During this time Dr. Beecher was supplying the pulpit in one of the churches of Cincinnati. On Sundays the pupils in the school went to hear him preach, and on Mondays they were called together to make reports on the sermon. A devotional character was given to the meeting of this class; it was conducted by Harriet and she gave to the service a quiet fervor that was most beautiful and helpful.
Very soon a rather important piece of work was put into Harriet’s hands. The school needed a geography for the younger scholars, and Harriet was appointed to make it. She went to work and produced a “New Geography for Children,” which was published in Cincinnati, and was used not only in the Beecher School, but also in all the primary schools of the city. Her geography was not at all like the books of that name that we now use. It belonged with the class of instructive treatises represented by the “Present Condition of the Terraqueous Globe,” written by “Jedediah Morse, D.D.,” which he “Dedicated and Devoted to the Young Gentlemen and Ladies of America with the Most Ardent Wishes for Their Improvement,” and which was reprinted almost every year from 1784 to 1850. The Peter Parley and Malte Brun books belong in the same group. It was the era of a sort of pious compendium written generally in the kindly letters of a father or an uncle. In one number of the Western Magazine, a magazine published in Cincinnati during that time, there is a scathing review of several of these small attempts at giving young people some knowledge of the world they lived in. The editor mentions the manual of Peter Parley and that of Malte Brun and complains that these would-be purveyors of natural history take liberties with fact. The anaconda, they informed the children, was so big that it could crush a house; the buffaloes of America were domestic and harmless. “This,” said the editor, “is the way they are teaching the young idea how to shoot, but we should call it bad shooting!” Miss Beecher had no domestic buffaloes and no house-crushing anacondas in her book, and it seems to have been clear enough of inanities to displace that of Malte Brun in the city’s list of school books in 1834. It was a modest little book, but it represented a great deal of work. She begins with the simplest but clearest directions for drawing a map of the schoolroom and then leads up gradually to the subject of the cape, isthmus, continent, etc. There are pictures of interesting places, descriptions of the products of the countries, the manners, costumes, religions and laws of the people. The book is written like a story, with frequent affectionate addresses to the young learner and admonitions that are to encourage him on his way where the study seems difficult or dry. The personal character of the writer has an opportunity to show itself in a book like this, and, if the reprint of 1852 was a facsimile of the original work, as seems likely, that Harriet Beecher, the teacher in the Cincinnati school in 1833, in a very earnest chapter on the subject of slavery, has shown clearly what her opinion would be when that great subject should come up for discussion. She also clearly points out the part that the English bore in the early history of our country in forcing the system of slavery upon their colonial subjects on this side of the sea. She takes good opportunity to urge the reasons why the New England forefathers left their native land and sought the inhospitable shores of New England and speaks feelingly of their sufferings in the early years of settlement. None of these passages was toned down when the little book was reprinted in England in 1852 for the use of the English schools.
CHAPTER XII
THE SEMI-COLONS
Soon after the Beechers were settled at Cincinnati the circle of old New England friends exiled together in this western land formed a literary club that met alternately at Uncle Samuel Foote’s and Dr. Drake’s. They called this society the “Semi-colon Club,” and gave the following explanation of the name: The Spanish name of Columbus was Colon; if the discoverer of a continent may be called a “Colon,” the discoverers of a new pleasure should at least be allowed the honor of being called “Semi-colons.” This new pleasure consisted in the delight they got out of the interchange of thought at weekly meetings.
The society of Semi-colons grew out of what Harriet called “Uncle Sam’s soirée,” the social assemblies that that genial host gathered about him in his house on the heights. The house where most of the meetings were held and which should be called “the home of the Semi-colon Club” was on the corner of Vine and Third Streets. It was a mansion with a stately colonnade of pillars across the portico. In the company that assembled beneath that friendly roof were several that were destined to become known to the world besides Catherine, Harriet and other members of their family. There were judges, generals, poets, professors, editors, and, as Harriet might have said, some human beings! Salmon P. Chase was there, a young man about twenty-five years old, afterwards the great statesman who met Mrs. Stowe at Washington and led her into the room where Abraham Lincoln greeted and talked with her. Mrs. Caroline Lee Hentz was one of the company; she had been the author of a poem, a play, and a novel before she was twelve years old, and had lately received from the Arch Street Theater in Philadelphia the five-hundred-dollar prize for her play, “De Lara, or the Moorish Bride.” Then there was Christopher Pearse Cranch, the poet, and Worthington Whitridge, the artist. There was Judge James Hall, editor of the Western Monthly Magazine, author of many letters, souvenirs, addresses, sketches and romances, who was then in the midst of a long and valuable literary career. Dr. Daniel Drake, a man some forty-five years old, had a national reputation in the field of medical research. The circle also included others in various fields of artistic activity. It is plain that the meetings of a company such as this must have been a great incitement to the genius of Harriet Beecher. We must not forget to mention that the young and handsome professor of Biblical history, Professor C. E. Stowe, was also a member of the Club.
In natural reaction from the strenuousness of her daily tasks Harriet could not resist the impulse to loosen the reins of her whimsical fancy at the meetings and to be the very soul of merriment in this intimate circle. The first thing she wrote as a Semi-colon was a letter purporting to have come from Bishop Butler, composed, as Harriet said to Georgiana May, in his “outrageous style of parenthesis and foggification.” Her next essay was a satirical piece on the modern uses of languages. We can hardly imagine how this subject could be made interesting, yet we feel that we could trust Harriet Beecher to turn any prosy matter into mirth. This essay was so well received by the audience that the editor of the Western Magazine requested permission to publish it in his magazine. Elated by this success, she undertook a larger task, planning a series of letters that were to take up a number of different subjects. She liked to write in a slightly satirical manner. There had been some random talk in the social hours of the Club meetings on the antiquated jokes about old maids and bachelors. Harriet thought she would touch upon this and call for some fresh pleasantries to take the place of those worn-out ones. She wrote a list of legislative enactments solemnly forbidding the merest mention of the word “old maid” or “bachelor” in the future and forever more. This was indeed a playing with fire, but the letters made no hard feelings, as there was a courteous spirit beneath the satire.
She followed this with an attempt at more serious writing, though here again her passion for fun made her resort to the device of a practical joke. Putting what she had to say this time into the form of letters, she carried out her idea with a wealth of incident and of particulars that made the letters give the feeling of a group of real people. The letters appeared to be written from a house in the country, where the hosts and their guests were pious, literary, and agreeable. By having the letters come apparently from different people who showed their various characteristics, the author had the opportunity to bring in different points of view and a lively interchange of ideas.
We can see how her story-making sense was developing. In these letters she was taking a hint from a certain plan which the Beecher family had been making use of since the members had been so widely scattered. They sent a circular letter around from one member of the family to another, each adding a letter to the collection that came to him, until all had read it. In this circular letter the different characteristics of the family were brought into a pleasant contrast, just as Harriet planned to bring them out in the imaginary family that she created. The first one of this series she surrounded with particulars intended to carry out the deception. Her one idea at this time seems to have been to conceal her budding tendency toward authorship, and yet she could not resist the fertility of invention and the pleasure it gave her. When she had finished the letter she smoked it to turn it yellow and tore the edges to give it the look of age; she wrote and re-wrote the direction, imitated a postmark by means of smears of ink, sealed the letter with wax and then broke the seal open again, all in order to give the letter the appearance of a really old letter. Then she put it into another envelope on which she placed the address in different handwriting and directed it to “Mrs. Samuel E. Foote.” At the same time she sent another letter to her cousin directing her to be on the lookout for the coming of a letter and to aid her in the deception. The family, including even that wary and clever Uncle Samuel, were taken in by the joke. The erased names and dates were deciphered and the whole epistle was subjected to criticism, but it was believed in as a real letter. So much for Harriet’s practical joke.
It is a little difficult to understand why this young author should have surrounded with so much mystery her earliest attempts in the work that was to become the business of her life. She seems to have had a strange sense of shrinking from publicity as though there were perhaps a lack of dignity about the appearance of one’s name in print. How little idea she had even by this time of her own powers is shown by the fact that her first published piece was, quite to Harriet’s satisfaction, attributed to Catherine. In fact she said that she did not know that she would have let it go if it had been assigned to its own author. She had no idea, she said, of appearing in propria persona. However, when the potent charm that lies in literary expression had once taken a firm hold of her genius those false scruples faded away; and we cannot believe that it was not a source of intense pleasure to her when she won the prize offered by the editor of the Western Monthly Magazine for the best story. This story appeared in the number for April, 1834, under the heading “The Prize Tale,” with the modest sub-title “A New England Sketch.” Her story was as different from the other articles in the magazine as black is from white. The contents of this heavy periodical consisted as a general thing of essays on the antiquities of America, the Indians and their customs, didactic tales related in trotting tetrameters, or perhaps a long-winded story of impossible adventure and sentiment in the Charles Brockton Brown manner. Harriet Beecher’s racy description of New England characteristics, the realness of the scenes, the actuality of the people, the easy simple flow of the discourse, the conversational quality of the language that the speakers used, the clever management of the incidents were all totally unknown to the readers of the magazine. It must have been like a sudden invitation to a feast of good nourishing food to those who had been living for a long time upon chaff. The story was welcomed with intense delight.
It is not remarkable that the heart of this young writer, who was still homesick enough to find it impossible to sing any kind of a song in the strange land, should turn for its inspiration to the old New England home. This is the way she began: