Tempest-Tossed: The Spirit of Isabella Beecher Hooker

4. Isabella in Love

4 Isabella in Love In the mid-1830s, Hartford was on the cusp of its glory days. The town was shifting from an economy built on oceangoing commerce to banking, manufacturing, merchandising, and publishing. The railroad would come to Hartford in 1839, and the population would reach 12,793 in 1840, up from 6,901 twenty years earlier.1 The increasingly fashionable capital of Connecticut would yield social opportunities — introductions to potential mates chief among them — under the steady eye of Mary and Thomas Perkins, both of whom Isabella loved. If this possibility was ever broached with Isabella, the conversation is not recorded, though given her age, a good match would have been paramount in the minds of her sisters. Within a short time after moving to Hartford, Isabella met John Hooker, a square-jawed young law student who was studying in her brother-in-law’s office. The attraction was mutual, and as Lyman had in his own courtships, JohnHookersetouttowinIsabellathroughletters.HesawinIsabella — who had gained a reputation for frivolity among her high-minded family — his intellectualequal.Theywouldbeengagedbeforesheturnedseventeen,with, wrote Isabella in Connecticut magazine, “the understanding that if either of us found we had made a mistake we were at liberty to choose elsewhere.” She had every reason to hedge her bets. In the first blush of love, Isabella’s concern about her increasingly serious relationship fit the context of her day. The notion of control over whom and when one should marry was rapidly being wrested from the fathers, who up to then did most of the choosing and blessing of their children’s life-mates. Young people began to have more of a say in courtship and marriage. Young women often stalled marriage for fear that “marriage would snuff out their independence.”2 For an example of an Isabella in Love 31 unmarried woman who’d managed to forge a career of her own, Isabella had to look no further than Catharine. It had to have been tempting to follow her sister into the field of education. But even at age twenty-three, John Hooker was a rare breed. As had the much-missed Roxanna, he traced his roots back to Thomas Hooker, who’d establishedConnecticut’sfirstEuropeansettlement inthe1630sand wasthe author of the world’s first written constitution. John Hooker’s ancestor had originally settled in Massachusetts, but he left to establish his own colony overadisagreementaboutpreciselywhowouldbeallowedtovote.Theelder Hooker’s move may have also been predicated on a clash of personalities with the leadership of the Massachusetts colony.3 Either way, John Hooker’s family — on both mother’s and father’s side — boasted senators, judges, and governors. His father, Edward, graduated from Yale College in 1805 and ran John Hooker, 1842. Courtesy of the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, Hartford, Connecticut. 32 Tempest-Tossed a classical private school in Farmington, Connecticut, called the Old Red College. John Hooker would have a distinguished law degree and serve as reporter of the state Supreme Court.4 Later, his name was bandied about as a potential justice on the state Supreme Court, but he declined to pursue the appointment because the timing was never right.5 Hooker’s hometown of Farmington was a pleasant New England town through which George Washington passed several times. Whether he stopped and slept — as was so often claimed in New England in revolutionary times — is best left to one of those New England guessing games.6 Much of what we know about John Hooker comes from his autobiography , Some Reminiscences of a Long Life: With a Few Articles on Moral Subjects of Present Interest, which Hooker wrote in 1899. He was born in 1816 to Edward Hooker and Eliza Daggett, formerly of New Haven. John Hooker entered Yale at age sixteen — about the time Isabella was settling in Cincinnati — after a rigorous education by Edward in Greek and Latin. And, like the college education of his future father-in-law, his education was interrupted by illness. John Hooker was struck with typhoid during his secondyear,andwhenherecoveredenoughtogobacktoschool,hisattempts to catch up strained his eyes to the point that he was forced to leave school permanently. His eyesight would never recover, but John Hooker would be a lifelong student. Yale eventually gave him a degree in 1842.7 Unsure of a career, John Hooker did what many young men did in the early 1800s and took to the sea, an experience that was every bit as romantic as...