In 1832, when Harriet Beecher was twenty-one years old, a great change took place in her fortunes. She was transplanted from her New England environment into the more dynamic life of the great, growing west. But of course we must not expect to find the west of eighty years ago very much like the west of to-day. In 1832 the middle of Ohio seemed separated by vaster distances and was more difficult of access than any part of our country this side of the Pacific Coast seems to-day. This alteration in our point of view has come about because there never has been a time or place in the history of the world when the growth of a region has been so swift or so picturesque as in that part of our country that we now call the “middle west.”
Of those wonderful things that were to take place in the advancement of our country’s resources and welfare, the building of schools, churches, libraries and institutions of all kinds, and the development of national spirit, Harriet Beecher’s father seems to have had a prevision. He saw the great possibilities in the growing western country, and felt a burning desire to have a share in upbuilding the best things there. His feeling in regard to this great work is illustrated in one little page of his biography.
In order to impress the full meaning of prayer upon his mind and heart, Dr. Beecher would sometimes write it out in his diary; and in one of these prayers written at about this time he said: “If there be anything which by living I can do, or by dying I can do, to mitigate on earth the miseries of sin and to save my country and to save the world, then speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth.”
About this time also he wrote a letter to Catherine, in which he said: “I have thought seriously of going over to Cincinnati, that London of the west, to spend the remnant of my days in that great conflict, and in consecrating all my children to God in that region who are willing to go. If we gain the west, all is safe; if we lose it, all is lost.... This is not with me a transient flash of feeling, but a feeling as if the great battle is to be fought in the valley of the Mississippi, and as if it may be the will of God that I shall be employed to arouse and help marshal the host for the conflict.... These are only my thoughts, but they are deep, and yet withal, my ways are committed to God.”6
It was in this spirit that he received a call to become the head of Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati, Ohio. Catherine sympathized with her father in his enthusiasm for the intellectual and spiritual development of the west, and she decided to go with him into the new work. In fact he had said to her, “If I go, it is part of my plan that you go.”
Harriet had now to leave her many friends in Hartford and the relatives in Litchfield and Nut Plains. Her two brothers, William and Edward, were now established preachers, and Henry Ward and Charles were in college. The sister next older than herself, Mary, was married and was living in Hartford. To separate from all these loved ones and go out into a far distant land was very hard.
The journey west occupied many days and had something of the fascination of a wild adventure. They were going into a new land, into a great missionary field; their hearts were high and their courage was good. They chose the most expeditious way of going, which at that time was by way of New York City, Philadelphia, over the mountains to Wheeling, and then down the Ohio River to Cincinnati. This, we must remember, was before the through railroad lines to the west had been built.
There were many pauses by the way for the Beecher cavalcade, since the fame of Dr. Lyman Beecher as the greatest of the pulpit speakers of New England had been carried everywhere, and the people in the large towns through which they passed wished him to stay long enough at least to preach to them—a request that he was anxious to grant.
The first stopping place was New York. Here they paused long enough for Dr. Beecher to preach several times and to see many of his friends among the ministers and to make more. Harriet found life in that great city of New York, as she said, “too scattering.” She believed it would “kill her dead” to live long in the way they were living there. It seemed to her like a sort of “agreeable delirium”! She began to be thirsty for the waters of quietness. But her father, she said, was in his element—dipping into books, consulting authorities for his orations, going around here, there, and everywhere, begging, borrowing, and spoiling the Egyptians, delighted with past success and confident for the future.
Dr. Beecher had also another object in view, which was to do some energetic begging for the foundation of the Biblical professorship in the Theological Seminary of which he was about to take charge. Harriet, in writing back to friends in Hartford about it, said casually: “The incumbent of this foundation is to be C. Stowe.” This is the first time that we hear the name of the one who is to bear so large a part in the story of Harriet Beecher’s life.
From New York the Beecher company went by steamboat to Philadelphia. Here they had the great misfortune to lose track of all their baggage. They had to wait for a time in Philadelphia until it could be traced to another wharf. It was finally recovered and brought on, but not till after the ladies of the family, usually the very pink of perfection in their starched and snowy collars and lace edgings, had suffered extreme discomfort because of the limp and dusty condition of their frills. The comfort of the family was at last restored and the mother and Aunt Esther were supplied with fresh caps and ruffles. Great was the joy! Dr. Beecher struck an attitude as the boxes were brought in, swung his hat, and called for three cheers. “So should a man do,” cried Harriet, “whose wife has not had a cap or a ruffle for a week!”
The delay in Philadelphia was not specially unwelcome. Here the party was separated into two sections: the father and mother with Aunt Esther and the baby, went to one friend’s house, and the older children to another. Their hosts were rich, hospitable folks and their visits were full of enjoyment. There was much to be seen by the young people, and the father’s energies were taken up with conferences and preaching and with prayer-meetings held specially for the success of the great missionary object that was calling him into what seemed to them all a very far-away country.
By all this business they were kept so long that Mrs. Beecher and Aunt Esther demurred at the delay. Dr. Beecher told them that they were in the hands of Providence, but they said that they would much prefer to trust Providence by the way!
At last they were all ready to take the plunge into the actual west.
If their journey had but been a few years later, a railroad train would have taken them as far as Columbia, Pennsylvania; then a canal would have carried them along the east bank of the Susquehanna River as far as the entrance to the Juniata. At this point the canal would have crossed that great river by means of an aqueduct and they would have followed the blue Juniata to Hollidaysburg. There the problem how to get over the forbidding mountain ridge that faced them would have been solved by the exciting method of a portage which by means of pulleys drew the cars up to fourteen hundred feet above that town, using three levels for separate short journeys from level to level. The descent to Johnstown on the other side of the ridge would have been made by the same method reversed, and the canal packet boat from that place would have used the Kiskiminetos River along to Pittsburgh, where the great Ohio River would have brought them to Cincinnati. All this could have been done in 1836. But this was 1832; and none of these things were under way at the time, though they were being more or less seriously thought of. The only method of traveling in the year 1832 was by the time-honored daily or tri-weekly stages.
Of these stage-coach lines an elaborate system was at their service; for the largest part of the journey, the family availed themselves of this method, sometimes, however, finding it more economical for so large a party to charter a coach and have it all to themselves.
We may imagine them climbing into a big old-fashioned stage, drawn by four great horses, and starting out for Wheeling, a city that lies right in the line from New York to the southern part of Ohio, if you make the line curve a little bit to the south in order to make the easiest cut through the mountains.
The company included Dr. and Mrs. Beecher and Aunt Esther; and for children, there were Catherine, Harriet, Isabella, George, Thomas and James; some of these names have been added to the list since the Litchfield days. As for this company of young folks, it may be safely said that they enjoyed every inch of the way; no badness of the roads, no threat of tempest, no weariness of unsupported backs, could subdue their skipping spirits. There was plenty of room in the coach with three on a seat. Besides that, George sat with the driver on the box, and as the journey progressed, and new drivers took their places at the points where horses were exchanged, he acquired every little while a new set of stories which he faithfully shouted back to the occupants behind. George was also a great singer, and led the choir of the whole coachful in singing hymns and songs. Whenever they passed through a town or along by a small wayside village, he let loose a packet of tracts and snowed them all along the road for the inhabitants to pick up after the cavalcade had gone by. And woe be to any wayfaring people that came along the road if they did not love tracts, for these snowy batteries were discharged regularly upon the head of each one they met! Harriet called out to him, “George, you are peppering the country with moral influence.”
The first day was full of enjoyment; they had an obliging driver, good roads, good spirits, a good dinner, fine scenery. Harriet pronounced it all good. That day they went about thirty miles and reached Downingtown], Pennsylvania. Here, as Harriet said, they were dropped down like Noah and his wife and his sons and his daughters, with the cattle and creeping things. And here they had the first night’s rest of their real pilgrimage.
Wherever they stopped was home for the time being. To bring about this magical transformation of things that mean nothing, into things that mean “home,” was a special gift of Harriet’s, acquired in her own home circle. On this journey into the wilds there was always a gathering of the children for singing and prayer in the little parlor of whatever inn might be their stopping place for the time. On such an evening we can see them sitting around the table in the candle light, the father reading and studying. Catherine writing to Mary at Hartford, and Harriet to her loved friend, Georgiana May, Thomas working at his journal, and Isabella keeping her little record, too, while George is only waiting for a chance to sit up to the table and take his pen. In her letter Harriet is saying this: “As for me, among the multitude of my present friends, my heart still makes occasional visits to the absent ones, visits full of pleasure and full of cause for gratitude to Him who gives us friends. I have thought of you often to-day, my Georgiana.... This afternoon as we were traveling, we struck up ‘Jubilee.’ It put me in mind of the time when we used to ride along the rough North Guilford roads and make the air vocal as we went along. Pleasant times, those! Those were blue skies, and that was a beautiful lake, and noble pine-trees and rocks they were that hung over it. But those we shall look upon ‘nae mair.’ Well, my dear, there is a land where we shall not love and leave. Those skies shall never cease to shine, the waters of life we shall never be called upon to leave. We have here no continuing city, but we seek one to come. In such thoughts as these I desire ever to rest, and with such words as these let us ‘comfort one another and edify one another.’”
The next stopping place was Harrisburg. Here they had another homelike evening, gathering in Catherine’s room for a “sing” before going to bed. Then followed a good restful sleep in preparation for the long, slow journey up the Appalachian range that was to begin in the morning. In this part of the pilgrimage they were not so fortunate as they had hitherto been. The horses were poor and the roads very bad. It took them eight days to do what the mail-stage was accustomed to accomplish in two. But good company makes a long journey short. The children’s spirits were equal to the need, though they may have been by this time a little weary. They flung their songs upon the breeze and their tracts upon the traveler whenever they met one, and left a trail of gladness upon the mountain heights.
When they reached the city of Wheeling the family were again distributed among the homes of the people who were desirous that they should remain so that they might hear Dr. Beecher preach. At this place the family had expected to take the canal boat down the Ohio. But either because the water was too low or because of a rumor that cholera was becoming prevalent down the river, they decided against the great waterway as a means of travel. And if the canal boat experience would have been like that described by Dickens in his “American Notes” or even like the short sketch that Harriet Beecher made in her little story, “The Canal-boy,” the Beecher party had little to regret in being compelled to go a roundabout way, in a comfortably airy stage-coach, even though the journey by this method did take longer.
After a busy week in Wheeling, they chartered a coach again and went on westward. This time they verged a little northward and took in Granville, Ohio, where they stayed a while to attend a protracted meeting. Here there was more and more preaching. For the rest of the way there was a corduroy road, made of logs laid crosswise. George said, “They make the roads this way for the benefit of the dyspeptics out here.” But never mind! That corduroy road led over the most beautiful rolling prairie, and down along pleasant river courses, till it came in view of a wide valley through which the great Ohio, La Belle Rivière, swept with a great curve, leaving a charmed space for the building of a city. Here the stage-coach swung along through streets between rows of neat red brick houses surrounded by abundant gardens, and paused at last for rest after the long pilgrimage. Here the Beecher home was to be for eighteen years.