Chapter 12

“I AM RELIABLY ASSURED THAT BEECHER PREACHES TO SEVEN OR EIGHT MISTRESSES EVERY SUNDAY EVENING”

The Golden Age of Liberty was turning out to be, in Mark Twain’s famous phrase, the “Gilded Age”—in which a thin veneer of virtue covered a host of shoddy work. People would come to use the phrase “Grantism” to refer to the stunning array of scandals that erupted under the two terms of Ulysses S. Grant’s presidency. In the South the utopian promises of Reconstruction were shattered by violence, bigotry, and neglect. In the North massive corporations were mushrooming without any regulation or check on their powers, and their enormous pools of money often went to defrauding investors and bribing legislators. Government, too, had grown exponentially since the war, creating new opportunities for graft, greed, and partisan profiteering. The scandals are familiar to any student of the period— the Whiskey Ring, Crédit Mobilier, Black Friday, the Indian Ring, Boss Tweed’s Tammany Hall, the Panic of 1873, and many lesser disgraces.

As the 1870s began, it seemed that Americans had too much liberty and that freedom had invited corruption, just as the Calvinists warned. In fact, despite the twentieth-century stereotypes of rapacious robber barons and prudish moral hypocrites, Victorians were no more greedy, lustful, or insincere than any other generation. Rather, they were living in a period of such rapid change that the devices of virtue could not keep pace with the innovations of sin. The ethical standards governing politics, business, journalism, and law that we take for granted did not yet exist.

Nowhere was this more true than in Brooklyn. This once-bucolic village had matured into the nation’s third-largest city and a major industrial center. (Brooklyn remained a separate city until 1898, when it was absorbed into the City of New York.) And no Brooklynite took greater advantage of the blurry ethical lines among government patronage, economic opportunity, and moral stewardship than Henry Bowen. “Everything in this world, to Henry Chandler Bowen, is something to be bought, something to be sold, or something to be haggled for. He is always in the market,” wrote the Brooklyn Eagle in one of its kinder moments.1

At the age of fifty-eight, Henry Bowen’s beard was graying and his head balding, but his ambition was as sharp as the day he arrived in New York. Bowen was deeply involved in the federal spoils system; first as a collector at the New York Custom House, where he awarded sweetheart contracts to himself and his allies, then as a federal tax collector, where a number of his appointees were accused of taking bribes. He gladly accepted $50,000 in bonds and $460,000 in stock from the fantastically corrupt Northern Pacific Railroad. In exchange he agreed secretly to promote Northern Pacific and its bonds in the pages of the Independent. (So, too, did a number of prominent writers and editors, including Henry Ward Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Horace Greeley, and others, although they did not reap the censure Bowen did when it all came out.) Among journalists he was notorious for his unscrupulous advertising policies, stuffing the Independent with ads for dubious patent medicines, baldness cures, and other fraudulent products.

But Bowen had suffered a number of reversals. Tilton’s incessant attacks on President Andrew Johnson had helped oust Bowen from his appointment as tax collector, drastically undermining his influence with the local Republican Party. The Independent was losing subscribers due both to Tilton’s increasingly radical social theories and the competition from Henry Ward Beecher’s new magazine, the Christian Union.

Bowen was determined to regain power. As his first step, in January 1870 he purchased a controlling interest in the local Republican organ, the Brooklyn Union. He would use the Union to shoehorn his own candidates into office, who would then reinstate Bowen as tax collector or at least reward him with a larger bite of the spoils flowing through Brooklyn’s waterfront warehouses and flourishing Naval Yard. Reestablishing at least the appearance of rapprochement with Henry Ward Beecher was critical to Bowen’s plans. He wanted Beecher’s sermons back in the Independent and Beecher’s political influence back in his pocket.

How much influence Beecher actually had is hard to say. Both Andrew Johnson and Ulysses S. Grant had good reason to thank the Reverend Beecher for his public support, at a time when gratitude looked a good deal like nepotism. Certainly people believed he had pull. Beecher was constantly approached by friends and strangers looking for help in getting government jobs or contracts, and he was constantly writing letters of recommendation, introduction, and advice to politicians and their backers.

But Beecher no longer needed Bowen. The trustees of Plymouth Church had just offered to raise his annual salary to the magnificent sum of twenty thousand dollars, but he was so flush from his various publishing projects, lecture fees, and product testimonials that he refused the raise as unseemly. Within Plymouth Church a crowd of younger men was taking power, and their loyalty to Beecher was rock solid.

Enraged by this snub, Bowen began hinting menacingly within select circles on the Heights that he knew something about Beecher, something that would shake all of Brooklyn if it became public. Beecher’s supporters grew alarmed. Finally a mutual friend brokered a private meeting between the two men in February. Beecher was conciliatory when they met, by Bowen’s account. But when Beecher asked if they could renew their old friendship, the merchant exploded. “I said, ‘Mr. Beecher, you have done a great wrong, and you know it and I know it. You know what I refer to.’” Presumably he meant the long-simmering accusations of adultery.

“Mr. Beecher then trembled like a leaf,” Bowen later testified; “he drew his chair up to me, turned it so that the side fronted toward me, got into it on his knees, resting his left arm on the back of it, and then made such an appeal to me as I never heard before. He said the past must be buried, buried forever; that he loved me tenderly; that no other man in the world had been so good to him, or such a friend as I had been; that he could not live without my confidence and affection.”

Bowen did not spell out his accusations, but “Mr. Beecher, I know, fully understood me, and I know I as fully understood him.” They talked for three hours, until Beecher “with tears streaming down his cheeks like rain,” agreed to Bowen’s various demands, including reinstating his sermons in the Independent and apologizing to Bowen in front of Plymouth Church.2

Beecher’s account matches Bowen’s generally, without the tears. Yet because Bowen never actually said the word “adultery,” Beecher later insisted that the merchant’s grievances “were all either of a business nature of or my treatment of him personally.”3 Sex never came up, Beecher said.

Thinking that all was resolved, Beecher then asked Tasker Howard to meet with Bowen “to remove the little differences between them.” But when the two men met, Bowen spitefully told Tasker that he personally possessed evidence that, if he chose to use it, “would drive Mr. Beecher out of Brooklyn.” Tasker demanded to know what Bowen could possibly mean.

Bowen refused to say more but challenged Tasker to ask Beecher about it, assuring him that “Mr. Beecher would never give his consent that he (Bowen) should tell Mr. Howard this secret.”4 If Tasker did quiz Henry, there is no record of it.

IT IS SURELY NO COINCIDENCE that within weeks of this encounter with Bowen, Elizabeth Tilton and Beecher tried to break off their relationship. The pressure on them was mounting, not only from Bowen but from Theodore.

The Tiltons’ marriage had been deteriorating steadily for the past two years. When Theodore returned from his annual lecture trip at the beginning of 1870, he found Elizabeth so absorbed in Beecher that all pretense of harmony evaporated. He interrogated their oldest daughter, Florence, about Beecher’s visits, and everything she said fed his fury. Now old suspicions came flooding back to him. He remembered Elizabeth sitting on a stool in Beecher’s library, as the minister spread out his collection of engravings on the floor, and being almost certain that he saw Beecher reach “very slyly” under Elizabeth’s skirt and caress her ankle and calf. When Theodore got home and asked her about it, at first, he recalled, “she was a little confused and denied it; and then said it was so, but that she had said, ‘You must not do that,’” to Beecher.

“I was very young in those days and utterly unsuspicious of such things,” Theodore said, and it was “blotted out of my mind.”5

On another occasion Theodore recalled returning to the house in the early afternoon, and being surprised to find the bedroom door locked. When he knocked, Elizabeth opened the door, and behind her was Beecher looking startled, “with his vest unbuttoned,” said Tilton, “his face colored like a rose when I saw him.”6 Again Elizabeth explained it away, saying they had only wanted to talk privately, away from the noisy children.

The Tiltons were trapped in the classic cycle of jealousy—he interrogating, she trying to prove her fidelity with small confessions and copious innocuous details, each of them growing ever more paranoid; “whenever I was alone with him, I used to make a memorandum and charge my mind with all the details of the conversation that passed between us, that I might repeat them to Mr. Tilton,” said Elizabeth of the preacher’s visits.

I never had a visit from Mr. Beecher that I was not questioned; Theodore would question me till I thought I had told him all that we talked about, and, perhaps, a day or two afterward, I would throw out a remark which Mr. Beecher had made, and Theodore would say, “You didn’t tell me that yesterday;” I would say: “Oh, yes, I did mean to tell you, but I forgot it;” for 2 or 3 years I tried faithfully to repeat to my husband everything that I said and did till I found it made him more suspicious than ever.7

Theodore became obsessed with the idea that their strained marriage would improve if only she would admit the affair, Elizabeth later testified. He swore he would forgive her if she would just tell the truth.

It was a miserable spring on Livingston Street. Theodore was openly cruel to Elizabeth, harassing her at home and ignoring her in public. He threw all his energy into the women’s movement, hoping to be the savior who would reunify the splintered suffragists. But his obvious rivalry with Beecher—whom he now “alternately snubs and patronizes,” noted the New York Times—only undermined his already doomed efforts, earning him the ridicule of the press and the enmity of many former friends.8

Finally in June 1870, broken in health and spirits, Elizabeth fled to a friend’s house in the country. On the sweltering hot evening of July 3 she unexpectedly took the train back to Brooklyn. According to Theodore’s account of that night, she said she had something to tell him, but only if he would promise not to do anything or tell anyone. He promised. Then, said Theodore, she confessed to having an affair with Beecher.

As he pressed her, the details spilled out. At first she had resisted Beecher’s passes, but over time: she had been persuaded by him that, as their love was proper and not wrong, therefore it followed that any expression of that love, whether by the shake of a hand or the kiss of the lips, or even bodily intercourse, since it was all an expression of that which by itself was not wrong, therefore that bodily intercourse was not wrong; that Mr. Beecher had professed to her a greater love than he had ever shown to any woman in his life; that she and I both knew that for years his home had not been a happy one; that his wife had not been a satisfactory wife to him; that she wished—that he wished to find in her—Elizabeth—the consolation, the help to his mind, and the solace of life which had been denied to him by the unfortunate marriage at home; that he had made these arguments to her during the early years of their friendship, and she had steadfastly resisted; that he had many times fondled her to the degree that it required on her part almost bodily resistance to be rid of him; that after her final surrender, in Oct. 1868, he had then many times solicited her when she had refused; that the occasions of her yielding her body had not been numerous, but that his solicitations had been frequent and urgent, and sometimes almost violent.9

Their sex had not come, she told Theodore, “out of low or vulgar thoughts either on her part or his, but always from pure affection and a high religious love.” Even now, according to Theodore, she still “felt justified before God in her intimacy with him, save the necessary deceit which accompanied it, and at which she frequently suffered in her mind.”10

When asked about this evening several years later, Elizabeth denied saying any such thing, but by that point Elizabeth and Theodore had contradicted each other and themselves so often that no one was quite sure what to believe. However, Theodore’s salacious story was the one that came to be whispered in dim parlors and trumpeted in headlines. Henry and Elizabeth were left to reinterpret or rebut Tilton’s accusations, as best they could—something to keep in mind in the pages that follow.

Despite his long-held suspicions Theodore said he was stunned by Elizabeth’s confession. After a long night of arguments and tears, he agreed to keep her secret and to help “restore her wounded spirit.”11 The next morning, Independence Day, he wandered over to his office in a daze. Unable to work, his anger mounted at Beecher. “That man is growing old,” Theodore said to himself. “I will punish him only to this extent—Elizabeth shall go and tell him that I know from her own lips which pattern of Godliness he is, and that I am a living, suffering sacrifice for his children.” Tilton was so inspired by his own nobility that “for two weeks I lived a kind of ecstasy.”12

That same day, at Henry Bowen’s annual Fourth of July celebration in Woodstock, Connecticut, Beecher and Bowen were enjoying the first fruits of their rapprochement. President Grant was there, along with a host of dignitaries, a testament to their combined influence. During the picnic the original Plymouth triumvirate of Beecher, Bowen, and Tasker Howard competed in a footrace—surely a good sign. Some of the partygoers whispered that Bowen had bent his strict temperance principles, in deference to the president. Beecher’s oration was so wild and disjointed that many listeners suspected that he had joined the old general in his cups.

ELIZABETH TRIED TO TELL Beecher that something had happened between her and Theodore. In August she sent an urgent note summoning the preacher from Peekskill. “I found her lying in the upstairs, second story front room,” Beecher remembered. She was “very much depressed in spirits, and she seemed to me like one who wanted to talk and didn’t. I prayed with her and cheered her as best I could.”13 He returned the next day, but she was too ill to see him. Not long after this, she discovered she was pregnant.

But if Elizabeth didn’t keep her promise to tell Beecher of her confession, neither did Theodore hold his tongue. His magnanimous high soon gave way to a smothering rage. Forgetting his pledge of forgiveness, he spent hours haranguing his wife, accusing her of seducing other men, and insisting that only three of their four children were his. Within a month of her alleged confession, Theodore had told the terrible story to Elizabeth’s best friends, Andrew and Mattie Bradshaw, and Oliver Johnson, the managing editor of the Independent. He had hinted so broadly to Elizabeth’s family that they guessed his secret. “Theodore, Theodore!” pleaded Elizabeth in a letter:

Do you not know, also, that when in any circle you blacken Mr. Beecher’s name—and soon after couple mine with it—you blacken mine as well? When by your threats, my mother cried out in agony to me, “Why what have you done, Elizabeth, my child?” Her worst suspicions were aroused, and I laid bare my heart then—that from my lips and not yours she might receive the dagger into her heart! Did not my dear child [their daughter Florence] learn enough by insinuations, that her sweet, pure soul agonized in secret, till she broke out with the dreadful question? I know not but it hath been her death blow.

When you say to my beloved brother—“Mr. B. preaches to forty of his mistresses every Sunday,” then follow with the remark that after my death you have a dreadful secret to reveal, need he be told any more ere the sword pass into his soul?14

One evening, as that wretched summer passed into fall, the Tiltons planned to meet Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Laura Curtis Bullard, the new editor of the Revolution, for dinner. Through some misunderstanding Theodore, Stanton, and Bullard ended up dining separately, leaving Anthony and Elizabeth alone at the house on Livingston Street. That night at dinner Theodore told the two women the story of the affair. “We were reformers,” Stanton later explained. “He gave us the story as a phase of social life.”15

When he arrived home around eleven o’clock, the ladies rebuked Theodore for his rudeness. This sparked a passionate argument between Elizabeth and Theodore, with each accusing the other of infidelity. Appalled, Susan B. Anthony withdrew to a guest room. A few minutes later, Elizabeth rushed up the stairs and into Anthony’s room, hastily bolting the door while Theodore pounded to be let in. Anthony refused, and Theodore finally retreated. Sobbing and distraught, Elizabeth spent the night in Anthony’s room, spilling out the whole story of her affair with Beecher. When Anthony and Stanton next saw each other, they found they had both heard the same terrible tale.

Elizabeth again fled, spending a month at a friend’s house in Ohio. The day she returned to Brooklyn, Elizabeth and Theodore fought so viciously, according to Bessie Turner, the Tilton’s hired girl, that Elizabeth took Bessie and the children to stay with Elizabeth’s mother, Johanna Morse.

That summer Theodore made the colossal mistake of telling Mrs. Morse of their troubles—for she was, by every account, crazy. She had recently separated from her second husband after trying to choke him in a murderous rage. She had long disliked Theodore, but now she set out to ruin him. Without telling Elizabeth, Mrs. Morse consulted a divorce lawyer, and then she sent Bessie Turner to Beecher’s house, instructing the girl to tell the pastor that Elizabeth had left her husband, and he should come immediately. Astonished and alarmed, Henry hustled to Mrs. Morse’s house. Once he got there, Elizabeth’s mother did most of the talking, telling of Theodore’s cruelty but not of his allegations of adultery. It fell on his ears, Henry later testified, “like a nightmare dream.”16

Beecher’s response could hardly have been more humiliating or hurtful to poor Elizabeth. “This is a case, it seems to me, where a woman is needed, and if you will allow me I shall bring my wife and let her hear,” said Beecher. Eunice had hated Theodore for years, nonetheless the next day both Beechers showed up. First Eunice and Elizabeth went upstairs to talk privately, then Mrs. Morse and Eunice conferred, leaving Elizabeth and Henry alone for the first time in months. “I have a recollection of only one single thing that I said to Mrs. Tilton,” he later testified. “‘How is it,’ I said, ‘that I have been so long with you and you never alluded before to me about distress in your household?’” She was despondent, Henry recalled, and replied that she had “sought to conceal, in the hope that the difficulty would pass away[.]” Elizabeth could not bring herself to tell him of her confession.17

The next day Eunice returned for another excruciating consultation. “I was not greatly helped in my mind by that interview with Mrs. Beecher,” Elizabeth admitted; “my talks with Mrs. Beecher were long and painful, and I cannot recall all that was said.”18 Eunice left Brooklyn some days later to spend the winter at Harriet Stowe’s new house in Florida, but before departing she advised Elizabeth, in no uncertain terms, to officially separate from her husband.

Elizabeth ignored Eunice’s surprising advice and returned several days later to the desolate house on Livingston Street. Theodore wasn’t around much, often sleeping at the home of Frank Moulton, an old friend from school who was now a merchant in Brooklyn. That Christmas Eve, 1870, Elizabeth suffered a miscarriage—“a love babe it promised, you know,” Elizabeth told a friend.19

AS ALWAYS, just as matters were reaching a crisis, politics intervened to make everything worse. “Republicanism was brought together from chaos by the question of slavery,” observed the New York World with typical Democratic derision. “Its leaders were carried into power by using the negro as their hobby horse. Now that he can carry them no longer, their differences of opinion are more clearly shown.”20

The World was right. After ten years of ascendancy, the Republicans had gone from a minority party of progressive reformers to the party of entrenched power, beholden to the massive corporations that now dominated the postwar economy. Under the careless eye of President Grant, bribery, fraud, and outright thievery were thriving, labor strife was spreading across the North, and the South was still embroiled in often-violent racial clashes. Before, the Conservative and Radical wings of the party had split over government expansion and equal rights. Now the line of division was shifting. A new “Liberal” coalition of disillusioned Radicals, reformers, intellectuals, dispossessed politicians, and laissez-faire moneymen arose to challenge the Republican “Regulars” who still supported Grant and his federal policies. To the Liberals it seemed as if the country had tipped too far toward equality, giving the reins of government to ignorant masses who were easily manipulated by demagogic politicians and rabble-rousers, and had fallen into deep disorder. Gripped by the twin specters of corrupt power and class warfare, the Liberal Republicans argued for a government limited in size and ambition, and run only by the “best men.”

Among Brooklyn Republicans, Henry Bowen fell squarely among the Regulars who were eager to preserve their privileges and patronage. For Theodore Tilton, his disgust with “Grantism” overwhelmed his egalitarian instincts, and he took up with the Liberals. That fall the two men clashed over the editorial policies of Bowen’s new newspaper, the Brooklyn Union. As editor in chief, Tilton not only refused to endorse President Grant and Bowen’s handpicked candidate in the U.S. congressional race, he openly attacked the man as a corrupt spoilsman. “If anybody in King’s County expects to see the Union consenting to be chained like a coach dog to the Republican or any other party, he is woefully mistaken,” wrote Tilton.21 Bowen’s candidate did not win.

Theodore’s stridency was also becoming a distinct liability to Bowen at the Independent. On December 1, 1870, the Independent published Theodore’s most inflammatory editorial yet, on “Love, Marriage and Divorce.” “Marriage without love is a sin against God—a sin which, like other sins, is to be repented of, ceased from and put away,”22 wrote Tilton, an argument sure to bring howls from orthodox readers. But Bowen could not afford to act precipitously.

Bowen’s weakened role within the Republican Party was directly linked to his declining influence in Plymouth Church. Bowen’s long dominance of Brooklyn’s political spoils was being challenged by an upstart faction led by Benjamin Tracy, a relative newcomer to Brooklyn Heights. Ben Tracy was Brooklyn’s district attorney and a ruthless political schemer who burnished his reputation for rectitude by joining Plymouth Church and striking up a friendship with Beecher. On December 21, at a meeting of the local Republican Committee, Tracy officially accused Bowen of defrauding the city when he was tax collector. Both sides began shouting. The packed room descended into pandemonium when one of Bowen’s friends clouted one of Tracy’s men in the face. The next day Bowen was ousted from the governing committee.

Bowen needed to regain control fast, and that meant ridding himself of Tilton. For the last year or two, a cloud of unseemly rumor had swirled around the editor, but Bowen had no specific proof of immorality with which to nail him. Then, the day before Christmas 1870, Bowen opened his mail to find a hysterical letter from Tilton’s mother-in-law accusing Theodore not only of practicing free love but of planning to elope to Europe with Laura Bullard, the editor of the Revolution. Bowen summoned Tilton to his mansion on Willow Street and confronted him with, in Tilton’s words, “an avalanche of accusations.”23

Yet when Tilton angrily challenged him to provide evidence, Bowen quickly dropped the subject and brought up the Brooklyn Union. He wanted Tilton to devote more space to Plymouth Church, and noted that Tilton himself hadn’t been in church for a long while.

“I never again should cross the threshold of Plymouth Church,” Tilton replied hotly.24 When Bowen pressed him, Theodore told him of Elizabeth’s confession.

Here, finally, was Bowen’s long-awaited opportunity to destroy Beecher without any risk to himself. “You ought to proceed against him instantly. Don’t let him preach another Sunday!” the publisher roared, setting off into a long tirade against the minister. Tilton asked why Bowen didn’t hit Beecher himself. Bowen explained that in February 1870 Beecher had confessed to adultery and tearfully begged Bowen’s forgiveness, which was granted. Thus, Bowen concluded, “I cannot open a settled quarrel.” But if Tilton was willing to put his charges in writing, Bowen would back him up and personally carry the letter to Beecher. After much heated conversation, with Bowen egging him on, Tilton penned the following:

December 26, 1870, Brooklyn

Sir: I demand that, for reasons which you explicitly understand, you immediately cease from the ministry of Plymouth Church, and that you quit the City of Brooklyn as a residence.

Theodore Tilton

Bowen tried to get Tilton to add the phrase “and cease editing the Christian Union,” but Tilton vetoed that as nakedly self-serving. Bowen then took the letter, promising to deliver it immediately.25

A LITTLE LATER THAT DAY, Tilton’s old friend Francis D. Moulton stopped by. Frank Moulton was a prosperous Brooklyn exporter, a junior partner in the firm of Woodruff and Robinson, marked by gentlemanly manners, quiet common sense, and bushy, bright red hair and mustache. Although Moulton had no interest in religion, and had only met Beecher a few times, his wife, Emma, was a devoted member of Plymouth Church. Moulton was appalled when Tilton told him of the arrangement with Bowen. Moulton, said Tilton, “told me with great emphasis that I was a fool” to trust the wily merchant. “You have made your demand all alone,” Moulton said. “What if he leaves you to support it all alone?” The best they could do now was to create some sort of record, so Moulton immediately wrote the following memo:

Brooklyn, Dec. 26, 1870. T.T. informed me today that he had sent a note to Mr. Beecher, of which Mr. H. C. Bowen was the bearer, demanding that he (Mr. Beecher) should retire from the pulpit and quit the City of Brooklyn. The letter was an open one. H. C. Bowen knew the contents of it, and said that he (Bowen) would sustain T. in the demand. 3:45 p.m.26

Moulton’s prediction was correct. At five o’clock that same day Bowen delivered the letter to the minister, acting as if he had no idea what Tilton had written. “Why, this man is crazy, this is sheer insanity!” cried Beecher as he scanned the paper. Bowen asked innocently if Beecher had any answer to send. Now it was Beecher who tried to turn the tables, asking calmly, “Are you friendly with me, Mr. Bowen?”

“I am,” replied Bowen. “We have settled all our differences. I have no unfriendly feeling toward you.”

According to Beecher, “Mr. Bowen fell in at once with me and commenced talking about Mr. Tilton, and not favorably.”27 Ever the opportunist, Bowen seemed to be manipulating the former friends into destroying each other, while keeping his own hands unbloodied.

The next day, December 28, Tilton decided he would personally confront Beecher with the full array of evidence, and sent a note to Bowen telling him of this plan. Not long after the note arrived, Bowen burst into Tilton’s office, his face white with fury. He began screaming that if Tilton told the minister anything that Bowen had said, he would fire Tilton and call the police to toss him into the street. Bowen slammed out of the office, leaving Tilton in a confused panic.28

He turned again to Frank Moulton for advice. With no idea what Bowen was plotting or what he’d said to Beecher, Frank and Theodore decided that the only way to save himself and his family from ruin was to have his wife sign a written confession. Elizabeth, still weak and bedridden from her miscarriage, was barely able to sit up in bed. When Theodore told her what he and Bowen had done, she was beside herself.

Beecher would have no idea what the letter meant, she told him, since she had never told him of her confession last summer. If Beecher resigned, she said sobbing, “Sooner or later everybody will know the reason why and that will be to my shame and to the children’s shame, and I cannot endure it.”29 She then begged him to send for Beecher, so the three could defuse the situation. Theodore finally agreed to meet with him in person. In exchange she and Theodore wrote up a letter informing Beecher of her confession.

On the night of December 30, as a snowstorm descended on the city, Theodore gave Frank Moulton Elizabeth’s written confession to take to Beecher. The preacher was about to go to the regular Friday-evening prayer meeting when Moulton met him. Beecher protested, “this is prayer meeting night; I cannot go see him.” But as soon as Moulton mentioned the letter sent by Bowen, the minister hastily arranged for someone to take his place at the church. Together the red-haired agnostic and the preacher headed out into the sleet and snow.

“What can I do? What can I do?” Beecher asked in panic as soon as they were outside.

“I don’t know,” said Moulton. “I am not a Christian. I am a heathen, but I will try to show you how well a heathen can serve you. I will try to help.”

As they walked, Moulton told him of Bowen’s accusations of adultery, which seemed to surprise Henry. “This is a terrible night. There is an appropriateness in this storm,” Beecher groaned.30

Tilton was waiting for Beecher at Moulton’s house on Remsen Street. Moulton left the two men together in an upstairs parlor. “You have been guilty of adultery with numerous members of your congregation ever since your Indianapolis pastorate, all down through these twenty-five years, you are not a safe man to dwell in a Christian community,” Theodore declared as he entered. For nearly an hour he barraged Beecher, repeating Bowen’s tales and accusing him of seducing Elizabeth. He read aloud Elizabeth’s declaration of guilt—which he had copied onto the back of an envelope from the original in Moulton’s possession. As they talked, Theodore nervously tore the envelope to pieces. Neither Moulton nor Tilton ever actually showed a copy of the confession to Beecher.

This turned out to be a critical misstep, for Beecher would later insist that that evening Tilton charged him only with making “improper advances,” saying, as Beecher put it, that “I had corrupted Elizabeth, teaching her to lie, to deceive him, and hide under fair appearances her friendship to me,” but mentioning nothing about sex—at least not “strictly and literally speaking.” (For a while Moulton retained the original confession for safekeeping, but later returned it to Elizabeth, who burned it before the scandal broke.)

Either way, Beecher admitted, his words “fell like a thunderbolt on me.”31

Theodore ended by announcing that he would no longer insist that Beecher quit the church, and he would not join forces with Bowen, but only because his wife had begged him to be merciful. Beecher’s face had become so bloodred that Theodore feared he might have a heart attack. “This is a dream,” Beecher burst out. “I don’t believe Elizabeth could have made charges so untrue against me.”32

Theodore unlocked the door to the room, saying stiffly, “You are free to retire.” Beecher did not move. Again Theodore pointed to the door. As he rose to go, one of them (they disputed which) insisted that Beecher go see Elizabeth to confirm the truth of her confession. Henry staggered down the stairs and out of the house, muttering, “This will kill me.”33

He made his way to Livingston Street in a daze. The visiting nurse led the minister into Elizabeth’s sick chamber. “Mrs. Tilton lay upon her bed, white as marble, with closed eyes, as in a trance, and with her hands upon her bosom, palm to palm, as one in prayer,” Beecher recalled.34 At first she refused to open her eyes or speak, as he pressed her to explain. Finally, according to Beecher’s testimony, she opened her eyes and, in a feeble voice clogged with tears, began to explain how much pressure she’d been under, and how she’d hoped a confession would solve everything.

“‘But,’ I said to her, ‘Elizabeth, this is a charge of attempting improper things. You know that is not true.’

“‘Yes, it is not true,’ she says, ‘but what can I do?’

“‘Do! You can take it back again.’ She hesitated, and I did not understand her hesitation. ‘Why can you not take it back? It is not true.’ She said something about—she would be willing to do it if it could be done without injury to her husband, which I did not at all understand. ‘But,’ I said, ‘you ought to give me a written retraction of that written charge.’”35

After making him promise that he would not use it to harm her husband, Elizabeth then wrote the following note:

Wearied with importunities, and weakened by sickness, I gave a letter inculpating my friend, Henry Ward Beecher, under assurances that that would remove all difficulties between me and my husband. That letter I now revoke. I was persuaded to do it, almost forced, when I was in a weakened state of mind. I regret it and recall its statements. E. R. T.

At the bottom she added a postscript:

I desire to say explicitly, Mr. Beecher has never offered any improper solicitation, but has always treated me in a manner becoming a Christian and a gentleman.

Elizabeth R. Tilton36

After leaving Elizabeth, Beecher returned to Moulton’s. He begged the exporter to “be a friend to him in this terrible business,” in Moulton’s words, but neglected to mention the retraction in his pocket.37

The eventful night was not yet over. When Tilton returned to his home around midnight and spoke with Elizabeth, discovering what Beecher had done, he was livid. Finally Elizabeth agreed to retract her retractions.

December 30, 1870—Midnight

My Dear Husband:

I desire to leave with you before going to sleep a statement that Mr. Henry Ward Beecher called upon me this evening, asked me if I would defend him against any accusation in a council of ministers and I replied solemnly that I would in case the accuser was any other but my husband. He (H.W.B.) dictated a letter, which I copied as my own, to be used by him against any other accuser except my husband. This letter was designed to vindicate Mr. Beecher against all other persons save only yourself. I was ready to give him this letter because he said with pain that my letter in your hands addressed to him, dated December 29, “had struck him dead and ended his usefulness.” You and I both are pledged to do our best to avoid publicity. God grant a speedy end to all further anxieties.

Affectionately, Elizabeth38

THE NEXT DAY, the last of that terrible year, Elizabeth summoned Frank Moulton to her bedside and begged him to retrieve all the letters she had written the night before. That evening Moulton stopped by the warehouses of Woodruff and Robinson and then headed once again to Beecher’s house, to rebuke the minister for his sneakiness and to take back Elizabeth’s retraction so it could be burned along with the original confession.

As Beecher was reluctantly digging it out, Moulton, who regularly carried a pistol on his trips down to his warehouses on the rough New York docks, took off his coat and took the pistol from his pocket, assuring Beecher that he would protect the document “with my life.” Later Beecher’s allies would cite the “Pistol Incident,” as it came to be known, as proof that Moulton was blackmailing the preacher with physical threats. Both Moulton and Beecher denied this, but they disagreed sharply on what came next.

After being scolded for treating both Tiltons so disgracefully, according to Moulton, Beecher “with great sorrow, weeping,” defended himself. He explained “that he had loved Elizabeth Tilton very much” and that “the expression, the sexual expression of that love, was just as natural in his opinion—he had thought so—as the language that he had used to her.” It was the first but not the last time, said Moulton, that Beecher admitted his sin. “I throw myself upon your friendship,” cried Beecher, and he begged Moulton to save him from “the brink of a moral Niagara.”39

“Such language is simply impossible to me,” Beecher would later retort, despite a lifetime of evidence to the contrary.40

Just as Moulton was retrieving Elizabeth’s letter, two notices from Bowen arrived at Livingston Street, officially dismissing Tilton from both the Independent and the Brooklyn Union. Theodore hightailed it to Moulton’s, arriving just as he returned from his conference with Beecher. The two friends spent that New Year’s Eve walking the streets, searching for some way to save the Tiltons from disaster.

For the first time in seven years, the next afternoon Henry Bowen stopped by the New Year’s Day reception at Beecher’s house on Columbia Heights. Bowen pulled Beecher aside, whispering that he’d fired Tilton. Beecher murmured his approval, but over the next several hours of shaking hands and kissing cheeks, he began to worry. Surely Theodore would blame him for this mortifying blow.

That evening when the guests dispersed, Beecher hurriedly requested Moulton to return. As they discussed Tilton’s plight—now without a job or any prospects of respectable work—Beecher paced the room weeping with regret and self-pity.

“I felt that my mind was in danger of giving way. I walked up and down the room, pouring forth my heart in the most unrestrained grief and bitterness of self-accusation,” Beecher later admitted.

Finally Moulton suggested that a written apology would go a long way to placating Theodore. Beecher was too distraught to write it himself, so he asked the merchant to take down his words as he dictated them. Although he did not know it then, Beecher’s fate would rest on this “Letter of Contrition,” as it became known.

In trust with F.D. Moulton

My dear friend Moulton:

I ask through you Theodore Tilton’s forgiveness, and I humble myself before him as I do before my God. He would have been a better man in my circumstances than I have been. I can ask nothing except that he will remember all the other hearts that would ache. I will not plead for myself; I even wish that I were dead. But others must live and suffer. I will die before anyone but myself shall be inculpated. All my thoughts are running toward my friends, toward the poor child lying there and praying with her folded hands. She is guiltless, sinned against, bearing the transgressions of another. Her forgiveness I have. I humbly pray to God that He may put it in the heart of her husband to forgive me. I have trusted this to Moulton in confidence.41

Beecher then hastily signed the paper, and Moulton delivered it to Theodore.

The next day Theodore and Henry accidentally ran into each other at Moulton’s house. There, Tilton later claimed, Beecher finally admitted that he had seduced Elizabeth. Beecher, in Tilton’s words, “wept again and again, and his face assumed a very peculiar redness,” as an avalanche of excuses, pleas, confessions, and explanations poured out of him. He begged for mercy not for himself but for Elizabeth and both their families.

“She was not to blame,” Beecher said over and over by Tilton’s account. “I was altogether at fault.” He said they’d only had sex during the last year or so, and even then he’d been gone on vacation for part of it; he said the sex had “been through love, and not through lust,” and that he’d originally sought “companionship in her mind.” He offered to resign if that would fix things, but pleaded for Tilton to tell anybody but Eunice, “for she is not only your enemy but may very well become mine.” He added that it was Eunice, not him, who had told Bowen all that malicious gossip. If Tilton ever decided to reveal his crime, please, Beecher begged, “give me notice in advance of your intention to do so in order that I may either go out of the world by suicide, or else escape from the face of my friends by a voyage to some foreign land.”42 Finally Moulton asked Theodore to leave so he and Beecher could talk privately. For the moment Theodore seemed placated.

Although Moulton was Theodore’s friend and an avowed agnostic, he was also an exceptionally decent man who genuinely believed that if Beecher’s secret were revealed it “would tend to undermine the very foundations of social order,” a conviction shared by everyone who heard the story. At considerable risk to himself, Moulton agreed to help them cover up the scandal.

“The Mutual Friend,” as Moulton came to be known, shuttled between the two men, soothing tempers, ferrying messages, and serving as the repository for the bushels of official and unofficial written statements they produced, in a fruitless attempt to establish definitive truths. In politics Beecher had always wavered between a defiant belief in the higher law of individual choice and its polar opposite, an almost superstitious Constitutionalism, as if ink and paper could of themselves command power. He’d had a weakness for legalistic “official documents” since high school, when he and his friend Constantine Fontellachi Newell signed a five-point “friendship covenant.” Henry brought these paradoxical impulses to the cover-up. They produced reams of documents—raw emotional letters, quasi confessions, declarations of friendship, pleas for forgiveness, contemporaneous notes from meetings, formal accusations, official denials, secret agreements, and public statements, with all copies going to Moulton’s vault. But Beecher’s political foes were right—the authority of contract and the authority of emotion cannot coexist. Of course if Elizabeth had had her wish, every scrap of paper would have been burned.

For more than two years Beecher saw Moulton nearly every day, usually at Frank’s house where prying eyes would not notice him, and Henry grew to love him. “I never doubted his professed friendship for me,” Beecher said later. “My confidence in him was the only element that seemed secure in that confusion of tormenting perplexities.”43

Their first task was to find Theodore a job. Bowen refused to reinstate him, so Moulton raised the money to start a new weekly paper for Tilton to edit, the Golden Age. Beecher invested five thousand dollars of his own money, a fact kept secret from Theodore and Eunice. They secured a written statement from Bessie Turner denying Mrs. Morse’s tales, and then Beecher paid to send her away to school in the West. Then there was Bowen’s alleged evidence that Beecher had raped Edna Dean Proctor back in the 1850s. Proctor was still unmarried and now living with another wealthy Plymouth Church family in Brooklyn. Moulton asked about Bowen’s allegation, and Beecher furiously insisted that the affair with Proctor had been consensual. So Moulton sent Beecher to ask the poetess for a written statement denying any impropriety—since, as Moulton noted archly, he was so good at that sort of thing.

At first the fragile cover-up seemed doomed. Elizabeth’s crazy mother, Johanna Morse, exasperated everyone by sending harassing letters to Bowen, Tilton, and Beecher. The rumor that Theodore had run off with Laura Bullard appeared in the Eagle, provoking Tilton’s already frayed temper. Then Theodore summoned Beecher to his house and demanded to know if he was the father of his son Ralph—which both Beecher and Elizabeth denied. But as Tilton focused on founding his new magazine, his mood improved. A few weeks after their blowup over Ralph, at Moulton’s suggestion Henry, Elizabeth, and Theodore met for a meeting of “amnesty and amity.” The conversation between Henry and Theodore was so gratifying, Beecher later testified, that “I came up to him and sat down on his knee,” causing Elizabeth to burst out laughing. When they rose to leave, said Beecher, “I kissed him and he kissed me, and I kissed his wife and she kissed me, and I believe they kissed each other.”44

Things seemed on an upward swing. But their desperate attempts at contractualism were constantly undermined by their emotional impulsiveness. For all his promises, Theodore continued to tell tales of Beecher’s infidelity to his friends in the press, who gleefully repeated his line that “Beecher preaches to seven or eight mistresses every Sunday evening.” The gossip spread quickly through the network of female reformers and Beecher’s inner circle, including the investors in the ChristianUnion and J. B. Ford and Co., and the bondholders of Plymouth Church. Beecher complained that church members were constantly asking him, with a concerned air, “Well, brother Beecher, how is your soul today?”

“None of your business,” Beecher testily told his Friday-night prayer meeting. “It is a kind of familiarity that I don’t relish.”45

Similarly, although Moulton had forbidden Henry and Elizabeth to see each other without his prior approval, as the atmosphere thawed they exchanged warm clandestine letters (it was “safe,” Beecher told her, since Eunice was in Florida).46 For the first time in more than a year, Elizabeth’s spirits soared. But Elizabeth’s feelings for Henry were dashed, by one account, when she learned with “certainty that, notwithstanding his repeated assurances of his faithfulness to her; he had recently had illicit intercourse, under the most extraordinary circumstances, with another person.”47 It seems hardly believable that Beecher would behave so recklessly, were it not so similar to Edna Dean Proctor’s story back in 1859.

By May it seemed to sink in for Elizabeth that Beecher had no intention of resuming their special relationship; he meant only to keep her placated and quiet. “My future either for life or death would be happier could I but feel that you forgave while you forget me,” she secretly wrote to him. “In all the sad complications of the past year my endeavor was to entirely save from you all suffering; to bear myself alone, leaving you forever ignorant of it. My weapons were love, a larger untiring generosity and nest-hiding! That I failed utterly we both know. But now I ask forgiveness.”48

Despite her emotional ups and downs, Elizabeth was easily controlled. Eunice was in Florida till May, and even Mrs. Morse was, for the moment, quieted by Elizabeth’s pleas. Then a magnificent wild card entered the game.

VICTORIA CLAFLIN WAS BORN in 1838 in Ohio, the seventh child of a small-time confidence man and his slatternly wife. Although raised in squalid poverty, Victoria was marked by her pretty face, unusual intelligence, and mystical visions of angels, devils, and spirits. Married in her teens to an alcoholic named Canning Woodhull, she and her family scraped up a living by running séances, telling fortunes, peddling patent medicines and makeshift contraceptive devices fashioned out of vinegar and sponges, and a bit of casual prostitution. Soon Victoria Woodhull divorced her first husband (but kept his name) and married Colonel James Harvey Blood, a radical anarchist. In 1868 she settled in New York City with Colonel Blood; her sister, a curvaceous fellow medium named Tennie C. Claflin; an assortment of illiterate relatives; and her first husband, who was too broken down by drink to support himself.

In New York, Victoria Woodhull drifted among the city’s demimonde—including high-class prostitutes and the “female doctors” who provided them with opium and abortions—but she had higher aspirations. Spiritualism, the belief that it is possible to communicate with the dead, was a hot topic in the postwar period. In a world where words could fly over telegraph wires, why shouldn’t they also descend from heaven? Although riddled with hoaxes and charlatans, spiritualism gained many respectable adherents over time, including nearly half of Henry’s siblings, particularly Harriet and Isabella. Harriet attributed “the sudden increase of spiritualism” to the millions of grieving families created by the war. “It is the throbbing of the severed soul to the part of itself that has gone within the veil.”49

By 1870 Colonel Cornelius Vanderbilt, a fantastically wealthy railroad mogul who took an ardent interest in both spiritualism and sex, had taken Victoria and Tennie under his wing. It was a mutually beneficial relationship. The high-toned gentlemen who frequented Manhattan’s brothels often gossiped in front of the prostitutes, boasting of business plans and telling other men’s secrets. It was believed that Victoria collected valuable information from the working girls and passed it on to Vanderbilt as being “from the spirit world,” and he used it to outmaneuver his rivals. Vanderbilt rewarded Victoria and Tennie by setting them up as the country’s first female financial brokers—the “Bewitching Brokers” of Wall Street, as the fascinated press dubbed them.

But Woodhull’s ambitions were manifold. Not long after her Wall Street triumph, she decided to enter politics. A bill proposing the sixteenth amendment, giving the vote to women, had been languishing in Congress for a year. Woodhull moved to Washington temporarily, where she developed a cozy relationship with Massachusetts senator and former Union general Benjamin Butler, a Radical Republican famed for his backroom dealing, “the smartest damn rascal that ever lived,” as Lincoln’s private secretary called him.50 Butler arranged for Victoria to testify—entirely on her own initiative, unbeknownst to the suffragists—in favor of woman suffrage to the House Judiciary Committee in January 1871, making Woodhull the first woman to address Congress.

By chance Isabella Beecher Hooker had volunteered to organize a national woman suffrage conference in the capital in January 1871. On New Year’s Day, just as her brother was descending into his personal purgatory, Isabella was shocked to discover that Mrs. Victoria Woodhull was going to address Congress on the opening day of their conference. None of the suffragists had met her, but some had heard tales of her multiple marriages and unconventional lifestyle. Their odor was nasty enough that Isabella nearly didn’t go to hear her speak.

When Woodhull expressed anxiety about her reputation among the female reformers, Ben Butler bluntly told her to ignore any snubs from the NWSA women, especially from Isabella Hooker. Overhearing this, a Radical congressman commented with a smirk, “It would ill become these women and especially a Beecher to talk of antecedents or to cast any smirch upon Mrs. Woodhull, for I am reliably assured that Beecher preaches to at least twenty of his mistresses every Sunday.”51 Woodhull filed away this information but said nothing.

Woodhull’s fears were unnecessary. Isabella and her compatriots were bowled over by Woodhull’s beauty and ladylike bearing, as well as her incisive testimony (written by Butler, it was later said). “All the past efforts of Miss Anthony and Mrs. Stanton sink to insignificance beside the ingenious lobbying of the new leader and her daring delegation,” declared the Tribune.52 Suddenly Victoria Woodhull was the rising star of the women’s movement. She brought not only a magnetic presence, but just as important, her own money and contacts, even a brand-new newspaper backed by Cornelius Vanderbilt named Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly.

Isabella was Mrs. Woodhull’s most ardent convert. She “impressed me profoundly, and in a manner I could never describe, with the conviction that she was heaven sent for the rescue of women from her pit of subjection,” wrote Isabella.53 Her more conservative sisters, Catharine and Harriet, recognized Woodhull’s talents but were uneasy about the rumors of free love and other immoralities that dogged her. Isabella urged them to meet her. Together, she hoped, the Beecher sisters might persuade Woodhull to drop some of her more outlandish views.

In February 1871 Catharine met Woodhull for the first time in Manhattan, sharing a carriage ride in Central Park. As they trotted along, Catharine began to lecture her about the natural subordination of women and the dangers of social equality. Suddenly, as Woodhull told the story, she saw a vision of a band of devils with rat tails dancing around Miss Beecher’s head.

“You are misguided,” Woodhull finally burst out. “Many great people have already accepted and are living my theories of social freedom though they are not ready to become its avowed advocates, as I am. You speak of Free Love with derision while your own brother, Henry Ward Beecher, the most powerful preacher in America, openly practices it. I do not condemn him, I applaud him. Would that he had the courage to join me in preaching what he practices.”

“Evil!” Catharine exclaimed. “I know my brother is unhappy but he is a true husband. I will vouch for my brother’s faithfulness to his marriage vows as though he were myself.”

“But you have no positive knowledge that would justify your doing so,” said Victoria.

“No . . . no positive—” stammered Catharine. “I know he is unhappy. Mrs. Beecher is a virago, a constitutional liar and a terrible woman altogether, so terrible his friends and family seldom visit. But unfaithful—no. I will hear no more of it.”

“You will hear,” said Victoria. “In concubinage with his parishioner’s wife—it is common knowledge. And if you were a proper person to judge, which I grant you are not, you should see that the facts are fatal to your theories.”

“Victoria Woodhull, I will strike you for this. I will strike you dead!”

“Strike as much and as hard as you please. Only don’t do it in the dark so I cannot know who is my enemy.”

“Stop!” Catharine cried, then climbed out and stalked away.54

Catharine’s version of the interview was much the same, minus the whirling rat-tailed devils. Catharine, Isabella wrote with amusement, “saw Victoria and, attacking her on the marriage question, got such a black eye as filled her with horror and amazement. I had to laugh inwardly at her relation of the interview and am now waiting for her to cool down!”55 But it was too late. The Beecher sisters, Catharine, Harriet, and Mary, now declared war on Victoria Woodhull.

The sisters began digging up the spiritualist’s sordid family history as fodder for a steady stream of public and private attacks. They inundated Isabella and her husband with letters begging him, in Mary’s words, to bring Isabella “back to God and away from that harlot.”56 Harriet satirized Woodhull in her current serial novel, My Wife and I, which was appearing in Henry’s paper, the Christian Union, characterizing her as a shameless hussy named Audacia Dangereyes. Isabella was torn; “my prevailing belief is in her innocence and purity,” she wrote to Susan B. Anthony, yet her sisters “have nearly crazed me with letters imploring me to have nothing to do with her.”57 Couldn’t they investigate Woodhull to discover the truth?

Anthony’s response to Isabella was blunt. “When we begin to search records, past or present—of those who bring brains or cash to our work for enfranchising women—it shall be with those of the men—not the women, and not a woman—not Mrs. Woodhull—until every insinuation of gossip of Beecher, Pomeroy, Butler, Carpenter shall be fully investigated, and each of them shall have proven to your and our satisfaction—that he never flirted or trifled with or desecrated any specimen of Womanhood,” wrote Anthony, naming a number of prominent Republicans.58 It was most likely the first time Isabella had heard the gossip about her brother put so plainly.

BY MAY 1871 the free-love attacks were savaging Woodhull’s reputation. But Victoria was a dangerous opponent. On May 3, the same day that Elizabeth Tilton was writing her “nest-hiding” letter to Henry, Elizabeth Cady Stanton told Woodhull the story of the Tiltons’ night of mutual confessions. Two weeks later Woodhull published the following notice in the New York World.

I advocate free love in its highest purest sense as the only cure for the immorality, the deep damnation by which men corrupt and disfigure God’s most holy institution of sexual relation. My judges preach against “free love” openly, and practice it secretly; their outward seeming is fair, inwardly they are full of “dead men’s bones and all manner of uncleanness.” For example, I know of one man, a public teacher of eminence who lives in concubinage with the wife of another public teacher of almost equal eminence. All three concur in denouncing offenses against morality. “Hypocrisy is the tribute paid by vice to virtue.” So be it. But I decline to stand up as “the frightful example.” I shall make it my business to analyze some of these lives, and will take my chances in the matter of libel suits.

The morning the notice appeared in the paper, she sent a note to Theodore, whom she had never met, demanding to see him. He hustled to her brokerage office, where she handed him a copy of the World. “I read, sir, by the expression on your face, that it is true?” she asked, before launching into a full recitation of all she knew of the scandal. Her story was, as Theodore described it, “extravagant and violent” but basically correct.59

Tilton hurried back to Brooklyn to confer with Moulton and Beecher. The way to keep her quiet, they decided, was to place her under “social obligation” by befriending her, a task which Henry left mostly to Theodore. Soon Theodore, too, had fallen under Woodhull’s spell; compared with his own web of hypocrisy, Woodhull struck Theodore like a beacon of moral courage. Later she claimed that for three months “we were hardly out of each other’s sights, and he slept every night in my arms.”60 Theodore denied having sex with her, but they were unquestionably intimate. He spent many late nights at her house that summer talking over their shared passion for social freedom and political justice, and preparing a biography of Victoria for his new magazine, the Golden Age.

Beecher spent almost the entire summer sequestered at the farm in Peekskill, as far from the city as he could get. His mood on vacation was almost manic. As Eunice observed, he is “just as full of fun and mischief and high spirits as a wild colt.”61 But behind his merry facade, the stress was taking a toll. He progressed from taking an occasional glass of wine “for the stomach” to drinking with gusto; he was eating like a stevedore and putting on weight. All work on the second volume of the Life of Christ was at a dead stop. The financial costs of the cover-up—including sending the talkative Bessie Turner away to school and a hefty investment in Theodore’s new paper—were mounting, and were exacerbated by the need to keep these expenditures a secret from Eunice.

Unfortunately Theodore’s contradictory mission of placating Woodhull while shoring up his own reputation was aggravated by his ill-advised zealotry. When Theodore’s biography of Woodhull came out in September 1871, it was so extravagant in its flattery and so rapturous in his description of her seedy childhood, multiple marriages, communings with the spirit world (especially her patron spirit, Demosthenes), and anarchistic social views, that everyone—friend or foe—was appalled. “Too ridiculous almost, even to ridicule,” wrote one of Tilton’s friends. An “incredible specimen of highfalutin’ idiocy,” declared the author Bayard Taylor, who harbored nothing but scorn for the editor. “Such a book is a tomb from which no author again rises,” wrote Julia Ward Howe, the leader of the Boston suffragists.62

“I urged him to make a prompt repudiation of these women and their doctrines,” Beecher later said.63 But their new “social obligation” worked both ways. Woodhull’s reputation had sunk low enough that only the imprimatur of a man like Beecher could redeem her. In November, Victoria wrote to Henry, demanding that he introduce her upcoming lecture on “The Principles of Social Freedom.”

“Two of your sisters have gone out of their way to assail my character and purposes, both by means of the public press and by numerous private letters written to various persons with whom they seek to injure me and thus to defeat the political ends at which I aim,” Woodhull wrote to Beecher. “I repeat that I must have an interview tomorrow morning, since I am to speak tomorrow evening at Steinway Hall; and what I say or shall not say will depend largely upon the result of the interview.”

Beecher hastily agreed to see Victoria at Tilton’s house the next evening. They had met once or twice before, briefly, but Henry had explicitly avoided her all summer. Now, in typical fashion, he did his best to convey mutual sympathy without committing to anything concrete. “Marriage is the grave of love,” he told Victoria, by her account. “I have never married a couple that I did not feel condemned.”

“Why then do you not preach that conviction?” she asked.

It was one of the first lessons he’d learned from Lyman Beecher, and the bedrock of his career—a public teacher could only go as far as his people would support him. “If I were to do so I should preach to empty seats,” he told her. “Milk for babies, meat for strong men.”

When she pushed him further, according to Woodhull, the preacher “got up on the sofa on his knees beside me, and taking my face in between his hands, while the tears streamed down his cheeks, he begged me to let him off.” It would all sound preposterous were it not the exact pose he’d taken when asking Bowen’s forgiveness, a story unknown to Victoria.

Victoria rose to leave, in disgust. “Mr. Beecher, if I am compelled to go on that platform alone, I shall begin by telling the audience why I am alone and why you are not with me.”64

The next day was one of the longest of Beecher’s life. Theodore and Frank urged him to reconsider, but he refused. At the last minute the two friends nervously rushed over to Steinway Hall, and Theodore stepped in to introduce her. “It may be that she is a fanatic,” he said to the audience, “it may be that I am a fool. But, before high heaven, I would rather be a fanatic and a fool in one than to be such a coward as would deny a woman the right to free speech.”

Sadly, Theodore was indeed made the fool, when midway through the lecture, Victoria lost her temper at some hecklers. When one cried out, “Are you a free lover?” Victoria furiously proclaimed: “Yes, I am a free lover. I have an inalienable, constitutional and natural right to change that love every day if I please.”65 The line was gleefully reprinted in all the New York papers.

Now Tilton was truly ruined. Subscribers fled the Golden Age, his winter lecture tour was beset by canceled engagements, withdrawn invitations, and nasty comments in local papers, and he was on the verge of bankruptcy. He and Victoria were in the same sinking boat, watching resentfully as Beecher seemed to sail smoothly on.

BY FEBRUARY 1872, more than one year into the cover-up, Beecher was a wreck. Woodhull was actively peddling the story to newspaper editors, who so far had declined to take her bait. Pressure was growing in Plymouth Church to investigate Theodore’s incessant rumormongering, despite Beecher’s efforts to sweep it under the rug. He was under terrible pressure from his publishing firm, but he could not focus enough to write. Meanwhile Theodore’s bitter tone was becoming ominous. When Elizabeth sent him a secret letter warning of Theodore’s volatility, Beecher could stand it no longer. On February 5, 1872, he wrote Moulton what came to be known as the “Ragged Edge Letter.”

No man can see the difficulties that environ me unless he stands where I do. To say that I have a church on my hands is simple enough—but to have the hundreds and thousands of men pressing me, each one with his keen suspicion, or anxiety, or zeal; to see tendencies which, if not stopped, would break out into a ruinous defense of me; to stop them without seeming to do it; to prevent anyone questioning me; to meet and allay prejudices against T. which had their beginning years before this; to keep serene as if I were not alarmed or disturbed; to be cheerful at home and among friends when I was suffering the torments of the damned; to pass sleepless nights often, and yet to come up fresh and full for Sunday—all this may be talked about, but the real thing cannot be understood from the outside, nor its wearing and grinding on the nervous system. [ . . . ]

If my destruction would place him all right, that shall not stand in the way. I am willing to step down and out. No one can offer more than that. That I do offer. Sacrifice me without hesitation, if you can clearly see your way to his safety and happiness thereby.

I do not think that anything would be gained by it. I should be destroyed, but he would not be saved. E. and the children would have their future clouded.

In one point of view I could desire the sacrifice on my part. Nothing could possibly be so bad as the horror of the great darkness in which I spend much of my time. I look upon death as sweeterfaced than any friend I have in the world. Life would be pleasant if I could see that re-built which is shattered. But to live on the sharp and ragged edge of anxiety, remorse, fear, despair, and yet to put on all the appearance of serenity and happiness, cannot be endured much longer. I am well-nigh discouraged. If you too cease to trust me, to love me, I am alone. I have not another person to whom I could go.66

When overwhelmed by such self-pity, Beecher turned to Frank Moulton and increasingly to Frank’s gracious, sensible wife, Emma. Emma Moulton was “very sympathetic,” as Henry said, “without being sentimental.” Although deeply disappointed in her pastor and not entirely trusting of Theodore, like her husband she took a realistic view of the whole mess. In dark moods Beecher would lie on the sofa in her sitting room, moaning about his sorrows. “I was groaning and saying it did not seem to me that I could live and I didn’t want to live,” said Beecher of a typical visit. “Hmmm,” responded Emma dryly; “you come and you are going to die, but I notice you like to live well enough.”67

“You are the best friend I have in this world,” Henry once told her; “you are dearer to me than any sister I have, for you, knowing all the truth, knowing that I am guilty, still stand by me, while they believe I am innocent.”68

Yet he was just as headstrong as Theodore. Beecher was nearly sixty and easily could have retired from the pulpit or taken a long journey to the Holy Land to do research for the Life of Christ, as Moulton suggested. But for all his anxieties, Beecher was incapable of giving up the adulation and the money.

By April 1872 Tilton was in dire financial straits. Moulton—along with several alarmed investors in Beecher’s publishing ventures who had caught hints of his troubles—pressured Bowen to settle Tilton’s claim for the broken contracts with the Independent and the Brooklyn Union. On April 2 Tilton, Beecher, and Bowen signed a secret “Tripartite Agreement,” in which Tilton was awarded seven thousand dollars—enough to keep him afloat for a while. In exchange the three men swore to withdraw and never repeat “all charges, imputations, and innuendoes,” and “resume the old relations of love, respect and reliance.”69 For a brief moment they were buoyed by their misbegotten faith in written contracts.

Then the letters from Isabella began arriving. Isabella’s attachment to Woodhull had only grown more steadfast, despite the disapproval of her family and friends. By now Isabella had heard the tales of her brother’s alleged affair from Elizabeth Cady Stanton and received indirect confirmation of them from Woodhull. By her own observation of Henry’s marriage, Isabella was inclined to accept them as true. With remarkable naïveté, she first wrote to Tilton for more information.

When he did not reply, she questioned Henry directly. Although the practice of free love “at present is revolting to my feelings and my judgment,” Isabella told Henry, she would be open-minded. “The only reply I made to Mrs. Stanton was that, if true, you had a philosophy of the relation of the sexes so far ahead of the times that you dared not announce it, though you consented to live by it.”70

“Of some things I neither talk nor will be talked with,” Henry calmly replied to Isabella. “The only help that can be grateful to me, or useful is silence, and a silencing influence on others. A day may come for converse—it is not now. Living or dead, my dear sister Belle, love me and do not talk about me or suffer others to in your presence.”71

Internally, however, he was panicked. For several weeks he suffered “spells” of dizziness so severe he could not preach. “I fear they are keeping something from me,” fretted Eunice from Florida to Susan Howard.72

Then arose that old devil politics, to stir the pot again at just the wrong moment. The presidential elections of 1872 were an unappetizing stew. President Grant’s administration was beginning to erupt in a series of spectacular scandals. Beecher remained an unapologetic Grant man, campaigning vigorously for the old general. Theodore Tilton, to no one’s surprise, rushed to the head of the oppositional Liberal wing of the Republican Party, announcing that the party “needs the thorn of the doctrinaire in its side.”73 That summer when the Liberal Republicans split off from the party and nominated Horace Greeley of the Tribune for the presidency, Tilton served as campaign manager. Greeley’s candidacy had the feel of a fool’s errand, but if he won Tilton would reclaim both public stature and the moral high ground.

But the most astounding turn came when Victoria Woodhull, determined to claim her place in the public eye, announced in May that she would be the first woman to run for president, on the ticket of her brand-new People’s Party. After Cornelius Vanderbilt dumped her, she had added socialism and labor reform to her other causes, printing the first American edition of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto in Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly and giving speeches excoriating Vanderbilt and his fellow robber barons.

Frank Moulton carefully monitored the situation to keep Tilton and Beecher from clashing on the stump, but he had no control over Woodhull, who was furious when Theodore refused to support her candidacy. As he was leaving for the Liberal Republican convention, Theodore called on Woodhull, explaining that he was going merely as a reporter.

“Theodore, you are lying again,” hissed Woodhull. “You are going to Cincinnati to nominate Mr. Greeley, and I see, clairvoyantly, a coffin following you, in which you will be responsible for putting him, because it will result in his death.”74 Theodore left without saying a word and never spoke to her again, ending all pretense of any mutual “social obligation.”

Woodhull was now frantic. Her presidential campaign was stillborn, Cornelius Vanderbilt had withdrawn his financial backing, she was evicted from her house, and no respectable landlord would rent to her. By now Isabella Hooker was one of the very few suffragists who still stuck by her. In desperation Woodhull sent another threatening letter to Beecher in June, asking for help.

But Beecher sent no reply. Instead he gave the letter to Moulton for safekeeping, asking if Frank could not make her “understand that I can do nothing? I certainly shall not, at any and all hazards, take a single step in that direction, and if it brings trouble—it must come.”75

By September, Woodhull was determined to strike. On September 12, 1872, a motley collection of psychics and seers, radical social reformers, random eccentrics, and curiosity seekers gathered in Boston, Massachusetts, for the annual convention of the American Association of Spiritualists. The hall was growing restless when all of a sudden, from a side door, a small, dark-haired woman flashed onto the platform. Her delicate features were pale and twisted into a tragic expression. Her blue almond-shaped eyes shone with what one observer called a lurid light. A sort of electric shock swept over the assembly, striking them into dead silence, as if they had seen a streak of lightning and were waiting for the thunderclap.

Woodhull paused, tossing her curls with a dramatic flourish. Then she began, as one audience member, Mrs. Elizabeth Meriwether, wrote, to “pour out a torrent of flame.” One by one she named some of the most powerful men in the country, following each name with a horrifying list of sins and hypocrisies—cheating, lying, swindling, committing adultery, visiting prostitutes. “It was, in fact, a declaration of war against those men,” Mrs. Meriwether said. “It made our flesh to creep and our blood to run cold.”

But the king of free love, Woodhull declared, was the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher. The audience shuddered in astonishment. For years this legendary minister had been carrying on an affair with his best friend’s wife, a poor defenseless woman named Elizabeth Tilton. There was no question the story was true, she claimed, for she had heard it directly from Elizabeth Tilton, her husband, Theodore, and from Henry Ward Beecher himself.

Nor was Tilton the only one, Woodhull cried, her pale cheeks now crimson. Every Sunday morning Henry Ward Beecher stood in his Brooklyn pulpit and preached to a dozen of his mistresses, every one of them “members of his church sitting on their pews robed in silks and satins and high respectability!”76

Then Woodhull disappeared from the platform, slipping out the side door of the auditorium. Afterward she remembered little of her speech. “They tell me that I used some naughty words on that occasion. All I know is, that if I swore, I did not swear profanely,” she said later. “I swore divinely.”77

BACK IN BROOKLYN, Plymouth Church prepared for a week-long Jubilee, celebrating Beecher’s twenty-fifth year as pastor. The organizers, chaired by the indefatigable Moses Beach, called it their Silver Wedding Anniversary, marking the marriage of “Church and Pastor—Man and Wife!” Eunice Beecher remarked tartly that half the people thought it was the anniversary of her own long marriage to Henry.

Beecher seemed unusually moved by the ceremonies. The emotional climax of the grand jubilee came when the Reverend Richard Salter Storrs, the other Congregational titan on the Heights, stood to pay tribute to his old friend and fellow worker. When Storrs finished Beecher stood, “with tears, and trembling from head to toe, arose and placing his hand on Dr. Storrs’ shoulder, warmly kissed him on the cheek.” The hushed audience erupted into tears and applause. “I want to say something, but I am unable to,” said Beecher, his voice choked with emotion. Instead they closed the evening with a favorite hymn, “Jesus, Lover of My Soul.”78

Woodhull read the glowing accounts of the Silver Jubilee with disgust. By contrast, the few papers that reported her Boston speech noticed it only to further insult her. “Very well,” she declared. “I will make it hotter on earth for Henry Ward Beecher than Hell is below.”

On October 28, just in time for election day, Woodhull published a new edition of Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly, bearing the startling headline “The Beecher-Tilton Scandal Case.” Inside she recounted many of the details of the affair and cover-up, adding some dramatic flourishes and presenting it all as solid fact. She listed Isabella Beecher Hooker, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and other well-known reformers as her sources, and claimed that both Theodore and Henry adhered to “free love theories” but were too cowardly to avow them publicly. “I intend,” she wrote, “that this article shall burst like a bomb-shell into the ranks of the moralistic social camp.”79

Within hours of its release, scores of newsboys were hawking the paper, and by evening the ten-cent papers were selling for $2.50 a copy. Within days 150,000 copies of Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly were sold, with secondhand copies going for as much as twenty dollars apiece. Now, after two years of seething in silence, Henry Bowen pounced. A little after midnight on the twenty-eighth, Bowen and his Brooklyn rival, District Attorney Benjamin Tracy, contacted Anthony Comstock, the eager young spearhead of the YMCA’s antipornography campaign. The next morning Comstock instructed two of Bowen’s clerks to buy and mail copies of the paper to a designated address. When the papers arrived at their destination on November 2, police arrested Woodhull and her sister Tennie for violating an 1865 law that forbade sending obscene materials through the U.S. mails. It was obvious, observed the Brooklyn Eagle when they discovered Bowen’s machinations, that he engineered the arrest to draw attention to Woodhull’s accusations.

And it did. All the respectable papers that would not reprint Woodhull’s articles gladly reported the details of her arrest, including all her accusations. Rumors, puns, dirty jokes, and cartoons about Henry and his paramours ran wild through the city.

Beecher was outwardly unperturbed. “For myself I have not a word to say. Twenty-five years must speak for me—or else Character is worthless,” he told one supporter. Plymouth Church rallied around him with unwavering support. “They act nobly—as I knew they would,” Beecher said.80

But as soon as he could slip away, Beecher ran to Moulton’s. Theodore didn’t see Woodhull’s bombshell until election day, when he returned from the campaign trail. “As soon as I entered the house Mrs. Tilton, with great distress, put into my hands a copy of Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly,” said Tilton.81 He too headed to Moulton’s. There the three men nervously recommitted themselves to the “policy of silence.”

Tilton’s wager on Greeley ended disastrously. Theodore’s connection to Victoria Woodhull made him a laughingstock and a liability to the campaign. Greeley alienated voters in both parties when he took Tilton’s advice and accepted the nomination of the Democratic Party, after years of vilifying them as the enemy of all things good and holy. Tilton joined the Liberal Republicans in repudiating the commitment to universal suffrage by calling for literacy tests for voters, banning women’s rights from the campaign, and actively courting former Confederates, while declaring that there was no more need for federal measures to protect the former slaves. Tilton had lost his idealism; nothing was left of his old zeal but self-righteous anger.

The loss crushed Greeley. He was ruined in fortune and health. At the end of November he sank into a coma and then died. His final instructions seemed almost prophetic: “Be kind to Tilton—he is foolish—but young.”82

“AT LAST THE BLOW HAS FALLEN,” Isabella wrote to their brother Tom, asking him to help her bring things right. “At present, of course, I shall keep silent, but truth is dearer than all things else and if he will not speak in some way I cannot always stand as consenting to a lie.”

Over the decades the formerly close brothers had drifted apart as Tom, who inherited both his mother’s melancholy and his father’s rigor, realized he could not share Henry’s sanguine view of human nature. Tom responded coolly to Isabella’s plea. Victoria Woodhull “only carries out Henry’s philosophy, against which I recorded my protest twenty years ago, and parted (lovingly and achingly) from him, saying, ‘We cannot work together,’” he told Isabella. “In my judgment Henry is following his slippery doctrines of expediency, and in his cry of progress and the nobleness of human nature has sacrificed clear, exact, ideal integrity.” Tom wanted nothing to do with the matter, and advised her to do the same. Even a court of law would never reveal the whole truth, he reminded her. “Perjury for good reason with advanced thinkers is no sin.”83

But still Isabella pleaded with Henry to make a clean breast. Finally she decided to do it for him. “I can endure no longer. I must see you and persuade you to write a paper which I will read, going alone to your pulpit, and taking sole charge of the services,” she wrote to Henry before Thanksgiving. She would take the train from Hartford to New York on Friday, to discuss her plan and to meet personally with Mrs. Tilton. “I feel sure,” she added, “that words from her should go into that paper and with her consent I could write as one commissioned on high.”84

“This is a disaster!” groaned Beecher to Moulton when he brought the stack of Isabella’s letters to Remsen Street, away from Eunice’s prying eyes. “Is there no end of trouble and complication?”85

Henry met his sister at the train station. Over a long dinner, he did his best to convince her of her mistake. After Henry went home, Isabella told her husband, John, “I sent for Tilton and he spent all the evening in trying to blind my eyes—declared that his wife solemnly assured him that she never confessed anything of the sort to Susan [B. Anthony]—and Henry told me the same thing.” The next morning Theodore told his co-conspirators that he’d broken Isabella to the point of tears, by threatening to accuse her of adultery and criminal insanity.

“Bravo!” responded Beecher, clapping his hands with delight.

The highlight of Isabella’s strange trip to New York turned out to be Horace Greeley’s grand public funeral at the Church of the Divine Paternity at Forty-fifth Street and Fifth Avenue. Beecher was to give the eulogy, so he got Isabella an invitation to the crowded ceremony. “When we came to fall in line to walk to the church I found myself side by side with Mrs. Tilton, who looked up in my face with a sweet smile,” wrote Isabella with surprise. “I drew her hand in mine, under my shawl pressed it close to my heart and we walked in silence to the church and sat close together through the service and at its close we spoke together a moment and instinctively our lips met in a long kiss of love and trust and she grasped my hand holding it till she passed out of the pew to join her husband and go to the grave.”

As he entered the pulpit and gazed over the audience, Henry was horrified to spot the two of them sitting together. With heart pounding and head swimming, he thought he might collapse then and there. As he told Isabella afterward, “he felt he was going just as Greeley did.” His voice was so choked by anxiety that the audience could barely hear the eulogy. The next day he met with Isabella again. Writing to her husband, Belle captured the cascade of charm, flattery, and self-pity Henry used in a fruitless attempt to regain her loyalty. He said that for two years he had been utterly alone—no woman to counsel or help and he feared he had lost me at one time—but now he took a long breath and would try to live to do the things His God would have him. There are no clouds between me and him he said and no lies. He [Christ] knows all and when He tells me to do what you ask I shall do it—but I can’t go any faster than I can see my way—don’t be discouraged keep on telling me what you feel and think—if I could only have you near me all the time—but that is impossible. I have always loved you more than any of my brothers and sisters and needed you at my side—but it can’t be even now—do you know I was away lecturing and Ma [Eunice] got hold of your first letters and read them all, etc.

Ironically Eunice “was drawn to him by my accusation but I suppose she would kill me if she had the opportunity,” Isabella concluded wryly.86

The only thing Henry did not do was deny committing adultery. Isabella returned to Hartford feeling that her worst fears had been confirmed. But Isabella’s continued loyalty to Woodhull made her a pariah. Her sisters, the Howards, her Hartford neighbors—all shunned her. Even that genial infidel Mark Twain informed his wife, as his sister put it, that she “shall not cross Mrs. Hooker’s threshold and if he talks to Mrs. H. he will tell her in plain words the reason.”87

Henry took his own precautions. On Sunday he stationed his sister Harriet in the front pew of Plymouth Church in case Isabella suddenly appeared. A few weeks after Greeley’s funeral, the Tribune reported that Henry Ward Beecher and his family feared that Mrs. Hooker’s friendship with Victoria Woodhull was a sign of insanity, and were consulting with doctors. Henry received no more letters from his sister.