Harriet Beecher Stowe: a biography for girls

by Martha Foote Crow

In fact, the town of Litchfield, in the days of the Beecher family, fairly bristled with traditions of that ancient, eventful era. It is certain that the little Harriet would be told about the time when the service of war had claimed all the men in the patriotic township of Litchfield except eight, who were too old or too young to go out and fight. It must also have been impressed upon her that the women of her native town shared in an especial degree this lofty patriotism, for it is related that when the leaden statue of King George was knocked off its pedestal in Bowling Green, in New York City, the shattered pieces were conveyed to the military storehouse at Litchfield and there hidden away. Then when the great need arose, the aristocratic ladies of Litchfield melted the broken fragments of that rejected statue and with their own hands molded the lead into bullets. Harriet’s heart swelled with pride as she heard this story or as she passed the very house where the lead was molded over or perhaps was shown the precious memorandum that indicated how many thousand bullets each helper had made. Litchfield, indeed, a very storehouse of patriotic tradition, was a fitting home for Harriet Beecher Stowe whose soul was to be a perfect flame of patriotic feeling by virtue of which she was to perform a great and permanent work.

In Harriet’s own childhood, too, Litchfield was a very busy place. There were some forty mills along the streams, not one of which remains to-day, and there was a famous law school, the first one in America, and a celebrated school for young ladies. The society in the village was singularly good; it was a place where piety, intelligence, and refinement were united. Mrs. Stowe, remembering the history that lay back of it in Colonial and Revolutionary days, spoke of it as “burning like live coals with all the fervid activity of an intense, newly kindled, peculiar and individual life.”

Perhaps one would realize this somewhat better on a Sunday than on a week day. Then from the fine old residences that adorned the principal street the families of comfortable means and impressive traditions proceeded in a dignified manner and solemnly entered the little church. From the outlying population for miles around came also processions of wagons, bearing the well-dressed wives, stalwart sons and blooming daughters of the well-to-do farmers, all punctual as a clock to the ringing of the second-bell. They were alert-minded, independent people; it was a highly intelligent audience that gathered to hear Dr. Beecher expound problems of theology, which his hearers were quite ready to debate with him if they thought he bent a little too far to the one side or to the other in some hair-splitting argument.

The parsonage where Dr. Beecher lived, and where seven of his thirteen children were born, was a roomy edifice that seemed to have been built by a succession of afterthoughts. It was first a model New England house, built around a great brick chimney which ran up like a lighthouse in the center of the square roof; but various bedroom additions had been gradually made and a new kitchen had been built on, and out of the kitchen a sinkroom, and out of the sinkroom a woodhouse, and out of the woodhouse a carriage house, and so on through a gradually lessening succession of out-buildings, until it might seem as if the house has been constructed on the model of a telescope. And besides all this, there were four great attics! What a wonderful house in which to play tag or blind-man’s bluff!

The house stood at the highest point on North Street in the midst of a colony of noble elms that gathered about the plain, old-fashioned parsonage like classic pillars, giving it a grand air of scholarly retirement. The surroundings of this rambling old house were delightful. There was the tall well-sweep, and a gate that swung with a chain and a great stone. From the pantry window could be seen a whole neighborhood of purple-leaved beets and feathery parsnips; the gooseberry bushes were rolled up by the fence in billows, and here and there stood an aristocratic quince tree. Far off in one corner a little patch penuriously devoted to ornament flamed with marigolds, poppies, snappers and four-o’clocks. Then there was a little box by itself with one rose geranium in it, which looked around the garden in a frightened way, as much a stranger as a French dancing master would be in a Yankee meeting-house. The little foreigner, however, received delicate attention at the hands of Harriet’s beauty-loving mother.

But, although the house was a big one, there was not too much room for the Beecher family. Besides the father and mother, there were, when the last arrival completed the magic number, thirteen children in all. Then there was sometimes an aunt, or a grandmother, or a cousin; there were generally a number of students as boarders, and these, together with one Rachel and one Zillah, both black, completed the household circle.

Rich in children was this New England family, but not in other wealth. Economy in the Beecher family was a necessity, but economy was also a law of New England life. Dr. Beecher in one of his reminiscences tells of an old parishioner of his who was so steeped in the prevailing spirit of economy that he boasted of having kept all of his accounts for thirty years with one quill pen; that he knew exactly how to lean his arm on the table so as not to take the nap off the sleeve; and how to set down his foot with the least possible wear to the sole of his shoe. It stands to reason that when the minister has to deal with such deacons as this the minister’s wife will turn a dress several times, and must be forgiven if she requires even the smallest children of her family to overcast the long seams of the linen sheets and to hem interminable towels. This is what the little Harriet had to do, and perhaps it did not cause her any harm.

In spite of this rather narrowed way of living, the children in this family did not feel poor. Once there was sent from Boston to the Litchfield parsonage a barrel of dishes embellished with figures which you could worship without worshiping the image of anything either in the heaven or upon earth—so Henry said; but the children thought them the very embodiment of beauty. When the barrel was unpacked, one of the boys said, “Oh, mother, what rich people we must be to have such wonderful dishes!” Wealth, it seems, consists more in the way one feels than in what one really possesses.

An establishment such as this, as any one may see, afforded occupation for a number of hands. Little Harriet was a great worker. Her brother wrote that before he was ten years old he had learned to sew, knit, scour knives, wash dishes, set and clear the table, cut and split and bring in wood, break tumblers and—earn whippings! There can be no doubt that his sister next older shared these exercises with him—except the last! We are not going to believe that Harriet ever deserved that.

Harriet Beecher said once that work, thrift and industry are the incessant steam-power of Yankee life; certainly none of her family seems to have been in any degree scared by the prospect of hard work. Harriet’s brother Edward makes light of the labor in a very jolly letter which he sent in 1821 to his stepmother. “And what shall I say more? Shall I speak of our orchard, from which the gale blew off apples enough for twenty barrels of cider, and whereon are yet cider and winter apples without number? Or of our cellar wherein are barrels small and great, moreover bins, boxes, cupboards, which I have arranged, having cleansed the cellar with bezom, rake, and wheelbarrow? Or of our garden, in which were weeds of various kinds, particularly pig; yea, also beets, carrots, parsnips and potatoes, the like of which was never seen?”[1] And Dr. Beecher himself, writing to one of the boys in July, 1819, tells how he has weeded the parsnips and beets, has planted potatoes in the orchard, plowed the yard and carried out the stones. With some help he has got out in two days a pile of stones as big as the salt mountain in Louisiana! After that they set to and tore down a useless eighty-year-old barn. The garden, he went on to say, was waving with corn, canteloupes, cabbages and pumpkins. The peas were some of them big enough to eat but had politely waited for the younger brethren around them to come to maturity so that they might all have the pleasure of being eaten together! The raspberries were so thick that one could not see between them, nor even stick between them a sharp-pointed knife. “Can you not find out by algebra,” he asks, “how many there will be?” So he goes on through the list—lettuce, radishes, pepper-grass, carrots, etc. “The garden gates shut,” he continues, “as regularly as they open, and no creature can get in except the hens, which are now about tired of coming, as they are sure to be saluted quite unexpectedly with a charge of powder, ‘speaking terror from the gun muzzle.’ Do you know,” he asks his son, “from whom the quotation is made? Some poet, you perceive.” So the wise father mixed instruction with gossip and made a game of work.