An unexpectedly effective witness at the trial was Mrs. He expressed great sorrow for the misery that he had brought upon himself and Mrs. Tilton, and upon everybody connected with the case, but said that he felt that he had thoroughly repented, and that he had been forgiven, and that he was better fitted now to preach than ever before.
After lying on the sofa a little while, he got up and walked up and down the room in a very excited manner, with the tears streaming down his cheeks, and said that he thought it was very hard, after a life of usefulness, that he should be brought to this fearful end.
He sat down in the chair. I will always be your friend. I am convinced. I cannot express to you the anguish and the sorrow that it has caused me to know what I have of your life. I believed in you since I was a girl, believed you were the only good man in this world. Beecher was in a very excited condition of mind on that day. He told me very positively that he should take his life, and I believed him when he said so.
Beecher denied that this talk ever took place and said he had received the kiss in question three days earlier. A: Well, I said that I did not say that, positively, and that something akin to it I did not say either. Q: Now, I ask you whether you will go beyond your best recollection, and say positively that you did not?
The defense lawyers enthusiastically explored the relationship between Tilton and Mrs. Woodhull, and the way was made easier for them by Mrs. Woodhull herself. Tilton, for he was my devoted lover for more than half a year. Woodhull replied. A woman who is before the world as I am would not make such a flagrant statement, even if it were true. The defense called three of Mrs.
One said that Tilton was a constant visitor at Mrs. Elizabeth La Pierre Palmer, an associate of Mrs. Tilton denied that he had had adulterous relations with Mrs. Woodhull but admitted that he had stayed overnight at her house once, when they were working on her biography. Woodhull in an attempt to keep her quiet about the scandal. Beecher is as much responsible for my connection with Mrs. Woodhull three times during the trial, but each time decided not to call her, because of the risks involved in submitting such an unpredictable witness to cross-examination.
The letters proved innocuous, and Mrs. Woodhull left immediately, as mysterious a figure as ever, if a somewhat less wicked one. As for Mrs. Judge Neilson refused the request.
The summations were as much contests in classical erudition and oratory as they were legal arguments. Johnson, Hawthorne, Saint Paul, and the Scriptures. The quotations sometimes ran to thousands of words, and the audience applauded them as if they were stage readings by well-known actors.
You have struck a blow not at Mr. Beecher, not at Mrs. Tilton, but at your own wives and your own daughters. Beecher may have been, he is yet, in the eye of God and in the eye of man, a fallible sinner. Are we to have a new version of the Scriptures? Are we to have new teachings in regard to the nature and the fall of man? Are we to be told that there is no sin among the apparently pure and great? There is no fear from the fall of Henry Ward Beecher for the progress of Christian civilization and Christian influence.
The Church will survive. Beecher, if innocent, should have garnered up in his heart all that pain and fear so long, when he might have made proclamation to the world and trampled out the scandal as with iron boots.
Beecher had preached regularly throughout the long trial. Beecher remained in Brooklyn and kept a day-and-night vigil at the courthouse. The city was sweltering in the first heat wave of the summer. The jury, which consisted of twelve retail merchants, headed by a flour dealer, deliberated for eight days, during which it did not leave the building. The jurors took turns sleeping on two old mattresses for a few hours a night, and food and changes of clothing were sent in to them after being carefully inspected by Judge Neilson.
They were scrutinized constantly from the windows and roofs of surrounding buildings, where space was rented out to the curious. By the sixth night, exhaustion had set in all around. Half-nakedness is its condition by choice. After fifty-two ballots, they had been unable to reach agreement. At the outset, they had been eight to four in favor of Beecher, and at the end they stood nine to three for him. As Beecher, who had returned to the city that day, entered Plymouth Church to conduct his weekly prayer meeting, he was cheered by a crowd on the sidewalk.
Beecher preached on the language of the New Testament. For a great many people, however, Beecher had become a considerably tarnished idol. Beecher is my name, Beecher till I die! During the summer and fall of , there was some talk of retrying the case, but nothing came of it, nor did anything come of a suit for criminal libel that Beecher had started against Moulton at one point in the lengthy conflict.
Tilton would be subpoenaed, and they still had qualms about how well she would fare under cross-examination, so the suit was nol-prossed.
After Beecher returned to Brooklyn in the fall, he avenged himself on Mrs. Moulton by moving to have her name stricken from the church rolls. More than two hundred Congregationalists and their guests descended on Brooklyn Beecher outdid himself.
He put his church ushers into livery and served the Council delegates special lunches. When the show was over, the Council had not only obediently given him its endorsement but supported his expulsion of Emma Moulton. One other parishioner subsequently stood up to Beecher, and that was Henry Bowen, the man who had done as much as anyone to create Plymouth Church and its pastor. So, at a special meeting of the Plymouth Church Examining Committee, he tried to get his blow in first.
My knowledge is so certain that it can never be shaken by any denials or protestations or oaths, past or future. The publisher mentioned no names, but there was no one in the church who did not know that he spoke of his wife. When he had finished, and because he still refused to mention names, Henry Bowen, like Emma Moulton, was expelled from Plymouth Church. And I have loved on the right and on the left, here and there, and it is my joy that today I am not ashamed of it. I am glad of it.
Criticism of Beecher continued, however, and in , in need of a hypodermic for his flagging popularity, he hit the lyceum circuit, as he had done several times in the past—this time as a champion of the workingman, Civil Service, and the Russians in their holy war against the Turks. He was paid from six hundred to a thousand dollars a lecture, but it was not all easy going.
He jotted down impressions of his tour in his diary. Received me with prolonged clapping. All wept, and it broke up like a revival meeting. I was in good trim, and for nearly two hours I avenged myself. Unfortunately for Beecher, just at that moment it did lift itself. Since the trial, Mrs. Tilton had been living in Brooklyn with her mother, supporting herself on the income from a small trust fund and by teaching in a private school. The house on Livingston Street was empty.
Tilton was living alone in a room on Second Avenue, in Manhattan. On April 13, , Mrs. Tilton wrote an open letter to her legal adviser, which was published in the New York Times. It read:. A few weeks since, after long months of mental anguish, I told, as you know, a few friends, whom I [previously had] bitterly deceived, that the charge brought by my husband, of adultery between myself and the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, was true, and that the lie I had lived so well the last four years had become intolerable to me.
That statement I now solemnly reaffirm, and leave the truth to God, to whom I also commit myself, my children, and all who must suffer. I know full well the explanations that will be sought for this acknowledgement: desire to return to my husband, insanity, malice—everything save the true one—my quickened conscience, and the sense of what is due the cause of truth and justice.
The letter caused a brief sensation. Nearly every newspaper in the country reprinted it. Beecher went on lecturing. In , he toured England, where he was regarded more as a curiosity than a serious speaker. Woodhull, too, went to England, where she married a wealthy London banker, and, with the help of her daughter, Zulu Maud Woodhull, started a new magazine, called the Humanitarian.
Her sister, Tennie C. Both of them became monuments of respectability. Tilton, on Second Avenue, found the going increasingly rough. He earned enough by lecturing to send his two daughters and two sons to school, but there were a great many Americans who never forgave him for attacking Beecher. In , he went abroad and, after travelling through England and Germany, settled in Paris, in a room on the Ile Saint-Louis, and wrote poetry and romantic novels.
He also spent a lot of time playing chess—often, it is said, with Judah P. A reporter tracked him down there on March 8, , to tell him that Beecher had just died in his sleep in Brooklyn, following an attack of apoplexy. Tilton stared into space a few moments and then continued his chess game without comment. Back in Brooklyn, the mayor declared a public holiday.
The New York State Legislature adjourned. The preacher lay in state in Plymouth Church, and fifty thousand people lined the streets for the funeral procession to Greenwood Cemetery.
Beecher continued to live In Brooklyn Heights, where she died a decade later. Tilton died and was buried in the same cemetery. She had gone blind and become a recluse, living with one of her daughters. He was buried in Barbizon, next to the painter Millet. Woodhull, who was supposed to have a weak heart, outlived all the others. In the last years of her life, she became a fanatic motorist, scorching around the English countryside in a shiny white car and firing chauffeur after chauffeur for not driving fast enough.
She died in England at the age of eighty-nine, in June, By Mavis Gallant. By Janet Flanner. Woodhull thereupon wrote Beecher a letter that read, in part: Two of your sisters have gone out of their way to assail my character and purposes, both by the means of the public press and by numerous private letters. To Beecher, Mrs. Beecher was a damned perjurer and libertine? A: Yes, sir. Q: And he dictated it deliberately?
Q: And you wrote it deliberately? A: Wrote it as he dictated it. Q: Did you write all that Mr. Beecher said? A: Every word. Q: Well, did you repeat to him what you expected he would take down? A: I repeated to him my sentiments on the topics that I thought he would take down. A: I relied upon Mr. Moulton to convey them. Q: Answer my question. A: I was not anxious that any phrase or any figure should be conveyed. A: But that my feeling should be conveyed, I was glad. Q: You were very anxious that that should be done?
It was at Mount Pleasant that Henry received technical training in public speaking, bolstering his self-confidence and helping his boisterous sense of humor to emerge. In Lyman sent Henry to Amherst College, an institution that specialized in the training of ministers. Upon graduating from Amherst, Henry moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, to join his father who had taken a position as the head of the Lane Theological Seminary.
Henry spent three years at Lane studying popular speakers and developing his own preaching style. This preparation helped him become minister of the First Presbyterian Church in Lawrenceburg, Indiana, in , and two years later, the pastor at the Second Presbyterian Church in Indianapolis. Henry traveled for weeks at a time on horseback preaching self-reliance, self-control—and garnering a reputation for delivering dynamic and emphatic sermons that appealed both to the principles of the common man and the values of the Victorian middle-class.
That message took on increasingly political tones as Beecher began using his pulpit more frequently to address social concerns. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of , which created the territories of Kansas and Nebraska and allowed voters to decide whether they wanted to make slavery legal or illegal in Kansas, spurred Beecher to new heights of political activism. He launched himself into a series of speaking engagements and fundraisers to rally northern support against the violence and corruption of slavery.
One of the benefits Beecher realized from his move back East was greater access to the New York publishing houses that played such a vital role in shaping American thought.
He also worked as a periodical editor for the Christian Union , and one of the largest religious journals of its day, The Independent.
It was his affiliation with The Independent that led to one of the great American scandals of the 19th century. The accusation first came about in a confession from Elizabeth Tilton to her husband in His message of morality and social progress was extremely popular with the American public. He maintained an extensive lecturing schedule throughout his later years, which left him little time for writing or for his family. In his sermons he vehemently attacked drinking and slavery.
He also called for more political and legal rights for women. As the North and South grew further apart during the s, some ministers condoned violence to settle the differences between the two regions.
Following the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in , he sent rifles to anti-slavery forces participating in "Bleeding Kansas. The entire Beecher family opposed slavery. Beecher's sister was Harriet Beecher Stowe. She was the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Beecher's oratorical skills led the Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, New York, to offer him a position as minister in He accepted and attracted as many as 2, people to his Sunday services.
Many of his congregants agreed with his views, but Beecher remained controversial because of his beliefs. Not all white Northerners favored abolition or equal rights for women with men. During the s, Beecher was involved in a scandal.
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