CHILDHOOD.
Early Glimpses—Recollections of the Mother—Going to School at Ma’am
Kilbourne’s—His First Letter—District School—The Coming of the New
Mother—His First Ride on Horseback—A Merry Household—Fishing
Excursions—Minister’s Wood-Spell—Saturday Night—Going to Meeting—The
Puritan Sabbath—The Cold of Litchfield Hill—Rats—Work—The
Catechism—Formative Influences—Summing Up.
We of course see but little of him in these early years.
“The younger members of the Beecher family came into existence in a
great, bustling household of older people, all going their several ways
and having their own grown-up interests to carry.
“The child growing up in this busy, active circle had constantly
impressed upon it a sense of personal insignificance as a child, and the
absolute need of the virtue of passive obedience and non-resistance as
regards all grown-up people. To be statedly washed and dressed and
catechised, got to school at regular hours in the morning and to bed
inflexibly at the earliest possible hour at night, comprised about all
the attention that children could receive in those days.”
Here and there a glimpse is given, just enough to tell us the direction
the stream is taking. The first is found in a letter of the mother to
her sister, Harriet Foote, written when he was a little more than a year
old:
“_July 12, 1814._—... I arrived Saturday at sunset, and found all well,
and boy (Henry Ward) in merry trim, glad at heart to be safe on terra
firma after all his jolts and tossings.”
Again in November of the same year:
“I write sitting upon my feet with my paper on the seat of a chair,
while Henry is hanging round my neck and climbing on my back.”
He himself gives an experience of a little later period:
“I remember very well when I was but two years old (strange as it may
seem; sometimes I think I spent all my remembering power on that early
period!) finding myself in the east entry of my father’s great house,
alone, coming down-stairs, or trying to. The sudden sense which I had of
being alone frightened me, and I gave one shriek; and then the echo of
my voice scared me worse, and I gave another shriek that was more
emphatic; and I remember seeing the light stream in from the
dining-room, and being taken up by loving hands. The face I do not
recall, the form I do not recall; but I remember the warm pressure. It
was my mother, who died when I was three years old. She took me to her
bosom. I recollect sitting by the side of some one who made me feel very
happy; and I recollect seeing my father’s swart face on the other side
of the table.
“Now I could not paint my mother’s face; but I know how her bosom felt.
I know how her arms felt. I have a filial sense, a child’s
interpretation, of motherhood. It was only an emotion or instinct in me,
but it was blessed.”
This incident of the mother is supplemented by two of the sister
Harriet, in which the little boy Henry had a part:
“In my own early childhood,” she says, “only two incidents of my mother
twinkle like rays through the darkness. One was of our all running and
dancing out before her from the nursery to the sitting-room one Sabbath
morning, and her pleasant voice saying after us, ‘Remember the Sabbath
day to keep it holy.’”
Another remembrance is this: “Mother was an enthusiastic horticulturist
in all the small ways that limited means allowed. Her brother John, in
New York, had just sent her a small parcel of tulip bulbs. I remember
rummaging these out of an obscure corner of the nursery one day when she
was out, and being strongly seized with the idea that they were good to
eat, and using all the little English I possessed to persuade my
brothers that these were onions such as grown people ate, and would be
very nice for us. So we fell to and devoured the whole; and I recollect
being somewhat disappointed in the odd, sweetish taste, and thinking
that onions were not as nice as I had supposed. Then mother’s serene
face appeared at the nursery door, and we all ran toward her and with
one voice began to tell our discovery and achievement. We had found this
bag of onions and had eaten them all up. Also I remember that there was
not even a momentary expression of impatience, but that she sat down and
said: ‘My dear children, what you have done makes mamma very sorry.
Those were not onion-roots, but roots of beautiful flowers; and if you
had let them alone ma would have had next summer in the garden great,
beautiful red and yellow flowers such as you never saw.’ I remember how
drooping and dispirited we all grew at this picture, and how sadly we
regarded the empty bag.”
When the mother grew sick and the children were admitted to her bedside
once a day, Henry was among the number, although no memory of the fact
lingered with him in after-years.
Mrs. Stowe writes of this event:
“I have a vision of a very fair face with a bright red spot on each
cheek, and a quiet smile as she offered me a spoonful of her gruel; of
our dreaming one night, we little ones, that mamma had got well, and
waking in loud transports of joy, and being hushed down by some one
coming into the room. Our dream was indeed a true one. She was for ever
well; but they told us she was dead, and took us in to see what seemed
so cold and so unlike anything we had ever seen or known of her.”
Mrs. Reeve, one of the most intimate friends of the family, writes of
the last day of her life:
“She told her husband that her views and anticipations of heaven had
been so great that she could hardly sustain it, and if they had been
increased she should have been overwhelmed, and that her Saviour had
constantly blessed her; that she had peace without one cloud, and that
she had never during her sickness prayed for her life. She dedicated her
sons to God for missionaries, and said that her greatest desire was that
her children might be trained up for God, and she trusted God would, in
his own time, provide another companion for him that would more than
fill her place.
“She spoke of the advancement of Christ’s kingdom with joy, and of the
glorious day that was ushering in.
“She attempted to speak to her children, but she was extremely
exhausted, and their cries and sobs were such that she could say but
little. She told them that God could do more for them than she had done
or could do, and that they must trust him.
“Mr. Beecher then made a prayer, in which he gave her back to God and
dedicated all that they held in common to him. She then fell into a
sweet sleep from which she awoke in heaven. It is a most moving scene to
see eight little children weeping around the bed of a dying mother; but
still it was very cheering to see how God could take away the sting of
death and give such a victory over the grave.”
Mr. Beecher’s remembrance of this event was simply of a feeling of fear
and pain at the weeping of the children around him, and of interest in
the baby, Charles, in his little white dress, as he was lifted up in the
arms of one of the attendants.
Of the funeral we read from Mrs. Stowe’s pen:
“Henry was too little to go; I remember his golden curls and little
black frock, as he frolicked like a kitten in the sun in ignorant joy.
“I remember the mourning dresses, the tears of the older children, the
walking to the burial-ground and somebody’s speaking at the grave, and
the audible sobbing of the family; and then all was closed, and we
little ones, to whom it was so confused, asked the question where she
was gone and would she never come back? They told us at one time that
she had been laid in the ground, at another that she had gone to heaven.
Whereupon Henry, putting the two things together, resolved to dig
through the ground and go to find her; for being discovered under sister
Catherine’s window one morning digging with great zeal and earnestness,
she called to him to know what he was doing, and, lifting his curly
head, with great simplicity he answered: ‘Why, I am going to heaven to
find ma!’”
We next hear of him in a letter written by his sister, February 1, 1817:
“... Henry is a very good boy, and we think him a remarkably interesting
child, and he grows dearer to us every day. He is very affectionate, and
seems to love his father with all his heart. His constant prattle is a
great amusement to us all. He often speaks of his sister Harriet, and
wishes spring would come, so that she might come home and go to school
with him.”
This was in the winter when he was past three years old.
Perhaps the prattle of this one will be instructive as well as amusing
some day. Who knows?
At last spring comes, and with it his sister Harriet from her long visit
at Nutplains, and an important era in his life opens. He begins to go to
school, with her as his companion and guardian.
He is just four years old that summer, the usual age for school
beginnings in rural New England. They went to Ma’am Kilbourne’s on West
Street, and there he clambered up the first rounds of the ladder of
book-learning and took his first lessons. These consisted in repeating
his letters twice a day, such as he could remember, and having the
others pointed out to him from Webster’s spelling-book, as he stood, a
chubby, bare-footed, round, rosy-faced boy, in front of the dreaded
schoolma’am, who had been made sharp and angular by her years of labor
in sharpening the intellectual faculties of generations of children.
In due time Charles is large enough to join the older brother and
sister, and tells us:
“I remember all three of us coming out of our yard and stringing along,
holding each other by the hand and saying every morning, ‘What if a
great big dog should come out at us?’ and Henry, as the larger brother
and protector of the group, answering, ‘I would take an axe and chop his
head off.’”
As yet he wears his hair in long golden curls, the badge of a continued
infantile state; but some of the girls at school improvising a pair of
shears from the pieces of tin thrown out from a shop near by, and
cutting off some of the coveted locks, it is thought best at home to cut
them all off; and now, with trousers, and suspenders, and jacket, and
short hair, and bare feet, he emerges from the half-infantile, girlish
state and becomes a full-fledged boy, much to his own satisfaction: “he
considered that his manhood had now commenced.”
That the instruction of his teacher is not all thrown away is evident by
the letter which he wrote at this time, when he was five years old, of
which a facsimile is given. Its merits of directness and originality, at
least in the matter of spelling, will be readily recognized:
[Illustration:
DER SISTER
WE AR AL WEL
MA HAZ A BABY
THE OLD SOW HAZ SIX PIGS
]
One incident of about these times, which is related by his brother, is
ludicrously prophetic:
“I remember Henry’s coming in and taking his turn” (reading to Aunt
Esther). “Once the piece was about wild beasts, and it said ‘two
monstrous lions came out.’ I can see Henry’s red face and declamatory
air as he read it ‘two monstrofalous great lions came out.’”
From Widow Kilbourne’s he graduated into the district school, which was
a few rods north of the parsonage, and was attended by all the children
of quite a large farming district. Like the other children, he carried
sewing and knitting, and the sister tells us that “this bashful,
dazed-looking boy pattered bare-foot to and from the little unpainted
school-house, with a brown towel or a blue checked apron to hem during
the intervals between his spelling and reading lessons.”
His eagerness for sister Harriet to return, that he may begin school,
has long since subsided, and given place to an unusual dislike for his
whole district-school experience, as appears from reminiscences which he
wrote in after-years:
“It was our misfortune, in boyhood, to go to a district school. It was a
little, square pine building, blazing in the sun, upon the highway,
without a tree for shade or sight near it; without bush, yard, fence, or
circumstance to take off its bare, cold, hard, hateful look. Before the
door, in winter, was the pile of wood for fuel, and in summer there were
all the chips of the winter’s wood. In winter we were squeezed into the
recess of the farthest corner, among little boys, who seemed to be sent
to school merely to fill up the chinks between the bigger boys.
Certainly we were never sent for any such absurd purpose as an
education. There were the great scholars—the school in winter was for
_them_, not for us pickaninnies. We were read and spelt twice a day,
unless something happened to prevent, which _did_ happen about every
other day. For the rest of the time we were busy in keeping still. And a
time we always had of it! Our shoes always would be scraping on the
floor or knocking the shins of urchins who were also being ‘educated.’
All of our little legs together (poor, tired, nervous, restless legs
with nothing to do!) would fill up the corner with such a noise that,
every ten or fifteen minutes, the master would bring down his two-foot
hickory ferule on the desk with a clap that sent shivers through our
hearts to think how that would have felt if it had fallen somewhere
else; and then, with a look that swept us all into utter extremity of
stillness, he would cry, ‘Silence in that corner!’ It would last for a
few minutes; but little boys’ memories are not capacious. Moreover, some
of the boys had mischief, and some had mirthfulness, and some had both
together. The consequence was that just when we were the most afraid to
laugh we saw the most comical things. Temptations which we could have
vanquished with a smile out in the free air were irresistible in our
little corner, where a laugh and a spank were very apt to woo each
other. So we would hold on and fill up; and others would hold on and
fill up too; till by and by the weakest would let go a mere whiffet of a
laugh, and then down went all the precautions, and one went off, and
another, and another, touching the others off like a pack of
fire-crackers! It was in vain to deny it. But as the process of snapping
our heads and pulling our ears went on with primitive sobriety, we each
in turn, with tearful eyes and blubbering lips, declared ‘we didn’t mean
to,’ and that was true; and that ‘we wouldn’t do so any more,’ and that
was a lie, however unintentional, for we never failed to do just so
again, and that about once an hour all day long.
“Besides this our principal business was to shake and shiver at the
beginning of the school for very cold; and to sweat and stew for the
rest of the time before the fervid glances of a great box iron stove,
red-hot. There was one great event of horror and two of pleasure: the
first was the act of _going to school_, comprehending the leaving off
play, the face-washing and clothes-inspecting, the temporary play-spell
before the master came, the outcry, ‘There he is! the master is coming!’
the hurly-burly rush, and the noisy clattering to our seats. The other
two events of pleasure were the play-spell and the dismissal. O dear!
can there be anything worse for a lively, mercurial, mirthful, active
little boy than going to a winter district school? Yes—going to a summer
district school! There is no comparison. The one is the Miltonic depth,
below the deepest depth.
“A woman kept the school, sharp, precise, unsympathetic, keen, and
untiring. Of all ingenious ways of fretting little boys doubtless her
ways were the most expert. Not a tree to shelter the house; the sun beat
down on the shingles and clapboards till the pine knots shed pitchy
tears, and the air was redolent of hot pine-wood smell. The benches were
slabs with legs in them. The desks were slabs at an angle, cut, hacked,
scratched; each year’s edition of jack-knife literature overlaying its
predecessor, until it then wore cuttings and carvings two or three
inches deep. But if _we_ cut a morsel, or stuck in pins, or pinched off
splinters, the little sharp-eyed mistress was on hand, and one look of
her eye was worse than a sliver in our foot, and one nip of her fingers
was equal to a jab of a pin; for we had tried both.
“We envied the flies—merry fellows! bouncing about, tasting that
apple-skin, patting away at that crumb of bread; now out the window,
then in again; on your nose, on your neighbor’s cheek, off to the very
schoolma’am’s lips; dodging her slap, and then letting off a real round
and round buzz, up, down, this way, that way, and every way. Oh! we
envied the flies more than anything, except the birds. The windows were
so high that we could not see the grassy meadows; but we could see the
tops of distant trees, and the far, deep, bounteous blue sky. There flew
the robins; there went the blue-birds: and there went we. We followed
that old polyglot, the skunk-blackbird, and heard him describe the way
they talked at the winding up of the Tower of Babel. We thanked every
meadow-lark that sung on, rejoicing as it flew. Now and then a
‘chipping-bird’ would flutter on the very window-sill, turn its little
head sidewise, and peer in on the medley of boys and girls. Long before
we knew that it was in Scripture we sighed: Oh! that we had the wings of
a bird; we would fly away and be out of this hateful school. As for
learning, the sum of all that we ever got at a district school would not
cover the first ten letters of the alphabet. One good, kind,
story-telling, Bible-rehearsing aunt at home, with apples and
ginger-bread premiums, is worth all the schoolma’ams that ever stood by
to see poor little fellows roast in those boy-traps called district
schools.
“I have not a single pleasant recollection in connection with my
school-boy days. The woods were full of temptations, the trees called
me, the birds wanted me, the brooks sung entreaties. It seemed cruel to
be shut up. The brooks, birds, flowers, sunshine, and breezes were free;
why not I?”
In the autumn of 1817, when Henry Ward was a few months past four years
of age, Dr. Lyman Beecher married Miss Harriet Porter, of Portland,
Maine, and brought his bride at once to Litchfield.
The advent of the new mother is thus described by Mrs. Stowe:
“I was about six years old and slept in the nursery with my two younger
brothers, Henry and Charles. We heard father’s voice in the entry, and
started up in our little beds, crying out as he entered our room, ‘Why,
here’s pa!’ A cheerful voice called out from behind him, ‘And here’s
ma.’
“A beautiful lady, very fair, with bright blue eyes and soft auburn hair
bound round with a black velvet bandeau, came into the room smiling,
eager and happy-looking, and, coming up to our beds, kissed us and told
us that she loved little children and that she would be our mother.
Never did stepmother make a prettier or sweeter impression. The next
morning I remember we looked at her with awe. She seemed to us so fair,
so delicate, so elegant that we were almost afraid to go near her. We
must have been rough, red-cheeked, hearty country children, honest,
obedient, and bashful. She was peculiarly dainty and neat in all her
ways and arrangements; and I remember I used to feel breezy and rough
and rude in her presence. We felt a little in awe of her, as if she were
a strange princess rather than our own mamma; but her voice was very
sweet, her ways of moving and speaking very graceful, and she took us up
in her lap and let us play with her beautiful hands, which seemed
wonderful things made of pearl and ornamented with strange rings.”
In a letter written to her sister Mrs. Beecher gives her impressions of
the group. She says: “We surprised them here almost as much as Mr.
Beecher did us. They did not expect us till the following evening, but
it was a joyful surprise to them. I never saw so many rosy cheeks and
laughing eyes. The little ones were all joy and gladness. They began
all, the first thing, to tell their dreams, for it seems they have
dreamed of nothing else but father’s coming home; and some dreamed he
came without me, and some that he brought two mothers. They all became
immediately very free and social, except the youngest (Charles), and he
is quite shy; calls me ‘lady,’ and sometimes ‘dear lady,’ but he loves
aunt much the best. I have never seen a finer family of children, or a
more agreeable. I am delighted with the great familiarity and great
respect subsisting between parent and children. It is a house of great
cheerfulness and comfort, and I am beginning to feel at home. Harriet
and Henry are very desirous for me to send their love.”
Later she writes of them:
“I perceive them to be of agreeable habits, and some of them of uncommon
intellect.... Harriet and Henry come next, and they are always
hand-in-hand. They are as lovely children as I ever saw, amiable,
affectionate, and very bright.... Our dwelling is pleasantly situated.
The garden yields plenty of vegetables for the year, plenty of cherries,
and the orchard furnishes cider and apples enough. A barrel of
apple-sauce is made in the fall, which the children use instead of
butter.... The boys are up before it is quite day, and make fires, and
we are all down and have prayers before sunrise. Our domestic worship is
very delightful. We sing a good deal and have reading aloud as much as
we can.”
The following silhouette, although following the last by quite an
interval of time—it is in 1819—is our next family picture in order:
“Papa is well and is still writing that piece with a hard name, I can’t
remember what. Mamma is well, and don’t laugh any more than she used to.
Catherine goes on just as she always did, making fun for everybody.
George is as usual. Harriet makes just as many wry faces, is just as
odd, and loves to be laughed at just as much as ever. Henry does not
improve much in talking, but speaks very thick. Charles is the most
mischievous little fellow I ever knew. He seems to do it for the very
love of it; is punished and punished again, but it has no effect. He is
the same honest little boy, and I love him dearly.”
It must have been about this time that Henry had the experience which he
thus describes:
“When I was a lad I was ambitious to ride, but never was permitted to
ride except behind an elder brother; but one fair morning, as the horse
was brought out to be watered, I bestrode him and took the reins in my
hand. He made for the brook with considerable celerity; but though he
was nimble I was willing, and I succeeded in holding on and getting back
without any accident. So elated was I with my first attempt at
horseback-riding that I felt that I was the horseman of the
neighborhood. The next morning I repeated the ride, but with a
variation; for, being unaccustomed to some of the phases of
horseback-riding, I was not prepared for what occurred. The horse did
not perform just as I wanted him to, so I laid the whip on him, and he
darted forward, and when he reached the edge of the brook he suddenly
stopped and I went on!”
They are a merry lot of children, getting up little impromptu concerts,
charades, and games of all kinds, at one time going so far as to
dramatize a favorite story. They “curtain off the end of the parlor,”
and “complete the entertainment amid thunders of applause.”
Animal life is regarded, and the absent members of the family are kept
duly informed of the well-being of their favorites:
“Old Puss is very well and sends her respects to you. And Mr. Black Trip
has come out of the barn to live, and says if you ever come into the
kitchen he will jump up and lick your hands and pull your frock, just as
he serves the rest of us. Henry and Charles love to play with him very
much.”
Little events in the family are noted and immortalized in verse, of
which the following letter is a sample:
“... Apropos, last week was interred Tom, Junior, with funeral honors,
by the side of old Tom of happy memory. What a fatal mortality there is
among the cats of the parsonage! Our Harriet is chief mourner always at
their funerals. She asked for what she called an _epethet_ for the
grave-stone of Tom, Junior, which I gave as follows:
“‘Here died our Kit,
Who had a fit
And acted queer.
Shot with a gun,
Her race is run,
And she lies here.’”
When Henry was eight years old we read of the three in this wise:
“Harriet reads everything she can lay her hands on, and sews and knits
diligently. Henry and Charles go to school. Henry is as sprightly and
active, and Charles as honest and clumsy, as ever.”
Later in the year he can be had if really wanted:
“We have four boarders besides our own sick folk, so that if you are
lonesome for want of children we could easily spare Henry or Harriet.”
Whether the hint was taken, and the boy who was sometimes too “sprightly
and active” and this girl who “reads everything she can lay her hands
on” were wanted and sent, is not told. The next year perhaps they would
not care to spare him. “I had the alders down at the bottom of the east
lot cut up, broke it up, and planted to corn and potatoes. Henry and
Charles began to help hoe a little.” Any one who has had experience in
such matters knows that hoeing potatoes in a newly-ploughed field just
cleared of alders is no fun. At this time Henry was nine years old.
It has been said by one whose hatred of orthodox religion is only
equalled by the beauty of the language with which he is able to clothe
his misconceptions, that “Henry Ward Beecher was born in a Puritan
penitentiary, of which his father was one of the wardens; a prison with
very narrow and closely-grated windows.” But Mrs. Stowe wrote years ago:
“One of my most vivid impressions of the family, as it was in my
childish days, was of a great household inspired by a spirit of
cheerfulness and hilarity, and of my father, although pressed and driven
with business, always lending an attentive ear to anything in the way of
life and social fellowship.”
The brother Charles, who was an almost inseparable companion for Henry
in those days, says in a letter recently received: “The parental
authority was pronounced but not very strict. That is, there was never
any thought in the mind of the children of disobedience, but resort to
corporal punishment was rare.
“Nor was brother Henry made to work very hard, nor was father very
strait-laced or stern. Nor were we often _switched_, tho’ I dare say we
deserved it. I only remember once distinctly, when Henry performed the
gymnastics and I furnished the music (out in the barn). Fortunately for
me, the switch was mostly used up on him as the elder—a birthright I did
not envy—and I howled in sympathy, with a few cuts for _Da Capo_.
“The fact is, father was very fond of all his children and frolicked and
romped with them. All the work there was to do (chores we called it) was
to take care of a horse and cow, and in spring make garden, and, after
wood-spell, carry in and pile up wood. I remember that we were told if
we made the garden so and so, or did this or that, we should go fishing;
and we used to go, the whole family of us, to Little Pond or Great Pond,
and catch ‘Perchy, roachy, bullhead,’ as we sang it. One afternoon at
Little Pond, where father had taken Henry and me in the chaise
(‘one-hoss’), we were catching roach when the church-bell rang, and
father remembered that it was Preparatory Lecture, and the way we
scurried in the old vehicle may be imagined.”
Mrs. Stowe writes: “I remember when the wood was all in and piled and
the chips swept up, then father tackled the horse into the cart and
proclaimed a grand fishing party down to Little Pond; and how we all
floated among the lily-pads in our boat, christened ‘The Yellow Perch,’
and every one of us caught a string of fish, which we displayed in
triumph on our return.”
The father was very wise in directing the homely labors of the
household, so that they became occasions of mental stimulus.
“I have the image of my father still, as he sat working the
apple-peeler. ‘Come, George,’ he said, ‘I’ll tell you what we’ll do to
make the evening go off. You and I’ll take turns and see who’ll tell the
most out of Scott’s novels’ (for those were the days when the ‘Tales of
my Landlord’ and ‘Ivanhoe’ had just appeared); and so they took them
novel by novel, reciting scenes and incidents, which kept the eyes of
all the children wide open and made the work go on without flagging.
“Occasionally he would raise a point of theology on some incident
narrated, and ask the opinion of one of his boys and run a sort of tilt
with him, taking up the wrong side of the question for the sake of
seeing how the youngster could practise his logic. If the party on the
other side did not make a fair hit at him, however, he would stop and
explain to him what he ought to have said: ‘The argument lies so, my
son; do that and you’ll trip me up.’ Much of his teaching to his
children was in this informal way.”
A kindly country life surrounded the minister’s family, that could not
fail of stamping the impress of its plain sincerity upon all who were
brought in contact with it. Once a year this came to its climax in the
winter’s wood-spell, when all the farmers upon a given day added their
contribution to the minister’s wood-pile—a festival of kindness and good
cheer.
“The kind farmers wanted to see all the children, and we were busy as
bees in waiting upon them. The boys heated the flip-irons and passed
around the cider and flip, while Aunt Esther and the daughters were as
busy in serving the doughnuts, cake, and cheese.”
Another influence we must not forget, and that was, being let alone. “I
think,” he says, “that I was about as well brought up as most children,
because I was let alone. My father was so busy and my mother had so many
other children to look after that, except here and there, I hardly came
under the parental hand at all. I was brought up in a New England
village, and I knew where the sweet-flag was, where the hickory-trees
were, where the chestnut-trees were, where the sassafras-trees were,
where the squirrels were, where all things were that boys enterprise
after, therefore I had a world of things to do, and so I did not come
much in contact with family government.” “Nobody,” so says his sister,
“thought much of his future, further than to see that he was safe and
healthy, or even troubled themselves to inquire what might be going on
in his life.”
Some of the reminiscences of this period now given in his own words are
interesting, not only from the wide field which they cover, but from the
revelation they make of the susceptibility of his nature to outside
influences. Of “going to meeting” he discourses in this wise:
“The coming on of Saturday night was always a serious business with the
youngsters. We had no stores of religious experience on which it is
presumed the old folks meditated, and the prospect of a whole day
without anything in it to interest us was not a little gloomy. On no
night of the week did the frogs croak so dismally, or the tree toads
whistle in a mood so melancholy, as on Saturday night.
“But those blazing summer mornings! What a wealth of light spread over
that blessed old hill-top! What a wondrous silence dwelt in the great
round heavens above our head! The birds sang on. The crows in the
distance called out to each other in hoarse discourse. The trees stood
in calm beauty—the great elm-trees, tall, pliant, graceful, the
perfection of strength and beauty. All this we saw and heard while
buttoning up our Sunday clothes by the side of the open window. For the
cow and horse had been foddered, and the pigs fed, and all the barn
chores done up, and a bountiful breakfast eaten, and our face and hands
washed, and every article of apparel, from shoe to hat, had changed from
a secular to a sacred use. Not the every-day hat, soft, shapeless,
universal instrument, used as a liquid or solid measure; used now for
the head, and now for a football; used for a net to catch butterflies or
to throw at wasps—no, not this bag, pocket, hat, pouch, and magazine,
but the Sunday hat, round, stiff, hard, and respectable.
“Although the new hat was always disagreeable to our head, yet we had a
wonderful reverence for it, and spent no inconsiderable portion of our
time in church in getting it dirty and then brushing it clean.
“Our jacket, too, was new. Only a handkerchief was then in the pocket;
no knife, no marbles, no strings, no stones, no fishhooks or dried
angle-worms. No; a boy’s Sunday pocket of the olden time was purged of
all temptation. In meeting-time we often put our little hands down into
our Sunday pocket with a melancholy wish, ‘Oh! if I only had my other
clothes on!’
“As soon as we were dressed and mustered in the sitting-room an
inspection was had. The collar was pulled up a little, the hair had a
fresh lick from the brush, the mouth must be wiped with a wet towel, the
shoestring tied, and, after being turned round and round, we were
started off.
“‘Now, Henry, be a good boy.’
“‘Yes, ma’am.’
“‘You must not laugh, or tease Harriet.’
“‘No, ma’am.’
“‘Don’t stop on the road—go right in when you get to church.’
“‘Yes, ma’am.”
“Every word was sincerely promised, and efficaciously broken within ten
minutes.
“Oh! how high the trees seemed! Oh! how bright the heavens were! Oh! how
hard it was not to play with Chester Covington’s dog, that came running
to us with bark and frolic, and seemed perplexed at our sturdy
propriety.
“The old musical bell up in the open belfry was busy a-tolling. It was
the only thing that was allowed to work on Sunday—the bell and the
minister. That bell-rope was always an object of desire and curiosity to
our young days. It ran up into such dark and mysterious spaces. What
there was up in those pokerish heights in the belfry tower we did not
know, but something that made our flesh creep. Once we ventured to pull
that rope. It was a bold and venturesome thing, we knew. But a sorcery
was on us. It came gently and easily to the hand. We pulled again.
‘Dong! dong!’ went the bell. The old sexton put his head out of the door
when, on that particular morning, service had begun, and said, in a very
solemn and low tone, ‘Boy! boy! you little devil you!’ and much more, I
presume, but I did not wait for it, but cut round to the other door and
sat all church-time trembling and wondering whether he would ‘tell my
pa’; and if he did, what _he_ would say, and more especially what he
would _do_. I called up the probable interview. I had numerous
precedents on which to found a possible experience, and afflicted our
little soul all meeting-time with needless punishment by the
imagination.
“But ordinarily we escaped into the minister’s pew without special
temptations. Imagine a boy of eight years old, round as an apple, hearty
and healthy, an hour and a half in church with nothing to do! We looked
at the galleries full of boys and girls, and wished we might go into the
galleries. We looked at the ceiling, traced all the cracks back and
forth. We looked at the dear old aunties all round the church, fanning
themselves with one hand and eating fennel-seed or a bit of dried
orange-peel out of the other. We gazed out of the window high above our
heads into the clouds, and wished we could only climb up and see the
trees and horses and dogs that abounded around the church on Sunday.
“Gradually these died out and we dropped asleep. Blessed liberty! the
child’s gospel! All trouble fled away. For a half-hour paradise was
gained. But then an unusual thump on the pulpit Bible, and the ring and
roar of a voice under full excitement, that went on swelling like a
trumpet, and that no one, not the most listless, could hear without
catching its excitement, waked us, blushing and confused that we had
been asleep in church! Even on the serene and marble face of mother the
faint suggestion of a smile came, as we clutched our hat, supposing
meeting to be over, and then sheepishly dropped it and sank back in
dismay. But even Sunday cannot hold out for ever, and meetings have to
let out sometime! So, at length, a universal stir and bustle announced
that it was time to go. Up we bolted! Down we sat as quick as if a
million pins were sticking in our foot! The right leg was asleep!
Limping forth into the open air, relief came to our heart. The being out
of doors had always an inexpressible charm, and never so much as on
Sunday. Away went the wagons. Away went the people. The whole Green
swarmed with folks. The long village streets were full of company. In
ten minutes all were gone, and the street was given up again to the
birds!
“Little good did preaching do me until after I was fifteen years
old—little good immediately. Yet the whole Sunday, the peculiar
influence which it exerted on the household, the general sense of awe
which it inspired, the very rigor of its difference from other days, and
the suspended animation of its sermon time, served to produce upon the
young mind a profound impression. A day that stood out from all others
in a hard and gaunt way might, perhaps, be justly criticised. But it
left its mark. It did its work upon the imagination, if not upon the
reason. It had power in it; and in estimating moral excellence power is
an element of the utmost importance. Will our smooth, cosey, feeble
modern Sundays have such a grip on the moral nature? They are far
pleasanter. Are they as efficacious? Will they educate the moral nature
as much?”
The cold of Litchfield Hill and the exposure of his old home were always
remembered.
“You may think you know something about winter; but if you never spent a
winter on old Litchfield Hill, where I was brought up, you do not know
much about it. It was before the days of stoves. There were what we
called ‘box-stoves,’ but they were a very small power for generating
heat. The idea of a furnace was not born. It was not even within the
reach of a prophet to predict it.
“My father’s house was a great barn of a structure, with rooms scattered
about here and there. Mine was the west and north room—on the corner; so
that I had the full benefit, without any subtraction or discount, of
everything that was going on out of doors; for double windows were not
known, and the carpenters did not care about making a tight fit.
Therefore the wind found no trouble in coming in, and on many and many a
morning the snow had blown from the window to my bed and across the foot
of it; and if anything inspires alacrity of step on a winter morning
when the feet are bare, it is a drift of snow. Walking on it is like
walking on wasps.
“To go back to the frigid houses of New England in winter, without
furnaces or hard coal, or air-tight stoves or steam, would make our
dainty skin tingle. What a pother is made to ascertain the exact
position of the North Pole, the very centre and navel of cold! Why, I
could have pointed to the exact spot sixty years ago. It was on the
northwest angle of my father’s house in Litchfield, Connecticut, in the
room where I slept.”
Not only did the severity of the elements affect him, but their uproar
as well, especially in the night-time.
“The war of winter winds to our young ears was terrible as the thunder
of waves or the noise of battle. All night long the cold, shelterless
trees moaned. Their strong crying penetrated our sleep and shaped our
dreams. At every waking the air was full of mighty winds. The house
creaked and strained, and at some more furious gust shuddered and
trembled all over. Then the windows rattled, the cracks and crevices
whistled each its own distinctive note, and the chimneys, like diapasons
of an organ, had their deep and hollow rumble.”
And now comes an influence that we should have passed by, if he himself
had not given it place and elaborate notice:
“Next to the winds our night experiences in early boyhood were much
affected by rats. The old house seemed to have been a favorite of this
curious vermin. There is something in the short, hot glitter of a rat’s
eye that has never ceased to affect us unpleasantly. We could not help
imagining them to be the mere receptacles of mischievous spirits, and
their keen eyes had always a kind of mocking expression, as if they
said, ‘You think we are rats, but if we get hold of you you will know
that we are a good deal more than that.’ We never could estimate how
many populated our old house. The walls seemed like city thoroughfares,
and the ceiling like a Forum or Roman theatre. We used to lie in bed and
marvel at what was going on. Sometimes there would be a great stillness,
as if they had all gone to meeting. Then again they would troop about
with such a swell of liberty and gladness that it was quite plain that
the meeting was out. But nothing ever scared and amused us so much as
their way of going up and down the partitions. At first up would come
one, then another, and finally quite a bevy, squeaking and frolicking,
as if they were school-boys going up-stairs, nipping each other and
cutting up all manner of pranks. Then came a stillness. Next a
premonitory rat would rush down, evidently full of news, and immediately
down would pour after him a stream of rats, rushing like mad, and
apparently tumbling heels over head. By and by some old sawyer would
commence where he left off the night before, cutting the same partition.
To this must be added nibblings, rat-nestled paper, an occasional race
of rats across the bed, the manipulation of corn in the garret, the
foray with cats and kittens, the rat engines—‘steel traps,’ ‘box-traps,’
‘figure-four’s,’ and all manner of devices, in spite of which the rats
held their own, and, if allowed suffrage, would have outvoted the whole
family, dog and cats to boot, four to one.”
He was early taught to work and endure what now might be called
hardships.
“It was my duty, after I got to be about eight years old, to go
down-stairs and build a fire. Ours was a house in which, when the
weather was cold, if water was left in any vessel it would freeze and
split the vessel asunder; and of course crockery had no chance. Our well
used to choke up with ice so that we had to cut it out in order to get
the bucket down; and sometimes, when the cistern was frozen up so that
we could not get water from it, I have gone, on washing-days, two miles,
and dipped water from a brook into barrels, and brought it home.
Therefore you see that, however dainty I may be nowadays, I started on a
very different pattern.”
But he came in after-years to be glad of this experience:
“I am thankful that I learned to hem towels—as I did. I know how to knit
suspenders and mittens. I know a good deal about working in wood—sawing,
chopping, splitting, planing, and things of that sort. I was brought up
to put my hand to anything; so that when I went West, and was travelling
on the prairies and my horse lost a shoe, and I came to a cross-road
where there was an abandoned blacksmith’s shop, I could go in and start
the fire, and fix the old shoe and put it on again. What man has done
man can do; and it is a good thing to bring up boys so that they shall
think they can do anything. I could do anything.”
The greatest trial of those days was the catechism. Sunday lessons were
considered by the mother as inflexible duty, and the catechism was the
_sine qua non_. “The other children memorized readily and were brilliant
reciters, but Henry, blushing, stammering, confused, and hopelessly
miserable, stuck fast on some sand-bank of what is required or forbidden
by this or that commandment, his mouth choking up with the long words
which he hopelessly miscalled, was sure to be accused of idleness or
inattention, and to be solemnly talked to, which made him look more
stolid and miserable than ever, but appeared to have no effect in
quickening his dormant faculties.”
Such were the influences that were exerted upon Henry Ward Beecher
during these early and formative years. Various as they were, they
preserved a general character of healthful simplicity; and numerous as
they appear, they can yet be readily generalized. The first were those
that were addressed to conscience, and that went to make this the
strong, influential factor which it became in all well-trained New
England youth of that period, and in none more markedly than in him. The
stepmother led in this work. She was the conscience of the family,
training to the strict observance of duty with a thoroughness which the
father, with his more impulsive nature, could never have equalled,
although he was in sympathy with the process. Home duties carefully
exacted, regular attendance upon school, the strict keeping the Sabbath,
even the hated lesson in the catechism, were some of the instruments
employed. Open to criticism, they may be, in method and extent, yet they
did their work, and strong conscientiousness was developed that made him
tremble at the thought of wrong-doing, and kept him so free from
viciousness that he was able to say: “I never was sullied in act, nor in
thought, nor in feeling when I was young. I grew up as pure as a woman.”
And although in after-years he gave more stress to heart than
conscience, and preached the Gospel rather than the law, it was but the
carrying out the natural process of soil-making and forest culture: the
granite ridges of conscience formed the foundation, clothed and hidden
by the growth, but not destroyed.
With all her admirable qualities his step-mother failed to satisfy his
longing for affection.
“It pleased God to give me a second mother, a very eminent Christian
woman. Now, my nature was enthusiastic and outgushing; I was like the
convolvulus—I wanted to be running on somebody all the time. But my
second mother was stately and not easy to approach. She was a beautiful
person, serene and ladylike. She never lacked self-possession in speech,
gesture, or posture. She was polished; but to my young thoughts she was
cold. As I look back I do not recollect ever to have had from her one
breath of summer. Although I was longing to love somebody, she did not
call forth my affection; and my father was too busy to be loved.
Therefore I had to expend my love on Aunt Chandler, a kind soul that was
connected with our family, and the black woman that cooked, who were
very kind to me. My mother that brought me up I never thought of loving.
It never occurred to me. I was afraid of her. I revered her, but I was
not attracted to her. I felt that she was ready to die, and that I was
not. I knew that at about twilight she prayed; and I had a great
shrinking from going past her door at that time. I had not the slightest
doubt that she had set her affection on things above, and not on things
beneath. I had the strongest conviction of her saintliness. It stamped
itself upon my youth.”
Another division of influences comes under the head of spiritual:
“I can look back upon my own early life, and see how one and another
took me, and how one prepared me for another. I can see how the largest
natures did not always get access to me. It was late in life before my
father influenced me very much. I think it was a humble woman who was in
our family that first gained any considerable control over me. I feel
the effect of her influence to this day.
“I next came under the influence of a very humble serving-man. He opened
up new directions to me and gave me new impulses. He was a colored man;
and I am not ashamed to say that my whole life, my whole career
respecting the colored race in the conflict which was so long carried on
in this country, was largely influenced by the effect produced on my
mind, when I was between eight and ten years of age, by a poor old
colored man who worked on my father’s farm, named Charles Smith. He did
not set out to influence me; he did not know that he did it; I did not
know it until a great while afterwards; but he gave me impulses, and
impulses which were in the right direction; for he was a godly and
hymn-singing man, who made wine fresh every night from the cluster. He
used to lie upon his humble bed (I slept in the same room with him) and
read his Testament, unconscious, apparently, that I was in the room; and
he would laugh and talk about what he read, and chuckle over it with
that peculiarly unctuous throat-tone which belongs to his race. I never
had heard the Bible really read before; but there, in my presence, he
read it, and talked about it to himself and to God. He turned the New
Testament into living forms right before me. It was a revelation and an
impulse to me.
“He talked to me about my soul more than any member of my father’s
family. These things impressed me with the conviction that he was a
Christian; and I never saw anything in him that led me to think
otherwise. The feeling that I was sinful, that I needed to be born
again, that there was such a thing as a regenerate life produced by the
Spirit of God in the soul—these feelings came to me by observing the
actual example of persons that I lived with more than from all other
sources put together.”
But above all others for diffusive and permanent impression affecting
his whole nature, bringing him into sympathy with God in all his works
as in all his words, and increasing to the day of his death, was the
influence of his own mother.
“The memory of my mother as one sainted has exerted a singular influence
on me. After I came to be about fourteen or fifteen years of age I began
to be distinctly conscious that there was a silent, secret, and, if you
please to call it so, romantic influence which was affecting me. It grew
and it grows, so that in some parts of my nature I think I have more
communion with my mother, whom I never saw except as a child three years
old, than with any living being. I am conscious that all my life long
there has been a moral power in my memory of her. It is evident to me
that while in education and in other material respects her death was a
deprivation, it was also an inspiration, a communion—one of those
invisible blessings which faith comprehends, but which we are not apt to
weigh and to estimate.
“Do you know,” he says, “why so often I speak what must seem to some of
you rhapsody of woman? It is because I had a mother, and if I were to
live a thousand years I could not express what seems to me to be the
least that I owe to her. Three years old was I when singing she left me
and sung on to heaven, where she sings evermore. I have only such a
remembrance of her as you have of the clouds of ten years ago—faint,
evanescent; and yet, caught by imagination, and fed by that which I have
heard of her and by what my father’s thought and feeling of her were, it
has come to be so much to me that no devout Catholic ever saw so much in
the Virgin Mary as I have seen in my mother, who has been a presence to
me ever since I can remember; and I can never say enough for woman for
my sisters’ sake, for the sake of them that have gathered in the days of
my infancy around about me, in return for what they have interpreted to
me of the beauty of holiness, of the fulness of love, and of the
heavenliness of those elements from which we are to interpret heaven
itself.”
In those influences that went to move the intellect, to awaken interest
and thought, while the family life and the school and nature were all
doing something, the dear old Aunt Esther with her Bible-readings and
her innumerable stories and incidents of animal life stood pre-eminent
and unapproachable at this period. It was but a few years before his
death that he spoke of her early influence upon him, and read to us the
story of Joseph as she used to read it to him, with the tears rolling
down his cheeks. He told us that he had never yet been able to read that
story or hear it read without crying.
But in those practical influences that had to do with life, that gave
him the impression that things could be done and must be done, that gave
him inspiration to labor, his father took the lead.
“What I was going to speak of was the effect upon my young mind of
observing my father’s conduct under trying circumstances. I never once
saw him flinch before the cold, or look as though anything was hard, or
as if there was a reason for not pitching in and holding on when things
were difficult. I have seen the time when we had to cut a
twenty-five-foot tunnel outward from the kitchen-door, carrying the snow
through the house; and such tunnels would sometimes remain a month
before they would break down. I have seen the children around the house
crying with cold, and slapping their hands, and stamping their feet,
when father had to go and dig wood out of the snow-bank, and cut and
split it; and his alacrity and vigor infused themselves into the
children. I recollect particularly that if, on such nights as this, when
to the high wind severe cold and thick darkness were added, my father
had appointments, he always fulfilled them. It was customary to have
preaching-places all around the neighborhood, here, there, and
everywhere; and I never knew him to think of shrinking from an
appointment, or holding himself back for a moment, on account of the
weather. There never was a snow so deep, or a wind so high, or a rain so
driving, or a night so black that the thought seemed to enter his head
that he must give up a meeting. I have many times seen him, on cold,
bitter nights, take out his old silk handkerchief and put it on, and go
forth into the storm without seeming to dread it; and often, as I have
remembered it, I have wished I could put on his spirit in the same way.
He did it as a matter of course. And such was the effect of his example
on his children that there was not one of them that would not be ashamed
to show the ‘white feather’ in the presence of external difficulties.
“When I was a boy I learned some hymns, and committed to memory an
indefinite number of texts, and waded a certain distance into the
catechism, never getting through it; and I forgot them again very
quickly. But I do not think all of them put together exerted any
material influence upon me one way or the other—they did not remain in
my mind to be understood when I was older; but a great many things which
my father did, but which neither he nor anybody else spoke of, have had
a strong influence on my whole life. For instance, his defying the
elements, making himself master in every condition and under all
circumstances, and exhibiting an indomitable pluck which did not pause
nor shrink—that made a powerful impression upon me, and has been one of
the reasons of the success of my life; not just here and now, but in my
earlier career, when I was in the West on the frontier, and when I was
very poor and had to do a great deal of rough work under circumstances
of discouragement. I had an ideal of what a man should be and should do,
and it stood me in stead better than any amount of catechetical
instruction could have done.”
So joined these—the stepmother, the mother, the humble servant in the
family, Charles Smith the happy Christian black man, Aunt Esther, and
the father—hand-in-hand with nature, with the life and events that were
moving on around them, and with God, in directing and moulding him in
every part in these early years.
There were none of them, perhaps, unusual, certainly not unprecedented;
for others besides Henry Ward Beecher have had heavenly-minded and
large-hearted mothers; others, as well as he, have been trained in
conscientiousness and have had a happy Christian example set before
them, and have enjoyed the influence of fathers full of manly
inspiration, while God and nature have been with and around them, and
yet no such marked results have been seen as in him. Something native
there was in the soil that enabled it to respond to such genial
influences with such unusual fruitage. We are driven, in accounting for
this, to that especial endowment that was given to him and withheld from
others through the will of One who gives to every man according to His
own good pleasure. “And to one He gave five talents.”
His appearance and attainments at this time are thus summed up by Mrs.
Stowe: “Henry was now ten years old, a stocky, strong, well-grown boy,
loyal to duty, trained in unquestioning obedience, inured to patient
hard work, inured also to the hearing and discussing of all the great
theological problems of Calvinism which were always reverberating in his
hearing;... but as to any mechanical culture, in an extremely backward
state, a poor writer, a miserable speller, with a thick utterance, and a
bashful reticence which seemed like stolid stupidity....
“He was not marked out by the prophecies of partial friends for any
brilliant future. He had precisely the organization which often passes
for dulness in early boyhood. He had great deficiency in verbal memory—a
deficiency marked in him through life. He was excessively sensitive to
praise and blame, extremely diffident, and with a power of yearning,
undeveloped emotions which he neither understood nor could express. His
utterance was thick and indistinct, partly from bashfulness and partly
from an enlargement of the tonsils of the throat, so that in speaking or
reading he was with difficulty understood. In forecasting his horoscope,
had any one taken the trouble then to do it, the last success that ever
would have been predicted for him would have been that of an orator!
‘When Henry is sent to me with a message,’ said a good aunt, ‘I always
have to make him say it three times. The first time I have no manner of
an idea more than if he spoke in Choctaw; the second I catch a word now
and then; by the third time I begin to understand.’”
Of the bashfulness referred to in the above he says: “We had our own
fill of it in childhood. To walk into a room where ‘company’ was
assembled, and to do it erectly and naturally, was as impossible as it
would have been to fly. The sensations of sensibility were dissolving.
Our back-bone grew soft, our knees lost their stiffness, the blood
rushed to the head, and the sight almost left our eyes. We have known
something of pain in after-years, but few pangs have been more acute
than some sufferings from bashfulness in our earlier years.”
Healthy, robust, frolicksome, conscientious, obedient, loving, and
efficient, but bashful in the extreme and backward in all his studies,
is the summing-up that we must make of Henry Ward Beecher at this period
of his life.