Men of Our Times. Or, Leading Patriots of the Day

It has made place for a thousand other forces and influences each powerless without it, but each now more powerful and more efficient in their own field.

Those who are so happy as to know Mr. Phillips personally, are fully aware how entirely this unflinching austerity of judgment, this vigorous severity of exaction, belong to his public character alone, how full of genial urbanity they find the private individual. We may be pardoned for expressing the hope that the time may yet come when he shall see his way clear to take counsel in public matters with his own kindly impulses, and that those genial traits which render his private intercourse so agreeable, may be allowed to modify at least his public declarations.

CHAPTER XVIII
HENRY WARD BEECHER

Mr. Beecher a Younger Child – Death of his Mother – His Step-Mother's Religious Influence – Ma'am Kilbourn's School – The Passing Bell – Unprofitable Schooling – An Inveterate School Joker – Masters the Latin Grammar – Goes to Amherst College – His Love of Flowers – Modes of Study; a Reformer – Mr. Beecher and the Solemn Tutor – His Favorite Poetry – His Introduction to Phrenology – His Mental Philosophy – Doctrine of Spiritual Intuition – Punctuality for Joke's Sake – Old School and New School – Doubts on Entering the Ministry – Settlement at Lawrenceburg – His Studies; First Revival – Large Accessions to the Church – "Tropical Style" – Ministerial Jokes – Slavery in the Pulpit – The Transfer to Brooklyn – Plymouth Church Preaching – Visit to England – Speeches in England – Letters from England – Christian View of England – The Exeter Hall Speech – Preaches an Unpopular Forgiveness.

Henry Ward Beecher was the eighth child of Lyman and Roxana Foote Beecher, born in Litchfield, Connecticut, June 24, 1813. The first child of a family is generally an object of high hope and anxious and careful attention. They are observed, watched – and if the parents are so disposed, carefully educated, and often over-watched and over-educated. But in large families, as time rolls on and children multiply, especially to those in straitened worldly circumstances, all the interest of novelty dies out before the advent of younger children, and they are apt to find their way in early life unwatched and unheralded. Dr. Beecher's salary was eight hundred dollars a year, not always promptly paid. This made the problem of feeding, clothing and educating a family of ten children a dark one. The family was constantly enlarged by boarders, young ladies attending the female academy, and whose board helped somewhat to the support of the domestic establishment, but added greatly to the cares of the head manager. The younger members of the Beecher family therefore came into existence in a great bustling household of older people, all going their separate ways, and having their own grown-up interests to carry. The child, growing up in this busy, active circle, had constantly impressed upon it a sense of personal insignificance as a child, and the absolute need of the virtue of passive obedience and non-resistance as regards all grown-up people. To be statedly washed and dressed and catechised, got to school at regular hours in the morning, and to bed inflexibly at the earliest possible hour at night, comprised about all the attention that children could receive in those days.

The mother of Henry Ward died when he was three years old; his father was immersed in theological investigations and a wide sphere of pastoral labors and great general ecclesiastical interests, his grown-up brothers and sisters in their own separate life history, and the three younger children were therefore left to their mortal pilgrimage, within certain well-defined moral limits, much after their own way. The step-mother, who took the station of mother, was a lady of great personal elegance and attractiveness, of high intellectual and moral culture, who from having been in early life the much admired belle in general society, came at last from an impulse of moral heroism combined with personal attachment, to undertake the austere labors of a poor minister's family. She was a person to make a deep impression on the minds of any children. There was a moral force about her, a dignity of demeanor, an air of elegance and superior breeding, which produced a constant atmosphere of unconscious awe in the minds of little ones. Then her duties were onerous, her conscience inflexible, and under the weight of these her stock of health and animal spirits sunk, so that she was for the most part pensive and depressed. Her nature and habits were too refined and exacting for the bringing up of children of great animal force and vigor, under the strain and pressure of straitened circumstances. The absurdities and crudenesses incident to the early days of such children appeared to her as serious faults, and weighed heavily on her conscience. The most intense positive religious and moral influence the three little ones of the family received was on Sunday night, when it was her custom to take them to her bed-room and read and talk and pray with them. At these times, deep though vague religious yearnings were created; but as she was much of her time an invalid, and had little sympathy with the ordinary feelings of childhood, she gave an impression of religion as being like herself, calm, solemn, inflexible, mysteriously sad and rigorously exacting.

In those days none of the attentions were paid to children that are now usual. The community did not recognize them. There was no child's literature; there were no children's books. The Sunday school was yet an experiment, in a fluctuating, uncertain state of trial. There were no children's days of presents and fêtes– no Christmas or New Year's festivals. The annual thanksgiving was only associated with one day's unlimited range of pies of every sort – too much for one day, and too soon things of the past. The childhood of Henry Ward was unmarked by the possession of a single child's toy as a gift from any older person, or a single fête. Very early, too, strict duties devolved upon him; a daily portion of the work of the establishment, the care of the domestic animals, the cutting and piling of wood, or tasks in the garden strengthened his muscles and gave vigor and tone to his nerves. From his father and mother he inherited a perfectly solid, healthy organization of brain, muscle and nerves, and the uncaressing, let-alone system under which he was brought up, gave him early habits of vigor and self-reliance.

Litchfield was a mountain town, where the winter was a stern reality for six months of the year, where there were giant winds, and drifting snows of immeasurable depth, and ice and sleet storms of a sublime power and magnitude. Under this rugged nursing he grew outwardly vigorous. At nine years of age, in one of those winter droughts common in New England towns, he harnessed the horse to a sledge with a barrel lashed thereon, and went off alone three miles over the icy top of the town hill, to dip up and bring home a barrel of water from a distant spring. So far from taking this as a hardship, he undertook it with a chivalric pride. His only trial in the case was the humiliation of being positively commanded by his careful step-mother to wear his overcoat; he departed obedient, but with tears of mortification freezing on his cheeks, for he had recorded a heroic vow to go through a whole winter without once wearing an overcoat.

For education, technically so called, there were small advantages. His earliest essay of letters was to walk over to West street, to a widow Kilbourn's, where he sat daily on a bench kicking his heels in idleness, and said his letters twice in the day, and was for so long out of the way of the grown folks, which was a main point in child schooling. There was a tinner's shop hard by, and the big girls, some of them, contrived to saw off some of his long golden curls with tin shears contrived from the fragments cast out of the shop. The child was annoyed, but dared not complain to any purpose, till the annoyance being stated at home, it was concluded that the best way to abate it was to cut off all the curls altogether, and with the loss of these he considered his manhood to commence. Next, a small, unpainted, district school-house being erected within a stone's throw of the parsonage, he graduated from Ma'am Kilbourn's thither. The children of all the farming population in the neighborhood gathered there. The exercises consisted in daily readings of the Bible and the Columbian Orator, in elementary exercises in arithmetic, and hand-writing. The ferule and a long flexible hickory switch were the insignia of office of the school mistress. No very striking early results were the outcome of this teaching. Henry Ward was not marked out by the prophecies of partial friends for any brilliant future. He had precisely the organization which often passes for dullness in early boyhood. He had great deficiency in verbal memory, a deficiency marked in him through life; he was excessively sensitive to praise and blame, extremely diffident, and with a power of yearning, undeveloped emotion, which he neither understood nor could express. His utterance was thick and indistinct, partly from bashfulness and partly from an enlargement of the tonsils of the throat, so that in speaking or reading he was with difficulty understood. In forecasting his horoscope, had any one taken the trouble then to do it, the last success that ever would have been predicted for him would have been that of an orator. "When Henry is sent to me with a message," said a good aunt, "I always have to make him say it three times. The first time I have no manner of an idea more than if he spoke Choctaw; the second, I catch now and then a word; by the third time I begin to understand."

Thus, while Dr. Beecher victoriously demonstrated the consistency of decrees and accountability, and the elder brother was drawing all the hopes of the family as the first in his college class, and his elder sisters were writing poetry and receiving visits, and carrying on the cheerful round of Litchfield society, this bashful, dazed-looking boy pattered barefoot to and from the little unpainted school-house, with a brown towel or a blue checked apron to hem during the intervals between his spelling and reading lessons. Nobody thought much of his future, further than to see that he was safe and healthy, or even troubled themselves to inquire what might be going on in his life.

But the child most let alone, is nevertheless being educated gradually and insensibly. The calm, inflexible, elegant breeding of the step-mother, her intense solemnity of religious responsibility, indicating itself in every chance look or motion, fell on the sensitive child-nature like a constant moral stimulant. When a little fellow, whose small feet could not touch the bottom of the old family chaise, he was once driving with her on an errand. The bell tolled for a death, as was then the custom in rural places. "Henry, what do you think of when you hear a bell tolling like that?" she said. Astonished and awe-struck at having his thoughts inquired into, the child only flushed, and colored and looked abashed, and she went on as in a quiet soliloquy, "I think, was that soul prepared? It has gone into eternity!" The effect on the child's mind was a shiver of dread, like the being turned out without clothing among the icy winds of Litchfield hills. The vague sense of infinite, inevitable doom underlying all the footsteps of life, added to a natural disposition to yearning and melancholy. The scenery around the parsonage fed the yearning – Chestnut Hill on one side, with its lovely, softly wooded slopes, and waving grain-fields; on the other, Mount Tom, with steel-blue pines and a gleaming lake mirror at its feet. Then there was the piano always going, and the Scotch airs, Roslin Castle, Mary's Dream, and Bonnie Doon, sounding out from the parlor windows, and to which the boy listened in a sort of troublous and dreamy mixture of sadness and joy, and walked humming to himself with tears in his eyes.

The greatest trial of those days was the catechism. Sunday lessons were considered by the mother-in-law as inflexible duty, and the catechism as the sine qua non. The other children memorized readily and were brilliant reciters, but Henry, blushing, stammering, confused and hopelessly miserable, stuck fast on some sand-bank of what is required or forbidden by this or that commandment, his mouth choking up with the long words which he hopelessly miscalled; was sure to be accused of idleness or inattention, and to be solemnly talked to, which made him look more stolid and miserable than ever, but appeared to have no effect in quickening his dormant faculties.

When he was ten years old, he was a stocky, strong, well-grown boy, loyal in duty, trained in unquestioning obedience, inured to patient hard work, inured also to the hearing and discussing of all the great theological problems of Calvinism, which were always reverberating in his hearing; but as to any mechanical culture, in an extremely backward state – a poor writer, a miserable speller, with a thick utterance, and a bashful reticence which seemed like stolid stupidity. He was now placed at a private school in the neighboring town of Bethlehem, under the care of the Rev. Mr. Langdon, to commence a somewhat more careful course of study. Here an incident occurred which showed that the boy even at that early age felt a mission to defend opinions. A forward school-boy, among the elder scholars, had got hold of Paine's Age of Reason, and was flourishing largely among the boys with objections to the Bible, drawn therefrom. Henry privately looked up Watson's Apology, studied up the subject, and challenged a debate with the big boy, in which he came off victorious by the acclamation of his school-fellows.

His progress in book-learning, however, was slow, though his year at the place was one of great happiness. One trait of the boy, as it has been with the man, was a peculiar passion for natural scenery, which he found full liberty to indulge in his present surroundings. He boarded with a large-hearted, kindly, motherly woman, in a great comfortable farm-house, where everything was free and unconstrained. The house was backed by a generous old orchard, full of fruits and blossoms in spring and summer, and where the partridges drummed and whirred in winter. Beyond that were dreamy depths of woodland, and Henry's studies were mostly with gun on shoulder, roving the depths of those forests, guiltless of hitting anything, because the time was lost in dreamy contemplation. Thence returning unprepared for school, he would be driven to the expedient of writing out his Latin verb and surreptitiously reading it out of the crown of his hat, an exercise from whence he reaped small profit, either mentally or morally. In short, after a year spent in this way, it began to be perceived by the elders of the family, that as to the outward and visible signs of learning, he was making no progress. His eldest sister was then teaching a young lady's school in Hartford, and it was proposed to take the boy under her care to see what could be made of him.

One boy of eleven in a school of thirty or forty girls has not much chance of making a durable impression, but we question if any of Henry's school mates easily forgot him. If the under stratum of his nature was a dreamy yearning melancholy, its upper manifestation was in constant bubbling, restless effervescence of fun and practical joking. The school room was up a long flight of stairs, and one wet day Henry spent a recess when he was supposed to be studying grammar, in opening every umbrella brought to school, and so disposing them on the stairs that the luckless person who opened the outside door would witness a precipitate rush of the whole series into the street – which feat was successfully accomplished to the dismay of the late comer, and the tittering of the whole school, who had been somewhat prepared for the catastrophe.

The school room was divided into two divisions in grammar, under leaders on either side, and the grammatical reviews were contests for superiority in which it was vitally important that every member should be perfected. Henry was generally the latest choice, and fell on his side as an unlucky accession – being held more amusing than profitable on such occasions.

The fair leader on one of these divisions took the boy aside to a private apartment, to put into him with female tact and insinuation those definitions and distinctions on which the honor of the class depended.

"Now Henry, A is the indefinite article, you see – and must be used only with a singular noun. You can say a man– but you can't say a men, can you?" "Yes, I can say Amen too," was the ready rejoinder. "Father says it always at the end of his prayers."

"Come Henry, now don't be joking; now decline He." "Nominative he, possessive his, objective him." "You see, His is possessive. Now you can say, His book – but you can't say 'Him book.'" "Yes I do say Hymn book too," said the impracticable scholar with a quizzical twinkle. Each one of these sallies made his young teacher laugh, which was the victory he wanted.

"But now Henry, seriously, just attend to the active and passive voice. Now 'I strike' is active, you see, because if you strike you do something. But 'I am struck,' is passive, because if you are struck you don't do any thing do you?"

"Yes I do – I strike back again!"

Sometimes his views of philosophical subjects were offered gratuitously. Being held rather of a frisky nature, his sister appointed his seat at her elbow, when she heard her classes. A class in Natural Philosophy, not very well prepared, was stumbling through the theory of the tides. "I can explain that," said Henry. "Well, you see, the sun, he catches hold of the moon and pulls her, and she catches hold of the sea and pulls that, and this makes the spring tides.

"But what makes the neap tides?"

"Oh, that's when the sun stops to spit on his hands," was the brisk rejoinder.

After about six months, Henry was returned on his parents' hands with the reputation of being an inveterate joker, and an indifferent scholar. It was the opinion of his class that there was much talent lying about loosely in him if he could only be brought to apply himself.

When he was twelve years of age his father moved to Boston. It was a great change to the two younger boys, from the beautiful rural freedom of a picturesque mountain town to the close, strait limits of a narrow street in Boston.

There was a pure and vigorous atmosphere of moral innocence about the mountain towns of Connecticut in those days, which made the breeding up of children on the let-alone system quite feasible. There was no temptation to vice or immorality. The only associate of doubtful character forbidden to Henry, for whose society he craved, was Ulysses Freeman, a poor, merry, softly giggling negro boy, who inhabited a hut not far off, and who, it was feared, might indiscreetly teach him something that he ought not to know – but otherwise it was safe to let him run unwatched, in the wholesome companionship of bob-o'links and squirrels and birch woods and huckleberry bushes. There was not in all Litchfield in those days any thing to harm a growing boy, or lead him into evil.

But in Boston, the streets, the wharves, the ship yards, were full of temptation – the house, narrow and strait. The boy was put into the Boston Latin School, where the whole educational process was a solid square attempt to smite the Latin grammar into minds of all sorts and sizes, by a pressure like that by which coin is stamped in the mint. Educated in loyal obedience as a religion and a habit, pushed up to make the effort by the entreaties of his father, by appeals to his gallantry in overcoming difficulties, his sense of family honor, and the solemn appeals to conscience of his mother, Henry set himself doggedly to learn lists of prepositions and terminations, and bead-rolls of nouns that found their accusatives or genitives in this way or that, except in the case of two dozen exceptions, when they formed them in some other way, with all the other dry prickly facts of language with which it is deemed expedient to choke the efforts of beginners.

It was to him a grim Sinaitic desert, a land of darkness without order, where he wandered, seeing neither tree or flower; a wilderness of meaningless forms and sounds. His life was a desolation, a blind push to do what was most contrary to his natural faculties, repulsive to his tastes, and in which with utmost stress and strain of effort he could never hope to rise above mediocrity. One year passed in this way, and with the fear of disgrace in the rear and conscience and affection goading him on, Henry had actually mastered the Latin grammar, and could give any form or inflection, rule or exception therein, but at an expense of brain and nerve that began to tell even on his vigorous organization.

The era of fermentation and development was upon him, and the melancholy that had brooded over his childhood waxed more turbulent and formidable. He grew gloomy and moody, restless and irritable. His father, noticing the change, got him on a course of biographical reading, hoping to divert his thoughts. He began to read naval histories, the lives of great sailors and commanders – the voyages of Captain Cook, the biography of Nelson; and immediately, like lightning flashing out of rolling clouds, came the determination not to rest any longer in Boston, learning terminations and prepositions, but to go forth to a life of enterprise. He made up his little bundle, walked the wharf and talked with sailors and captains, hovered irresolute on the verge of voyages, never quite able to grieve his father by a sudden departure. At last he wrote a letter announcing to a brother that he could and would no longer remain at school – that he had made up his mind for the sea; that if not permitted to go, he should go without permission. This letter was designedly dropped where his father picked it up. Dr. Beecher put it in his pocket and said nothing for the moment, but the next day asked Henry to help him saw wood. Now the wood-pile was the Doctor's favorite debating ground, and Henry felt complimented by the invitation, as implying manly companionship.

"Let us see," says the Doctor, "Henry, how old are you?"

"Almost fourteen!"

"Bless me! how boys do grow! – Why it's almost time to be thinking what you are going to do. Have you ever thought?"

"Yes – I want to go to sea."

"To sea! Of all things! Well, well! After all, why not? – Of course you don't want to be a common sailor. You want to get into the navy?"

"Yes sir, that's what I want."

"But not merely as a common sailor, I suppose?"

"No sir, I want to be midshipman, and after that commodore."

"I see," said the Doctor, cheerfully, "Well, Henry, in order for that, you know, you must begin a course of mathematics, and study navigation and all that."

"Yes sir, I am ready."

"Well then, I'll send you up to Amherst next week, to Mount Pleasant, and then you'll begin your preparatory studies, and if you are well prepared, I presume I can make interest to get you an appointment."

And so he went to Mount Pleasant, in Amherst, Mass., and Dr. Beecher said shrewdly, "I shall have that boy in the ministry yet."

The transfer from the confined limits of a city to the congenial atmosphere of a beautiful mountain town brought an immediate favorable change. Here he came under the care of a mathematical teacher, educated at West Point, a bright attractive young man of the name of Fitzgerald, with whom he roomed. Between this young man and the boy, there arose a romantic friendship. Henry had no natural talent or taste for mathematics, but inspired by a desire to please his friend, and high ambition for his future profession, he went into them with energy, and soon did credit to his teacher at the blackboard, laboring perseveringly with his face towards the navy, and Nelson as his beau ideal.

Here also he was put through a strict drill in elocution by Professor John E. Lovell, now residing in New Haven, Conn. Of him, Mr. Beecher cherishes a grateful recollection, and never fails to send him a New Year's token of remembrance. He says of him, that "a better teacher in his department never was made." Mr. Beecher had many natural disabilities for the line of oratory; and their removal so far as to make him an acceptable speaker he holds due to the persevering drill of Mr. Lovell. His voice, naturally thick and husky, was developed by most persevering, systematic training. His gestures and the management of his body went through a drill corresponding to that which the military youth goes through at West Point, to make his body supple to the exigencies of military evolution. As an orator, this early training was of vital importance to him. He could never have attained success without it.

At the close of the first year, a revival of religion passed through the school, and Henry Ward and many others were powerfully impressed. It was in fact, on the part of the boy, the mere flashing out into visible form of that deep undercurrent of religious sensibility which had been the habit of his life, and the result of his whole home education. His father sent for him home to unite with the church on a great communion season; and the boy, trembling, agitated, awe-struck, full of vague purposes and good resolutions and imperfectly developed ideas, stood up and took on him irrevocable vows, henceforth in his future life to be actively and openly on the side of Christ, in the great life battle.

Of course the naval scheme vanished, and the pulpit opened before him as his natural sphere. With any other father or education, this would not have been an "of course;" but Dr. Beecher was an enthusiast in his profession. Every word of his life, every action or mode of speaking, had held it up before his boys as the goal of all his hopes, that they should preach the gospel, and the boy therefore felt that to be the necessary obligation which came upon him in joining the church. He returned to Amherst, where his classical education was continued for two years longer, with a view to fit him for college.

The love of flowers, which has always formed so marked a branch of his general enthusiasm for nature, developed itself at this time in a friendship with a rather rough man who kept a garden. He was so pleased with the boy's enthusiasm that he set apart a scrap of ground for him which he filled with roses, geraniums and other blooming wonders, and these Henry tended under his instructions.

At that time the love of nature was little cultivated among the community. By very many good people, nature was little spoken of except as the antithesis to grace. It was the tempter, the syren that drew the soul from higher duties. The chaplain of Mount Pleasant Institute, a grave and formal divine, found Henry on his knees in his little flower patch, lost in rapturous contemplations of buds and blossoms. He gave him an indulgent smile, but felt it his duty to improve the occasion.

"Ah, Henry," he said condescendingly, as one who makes a fair admission, "these things are pretty, very pretty, but my boy, do you think that such things are worthy to occupy the attention of a man who has an immortal soul?" Henry answered only by that abashed and stolid look which covered from the eyes of his superiors, so much of what was going on within him, and went on with attentions to his flowers. "I wanted to tell him," he said afterwards, "that since Almighty God has found leisure to make those trifles, it could not be amiss for us to find time to look at them." By the time that Henry had been three years in Amherst he was prepared to enter Sophomore in College. Thanks to his friend and teacher Fitzgerald, his mathematical training had given him the entire mastery of La Croix's Algebra, so that he was prepared to demonstrate at random any proposition as chance selected – not only without aid or prompting from the teacher, but controversially as against the teacher, who would sometimes publicly attack the pupil's method of demonstration, disputing him step by step, when the scholar was expected to know with such positive clearness as to put down and overthrow the teacher. "You must not only know, but you must know that you know," was Fitzgerald's maxim; and Henry Ward attributes much of his subsequent habit of steady antagonistic defence of his own opinions to this early mathematical training.

Though prepared for the Sophomore class, his father however, deemed it best on the whole, that he should enter as freshman, and the advanced state of his preparation therefore gave him leisure the first year to mark out and commence a course of self-education by means of the college libraries, which he afterwards systematically pursued through college life. In fact he gave no more attention to the college course than was absolutely essential to keep his standing, but turned all the power of study and concentrated attention he had acquired in his previous years, upon his own plan of culture. As he himself remarks, "I had acquired by the Latin and mathematics, the power of study. I knew how to study, and I turned it upon things I wanted to know." The Latin and Greek classics did not attract him. The want of social warmth in the remove at which they stood from the living present, alienated them from the sympathies of one who felt his mission to be among the men of to-day, and by its living literature. Oratory and rhetoric he regarded as his appointed weapons, and he began to prepare himself in the department of how to say – meanwhile contemplating with uncertain awe, the great future problem of WHAT TO SAY.

For the formation of style he began a course of English classical study; Milton's prose works, Bacon, Shakspeare, and the writers of the Elizabethan period were his classics, read and re-read, and deeply pondered. In common with most of the young men of his period, he was a warm admirer of the writings of Robert Hall, and added him to his list of favorite authors. His habits of study were somewhat peculiar. He had made for himself at the carpenter's, a circular table, with a hole in the middle, where was fixed a seat. Enthroned in this seat with his English classics all around him, he read and pondered, and with never ceasing delight.