Tempest-Tossed. Susan Campbell

qualities in youth were sweetness, delicacy and modesty and in later life, a home-loving wifeliness and Madonna-like motherliness.” But he’d changed his mind over fifty years, and while he still believed the ideal woman should be involved with her family, he also thought that

      … she is to me the noblest woman who, without mere personal ambition or self-seeking of any sort and with a great spirit of helpfulness toward all the wronged and suffering, limits the field of her work only by her ability and opportunity, making these and not any conventional rules the test of what God meant that she should do.¹⁰

      For her part, Isabella was, by her own admission, a “spicy young girl, who hated abolitionists even more than she did slavery.”¹¹ Perhaps the sting of her father’s pain at the earlier defection of his Lane students — those he loved as his own sons — influenced her attitude. Perhaps she was more interested in social events than social issues.

      If she hadn’t given much thought to abolition, she had thought a great deal about marriage. Shuttling back and forth between family members, Isabella had spent time observing the marriages in her family, and if she wasn’t sure what she wanted from her own union, she was at least aware of what she didn’t want. She wrote John in August 1838:

      I have — for some moments in looking at the families of some even of my brothers and sisters — felt misgivings — many and great — but then, I feel that there is a radical defect in their plan — one which can be avoided — they did not start rightly … if I tho’t my married life would be such as I have seen exhibited in my own family — I never could bring myself to fulfill an engagement, other wise delightful.

      Besides moving between the homes of family members, Isabella’s frequent absences from Hartford would give her and her intended ample opportunity to get to know each other through letters in which no topic was taboo. While Isabella was in Ohio, her sister Mary herself wrote affectionate notes from Hartford: “I do hope and trust you will not fail to write often and long to me, we know not how long this privilege will be permitted…. [W]rite as soon as you get this and remember that every thing is interesting that concerns you or your friends.”¹²

      Mary added, a few months later, that she felt like a lover awaiting letters from Isabella as she gently chided her little sister to write more often:

      I don[’]t believe Mr[.] H.[ooker] is more impatient to get one, but what a naughty girl you are to have the blues so dreadfully. I think a young lady who weighs 129 lb[.] must not consider herself very much of an invalid, if you are not ethereal in your person you must be so in mind or you will lose all chance of being an angel. I don[’]t believe an angel ever weighed 129 lb[.]¹³

      By August 1839, conversation between John and Isabella turned to marriage, but Isabella wasn’t sure she wanted to marry a man who wasn’t a minister. All of her brothers had followed their father into the ministry, and her family, as well, worried that the law was not of sufficient importance for a Beecher. In November 1839, Catharine weighed in with (unasked-for) advice and a bit of information about her younger half-sister that might have scared a lesser man:

      … Belle is formed by nature to take the lead — she will every year learn more and more of her power to influence others…. She is growing fast in piety — in power of intellect — in power of controlling other minds. What will you find for her to do[?] … I do not want to see a woman of her talents and power put out of her place as a leader. She is formed to be a minister[’] s wife as much as you are for a minister. If you decide to be a lawyer I shall not be very much disappointed or troubled for tho’ I shall think you and Belle will in consequence be less useful and of course less happy, still I shall esteem it as the will of God that so it should be.¹⁴

      In an October 1839 letter, Isabella wrote to John, “Every young man with the means of education and common sense is called to be a minister.” And: “I have felt for some weeks past in visiting my brothers — who are ministers — that they are the only class of men, that can accomplish any considerable amount of good without turning aside from their usual business — all that a minister does, is designed in some way to save the souls of his fellow human beings…. Now it seems to me that it is not thus with a lawyer….”

      She was mostly parroting her sister Catharine’s much longer letters. It would be John’s first taste of his soon-to-be sister-in-law’s meddling, and he was savvy enough to remain reluctant to discuss the topic with Catharine, for fear she would share his correspondence with a wider audience.

      But if Isabella was pushing John toward the pulpit, she didn’t seem committed to the task, and as she questioned the role of a minister, she also questioned the role of a minister’s wife. In a July 1839 letter to John, she called herself a “tempest-tossed spirit” and fretted whether she would be worthy of so well educated a spouse.

      She was quick to announce that she would be as dutiful a wife as was necessary, but she wouldn’t enjoy the role much. In an August 1839 letter to John, she wrote that she would give him “the required obedience without being constantly reminded that such is the will of God and the exception of man.” But she continued that such submission was “galling to a sensible woman.”

      John Hooker wrote back repeatedly that he intended them to be partners — which in any other man of that age may have been strictly a means of placating a nervous fiancée. But from John Hooker’s lifelong support of his wife and his dedication to the suffrage movement, he appears to have meant it.

      Meanwhile, Mary Beecher Perkins — knowing her husband’s financial struggles and the hole his clerk’s career move would leave in Thomas Perkins’s office — was against John entering the clergy. In a November 1839 letter, she corrected her younger half-sister on her entreaties to her intended, sought to soften Lyman’s weighing in on the matter, and summoned for her argument a powerful ally, Isabella’s dear, departed mother:

      I am surprised that father should have made the remark you ascribed to him that “every man of good common sense and piety ought to be a minister,” I am sure it was uttered in the enthusiasm of the moment and that his cooler judgment would not endorse it — what would become of society if that principle should be acted upon, do we not need pious lawyers and physicians and mechanics and farmers and teachers and ought they not to be men of common sense? … I believe the responsibility and excitement would soon consume him…. It seems to me you are all running wild on this subject — pray bring common sense to bear…. [T]hink of your own dear mother as well qualified by education and piety as you and with a better prospect of health, after marriage her health gave way, her spirits sank, and she was ever mourning that she was so useless as she appeared to herself to be, I do not believe she would advise the change.

      Mary also wrote to Isabella that from all she saw and heard from John, any career choice other than law would be “to please you and not from a conviction that he is called of God to enter the sacred offices.” And she wrote, “I think it would be utter madness for you to marry a minister and I wonder at father and Catharine and Harriet that they should think of such a thing.”¹⁵

      Meanwhile, many of the rest of Isabella’s siblings felt called to encourage John Hooker’s career change. As boisterous and as traveled and as learned as was the family’s collective approach to life, its members — save for Mary — simply could not understand a man living outside the ministry. In a November 18, 1839, letter from Charles, Isabella’s older half-brother, who would later face his own apostasy charges, took a page from his father’s hyperbole and wrote to a bewildered John: “You have never stood by the dark cave of Insanity — and looked with horror in at the dark door — and down the frightful chasms.” Nor, Charles wrote, had John ever heard “the hideous noises — the shrieks and the laughter — feeling meanwhile your own brain boil.”

      Considering that threat of hellfire — or mental illness — and how tenacious she normally could be, Catharine took an uncharacteristically lighter tone. Her younger brother Henry Ward had made an inauspicious entry into the clergy but had recently moved to Indianapolis, where the members of his new congregation were pleased to have a son of Lyman Beecher in their pulpit. Henry Ward, who would later command the attention of the country as a gifted