Nineteenth-century revivalist and social reformer Lyman Beecher and the eleven of his children who survived to adulthood kept tabs on each other via circular letters. Writing from cities across the eastern half of the country, these preachers, authors, academics, and activists would add a few lines of news to the evolving document and send it on to the next family member. Obbie Tyler Todd’s group biography of the famed Beechers re-creates this linkage, connecting strong personalities to each other and to the many causes and institutions they influenced. Like the family members and these letters, which constituted just a portion of Todd’s wide-ranging research, the book is lively, quick-paced, and sometimes a bit too much.
Because so many members of the family were towering figures, they have been subjects of biographies before. Todd, a Baptist pastor and adjunct professor of history who holds a PhD from New Orleans Baptist Seminary, draws on these prior books about patriarch Lyman Beecher, doyenne of domesticity Catherine Beecher, antislavery novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe, suffragist Isabella Beecher Hooker, and (in)famous pastor Henry Ward Beecher. Correspondence and publications help fill in details about the rest of the siblings, while additional secondary research places the Beechers in historical context. Whereas previous analyses of the family emphasized the children’s rejection of Lyman’s Calvinism—a preoccupation of mid-20th century “American mind” historiography—Todd attends more to continuities. True, the family members diverged (and often later converged) in their thinking about such weighty subjects as Providence, enslavement, and women’s rights, but a common, crusading energy coursed through their veins. “In some sense,” Todd writes, “Beecherism was the moralistic spirit with which the family stumped for their various causes, not the causes themselves” (20). This spirit was fueled by unshakeable confidence in human progress, America, and above all in the Beechers themselves. “The Beecher conceit surpasses understanding,” groaned Elizabeth Cady Stanton (quoted, 242).
Todd’s chapters proceed chronologically, tackling roughly one decade each. Some chapters also center on one key cause or controversy, such as attempts to “save” the West (chapter 2) or compromises delaying the eruption of the Civil War (chapter 4), but other events routinely intrude to pull focus from larger themes. Chapter 3 addresses the Old School-New School Presbyterian schism, Catherine’s major publications on Christian Republican womanhood, and the apparent suicide of Lyman’s third son, George. Chapter 6 tacks between three of the sisters’ views of women’s rights and brother Henry’s headline-grabbing sex scandal. That chapter is titled, ambivalently, “The Woman (or Women) Question.” Real life is, of course, like this, full of incongruous events tumbling into each other, but it can be disorienting to read. There is more than a whiff of “meanwhile, back at the ranch” in Todd’s transitions between coverage of the Beechers’ numerous church trials, landmark publications, relocations, marriages, squabbles, and tragic deaths, all against a backdrop of national events and developments in church history.
In the Introduction, Todd offers two explanations for taking the group biography approach. One, it had been attempted only once before (Milton Rugoff, The Beechers: An American Family in the Nineteenth Century, HarperCollins, 1981), and that book was both long and, in Todd’s view, “riddled with inaccuracies and stereotypes about New England Puritanism” (10). Two, because the Beechers were so entangled with each other privately and publicly, “it is difficult to tell one Beecher’s story without telling them all” (8). Additional upsides of the group biography emerge from the text. It is interesting to see how people with the same background and very similar values could come to differing positions on key questions of their day. The same family tree bore ardent and reluctant abolitionists, as well as men and women with irreconcilable views of marriage and divorce. Including more lives also naturally causes the book to include a more comprehensive overview of 19th-century American life. The Beechers did not do everything—none joined the Gold Rush, for example, or became a foreign missionary, or founded a commercial empire or Utopian commune—but they did an awful lot. A survey of 19th-century social movements can become an alphabet soup of benevolent organizations, while tying these trends to the lives of specific individuals helps the reader relate to them.
What all of this material adds up to is, however, not entirely clear by the end of the book. It has no conclusion, merely a final chapter in which everyone who has not already died, dies. Real life is, of course, like this, too. Legacies are complicated. Influence can dissipate or persist in ways the deceased person never intended. As hard as it is to impose a scholarly interpretation on any single human life, it is probably impossible—or intellectually irresponsible—to attempt such imposition on a family the size of a football team. Better, perhaps, to sit back and marvel at their energy, watching them advance and collide, confident that they held an entire nation’s attention.
