Beecher, Henry Ward (1813-1887)

Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887)

Sources

Preacher

Difficult Childhood. Henry Ward Beecher overcame several obstacles in his early life to become one of the best-known preachers in American history. He did miserably in school and he stuttered, an inauspicious sign in someone whose father wanted him to join the ministry. (His father was the famous conservative Congregationalist minister Lyman Beecher.) Nevertheless, after receiving a bachelor’s degree from Amherst College, he received a divinity degree from his father’s Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati. He then obtained a license to preach from the Cincinnati presbytery in 1837, where he developed such a popular preaching style that he soon attracted offers from prestigious churches.

Permanent Home. Brooklyn was gaining a reputation as a “city of churches.” People purchased lots, erected brownstones, and created the institutions that supported middle-class nuclear family life. Two of these people were Henry C. Bowen and John T. Howard, Republican and Democratic newspaper publishers, respectively. They helped to organize Plymouth Church and hired Beecher, hoping he would preserve the Orthodox Congregational traditions of their youth and attract many new church members. Beecher took up his duties on 10 October 1847 and, for a while, exceeded everyone’s expectations. On Sunday mornings Manhattanites boarded ferries to Brooklyn, and at Plymouth Church they entered a theatrical setting, with three thousand ground-floor and balcony seats arranged in a semicircle. The focal point was not a pulpit but an easy chair located on a stage. The congregation joined in the rousing hymns, accompanied by an organ, enjoyed the flowers that decorated the church, and watched as Beecher addressed his audience informally from his easy chair or strode about the stage. The content of Beecher’s preaching was even more novel.

New Assurance of Salvation. Beecher agreed with his Calvinist forebears that God had given Scripture and social institutions to teach sinners the right way and to control them. However, not everyone still needed to be burdened by such constraints. By living a virtuous life one acquired good work habits which in turn gave him material success. Beecher told his parishioners that they should work to be persons of culture and refinement, sensitive to the gentle guidance God offered them through the beauties of nature and through the opportunities that wealth brought their way. They should strive to be good not out of a sense of duty toward God but because they were so full of love that they would not willingly do wrong.

Scandal. On 21 June 1874 Theodore Tilton published a letter accusing Beecher of seducing Tilton’s wife, Elizabeth. Tilton’s divorce suit against his wife, and a Congregationalist investigation into Beecher’s activities, disclosed that Beecher’s popularity with his flock obscured the harsher judgments of close associates. Bowen had asked Beecher to write for the newspapers he published, but the minister was so late with his essays that the publisher hired Tilton to be his editor and ghostwriter. Tilton’s career had taken off from there, and soon he was on the lecture circuit, which gave Beecher the opportunity to visit his helper’s wife. The case against Beecher looked bad. However, Mrs. Beecher took her husband’s side, and Elizabeth Tilton took the blame for the affair. The court awarded Tilton a divorce from his wife without requiring him to pay her alimony, and the Congregationalist investigation ended with a vote that Beecher was innocent of the charges against him.

Current Events. Beecher kept perfectly in step with historical trends. Like many people in nonslave states, he opposed the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. When Kansas became open for settlement, he advised those opposing slavery to claim it for freedom, by force if necessary. He opposed immediate abolition, but once the Civil War started, he urged President Abraham Lincoln to emancipate the slaves. He was one of the first to advocate lenient Reconstruction measures and a quick return to state government in the South. Beecher supported black voting rights but not social equality, and women’s voting rights but not the radicalism of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. The work of Charles Darwin intrigued the preacher, and he applied the British scientist’s theories to economics. Beecher continued to preach almost to the end of his life, appearing on his platform for the last time on 27 February 1887; nine days later he died of a cerebral hemorrhage.

Sources

William G. McLoughlin, The Meaning of Henry Ward Beecher: An Essay on the Shifting Values of Mid-Victorian America, 1840-1870 (New York: Knopf, 1970);

Altina L. Waller, Reverend Beecher and Mrs. Tilton: Sex and Class in Victorian America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1982).