two weeks of setting up housekeeping were one of the high points of their marriage. Clad in a sturdy gray apron, Henry worked side by side with her, scouring the tobacco-stained walls and floors with soap, water, and sand, mending the castoff furniture, and lightening the load with constant jokes—“making a frolic of those three days” of scrubbing. The newlyweds nearly burst with satisfaction as they arranged their worldly goods, with a new corn-husk mattress on the bed, a closet fashioned from a strip of four-cent calico taped to a wire string, and Henry’s saddle, bridle, and buffalo robe hanging from a hook above the door (the horse itself had to be borrowed). The crowning glory was his “library,” lovingly displayed in a bookshelf rigged from old packing crates.

Henry marked the day in his journal: “At housekeeping with this same dear wife. Began Oct. 17, 1837.” He hummed to himself as he strolled the dingy streets of Lawrenceburgh, contentedly quizzing the world: “Was there ever a man so happy as I am?”20 Neither knew on that joyful October day that after only two months of marriage Eunice was pregnant.

THIS WAS THE “AGE OF THE COMMON MAN,” as the pundits of the day dubbed it—when the populist impulses of 1776 truly began to find their footing in American culture. The opening of cheap land in the West, the extension of voting rights to all white men in the western states, and the expansion of common education were sweeping out the old colonial habits of deference to elites and replacing it with a new faith in the vox populi. In politics, this movement was marked by the presidency of Andrew Jackson, who was given a landslide victory by eastern workingmen and western farmers attracted by the antiaristocratic rhetoric of the Democratic Party. In religion it was found in the remarkable rise of the Methodist Church.

Methodism was a deeply populist religion, which held that salvation was open to any sinner who sought the open arms of Jesus. Methodists had no interest in metaphysical debates. Instead they emphasized the power of God to bestow happiness, and the dignity of individual religious feeling—the more fervent the better—even among poor people, women, and blacks. It was a theology made easy for the average man to understand, emphasizing love and free will rather than exclusionary tests of faith and esoteric logical proofs. Methodists were famous, above all, for their passionate preaching, lively singing, and flamboyant emotional expressiveness.

This defiant antielitism shaped everything about the sect. In the West the Methodists developed an extraordinarily successful system of itinerant ministers who rode in regular circuits from one isolated settlement to another, ministering to small congregations that were run by lay leaders until the next time the preacher returned months later. In warm seasons they would get up camp meetings that lasted for days, drawing hundreds, even thousands of people. These circuit riders were young, uneducated men, some barely literate—graduates of Brush College, as they proudly proclaimed. Henry recalled one prominent Methodist elder who “knew so little, had so little culture, that he had to count the chapters to tell what chapter it was, and then count the verses to tell what verse it was.” Yet these men “were real preachers,” Henry admitted years later. “Their personal experience was very strong, and their feelings were outspoken, demonstrative.”21

In New England the Methodists were still a minority, but they were fast taking over the rest of the country, especially the rough western states like Indiana, where Methodists outnumbered Presbyterians nearly 4 to 1. By midcentury Methodism was the single most popular denomination in the United States. With success, however, came the yearning for respectability, exerting pressure to curb the excessive emotionalism of the revivals and camp meetings—the hysterical sobbing and “holy laughter,” the involuntary physical responses like “the jerks,” in which worshippers began to twitch and turn until they fell convulsing into the straw, or the “barking exercise” (also known as “treeing the devil”), in which they began barking and baying. By the time Henry began preaching, the only place where such wild frontier emotions were still common was among the settlers of Indiana and Illinois.

Most Presbyterian clergy were both competitive with and contemptuous of the Methodists. Yet they had to be careful in their criticism. Remember, Henry wrote in his diary, “you can gain men easily if you get round their prejudices and put truth on their minds. But never if you attack prejudice. Look well at this.”22

Nothing in Henry’s education had prepared him to preach to this hard-bitten audience, who held Methodist emotionalism as the gold standard of religion. But he tackled his new job with all the professionalism that he could muster. He laid out his goals and strategies, he carefully composed and numbered all his sermons, and kept an elaborate journal with notes on what he preached, who came, and how it went over. For most of that first year, the young parson cribbed from his father’s themes and volumes of old Calvinist sermons. He preached at least one sermon of heavy-going biblical analysis a week, and tried his hand at some fire and brimstone.

“I had just come out of the Seminary,” Henry later recalled, “and retained some portions of systematic theology which I used when I had nothing else; and as a man chops straw and mixes it with Indian meal in order to distend the stomach of the ox that eats it, so I chopped a little of the regular orthodox theology, that I might sprinkle it with the meal of the Lord Jesus Christ.”23 Unsurprisingly, this was not very gratifying to him or his congregation. Threatening his people with the lake of eternal fire left him especially depressed, Eunice recalled. “I preached a great many sermons,” Henry claimed, “which, after six months, I would not have preached again.”

At first the new preacher attracted quite a few curiosity seekers, but after a month or two it was obvious that Henry’s efforts weren’t amounting to much. “I remember distinctly that every Sunday night I had a headache,” he recalled. “I went to bed every Sunday night with a vow registered that I would buy a farm and quit the ministry.” Just as in school, he berated himself for his procrastination and laziness. “I made many promises,” he said, “that, if God would help me, I would make my sermons a long time beforehand.”24 He asked his brother-in-law, Calvin Stowe, to come help him get up a revival, but Stowe refused, saying that he had to face this challenge by himself.

Soon Beecher lost even the advantage of novelty, however, when the Methodist church in town acquired an energetic new pastor. To Henry’s chagrin the new minister managed to spark his own revival within the first six months by sponsoring a camp meeting, a huge outdoor gathering of constant preaching, prayer, and exhortation that lasted for ten days. By the end of that year the Lawrenceburgh Methodist Church had taken in two hundred new members. Beecher, in stark contrast, added only eight people to his own congregation (including his own wife) over his entire term.

Still, Henry plugged away. By the time George Beecher and his new wife, Sarah, came to visit in the spring of 1838, Henry was making great strides as an orator. George was considered the rising star among the Beecher sons, and after receiving two new prestigious job offers that winter, he was about to leave for a prosperous church in Rochester, New York. Before he departed, the two brothers took turns preaching that Sunday.

“When George preached the first sermon, I came home, and said to my wife: ‘I never felt as much indisposition to go into the pulpit again as I do now,’” Henry remembered. “The next night I preached, and George came home and said to his wife: ‘Well, Sarah, since I have heard Henry preach I feel as if I had not been called to the ministry.’”25 It was high praise indeed, and he counted it as a milestone.

WHILE HENRY RETAINED HIS Presbyterian pretensions in the pulpit, after church he tossed aside the gentlemanly ambitions he had so carefully cultivated in Cincinnati and threw himself into the local scene. “I could have said: ‘Humph! Pretty business! Son of Lyman Beecher, president of a theological seminary, in this miserable hole,’” Henry recalled, but that would have been absurd. Young and poor as he was, he had no airs to put on with his neighbors.

Before long the young Reverend Beecher seemed to know everyone, high and low. “He was universally popular,” testified the pastor who succeeded him. “He would hunt and fish with men not used to the society of clergymen, and spent much time down on the river” loafing and chatting with the constant flow of people coming on and off the boats.26 For the first time since college he was spending most of his time with other men, hanging around the general store talking politics or debating religion for hours with everyone from an old infidel shoemaker to the rival Baptist minister.

But Eunice hated life in the West. She found nearly everything about Lawrenceburgh to be crude, ignorant, and dirty. Raised in a culture in which ministers topped the social ladder, she resented the informal familiarity with which the town treated her husband—a Beecher, no less!—and the way westerners treated the clergy like objects of reluctant charity.

For all their education and eastern refinement, there was no way around it: The young Beechers were dirt-poor. It was no small task to keep house, even in two rooms. All their firewood and all their drinking, cooking, and washing water had to be hauled from the backyard up a flight of steep stairs. It was a constant battle to subdue the mud and manure that made its way up from the road. They were far too poor to hire a servant to help. Too poor even to receive mail—at a time when postage was extremely expensive and paid by the recipient rather than the sender, they often left letters sitting in the post office until they had the money to pay for the stamps.

The Beechers—long experienced in the ways of pious poverty—offered Eunice what help they could. As a way to eke out extra income and escape the overwhelming drudgery of housework, Henry’s equally impoverished sister Harriet had begun to write stories, Sunday-school tracts, and essays, and she urged Eunice to follow her example. “If you can make money by sewing and it hurts you to wash and iron and do those things why not hire the latter with the avails of the former?”27 Eunice, a highly skilled seamstress, did try, earning nearly two dollars a week by sewing for a few hours a day. But she hated it—it was exhausting, demeaning work, and nearly impossible once the baby was born.

There were good times in Lawrenceburgh, too, Eunice later admitted. She and Henry were never so close as in those two small rooms. Henry would work on his sermons in the bed-sitting room, surrounded by books at his new work desk, purchased at the expense of Eunice’s winter cloak. Six feet away his wife sewed, kneaded bread, or washed dishes until Henry whistled for her help. She would drop her work, her hands still covered with dough or soapsuds, to sit at Henry’s knee to listen to him read from his sermon-in-progress. Reciprocating the favor, Henry could be mildly helpful around the house, occasionally frying a steak or making a pot of coffee, and once, to his great pride, kneading and baking a loaf of bread when Eunice was suddenly overcome by an attack of the chills.

Soon Eunice’s health began to fail under the influence of the harsh climate, hard work, and pregnancy. The prospect of a child filled her with fear and anxiety. She confessed to George and Sarah that during her pregnancy, “often I had felt that it would be no great trial to me—and release me from a load of responsibility, which I felt unfit to sustain, should the babe be stillborn.”28

For three weeks she suffered from false contractions, before heading into labor around midnight on May 15, 1838. It was a hard birth, lasting eight hours. “The child was presented wrong,” Henry wrote to his mother-in-law, “its hand being on its head and it was two hours before it could be remedied, which so exhausted the child that we thought at first that it was dead—but after a few moments it shot forth from its mouth very satisfactory evidence of breath and breath well used.”

They named their healthy eight-pound girl Harriet Eliza—just as his sister Harriet had named her first boy Henry. The new father was besotted by his daughter, whom they nicknamed Hattie. “It’s a real Beecher baby,” he crowed, “and I shall be much mistaken if everybody does not say ‘Oh how exactly like its father!’” Eunice’s feelings were more complex. “Henry makes a dear, fond father,” she told George and Sarah. “The only trouble about it is a wee bit of jealous fear, lest he should love me less, as he loves his babe more. Jealous of my own daughter!”29

That summer was lovely. Eunice recovered quickly, and Henry had reason to believe that his congregation might soon offer him a raise in salary. Various Beechers came to help with the baby, and Harriet Stowe brought her own baby Henry for a heartwarming visit. The proud father so enjoyed loafing with his happy little family that he made not a single entry in his diary for three months.

BY NOW HENRY SHOULD HAVE BEEN officially ordained as a minister, but he was waylaid by ecclesiastical backbiting and the Beecher baggage. For the last several years the annual Presbyterian General Assembly had nearly broken up over the bickering between the Old and New School factions. When the General Assembly met in Philadelphia in May 1837, the meeting degenerated into an angry riot of clergymen standing on their pew seats howling at one another.

At that same moment, just across town, Angela Grimké—a Quaker reformer who was once a pupil of Catharine Beecher’s and now the bride of the abolitionist Theodore Weld—was giving an impassioned speech against slavery in Philadelphia’s newly erected Abolition Hall. A woman onstage speaking to a mixed-race audience was too much for the a ntiabolitionists to stomach. When a black man was seen entering the hall arm in arm with a white woman (in fact, a light-skinned former slave), a mob arose with sudden, terrifying force, smashing the windows and doors and returning the next day to burn the hall to the ground. The city’s firemen, sheriff, and mayor stood watching as the reformers fled.

By the end of the week Abolition Hall was a smoldering rubble, and the Presbyterian General Assembly was in shambles. The Presbyterian Church was now officially split in two. Theology was the ostensible cause, but everyone whispered that the real reason was slavery, with rumors of a secret alliance between the Southern slaveholding churches and the Old School orthodoxy.

If “theology is but another name for the politics of the universe, or the Kingdom of God,” as Charles Beecher observed with typical Beecher bias, then this corrupt bargain between hyperorthodoxy and slavery was inevitable. “Old School theology enthrones a great slave-holder over the universe,” Charles argued, while the “New School enthrones a great Emancipator.”30

After the schism at the General Assembly, Presbyterian synods across the country were given the choice of affiliating with either the New or the Old School organizations. As a Beecher, Henry was a well-known New Schooler, but his church was part of the presbytery of Oxford, Ohio, a staunch Old School outpost where many of the churchmen had supported the heresy charges against his father. His ordination exam was an all-day oral interrogation, and his hyperorthodox examiners would be looking for any chance to trip him up. But after a lifetime of drilling Henry was ready. “I knew all their proofs, all their digging cuts, all their ins and outs.”

The exam was to be held sixty miles away, in Eaton, Ohio. When he arrived, the board of examiners was packed with his father’s Old School enemies. The room was tense as the moderator, “Father” Archibald Craig, a tall, lean man of fifty or sixty, with a “shrill, ringing voice,” called them to order. “There he sat,” Henry crowed in the sarcastic account he sent to his brother George, “the young candidate begotten of a heretic, nursed at Lane; but, with such a name and parentage and education what remarkable modesty, extraordinary meekness and how deferential to the eminently acute questioners, who sat gazing upon the prodigy! Certainly this was a bad beginning! Having predetermined that I should be hot, and forward and full of confidence, it was somewhat awkward truly to find such gentleness and teachableness!”

As the examiners warmed up “the questions came like hail,” Henry said. “Some of them I answered directly, some ingeniously, some intelligently, and others somewhat obscurely.” But in all cases he told them essentially what they wanted to hear. The board was shocked to find that just “when they thought they were going to get heresy they got a perfect avalanche of orthodoxy.”

Some might accuse Henry of hypocrisy, or even lying, that day. Retelling the story years later, Henry would describe it as a natural gift for persuasion. “Somehow I have always had a certain sympathy with human nature which has led me invariably, in my better moods, to see instinctively, or to perceive by intuition, how to touch the right chord in people, how to reach the living principle in them; and that faculty was awakened on this occasion,” he recalled. After a full day of questions the panel unanimously declared Henry orthodox and eligible for ordination. They would set the date of the ceremony when they met the following day.

The trouble was, as Henry put it, “that then they slept on it.” Lyman’s Old School enemies were galled at once again being outfoxed by a Beecher. So in the first order of business the next morning, they voted to postpone setting the date for Henry’s ordination while they debated several resolutions designed specifically to confound him.

First they passed a motion declaring that the Presbytery of Oxford align itself officially with the Old School National Assembly—the very same one that had expelled Lyman and his New School supporters in Philadelphia the year before. Then they passed a motion requiring all candidates for ordination to swear allegiance to the Old School Assembly. Only then did they return to Henry’s case, demanding that he take the oath.

“I refused” on the spot, Henry said, even after Father Craig generously offered him six months to think on it. So “they turned me out— and gave me my papers back again.”

“I felt as big as forty men,” Henry recalled, without even a hint of irony. “I simply said: ‘Well, brethren, I have nothing to do but to go back to my father’s house.’”31

Before leaving, Henry asked about the status of his post in Lawrenceburgh. The board replied that in light of his decision, it was declared officially unfilled. “Just what they had to say, and just what I wanted them to say and moreover just what I determined they should say,” Henry told his brother with some bravado. “I drove home forthwith, got back on Saturday. On Sunday recounted from the pulpit the doings of the [Presbytery] and declared them vacant if they continued under Oxford.”

The story infuriated Beecher’s congregation, just as he hoped it would. Under the young minister’s not-so-subtle guidance, the members held a meeting two days later, and by “a unanimous vote they withdrew from Oxford and declared themselves an Independent Presbyterian Church.”32 It was the first time, but not the last, that his congregation would defy a higher authority out of loyalty to Henry.

News of Henry’s crisis spread like prairie fire, throwing the entire western Synod into an uproar. Oxford’s decision to ally themselves with the Old School as a way to force Henry’s hand effectively forced the hand of every Presbyterian minister in the western territory, requiring each church to declare its allegiance one way or another. There was no more room for hedging.

Within several weeks of Henry’s debacle the Synod convened in Cincinnati for a vicious fight to the finish. Henry rode up to Cincinnati to watch the debates. Now that he was personally involved, he took an unusual interest in the dry ecclesiastical proceedings. But as the meeting degenerated into open hostility, his usual boredom hardened into deep disgust, and he left for home before they cast the final, acrimonious vote to split the western territory into two separate synods, one Old and one New School.

Lyman’s dreams of a western religious empire now lay in shards around his feet. His beloved church was nearly destroyed, not by its enemies but through its own internal contradictions and petty jealousies. When asked years later if he regretted leaving Boston for this godforsaken country, Lyman replied, with a hint of sadness, that he preferred not to think about the past.

But the younger Beecher was exhilarated. It was just as well to have these men of “mad ambition and madder jealousy” out of their camp, he told a friend. With their underhanded tactics, “there was not one moment’s safety for character or standing to any New School man.” With his dramatic display of loyalty, Henry earned his father’s approval and found his first intoxicating taste of fame. He could not help gloating about his newfound notoriety. “My case may stand for many,” he exulted. “A graduate of Lane (that propaganda of heresy)—the son of the Arch Heretic—has received the imprimatur of Orthodox Oxford!”33 There was something deliciously funny and deeply satisfying to Henry in gaining renown as an orthodox rebel.

On November 9, 1838, Henry was ordained by his father and Calvin Stowe, establishing him as minister of the Independent Presbyterian Church of Lawrenceburgh within the newly created New School Presbytery of Cincinnati. The symbolism was ideal. He began his career by simultaneously swearing allegiance to his father, fulfilling the deathbed dream of his mother, and declaring his independence. But just as Henry was celebrating his triumphant outmaneuvering of the Old School enemies, he was hit with the first big blow of his career.

THAT AUTUMN THE UNITED STATES was gripped by a major financial depression. It began in the spring of 1837, when the bottom dropped out of the international cotton market, igniting a financial panic that shut down the banking system of New York. This in turn plunged the supply of money to a new low, crippling the overextended and underregulated western banks. Eastern commerce ground to a halt, and now the paralysis was spreading to the agricultural regions of the West. In Cincinnati, Catharine Beecher’s Western Female Seminary failed in May 1838. Uncle Samuel Foote was bankrupted by generosity when many of his friends defaulted on personal loans. In New York, the Tappan Brothers’ dry-goods business went under. Arthur Tappan’s checks to Lane Seminary were suddenly worthless, leaving President Beecher and Professor Stowe nearly penniless.

In Lawrenceburgh, the government-backed canal and railroad projects had kept the depression at bay, but in the fall of 1838 the Ohio River—the great commercial highway of the region—began to dry up, making it almost impossible to carry goods in or out of town. Wages tumbled and prices skyrocketed. Coffee, butter, and sugar were going for the exorbitant price of fifty cents a pound. Only corn and its two subsidiary products, pork and whiskey, could still be bought for a pittance.

Henry’s little family was bowled over by the sudden contraction of the economy. In anticipation of his upcoming raise, they had gone into debt to fix up their rented house. Now his congregation could no longer meet even his current salary, and the coffers of the American Home Missionary society were practically empty. Henry’s income from all sources for 1838 would amount to far less than three hundred dollars, not including the potatoes and corn given by farmers in lieu of money, and the regular plates of tenderloin sausage sent over by “the gentleman who does pork business.”34

Squeezed by stress, the constitutional differences between Eunice and Henry began to emerge, especially relating to money. Eunice had inherited “my father’s dread of living in debt,” as she admitted, while Henry possessed his father’s almost reckless faith in Providence. “God only knows how we are to get along,” he confessed to George that fall, “and I leave it cheerfully to him.”35 In one year Henry had run up credit all over Lawrenceburgh.

His parishioners were happy to support him when he was attacked by outsiders in his squabble with the Presbyterians, but in exchange they tightened their claims on him. The day after the church declared its independence from the Old School Presbyterians, one of Henry’s parishioners came to scold the young pastor for a variety of sins. They were unhappy with his rising debts around town, laying the blame on his weakness for “fine living”—a claim that surely outraged Eunice. They were put off by his failure to make regular pastoral visits among the congregation over the summer, and several members had been insulted by a sermon that had seemed to attack them personally. His summer of pleasure had a steep price.

The local critics also had harsh words for his wife. Henry’s parishioners were offended by Eunice’s frequent absences from church and by her failure to accompany Henry on his rare pastoral visits. The matrons of the town thought she put on airs, with her fancy manners and Yankee habits, and they sniped at her lax housekeeping. In her defense, Eunice was plainly overwhelmed by work. But why then, the ladies gibed, did she keep the pretentious habit of serving the family’s daily meals on a tablecloth?

“It has depressed me exceedingly. Told wife of it,” Henry wrote ruefully. “I was becoming too much elated and too independent. Tho’ painful I can truly say it has done me good. It has given me Experience. It will be my fault if I am not a better man, and don’t preach better for it, than before.” Not for the first time, and certainly not for the last, Henry vowed to take a crash course in humility: to avoid all debt, to visit more, to “abate my desire for fine living,” and to “diminish self-estimation.”36

To earn badly needed cash, Eunice began sewing for hire, and Henry tried to follow Harriet’s example by writing Sunday-school books and articles, but that didn’t amount to much. As their troubles mounted, their home life began to show the strain. Like most twenty-five-yearolds, Henry had no taste for calling on old ladies, shut-ins, and poker-faced respectables, to talk gravely about their souls or to comfort the grieving or ill. But he found plenty of time to go fishing with his new pals or to loaf around the cracker barrel in the general store. Eunice developed a poisonous jealousy of his time away from home, which festered until it became, in her mind, the central conflict of her marriage. Within a year of their wedding they embarked on the classic marital cycle of neglect and nagging. Unfortunately to outsiders henpecking is more obvious than stealthy emotional neglect. The more shrill Eunice became, the more sympathy flowed to Henry. There was, as his brother Charles quipped, “No terror like the terror of Eunice.”37

Although it was a subject of discussion among his family and friends, Henry himself said very little about the friction at home. As 1838 drew to a close he began to recover his health and optimism. His first day back in the pulpit after a month’s illness, he preached from John 14:27: “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you; not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.”38 He spoke movingly of how to cope with trouble, sickness, and despair. Afterward the congregation buzzed with approval, noting that the autumn’s harsh lessons seemed to be giving him a new power in the pulpit. Perhaps they were right.

WITH THE NEW YEAR Henry determined to make a fresh start. After several friends (and potential converts) surprised him by joining the Methodists, he began to study his competitor’s tactics. Finally he decided to visit the Methodist church himself. He was astonished by what he saw.

The sermon was plainspoken and sensational, skillfully pulling the audience onto an emotional seesaw, alternately issuing vivid warnings of impending doom and impassioned pleas to flee to the glorious bliss of God’s love. Lively hymns, adapted from popular folk tunes (in marked contrast to the gloomy Puritan dirges sung in a perpetually minor key) sung not by a professional choir but by the entire congregation, punctuated the passionate prayers and exhortations. He watched in amazement as their “low” methods drove the otherwise “sober and unextravagant” townspeople into a frenzy of feeling, groaning with misery and fear, crying and shouting with joy and fervor, filling the air with “Amen!,” “Mercy! Mercy!,” and “Come to Jesus!” This “contagion of example,” Henry noted, awakened an “animal excitation or magnetism” that saturated the room, creating the “extraordinary zeal of members, to increase their ranks.”

Just as important was the contrast between the long, arduous Presbyterian conversion experience and the easygoing Methodist belief that anyone could join the church if they took Jesus Christ as their savior. It was difficult to compete, he noted in his diary, when “I am opposing a church which lets into full communion any who choose without any change of heart or preparation whatsoever, except seriousness and desire to be better.”39

Yet even as he continued to rail against the “excess and absurdity” of the Methodists, Henry began quietly, deliberately to imitate them. He put more emphasis on “regular and attractive” music, eventually making it his personal signature. He began to cultivate, in his words, “More spirited preaching.”40 To make his sermons seem spontaneous, he trimmed his notepaper to fit unobtrusively inside his pulpit Bible, so that no one could see that he was speaking from notes. That spring he seemed to be on fire.

Suddenly opportunity landed in his lap. Samuel Merrill, an early Yankee settler who was now a wealthy landowner in Indianapolis and the president of the Indiana State Bank, began attending Henry’s church whenever he was in town to inspect the local branch bank. That spring, as Merrill was riding by coach into Lawrenceburgh, a box of coins fell and broke his leg, forcing him to remain in town for six weeks while the leg healed. Over those six weeks Merrill and the young pastor hit it off, discovering a mutual love of books and ideas. (Sam Merrill would later found the famous publishing firm the Bobbs-Merrill Company.)

As the Old and New School rivalry came to a head in late 1838, the small Presbyterian church of Indianapolis was one of the casualties. Led by Samuel Merrill, a circle of well-to-do businessmen split off from the Old School church to establish a more liberal New School church. The new Second Presbyterian Church promised a generous salary, but they were having a devil of a time breaking through the common prejudice against settling in Indiana. After the job was refused by six ministers, including his own brother, Samuel Merrill turned to young Beecher, asking him to come preach a trial sermon in Indianapolis.

Indianapolis was two days of hard riding from Cincinnati, more than forty miles of rough tracks cut through an ancient forest of maple, walnut, oak, and ash trees. Indianapolis was not much larger than Lawrenceburgh, but as the newly designated state capital it had higher aspirations. A grand new domed capitol building gleamed in the center of town, and the streets swarmed with judges, legislators, land speculators, entrepreneurs, and bankers, buzzing with schemes to bring highways, canals, and railroads to the young capital.

Here, Henry was treated like a VIP, sleeping in the town’s finest hotel and dining with some of the town’s most prominent men, including the former governor, Noah Noble. After his sermon the committee plied him with flattery, telling him that the “young men not generally attached to any church are favorably impressed with me. My manners win them,” Henry confided to his diary. “They think I have the right kind of mind.”41

By his second visit Henry was nearly decided. He drew up lists of pros and cons, leaning heavily toward the pros. All his reasons for leaving boiled down to ambition, both godly and personal. He saw boundless opportunities for influence in the fledgling church, the raw new capital, and the rich but unformed state. He dutifully noted how much good he could do for the New School cause in Indiana, but the capping motive was his desire for a more stimulating intellectual environment, where he would finally find “Gratification of all literary appetites.”42 Then there was the money. The founders were committed to paying the minister enough to live within their own range of comfort, a tempting promise to a man in perpetual debt.

The official call came on May 13, 1839, by unanimous vote, offering an annual salary of six hundred dollars. Henry had no hesitation. It was his duty to go, he told his bereft parishioners.

Eunice was harder to convince. For all her complaints she was reluctant to leave the friends they’d made in Lawrenceburgh and the close proximity of Walnut Hills. But Henry played on her anxiety about baby Hattie, who was sickly and losing weight. He reassured her that Indianapolis’s climate would be gentler and healthier. With Eunice’s consent, they made plans to leave by the end of July.

Henry’s first two years as a minister had been a mixed bag. He’d improved vastly as an orator, but as a spiritual pastor he left much to be desired. As the Reverend Joseph Tarkington, his Methodist rival, put it, “Mr. Beecher could outpreach me, but I could outvisit him, and visiting builds up a church more than preaching.”43

“I had been discontented for two years,” Henry later admitted, but now everything was looking up. For the first time his father was asking for Henry’s help with a revival in Oxford, Ohio. “I know he will come if he can,” Lyman told his new wife, Lydia, for he is “so like-minded with his father.”44

Just before they left for Indianapolis, Henry delivered the Independence Day oration, a national tradition on the Fourth of July and a great honor. It was declared “a rich treat” by the editor of the Lawrenceburgh Political Beacon, who asked if he could print a copy of the speech.45 Surprisingly Henry refused, explaining that it would take more time to write up his notes than he could spare. The Reverend Beecher was shaking the dust of Lawrenceburgh from his shabby coat and moving on.