Boston—Home Atmosphere—Various Experiences—Ethics rubbed in by a six-pound Shot—Discontent—Makes up his mind to go to Sea—To Study Navigation—Picture of his Life in Boston.

In the spring of 1826 Dr. Lyman Beecher moved with his family to Boston. Henry Ward was thirteen years old the following June, “a green, healthy country lad,” “with a round, full, red-cheeked face.” Here a new world opened to him and a new set of influences was brought to bear upon him.

The same home life was around him, and, if possible, more intense than ever; for Dr. Beecher had come to Boston to be the champion “of the Faith once delivered to the saints,” and he threw himself into the work with all the zeal and enthusiasm of an intensely ardent nature.

He had watched with intense interest every step of that reaction in Massachusetts from the strict theocracy of the Puritans, called the “Unitarian Controversy.” He thoroughly understood and heartily condemned the process, employed by the wealthy and literary classes, of taking away from the church, composed presumably of regenerate persons, the power to govern their own affairs and of giving it to the congregation, which was often composed of men hostile to a spiritual religion. He had seen the dominant majority enter into the possession of church edifices and church property, employ ministers opposed to the old faith, and drive the orthodox ministry out into school-houses and town-halls; and old foundations established by the fathers to perpetuate the faith had been seized and made to support opposite and antagonistic views. All this had kindled in him a burning indignation against the wrong that had been perpetrated, and a deep sympathy for the brethren who had suffered. “It was as a fire in my bones,” he said. “My mind was all the time heating, heating, heating.”

“His family prayers,” we are told by Mrs. Stowe, “at this period, departing from the customary forms of unexcited hours, became often upheavings of passionate emotion such as I shall never forget. ‘Come, Lord Jesus,’ he would say, ‘here where the bones of the fathers rest, here where the crown has been torn from thy brow—come and recall thy wandering children. Behold thy flock scattered on the mountains; these sheep, what have they done? Gather them, gather them, O Good Shepherd, for their feet stumble upon the dark mountains.”

Mr. Beecher in after-years spoke of the work here as something deeper than a mere dispute between rival denominations or antagonistic creeds. “The outward form of the great excitement was that of controversy between the Unitarian and Calvinistic faiths. But, as compared with the great inward reality, this was but superficial. It was broader than any doctrinal controversy, deeper than any sectarian conflict. It was a resurrection of vital religion, in all churches of every name, and in the Unitarian churches as well as the Evangelical.”

It will be seen that the same atmosphere of deep feeling and triumphant faith, if possible more tropical and more thoroughly charged with electricity, continued in the new as in the old home; but outside the family very different influences were brought to bear upon the lad, and he was led out into a much wider range of experiences. We give as many of these as space will allow.

The first thing that greatly impressed him seems to have been the bells:

“Is there any boy left in Boston to whose ears the Christ Church chimes sound as they did to mine? Some travelled persons in Litchfield had informed me that the churches in Boston were so thick that the bells on Sunday morning would almost play a tune. The first Sunday morning after the family took possession of the house in Sheafe Street, being in the back-yard, I heard in a wondrous manner the tune of ‘Greenville,’ played on bells! The whole air was full of ‘Greenville.’

“I was fully persuaded that this was the thing predicted, and that this tune simply fell into place among the vast number of bell-strokes. Too young to analyze or reason upon the matter, I listened with a pleasure and amazement which I fear nothing will ever give me again till I hear the bells ring out wondrous things in the New Jerusalem. Blessed city! in which dwelt so divine a spirit of harmony that some airy hand governed the widely scattered belfries, and taught the notes which each bell carelessly struck to come together in time and tune, and march through the air in harmony. And when, after a few minutes, the tune changed and ‘St. Martyn’s’ came sadly and slowly through the air, I could contain myself no longer, but rushed, red and eager, to bring out ‘Charles,’ the inseparable companion of all my marvels, who opened his great eyes with a look of amazement as utter and implicit as if he had been a young devotee witnessing his first miracle. I expounded to him the cause, taking for text the reports which had been made to me while yet in the country. Alas for marvels! The cook, overhearing, laughed us out of countenance, and explained that it was a chime of bells, and also what a chime was. Of course we were wiser and less happy. But never, in forty years, has that chime of bells sounded in my ears without bringing back, for a second, the first electric shock of wonder and pleasure.pleasure.

“Next to Boston bells were Boston ships. Here first we beheld a ship! We shall never again see anything that will so profoundly affect our imagination. We stood and gazed upon the ship, and smelt the sea-air, and looked far out along the water to the horizon, and all that we had ever read of buccaneers, of naval battles, of fleets of merchantmen, of explorations into strange seas, among rare and curious things, rose up in a cloud of mixed and changing fancies, until we scarcely knew whether we were in the body or out. How many hours have we asked and wanted no better joy than to sit at the end of the wharf, or on the deck of some newly-come ship, and rock and ride on the stream of our own unconscious imagination! We went to school in Boston Harbor.

“Next to the merchant marine was the Navy-Yard. We stole over to Charlestown almost every week. With what awe we walked past the long rows of unmounted cannon! With what exhilaration we looked forth from the mounted sea-battery that looked down the harbor, and just waited for some Britisher to dare to come in sight! We have torn any number of ships to pieces with those cannon, with imagination for our commodore and patriotism for our cannoneer. There have been great battles in Boston harbor that nobody knows anything about but ourself!”

Other experiences there were of a different nature.

The peaceful life of the quiet New England village, where each one took his place mostly by the position of the family and held it largely undisturbed, had given way to that of a city full of antagonisms and strife. It was a life not exactly in accordance with the instructions of a well-regulated Christian family, but its rough experiences were undoubtedly adapted to bring out some qualities that were useful in an after-career in which battle was to have so prominent a place.

“It was with some slight contempt that we beheld our first companions. Our first home was in Sheafe Street, far down at the North End, next door to Mr. Gay, the landlord. The boys thereabouts were smart and lively, but few of them could wrestle, and none of them often held out with us in a downright race. I was always long-winded, even before I began public speaking.

“In those days no boy was a good boy among his fellows who had not the courage of battle. It was the duty of all living in certain districts, upon proper occasion, to fight the boys of other streets or districts. The Salem-Streeters included all the small streets adjacent—Sheafe Street, Bennett Street, etc. When nothing else was on hand small scrimmages were gotten up between ourselves—Sheafe Street vs. Bennett Street, etc.; but we all united against Prince Street. Prince-Streeters were the natural enemies of all the surrounding streets. Yet, when the West-Enders came over in battle array, yelling, throwing stones, and driving in the timid lads caught out of bounds, all the North-Enders rose, forgot their local feuds, and went forth in awful array to chastise the wretches that lived at the West End. And if one were to believe all the feats of which we boasted for a month thereafter, he would be sure that since the days that Homer sang no such fighting had ever taken place.

“But what were all these things to that implacable and ineradical hatred which all true Boston boys entertained against Charlestown Pigs? For by such a title did we expose the meanness, the degradation, the cowardice, the utter despicableness of a boy born the other side of the ‘draw’ of the Charlestown Bridge!”

While the father was coming to leadership in the pulpit his son Henry was reaching the same point in his set by the only way opened to him at that time.

“Copp’s Hill? It recalled many a boyish prank. One sport engaged our youthful leisure. It was called ‘Follow your leader.’ It was considered as a testimony to one’s courage when, by acclamation, he was elected to leadership! The game was simple; but the results, always amusing, were sometimes somewhat too stimulating for pleasure. The leader started upon a run, with a long trail of boys in a line behind him, whom he endeavored to throw off by doing things which they were not strong enough or skilful or daring enough to imitate. If twenty boys started, half would drop away, after a sharp run, by mere want of breath; another section could be thrown off by some feat that terrified them.

“We recall one memorable chase. Called to the head of the column, I plunged down Margaret’s Lane, up Prince and back, up toward Copp’s Hill, reducing my followers, by sheer exhaustion, one-half. A brick house was going up; into it I dashed, ran up the ladder, walked along the floor-joists, and let myself down by a rope attached to a guy on the front. Only six or seven could follow. A large mortar-bed lay near by. I dashed into that, wading through the slush. Five came out on the other side with me. Tough five! They followed me into a shop, right back into the adjacent parlor, out at a side-door, though some of the last got the yard-stick well laid on by the indignant shop-keeper, and the last one out came dripping from a pail of water which a woman flung after ‘the nasty varmints,’ as she styled us. Many other feats did we, but in vain. The five would stick. I remember that a large part of Copp’s Hill had been dug down for filling the ‘Causeway,’ leaving a precipitous face—well, say fifty feet high to the eyes, but, if measured, perhaps twenty feet. Ascending the hill, I drew near the verge, a little hesitant to venture the plunge. But to confess that I dare not do anything would be disgraceful, and so, with but a moment’s pause, I jumped for a little crumbling foothold half-way down, and off from that, as soon as on it, to the bottom, which I reached in a heap, with dirt and stones and two boys following after! Not stopping to rub my shins, rejoicing that only two were left, and desperate, I took my way to the near wharf where ‘Billy Gray’s’ ships used to be, climbed the side, ran along the deck, up the bowsprit, far out, and then, with a spring, off into deep water! Down, down, down we went, and seemed likely to go on for ever. At length the descent stopped, and we rose again to the surface—O joy!—to see the two boys standing on the bowsprit! They did not dare! That day’s work established our reputation! We know how Alexander felt! CÆsar and Napoleon can tell us nothing new about the glories of victory!”

That his country honesty was not altogether proof against the temptations of his life in the city is shown by a description he gives, in “Eyes and Ears,” of his successful attempt to purloin a six-pound cannon-ball from the Navy-Yard:

“One day I visited some ill-constructed vaults where shot had been stored. The six and twelve pound shot were extremely tempting. I had no particular use for them. I am to this day puzzled to know why I coveted them. There was no chance in the house to roll them, and as little in the street. For base-ball or shinty they were altogether too substantial. But I was seized with an irresistible desire to possess one. As I had been well brought up, of course the first objection arose on the score of stealing. But I disposed of that, with a patriotic facility that ought long before this to have sent me to Congress, by the plea that it was no sin to steal from the government. Next, how should I convey the shot from the Yard without detection? I tried it in my handkerchief. That was altogether too plain. I tried my jacket-pocket, but the sag and shape of that alarmed my fears. I tried my breeches-pocket, but the abrupt protuberance was worse than all. I had a good mind to be honest, since there was no feasible way of carrying it off. At length a thought struck me: Wrap a handkerchief about it and put it in your hat.

“The iron ball was accordingly swaddled with the handkerchief and mounted on my head, and the hat shut over it. I emerged from the vault a little less courageous than was pleasant, and began my march toward the gate. Every step seemed a mile. Every man I met looked unusually hard at me. The marines evidently were suspecting my hat. Some sailors, leering and rolling toward the ships, seemed to look me through. The perspiration stood all over my face as an officer came toward me. Now for it! I was to be arrested, put in prison, cat-o’-nine-tailed, or shot, for aught I knew. I wished the ball in the bottom of the sea; but no, it was on the top of my head!

“By this time, too, it had grown very heavy; I must have made a mistake in selecting! I meant a six-pounder, but I was sure it must have been a twelve-pounder, and before I got out of the Yard it weighed twenty-four pounds! I began to fear that the stiffness with which I carried my neck would excite suspicion, and so I tried to limber up a little, which had nearly ruined me, for the shot took a roll around my crown in a manner that liked to have brought me and my hat to the ground. Indeed, I felt like a loaded cannon, and every man and everything was like a spark trying to touch me off. The gate was a great way farther off than I had ever found it before; I seemed likely never to get there.

“And when at length, heartsore and headsore, with my scalp well rolled, I got to the gate, all my terror came to a culmination as the sentinel stopped his marching, drew himself up, and, looking through me, smiled. I expected him to say: ‘O you little thievish devil, do you think I do not see through you?’ But, bless his heart! he only said: ‘Pass!’ He did not say it twice. I walked a few steps farther, and then, having great faith in the bravery of my feet, I pulled my hat off before me, and, carrying it in that position, I whipped around the first corner and made for the bridge with a speed which Flora Temple would envy.

“When I reached home I had nothing to do with my shot. I did not dare show it in the house nor tell where I got it; and after one or two solitary rolls I gave it away on the same day to a Prince-Streeter.

“But, after all, that six-pounder rolled a good deal of sense into my skull. I think it was the last thing I ever stole (excepting a little matter of a heart now and then), and it gave me a notion of the folly of coveting more than you can enjoy, which has made my whole life happier. It was rather a severe mode of catechising, but ethics rubbed in with a six-pound shot are better than none at all.”

His student life, which had been such a failure heretofore, was improved a little, and but a little. By means of the pressure of school discipline, backed up and made formidable by family pride and the advice and exhortations heard at home, he managed to make fair progress in most of his studies, especially in the rules and exceptions of the Latin grammar, and to the day of his death was able to establish his claims to proficiency in that language by rattling off the list of eleven prepositions that govern the ablative. But his heart was not in the work. Disgust, insurrection, revolution, was the stormy way along which he was rapidly travelling.

This period in his own life is described in “Norwood”: “Long before the Amazon reaches the ocean it has grown so wide that from the channel no shore can be seen from either side. It is still a river, but with all the signs and symptoms of becoming an ocean. There is a period, beginning not far from fourteen, in young lives, when childhood is widened suddenly, and carries its banks so far out that manhood seems begun, though as yet it is far off. The stream is ocean-deep. Upon this estuary of youth the currents are shifting, the eddies are many. Here are united the strength of the sea and the hindrances of the land.

“The important organic changes which, in our zone, take place in the second full seven of years, produce important results even in the coldest temperaments and in the slenderest natures. But in persons of vigor of body and strength of feeling there is frequently an uprising like a city in insurrection. The young nature, swelling to the new influences with a sense of unmeasurable strength, sometimes turbulent with passions, but always throbbing with excited feelings led on and fed by tantalizing fancies, seems transformed from its previous self and becomes a new nature. New moral forces are developed into activity. Aspirations begin to quicken the soul. Ambitions grow nobler.”

Mrs. Stowe says: “The era of fermentation and development was upon him, and the melancholy that had brooded over his childhood waxed more turbulent and formidable. He grew gloomy and moody, restless and irritable. His father, noticing the change, got him on a course of biographical reading, hoping to divert his thoughts. He began to read naval histories, the lives of great sailors and commanders, the voyages of Captain Cook, the biography of Nelson; and immediately, like lightning flashing out of rolling clouds, came the determination not to rest any longer in Boston, learning terminations and prepositions, but to go forth to a life of enterprise. He made up his little bundle, walked the wharf and talked with sailors and captains, hovered irresolute on the verge of voyages, never quite able to grieve his father by a sudden departure. At last he wrote a letter announcing to a brother that he could and would no longer remain at school; that he had made up his mind for the sea; that if not permitted to go he should go without permission. This letter was designedly dropped where his father picked it up. Dr. Beecher put it in his pocket and said nothing for the moment, but the next day asked Henry to help him saw wood. Now, the wood-pile was the doctor’s favorite debating-ground, and Henry felt complimented by the invitation, as implying manly companionship.

“‘Let us see,’ said the doctor, ‘Henry, how old are you?’ ‘Almost fourteen!’ ‘Bless me! How boys do grow! Why, it’s almost time to be thinking what you are going to do. Have you ever thought?’ ‘Yes; I want to go to sea.’ ‘To sea! Of all things! Well, well! After all, why not? Of course you don’t want to be a common sailor. You want to get into the navy?’ ‘Yes, sir; that’s what I want.’ ‘But not merely as a common sailor, I suppose?’ ‘No, sir; I want to be a midshipman, and after that a commodore.’ ‘I see,’ said the doctor cheerfully. ‘Well, Henry, in order for that, you know, you must begin a course of mathematics and study navigation and all that.’ ‘Yes, sir; I am ready.’ ‘Well, then, I will send you up to Amherst next week, to Mount Pleasant, and then you’ll begin your preparatory studies, and if you are well prepared I presume I can make interest to get you an appointment.’”

And so he went to Mount Pleasant, in Amherst, Mass., and Dr. Beecher said shrewdly: “I shall have that boy in the ministry yet.”

In a sermon preached by his brother, Rev. T. K. Beecher, we have this picture:

“All of you know more about ‘Henry Ward Beecher’ than I do, but I know more about ‘Brother Henry’ than you do.

“A little Boston boy five years old had a brother Henry who was sixteen, and a brother Charles who was fourteen; and though he knew of David and Goliath, who ‘fell down slambang,’ and David, ‘little David ran up and cut his head off’! though he knew about Samson and the lion, yet for the present strength and greatness Henry and Charles were his heroes. Did they not own a long sled and coast down Copp’s Hill and jump sixteen sleds at the bounce? Did they not sharpen skates with enthusiasm and go off to the mill-dam alone?

“By night when the tocsin rang and the little boy covered his head and shivered under the sheets, did not Henry and Charles rush down two flights of stairs and out the door, yelling fire? And they were at school fitting for college at Mt. Pleasant. Their hair-trunk was two days a-packing, and the stage took them away before daylight, leaving the house so quiet and so empty. Sixteen and five—oh! how magnificent the boy of sixteen to the little boy of five. I speak of brother Henry.

“But at prayers, family prayers, Henry and Charles could sing, and so could the little boy. A frail, blue-eyed, willowy mother sat in the rocking-chair. Father would read—the little boy knew not what. But for the singing from village hymns Henry sometimes fluted, making a queer mouth; and then, all kneeling, it was ever asked by father, ‘Overturn and overturn, till He whose right it is shall come and reign, King of nations as King of saints.’

“Prayers over, Aunt Esther and the little boy, he standing in a chair, washed the dishes, and Henry and Charles stormed out to the Latin School. But they went to Mount Pleasant, and Mr. Colton was the teacher. Twice a year they came home, at Thanksgiving and the summer vacation. The expected stage drove up, and the little boy, in agony of delight that could not be endured, hid himself on a trundle-bed under mother’s and braided bed-cords till, searched out, he was tossed above the clouds by great, strong brother Henry.

“At morning prayers, ‘Thou hast brought back our boys in health,’ the little boy heard that and the ‘overturn and overturn’ part; and that little boy, now your pastor, bears witness in your ears that the boys were kept, and that since those days there have been overturnings not a few. And further he tells you that those family prayers propagated the ancestral religion in brother Henry, though they have failed to hand down the ancestral theology.

“The boys must go to college, and leave the little boy to go to infant school, to Miss Bull, and learn to tell the hour on a card clock, and add, subtract, and count with an abacus. Henry in the world of departed spirits, Amherst; Charles at Bowdoin. Every morning father praying for our boys at college: ‘May they become good ministers of our Lord Jesus Christ!’

”... Edward was a man, like father. But Henry and Charles were heroes, doing things. How they could jump! How they whirled around the horizontal bar! How Charles could flog a top! And Henry had peanuts and red peppermints. Shall I ever be big and do things, and run to fires, and go way down Milk Street?

“Yes, one vacation brother Henry took the little boy down on Milk Street, past two Unitarian churches safely, past Tremont Theatre, past an open stable-door where lay a red cow with monstrous horns, chewing her big mouth with nothing in it, and looking, oh! so strong and hungry at that little boy. But Henry wasn’t scared. He was whistling. ‘Come along, Tom,’ he said, ‘that’s only a cow.’

“Henry and Charles at college; father and eight of us staging from Boston to Cincinnati, leaving my heroes. Amherst and Bowdoin loom large in my fancy still. My heroes were to stay and grow! Tidings once a month: Charles has a fiddle, Henry has a six-keyed flute; Charles, and something about circles and geometry; Henry, and phrenology and temperance lectures.”

Such was his life in Boston, undoubtedly to a certain extent beneficial, and, by reason of the activity of the streets of the city and the bustle of the wharves, attractive. But coming at the turbulent period of his own development, when the rough elements of its thoroughfares were more congenial to him than the influences of its churches, libraries, or homes, it was far from being satisfactory. Its liberty was not altogether safe, nor were its restrictions healthful; and he says: “I cannot see how, if I had remained much longer in Boston, I could have escaped ruin.” We see him, therefore, start off on the lumbering stage-coach, in the early autumn morning before daylight, for Amherst, with a sense of relief and hearty thankfulness that he is escaped as a bird from the snare of the fowler.