Harriet Beecher Stowe: a biography for girls

by Martha Foote Crow

The work and plans and interests of the household went on like a great well-balanced machine, in which one little cog, that good child Harriet, was taking its part according to its ability. Harriet was also getting ready to perform a greater part, for all these home experiences were turning in a direction that gave her a special preparation for her life-work.

At this time Harriet’s older sister, Catherine, was considered by far the more promising daughter. She did become a most efficient woman, who wrote a long list of educational books and who had a great influence on the schools of her time throughout the country. When Harriet was in the early teens, however, Catherine was simply a brilliant young woman, efficient, sparkling and full of life. She caused a breath of mirth to flow through the home every minute, even the stern father being indulgent toward her pranks and jokes. She made every occurrence the subject of a bit of composition in prose or in verse, like the “epithet” for the kit. Everything was turned into literary expression; the disappearance of a favorite calf inspired a threnody; if a precious brown-edged platter was smashed, an epic poem was forthwith composed; if a marriage took place among the cousins, a ballad appeared into which the names of all the guests were woven and which was learned by heart by every one and was quoted for months.

In such an atmosphere as this it is not strange that the bent of Harriet’s mind toward writing should have been strengthened. The wonder is not that she developed in that direction, but that she did not begin to write even earlier than she did. We shall see that the reasons for that were sufficient.

A great deal has been said about Harriet’s father, but her mother must have a special word also. It could be said of her, as it has been of another ideal woman of history, that to know her was in itself an education. Roxana Foote Beecher belonged to the old Guilford Foote family, so conspicuous for intellectual and social attainments in the early New England days. One of Harriet’s sisters, in writing to her daughter of the Foote homestead at Nut Plains near Guilford, said: “These Footes are a people by themselves in their literary accomplishments, their good sense and fine breeding. Their homestead almost talks to you from its very walls of the days gone by. I never felt more sure of spirit companionship of the highest order, and your father thinks few parlors in all the land have gathered a more noble company. The place is full of rich and inspiring associations.”

In this Foote family there were traditions that must have been especially inspiring to a child like Harriet Beecher. One of the stories centered about a young girl named Lucinda Foote, who was born in Chester, Connecticut, only a few years before Roxana Beecher’s time. She displayed great taste for study and attained a distinction that not many other girls of her time gained. She was the daughter of the Reverend John Foote, the minister in Chester, a man distinguished for his scholarship.

Little Lucinda Foote studied the “learned languages,” as they were called, that is, Latin and Greek, and when she was only twelve years old she was examined in them by the President of Yale College, the great Ezra Stiles. He testified in a parchment which is one of the precious treasures among her descendants that she had shown commendable progress in these studies, giving the meaning of passages in the Æneid of Virgil, the select Orations of Cicero and also in the Greek Testament, and that she was “fully qualified except in regard to sex to be received as a pupil in the freshman class in Yale University.” It may satisfy a natural curiosity to add that this child afterwards privately pursued a full collegiate course, including Hebrew, under President Stiles; was married at the age of eighteen; had ten children and lived to be sixty-two years old! In fact, as the elderly Mrs. Cornwall, wife of the physician in Chester, Harriet Beecher may possibly have seen her as she passed through the village in the stage coach on her way to visit her aunts in Guilford.

The traditions of this highly intellectual family were carried on excellently by Roxana Foote. Even in her girlhood, when the spinning-wheel was her daily companion, it was a habit of hers to adorn one end of the wheel beam with the pile of fleecy rolls ready for the spinning and then to lay on the other end an open book which, with its face down, waited for the minute when her conscience would allow her to leave her work and pore for a while over its pages. Roxana’s grandfather, General Ward, used to tell a story about his three granddaughters. He said that when the three girls came down in the morning Harriet Ward’s voice would be heard briskly calling, “Here! take the broom; sweep up; make a fire; make haste!” Betsy Chittenden would say, “I wonder what ribbon it’s best to wear at that party?” But Roxana Foote would say, “Which do you think was the greater general, Hannibal or Alexander?”

Roxana took advantage of every opportunity for culture. From a French gentleman who, after the massacres at San Domingo had taken refuge in this country and settled in Guilford, she learned French and became able to speak it fluently. He lent her the best French authors, which she studied as she spun flax, tying the book, face forward, to the distaff. She had a brother who went into business in New York; while visiting him she studied drawing and painting with water colors and in oils; afterwards when any problem in perspective puzzled her she flew to the encyclopedia and was not content till she had overcome the difficulty. She was highly gifted in artistic execution of many kinds. She painted miniature portraits upon ivory for various members of her family and for her pupils and rarely failed to get a good likeness. Her needlework was a marvel in its delicacy and complexity; bobbin lace and cobweb stitch like hers have now passed out of memory. The house was full of works of ingenuity devised by her which adorned wall and furniture and drapery. Her famous Russian stove, made with the aid of a mason from the description in her encyclopedia, warmed six rooms with less fuel than many of her neighbors used for a single fire. In fact, the second Mrs. Beecher declared that this wonderful stove entirely annihilated the winter indoors.

Under her mother’s guidance, Catherine, at about fourteen, decorated with landscapes a new chamber set of beautiful white wood, the bureau, dressing-table, candlestand, washstand and bedstead. She surrounded the pictures with garlands of flowers and fruits, and then varnished them according to a recipe in the same encyclopedia. Once Dr. Beecher sent home a whole bale of cotton which he bought just because it was cheap. Roxana found a use for this commodity. She conceived the idea of making a carpet of it—a thing unheard of in the little Long Island town where they began their housekeeping together. In that primitive place they still covered their floors with sand dampened and smoothed over, marking this smooth surface with the broom in zig-zag lines if they wanted decoration. But Mrs. Beecher’s artistic mind took a higher flight. She carded and spun the bale of cotton, had it woven, cut and sewed it to fit the parlor, and then stretched it on the garret floor to begin the operations. Here she brushed it over with thin paste to make a stiff foundation. Meantime she had sent to her brother in New York for paints and had learned from the invaluable encyclopedia how to use them. She painted flowers and leaves in groups on this background, taking for models the plants in her own garden. The carpet, when it was done, was the admiration of the whole town, but the deacons, when they came to the door, did not dare to step on anything so splendid; they also thought it a sin to make the room so magnificent that the splendors of Heaven would lose their attractiveness! “Do you think,” said one of them, “that you can have all of this and Heaven besides?”

It is difficult to say what her chief interests were, she was so full of activities. She loved works on philosophy and on science, and was ingenious in making devices for experiments in natural philosophy. She was intensely interested in all the new books of poetry. Writing to her sailor brother Samuel, she besought him to come up to Litchfield to visit them. “Just pack yourself into the chaise,” she said, “and come up here and see how pleasant it is in winter. You might fancy yourself at sea now and then when we have a brisk breeze, with the help of a little imagination. You might find sundry other things to amuse you. I have a new philosophical work you may study and some new poems you may read.” This was in November, 1814, when Harriet was two years old; while her mother was writing Harriet was clinging about her neck praying her to stop writing and make her a doll baby!