Harriet Beecher Stowe: a biography for girls

by Martha Foote Crow

In other books she takes still higher flights. Her “Elements of Mental and Moral Philosophy Founded on Experience, Reason, and the Bible,” published at Hartford in 1831, and her “Letters on Difficulties of Religion,” and her “Appeal to the People as the Authorized Interpreters of the Bible,” are examples of her excursions into philosophical and theological realms. In the large collection of Beecher writings that would be ours if we should gather all the writings of the family into one library, an ample shelf would have to be given to this talented favorite daughter of Dr. Lyman Beecher.

A curious story is told in connection with one of Catherine Beecher’s philosophical essays. In 1840 she wrote an article called “Free Agency,” which was published in the Biblical Repository. This is a theological term, meaning “free will,” and Catherine’s object was to answer the arguments on the subject of the human will that had been given out by Jonathan Edwards, one of the most profound scholars of New England. The story is that a New England preacher in talking with a professor of theology in Germany once mentioned this essay of Miss Beecher’s, calling it the ablest refutation of Edwards that had yet been written. “Do you mean to say that you have in your country a woman who can write the ablest refutation of Edwards on the will?” exclaimed the German professor. “Then may God forgive Christopher Columbus for discovering America!” This story had a good point in its day. But now that women have proved by their achievements in all branches of science and in literature and the arts that they needed only education and opportunity to attain distinction, it is only amusing that such a remark could ever have been made—even in Germany.

When Harriet was nine years old—about the time when she was writing essays on the “Difference Between the Natural and Moral Sublime”—her sister Catherine was away at Boston studying music and drawing, and preparing herself in general to be a teacher. Because of her remarkable powers of mind, she made such progress that in a short time she was able to take a position as teacher in a young ladies’ school in New London, Connecticut.

While in this place she met a young man of brilliant prospects and of great personal charm, a professor at Yale College. They became engaged and were most happy; but their joy was short-lived. Professor Fisher, commissioned to go to Europe to buy books for his department, set sail in the ship Albion, which encountered a severe storm and was dashed to pieces on the rocks of the Irish coast.

Catherine faced her grief bravely as her lover had faced death bravely. But added to her natural grief for the loss of her lover was a tormenting fear for the welfare of his soul, for she feared lest the spiritual conditions that she had been accustomed to regard as essential had not been met by her lover. Her disturbance was not quieted when she went to live for some years with the parents of her lost lover and while there listened to one of the strictest of the early theologians. Almost crushed in her grief, her strong original mind nevertheless grappled with the problems of death and the after-life. She used her great power in metaphysical analysis in endless discussion, exchanging many long letters with her father, whose loving sympathy was a tower of strength to her in this crisis. After a long period of darkness and struggle, Catherine took the wisest course that the profoundest philosophy could suggest: she determined to find happiness in living to do good. This thought she clung to and in it she found comfort.

She looked about her to see what use she could make of her life. Writing to her father, she said that she did not see any very extensive sphere of usefulness for a single woman except in teaching, and asked his advice about starting a school or seminary, something like the Litchfield Female Academy, perhaps in Hartford.

Her father answered with characteristic energy that if she were going to have a school it should be a good one. She should not engage in it listlessly, expecting to superintend, and do a little, and have the weight of the school come on others. He would be ashamed, he said, to have her keep only a commonplace, middling sort of a school. Unless she was willing to put her talents and strength into it, it would be better not to begin. He called the spent energies of the daughter into line and made them march. He himself went straight to Hartford to look over the ground and see whether there was a good opening for a school there.

Catherine felt that her own enthusiasms would rise to the occasion. She went to Hartford, canvassed the ground, gathered a company of pupils, and was eager to start. She resolutely prepared a text-book on chemistry, one on natural philosophy, and one on logic. Arithmetic and algebra and a part of geometry she also thoroughly reviewed. Under such a character as this Harriet was now to be trained.

When Harriet entered her sister’s school in the fall of 1824, there were but twenty-five pupils. Later there were hundreds. At the beginning the school was situated in an upstairs apartment on Main Street, nearly opposite to Christ Church. The lower floor was used for a harness shop and the shopkeeper had set up a dummy white horse on each side of the entrance. Harriet thought them beautiful and invested them with the glories of Castor and Pollux; and many a pupil of the hundreds that came to that school will remember through life the Sign of the White Horses that guided them to that quiet retreat. In another year the school was so prosperous that they put up a building for their own use; the stock was easily taken and a fine prospectus of the full-fledged Hartford Female Seminary was sent out.

On her arrival, Harriet was at once placed in the care of a delightful family named Bull, who, as a convenient exchange, were sending a daughter to the Litchfield Academy to make her home, while there, at the Beecher homestead. Mrs. Bull was so good a housekeeper that even Harriet’s orderly stepmother was satisfied. She was a motherly woman and took Harriet to her heart at once in the place of the absent daughter. Harriet was given a charming little hall chamber with a beautiful outlook from the window over the Connecticut River valley. We may believe that this was the first time in her life when she had a room all her own. The little single bed assigned to her was the object of her special delight, and she took daily care of it with a satisfaction mingled with awe; and though the room was small as a nun’s apartment, it was, like that of one of Harriet’s heroines, as dainty in its neatness as the waxen cell of a bee.