“While he was eloquent and among the foremost speakers of his day, I remember particularly that I never heard from him a word of uncharitableness, nor saw a symptom of envy or jealousy, or aught else but the most enthusiastic love of men, and of young men and young ministers; and knowing him in the household, I have yet to know another person that was so devoid of the inferior feelings and so eminent in the topmost feelings of human nature.”
Lyman’s father’s name was David, a well-read, clear-headed man, with decided opinions upon the questions of the day; one with whom Roger Sherman delighted, upon his return from Congress, to talk over the business of the session and discuss public affairs. He kept college students as boarders, that he might enjoy their conversation, and made himself proficient in many of their studies. Of him his son said: “If he had received a regular education he would have been equal to anybody.” He was both blacksmith and farmer, and had the reputation of “raising the nicest rye and making the best hoes in New England.”
The Anvil and Oak Stump.
Lyman Beecher’s mother was a Lyman, a woman “of a joyous, sparkling, hopeful temperament.” Her grandfather was a Scotchman, thus giving a little Gaelic blood to the veins of her descendants. In his autobiography Lyman Beecher says: “She died of consumption two days after I was born. I was a seven-months child, and when the woman that attended on her saw what a puny thing I was, and that the mother could not live, she thought it useless to attempt to keep me alive. I was actually wrapped up and laid aside. But after a while one of the women thought she would look and see if I were living, and, finding I was, concluded to wash and dress me, saying: ‘It’s a pity he hadn’t died with his mother.’ So you see it was but by a hair’s-breadth I got a foothold in this world.” He was taken in charge by “Aunt Benton” and brought up on his uncle Lot Benton’s farm in North Guilford, where farm-work and farm-fare made him strong.
Their intention was to make a farmer of him; but the intolerable slowness of an ox-team, in ploughing fifteen acres of summer fallow three times over in a single season, so disgusted the lad that he became restless. His uncle saw it, and upon consultation with the father they decided to send him to school to prepare for Yale College, which was accordingly done. He often said, “Oxen sent me to college.”
David’s father’s name was Nathaniel. He was also a blacksmith, and the anvil of both father and son stood upon the stump of that old oak under which John Davenport preached his first sermon to the New Haven Colony. He married a Sperry, “a pious woman,” whose mother was a Roberts from Forlallt, Cardiganshire, Wales. From her, his great great-grandmother, came the fervid Welsh blood with which Henry Ward was always so well pleased.
Joseph was the father of Nathaniel. His father’s name was John, of whom tradition says that he was one of those who in the fall of 1637 accompanied Samuel Eaton in his explorations for a suitable location for the colony of John Davenport, that had just come over and was then staying at Boston; and that he was one of the very few men who lived through the winter in the poor hut that had been built at “Quinnipiack,” New Haven, that they might pre-empt the territory and be in readiness to welcome the colony in the following spring.
He was the only son of Hannah Beecher, whose husband, born in Kent, England, died just before the colony sailed. She was about to abandon the enterprise, but, being a midwife and likely to be of service to the youthful colony, they promised her her husband’s share in the town plot if she would come. They kept their word, and it was in her lot that the historic oak just mentioned stood.
Her business seems not to have been remarkably lucrative, for at her death her estate inventoried only £55 5s. 6d.
One earlier mention of the family was found by Mr. Beecher in the British Museum during his visit to England in 1863, and copied in his diary:
“Visitation of Kent, 16,279 Brit. Museum.
“Henry Beecher, alderman and sheriff of London 1570, ob’t 1571.”
Apparently of more than the average intellectual ability of their class, there was one feature in which the men whom we have described markedly excelled—namely, in their physical strength. The standard of measurement was peculiar to those early times, and may not be as well understood by us; yet it even now conveys the idea of great stalwartness. David, it was said, could lift a barrel of cider and carry it into the cellar; Nathaniel, his father, was not quite as strong, yet he could throw a barrel of cider into a cart; while Joseph exceeded them all, for he could lift the barrel and drink out of the bung-hole. Of Henry, the sheriff, no description has been found.
There was one especial feature of degeneracy in these modern days, compared with the good old times of the fathers, over which Henry Ward, when Mrs. Beecher was just within earshot, moaned and groaned. His grandfather, he said, had five wives, his father had three, but such was the meagreness of these penurious times in which he lived, and the persistence of the Bullard blood, that he saw no chance for himself to have more than one. But afterwards, lest she should feel hurt at his raillery, he writes her with many expressions of affection, in a letter dated March 31, 1872: “It“It has always been a shadow over the future to fear that I should walk alone the few remaining years of my life, for alone I shall be if you go from me. In jest we have often spoken of other connections. But such a thing is the remotest of possibilities. Should you go no one would ever take your place.”
Such was the ancestry selected on the father’s side. Six generations, without question, are known to us, reaching from the hills of Litchfield, in Connecticut, to the chalk-cliffs of Kent, England. For that distance we can trace the family stream up to its sources in the great body of the English common people, in that county most characteristic of England, where the Roman had first struggled with the Briton, where the “free-necked men,” under Hengist and Horsa, had first made a lodgment on English soil, and near which was Hastings and the fields of the Norman conquest, and where, perhaps more than in any other county, mingled those different strains of blood, Briton, Roman, Saxon, Northmen, Scots, and Picts, out of which has come England’s strength and England’s greatness. We find all of them of the yeomanry, all of them honest, useful, God-fearing men, fit to be the progenitors of one who delighted in nothing more than in his common experiences with common people, and valued nothing more highly than their confidence and friendship.
Nor would it be difficult to find in the sturdy independence and quaint humor of these men of the anvil and the plough, the origin of much of that robust and humorous manliness which made Henry Ward Beecher so conspicuous in his day and generation.
His power to strike heavy blows and to hit the nail on the head was partly inherited, and that anvil-ring of the fathers has been often heard in these latter days under his sledge-hammer strokes. If the iron were not hot, he heated it by striking, and sparks flew, and men’s hearts and minds were moulded and welded before he was done.
More than this, there appears in him something of the love of the “shield-game” and the “sword-play” of those earlier generations that were “at heart fighters,” and something also of the sadness and heroism which led them to say, “Each man of us shall abide the end of his life-work; let him that may, work his doomed deeds ere death come.”
On the mother’s side the selection was somewhat different. While we find no more sterling qualities, there is in this line a higher social position, more culture, a broader training in public affairs, both civil and military, and what with some may appear of still greater importance, a coat-of-arms given as a special mark of royal gratitude.
Roxana Foote had gentle blood in her veins. She could trace her genealogy on the father’s side back through Nathaniel Foote, who came into Connecticut with Hooker’s company in 1636, to James Foote, an officer in the English army, who aided King Charles to conceal himself in the “Royal Oak” and was knighted for his loyalty. As the old primer has it:
“It was the tree, the old oak-tree,
Which saved his royal majesty.”
The