Tempest-Tossed. Susan Campbell

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      TRAINING TO BE A BEECHER

      Childbirth in early America was a dangerous thing. Women gave birth anywhere from five to eight times, and a new mother’s chance of dying during the process was between 1 and 1.5 percent. Extrapolating for the non–math majors, that meant a woman’s chances of dying over the course of her childbearing years could be as high as one in eight.¹ If she survived, her child might not. In the early 1800s, there wasn’t the language for birth control.² You can perhaps see why pregnancy was approached with no small amount of dread.

      We know nothing about Isabella’s actual birth, other than it took place on February 22, 1822, but we can take a few educated guesses. Unattended births were rare among people with any kind of social standing. A woman of Harriet Porter’s position might have opted to give birth in the presence of a physician.³ However, with her marriage to Lyman Beecher, Harriet Porter had slipped a few rungs down the socioeconomic ladder, and Isabella’s birth most likely was attended — if it was attended at all — by a house servant or a trusted family member such as the ever-present Aunt Esther Beecher, Lyman’s unmarried sister who frequently cared for the children. As Harriet Porter had had one child previously — little doomed Frederick — she would have at least known what to expect.

      Meanwhile, the joys of child-rearing were being codified in a slew of parenting books that began hitting the markets in the 1820s. Previously, childhood was considered an event best navigated quickly, but in the early part of the nineteenth century, writers began to devote more time to essays and books on child-rearing, and on parental (read: maternal) involvement. By mid-decade, the relatively new genre focused most intently on the authority of the parent, and the need for the child to acquiesce.⁴ The books stressed self-discipline “over physical and moral faculties”— which dovetailed nicely with the Beecher family religion of rigorous self-examination.⁵

      Two more children followed Isabella: Thomas Kinnicut Beecher in 1824 and James Chaplin Beecher in 1828. With each new child, Harriet’s sojourns in her bedroom grew longer and longer, and her time with her children — both step- and birth — grew increasingly short. Mary and Catharine proved themselves capable of helping run the household and manage the children, and Isabella most likely learned to look to her sisters for what mothering she needed.

      Catharine, a generation older than baby sister Isabella, was engaged to be married and soon to leave the nest when word reached Litchfield that her fiancé, Alexander Metcalf Fisher, a brilliant mathematician from Yale, had been killed in a shipwreck off the coast of Ireland just two months after Isabella was born. For as much as he could move people from the pulpit, Lyman Beecher lacked the ability to comfort his grieving eldest daughter. He believed that her beloved had died in a state of sin, because although Fisher had studied religion at Yale, he was not a member of the Congregational Church. If the young mathematician had had a religious conversion — to Lyman’s brand of Christianity, as none other would do — he left no record of such a conversion.⁶ Instead of comfort, Lyman spoke to his daughter about how God tests his children, and he urged her to turn to God for comfort.

      Being told by your father that your fiancé is burning in hell is not a motivator to draw nigh unto the Lord. Catharine, who had seemed likely to be the Beecher who would cling to the old rugged cross so adored by her father, suffered a crisis of faith from which she never quite recovered. Why should she give fealty to a God who took her beloved? An anguished father-daughter debate carried on for months, and was sometimes joined by Edward, three years Catharine’s junior and one of the family’s earliest abolitionists.

      Catharine inherited Fisher’s library, which she began to rigorously explore. With study and debate within the family, Catharine became an ambassador of a new theology, and the family’s first break from their father’s brand of Calvinism had begun.⁷ And those family debates formed the foundation of Isabella’s instruction — that she should be as well-read as her brothers in order to create a home environment that would serve as a springboard for her future husband’s son’s success in the world.

      At home, the family scene was dynamic. There was the ever-rotating crew of boarders and the continual addition of new babes, while older children rotated in and out, subject to the school calendar.