Harriet Beecher Stowe: a biography for girls

by Martha Foote Crow

So poor little Harriet fell into a disconsolate mood. She thought that she did nothing right, that she yielded to temptation almost as soon as it assailed her. What most commonly beset her, she believed, was pride; she could trace all her sins back to that fault. She thought she was not fit for anything, and she wanted to die young.

What young growing soul has not been assailed by moods like this? This half child, half grown woman was developing mentally with great swiftness, and could not understand the meaning of the tumults that were sweeping through her soul. Not being able to answer certain lofty questions, she decided at once that they were unanswerable and that therefore the universe must be all a disastrous affair. Who has not sometime made the same mistake?

Little things had great power over her. If she met something that crossed her feelings she was unhappy for days. She wished she could bring herself to be perfectly indifferent to the judgments of others. She believed there never had been a person more dependent on the good and evil opinions of others than she was. This desire to be loved formed, she feared, the great motive for all her actions. Alas, she was in a parlous state!

That young mourner for the death of Byron and author of the dramatic poem, “Cleon,” found her love of literature a snare in her spiritual pathway. Of course, she could not know that those very powers that were shown by her tastes and inclinations were to be trained and used for the most important and world-influencing work.

It is unfortunate that her father did not think to say to her what he wrote in a letter some twenty years later: “Too long, quite too long, has the devil held in his exclusive possession the fine arts.” He came to the conclusion in the end that ministers would make their sermons more interesting if they would add to their “leaden prose” some of the untrammeled fire that gives charm to poetry and fiction. That Dr. Beecher had an open mind on this subject is shown by his attitude toward Byron and also toward the novels of Sir Walter Scott. It could never have been a pain to him to know that a daughter of his would become the author of a shelf full of novels, all strongly uplifting in their tendency.

But Harriet did not confide her deepest thoughts to him. If she had he might have recalled that his own early days had been checkered with despondency and shamefacedness and jealous feeling. He had imagined in his sensitive humility that everybody could see the interior of his mind and find the emptiness and vanity that he believed must be there. Yet he had a good cure for such moods, one that he could have recommended to his daughter. He resisted all this, he once said, as if it were a physical lying disease, representing things that were not as if they were, and saying to such feelings, “Get thee behind me, Satan, for thou savorest not the things that be of God!” But at the time of Harriet’s greatest despondency her father seems not to have remembered the cravings and perplexities of his own youth.

Harriet made up her mind to live a far better life. She would regulate it and improve it. She gave herself a strict set of rules, a regular system of things for every hour of the day. But she found that she could not live up to all this and the derelictions gave her sleepless nights. Her feelings were not always equable. She was absent-minded and made mistakes. Terrible faults, these! How like a page from the life of everybody! The trouble in Harriet’s case was that she took these variations of mood for a serious breakdown of her religious stability. She suffered intensely, yet for a long time she kept her suffering to herself. Her naturally buoyant spirits did much to help her, but often she was reproved for laughing so much when she was feeling worst.

It was difficult for Harriet to speak of these inner feelings to others. The reason for this was that she was too humble-minded to speak of so weighty matters at all. Besides this, she felt that she should understand them better than she did, and did not know that every human being is beset by the same questions that puzzled her. Fortunately, Harriet at the age of fourteen had a brother who had just graduated at Yale and was studying theology at Andover. This strong and tender brother to whom she opened her heart just as Catherine had opened hers to her father, unraveled many of her difficulties for her.

The year 1829, when Harriet was sixteen years old, was a period of especial despondency. Catherine, worried about her state of health, sent her to spend a summer at Nut Plains. There at the Foote homestead, the rest in the beautiful country, and we may imagine, the regular meals and the abundance of good sleep, did wonders for tired Harriet.

In that year the Beecher home was moved from Litchfield to Boston, where Dr. Beecher had been called to the pastorate of the Hanover Street Church. Now the atmosphere of any house in which Lyman Beecher dwelt would perforce be stirred by theological controversy. As Harriet’s brother Henry said, “Theology was the food we ate, and the milk we drank, and the air we breathed, and the ground we trod, from our earliest years.” But the new surroundings into which Dr. Beecher now came caused him to strike out more vigorously than ever in defense of his favorite beliefs. In this atmosphere Harriet whenever she came to her home must thrive as she could. Her son, who wrote a book about her life in 1911, says that the atmosphere of mental excitement and conflict in which her father lived and preached at this time drove her already over-stimulated mind to the point of distraction. “Too much mental strain and too little exercise had,” he says, “brought her to her seventeenth year without the strength which should have been the heritage of her robust childhood.”