Chapter 11

“MY HEART IS WITH THE RADICALS, BUT MY EMOTIONS ARE WITH THE ORTHODOX”

Henry Ward Beecher was euphoric in the spring of 1865. His first stroke of unexpected fortune arrived in the shape of a letter from Robert Bonner, his good friend and editor of the New York Ledger. “I have a proposition to make to you; and, whether you accept or decline it I wish the compensation part of it kept secret,” Bonner wrote. If Beecher would write a novel for the Ledger, Bonner would pay him the staggering sum of twenty-four thousand dollars!1 “A clap of thunder would not have been more astounding to me,” Beecher said later. “I laughed as I read the dispatch. I refused at first, but he continued to talk to me about it, until finally I agreed to do it.”2 How could he not? Twenty-four thousand dollars was nearly double his annual salary.

The second stroke of luck came in April, when President Lincoln asked Beecher to speak at the flag raising at Fort Sumter. Robert Bonner took particular pleasure in Beecher’s success at Fort Sumter, and not just because it was good for business. “I am, personally, very much pleased that you delivered such a splendid oration because some of your so-called friends (I allude particularly to Tilton) have in a Pecksniffian way been regretting that you were on the decline. Tilton has said to me within two months that you reached the culminating point in your career when you were in England, that your discourses were not what they used to be, etc. etc.,” Bonner told Beecher confidentially.

“I can only say (and I will stake my life on it) that Tilton is not a real friend of you or yours. If he is, he has a queer way of showing it,” Bonner continued. “Every one knows that he owes his position to you. You may not care anything about such a matter as this; but I hate to see a man constantly following you—hanging on to your coat-tail—identifying himself with you as your right-hand man and co-laborer—and behind your back endeavoring to boost himself up at your expense.”3

Beecher blithely batted away Bonner’s warning about Tilton. “I hope that his utterances are but the effusion of a heated moment,” he replied mildly. “I cannot remember a year for fifteen years in which I have not been told that I had reached the end of my influence.”4 Beecher wrote with the confidence of a man who was, in fact, at the peak of his influence. For him 1865 seemed like the fulfillment of a prophecy—the beginning of a Golden Age of Liberty and Progress.

Perhaps it was inevitable that after two decades of promoting “Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Press, and Free Speech,” Beecher would now take up “Free Thought.” After his death Beecher gained a reputation for unthinking emotionalism, for preaching a “Gospel of Gush.” But during his lifetime Beecher was considered a great, if erratic, intellect. He kept up with the latest thinkers, using his constant train travel to consume dozens of journals and a steady stream of new books. He was vitally interested in science of all kinds, especially the emerging fields of psychology and sociology. Above all he loved the “scientific method” of thought—freely experimenting with new ideas to find the ones that work best, holding no idea too sacred to test against practical experience.

It was the scientific method, as much as any particular scientific discoveries, which so alarmed America’s orthodox. Religious orthodoxy in the late nineteenth century was as much an ingrained obedience to traditional authority, especially the authority of the Bible, as it was a set of specific religious beliefs. In the postwar period Beecher was determined to bridge the divide between rational thought and Christian faith. “My heart is with the radicals, but my emotions are with the orthodox,” as he put it.5 To him religion was the emotional, and science was the rational, response to the world. As the journalist James Parton observed:

No matter how fervently he may have been praying supernatural-ism, he preaches pure cause and effect. His text may savor of old Palestine, but his sermon is inspired by New York and Brooklyn; and nearly all that he says, when he is most himself finds an approving response in the mind of every well disposed person, whether orthodox or heterodox in his creed.6

The most important intellectual influence on Beecher in this period was Herbert Spencer, the famed British social thinker who originated the term “survival of the fittest.” Spencer had a talent for stitching together ostensibly unrelated facts and phenomena into broad, over-arching structures—Beecher’s favorite sort of thinking. He was one of the earliest American fans of Herbert Spencer’s “conception of gradual development”7—the theory that everything—nature, society, individuals—evolves and, if left alone, progresses. Spencer’s all-encompassing, laissez-faire theory of evolution predated Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, but in its raw form it was just as shocking to people raised to believe that truth was eternal and identity was fixed.

After the war Beecher was increasingly open about his religious liberalism. In 1867 Ralph Waldo Emerson noted with surprise that “Beecher told me, that he did not hold one of the five points of Calvinism in a way to satisfy his father.” By 1870 Beecher was campaigning to drop the concept of hell, or divine punishment, from the official creed of Plymouth Church. “Love, with its freedom, has taken the place of authority, and of obedience to it,” he argued. For those who had “ripened” to a “nobler plane,” desire was a far more effective motive than fear.8

Those worried that such freedom might be sacrilegious, corrupting, or chaotic were reassured by the example of Beecher’s own homey common sense. “He was one of those men,” as the writer Edward Eggleston noted appreciatively, “who connect the past with the future, and make of themselves a bridge for the passage of multitudes.”9 Henry was often accosted by strangers, like the young man who sat down by him on a train, asking: “Mr. Beecher! Must I believe every word in the Bible, to be a Christian?”

“No!” replied Beecher.

“Well—what then?” asked the bewildered boy.

“You must believe the truth that is in the Bible.”

The boy pondered this for a moment and then asked “Now, about the Incarnation? Why do I need to believe in that?” Beecher quickly sketched his views.

“I see, now what about Conversion?” They talked until the train reached the station. The young man took his leave, saying, “Mr. Beecher, you have laid my ghosts to rest.”

“I hope they will never rise again,” replied Beecher.10

THE GOLDEN AGE OF LIBERTY was not without challenges. At the end of the war two questions hung ominously over the landscape: What would happen to the Rebel states? What would happen to the former slaves? Making peace with hostile Southern whites while empowering Southern blacks promised to be a Sisyphean task.

President Lincoln had intended to navigate these contradictory demands with the same combination of principle and pragmatism that carried him through the Rebellion. At the end of 1864 a coalition of conservative Republicans led by Secretary of State William Seward brokered a deal to pass the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery throughout the country, in exchange for the promise of a speedy reconciliation with the Rebel states. Lincoln made both justice for the freedmen and generosity to the former Confederacy the cornerstones of his famous second inaugural address—“With malice toward none, with charity for all,” in his immortal words. But Lincoln’s assassination threw all such plans into the whirlwind.

No one knew what to expect from Lincoln’s successor. Andrew Johnson was an antiaristocratic populist who had worked his way up from poverty through the ranks of the Tennessee Democratic Party. When Tennessee seceded, Johnson was the only U.S. senator from a Confederate state to remain loyal to the Union. When Tennessee was reconquered in 1862, Lincoln appointed him military governor of the recaptured territory, and in the presidential race of 1864, Lincoln asked him aboard to balance the Union ticket. During the election the Republican press had applauded Johnson’s vicious denunciations of the Slavocracy. But reporters were literally dumbfounded when Johnson arrived at his own vice-presidential inauguration ceremony so drunk he could barely take the oath.

Henry Ward Beecher and Theodore Tilton eagerly threw themselves into the debate over how to reconstruct the Union. Both strongly supported universal suffrage, for women as well as black men, and were active fund-raisers for various freedmen’s aid organizations. But from the first the two pundits disagreed about Andrew Johnson. Tilton was appalled by Johnson’s drunken inaugural escapade, and his opinion of the Tennessean declined rapidly. Beecher, by contrast, was one of many Republicans who were secretly pleased to see a firebrand at the helm. “Johnson’s little finger was stronger than Lincoln’s loins,” declared Beecher only hours after learning of Lincoln’s death.11

But their differences sank deeper. Since returning from England, Beecher had ensconced himself in what was now called the “Conservative Republican” camp, led by men like Secretary Seward and New York Times founder Henry J. Raymond. Meanwhile Tilton had attached himself to the “Radical Republican” wing, represented by Wendell Phillips, Pennsylvania congressman Thaddeus Stevens, and Senator Charles Sumner. The two factions clashed bitterly over the readmission of the Confederate states.

Tilton and the Radicals advocated onerous concessions from the Rebels and strict federal protections for the freedmen. To the surprise of those who remembered only his fiery war sermons, Beecher (like his fellow Conservatives) advocated a generous and quick reconciliation with the South. Even before the assassination, Thaddeus Stevens ridiculed Beecher’s magnanimous message at Fort Sumter, accusing Beecher of misusing the Bible to persuade Northerners to embrace “the impenitent and unwashed traitors whose garments are still dripping with the blood of my relatives, neighbors, friends and countrymen.”12 Instead Stevens quoted the Old Testament’s demand that the righteous smite those who have offended the Lord. Lincoln’s murder only made the calls for retribution more clamorous.

It soon became obvious that, unlike his predecessor, Johnson was a pugnacious ideologue and an unreconstructed racist. “This is a country for white men and, by God, as long as I am president it shall be a government for white men,” he vowed on more than one occasion.13 As soon as Congress recessed for the summer, Johnson seized control of the Reconstruction process. He offered blanket amnesty to all but the very highest-level Rebel leaders and ordered all land in federal hands returned to its former owners, evicting the freedmen who’d been settled on them and sparking a series of violent confrontations. Johnson gave each state free rein to begin reconstituting their governments, requiring only that they repudiate secession, abolish slavery, and forfeit all Confederate debts.

The North was incensed by Johnson’s apparent about-face. By the time Congress returned to Washington in the winter of 1865, a powerful coalition of Radicals and moderate Republicans was determined to wrest control of the Reconstruction process from the president. Theodore Tilton eagerly leaped into the breach, turning the Independent into a Radical mouthpiece.

Yet many people were surprised to find Beecher’s faith in the president and his policies unshaken. When Beecher spoke against the death penalty for Jefferson Davis, even such gentle Christians as Calvin Stowe objected. “If such a man deserves to be treated and eulogized as a generous and magnanimous foe then let the Devil have full credit for such magnanimosity and generosity,” Calvin admonished Henry.14

HENRY’S REASONS RESTED ON BOTH morality and expediency. Henry genuinely believed that sin was itself a form of suffering, making further punishment cruel and unnecessary, a belief borne out by the terrible devastation he witnessed in Charleston. Politically he believed that delay would only deepen Southern resistance to the new regime, and he feared the expansion of federal power and the use of it to compel behavior, even for a just cause. “Unless we turn the government into a vast military machine, there cannot be armies enough to protect the freedmen while Southern society remains insurrectionary,” Beecher said.15 “However humane the end sought and the motive, it is, in fact, a course of instruction preparing our government to be despotic and familiarizing the people to a stretch of authority which can never be other than dangerous to liberty.”16

Here was the first challenge to the Golden Age of Liberty—was it possible to have freedom without the compulsion of law? At bottom this was a conflict over human nature itself. The Radicals took what might be called the pessimistic view, insisting that the only way to redeem the South was to punish its evil mistakes and force it to reform.

Beecher claimed a more realistic understanding of human psychology. It was foolish to believe that Northern coercion could force either slaves or their owners instantly to abandon the bad habits of generations. “It is hard enough to take a kid out of a lion’s paw; and to insist that the lion shall take the kid into his den, and make him an equal, and call him a lion, is too much for a lion to bear.” After watching the Slave Power dominate the federal government for three decades, Henry had good reason to fear the further concentration of power in Washington. And while there is something distasteful in it, he wasn’t entirely wrong in insisting that “the welfare of the freedmen depends far more upon the good will of their white neighbors than it does upon northern philanthropy or Governmental protection,” as he wrote to President Johnson.17

But underlying these caveats was the sort of reckless optimism that Herman Melville satirized in The Confidence Man—now bolstered by Herbert Spencer’s theories of laissez-faire evolution. Henry genuinely believed that with love, patience, and goodwill toward the Rebels, “the great normal, industrial and moral laws shall work such gradual changes as shall enable them to pass from old to the new.” Theodore Tilton offered a more cynical interpretation. Mr. Beecher “never was willing to see any one punished for anything he had done,” he told a friend flatly.18

By the autumn of 1865 Beecher and Tilton were clashing openly, egged on by the anti-Radical press. When Beecher delivered a sermon on his reluctant willingness to delay black suffrage in pursuit of peace, Tilton was certain it was “aimed at the Independent,” and replied with a zinging editorial.19 Beecher responded the next week with another veiled reference to Tilton. For every magnanimous sermon from Henry of the Independent, Theodore countered with a harsh editorial.

By December it was clear that Beecher’s view of human nature was overconfident. Left by Johnson to their own devices, the Southern states quickly resurrected the old white-supremacist regimes. They established “Black Codes” that kept blacks from voting, owning land, accessing the legal system, and making free labor contracts. They restored the old planter elite to power, electing scores of former Confederate leaders to state and federal offices. Instead of blocking them from taking office, Johnson began issuing pardons by the fistful.

Privately Beecher urged Johnson to do more to protect the freedmen, but publicly his support for the president was unwavering. Beecher was equally poor in judging President Johnson’s personal character. Even as Johnson was making enemies in every corner, Beecher wrote to compliment the president on how “enlightened and statesmanlike” he seemed.20

This battle between justice and mercy roused that apostle of ambivalence, Herman Melville, from his literary exile, inspiring one last meditation on misplaced confidence. Battle-Pieces, a volume of war poetry accompanied by an essay on Reconstruction, appeared in 1866. But this time he concurred with Beecher. “Nor should we forget that benevolent desires,” wrote Melville, “after passing a certain point, can not undertake their own fulfillment without incurring the risk of evils beyond those sought to be remedied.”21

Unsurprisingly, the Independent’s review of Battle-Pieces excoriated Melville—“this happy optimist”—warning that “gentlemen of Mr. Melville’s class are mischievous men in these troubled times. Only absolute justice is safe. Peaceable, by all means peaceable, in God’s name; but first pure, in God’s name, also.”22

AS 1866 ENTERED, Beecher was firmly on the wrong side of public opinion. Speaking at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Frederick Douglass, America’s premier black intellectual, summed up prevailing opinion on the preacher. He was reminded, Douglass said, of a speech Beecher gave back in 1852, declaring that he’d rather wait twenty-five years to have slavery abolished through Christ than see immediate emancipation without Christ. “If he had been the slave of a man and I had had a decent sort of a slave whip in my hand and stood over him I could have changed Mr. Beecher’s opinion,” Douglass thundered. “I think he would have been in favor of abolishing slavery whether the church were ready for it or not.”23 Cheers and laughter rolled through the hometown audience.

Reconciliation between Congress and the president still seemed possible that spring, when even the Conservatives supported federal action to nullify the heinous “Black Codes” sweeping the South. In March, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866, granting equality before the law to all American citizens and making it a federal crime to deprive citizens of their civil rights. Privately Beecher urged Johnson to sign it. “I have strongly and to my own personal inconvenience (for the present) defended your wisdom, in most things, and your motives, and I feel most profoundly how the signing of this bill will strengthen the position that I have defended in your behalf,” Beecher wrote.24 But when Johnson vetoed the bill and then compounded the insult with a shockingly racist veto message, Beecher made no public protest.

Tilton, by contrast, went to D.C. to help lead the successful fight to override the veto. The evening the override passed, Gideon Welles, the Conservative secretary of the navy, ran into an exultant Tilton and could barely suppress his contempt. “Theodore Tilton, as full of fanatical, fantastical, and boyish enthusiasm as of genius and talent, but with no sensible ideas of the principles on which our government is founded or accurate knowledge of our republican federal system, or of the merits involved in pending questions, was boisterous over the result in the Senate,” Welles wrote with disgust in his diary that evening.25

Johnson’s veto of the Civil Rights Bill set off a political war that raged through the brutally hot summer of 1866. In Washington, Johnson vetoed every Reconstruction measure passed by the Congress, and Congress overrode nearly every veto. In the South it was increasingly clear that white Southerners were determined to strip blacks of any semblance of legal equality. As the fall midterm congressional elections approached, the battle shifted to a series of political conventions.

The first—and worst—was a convention of black and white Republicans in New Orleans to promote a black suffrage amendment to the Louisiana constitution, held at the end of July. The North was horrified when white rioters, including policemen and former Confederate soldiers, attacked the convention with clubs and guns, killing 40 Radicals of both races and wounding 140.

Two weeks later the president’s supporters called a National Union Convention in Philadelphia. It was to be a formal burying of the hatchet, featuring both Northern and Southern states, as well as Republicans and Democrats, Copperheads and Unionists. But when the ceremonies opened with a grand procession into National Hall, in which the delegates from Massachusetts and South Carolina paraded arm in arm down the aisle as a symbol of national reconciliation and social equality, the hypocrisy was so rank that the press broke into open ridicule.

Johnson compounded the bad publicity by spending the next two months taking what became known as the “Swing ’Round the Circle,” a speaking tour in support of his policies and candidates. Riled by alcohol and anger, the president delivered a series of venomous stump speeches, in which he wildly accused the Radicals of instigating the New Orleans massacre and of plotting to assassinate him, and jokingly suggested executing their leaders. By September even Johnson’s strong supporters were beating a hasty path away from him.

Meanwhile, back in Philadelphia, a second convention was assembling, gathering together Southern loyalists and Radical Northern Republicans. But the Radicals proved only that hypocrisy was nonpartisan. When Frederick Douglass arrived as a delegate from upstate New York, the convention nearly shut down rather than seat him. And during their own grand procession, marching two abreast into National Hall, the delegates refused to come near Douglass. As Douglass was about to march alone down the aisle, Theodore Tilton rushed up and locked arms with him, in imitation of Johnson’s Philadelphia convention.

Onlookers cheered, but privately the delegates were furious at Tilton for giving fodder to their racist opponents. “Why it was done I cannot see except as a foolish bravado,” lamented Thaddeus Stevens, the leader of the Congressional Radicals. The convention finally broke down when, under Tilton’s leadership, the New York delegation passed a resolution calling for black suffrage, leading the border state delegations to withdraw in a huff. So much for the City of Brotherly Love.

Cleveland, Ohio, hosted the last ill-starred convention of the summer. The National Convention of Soldiers and Sailors was called to support Johnson’s policy of prompt reconciliation with the South, and they invited Beecher to serve as chaplain to the convention. Beecher, suffering from his annual end-of-summer hay fever, declined their invitation but wrote a warm letter restating the views he’d been preaching for the last year and a half. But Henry had not bargained for the hostility created by the slaughter in New Orleans and Johnson’s disastrous “Swing ’Round the Circle.”

When the so-called Cleveland Letter appeared in the press, Beecher was enveloped in a tempest of anger. “To think of a man like H. W. Beecher lending himself to the unprincipled schemes of that tippling traitor, that boozy boaster, that devilish demagogue! What can be his motive?” demanded the abolitionist Lydia Maria Child in her inimitable way.26 Whatever the motive, wrote Tilton in the Independent, Beecher “has done more injury to the American republic than has been done by any other citizen except Andrew Johnson.”27 His family was furious, and for the first time Plymouth Church was on the verge of open rebellion.

Beecher quickly backtracked. His first effort, an agree-to-disagree letter read aloud to his congregation, did little to placate the outrage, however. So he followed it with an appearance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on October 25. This time he read a carefully written speech that reaffirmed his loyalty to the Republican Party and repudiated Andrew Johnson. He dissented only in personal philosophy and practical policy, he patiently explained, not on fundamental principles. Although Beecher had not actually changed his position, it sounded enough like an apology that most people grudgingly accepted it.

But not Theodore Tilton. “The spectacle at the Academy of Music had in it a touch of humiliation which even the noblest passages of the address did not redeem,” Tilton wrote in the Independent. “Something of true moral grandeur is wanting to the position of a veteran who, after 25 years of service as a pioneer of political opinion, has nothing nobler to say in the present juncture than simply: ‘I am not a Democrat.’”28

RADICAL RECONSTRUCTION ALLOWED TILTON to combine with remarkable success his passionate idealism and personal ambitions. By minimizing religious sectarianism and maximizing partisan politics and social reform, Tilton turned the Independent into one of the most influential journals of the postwar period and catapulted to the top of the editorial profession. He parlayed the popularity of the Independent into a lucrative career as a public lecturer. By 1866 Tilton was prosperous enough to purchase an airy, three-story house at 124 Livingston Street, about six blocks from Plymouth Church.

Nonetheless, in the winter of 1866–67 Theodore was deeply discontented, and much of it seemed strangely centered on Beecher. When Sarah Putnam, a close friend of Elizabeth Tilton, visited the Tiltons’ house in October, just after the uproar over the Cleveland Letters, she was surprised to find that they had turned their small plaster bust of Henry Ward Beecher to face the wall.

Why? asked Mrs. Putnam in surprise, knowing of Elizabeth’s warm devotion to Beecher.

“Theodore says that our pastor has proved himself a traitor to the Republican party,” Elizabeth replied dutifully, as Theodore looked on.

Nonetheless Theodore denied that the Independent’s attacks had strained his relationship with the preacher. “Mr. Beecher was too magnanimous a man to lay up anything against anyone that expressed his honest sentiments,” he told Sarah Putnam.

Didn’t he think that Mr. Beecher’s feelings might be hurt? she asked.

Theodore replied, rather smugly, that he “presumed it had, but Mr. Beecher would never show it.” Besides, he added, “Mr. Beecher had a very peculiar constitution of mind; if anyone wanted to enlist Mr. Beecher in his behalf, the best way to do it was to abuse Mr. Beecher.”

Like his former mentor, Tilton was increasingly drawn to freethinkers, social radicals, and men of the world. But unlike Beecher, he seemed unsettled by these new associations. Theodore was a man who thrived on absolutes; it was his gift and his curse. Deprived of his old certitudes, he swung wildly between self-complaisance and self-loathing. As Bessie Turner, the Tiltons’ hired girl, put it, “he would be apparently very happy some part of the day, and then in about an hour, it may be, he would be so cross and ugly that nothing or nobody could please him.” He regretted his dark moods, he told Sarah Putnam, but they were “the penalty that genius had to pay.”29

Elizabeth bore the brunt of his ill temper, but what worried her most was Tilton’s growing contempt for organized religion. Theodore admitted that his declining “religious conviction was a great source of tears and anguish to her; she said to me once that denying the divinity of Christ in her view nullified our marriage almost.”30 But he seemed to enjoy goading her, speaking scornfully of the Bible, and bragging about attending the theater, playing billiards, and bowling on Sunday. He told friends that if he had his way he’d forbid his children to attend church. “He used to say that a man and wife should not live together longer than they took pleasure in each other’s company,” recalled one friend with surprise.31

Under Tilton’s direction the Independent now featured essays satirizing the orthodox, bashing Conservatives, advocating women’s rights, and promoting radical new thinkers. A council of seven Congregational ministers led by Edward Beecher called Bowen onto the carpet, insisting that he get rid of Tilton or give up any religious pretensions. Bowen soothed them, but Tilton’s rising fame and considerable talent made him too valuable to fire. When the council of seven admonished Tilton directly, he defiantly told them that his views were exactly the same as those of the eminent pastor of Plymouth Church.

Edward Beecher immediately wrote to his brother, demanding to know if this was true. “I fear Tilton more and more. His advice to young men to read Emerson’s essays and especially Herbert Spencer’s first principles as ‘awakeners’ is dangerous and may be ruinous,” Edward warned. “If things come to this issue, you will not be able to uphold Tilton but he will sink you.”32

Henry replied to his brother with unusual speed and harshness. Carefully sidestepping his own affection for Spencer and Emerson, he vigorously disavowed the Independent; “it is well known that I am in positive antagonism with the whole general drift of the paper,” he told Edward. “Mr. Bowen will scarcely recognize me in the street and feels bitterly about my withdrawal from all part or lot in the paper.” But everyone, he noted with uncharacteristic nastiness, had noticed that the Independent still advertised Edward Beecher as a contributor. “How is that?” Beecher gibed. As for Theodore, “I am an old man—Tilton a young man—The question is not whether I agree with him, but how far he agrees with me!”33

With Beecher off the Independent and Theodore out of the church, their fraught relationship ought to have cooled. But the two men seemed locked in a strange antagonistic embrace. Beecher couldn’t stand breaking openly with anyone, and Tilton couldn’t bear losing such a famous friend. But there was something more.

Fed by Bowen’s bitter whisperings, Theodore had become obsessed with the perennial rumors of Beecher’s sexual indiscretions. Theodore began “to talk to me about Mr. Beecher’s wrong-doings with ladies which he had heard from Mr. Bowen,” Elizabeth Tilton recalled, “night after night, and day after day he talked about Mr. Beecher[.]” In November 1865 Tilton shocked Charles Judson, a Plymouth Church congregant, by hinting that he knew the dark truth behind the rumors of Beecher’s infidelity. When Judson protested, Tilton only moaned several times, “I have lost my faith in man.”

Appalled, Judson went directly to Beecher with these accusations. Yet when Beecher confronted Theodore, the editor denied it all, and then sent Beecher a long, sycophantish letter of “recuperated love,” signing himself “your unworthy but eternal friend.”34 For a man who hated hypocrisy above all, it was a strange performance.

In November 1866 Theodore set off on a four-month lecture tour through New England and across the Midwest. He departed, as he told Elizabeth, with “unusual disquiet of mind—something akin to bitterness of spirit.”35 Despite his hostility, before Theodore left he told the minister, “I wish you would look in after and see that Libby is not lonesome or does not want anything.”36

Beecher, with exquisite passive-aggression, did just that.

THEODORE TILTON WAS NOT THE ONLY ONE obsessed with Beecher’s roving eye. For Moses Beach, his wife’s infatuation with her minister was becoming intolerable. After Chloe Beach accompanied Beecher on his trip to Fort Sumter in 1865, the two had grown more intimate than ever. Jealous beyond endurance, Moses sold their Brooklyn Heights town house to his brother and moved the whole family out of the city, trying once again “to cut off the associations which were constantly dragging me into a mire of unhappy thought and depriving me of an affection which it had been the one aim of my life to cherish and nourish.”

To no avail. In his deepening depression, Moses fell desperately ill. The cause, ostensibly, was typhoid fever, but as he later wrote to Beecher, “you know enough of the human mind to be aware that a mind afflicted not unfrequently brings affliction to the body; and this, more than anything else, as I then thought and have ever thought, brought affliction to me.”

All through the winter of 1865–66, Moses lingered on the edge of death. “For myself I would then, most cheerfully, have passed away,” Moses told Henry. “But one object for life remained—that I might still keep watch and ward for her—one hope for happiness; that she would return with me to our wonted days of confidence and perfect happiness.” When his health finally returned, Moses was determined “to add every whit to her happiness, though I should thereby be dragged to yet lower depths of mental misery. I did hope to awaken those dormant feelings of attachment by this sacrifice of self. And so, came back the old home again—so, came back the opportunities, which I too well knew were coveted, for association with you.”

So Moses repurchased the house on the Heights and returned to his private hell. Chloe seemed blind to the neighbors’ whispers as well as her husband’s pain. She had eyes only for Henry. Mary Hallock Foote, a young friend of the family, remembered being scolded by Mrs. Beach one evening when Beecher was holding forth to a room full of people. As Mary quietly rose to slip out, Mrs. Beach said sharply, “Mary Hallock, sit still!”

“Mr. Beecher was in and out of the house every day,” recalled Mary with surprise; “and still he was sacrosanct: to leave the room where he was in full tide of speech was an incredible offence against that homage everyone was supposed to pay him.”37

In April 1866, while Moses was still feeble from his long illness, Chloe Beach became pregnant. Moses was an unusually warm and devoted father, but this pregnancy only deepened his despondency. “I had over estimated my own power of endurance,” he told Beecher. “I gave way and tried to hide from it by informing you what I observed,” hoping that the minister might cool his relationship with Chloe. Not long after that conversation, Moses sailed for Germany with his son, hoping for some change. But when he returned in December 1866, he found that Chloe and Henry were more tightly entwined than ever. “I felt little less than crazed to observe that my absence had been improved—if such things can be called improvements—and that the goal I wished was vanishing from even hope.”38

Chloe’s thoughts on these or any other subject are a mystery. In the gossipy world of Brooklyn Heights she was an unusually private woman who hated writing letters. Eunice Beecher considered Chloe her dearest friend in the world, writing her hundreds of notes over the years, but at some point before death, the two women must have returned each others’ letters, for barely a scrap of Chloe’s handwriting exists among thousands of Beecher documents.

HENRY, TOO, ENTERED THE WINTER OF 1866—67 in a low mood. The uproar over his Cleveland Letters on Reconstruction rattled him more than he cared to admit. And then there was the looming deadline for his novel, Norwood. The book was more than a year late and his publisher, Robert Bonner, was becoming impatient. Paralyzed by inexperience, insecurity, and chronic procrastination, Henry had written almost nothing. “I am like a young wife for the first time with child,” Henry complained to Bonner. “Sometimes I imagine there is nothing— then I am sure there are twins, and next I am perfectly sure that ‘I never shall live to get through.’”39

Normally Henry would have turned to Chloe Beach for encouragement, but that uncomfortable conversation with Moses Beach, Chloe’s blossoming pregnancy, and her husband’s return from Berlin only further strained his overwrought nerves. Feeling beleaguered and sorry for himself, Beecher found comfort in the parlor of Elizabeth Tilton.

Beecher began stopping by 124 Livingston Street as soon as Theodore left for his long winter lecture tour, seeking, Henry said, a refuge “where people could not find me.”40 He often brought his latest chapter of Norwood to read aloud to Elizabeth. “In the earlier chapters I was almost in despair,” Henry admitted. “I needed somebody that would not be critical, and that would praise it, to give me courage to go on with it.”41

The relationship between Elizabeth and her pastor blossomed along with his novel. After he read a passage glorying in the trailing arbutus, “like the breath of love,”42 he presented her with a watercolor of a trailing arbutus. Norwood’s heroine, Rose Wentworth, “the woman of nature and simple truth,” bore an increasing resemblance to Elizabeth. Years later she would adopt his description of Rose’s secret love as her own:

It would seem as if, while her whole life centered upon his love, she could hide the precious secret by flinging over it vines and flowers, by mirth and raillery, as a bird hides its nest under tufts of grass, and behind leaves and vines, as a fence against prying eyes.43

Henry brought toys for the children and gifts for Elizabeth—flowers, books, perfumes, fancy soaps, stationery, and pictures of himself, most of which she locked in her bedroom closet. They talked of Theodore’s growing irreligiosity and Eunice’s coldness, and of spiritual and literary matters. “It was entering into her life, and, in a sense, giving her an interest in mine,” Henry said.44

Unlike Chloe Beach, Elizabeth wore her heart on her sleeve. She and Theodore wrote each other nearly every day, long letters overflowing with high-toned language and extravagant emotions. As Elizabeth blossomed under Beecher’s attention, she tried to share her feelings with Theodore—in part from sheer enthusiasm, in part, as she explained later, because “when Mr. Beecher came to see me, Mr. Tilton immediately began to have suspicions.”

Theodore hotly denied this. “I am not jealous,” Tilton told Elizabeth. “I think any man is a fool who is jealous[.]” Still, Beecher’s visits weighed on his mind. That winter Theodore was electrified by the bestselling novel Griffith Gaunt, by Charles Reade, the story of a devout woman who becomes so infatuated with her priest that her jealous husband abandons her. “Go to the bookstore, buy a copy, and read it,” he instructed Elizabeth. Two weeks later, when Elizabeth put off his request to meet him in Chicago for a few days, Tilton blamed Beecher. “Now that the other man has gone off lecturing (as your letter mentions), you can afford to come to me,” Theodore wrote with barbed humor. “Leave home, children, kith and kin and cleave unto him to whom you originally promised to cleave. You promised the other man to cleave to me and yet you leave me all alone and cleave to him. ‘O Frailty! Thy name is woman.’”

Elizabeth’s efforts to be, as she put it, “perfectly transparent” in her feelings about Beecher worked all too well. Theodore could hardly have been comforted by letters like the one she wrote at the end of December.

I have been thinking of my love for Mr. B considerably of late, and those thoughts you shall have. I remember Hannah Moore says: “My heart in its new sympathy for one abounds towards all.” Now, I think I have lived a richer, happier life since I have known him. And have you not loved me more ardently since you saw another high nature appreciated me? [ . . .]

But to return to Mr. B. He has been the guide of our youth, and until the three last dreadful years, when our confidence was shaken in him—we trusted him as no other human being. During these early years, the mention of his name, to meet him, or, better still, a visit from him, my cheek would flush with pleasure—an experience common to all his parishioners of both sexes. Is it not strange, then, darling, that on a more intimate acquaintance my delight and pleasure should increase? Of course I realize what attracts you both to me is a supposed purity of soul you find in me.

Years later Theodore said that Elizabeth had been trying to save Beecher from himself. “She had been much distressed with rumors against his moral purity and wished to convince him that she could receive his kindness, and yet resist his solicitations,” Theodore testified. She wanted to give him “an increased respect for the chaste dignity of womanhood.”45 As the winter wore on, however, Elizabeth’s confidence faltered. Exactly what occurred is unclear, but by mid-January, Elizabeth suddenly gave full credence to rumors of the minister’s philandering.

“You, my beloved, are higher up than he; this I believe,” Elizabeth wrote of Beecher in a teary letter to her husband.

Oh let us pray for him. You are not willing to leave him to the evil influences which surround him. He is in a delusion with regard to himself, and pitifully mistaken in his opinion of you. [ . . .] Why I was so mysteriously brought in as actor in this friendship, I know not, yet no experience of all my life has made my soul ache so keenly as the apparent lack of Christian manliness in this beloved man.46

Others also noticed the pastor’s unusual attentions to Mrs. Tilton. Joseph Richards, Elizabeth’s brother and the former publisher of the Independent, had heard enough of Bowen’s gossipmongering to feel uneasy—especially after he stopped by the house and found Beecher and Elizabeth in the front parlor, his sister making, as he later described it, “a very hasty motion, and with highly flushed face, away from the position that Mr. Beecher occupied.”47

But like Chloe Beach, Elizabeth was so artless and so goodhearted that she was oblivious to these ill winds. As she told Theodore on January 28, 1867:

Mr. B called Saturday. He came tired and gloomy, but he said I had the most calming and peaceful influence over him, more so than anyone he ever knew. I believe he loves you. We talked of you. He brought me two pretty flowers in pots, and said as he went out, “What a pretty house this is; I wish I lived here.” It would make me very happy if you could look in upon us without his knowing it.48

THREE DAYS LATER, ON JANUARY 31, Chloe Beach gave birth to a little girl she named Violet. It is a fearsome thing to suggest, but there is reason to think that Violet might be Henry Ward Beecher’s daughter. In the absence of modern DNA testing, the evidence is circumstantial but provocative.

When Violet was conceived, around April 1866, sexual relations between the Beaches would have been minimal at best. Not only had the Beaches’ marriage reached a new nadir, but Moses was barely recovered from the painful rashes and intestinal distress of typhoid fever. Knowing how feeble Moses was, Chloe coyly tried to push back her due date. The biggest challenge for a woman seeking to hide the paternity of her unborn child is to make sure the date of conception matches her opportunities to conceive. Eunice, an experienced nurse, was extremely surprised when, on January 25, Chloe told her that her baby was due in mid-February. No doubt Eunice was far more surprised when the baby arrived only four days later, with no evidence of premature birth.

Then there is the Beaches’ uncharacteristic behavior. Not long after Chloe’s pregnancy became apparent, Moses finally confronted Henry about his relationship with Chloe and then fled the country in despair. While there is no sign that Moses questioned Violet’s paternity, he took little pleasure in her birth, spending almost the entire first year of Violet’s life either up at their farm on the Hudson, while Chloe and Violet remained in the city, or traveling abroad. By contrast, for the rest of her life, Chloe favored Violet over her other children; “you are dearer than the others,” Chloe explained to Violet, “perhaps because your love for me is deeper, perhaps that you have not been in health like them, maybe that you are the youngest, and perfection seems to be in the younger one usually.”49

But Henry’s role is the most telling. First there was Violet’s name. Flowers were a shared passion of Chloe’s and Henry’s, and they often communicated through gifts of flowers. Like many Victorians, he believed that flowers had their own personalities and symbolism, and that there were strong “analogies between plants and thoughts and sentiments, ” as he wrote in Norwood.50 The violet was one of his favorite flowers. A small, fragrant blossom that blooms in shady, sheltered spots, in the common language of flowers the violet symbolizes a hidden gem and innocence slightly eroticized. In Roman mythology the goddess Diana turned the nymph Ion into a violet to save her from the lustful attentions of the god Apollo.

Henry adored children, but his devotion to Violet went beyond normal boundaries. Unlike the other Beach children, Violet called him “Grandpa,” and came and went in the Beechers’ house as if it were her own. When she was as young as four, Violet would scamper over to Henry’s first thing in the morning to play with him at breakfast. In fact Henry seemed closer to Violet than to his own grandchildren. As she got older he took her on outings, wrote her warm letters, showered her with gifts, and accompanied Chloe to the train station when Violet went away to boarding school.

But the most compelling evidence is the photographs. When she was around six, Violet and Henry posed together for a formal studio portrait—then as now a very unusual thing for a man and his neighbors’ daughter to do. Already her face shows hints of Henry’s moon shape and ample mouth. By the time she is a teenager the resemblance between Violet and Henry—the large, heavy-lidded eyes, the broad chin, and wide, thin lips—is so pronounced that even today some casual viewers assume they are close relatives.

Of course there is something tawdry in such speculations. All we know for certain is that Moses Beach spent decades agonizing over his wife’s increasing infatuation with her minister, and that from 1866 until Henry’s death the Beach and Beecher families were deeply intertwined beyond the conventional bonds of friendship. We also know this: Had Henry not spent that winter seeking consolation in the company of Elizabeth Tilton, no one would ever have entertained such a vulgar idea.

Whatever conflagration Beecher had feared from the Beaches, it did not come, and within a few weeks of Violet’s birth Henry was feeling quite jolly again. Even Theodore was in good spirits when he returned in early March, and feeling generous toward the parson. “In view of his kind attentions to you this Winter, all my old love for him has revived, and my heart would once more greet him as of old,” he told Elizabeth. “I sometimes quarrel with my friends on the surface, but never at bottom.”51

Only Elizabeth was disappointed that spring. For now that Theodore was back, the only time she saw the Reverend Beecher was in the pulpit.

IN JANUARY 1867 a thirty-one-year-old writer named Samuel Clemens arrived in New York. Sam Clemens joined the bohemian journalists swarming the city; drinking, smoking, and swearing were his pleasures, and sarcasm was his stock-in-trade. Under the pen name Mark Twain, Clemens had made a splash out West with his humorous essays and lectures, and now hoped to hit the big time in the East.

The last time Twain had been in New York was 1853, and he was astonished by how much the city had changed. In ’53 Uncle Tom’s Cabin had been the big box-office smash. Now risqué “Model Artists Shows,” which had been banned in ’53, were all the rage. One current smash, The Black Crook, featured “70 beauties arrayed in dazzling half-costumes; and displaying all possible compromises between nakedness and decency,” marveled Twain. Even women on the street looked racier as the wide-hooped crinoline dresses of the fifties were replaced by form-fitting ankle-length dresses that, as Twain noted with approval, exposed “the restless little feet. Charming, fascinating, seductive, bewitching!”

Frank as this new generation of New Yorkers was about sex, they were even more blunt about money. “The old, genuine, traveled, cultivated, pedigreed aristocracy of New York, stand stunned and helpless under the new order of things,” observed Twain. “They find themselves supplanted by upstart princes of Shoddy, vulgar and with unknown grandfathers. The incomes which were something for the common herd to gape at and gossip about once, are mere livelihoods now—would not pay Shoddy’s house-rent.” If things get much worse, Twain concluded, “I fear I shall have to start a moral missionary society here.”

Like all tourists, Twain made Plymouth Church one of his first stops. It was well worth the frigid ferry ride and sitting jammed into a spot “about large enough to accommodate a spittoon,” he declared. As Beecher “went marching up and down the stage, sawing his arms in the air, howling sarcasms this way and that, discharging rockets of poetry, and exploding mines of eloquence, halting now and then to stamp his foot three times in succession to emphasize a point, I could have started the audience with a single clap of the hands and brought down the house. I had a suffocating desire to do it,” wrote Twain. “Mr. Beecher is a remarkably handsome man when he is in the full tide of sermonizing, and his face is lit up with animation,” Twain concluded, “but he is as homely as a singed cat when he isn’t doing anything.”

Casting about for fresh subjects, Twain stumbled on something new under the sun: America’s first luxury cruise. Captain Charles Duncan, a deacon of Plymouth Church and close friend of Beecher’s, was leading the steamer Quaker City on a five-month pleasure cruise through the Mediterranean to the Holy Land. It was to be both deluxe (costing an exorbitant $1,250 at a time when around-trip first-class fare to Paris was $200) and pious, with all passengers required to present character references. Rumor had it that the Civil War hero General William Tecumseh Sherman and the Reverend Beecher would be going. The passenger list was already half filled with Plymouth Church folk.

Twain finagled the editors of a California paper into paying his fare, but from the outset he struggled against the piety part. Twain and a reporter from the Tribune he called Smith were unshaven and a little tipsy when they arrived in Captain Duncan’s office. Smith made it worse by introducing Twain as a Baptist missionary just returned from the Sandwich Islands (now known as Hawaii). Twain then asked, with mock solemnity, about the rumor that Beecher would be coming and whether he might allow a Baptist to preach on board.

“I am only a Baptist, you see, but I’d like to have a show,” Twain explained, barely suppressing his laughter.

“‘Oh, d——it!’ Smith whispered, ‘you’ll ruin everything with that slang.’ Then aloud: ‘Yes, my friend is a Baptist clergyman, and we feared that inasmuch as Mr. Beecher is a Universalist, he—’” This subtle dig at Beecher’s free and easy salvation had the gratifying effect of flummoxing Captain Duncan.

“‘Universalist! Why, he is a Congregationalist. But never mind that,’” Duncan protested. “‘I have no doubt he would be sincerely glad to have Mr. Twain assist him in the vessel’s pulpit at all times—no doubt in the world about that.’

“I had to laugh out strong, here—I could not well help it,” Twain recalled. “The idea of my preaching time about with Beecher was so fresh, so entertaining, so delightful.” Twain returned the next day to apologize and pay his fare.

But the captain could not afford to be picky, as it turned out. By the time the Quaker City left New York, both General Sherman and Beecher had withdrawn from the passenger list. With Beecher out, most of the Plymouth Church people stayed home as well. The one major exception was Moses Beach. He had returned from Berlin in time to see Violet born but was so miserable in Brooklyn that he jumped at the chance to escape again. This time he took along his seventeen-year-old daughter, Emma.

The night before the Quaker City shipped off, Moses Beach hosted an elegant reception for the passengers, with Beecher as a featured guest. What the passenger list had lost in selectivity they made up for in self-righteousness. One passenger, “a solemn, unsmiling, sanctimonious old iceberg that looked like he was waiting for a vacancy in the trinity” as Twain described him, asked the captain if the ship would stop sailing on the Sabbath. Even Captain Duncan was taken aback by that suggestion.52

Twain’s shipboard essays soon turned from an exotic travelogue into a biting satire of his sanctimonious shipmates, with their daily prayer meetings, petty prejudices, and shipboard bans on dancing and other sins. The final straw came when the whole group toured the Pyramids and refused to travel on Sunday, stranding everyone in the scorching desert. “Such was our daily life on board the ship—solemnity, decorum, dinner, dominoes, prayer, slander,” wrote Twain. “The advertised title of the expedition—‘The Grand Holy Land Pleasure Excursion’—was a ghastly misnomer. ‘The Grand Holy Land Funeral Procession’ would have been better—much better.”53 He ridiculed the Holy Land as dirty and uncivilized, Europe as overrated, and Americans as pretentious and parochial. This was not Beecher’s gentle irreverence. This was the unadulterated impudence of a new generation, mocking the very idea that anything could be sacred.

But Twain appreciated Moses Beach, who was adventurous, enthusiastic, and a Christian of the best sort. When the Quaker City ran across forty destitute Yankees who had been lured to Palestine by a confidence man claiming to be a prophet, Beach personally paid for their passage back to New England. Twain took a special shine to seventeen-year-old Emma Beach, who became his regular chess partner.

After the Quaker City returned in the fall of 1867, Mark Twain continued his flirtation with Emma Beach. Through the Beaches he was invited to Beecher’s house for dinner one Sabbath. “We had a tip-top dinner, but nothing to drink but cider,” Twain wrote to his mother. “I told Mr. Beecher that no dinner could be perfect without champagne, or at least some kind of Burgundy, and he said that privately he was a good deal of the same opinion, but it wouldn’t do to say it out loud.”

The two men hit it off handsomely. “Henry Ward is a brick,” declared Twain in the superlative slang of the day. A few weeks later, as Twain was negotiating with a Hartford publisher to turn his Quaker City essays into a book, Beecher took the young man aside, saying, “Now, here, you are one of the talented men of the age—nobody is going to deny that—but in matters of business, I don’t suppose you know more than enough to come in when it rains. I’ll tell you what to do, and how to do it.”

Following Beecher’s advice, Twain made a savvy deal that turned into a small fortune when the book, Innocents Abroad, or, the New Pilgrim’s Progress, became a best-seller. Suddenly endowed with wealth and respectability, Twain moved to Hartford’s Nook Farm neighborhood, a literary enclave where his close neighbors were Henry’s sisters, Isabella Hooker and Harriet Stowe. A year later he was married by Tom Beecher to Olivia Langdon, a close friend of the Hookers.

“Puritans are mighty straight-laced and they won’t let me smoke in the parlor, but the Almighty don’t make any better people,” Twain decided after an evening at Isabella’s.54 If any of them noticed the irony of a Beecher advising an avowed heathen on how to profit by parodying self-righteous Christians, it went unrecorded.

FOR MOSES BEACH the Quaker City trip turned out to be a grave mistake. “That my continued absence would continue the evil was a matter of course,” Moses realized when he returned to Brooklyn.55 With Eunice up at the farm in Peekskill, Henry had spent most evenings with Chloe, and when Henry moved upstate to Peekskill for his summer vacation, Chloe made plans to join them.

Once again Moses repressed his bitterness. In a supreme act of selfeffacement he brought a magnificent gift to Beecher—an entire olive tree from the Holy Land, which he had crafted into a pulpit chair and desk that he presented to Beecher on New Year’s Day 1868. That same day Moses gave up the New York Sun for good, selling it to Charles Dana, a former editor at the Tribune. His bed might be cold, but at least he now had full freedom to flee when he could no longer bear it. That summer he again left for several months, taking Emma on a long trip to California.

In 1870, in honor of her forty-third birthday, Moses bought Chloe, as he told her, “thirty acres of the land you have so much and so long coveted—adjoining that of Mr. Beecher in Peekskill.”56 That “a residence should be obtained in your immediate neighborhood did not surprise me though it did and does embitter my thoughts and feelings. Other reasons were given for that residence and much I wish they had been the true ones,” Moses wrote to Beecher. “One less infatuated would have devised ways to avoid the heart-woundings then and on previous occasions given.”

This reluctant sacrifice finally pushed Moses to his limit. Unable to sleep one midnight not long after this, he rose from his bed and composed a heartbreaking letter to Henry. Out poured the story of the last decade, watching his wife fall in love with the pastor:

During all this time you have been stealing the affections of one dearer to me than life itself. That you have not done it with intent I most fully believe, but that you have done it ignorantly I cannot feel so confident, for the reason that, in my crude, uncertain way I once strove most fiercely to make you aware.[ . . . ]

And if you yet question the truth of my complaint, ask your own heart for a reply. Have you no feeling, a thought more tender in the direction where lies my wound than in others of your many associations? If not why should I have heard the intimacy remarked upon by those who I knew were strangers to my own thoughts and feelings—remarked apparently, to draw attention to it?[ . . . ]

But what can I do? you will ask, possibly. And I shall but echo the question back again. I come to you because I can do nothing else. I come that you may know what is the result to me of the constant intercourse and how deeply I am being wounded at every turn—how that, more and more, I am being left in a sea of mental trouble, by one whose right it is but whose pleasure I more and more feel it is not, to sympathize with and help me to rise above and overcome all that assails me, and whose duty it is to be watchful against acts or thoughts calculated to give me pain.

If you can see light any whither lend me your eyes that I also may look. I would suggest your verbal influence but that I fear an evil result from the fresh awakening of a naturally self-sufficient and self-reliant disposition. And thus I wait the judgment of more mature and more experienced heads than my own.57

There is no sign that Moses ever sent this anguished letter. If he did, it had little effect. After Violet was born, Chloe became, essentially, a second, unofficial wife to Henry, especially now that Eunice spent half the year in Peekskill and would soon begin wintering in Florida. Indeed, Eunice depended upon Mrs. Beach almost as much as her husband did. A day rarely passed without Eunice’s asking Chloe for some intimate favor, from searching Henry’s bureau for clean shirts to secret loans of money. “I shall feel always sure that he is comfortable and at home when I know he is with you,” Eunice told her gratefully.58

IN MAY 1867 the first installments of Norwood appeared in the New York Ledger. Bonner’s bet paid off handsomely as readers rushed to see what sort of novel a clergyman—a Beecher, no less!—would write.

The plot of Norwood—the tale of a boy much like young Henry, growing up in a village much like Litchfield—was thin. But it was redeemed by the deftly drawn characters who gave voice to Beecher’s various theories. The village doctor becomes the vehicle for Beecher’s beliefs in the spirituality of nature and the natural law of evolution, while the village parson is the butt of Henry’s jokes about dour Yankee theology. The heroine, Rose Wentworth, entertains two suitors, one Yankee, one Virginian, who become friends while competing for her heart, dramatizing Beecher’s generous vision of Reconstruction. (Beecher was still Yankee enough to kill off the Southern suitor in the Battle of Gettysburg, while the Northern suitor became a Union general and married the heroine.)

The critics were kind, if not ecstatic. In the Atlantic Monthly William Dean Howells complained of “the ruthlessness with which the author preaches, both in his own person and in that of his characters, spinning out long monologues and colloquies upon morals, religion, and the whole conduct of life.” But only one reviewer spied the freethinking heresies hiding beneath the sentimental sermonizing. “The author, though nominally a Christian, professedly a Congregational preacher, is really a pagan, and wishes to abolish Puritanism for the worship of nature,” wrote Orestes Brownson in the Catholic World. “Beecherism,” Brownson concluded with genuine anger, “resolves the Christian law of perfection into the natural laws of the physicists.”59 Still, the novel was a popular success and was quickly adapted for the stage.

Beecher took it all with good humor. “People used to accuse me of being the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” he joked, “until I wrote Norwood.” Whatever its literary merits, Henry exulted, “The book has taken me entirely out of debt. The farm is my own. The house and its contents in Brooklyn is my own.”60

Ever on the lookout for new paths to profit, a group of investors from Plymouth Church led by Tasker Howard set up a publishing firm to milk the insatiable market for all things Beecher. The first act of J. B. Ford and Co. was to give Beecher a ten-thousand-dollar advance for a two-volume novelistic biography of Jesus called The Life of Christ. Soon they were churning out Beecher’s sermons and prayers by the ream and planning their own weekly paper. Even Eunice got to indulge her long-suppressed literary ambitions, taking the helm of a short-lived magazine called Mother at Home.

THEODORE TILTON OUGHT TO HAVE BEEN content in the winter of 1867–68. In December 1867 Elizabeth gave birth to a son named Paul and was recovering nicely. He could boast of a national reputation as a political crusader and an editorial wunderkind, and personal friendships with many of the era’s great thinkers and doers. The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, granting citizenship to African American males, would soon be ratified. And after nearly two years of demanding Andrew Johnson’s ouster, Congress was moving to impeach the president. As Elizabeth wrote to her husband, “Now, I say to myself—with Andy removed, and your wife restored, and your debts most paid, what remains but to be happy?”61

But always he felt the dampening shadow of Beecher. While Beecher was earning the magnificent sum of thirty thousand dollars (including a six-thousand-dollar bonus) for his mediocre novel, Theodore published a book of leaden poetry to caustic reviews. Every word Beecher uttered was packaged and repackaged for sale, but Tilton was that winter publicly humiliated when Demorest Magazine bought some of his poems and then sued him when they discovered he’d already published the poems elsewhere. Beecher’s flirtations with free thought only extended his popularity, while Theodore’s unorthodoxy endangered his very livelihood.

In fact, Beecher took ten times the public criticism that Tilton did. But unlike the resilient preacher, Theodore felt every blow and seethed with resentment. He was too high-minded to hedge his views yet too proud to be a pariah. He yearned for fame and adulation but was disgusted by his own desires. He disdained the pursuit of wealth, but the trappings of bohemian gentility—art, books, salonlike entertaining— kept him in perpetual debt. Capping his contradictions, that winter he spent five hundred dollars (“more money than I could afford,” he admitted ruefully) commissioning his friend William Paige to paint a portrait of Henry Ward Beecher!62

The sharpest point of rivalry was Elizabeth. “I think she regarded Mr. Beecher almost as though Jesus Christ himself had walked in,” Theodore said bitterly.63 The further Theodore drifted from orthodoxy, the more her faith, especially her faith in Beecher, aggravated him, and the more he harped on Beecher’s alleged infidelities. Elizabeth brushed them off. “I attributed those criticisms from Theodore to Mr. Bowen’s criticism,” she said.64

As soon as Theodore departed for his annual winter lecture tour, Beecher again began to appear at the house on Livingston Street. He took Elizabeth on outings and read her the first chapters of his new Life of Christ. He frolicked with her children and rocked baby Paul to sleep. But this winter Elizabeth was more uneasy.

“About 11 o’clock today, Mr. B called. Now, beloved, let not even the shadow of a shadow fall on your dear heart because of this, now, henceforth or forever. He cannot by any possibility be much to me, since I have known you. I implore you to believe it and look at me as in the Day of Judgment I shall be revealed to you. Do not think it audacious in me to say I am to him a good deal,” she wrote to Theodore in a typical letter.

Soon the gossip mill was churning loudly enough that even Elizabeth’s best friend, Mattie Bradshaw, was worried. “I think she feels a little care that Mr. B visits here,” Elizabeth confided to Theodore. “She said: ‘Lib, I heard through Mrs. Morrill that Mr. B called on you Wednesday. I believe he likes you ever so much.’”65

But Theodore was too busy to pay much attention. When he returned from his western tour, the impeachment of Andrew Johnson was well under way. Tilton spent most of the spring in the capital, caucusing and scheming with the Radical congressmen. Tilton led the frantic, last-minute negotiations and, according to Navy Secretary Gideon Welles (no fan of the Radicals or Tilton), it was his “sanguine representations” that spurred the Radicals to call for the final vote. Despite his efforts, President Johnson was acquitted by one ballot.66

The loss was crushing. For Theodore it amounted to a midlife crisis. “I became editor of the Independent when I was quite young, and my hands were immediately filled with public questions—the antislavery movement, the prosecution of the war, the reconstruction of the Union,” Tilton later explained. “But, when slavery was abolished and the war was over, my occupation in a certain sense, was gone.”67

His petulance became unbearable. Bessie Turner, a teenager who lived off and on with the family as a mother’s helper to Elizabeth Tilton, recalled how, unable to sleep, Theodore would roam around the house at night, rehanging pictures, or switching from bed to bed, looking for one that suited him, with his groggy wife following behind. He was increasingly irritable with Elizabeth, berating her for her spending, her grammar, her religiosity, even her small size. He began drinking more and occasionally staying out all night without warning.

On August 25, 1868, their one-year-old son, Paul, died of cholera. Beecher rushed down from Peekskill to officiate at the funeral. When Tilton’s friend and fellow reformer, Susan B. Anthony, arrived for the service, she was surprised to find the Tilton house filled with sunlight and Elizabeth dressed entirely in white rather than the typical black of mourning. “I expected to find her overwhelmed with grief,” recalled another friend, “as when her little daughter died, she was inconsolable for months; but instead, she was lifted up into a rapt, spiritual state of communion with the invisible world.”68

But Theodore was inconsolable, his grief untempered by the faith that sustained his wife. He was filled with regret at how little time he had spent with Paul—indeed, Beecher had spent nearly as much time with the boy as he had.

NOW THAT ANDREW JOHNSON’S FATE was settled, all political eyes turned to the upcoming presidential election. The Democrats offered New York governor Horatio Seymour, who ran on a platform of rabid, unreconstructed racism. The Republicans nominated the closest thing to a sure bet: the great hero of the Union army, Ulysses S. Grant.

Beecher was an unabashed admirer of Grant, despite the general’s lack of political experience. “Solid, unpretentious, straightforward, apt to succeed and not spoiled by success, wise in discerning men, skillful in using them, with the rare gift (which Washington had in an eminent degree) of wisdom in getting wisdom from other men’s councils,” Beecher declared. “I confidently anticipate that, great as his military success has been he will hereafter be known more favorably for the wisdom of his civil administration.”69 Sadly, Beecher was as wrong about Grant as he had been about Andrew Johnson. Grant’s administration would go down as one of most corrupt in history, precisely due to his lack of wisdom “in discerning men.”

But Beecher could hardly be blamed. Even the venerable Ralph Waldo Emerson clambered onto Grant’s bandwagon. Emerson’s daughter Ellen was a huge fan of Beecher’s (although she exhibited almost no interest in her father’s work) and in April, Ellen dragged her father to Plymouth Church. Emerson enjoyed the service, noting with approval how few Calvinists there were in the audience. (“He could always tell them by sight,” Ellen said, and Methodists too. “Methodists were very different, but equally marked.”) But the big thrill came as they were heading to the ferry, when a shout electrified the crowd: “Why! it is General Grant!”

“Father and I joined madly in this pursuit, and ran along, now in the street, now out, like little boys beside the trainers, and one way and another succeeded in seeing his head and shoulders, and, now and then, an interrupted glimpse of his face,” Ellen said. They chased the poor ex-soldier all the way to the ferry landing. “Then Father, saying, ‘We have nabbed him now; he can’t get to the boat without our seeing him,’ manned the small gate, and posted me in an advantageous position behind him. But we were outwitted. General Grant went in at the horse-gate. Father quickly discovered his intention, rushed to the gate and saw him very well, so did I.”70 They stared unashamedly at the general until the ferry arrived in Manhattan.

The year 1868 brought another ugly election. The Democrats denounced Grant as a drunk and a military dictator, and promised to roll back Radical Reconstruction. Republicans branded Democrats as the party of Copperheads, Rebels, and drunken Irishmen. Beecher “waved the bloody shirt” with gusto, setting aside all talk of charity for the former enemy. Democrats assailed him with the old “nigger-lover” attacks, and tried to trip him up with his Cleveland Letters, but Beecher deftly threw off all comers.

On October 9, 1868, after the regular Friday-night prayer meeting, Beecher and a bevy of parishioners, including Elizabeth Tilton, walked over to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where Beecher was to speak at a mammoth Grant rally. Eunice was gone for several weeks, visiting their son Harry, his young wife, and their brand-new baby up in Albany, and then heading on to Connecticut to see their daughter Hattie, who had just given birth to a baby boy—named, at Eunice’s insistence, Henry Ward Beecher Scoville.

The Academy of Music was packed to the rafters and eager for excitement. Just as Beecher stepped out onto the stage, a huge canvas backdrop unrolled dramatically from the ceiling. On it the renowned illustrator Thomas Nast had painted Governor Seymour sitting dejectedly on the steps of the White House next to a lamppost with a black man hanging from the crossbar, and General Grant being led up to the front door by Columbia, the goddess of liberty. “It is said that General Grant is a drunkard. I do not believe a word of it,” Beecher thundered. “But if it were so, I had rather have General Grant a drunkard than Horatio Seymour sober!” The audience roared with approval.71

The next day Elizabeth Tilton made her way over to Beecher’s house to congratulate him on his enthralling performance the night before. She was one month pregnant and still in a “tender state of mind” from the death of her baby, Paul.

What happened that day in Beecher’s brownstone would become a matter of international debate. According to Theodore Tilton, Henry, “after long moral resistance by her and after repeated assaults by him upon her mind with overmastering arguments, accomplished the possession of her person;” in other words Elizabeth and Henry allegedly made love.72

All we know of this encounter comes secondhand, from people who swore they heard it from Elizabeth’s own lips. In her diary she described it simply as “A Day Memorable.”73 We do know that Henry immediately canceled his plan to go see Hattie’s new baby. Instead he told Eunice that he’d forgotten an engagement and she should stay in Connecticut for another week until he could come get her. The following Saturday evening, according to later testimony, Henry came to the Tiltons’ house on Livingston Street, where he and Elizabeth again made love.

By the very nature of seduction and adultery, no one but Elizabeth and Henry can know for certain what actually happened that October. But nearly everyone could agree on this: Religion, not lust, was Elizabeth’s downfall. Beecher “took advantage of her orthodox views to make her the net and mesh in which he ensnared her,” Tilton claimed bitterly. “They were years courting each other by mutual piety.” “God would not blame them,” he said the minister assured her, for theirs was a “a high religious love,” a sacred outgrowth of their love for Christ, which transcended vulgar impulses and conventional morality. Their sexual intimacy was as “natural and sincere an expression of love,” said Elizabeth, according to another friend, “as words of endearment.”74

After Theodore left for his annual lecture tour in the winter of 1868–69, Beecher visited Elizabeth at least a dozen times and, according to Theodore, continued to press her for sex. The visits slackened when Theodore returned, but that summer, when Elizabeth gave birth to a baby named Ralph, Beecher came bearing armloads of flowers. She and the preacher continued their alleged affair through the spring of 1870, having sex at her house and his, and at other unnamed places.

Elizabeth seemed to regret nothing but the deceit. For even though Beecher “repeatedly assured her that she was spotless and chaste,” he insisted that they must be cautious, for lower minds would persecute them if their secret was revealed. “ Nest-hiding,” he called it.75

THE ELECTION OF ULYSSES S. GRANT signaled the beginning of the end for both the Radical Republicans and the nation’s interest in the fate of the slaves. The Republican Party’s original social activism was fast fading. Within a decade it would be the party of big business and laissez-faire policies. February 1869 marked the last great battle of the abolitionists, the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, stipulating that voting rights cannot be denied on the basis of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. “Reconstruction is nearly concluded, and the great principle on which the party rests is that of equal suffrage,” wrote Tilton in the Independent. “It is the last step taken, or to be taken.”76 But “equal suffrage” was a misnomer. The one category entirely excluded was women.

The women’s rights movement had been active for two decades, but like many of the reforms that mushroomed in the 1840s, it was placed on the back burner during the Rebellion, as reform-minded women threw their energies into the war effort and emancipation. The abolition crusade had sharpened the skills and ambitions of women like Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone, and Julia Ward Howe. Now with the Radicals in control of Congress, and all the talk of equality, natural rights, and radical social change, the time seemed ripe to resurrect their cause.

As a result many women activists felt angry and betrayed when they read the wording of the Fourteenth Amendment, which defined U.S. citizens specifically and solely as “male”—the first use of the word “male” in the Constitution. Their Radical allies placated the women, explaining that political realities made it impossible to pass both woman and black suffrage. This was “the Negro’s Hour,” but their time would come soon. Now they were again bitterly disappointed to find that the Fifteenth Amendment specifically excluded women from the right to vote. Again they were offered reassurance. Having delivered the crowning blow to slavery, some of the bolder male reformers were now ready to embrace the women’s cause.

Henry Ward Beecher was an early and enthusiastic advocate of expanding women’s rights, and had converted many friends to the cause, including Theodore and Elizabeth Tilton. He was one of the few Republicans who had not told the women to wait their turn. “If you have any radical principle to urge, any higher wisdom to make known, don’t wait until quiet times come, until the public mind shuts up altogether,” he had told the first meeting of the American Equal Rights Association two years earlier in 1867.77 That same year Beecher made his first and only run for political office, unsuccessfully campaigning to be a delegate to the New York State Constitutional Convention in hopes of persuading the convention to extend voting rights to all adult citizens. Now he took up the women’s cause in earnest.

With Henry in the lead, the Beecher sisters began to prick up their ears, particularly his youngest sister, Isabella, or Belle as she was nicknamed. Instead of following Catharine and Harriet into public life, Isabella had taken her sister Mary’s example, marrying a well-to-do Connecticut lawyer and focusing on her family. But as her children grew older, Isabella began to chafe at the limitations of the domestic sphere, and the comparisons with her famous siblings—“everywhere I go—I have to run on the credit of my relations—no where, but at home can I lay claim to a particle of individuality,” she complained to her husband, John.78 Now in her mid-forties, Isabella decided to make her debut as a public woman and reformer by becoming a leader in the women’s movement.

In May 1869 Isabella accompanied Henry to the third annual gathering of the Equal Rights Association in New York, along with Elizabeth Tilton and a who’s who of major reformers—a convention of “long-haired men and short-haired women,” in the phrase of the day. Intended to rally support for a proposed Sixteenth Amendment, giving women the right to vote, the meeting was a disaster. Not only did it degenerate into a mudslinging match over the Fifteenth Amendment, but a new fissure erupted along the old Boston/New York fault line. The New York faction, led by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, wanted to move beyond suffrage, to take up a wide range of economic and social issues, including abortion, birth control, prostitution, divorce reform, financial independence, and the double standard that turned a blind eye to the sexual foibles of men while destroying any woman who dared speak of sexual matters. The more conservative clique of Boston women, led by Lucy Stone, were disgusted by these taboo topics and feared that such talk would derail their campaign for the vote. Henry wisely stayed above the fray.

Two days after this acrimonious meeting, Stanton and Anthony broke away and founded the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), turning their newspaper, the Revolution, into its official organ. Unfortunate as the split was for the cause, it was wonderful for Isabella’s ego. Both the conservative Bostonians and the radical New Yorkers immediately began to compete for her loyalty. Not only would it be a coup to catch a Beecher but Isabella might bring along her famous sisters, who, despite their own unconventional careers, had stayed aloof from women’s reform.

At the outset, Isabella’s Yankee propriety prejudiced her against Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. But that summer, Isabella was won over by their charismatic personalities and bold intellects. She tried to use her newfound influence to bring the factions together, but that went nowhere. She was, however, pulling in her sister Harriet Stowe, who was considering writing an Uncle Tom’s Cabin–style novel about the injustices suffered by women. By late 1869 Harriet and Isabella were negotiating with Stanton and Anthony to take over as editors of the Revolution.

Catharine was a tougher nut to crack. She was a heroic pioneer in the field of women’s education and employment. But Catharine had long relied on the rhetoric of traditional femininity to smooth her path and bolster her arguments. It was too late now for her to start dismantling those prejudices. That summer of 1869, she began a personal crusade against woman suffrage as demeaning and unnatural—“the Beecher idea against the Stanton idea,” as the New York Times termed it.79

LURKING BEHIND ALL THESE CONFLICTS was the pungent aroma of sex. Just as racism was made more potent by linking it to interracial sex, so it worked with those who wanted to enforce the hierarchy of gender. Victorians were no more or less sexual than any other generation. But just as in our own time, because sexuality was so deeply personal and so inextricably linked to shame and taboo, any attempt to challenge sexual mores—whether it be interracial marriage, the recognition of female desire, or legalizing divorce—brought with it a firestorm of discomfort and disgust.

Yet there was no denying that New York, like many cities, was teeming with sex. Prostitution, casual and organized, seedy and high class, was second only to the garment trade in employing female workers. They plied their trade on street corners, in saloons, in dance halls, and in the elegant brothels that lined the finer regions of Broadway. Before the war it was estimated that there was one prostitute for every sixty-four men in New York, and the disruptions of the Rebellion vastly increased their numbers and visibility. In 1868 the city was home to an estimated twenty thousand prostitutes and six hundred bawdy houses, many helpfully listed in A Gentleman’s Guide for tourists. Venereal disease was rampant, with philandering husbands often infecting their faithful wives, and abortionists openly advertised their services in the city papers.

People were beginning to acknowledge sexuality as not only a matter of public morals but of public health. But attempts to address the situation were shut down by the ironclad double standard that ruled Victorian America. Those who called for more liberal divorce laws, controlling childbirth, or better sex education were accused of promoting “free love,” a dangerous variant of “free thought.”

This double standard, in turn, depended on a conspiracy of secrecy. While it was a known fact that many of the nation’s public men patronized bawdy houses or kept mistresses, anyone speaking openly of such matters would be cast out of respectable society. The penalty was double for women. Ministers and reformers might occasionally speak out against prostitution or abortionists, at their own peril, but a true woman should not even know of such things.

This deplorable situation pressed itself on Beecher’s attention in June 1869, when his close friend, the editor of the New York Times Henry J. Raymond, died of a heart attack. Beecher delivered a glowing eulogy, but as he rode back from the funeral with John Bigelow, another friend and former Times staffer, he whispered to Bigelow the real circumstances of Raymond’s death. While his wife was in Europe, Raymond had been carrying on a torrid affair with Rose Etynge, a popular dark-eyed actress. When his wife returned, Raymond tried to end the affair, but his recalcitrant mistress was using his love letters to blackmail the editor. Blackmail was fairly common in the back rooms of nineteenth-century New York; it was the price men paid to keep the double standard intact. The night of his death, Raymond told his wife that he was going to a political meeting, but instead headed to Etynge’s apartment, where they had “a very stormy time.”80 Late that evening two men in a carriage brought Raymond’s body home and threw it on the hall floor of his house, and then disappeared. The next morning a servant stumbled upon him, still alive but barely breathing, and he died soon after. Beecher did not seem the least bit shocked by the story.

Just as Henry was eulogizing his wayward friend, his sister Harriet was writing an article on the infamous libertine Lord Byron for the AtlanticMonthly. In her travels abroad Harriet Beecher Stowe had become friends with Byron’s widow, who confided to Harriet that the reason she had left her marriage to Lord Byron was that he had committed incest with his half sister, Augusta. Lady Byron had been much abused for abandoning her husband before her recent death. Now that she was gone, Harriet was determined to tell the true story.

Friends warned Harriet that the story would cause a commotion, but after the furor over Uncle Tom’s Cabin she felt that nothing could shake her. Harriet was wrong. When the article appeared at the end of August, the outcry was immediate and unforgiving from all sides. Many were mystified at her sudden debauchery, suggesting the whole thing was a hoax, or that if she had truly written it, perhaps she’d been possessed by the devil. Nearly all insisted that even if such sordid filth were true, it should never have been uttered, especially by a woman. Henry Bowen ostentatiously announced that he was canceling his subscription to the Atlantic Monthly, a move followed by many shocked readers. Subscriptions to the Atlantic dived from fifty thousand to thirty-five thousand, and Harriet’s book sales plummeted.

Henry made light of Harriet’s latest controversy. “You have stirred up the annual family row—sometimes it is one, sometimes another of those Beechers, that keep people in hot water. Now it is your kettle that has boiled over,” he wrote to her.81 But he was careful to keep out of it publicly. He was working steadily on the Life of Christ, and, after years of plotting, he and the Howards were starting his own weekly religious paper. But his turn in the hot water would come quicker than he thought.

The conservative Boston wing of the women’s rights movement quickly absorbed the lesson of the Bryon flap—any association with sexual reform would surely sink the suffrage campaign and tar the women’s movement. So in November 1869, five months after Anthony and Stanton formed the NWSA, the Boston wing retaliated by founding the rival American Woman’s Suffrage Association. The AWSA’s first act, before they even drafted a constitution, was to invite Henry to serve as their first president. He agreed and was elected unanimously.

Why he chose this path is unclear. Henry had close ties to both camps, not to mention a long aversion to joining organizations. Whatever the reason, he would soon regret it. Intensifying the rivalry between the organizations, within months the NWSA had set aside their rules requiring all officers to be female, and elected Theodore Tilton the president of their organization! By March 1870, reported Susan B. Anthony with pleasure, Beecher was swearing that “if he can get out of this—he’ll never be so big a fool again as to give his name to any dividing party or movement.”82

The regret of the Bostonians would come even faster. Less than a week after Beecher accepted the presidency of the conservative AWSA, Beecher hoisted the ladies by their own proper petards.

ON NOVEMBER 30, 1869, a messenger was sent to bring Beecher to the Astor Hotel on Broadway. There Beecher found the journalist Albert Richardson on his deathbed. Albert Richardson came to fame as an undercover war correspondent for the Tribune who spent two years in a Confederate prison camp before making a daring escape and turning his story into a best-selling book. After the war Richardson fell in love with an actress named Abby Sage McFarland, whose life was being destroyed by her drunken, abusive husband, Daniel McFarland. With Richardson’s help she moved to Indiana, a state known for its liberal divorce laws, and she had just returned to New York, divorce decree in hand. On November 25 her enraged ex-husband hid behind a pillar in the Tribune office and shot his rival at close range.

Now, with Abby by his side and his life ebbing away, Richardson asked Beecher to marry them. Beecher was a great admirer of Richardson’s career, and the case touched his romantic instincts. So after asking a few questions, he performed the brief ceremony. Richardson died the next morning.

As with Harriet, both press and public descended upon him instantly. Byron and McFarland may have been beastly, but their private crimes paled in comparison to the Beechers’ combined assault on public decency. Not only did Beecher seem to be sanctioning adultery, home wrecking, and easy divorce, but it turned out that Indiana divorces were not recognized in New York State, making Abby McFarland a bigamist. “Yes,” sneered the New York Sun, “it is the pious, the popular, the admired, the reverend Henry Ward Beecher, who comes boldly and even proudly forward, holding by the hand and leading Lust to her triumph over Religion! ”83

Beecher defended his actions and gave the eulogy at Richardson’s funeral, but he didn’t sound entirely sure of himself. “I took every statement of every kind respecting the affair,” he told the Sun. “Was that a time for sifting evidence?” He’d been told that Daniel McFarland had been guilty of adultery himself, thus making her “legally and morally free from her husband,” but if further investigation proved that Beecher was mistaken, he would “make such reparation to McFarland as I can.” To his outraged parishioners Beecher explained that he’d acted “as a magistrate,” not as a minister, but despite all that he’d since learned, he said he would do it again if asked. As the Brooklyn Eagle observed, he gave a “Dutchman’s answer”: If his foresight were as good as his hindsight, he’d do a lot of things better.84

Henry also rushed to shore up his commitment to traditional marriage, although it was not the most inspiring message. “Men must overcome the causes of unhappiness within the household, or else endure them,” he told an audience in Hartford; “two hearts are to be shut up, and forbidden to go out until they have adjusted all their differences— and then they will not wish to go out.”85 Knowing observers could hardly fail to think of Beecher’s own famously strained marriage.

To Theodore Tilton’s credit, he defended both beleaguered Beechers. He printed Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s defenses of both Henry and Harriet, and wrote his own editorials reviewing the Bible on fornication and calling for more liberal divorce laws.86 But the support of such known radicals only tarred the Beechers blacker. Fearing for what was left of her reputation, Harriet abandoned her plan to edit the Revolution and began to backpedal from the women’s movement. But Isabella was radicalized by the scandals.

Longtime Beecher watchers professed no surprise over the McFarland flap. Really, pointed out the Eagle, it was one more example of Beecher’s notion of “higher law,” which they’d first seen during the Fugitive Slave Law debates. “Beecherism—or the higher law,” said the Eagle, “means merely that each man is to believe and do in all things about as he feels like doing, regardless of all recognized moral codes or legal provisions.”

“Being a personally pure and good man, Beecher’s higher law delusion does not lead him into worse errors than those of the tongue. But his preaching guides others,” warned the Eagle. If it isn’t the Richard-sons turning it into an “excuse for captivating other men’s wives,” it’s the “Republican politicians” using it to justify the military occupation of the South.87

But Beecher dismissed such anxieties as the chimeras of those who had not yet evolved to a higher sphere. As he preached only one week after that “Day Memorable” when he and Elizabeth allegedly first made love: “Those who are on the lower plane—namely the plane where they act from rules—are strongly inclined to believe that those who go higher and act from principles are,” as he put it, “abandoning right and wrong.”88

Others offered a simpler explanation. “It seems a rule that these popular sensational ‘free-thinkers’ of the pulpit and the platform, such as Beecher,” mused the famous Manhattan diarist George Templeton Strong; “have a screw loose somewhere. They are brilliant, clever, astute talkers, efficient in business—‘men of the world’ and of affairs, far more than ordinary clerics; yet every now and then their common sense gives way and lets them down, with a grievous fall, into some flagrant disastrous blunder, like this one.”89