September 30, 1880.
My dear Charley,—My mind has been with you a great deal lately. I have been looking over and arranging my papers with a view to sifting out those that are not worth keeping, and so filing and arranging those that are to be kept, that my heirs and assigns may with the less trouble know where and what they are. I cannot describe (to you) the peculiar feelings which this review occasions. Reading old letters—when so many of the writers are gone from earth, seems to me like going into the world of spirits—letters full of the warm, eager, anxious, busy life, that is forever past. My own letters, too, full of by-gone scenes in my early life and the childish days of my children. It is affecting to me to recall things that strongly moved me years ago, that filled my thoughts and made me anxious when the occasion and emotion have wholly vanished from my mind. But I thank God there is one thing running through all of them from the time I was thirteen years old, and that is the intense unwavering sense of Christ's educating, guiding presence and care. It is all that remains now. The romance of my youth is faded, it looks to me now, from my years, so very young—those days when my mind only lived in emotion, and when my letters never were dated, because they were only histories of the internal, but now that I am no more and never can be young in this world, now that the friends of those days are almost all in eternity, what remains?
Through life and through death, through sorrowing, through sinning,
Christ shall suffice me as he hath sufficed.
Christ is the end and Christ the beginning,
The beginning and end of all is Christ.
THE LATER HARTFORD HOME.
I was passionate in my attachments in those far back years, and as I have looked over files of old letters, they are all gone (except one, C. Van Rensselaer), Georgiana May, Delia Bacon, Clarissa Treat, Elisabeth Lyman, Sarah Colt, Elisabeth Phenix, Frances Strong, Elisabeth Foster. I have letters from them all, but they have been long in spirit land and know more about how it is there than I do. It gives me a sort of dizzy feeling of the shortness of life and nearness of eternity when I see how many that I have traveled with are gone within the veil. Then there are all my own letters, written in the first two years of marriage, when Mr. Stowe was in Europe and I was looking forward to motherhood and preparing for it—my letters when my whole life was within the four walls of my nursery, my thoughts absorbed by the developing character of children who have now lived their earthly life and gone to the eternal one,—my two little boys, each in their way good and lovely, whom Christ has taken in youth, and my little one, my first Charley, whom He took away before he knew sin or sorrow,—then my brother George and sister Catherine, the one a companion of my youth, the other the mother who assumed the care of me after I left home in my twelfth year—and they are gone. Then my blessed father, for many years so true an image of the Heavenly Father,—in all my afflictions he was afflicted, in all my perplexities he was a sure and safe counselor, and he too is gone upward to join the angelic mother whom I scarcely knew in this world, who has been to me only a spiritual presence through life.
In 1882 Mrs. Stowe writes to her son certain impressions derived from reading the "Life and Letters of John Quincy Adams," which are given as containing a retrospect of the stormy period of her own life-experience.
"Your father enjoys his proximity to the Boston library. He is now reading the twelve or fourteen volumes of the life and diary of John Q. Adams. It is a history of our country through all the period of slavery usurpation that led to the war. The industry of the man in writing is wonderful. Every day's doings in the house are faithfully daguerreotyped,—all the mean tricks, contrivances of the slave-power, and the pusillanimity of the Northern members from day to day recorded. Calhoun was then secretary of state. Under his connivance even the United States census was falsified, to prove that freedom was bad for negroes. Records of deaf, dumb, and blind, and insane colored people were distributed in Northern States, and in places where John Q. Adams had means of proving there were no negroes. When he found that these falsified figures had been used with the English embassador as reasons for admitting Texas as a slave State, the old man called on Calhoun, and showed him the industriously collected proofs of the falsity of this census. He says: 'He writhed like a trodden rattlesnake, but said the census was full of mistakes; but one part balanced another,—it was not worth while to correct them.' His whole life was an incessant warfare with the rapidly advancing spirit of slavery, that was coiling like a serpent around everything.
"At a time when the Southerners were like so many excited tigers and rattlesnakes,—when they bullied, and scoffed, and sneered, and threatened, this old man rose every day in his place, and, knowing every parliamentary rule and tactic of debate, found means to make himself heard. Then he presented a petition from negroes, which raised a storm of fury. The old man claimed that the right of petition was the right of every human being. They moved to expel him. By the rules of the house a man, before he can be expelled, may have the floor to make his defense. This was just what he wanted. He held the floor for fourteen days, and used his wonderful powers of memory and arrangement to give a systematic, scathing history of the usurpations of slavery; he would have spoken fourteen days more, but his enemies, finding the thing getting hotter and hotter, withdrew their motion, and the right of petition was gained.
"What is remarkable in this journal is the minute record of going to church every Sunday, and an analysis of the text and sermon. There is something about these so simple, so humble, so earnest. Often differing from the speaker—but with gravity and humility—he seems always to be so self-distrustful; to have such a sense of sinfulness and weakness, but such trust in God's fatherly mercy, as is most beautiful to see. Just the record of his Sunday sermons, and his remarks upon them, would be most instructive to a preacher. He was a regular communicant, and, beside, attended church on Christmas and Easter,—I cannot but love the old man. He died without seeing even the dawn of liberty which God has brought; but oh! I am sure he sees it from above. He died in the Capitol, in the midst of his labors, and the last words he said were, 'This is the last of earth; I am content.' And now, I trust, he is with God.
"All, all are gone. All that raged; all that threatened; all the cowards that yielded; truckled, sold their country for a mess of pottage; all the men that stood and bore infamy and scorn for the truth; all are silent in dust; the fight is over, but eternity will never efface from their souls whether they did well or ill—whether they fought bravely or failed like cowards. In a sense, our lives are irreparable. If we shrink, if we fail, if we choose the fleeting instead of the eternal, God may forgive us; but there must be an eternal regret! This man lived for humanity when hardest bestead; for truth when truth was unpopular; for Christ when Christ stood chained and scourged in the person of the slave."
In the fall of 1887 she writes to her brother Rev. Dr. Edward Beecher of Brooklyn, N. Y.:—
49 Forest Street, Hartford, Conn., October 11, 1887.
Dear Brother,—I was delighted to receive your kind letter. You were my earliest religious teacher; your letters to me while a school-girl in Hartford gave me a high Christian aim and standard which I hope I have never lost. Not only did they do me good, but also my intimate friends, Georgiana May and Catherine Cogswell, to whom I read them. The simplicity, warmth, and childlike earnestness of those school days I love to recall. I am the only one living of that circle of early friends. Not one of my early schoolmates is living,—and now Henry, younger by a year or two than I, has gone—my husband also.[21] I often think, Why am I spared? Is there yet anything for me to do? I am thinking with my son Charles's help of writing a review of my life, under the title, "Pebbles from the Shores of a Past Life."
Charlie told me that he has got all written up to my twelfth or thirteenth year, when I came to be under sister Catherine's care in Hartford. I am writing daily my remembrances from that time. You were then, I think, teacher of the Grammar School in Hartford. . . .
So, my dear brother, let us keep good heart; no evil can befall us. Sin alone is evil, and from that Christ will keep us. Our journey is so short!
I feel about all things now as I do about the things that happen in a hotel, after my trunk is packed to go home. I may be vexed and annoyed . . . but what of it! I am going home soon.
Your affectionate sister,
Hattie.