Beginning nine months before American Independence and ending nine days after the Emancipation Proclamation, the life of Lyman Beecher is, quite arguably, the story of American evangelicalism in the early republic. However, due to their common cause in reforming America, it is difficult to tell one Beecher’s story without telling them all. Just as Lyman helped write his children’s stories, so they helped write his—literally. The “so-called autobiography” of Lyman Beecher was in fact a project carried out by several of the Beecher children, principally by Charles. And the children did the same for one another. Charles wrote his brother Edward’s autobiography, and Catharine did similarly for her brother George. As the once-widowed father of eight small children at the age of forty, and the twice-widowed father of eleven children at the age of fifty-nine, Lyman, who did not know his own mother and had no relationship with his father, forged an especially affectionate bond with his sons and daughters and became a connection point between the Beecher siblings long after they had left the Cincinnati residence at Walnut Hills. In fact, by the 1850s, when distance and personalities divided them, many of the Beechers longed for “the early unity of the family.” Therefore, that Lyman’s children continued his legacy of reform and that several surpassed their father in notoriety was perhaps to be expected.
Discussing Lyman Beecher’s politics, for example, historian Daniel Walker Howe could not avoid mentioning his children. Calling Beecher “the Henry Clay of the ecclesiastical realm,” Howe then notes,
The son of a blacksmith, Beecher fathered one of the truly great families in American history. Among his five daughters and eight sons were Harriet the novelist, Edward the abolitionist, Henry Ward the preacher, Isabella the suffragist, and Catharine, the founder of home economics. His own father had been stern and unloving, but Lyman involved himself wholeheartedly with his children. He encouraged them in both intellectual and religious seeking and succeeded in imbuing them with his strong sense of mission. In an age when education for women was a novelty, Beecher devoted as much concern to his daughters’ minds as to his sons’. His drive for himself, his family, and the cause of Christ knew no bounds.
In such an enlightened and well-known family, the father was somewhat overshadowed by his children. Transcendentalist Theodore Parker once called Lyman Beecher “the father of more brains than any other man in America.” So notable was the entire Beecher family by the late nineteenth century that a reference to one Beecher often begged mentioning another. When the New York Evening Express praised the ministry of Henry Ward Beecher at Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, the editor called America’s most famous pastor “a worthy scion of the name,” as if celebrity was simply to be expected of Lyman Beecher’s son. Like his father, Henry had become the most famous preacher of his generation and “the Billy Graham of his era.”
However, Beechers weren’t just compared with their father. Sometimes they were confused with one another. In 1863, when Henry visited Britain, where his sister’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) was an overwhelming sensation, he was once accidentally introduced as the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher Stowe. Nevertheless, Henry would become almost as well-known in England as his sister. At his residence in London, the famous Baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon was once nearly swindled by a con man claiming to be “Captain Beecher, the son of Henry Ward Beecher.” Thankfully, Spurgeon did not fall for the ruse. He replied warily, “If you are really Mr. Beecher’s son, you must be able, through the American consul, or some friend, to get your cheque cashed, without coming to a complete stranger.”
Whether in pretense or in truth, the name of Beecher was known throughout the Anglo-American world. At the funeral of Lyman Beecher in 1863, Rev. Dr. Leonard Bacon famously commented that the nation was inhabited by three types of people: saints, sinners, and Beechers.
In a golden age of oratory and print, the Beechers were, one could argue, the most recognizable family in nineteenth-century America. Noting their signature style of communication, Unitarian Thomas Starr King described “the rhetorical and emotional friskiness of the Beechers.” Even Samuel Clemens, or Mark Twain, known for his own “rhetorical and emotional friskiness,” described the lesser-known Thomas as “a famous Beecher.” Thomas officiated Clemens’s wedding to Olivia Langdon in 1870. Clemens was also known to drop by the Stowe residence in Hartford quite regularly, pretending to ask advice from his fellow celebrity novelist. So renowned was the entire family that Isabella complained of being overshadowed by her other siblings: “Everywhere I go, I have to run on the credit of my relations. Nowhere but at home can I claim to a particle of individuality, to any distinction of goodness, smartness, or anything else whatever.” In 1868, Isabella even published a couple of articles on women’s suffrage anonymously because she desired the essay to “make its own way, [rather] than be helped by my Beecher name.”
Reprinted with the permission of The Beechers: America’s Most Influential Family
Obbie Tyler Todd is a pastor and historian. He is the pastor of Third Baptist Church of Marion, Illinois and serves as adjunct faculty at Luther Rice College & Seminary. Obbie is the author of three books, including The Moral Governmental Theory of Atonement (Cascade, 2021), A Baptist at the Crossroads (Pickwick, 2021), and Southern Edwardseans (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2022). Obbie has also been published in a dozen academic journals and has written on American history for Desiring God, The Gospel Coalition, and The Liberty Fund.
