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CHAPTER 1
The Beecher Family
This country is inhabited by saints, sinners and Beechers.
— Dr. Leonard Bacon, c.1863
In November 1907, three-year-old John Henry Newman Beecher arrived in Birmingham, Alabama. The move to this distant southern outpost, often called the Magic City, allowed his father to keep his job as a steel executive in the midst of that year's financial panic. Beecher and his parents — he was an only child — left their suburban New York mansion, boarded a private Pullman car, and, after a one-thousand-mile journey, arrived in a grimy train station that the booming industrial city had already outgrown. The social, racial, and religious divides soon became clear to the boy, first on the playground where it was locally unacceptable for his white, German nanny to associate with the other children's black nannies; and then in public schools, in the family's upscale neighborhood, and around the furnaces of Tennessee Coal, Iron, and Railroad Company, a subsidiary of U.S. Steel and his father's employer. His perspective on these divides was influenced by his identity as a Beecher descendant, the great-grandson of minister, educator, and abolitionist Edward Beecher and the great-great-nephew of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Henry Ward Beecher. John's early education about the Beecher family legacy came through his mother, Isabel, and his grandmother Sarah, both of whom were Beechers by marriage but held the family name in high regard.
The nineteenth-century Beecher family is an important lens through which to view John Beecher's work as a poet, professor, social worker, New Deal administrator, journalist, and civil rights activist. The Beechers influenced American religious and social consciousness through most of the nineteenth century. In the next century, John drew from them an awareness of social injustice that he carried throughout his life. His ancestors fought against slavery because the institution conflicted with their understanding of a just and loving God. They believed that all people are God's children, whatever their race. John Beecher's beliefs were quite similar, although his were not anchored in religion. He held that all men are equal in the strictest sense, both by law and social circumstance, and he fought unapologetically with a passion reminiscent of his famous ancestors. He exhibited this consciousness in his vocational choices, his personal and public stands, and his poetry, news reporting, and speeches, often acknowledging his heritage and the role his ancestors played in his identity.
Lyman Beecher, John Beecher's Great-Great-Grandfather, and His Children
The role that the Beecher family played in the nineteenth century is well documented. Patriarch Lyman Beecher had thirteen children born between 1800 and 1828, eleven of whom lived to adulthood. His first wife, Roxana, was the mother of Catharine, William, Edward, Mary, Harriet, George, Harriet E., Henry Ward, and Charles. Roxana Foote Beecher died in 1816, and a year later Lyman Beecher married Harriet Porter, with whom he had four more children, Frederick, Isabella, Thomas, and James. After his second wife's death in 1835, he married Lydia Beals Jackson. He died January 10, 1863, just ten days after President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, a noteworthy fact because of the role his abolitionist family had played to bring the injustice of slavery into the conscience of the nation.
Lyman Beecher and his children helped transform American Protestantism from a rigid Puritanism to a more personal and relational belief system. The New England Puritan tradition was instilled in him as he studied under Timothy Dwight, president of Yale University and grandson of theologian Jonathan Edwards, author of the classic sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." He began his ministry as a staunch Presbyterian and believer in the Puritan way of salvation and pushed his children to follow that path. His children, however, ultimately rejected the God of their father and the idea of innate depravity — the theological concept that humans are inherently evil — and, instead, their beliefs evolved to trust in a God of love, compassion, and redemption. The Beecher siblings arrived at this understanding of God after a lifetime of wrestling with theological issues and with each other. Over the course of his life, Lyman Beecher found himself influenced by his children's view and shifted from a belief in a rigid and angry God to one that was stern but loving.
Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin and the most widely known of Lyman Beecher's children, moved with her father to Cincinnati when he became president of Lane Theological Seminary in 1832. It was there that Stowe encountered slavery firsthand. Ohio prohibited slavery, but Kentucky, immediately across the Ohio River to the south, did not, so Cincinnati was a critical early stop on the Underground Railroad. Stowe maintained that she created her fictional characters after she interviewed fugitive slaves and former slaves as they fled north via the Underground Railroad. Notably, the book made an unforgettable impression on young John Beecher in the early twentieth century. His grandparents, Frederick and Sarah Hale Beecher, retired to Birmingham in 1910, when their only grand-child was six years old. He described how he felt after hearing his grandmother reading Uncle Tom's Cabin aloud to him: "My heart was greatly stirred and troubled by the picture of injustice which was unfolded in this book and which tallied with the things that I had seen around me. I was very sympathetic with the Negroes whom I knew. ... I resolved that when I grew up, I too would become a liberator of the Negroes like my ancestors. So this resolve formed when I was very young." The novel, published in 1852, sold 1.5 million copies in its first year and became the best-selling novel of the nineteenth century. Uncle Tom's Cabin meaningfully shaped the perception of slavery in America, and some argue it was one of the contributing causes of the Civil War. Charles Edward Stowe, Harriet Beecher Stowe's son, described what Lincoln said when he met his mother in the fall of 1862: "So you're the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war!" One of Harriet Beecher Stowe's brothers, firebrand minister Henry Ward Beecher, was two years younger and her close confidant; he also carried the antislavery banner. He used his powerful rhetorical skills not only to deliver sermons from the pulpit of Plymouth Church of Brooklyn, but also to take advantage of broader public forums to give speeches against slavery and the Confederacy.
Edward Beecher, John Beecher's Great-Grandfather
Even before Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin, Edward Beecher, her older brother and John Beecher's great-grandfather, had already become involved in the abolitionist cause. He was valedictorian of the class of 1818 at Yale University. He then spent two years as headmaster of Hartford Grammar School before enrolling at Andover Theological Seminary. According to historian Marie Caskey, Edward Beecher had a mild and diplomatic temperament and, being the third oldest of Lyman Beecher's children, became something of a second father to his younger siblings. He was considered the scholar of the family, and his father groomed him to be his primary successor in the ministry. In 1826, Edward Beecher was ordained as the pastor of the Congregational Park Street Church in Boston. His ministry at Park Street ran aground when some members of his congregation learned that he did not hold their views about baptism. His father encouraged him to remain silent about this theological questioning, but Edward Beecher was unwilling to set aside his strong feelings. In November of 1830, to distance himself from the strict orthodoxy of the Boston church, he left New England for the Midwest.
Edward Beecher became the first president of Illinois College, founded in 1829 in Jacksonville, Illinois. He held the post for the first thirteen years of the institution's existence. Compared to Boston, Jacksonville was an undeveloped frontier outpost, and when he arrived he moved into a log cabin with his wife, Isabella — not to be confused with his sister, suffragette Isabella Beecher Hooker. He faced challenges that arose out of the physical environment as well as local attitudes. The state legislature was decidedly rural and anti-intellectual, and for three years the body refused to give the college a charter. Edward Beecher spent fourteen years as president raising money for the struggling college. In that period, he and his wife had six of their eleven children, including John Beecher's grandfather, Frederick William.
An intellectual theologian and minister, Edward Beecher did not blindly accept the dogma of his father. Instead, he studied his own beliefs to understand and use that knowledge to teach spiritual concepts more clearly in both the pulpit and the classroom. While president of Illinois College, he expressed his belief that all slaves should be emancipated immediately and he joined the Illinois Antislavery Society in 1837. Later that same year, he nearly died with Elijah Lovejoy, an abolitionist martyr, minister, and newspaper publisher. In an effort to destroy Lovejoy's printing press, a proslavery mob ambushed the building in Alton, Illinois, that housed his antislavery newspaper, the Saint Louis Observer. The incident occurred just hours after Edward Beecher had left Lovejoy's shop, and it left a formative impression on his life and politics. Soon afterward, he wrote about the experience in a book, Narrative of Riots of Alton, in Connection with the Death of Elijah P. Lovejoy. By the late 1840s, he was a champion for abolition and influenced many toward a different attitude about slavery.
Charles Beecher's biography of Edward Beecher explained his brother's understanding of slavery as a theological issue: "It may not be clear at first to the ordinary mind why slavery and theology should go hand in hand in national affairs. But if we reflect that theology is but another name for the politics of the universe, or the Kingdom of God, the problem becomes simple. ... Old School theology enthrones a great slave-holder over the universe; New School enthrones a great Emancipator." This passage alludes to Edward Beecher's belief that the temporal world is the kingdom of God. He urged Christians to accept a moral responsibility to be socially active in the here and now rather than to be passive churchgoers who looked only to the beyond. He urged people to see slaves as human beings and children of God and strongly advocated his belief that Christians had a moral obligation to work together to eliminate slavery.
Edward Beecher trusted in an intellectual, spiritual, and moral consistency in thought, word, and deed. This characteristic drove him to reexamine not only slavery but also baptism and original sin. Instead of accepting theological inconsistencies, he arrived at interpretations that he found to be congruent. For example, after his sister Catharine's fiancé, Professor Alexander Metcalf Fisher, drowned in 1822 without a salvation experience, both Catharine and Edward Beecher struggled with the Calvinist belief that Fisher was cast to hell for eternity. Earlier that year, Edward Beecher had undergone his own salvation experience, and he had first sought to use the tragedy to convince his sister that her soul was in danger. However, Catharine Beecher soon appealed to his sense of logic, encouraging him to reexamine his beliefs. "The difficulty originates in my views of the doctrine of original sin," she told her brother. "I feel that I am guilty, but not guilty as if I had received a nature pure and uncontaminated. ... Is there any satisfactory mode of explaining this doctrine, so that we can perceive its consistency while the heart is unrenewed?" According to historian Robert Merideth, her argument convinced Edward Beecher to take a new look at the doctrine of original sin. He answered his sister's question in 1853 with a complex systematic theology based on the ancient idea of the preexistence of souls, which he detailed in his 1853 book Conflict of the Ages.
Frederick Beecher, John Beecher's Grandfather
Frederick William Beecher followed his father, Edward, into the ministry. Born in 1835, Frederick was Edward and Isabella Beecher's third child and John Beecher's grandfather. He was named for his father's brother, the first child of Lyman and Harriet Porter Beecher, who died of scarlet fever in 1820 at the age of two. By 1857, Frederick Beecher had graduated from Williams College in Massachusetts and gone on to Chicago Theological Seminary. After a year of seminary he married Sarah Hale Goodwin, to whom he had become engaged in his junior year at Williams. Henry Ward Beecher officiated their wedding on May 1, 1859. Many years later, he wrote to his grandson that he and his bride were married at his uncle's residence in Brooklyn Heights where "the rear windows overlook the city of New York." According to Frederick Beecher, his wife came from a "notable N.E. colonial family" and was descended from patriots Nathan and Edward Everett Hale. Her father was a sea captain who died in a cholera epidemic in San Francisco during the gold rush. After this tragedy, her mother took the family to live in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, with her brother, Paul Thurlow, who was a coal baron. Eventually, Sarah Hale Goodwin moved to Boston to live with her older sister, who attended Salem Street Congregational Church, where Edward Beecher was pastor. It was there that she and Frederick Beecher met.
After their marriage in 1859, Frederick Beecher completed his training at Chicago Theological Seminary. After graduation, he served as pastor of a Congregational church in Milwaukee for a year and then settled down for ten years at the Congregational church in Kankakee, Illinois. During that time, Frederick and Sarah Beecher had two children, Edward Lyman Beecher, who died as a young child in 1865, and Leonard Thurlow Beecher, John Beecher's father, who was born in 1867. Frederick Beecher became the minister of the Congregational church in Wellsville, New York, in 1873. He served there for twenty years before he resigned and became the rector of the Wellsville Episcopal Church, where he served until his retirement in 1910. John Beecher said that his grandfather left the Congregational church ministry after thirty years because he rejected the doctrine of total depravity and "embraced Anglican sweetness and light." In his poetry and his unpublished autobiography, John wrote extensively about his grandfather, whom he knew well. He described him in the book-length poem And I Will Be Heard:
My grandfather Frederick Beecher was a Congregational and then an Episcopal preacher at Sodus Point on Lake Ontario and afterwards at Wellsville, New York —
After Frederick Beecher retired in 1910, he and Sarah moved to Birmingham to be near their only surviving child and their only grandson. The couple moved into what had once been servants' quarters behind the Beechers' home in Graymont, an upscale suburb of Birmingham. They lived there until their deaths, hers in 1916 and his in 1919.
Leonard Beecher, John Beecher's Father
Leonard Thurlow Beecher's forebears were largely ministers. His father, Frederick, his grandfather, Edward, and four great-uncles followed the noted patriarch Lyman Beecher into the pulpits of several denominations. Leonard Beecher, who grew up in Wellsville, New York, while his father served as minister there, was determined to forego the family profession for a career in business. His mother, the former Sarah Hale Goodwin, wrote children's books. The family suffered a difficult loss when their first child, Edward died of a childhood illness. Leonard, born two years after Edward's death, was raised as an only child. John Beecher explains that his father believed that his great-aunts and uncles were "all a bunch of nuts," a belief that offended Sarah Beecher.
She would later set him straight on that, at least from her perspective. Still, while John Beecher patterned his social values to echo the nineteenth-century Beecher men and women, his father was determined to separate himself from them. Leonard Beecher went on to make his mark in the steel business, retiring from Tennessee Coal and Iron Company (TCI) in 1938 after thirty-six years. His success provided John with a secure base to become a twentieth-century Beecher.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Here I Stand"
by .
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