Agassiz’s son, Alexander, who was trained by his father and served as his principal museum assistant, became a leading zoologist, a pioneer in oceanography, and made a fortune in copper mining, much of which he ultimately devoted to the museum and other work begun by his father. Elizabeth Cary Agassiz, in less than a decade after her husband’s death, became a founder of Radcliffe College, and was its first president.
In all the surviving accounts in which those who knew Louis Agassiz strive to describe and explain the hold he had on his time, the enthusiasm he generated, his charm and powers as expositor and leader, one theme remains constant: the quality of the man’s commitment. Silliman used the word engaged. William James told a story.
James had been a member of the expedition to Brazil and had his hammock slung next to Agassiz on the deck of the steamer that carried the party up the Amazon. Late one night, lying sleepless as the engines throbbed and the jungle slipped by under a full moon, he heard Agassiz whisper, “James, are you awake?” then continue, “I cannot sleep. I am too happy; I keep thinking of all those glorious plans.”
CHAPTER THREE
The Unexpected Mrs. Stowe
SHE HAD been brought up to make herself useful. And always it suited her.
As a child she had been known as Hattie. She had been cheerful but shy, prone to fantasies, playful, and quite pretty. After she became famous, she would describe herself this way: “To begin, then, I am a little bit of a woman—somewhat more than forty—about as thin and dry as a pinch of snuff; never very much to look at in my best days, and looking like a used-up article now.” She wasn’t altogether serious when she wrote that, but the description was the one people would remember.
She was born in Litchfield, Connecticut—in a plain frame house that still stands—in 1811, when Lincoln was two years old and when Dolly Madison was in the White House. She was the seventh of the nine children Roxana Foote bore Lyman Beecher before being gathered to her reward, and she was such a worker, even when very small, that her preacher father liked to say he would gladly have given a hundred dollars if she could have been born a boy.
As a child she had found most of his sermons about as intelligible as Choctaw, she wrote later, and never would she be at peace with his religion. But she loved him, and for all his gloomy talk of sin and damnation it is not hard to understand why. He was a powerful, assertive figure who had an almost fiendish zest for life—for hunting and fishing with his sons, for listening to all music, and for playing the violin, which he did badly. But could he only play what he heard inside him, he told them all, he could be another Paganini. Best of all he loved to go out and “snare souls,” as he said. In a corner of the cellar he kept a pile of sand, and if his day was not enough to use him up, and stormy weather kept him from outdoor exercise, down he would go, shovel in hand, to sling sand about.
Sunday mornings he would come bounding along through the sunshine, late again for that appointed hour when weekly he brought down Calvinist thunder upon the heads of upright Litchfield people. He had a special wrath for drunkards and Unitarians, and he believed passionately in the Second Coming. But something in him made him shy away from the strictest tenet of his creed—total predestination—and its logic. Once when he had agreed to exchange pulpits with another pastor, he was told that the arrangement had been preordained. “Is that so?” he said. “Then I won’t do it!” And he didn’t.
The happiest times in her childhood, Hattie would write later, were the days spent away from him, visiting an Aunt Harriet in Nutplains, Connecticut, in a house filled with books and pictures gathered by a seafaring uncle and a wonderful old Tory grandmother, who in private still said Episcopal prayers for the king and queen.
At twelve Hattie often wandered off from the noisy parsonage to lie on a green hillside and gaze straight into a solid blue sky and dream of Byron. One month she read Ivanhoe seven times.
In 1832, when Hattie had turned twenty-one, Lyman Beecher answered the call to become the first president of the Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati. He packed up his children and a new wife and set off for what he called “the majestic West.” A New Jerusalem was to be established on the banks of the Ohio. The family spirits were lifted; and crossing the Alleghenies, they all sang “Jubilee.” A Philadelphia journal likened the exodus of the Reverend Mr. Beecher and his family to the migration of Jacob and his sons.
The following summer the Lane Theological Seminary’s first (and at that time, only) professor, Calvin Ellis Stowe, a Biblical scholar and Bowdoin graduate, traveled west in the Beechers’ wake. For all his learning and devotion to the Almighty, Stowe was a very homely and peculiar worker in the vineyard.
He was accompanied by a beautiful young bride, Eliza, who soon became Hattie Beecher’s best friend in Cincinnati but died not very long afterward. Apparently it was a shared grief over Eliza that brought Hattie and Calvin Stowe together. Years later, with some of the proceeds from Uncle Tom’s Cabin, they would commission an artist to do a portrait of Eliza, and every year thereafter, on Eliza’s birthday, the two of them would sit before the portrait and reminisce about Eliza’s virtues.
The wedding took place in early January 1836. What exactly she saw in him is a little hard to say. The night before the ceremony, trying to describe her emotions in a letter to a school friend, she confessed she felt “nothing at all.” But Lord Byron had not appeared in Cincinnati. At twenty-four she may have felt she was getting on.
Calvin was thirty-three, but he seemed as old as her father. He was fluent in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, French, Italian, and German; he was an authority on education; he knew the Bible better than her father. Also, it is recorded, he had a grand sense of humor. But he was as fat and forgetful and fussy as an old woman. In the midst of a crisis, as she would soon discover, he had a bad habit of taking to his bed, and he had absolutely no “faculty,” that Yankee virtue she defined simply as being the opposite of shiftlessness.
He also had an eye for pretty women, as he admitted to Hattie, and a taste for spirits, but these proclivities, it seems, never got him into any particular trouble.
But there was more. Calvin, from his boyhood until his dying day, was haunted by phantoms. They visited him most any time, but favored dusk. They appeared quite effortlessly out of the woodwork, the floor, or the furniture. There was a regular cast of characters, Calvin said, as real and familiar to him as anyone else he knew. Among his favorites were a giant Indian woman and a dark dwarf who between them carried a huge bull fiddle. There was a troupe of old Puritans from his native Natick, all shadowy and dark blue in color, and one “very pleasant-looking human face” he called Harvey. They performed music for Calvin Stowe, and somehow or other they talked to him without making any sound at all, or so he said. He had no reluctance about discussing the subject, and there is no indication that any of his circle thought the less of him for it.
Still, the marriage proved difficult soon enough. Hattie became pregnant almost immediately, and just about then Calvin was asked by the state of Ohio to go to Prussia to study educational systems there. Professing a profound fear of the salt sea, he told her he would never see her again in this life. She insisted that he go, and had given birth to twin daughters by the time of his return. There was a third child two years later, then another, and another, and two more later on. A professor’s wages were never enough, even when old Lyman could pay Calvin in full, which was seldom. Hattie’s health began to fail. “She lived overmuch in her emotions,” one son would explain years later.
“It is a dark, sloppy, rainy, muddy disagreeable day,” she wrote once to Calvin when he was in Detroit attending a church convention. “…I am sick of the smell of sour milk, and sour meat, and sour everything, and then the clothes will not dry, and no wet thing does, and everything smells mouldy; and altogether I feel as if I never wanted to eat again.”
She began going off on visits to relatives, leaving Calvin and the children behind. The visits grew longer. She went to the White Mo
untains, then to Brattleboro, Vermont, to try the water cure. The expenses were met by gifts from distant admirers of the family: the Stowes felt that the Lord had a hand in it. Hattie stayed on for nearly a year at Brattleboro, living on brown bread and milk, enduring the interminable sitz baths of one Dr. Wesselhoeft, and writing home exuberant letters about moonlight snowball fights. And no sooner did she return to the cluttered house in Cincinnati than the professor hauled himself off to Brattleboro, there to stay even longer than she had. When a cholera epidemic broke out in Cincinnati and more than a hundred people a day were dying, she wrote to tell him to stay right where he was. She would manage.
In all they were separated a total of three years and more, and their letters back and forth speak of strong, troubled feelings. The hulking, clumsy Stowe, bearded, nearsighted, complained that she never folded his newspaper properly and that her letters of late were too uninteresting for him to read aloud to his friends. She in turn would run on about her own miseries. The house depressed her, she worried about money, she hated the climate in Cincinnati. She thought too much about death.
But she also told him, “There are a thousand favorite subjects on which I could talk with you better than anyone else. If you were not already my dearly loved husband I should certainly fall in love with you.”
And Calvin would write to her when she was visiting her sister in Hartford, “And now my dear wife, I want you to come home as quick as you can. The fact is I cannot live without you and if we were not so prodigious poor I would come for you at once. There is no woman like you in this wide world.”
In this same letter Calvin proclaimed to her—and apparently he was the first to do so—“My dear, you must be a literary woman. It is so written in the book of fate.” He advised her to make all her plans accordingly, as though she had little else to do. “Get a good stock of health and brush up your mind,” he declared. And he told her to drop her middle initial, E (for Elizabeth), from her name. “It only incumbers it and interferes with the flow and euphony.” Instead: “Write yourself fully and always Harriet Beecher Stowe, which is a name euphonious, flowing, and full of meaning.”
She had already written quite a little—temperance tracts, articles on keeping the Sabbath, New England “sketches,” for which she drew heavily on Calvin’s seemingly inexhaustible fund of childhood reminiscences. Once she had done an article about a slave. She had been selling these pieces to Godey’s Lady’s Book and one or two other magazines. She got two dollars a page on the average, which was more profitable than taking in boarders, she decided. But no one in the family, other than Calvin, had taken her writing seriously.
She worked at the kitchen table, confusion all around, a baby in a clothes basket at her feet. She couldn’t spell very well, and her punctuation would always be a puzzle for her publishers. She dreamed, she said in a letter to Calvin, of a place to work without “the constant falling of soot and coal dust on everything in the room.”
Then in July of 1849 she was writing to tell him that their infant son Charley was dead of cholera. The summer before she had nearly died of it herself, with her father praying over her all through one terrible, sweltering night, the room alive with mosquitoes. She had been unable to do a thing for the child, she told Calvin. For almost a week she watched him die, with no way to help, she said, no way even to ease his suffering.
Calvin returned to her very soon after that, determined to leave Cincinnati for good. He had accepted a professorship at Bowdoin College, in Brunswick, Maine, and before he could settle up his affairs in Cincinnati, he characteristically sent Harriet and three of the children off to Maine ahead of him.
She left Cincinnati in the early spring of 1850, a shabby little figure, perfectly erect, perhaps no more than five feet tall, nearly forty, and pregnant once again. She boarded a riverboat at the foot of town, saying farewell with no misgivings. She was going home, she felt.
She was also heading for a sudden and colossal notoriety of a kind never known by any American woman before, and very few since; but of that she had no notion whatever. Nor did she or anyone else alive have any idea how important those seventeen years in Cincinnati had been to her and, as things turned out, to the course of American history.
She sailed up the Ohio to Pittsburgh, where she changed to a canal boat. Already she was feeling so good she got out and walked the towpath between locks. At Johnstown the boat and all its passengers were hoisted up and over the Allegheny Mountains by that thrilling mechanical contrivance of the nineteenth century, the Portage Railroad. East of the mountains she went by rail to New York and there crossed by ferry to Brooklyn to see her younger brother, Henry Ward, pastor of Plymouth Church. As children they had sometimes been taken for twins, only Henry Ward had been thick of speech and considered the slow one. Now she took note of his obvious success, and they went out for a drive in a spotless six-hundred-dollar carriage, a recent gift from his parishioners.
In a few days she went on to Hartford, still looking after the children and all their baggage. Her spirits were soaring. At Hartford she stayed with her sisters Mary and Isabella; in Boston with her brother Edward, who was growing ever more militant over the slavery issue. All the Beechers were growing more militant over one thing or another. For Isabella it was women’s rights; for the brilliant Catherine, education; for Charles, freedom from theological authority. From Boston, Harriet took the Bath Steamer to Maine, sailing headlong into a northeaster.
On the day they were scheduled to arrive at Brunswick, one story goes, the president of Bowdoin sent a professor named Smith down to greet the new faculty wife, but Smith returned disappointed, saying she must have been delayed. Nobody got off the boat, he said, except an old Irish woman and her brats.
Brunswick offered precious few of the Eastern civilities Mrs. Stowe had longed for, and the house Calvin had taken in advance turned out to be deserted, dreary, and damp, to use her words. She went straight to work, refinishing floors, putting up wallpaper—the pioneer again. When Calvin wrote from Cincinnati to say he was sick and plainly dying and that she and theirs would soon be plunged into everlasting debt, she read the letter with humor and stuffed it into the stove.
Calvin showed up before summer, her baby was born, she rested two weeks. When winter came, there were holes in her shoes, and the house was so cold during one long storm that the children had trouble sitting still long enough to eat their meals. It was during the following spring that she began Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
People are still trying to interpret the book and to explain just how and why she came to write it. At first she said she really didn’t write it at all. She said the book came to her in visions and all she did was write down what she saw. When someone reproached her for letting Little Eva die, she answered, “Why, I could not help it. I felt as badly as anyone could! It was like a death in my own family and it affected me so deeply that I could not write a word for two weeks after her death.” Years later she stated categorically, “God wrote it.” And a great many of her readers were quite willing to let it go at that.
The truth is, the subject of the book had been all around her for a very long time. Old Lyman had been able to make Litchfield farmers weep when he preached on slavery. In Cincinnati she had opened her own Sunday school to black children, and the Lane Seminary had been a hotbed of abolitionist fervor. The Underground Railroad, she later claimed, went directly through her Cincinnati house, which was a bit of an exaggeration; but on one occasion Calvin and her brother Charles did indeed help a black woman and her child elude a slave hunter. The only time she was in an actual slave state, during a visit across the Ohio River in Kentucky, she made no show of emotion about it. But stories she heard from the black women she knew in Cincinnati moved her enormously, particularly those told by a gentle person named Eliza Buck, who helped her with housework and whose children, Harriet Stowe discovered with incredulity, had all been fathered by the woman’s former master in Kentucky. “You know, Mrs. Stowe,” she had said, “slave
women cannot help themselves.”
Eliza Buck told her of lashings and of slave families split up and “sold down the river.” Once on an Ohio River wharf Mrs. Stowe had seen with her own eyes a husband and wife torn apart by a slave trader.
By the time she came east to Maine, Henry Ward was using his Brooklyn pulpit to raise money to buy children out of slavery. In Boston she and Edward had talked long and emotionally about the Fugitive Slave Bill, then being debated in Congress, which made it a federal crime to harbor or assist the escaped “property” of a slave master. Her duty was plain. There was, she said, a standard higher than an act of Congress.
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