Tempest-Tossed. Susan Campbell

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      If Lyman Beecher had not existed, someone would have invented him. He was thunderous in the pulpit, and rough-hewn away from it. Even though his children did not cleave to his brand of fundamentalist theology, they worshipped him for all his charismatic, sometimes coarse ways. But at his core, Lyman was a storyteller, and one of his favorite stories involved his own birth. How he came to this story one can only guess, as one can only guess if it’s accurate. But it’s a good story.

      As so often happened with marrying men in the 1700s, Lyman’s father, a blacksmith named David, was widowed and married five times — to Mary Austin, Lydia Morris, Esther Lyman, Elizabeth Hoadly, and Mary Lewis Elliott. He had twelve children with his wives, though eight of the children died in infancy. This, too, was common in a time of infant mortality that ranged, depending on the year and location, from 10 to 30 percent.³ Lyman, born October 12, 1775, in Guilford, Connecticut, was the product of David’s third and best-loved wife, Esther. She was from Middletown, Connecticut, and of Scottish descent. She possessed, said her son, “a joyous, sparkling, hopeful temperament.”⁴

      This characterization is conjecture on his part, or it is a description based on information gathered from his relatives. Lyman Beecher was born in the seventh month of his mother’s pregnancy, and she died of consumption — the “great white plague”— two days after his birth.⁵ Her illness had weakened her to the point that the midwives had little hope for the baby, and, wrote Beecher, wrapped his tiny body and laid him aside to die, until one of the women attending his mother thought to check him, and found him alive. She cleaned him and properly ushered him into the world.

      “So you see it was but by a hair’s-breadth I got a foothold in this world,” Lyman wrote.⁶ That early brush with death — or, at least, the family stories he heard about it — helped set Lyman Beecher on the road to a lifetime of conquering — starting with his weak infant nature and branching out to conquer his adult sinful nature and that of sinners who refused to hear the gospel. The story paints Lyman as stronger than mere mortals — a view his children, including Isabella, all seemed to share.

      He entered Yale College, then nearly a hundred years old, in 1793.⁷ His education was interrupted in its first year when he contracted scarlet fever. An epidemic swept through Connecticut and peaked in New Haven in January 1794 with some seven hundred cases reported.⁸ Lyman recovered, only to discover during his second year that he was abysmal at mathematics. During his third year, he became heavily involved in gambling — so much so that he ended the year in debt. Frightened at the hold gambling had on him, he took a leave of absence for a week and cured himself of “that mania.”⁹

      A degree from Yale — a school with a theology far more orthodox than that of the other premier New England school, Harvard — gave graduates two career choices, law or the ministry. By Lyman’s junior year, the thought of entering law — with its “little quirks, and turns and janglings — disgusted me,” wrote Lyman.¹⁰ He graduated in 1797 with a class of thirty-one, sixteen of whom became lawyers, fifteen of whom entered the ministry.¹¹

      As he was completing his education, Lyman met the woman who would be the love of his life, Roxanna Foote. Roxanna traced her family back to the early congregation of Thomas Hooker, who settled Connecticut and was known as the first American democrat.¹² The men of her family fought in the French and Indian and Revolutionary Wars.

      Roxanna Foote was every bit as intellectually curious as her young swain. As a girl, she’d learned French by propping her lesson books on her distaff so that she could read them as she spun flax. Her grandfather once described his three eldest granddaughters by guessing what each girl would say upon rising from bed. Harriet, the eldest, would encourage everyone to start a fire and sweep. Betsy would wonder which ribbon to wear to a party. And Roxanna would say, “Which do you think was the greater general, Hannibal or Alexander?”¹³ Neighbors shared books with one another, and when one much-awaited volume was published, a neighbor rode on horseback to bring it to Roxanna, and “a great treat they had of it.”¹⁴