Henry Ward Beecher (1813–1887) was an immensely famous minister, abolitionist and public intellectual.

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Product Description

No one predicted success for Henry Ward Beecher at his birth in 1813. The blithe, boisterous son of the last great Puritan minister, he seemed destined to be overshadowed by his brilliant siblings—especially his sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe, who penned the century’s bestselling book Uncle Tom’s Cabin. But when pushed into the ministry, the charismatic Beecher found international fame by shedding his father Lyman's Old Testament–style fire-and-brimstone theology and instead preaching a New Testament–based gospel of unconditional love and healing, becoming one of the founding fathers of modern American Christianity. By the 1850s, his spectacular sermons at Plymouth Church in Brooklyn Heights had made him New York’s number one tourist attraction, so wildly popular that the ferries from Manhattan to Brooklyn were dubbed “Beecher Boats.”

Beecher inserted himself into nearly every important drama of the era—among them the antislavery and women’s suffrage movements, the rise of the entertainment industry and tabloid press, and controversies ranging from Darwinian evolution to presidential politics. He was notorious for his irreverent humor and melodramatic gestures, such as auctioning slaves to freedom in his pulpit and shipping rifles—nicknamed “Beecher’s Bibles”—to the antislavery resistance fighters in Kansas. Thinkers such as Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, and Twain befriended—and sometimes parodied—him.

And then it all fell apart. In 1872 Beecher was accused by feminist firebrand Victoria Woodhull of adultery with one of his most pious parishioners. Suddenly the “Gospel of Love” seemed to rationalize a life of lust. The cuckolded husband brought charges of “criminal conversation” in a salacious trial that became the most widely covered event of the century, garnering more newspaper headlines than the entire Civil War. Beecher survived, but his reputation and his causes—from women’s rights to progressive evangelicalism—suffered devastating setbacks that echo to this day.

Featuring the page-turning suspense of a novel and dramatic new historical evidence, Debby Applegate has written the definitive biography of this captivating, mercurial, and sometimes infuriating figure. In our own time, when religion and politics are again colliding and adultery in high places still commands headlines, Beecher’s story sheds new light on the culture and conflicts of contemporary America.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #332175 in Books
• Published on: 2006-06-27
• Released on: 2006-06-27
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 544 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Now nearly forgotten, Henry Ward Beecher (1813–1887) was an immensely famous minister, abolitionist and public intellectual whose career was rocked by allegations of adultery that made nationwide headlines. In this engaging biography, American studies scholar Applegate situates this curiously modern 19th-century figure at the focus of epochal developments in American culture. Beecher's mesmerizing oratory and fiery newspaper columns made him one of the first celebrities of the nascent mass media. His antislavery politics, though often tepid and vacillating, Applegate argues, injected a note of emotionalism into the debate that—with his sister Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin—galvanized Northern public opinion. And by preaching a loving God instead of a wrathful one, the author contends, Beecher repudiated the dour Calvinism of his youth and made happiness and self-fulfillment, rather than sin and guilt, the centerpiece of modern Christian ideology. (The implicit moral anarchy of his creed, critics charged, evinced itself in his sexual indiscretions.) Although marred by occasionally facile psychoanalysis (Applegate describes Beecher, the seventh of 12 siblings, as a classic "middle child" personality), this assessment of Beecher is judicious and critical. Applegate gives an insightful account of a contradictory, fascinating, rather Clintonesque figure who, in many ways, was America's first liberal. (June 27)
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From The Washington Post
After dinner one evening in December 1847, Susan Howard, daughter of a prominent Brooklyn family, wrote a letter to her brother to apologize for a long silence. Much had been happening, she said, but "were I to reduce them all to the first elements . . . I verily believe they would all come down to Beecher, Beecher, BEECHER! He seems to be a subject of universal interest, and he is a curiosity, that is a fact. Don't ask what I think of him, I can't tell you, for the life of me. I only know that I am intensely interested."

As Debby Applegate's fine new biography, The Most Famous Man in America, makes clear, Howard was far from alone in her fascination with the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, one of the many great American figures who dominated an era just before slipping forgotten into history, providing the present with an object lesson in the brevity of celebrity. Preachers and commentators, even the most influential, are particularly prone to this fate, for their power lies in spoken or hastily written words -- words addressed to occasions that burn bright for those experiencing them but that may not resonate beyond the given moment.

Applegate, who holds a PhD in American studies, rescues Beecher from popular obscurity in this illuminating and thorough book. A son of the powerful Calvinist divine Lyman Beecher, young Henry Ward -- brother of Harriet, the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin -- rose to prominence as a charismatic Congregationalist clergyman in Brooklyn Heights in the 19th century. His message was not as dark as his father's. To Lyman, talk of God tended to revolve around sin and the looming prospect of damnation; to Henry (born in 1813), the conversation was more about love and salvation. "I do not recollect," the son later said, that "one word had been said to me, or one syllable had been uttered in the pulpit, that led me to think there was any mercy in the heart of God for a sinner like me."

Where the father preached the fear of darkness, the son spoke of the hope of light. "It is Love the world wants," Henry declared from his pulpit in the 1850s. "Higher than morality, higher than philanthropy, higher than worship, comes the love of God. That is the chiefest thing."

It was not, however, always the chiefest thing in the Beecher family ethos. Applegate writes vividly of the tensions Lyman Beecher's vision created for his many children. "Lyman left his children a complex legacy," she notes. "They basked in his extraordinary love even as they quailed under his terrible theology." Two of them, Henry and Harriet, became national forces -- yet two others, Applegate writes, committed suicide. Henry loved his father, but Henry loved something else even more: making others love him. This hunger for the approval of the crowd and the affection of the congregation drew Henry out of his father's long shadow. "The less he preached of God's wrath, and the more he emphasized the pleasures of God's love," Applegate writes of Henry, "the more people came to listen."

And how he relished that. Congregants from Manhattan came to his Plymouth Church in Brooklyn in what were known as "Beecher Boats," and Beecher's embrace of abolition during the Civil War era earned him the privilege of delivering the first remarks as Union troops reclaimed Fort Sumter. He raised money to buy rifles -- called "Beecher Bibles" -- to arm antislavery forces in Kansas. Abraham Lincoln believed his support of emancipation essential to the Union victory.

Though at home in what Roger Williams called "the garden of the church," Beecher also enjoyed life in Williams's "wilderness of the world." He loved horses, shopping, art, books, classical music and more than a few women who were not his wife; this last weakness led to a celebrated scandal in New York as he faced legal proceedings for alleged adultery. An 1874 trial for "criminal conversation" with a married parishioner led one newspaper to write: "We can recall no one event since the murder of Lincoln that has so moved the people as this question whether Henry Ward Beecher is the basest of men." The jury ended in deadlock.

The verdict on Beecher's significance in the history of American religion, though, is clear. He was an early avatar of the highly personalized, gentler Christianity that came to characterize the nation as it grew more prosperous and more cosmopolitan. Describing his intense religious experience of Jesus, Beecher recalled a day in May when he was in seminary in Cincinnati: "There rose up before me a view of Jesus as the Saviour of sinners -- not of saints, but of sinners unconverted, before they were any better -- because they were so bad and needed so much; and that view has never gone from me." It has never gone from America, either: Evangelical Christianity is still founded in large measure on the personal experience of the individual, and, for a time in the midst of the Victorian Age, Beecher overcame childhood fears to articulate a vision of faith that won him fame in a nascent tabloid age. For readers seeking the roots of the popular religion and popular culture of our own time, Applegate's resurrection of Henry Ward Beecher is an excellent place to begin.

Reviewed by Jon Meacham
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Booklist
Yankee preacher Henry Ward Beecher (1813-87) knew everybody who was anybody, and his Plymouth Church in Brooklyn was a popular tourist attraction. If he was the most famous American, he was also a polarizing figure because of the abolitionism that made him "most hated" in the antebellum South. Overachievement was in his blood: father Lyman was the last great American Puritan minister; most siblings were missionaries, educators, and scholars; and sister Harriet became the most famous woman in the English-speaking world for the novel Uncle Tom's Cabin. Assuming Lyman's mantle, Henry distinguished himself by preaching unconditional love when most ministers prosecuted biblical literalism. Applegate well evokes Beecher's nineteenth-century milieu while making connections to the present day. Orators were celebrities then, and whereas twentieth-century evangelicals are reputedly anti-intellectual, the Beechers ardently advocated education. Adultery with his best friend's wife led to a sensational trial that irrevocably damaged Beecher's reputation. Applegate sympathetically portrays this larger-than-life figure as appealingly human. June Sawyers
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