By Justice Possessed: the Life and Times of Henry Ward Beecher

Brooklyn has had its share of famous people, but very few were of the influence and stature of the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher. He was an amazingly complex man, with the religious zeal of a Billy Graham, the oratorical gifts of a Martin Luther King, Jr., the showmanship of a P.T. Barnum, and the marital infidelity, affairs and scandalous downfall of too many contemporary people to name. Add to that the societal mores of Victorian Brooklyn, a couple of enemies looking for weakness, an eager press, and you’ve got the makings of a great tale. Most Americans have heard of Henry Ward Beecher, and many have heard of the scandal and trial that almost ruined him. If you haven’t, well….sit back.

Henry Ward Beecher was born in Connecticut in 1813. His father, Lyman Beecher, was also a preacher, and Henry was the eighth of nine children. His next eldest sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe, became almost as famous as he, as the author of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.  She and her sister Catherine were authors and lecturers, with books and articles about home management and other topics for women. Another sister, Isabella Beecher Hooker, as well as his brothers, Rev. Thomas K. Beecher and Charles Beecher, also gained great prominence for their social activism and work on education.

Henry Ward Beecher and sister Harriet Beecher Stowe

The Beecher children grew up in a very strict home, giving new meaning to the phrase “preacher’s kids.” They were required to participate in family prayer morning and night, participate in all phases of their father’s church services and ministries, including prayer meetings, lectures and other services. They were forbidden to engage in “undue frivolity” and they did not celebrate Christmas or their birthdays, or participate in dancing, or the reading of common and popular fiction.

Despite this strictness, Lyman Beecher also taught his children the importance of social reform, and encouraged an opposition to slavery, prostitution and the use of alcohol. After college, seminary and some preliminary church postings, Henry Beecher was hired to be the first minister of the new Plymouth Congregational Church in Brooklyn. This was in the fall of 1847.

He and his wife, Eunice, and their three children, came to Brooklyn to become the first minister and family to lead a new church comprised of New England Congregationalists who wanted to worship simply, as they did back in New England. This was a wealthy group, comprised of the successful merchant princes and ship-owning New Englanders who made their fortunes in the Brooklyn and Manhattan ports. They built a church on Cranberry St. and Rev. Beecher and Plymouth Church began their long and rich association. It was soon apparent that Beecher was more than just a good religious speaker. The man had “it”, that undeniable, yet elusive gift of charisma and leadership, aided by a dynamic speaking style that soon was packing the pews.

Two years after taking the helm, Plymouth Church had a fire, and Rev. Beecher pushed for a new and larger church to accommodate the crowds of people coming to worship. Under his direction the brownstone church on Orange Street in Brooklyn Heights was built. The architect was Joseph Wells, a well-known church architect. But when it came to the interior design of the sanctuary, Henry Ward Beecher took control of the space. He designed America’s first auditorium, or theater plan church, a vast space with no center aisle, with seats curved towards the pulpit, both on the floor and above in the balcony. The church now had space for 2,800 people, and there was rarely an open seat on Sundays.

(Plymouth Congregational Church, Orange Street, Brooklyn Heights)

In addition to Sunday services, Beecher was the author of a successful biography of Jesus, several other inspirational books and pamphlets, and the editor of the very first church hymnal. It seems hard to believe for any church goer, but until he put together his Plymouth Hymnal in 1855, churches did not have one book that printed the words and music of the hymns and songs used in services on the same page. For the last 170 years, hymn mumblers and tune scramblers alike can thank Henry Ward Beecher for this innovative step in public Christian worship.

So, what was he preaching? Social justice. Henry Beecher believed Christianity had the power to change culture, and that individuals could rise above the sin in the general society, and rid that society of its ills. And mid-century Victorian society had a lot of ills to purge. He hated bigotry – religious, racial and social. And more than that, he absolutely loathed and hated the “peculiar institution” of slavery. He had grown up in a slavery hating home, and all his siblings and he were active Abolitionists. His sister’s famous book, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”, was a biting condemnation of slavery, which influenced thousands. From his pulpit at Plymouth, Beecher thundered down his opposition to slavery and those who supported and maintained it. His sermons moved audiences to tears, to anger, and to action.

He led Plymouth Church on the dangerous path to becoming one of the most active stations on the Underground Railroad, the path escapees would take to reach the North, and on to Canada, and freedom. We often see Railroad stops in old houses and think it was a great adventure for those making their way north, and those harboring them, but it was dangerous, illegal, and death and/or imprisonment could be the consequence of escape or harboring escapees. Although slavery was abolished in New York State in 1827, it was still illegal to harbor escaped slaves, or to help, or employ them. Slave catchers or former owners were within their legal rights to capture people off the streets and return them to slave holding states. Just being in NY was not enough, it soon became very apparent that true freedom for escapees lay in Canada, beyond America’s borders and jurisdiction.

(The mock slave auction of “Pinky” at Plymouth in 1860)

Henry Ward Beecher was not above high degrees of showmanship and spectacle to prove his point. He invited guest speakers to his church to talk about the evils of slavery. Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and other former enslaved people talked about the horrors of the institution. His sermons shocked and horrified his upper-class gentile congregation, so far removed from the atrocities they heard about. He raised thousands of dollars for Abolitionist causes. On more than one occasion, he held mock slave auctions from his pulpit, allowing his congregation to collect money to buy real people, always young women or girls away from their owners. His most famous auction was the 1860 mock sale of a nine-year-old girl nicknamed Pinky.

Pinky’s sale was right out of a Victorian novel. Actual records tell us that she was bi-racial, a pretty girl who looked more white than black, with long hair trailing down her back and Caucasian features. She was hardly typical of your average African descended slave, but because it only took one drop of African blood to keep one in slavery, she was not free. Beecher knew his audience, and in a masterful stroke of both righteous persuasion and melodramatic showmanship, he “sold” her to the crowd, praising her physical attributes, describing how the auctioneer would sell her, and how the leering audience of men at a real auction would regard her, and what her fate would be.

She looked like their sisters, their daughters, themselves. Women in the congregation were swooning; men were reduced to helpless tears and were rising to their feet in outrage at her humiliation and shame. If there had been an actual slave holder in the room, they probably would have ripped him to shreds. Instead, they opened their wallets and purses and raised $900 to free her, the equivalent of thousands of dollars in today’s money. In the collection plate was a gold ring that Beecher presented to Pinky, which she kept for most of her life.

Pinky, whose real name was Sally Maria Diggs, returned the ring to the church in 1927, at Plymouth’s 80th anniversary, and it is still among their most prized possessions, along with her bill of sale. Pinky’s sale would make national news and bring even more people to crowd the entrance to Plymouth Church to hear Rev. Beecher preach. He held up the chains that had held John Brown, and trampled them under his feet. He raged and railed, and by the beginning of the Civil War, he put the Abolitionist cause on the front pages of the New York press, and in the drawing rooms of the wealthy and influential everywhere.

The influential and the famous made their own pilgrimage to Plymouth Church. Walt Whitman, who shared Beecher’s hatred of slavery, paid his respects.  Mark Twain, on a speaking tour, attended a service, and would later write about Beecher’s theatrical and passionate preaching, saying that Beecher was “sawing his arms in the air, howling sarcasms this way and that, discharging rockets of poetry and exploding mines of eloquence.” Presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln attended a service at Plymouth before his famous Cooper Union speech in 1860.

(Lincoln window at Plymouth Church)

Six years before Lincoln’s famous visit, now memorialized in a stained glass window at Plymouth, the issue of slavery was dividing the country into slave state and free. In 1854 Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which opened up those territories for settlement and statehood. Many legislators wanted the new states to come in either slave state or free, but the Act was vague.  Organized groups of settlers, both pro and anti-slavery swept into the territories and claimed land. Elections were held, and although only around 2,000 men were eligible to vote, over 6,000 votes were cast, most by pro-slavery factions from next door Missouri, who stuffed the ballot boxes for their candidates.

Although Kansas came in as a Free State, the result was a victory for slave holders, as sympathetic elected officials basically gave them carte blanche, setting off some of the worst violence outside of the Civil War. On the pro-slavery side, Quantrill’s Raiders swept through Kansas, killing hundreds and burning the town of Lawrence, Kansas. On the anti-slavery side, John Brown, his five sons, and their followers also took up arms. Some of their weapons were paid for by Henry Ward Beecher’s direct funding.

In 1856, Beecher was quoted in the New York Tribune, saying that the Sharps rifle was a “truly moral agency, and that there was more moral power in one of those agencies, as far as the slaveholders in Kansas were concerned, than in a hundred Bibles.” From that time onward, the Sharps rifle was known as “Beecher’s Bible.” It was illegal to ship arms to Kansas during this conflict, but shipments of rifles were labeled “Bibles” and “books”, and so made their way to Kansas, and to the hands of the anti-slavery factions.  Today, buying guns for an armed conflict within the United States would be considered terrorism. Does a righteous cause excuse arming dangerous people? We still struggle with those questions today.

When the Civil War erupted in 1861, Beecher and Plymouth Church raised enough money to support a volunteer regiment, and Henry Beecher travelled to England and around the United States, raising funds for, and championing the Union cause.  He would often be a thorn in President Lincoln’s side, as he was quoted as saying he was unimpressed by the activities of Lincoln’s cabinet and wondered about the president’s intellectual capacity. He would on other occasions then praise the President and his actions.

Beecher biographers have written that this was classic Beecher. No one was really good enough, or their actions sufficient to please him, and he often had acrimonious relationships with some of his strongest allies. He himself is quoted as remarking about letters written to Lincoln, “"I wrote a series of editorials addressed to the President (three or four), and as near as I can recollect they were in the nature of a mowing machine — they cut at every revolution.” Beecher would let up on Lincoln only when Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863.

The Civil War ended in 1865. Beecher would preach that the Southern leaders deserved places in the depths of hell, but he eventually urged reconciliation for the good of the entire nation. Like any victorious general after the war is won, Henry Ward Beecher was now without the major driving point of his life. So much had gone into his hatred of slavery, and his efforts towards ridding the nation of that legal imprisonment and exploitation of an entire race of people. He must have been both elated and drained. When the battle was won, he came back to his congregation and his family. A simpler time, and simpler issues awaited him. But how do you come down from Mount Olympus without tripping over some rocks and landing on your face?

(Plymouth’s sanctuary today. Photo: Plymouth Church of the Pilgrims)

Henry Ward Beecher was a man of many interests, and a new kind of preacher in America. He preached about God’s love and desire for people to be happy, a change from the sin, fire and brimstone that was most Protestant preaching of the time. He told jokes from the pulpit, spoke in terms that people understood, and with his new hymnals, encouraged congregational singing, and he even put flowers in the sanctuary.

The mixture of the pulpit with politics never bothered him. He was an ardent supporter of the new Republican Party, which had been born in the furor over the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854. He supported opening the US to full immigration from China, not just the temporary immigration of a male labor pool. He championed women’s rights and equal rights for all. Going to a Beecher service left his audience full of joy and the promise of a peaceful new America.

Sadly, he didn’t extend this happiness and love to his wife, Eunice, whom he basically ignored. She was the sister of his college roommate, Ebenezer Bullard. They stayed married throughout his life, and she gave him ten children, but even contemporary descriptions of their union said that she was “unloved”. But Henry himself knew a bit about love. He was tall, muscular and well built, and had long flowing hair and the carriage of a warrior. He oozed charisma and holy power. His photographs belie the fact to a modern audience, but to many of the ladies, Henry Beecher was hot!

Debby Applegate, in her Pulitzer Prize winning biography of Beecher, called “The Most Famous Man in the World,” postulates that as early as 1867, Beecher was fooling around. He was said to have fathered a child with Chloe Beach, the wife of his friend, Moses Beach. The little girl, Violet, was said to look so much like him that the evidence was clear. There were also other allegations of improper conduct by Beecher with some of the women in his congregation, but perfunctory investigations by a church board that really didn’t want to know, or want to have to do anything about it, went nowhere.  I

n 1870, Elizabeth Tilton, the wife of his protégé, radical newspaperman Theodore Tilton, and a member of Plymouth Church, confessed to her husband that she had engaged in an affair with Henry Beecher. During the investigation, Theodore Tilton’s newspaper, the Independent, fired him, because his editors feared bad publicity. A select group of influential Plymouth Church members knew about the alleged affair, and from behind the scenes, they mediated and negotiated to keep the matter quiet. Beecher put pressure on Elizabeth to recant her story, which she eventually did, in writing. Her husband, Theodore Tilton, put more pressure on her to recant her recantation.

Theodore was angry. So angry that he told his friend, women’s rights pioneer Elizabeth Cady Stanton about the matter. She told her friend Victoria Woodhull, and the poo hit the revolving blades. You see, Victoria Woodhull was an outspoken advocate of women’s rights and free love. It meant the same thing then as it does now, but in Victorian America, the concept was absolutely shocking. Woodhull wrote eloquently about miserable marriages where divorce was not considered, where the husbands could cheat openly, while the women remained faithful, or faced social disgrace and rejection.

She advocated that people would be much happier if open marriages and free love were instituted; where couples could remain together for family or appearance, as a business arrangement, but were free to find their own sexual happiness outside of marriage. Sounds like something Henry Ward Beecher could get behind, right? Most definitely not. He preached against free love and Victoria Woodhull on several memorable occasions.

Victoria Woodhull was a staunch member of the National Women’s Suffrage Movement, ironically, along with Beecher sister, Elizabeth Beecher Hooker. Two other sisters, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Catherine Beecher were dead set against Victoria, considering her a menace to proper Victorian society. She was the first woman to run for President, at a time when women could not even vote. Since Henry was also an advocate of women’s suffrage, Victoria Woodhull asked him to introduce her at an important speech in New York in 1872.

She told him she knew of his affair with Mrs. Tilton, and thought since he was, in fact, practicing his own version of free love, that he should support her. He refused, and she threatened him with public exposure. He then pulled a Jimmy Swaggart, and fell at her feet, tearfully confessing his weakness, according to Victoria Woodhull’s biography. She wasn’t impressed. When that didn’t work, he promised to introduce her, but then didn’t show up, embarrassing her.

Well, she embarrassed him right back. She mentioned the affair in her speech. She then published an article in her journal, Woodhull and Clafflin’s Weekly, in which she claimed that the most famous preacher in America was practicing the very free love that he condemned in the pulpit. The scandal was now out in the light of day. Woodhull herself was arrested and imprisoned for sending obscene materials through the mail. Theodore Tilton was excommunicated from Plymouth in 1873, and a board of inquiry investigated Beecher’s conduct, and exonerated him. Tilton fired back by suing Beecher, who had once been his mentor and best friend, for “willfully alienating himself from the affections of his wife”. A trial was scheduled, where the matter would receive the attentions of a court of law.

The trial began in January of 1875, and was in the papers, and on the lips of Brooklynites and New Yorkers from beginning to end. Tickets were scalped for outrageous amounts of money on the Brooklyn courthouse steps, and refreshment stands were set up, and souvenirs sold. Inside, poor Elizabeth Tilton changed her story several times, and was tossed like a football between the fame and influence of Henry Ward Beecher, her very public shame, and the anger and shame of her disgraced husband.

Eunice Beecher, the upstanding and long-suffering wife, was Henry’s finest witness, as she declared that she didn’t believe the allegations, and never would. It finally ended in July, when the jurors deliberated for six days without ever coming to a verdict- a hung jury. A second board of inquiry was held at Plymouth, and again, they exonerated Henry Beecher. Two years later, Elizabeth Tilton again asserted that there had been an affair, and she was excommunicated from Plymouth.

The affair and trial didn’t cost Henry Beecher his job at Plymouth, but it certainly took the shine off his pedestal. His sister, Isabella Beecher Hooker, split from the family, siding with his accusers. Although he was revered and admired for the rest of his life, the scandal followed him into the grave. He reinvented himself on the lecture circuit and paid back his massive legal and personal debt. He remained Plymouth’s popular minister, still filling the pews, until his death.

In the end, he died of a cerebral hemorrhage on March 8, 1887. Brooklyn declared a day of mourning, and his funeral procession was led by a black commander of the William Lloyd Garrison Post in Massachusetts and a Virginia Confederate General and former slave holder, walking arm in arm. Henry Ward Beecher was buried in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery on March 11, 1887, survived by his wife Eunice and four of his ten children.

His legacy today remains strong and impressive: he helped end slavery in the United States. He took some of the stuffiness out of church going and placed social reform in the pulpit.  His statue stands in Cadman Plaza in Brooklyn, near the courthouse, a tribute to one of Brooklyn’s most important and influential men. Another statue stands in the courtyard adjacent to Plymouth Church, honoring Plymouth’s first pastor. Like most great people, Henry Ward Beecher was a complicated, conflicted and often craven individual, incapable of controlling himself at times, but also capable of moving heaven and earth. When he soared, it was on wings of eagles.

The research for this series comes from Debby Applegate’s biography “The Most Famous Man in the World,” a Pulitzer Prize winner. Also referenced were the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, the Website for Plymouth Church of the Pilgrims, Wikipedia, and a lot of Googled information. Thank you, internet.

(Beecher statue in the courtyard of Plymouth Church of the Pilgrims)