Lyman Beecher

Lyman Beecher 1775-1863, American Presbyterian clergyman, b. New Haven, Conn., grad. Yale, 1797. In 1799 he became pastor at East Hampton, N.Y. While serving (1810-26) in the Congregational Church at Litchfield, Conn., he published his six sermons on intemperance, which passed through many American and English editions. Beecher helped to found (1816) the American Bible Society. In 1826 he was called to the Hanover St. Church, Boston, where his revival services created excitement. He was president of Lane Theological Seminary, Cincinnati, from 1832 to 1852. His liberal views not infrequently placed him in sharp opposition to the conservative group in the Presbyterian Church. Of his 13 children, Henry, Charles, Edward, Thomas, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Catharine Esther Beecher won wide recognition.

Bibliography: See his Collected Works (1852-53) and his Autobiography ed. by B. M. Cross (1864, new ed. 1961); biography by S. C. Henry (1974).

Beecher, Lyman (1775–1863) US temperance reformer and Presbyterian clergyman. In 1832 he was appointed First President of the Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati, where his daughter, Harriet Beecher, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), married Calvin Ellis Stowe, professor of biblical literature. Lane Seminary students were among the first ABOLITIONISTS. Beecher became a target for attack by conservative Presbyterians and had to face charges, of which he was finally acquitted, of slander, heresy, and hypocrisy.

Beecher, Lyman (1775–1863), American Protestant minister. He was pastor first of Presbyterian and then of Congregational churches. A major figure in American evangelical Protestantism in the period before the Civil War, he was a leader in revivals (at first he opposed C. G. Finney and his ‘new measures’ but later accepted him), a committed advocate of social reform (the temperance movement and anti-slavery), and a staunch opponent of Unitarianism and RCism. In 1835 he was tried for heresy but acquitted by his presbytery and synod.