Imagine a large New England family, headed by an arriviste patriarch endowed with overweening ambition and an aggressive sense of tribal loyalty. Spurred by paternal aspirations, each of his sons, in turn, enters public life, with greater or lesser degrees of success and not without the occasional hint of scandal. Each of his daughters either marries well or spends her life engaged in good works. Never far from the public eye, marked by intense clannishness, the family involves itself in every manner of contemporary liberal cause, particularly taking up the rights of black people. At the same time they display an innate cultural conservatism and distrust of foreign influences. The Kennedys of Massachusetts? No, the nineteenth-century Beechers of Connecticut.

It was an article of faith among New England Puritans that the line of godly children “doth . . . for the most part run through the loyns of godly parents. . . . And there are some Families that the Lord hath Chosen above others and therefore poureth his spirit upon the offspring in such families successively.” By these standards, the loins of Lyman Beecher were godly indeed. Born to a New Haven blacksmith and raised by a Guilford farmer, Lyman Beecher clawed his way into the New England clerical elite with a combination of raw ambition, well-honed disputational skills, a homely sense of humor, and an uncanny nose for the direction of popular sentiment. Of his eleven children who survived to adulthood, all seven boys followed his example and