Litchfield—Situation—Natural Features—Early Settlers—Social and Moral Advantages—Patriotism—North Street Described—The Beecher Home—Birth of Henry Ward—The Times at Home and Abroad—His Birth-Mark.

As Henry Ward was perfectly satisfied with the parents that bore him, so he was with the place in which he was born. “Surely old Litchfield,” he says, “was a blessed place for one’s birth and childhood. Although there were no mountains, there were hills, the oldest-born of mountains, high, round, and innumerable. Great trees there were, full of confidences with the wind that chastised them in winter and kissed and caressed them all the summer.”

The hills referred to were “Prospect” and “Mount Tom” on the west, “Chestnut Hill” on the east, and others like them but unnamed—the “high, round, and innumerable” ones of which he speaks, and which together formed, with their sloping sides and valleys between, that broad and irregular plateau of elevated land, extending for miles on either side, in the midst of which the village of Litchfield is situated. A country of hills, with that wide and picturesque horizon which only such a landscape can furnish, where the irregular outline appears as walls and watch-towers for the protection of the home territory, with here and there an open door, through which the imagination of youth or the feet of maturer years may pass out into the great world of sunshine or of cloud beyond.

Litchfield Hill itself, on which the village stands, is more than a thousand feet above sea-level, “high and broad-backed,” and belongs, with all its fellows, to the Green Mountain range, which, beginning near the Gulf of St. Lawrence, sweeps in an irregular curve to the seaboard at Long Island Sound, the back-bone of this great New England peninsula.

High enough to be breezy and healthy, but not so high as to be unfertile, and sloping to the south, it afforded then, as now, all the inducements for residence which sun, soil, pure air, and a beautiful landscape could furnish.

Lakes, without which no landscape is perfect, were added: Little Pond to the southwest, and Big Bantam Lake beyond, were the ones that were visible from the village, out of a large number that can be found in the township; but the Sawmill Pond, where Henry Ward caught his first fish, with an alder-stick for a pole and a bent pin for a hook—caught it so thoroughly that it was dashed in pieces upon the rocks behind him—has disappeared with the tearing away of the dam that held it.

Brooks ran down between the hills and sang their way through the meadows, each one offering some new feature to the landscape, and each a field of new discovery for inquisitive youth.

Woods, made up of every variety of tree and shrub native to our latitude, where nuts grew and all kinds of small game abounded, where crows and now and then a hen-hawk built their nests, were in easy reach upon the slopes of the hills both to the west and east. Ledges of rock to the north were the lair of wildcats, a vermin so numerous seventy-five years ago as to be a serious pest to the farmers; and stone walls, where woodchucks retreated from the clover-fields and thought themselves safe, were the usual division-fences for the fields.

There were other things that were equally pleasing to a boy’s fancy, and perhaps equally influential in his education. The lakes, streams, and forests of the town had been the favorite fishing and hunting ground of the Indians; arrow-heads were occasionally picked up on the lake shore or turned up by the ploughshare upon the hillside; and, best of all, Mount Tom was one of the series of stations where blazed the signal-fires which the Indians of this region built to warn their brethren of the whole territory between the Housatonic and Naugatuck rivers of the approach of their enemies, the fierce Mohawks.

Litchfield, in short, was the paradise of a birth-place for any boy. It was paradise, school-house, gymnasium, church, and cathedral to Henry Ward Beecher. In it he experienced his sweetest pleasures, learned his best lessons, gained control of his powers, and offered his first worship. He breathed its pure air, climbed its rocks, wandered in its woods, wrestled with its winter storms, and in this way laid the foundation for that superb health for which he was remarkable through life.

With the hunger and inquisitiveness of a growing boy, he searched nature’s storehouse of fruits and nuts, which opens with the wintergreen plums and squaw-berries of the melting snow-time of spring, and continues, a house of plenty for all that know her secrets—partridges, squirrels, and boys—until the snow covers the ground in December, and so gained that habit of investigation into the things of nature, and of close observation, that distinguished him ever after.

He lay on the ground and looked up into the blue sky and the moving tree-tops for hours together, and listened to the voices of spring-time and eventide, and in this way, as he tells us, received the first distinct religious impressions that he remembered. His nature, which seemed closed almost to the verge of stupidity to the rules of syntax and the answers in the Westminster Catechism, was wide open and receptive to all the processes and influences of nature around him. He drank them in, and they became not only a vast storehouse of facts and images to which he resorted in after-life for illustrations, but, even more than that, a very part of himself. The tree that so often appeared in his sermons was made from those up whose trunks he had climbed, in whose shade he had lain, and to the whisperings of whose leaves he had listened in boyhood. The spring which so often served in illustrating spiritual truths was but the description of those that burst out from the foot of Chestnut or of Prospect Hill, and the flowers so frequently referred to in the pulpit or in private conversation were such as he had grown familiar with by the roadside, in the meadows or the forests of his country home. The moving of the great cloud-shadows across the fields of Litchfield, the blue of its skies, the reddening of its mornings and the gold of its sunsets, the flash of its sunlight upon the lake, its wealth of apple-blossoms, the exquisite beauty of its violets hidden away in fence-corners, the grace of its elm-branches, the ruggedness of its oaks, the strength of its rocks, the soft catkins of its willows, its meadow flower-garden of clover, daisy, and buttercup, the gorgeousness of its forests in autumn, the gurgle of its brooks, the song of its birds, the plaintive voices of its twilight, the gentle breathings of its August winds and the fierce rattle of its December storms, were all absorbed by his receptive nature and continually reappeared in his writings and talk of after-years. They added the grace and beauty native to them to all that he wrote or spoke, and were in part the secret of that charm in his words which attached and interested all alike. They did more than this: they prepared him to be an interpreter of nature to others, and, when he had become equally well equipped with a rich spiritual experience, they fitted him, as we shall see farther on, to be the reconciler of a spiritual faith and a material science.

It was not an unimportant thing, but one of God’s beautiful provisions, that Henry Ward Beecher was born in Litchfield, where there is more of nature to the square foot, as we believe, than in any other place on the globe; to learn his first lessons in the beautiful school of her flowers, birds, brooks, meadows, pasture lands, hill-tops, and forests.

“Dear old Litchfield! I love thee still, even if thou didst me the despite of pushing me into life upon thy high and windy hilltop! Where did the spring ever break forth more joyously and sing at escaping from winter, as the children of Israel did when that woman’s-rights Miriam chanted her song of victory? Where did the torrid summer ever find a lovelier place in which to cool its beams? What trees ever murmured more gently to soft winds, or roared more lion-like when storms were abroad?

“It was there that we learned to fish, to ride a horse alone, to do the barn chores, to cut and split wood, to listen at evening to the croaking frogs and whistling tree-toads, to go to meeting and go to sleep, to tear holes in new clothes; there we learned to hoe, to mow away hay, to weed onions, to stir up ministers’ horses with an unusual speed when ridden to water; there we went a-wandering up and down forest-edges, and along the crooked brooks in flower-pied meadows, dreaming about things not to be found in any catechism.”

Equally marked was Litchfield at that day for its social and moral as for its natural advantages. Its early settlers, mostly from the excellent stock from which the colonies of Hartford and Windsor were formed, were men of broad and liberal mould, and began their work upon this hilltop in a characteristic fashion. They laid out their streets and staked off the village common with such generous breadth that they remain the delight of residents and the admiration of strangers to this day. They made such liberal provision for education and religion that the settlement soon became noted for the excellency of its schools and the commanding influence of its pulpit.^[1]

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The law-school of Judges Reeve and Gould, and the young ladies’ school of the Misses Pierce, made it an educational centre scarcely second in the breadth of its influence to any in the land, and attracted a class of residents of high social position.

Its courts gathered from time to time some of the leading members of the bar from the whole country, not for a few hours, as now with our railroad facilities, but for days and weeks together. All these things helped to create a very high order of public spirit—that force which, often wholly unregarded, is yet so powerful in moulding the character and giving direction to the life.

One other element in this communal influence must not be omitted—its intense patriotism. From the beginning to the close of the Revolutionary struggle the records of the county of Litchfield are stamped with the evidence of the most enthusiastic loyalty to the cause of the struggling colonies. At the time of the Boston Port Bill, Litchfield had forwarded a liberal contribution for the aid of the poor of that city. When the equestrian statue of King George, of gilded lead, was missing from the Bowling Green in New York, it was shortly found in the dwelling-house of Oliver Wolcott in this village, was melted down by his daughters and their friends, and furnished forty thousand bullets, which were sent to our soldiers in the field, to be afterwards forwarded by them, from the muzzles of their muskets, to the king’s Hessians, with the hissing compliments of the American colonies.

No town excelled her in the proportionate number or quality of the men she sent into the field (at one time every able-bodied man in the town being, it is said, at the front), nor in the suffering and loss which they endured. Thirty out of a company of thirty-six who surrendered at Fort Washington, New York, “died miserable deaths from cold, hunger, thirst, suffocation, disease, and the vilest cruelties from those to whom they had surrendered on a solemn promise of honorable treatment.” This had made Ethan Allen, a native of this village, and, as is well known, a professed infidel, grind his teeth and exclaim: “My faith in my creed is shaken; there ought to be a hell for such infernal scoundrels as that Lowrie,” the officer in charge of the prisoners. Nor were these days so remote that their influence was unfelt. In 1810 the spirit of ’76 was not seriously diminished, and many of the principal actors in the stirring scenes of the Revolutionary struggle were still alive. Colonel Tallmadge, one of the most dashing and able cavalry officers of the army, Governor Oliver Wolcott, Jr., a member of Washington’s cabinet, and many other soldiers of the Revolution and actors of less note, were residents of the village at the time of the coming here of Lyman Beecher. When we note the burning patriotism which was always so marked a characteristic of Henry Ward, we must remember that he drank it in in his youth from its primitive sources among the old soldiers of Litchfield.

We give his description of the village as it appeared to him in his childhood, although a part of it is out of chronological order. It is found in an article entitled “Litchfield Revisited,” written in 1856:

“The morning after our arrival in Litchfield we sallied forth alone. The day was high and wide, full of stillness, and serenely radiant. As we carried our present life up the North Street we met at every step our boyhood life coming down. There were the old trees, but looking not so large as to our young eyes. The stately road had, however, been bereaved of the buttonball trees, which had been crippled by disease. But the old elms retained a habit peculiar to Litchfield. There seemed to be a current of wind which at times passes high up in the air over the town, and which moves the tops of the trees, while on the ground there is no movement of wind. How vividly did that sound from above bring back early days, when for hours we lay upon the windless grass and watched the top leaves flutter, and marked how still were the under leaves of the same tree!

“One by one came the old houses. On the corner stood and stands the jail—awful building to young sinners! We never passed its grated windows without a salutary chill. The old store, and same old name, Buell, on it; the bank, and its long, lean legs spindling up to hold the shelf up under the roof! The Colonel Tallmadge house, that used to seem so grand that it was cold, but whose cherry-trees in the front yard seemed warm enough and attractive to our longing lips and watery mouths. How well do we remember the stately gait of the venerable colonel of Revolutionary memory! We don’t recollect that he ever spoke to us or greeted us; not because he was austere or unkind, but from a kind of military reserve. We thought him good and polite, but should as soon have thought of climbing the church-steeple as of speaking to one living so high and venerable above all boys!

“Then came Judge Gould’s! Did we not remember that and the faces that used to illuminate it? The polished and polite judge, the sons and daughters, the little office in the yard, the successive classes of law students that received that teaching which has since so often honored both bar and bench. Here, too, we stopped to retrace the very place where, being set on by a fiery young Southern blood, without any cause that we knew of then or can remember now, we undertook to whip one of Judge Gould’s sons, and did not do it. We were never satisfied with the result, and think if the thing could be reviewed now it might turn out differently.

“There, too, stood Dr. Catlin’s house, looking as if the rubs of time had polished it instead of injuring. Next there seemed to our puzzled memory a vacancy. Ought there not to be about there a Holmes house, to which we used to go and get baskets of Virgaloo pears, and were inwardly filled, as a satisfying method of keeping us honest toward the pears in the basket?

“But Dr. Sheldon’s house is all right. Dear old Dr. Sheldon! We began to get well as soon as he came into the house; or, if the evil spirit delayed a little, ‘Cream-o’-tartar with hot water poured upon it and sweetened’ finished the work. He had learned, long before the days of homoeopathy, that a doctor’s chief business is to keep parents from giving their children medicine, so that nature may have a fair chance at the disease without having its attention divided or diverted.

“But now we stop before Miss Pierce’s—a name known in thousands of families, where gray-headed mothers remember the soft and gentle days of Litchfield schooling. The fine residence is well preserved, and time has been gentle within likewise. But the school-house is gone, and she that for so many years kept it busy is gone, and the throng that have crossed its threshold brood the whole globe with offices of maternal love. The Litchfield Law School in the days of Judge Tapping Reeve and Judge Gould, and Miss Pierce’s Female School, were in their day two very memorable institutions, and, though since supplied by others upon a larger scale, there are few that will have performed so much, if we take into account the earliness of the times and the fact that they were pioneers and parents of those that have supplanted them. But they are gone, the buildings moved off, and the ground smoothed and soft to the foot with green grass. No more shall the setting sun see Litchfield streets thronged with young gentlemen and ladies, and filling the golden air with laughter or low converse which, unlaughing then, made life musical for ever after!

“But where is the Brace house? An old red house—red once, but picked by the winds and washed by rains till the color was neutral, thanks to the elements. The old elm-trees guard the spot, a brotherhood as noble as these eyes have ever seen, lifted high up, and in the part nearest heaven locking their arms together and casting back upon their separate trunks an undivided shade. So are many, separate in root and trunk, united far up by their heaven-touching thoughts and affections.

“Mrs. Lord’s house is the only one now before we reach our own native spot. This, too, holds its own and is fertile in memories. Across the way lived Sheriff Landon, famous for dry wit and strong politics.

“But south of him lived the greatest man in town, Mr. Parker, who owned the stages; and the wittiest man in town, with us boys, was Hiram Barnes, that drove stage for him! To be sure, neither of them was eminent for learning or civil influence, but, in that temple which boys’ imaginations make, a stage proprietor and a stage-driver stand forth as grand as Minerva in the Parthenon!

“But there are houses on the other side. The eastern side of Litchfield North Street, like the eastern side of Broadway, was never so acceptable to fashion, albeit some memorable names lived there. It was our good fortune to be born on the west side of the street. We know not what blessings must have descended upon us from having been born on the fashionable side; one shudders to think how near he escaped being born on the other, the east side of the street.”

Into this village Lyman Beecher brought his family in 1810. The dwelling had been described by himself: “The house I shall purchase is in a beautiful situation, is convenient, has a large kitchen, a well-room, a wood-house, besides two barns and a shop on the premises, and one and a half acres of land; price, about $1,350; and there is a good young orchard near for sale, so that we can keep a horse and one or two cows and have apples of our own from the money we shall reserve after paying our debts.” A row of quince-trees “whose early blossoms were so tender and whose switches were so tough—ah! those trees used to come home very near to me!” was on the north side of the house.^[2]

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The home circle was large and varied. There were at this time the parents and six children, “Sister Roxana and her little group of countless numbers.” “Aunt Mary Hubbard,” the mother’s favorite sister, “spent much of her time with us, and some of mother’s favorite pupils from East Hampton, who had come to attend Miss Pierce’s school, sought a home in our family. Betsy Burr, an orphan cousin, lived with us like an adopted daughter, while the kitchen department was under the care of the good and affectionate Zillah and Rachel, who came with us and completed the home circle.”

The circle was still farther enlarged by the coming of Grandma Beecher and Aunt Esther, who, it will be remembered, was Lyman Beecher’s half-sister—“a woman,” as Henry Ward once said, “so good and modest that she will spend ages in heaven wondering how it ever happened that she ever got there, and that all the angels will be wondering why she was not there from all eternity.” “They occupied half of the next house to ours on the way to Prospect Hill, making a place of daily resort for some of the family.”

“Uncle Samuel Foote,” the mother’s sea-captain brother, “came among us, on his return from each voyage, as a sort of brilliant genius of another sphere, bringing gifts and wonders that seemed to wake new faculties in all. Whenever he came to Litchfield he brought a stock of new books, which he and Aunt Mary read aloud.”

It will be seen that, without referring to other inmates of the family, such as boarders and visitors, who afforded a great variety, some amusing and others instructive, the things which Henry Ward said were “the great treasures of a dwelling—the child’s cradle, the grandmother’s chair, the hearth and the old-fashioned fireplace, the table and the window”—were all there, and a great many things beside.

There were trials, almost hardships we should call them, as appears from a letter of Mrs. Beecher’s dated January 13, 1811, but none of them sufficient to bring discouragement or destroy her interest in scientific subjects: “... Would now write you a long letter, if it were not for several vexing circumstances, such as the weather extremely cold, storm violent, and no wood cut; Mr. Beecher gone, and Sabbath day, with company—a clergyman, a stranger; Catharine sick; George almost so; Rachel’s finger cut off, and she crying and groaning with the pain. Mr. Beecher is gone to preach in New Hartford, and did not provide us wood enough to last, seeing the weather has grown so exceedingly cold.... As for reading, I average perhaps one page a week besides what I do on Sundays. I expect to be obliged to be contented (if I can) with the stock of knowledge I already possess, except what I can glean from the conversation of others.... Mary has, I suppose, told you of the discovery that the fixed alkalies are metallic oxides. I first saw the notice in the Christian Observer. I have since seen it in an Edinburgh Review. The former mentioned that the metals have been obtained by means of the galvanic battery; the latter mentions another and, they say, a better mode. I think this is all the knowledge I have obtained in the whole circle of arts and sciences of late; if you have been more fortunate, pray let me reap the benefit.”

Looking at both its sunshine and its shadows, this Litchfield parsonage offers an illustration of an ideal New England home. The household was large, large enough to contain in itself a great variety of resources, and able in that roomy house to offer a broad hospitality to all comers. Democratic in the best sense of the word, servants being considered and treated as constituent members; wide awake, reading all the new books, discussing all the vital questions of the day, arguing all the knotty points of theology; industrious and frugal; allied to the best life of the place and the times, with a broad outlook that took within its horizon all the interests of country and humanity, of the kingdom of God at home and abroad, social, political, and spiritual, it was good soil, and a good exposure for planting a tree whose branches should spread abroad throughout the land and the whole earth.

Into this family was born a son, June 24, 1813—“the fourth, fifth, sixth, or seventh child, somewhere thereabouts,” as he himself says in a speech before the London Congregational Board, with that forgetfulness of numbers which was always characteristic of him. In fact, the ninth child, the eighth living at the time. It was in one of his favorite months, that of June, “which bursts out from the gates of heaven with all that is youngest, and clothed with that which is the most tender and beautiful,” that he began his career.

The grandmother, Roxana Foote, being with her daughter at the time, and remembering her own two favorite sons, who died in youth, named the new-born infant after his uncles, Henry and Ward.

They were stirring times, those of the early summer of 1813. The second war of our national independence was then in progress, and tidings had just reached the village that Fort Brown had been captured by the United States forces. Lyman Beecher says of those times:

“Our dangers in the war of 1812 were very great, so great that human skill and power were felt to be in vain. Thick clouds begirt the horizon, the storm roared louder and louder; it was dark as midnight, every pilot trembled, and from most all hope that we should be saved was taken away; and when from impenetrable darkness the sun burst suddenly upon us and peace came, we said: ‘Our soul is escaped as a bird from the snare of the fowler. The snare is broken and we are escaped.’”

Across the water Napoleon was rallying from the disaster of his Russian campaign, and making the Continent again resound with the roar of his cannon. Not only did these events stir mind and heart of all alike, but the increased taxation and the high prices that resulted from a world at war were severely felt in the parsonage. Mrs. Lyman Beecher wrote: “We feel the war somewhat more than we should one between the Turks and Crim Tartars, inasmuch as, for the most part, every article is double or treble the former price, and some things even more than that.”

These were also the days of the inauguration of some of those great moral movements that are even now in progress in this State and in the land. It was but the year before that the General Association of Connecticut, under the leadership of Lyman Beecher, had taken decided action upon the temperance question. In speaking of it he says:

“I was not headstrong then, but I was heart-strong—oh! very, very! From that time on the movement went on, not only in Connecticut but marching through New England and marching through the world. Glory to God! Oh! how it wakes my old heart up to think of it!”

Morals in general at this time were at a low ebb, and he secured the organization of a “General Society for the Suppression of Vice and the Promotion of Good Morals in the State.”

His sermon upon the “Building of Waste Places” resulted in the institution of a “Domestic Missionary Society” for the work of home evangelization in Connecticut, and he had already secured a Foreign Missionary Society for Litchfield, which was one of the most efficient auxiliaries of the American Board, then but recently established. The conflict concerning the Standing Order which in 1818 resulted in the withdrawal of State aid from the Congregational churches, and which Dr. Beecher feared as likely to open the flood-gates of ruin upon the State, and by reason of which he says, “I suffered what no tongue can tell, for the best thing that ever happened to the State of Connecticut,” was just beginning.

In all the movements of this progressive period stands this village parsonage, like an outpost of an advancing army, held almost within the enemy’s lines.

Added to these public labors and troubles a very heavy family sorrow was laid upon them during this year. The mother, for months before the birth of her ninth child, saw her favorite sister, Mary Hubbard, slowly wasting away with consumption, and had need to call up all her resources of faith and resignation to meet this complication of trials that was upon them.

So this child was nourished, even before birth, in the sweet spirit of a most godly soul, deepened and chastened by both private griefs and public sorrows, and was ushered into the world at an era of most important events, into the very midst of multiplied labors and stirring, progressive movements. All these formed, as it were, an atmosphere of influence as imperceptible to the eye as common air, but as powerful in moulding character in its formative periods as are the natural forces in shaping the mountains or growing the forests. By virtue of that law by which the offspring are affected by those things which most interest the parents, we may safely say that Henry Ward Beecher was in part a product of the times that preceded, attended, and followed his birth, and was stamped by their strong and peculiar characteristics. He carried war in him as a birth-mark, but with him it was war against wickedness and wrong.

The springs of consolation, which flowed from him in after-years for the relief of troubled souls the world over, were such as his mother resorted to in days of trial, and were opened to him in her bosom; and he was continually pressing forward through life to some new measure of reform, to some new step of attainment, by virtue of that reforming, progressive age that so early became a very part of his nature.